Since there seems to be some confusion, I'll throw up a more formal definition of entrapment.
A person is 'entrapped' when he is induced or persuaded by law enforcement officers or their agents to commit a crime that he had no previous intent to commit; and the law as a matter of policy forbids conviction in such a case.
However, there is no entrapment where a person is ready and willing to break the law and the Government agents merely provide what appears to be a favorable opportunity for the person to commit the crime. For example, it is not entrapment for a Government agent to pretend to be someone else and to offer, either directly or through an informer or other decoy, to engage in an unlawful transaction with the person. So, a person would not be a victim of entrapment if the person was ready, willing and able to commit the crime charged in the indictment whenever opportunity was afforded, and that Government officers or their agents did no more than offer an opportunity.
On the other hand, if the evidence leaves a reasonable doubt whether the person had any intent to commit the crime except for inducement or persuasion on the part of some Government officer or agent, then the person is not guilty
That said, assuming the ISP isn't acting in concert with law enforcement, they're allowed to do whatever they want to keep out RIAA. RIAA would only have rights to pursue recourse if they had a contract with the ISP in some vendor-customer relationship. The ISP's actions don't constitute an attack against RIAA, although I'm sure RIAA would love to spin it that way.
Damnit, the main reason I got into molecular biology was because I wanted to make people scream and run in fear from my terrible creations. Oh and, of course, I'd have to die a Frankensteinian death as well.
The advances in molecular biology and genetics analysis create reams and reams of information that needs to be analyzed, that's a simple fact of the matter.
You can't fake bioinformatics. Either you're technically skilled and know what you're doing or you don't. This is stuff that's subject to close scrutiny and peer review. The market is small and a very particular niche.
Yeah, there's been hype about it, but it's not something that can easily mushroom overnight. You have to invest significant amounts of time in research and education to work in the field. Yes everyone wants to do it and people are going to get rich, but it's going to be hard to have a bioinformatics 'gold rush'.
The hype will eventually die away as bioinformatics becomes a more everyday fact of genetics and molecular biology. It's just that right now the convergence of biology and computing is exciting and heady stuff. Still, it is most real.
See, I've got a microbiology degree and a good deal of computer science under my belt. I'm working a research technician job that's 50% wet lab work and 50% bioinformatics computation work. The job is great really because I get to do both and the people I'm working with are very enthusiastic and young, plus I think doing the wet benchwork is very key.
You're right, the lab work can be very boring, but by the same token programming on big projects can be pretty mind numbing too. It's when you can live on the edge of both that it gets interesting, but that's a rare combination to find in one person.
I've been around a lot of different people trying to get into bioinformatics. You have biologists who are trying to learn the programming and software skills. They have a hard time adapting to thinking in binary and not fearing computers in general. Then you have computer science and IT people trying to pick up some molecular biology. They have a hard time grasping the messy world of genetics and cell biology.
It boils down to this. If you have the wet lab skills, you have cred with the molecular biologists. If you can program, you have cred with the computation people. It pays to have both.
And how about in real life? Like contractors should roam the streets and randomly break into peoples' houses to fix things. No biggie right? If you come home and there are guys in tool belts breaking down your walls and moving your stuff around, you should welcome them with open arms, right?
Oh and we should absolve these roving contractor crews from any associated liablities too. After all, they're doing it for the good of all.
In the meantime, I'll stick with downloading and implementing fixes from trusted sources, and hiring bonded and insured contractors.
This has some very useful applications. I work in a genetics lab doing a lot of molecular biology work with primate genomes.
It's still a needle in a haystack issue. We deal with nanograms of DNA suspended in microliters of liquids. The microliter is pretty much the limit of what we can manually manipulate, anything less and it gets damn expensive. As it is, there's a lot of suspending, centrifuging, and shaking going on in the lab; a lot of work and time to manipulate a very small amount of material.
If I could just load my sample onto a microfluidics device and 'manipulate' everything by executing commands, life would be much easier. You'd probably avoid a lot of loss and contamination issues with this type of technology. The amounts of expensive reagents used could be reduced significantly. It'd be like a tiny tiny molecular biology lab in a box.
Those are just some of the research possiblities. I'm sure you could have a 'farm' of these microfluidics devices to do production level work.
OpenBSD is less of a fortress and more of a flexible defense. In this case, even though the integrity of the centralized source code was compromised, any end-user who accessed it via the ports tree was immediately tipped off that something wasn't kosher. They could then communicate this to other users and the maintainers of OpenBSD and thus make this attack known to the public within hours of it happening. And due to the ease of updating that the ports tree provides, the maintainers of OpenBSD can correct this problem very quickly. This sort of suppleness provides for the best kind of broadband defense, whereas a "fortress" cannot brook much weakness in any of its parts and is far more brittle. Had users not been able to see the disparity (via MD5 sums), or not been able to communicate it to their fellow users, or not have been able to easily obtain a clean copy, then the problem may have been easily transmitted to a large number of operating OpenBSD machines. As it was, the problem got nipped at the bud.
This event would be the sort of reason why security-conscious people should stick with OpenBSD.
Momma warned me not to become a microbiologist, but I did anyways. She did her fellowship in infectious disease after all.
Yeah, it probably is just a big coincidence, but the FBI *still* hasn't figured out who mailed out all that lovely anthrax last year. And that's a bit disturbing.
For those in the biological sciences who do this kind of stuff, this is pretty old news. It was pretty obvious when they "announced" the completion that they had barely finished anything. Annotating the sequence information to include meaningful protein expression and gene regulation data will take many more years. It has come to light that the disparity between the Human Genome Project's version of the genome and Celera's version of the genome is pretty wide. This means that both sides missed something. Unfortunately, the political push to announce overpowered fact.
While by the present count, there seem to be too few genes, there are many other mechanisms to be explored, including alternative splicing, where the previously inviolable gene unit gets reorganized to generate different proteins, as well as ways to discover more genes. I have no doubt that the dynamics of genetic expression are far more complex than we know now.
DNA may be a linear string of data, but the interactions it makes with enzymes, cellular structures, and other molecules are massively parallel.
I know it's hard to imagine evolutionary time, where things require a few hundred thousand years to be relevant, but really this assertion that we have stopped evolving is so much crap.
Modern medicine and sanitation are pretty much developments of the last two thousand years (the Romans had pretty elaborate sewer and aqueduct systems), while speedy air and land travel has only been around for a hundred years. These really only register as a blip on the scale of evolutionary time. During this blip, we are doing well and reunited as a species (reproductively speaking). This by itself is not significant enough to alter our rate of evolution. Subpopulations of many species go through these cycles and are still "actively evolving". More significantly, the incredible technological changes we are generating in such short order will have an unpredictable impact on the environment around us and thus our own survival. We may think that our lives are becoming more stable, but this does not come without alteration to the world around us.
While it may seem that we are conquering nature, we are doing nothing less than ensuring the struggle of nature continues.
Of course they've got something to hide. Even the most squeaky clean company around will realize that if you put a thousand lawyers into your archive room, they'll come up with something to file a lawsuit over, whether or not there's something to actually sue over. Documents that sit around past their useful life are just begging for a supoena.
And this research is preliminary enough that to lock it down under IP law would kill any chance of it having a significant impact on either the organization's bottom line or mankind's well-being.
I don't think I was calling for the end of the corporate system or the end of capitalism, nor was I implying that communist societies have none of these problems. I have no doubt that biotechnology can yield beneficial results for mankind and nature. It takes a shitload of money to fuel that kind of research and private firms are good at raising that sort of money and pushing for moneymaking results.
I'm a researcher in this area, so I have a grasp of how genetic engineering technology is both advanced and primitive. There is a lot of raw power to be harnessed here. Along with this comes a significant risk because organisms tend to reproduce and spread their genes in ways we cannot foresee. Plants specifically are very adept at horizontal transfer and can spread genes, engineered or not, to other plant species easily.
I've also spent time as a business analyst, so I have a sense of how profit-driven companies have to be to survive and prosper. If it doesn't have a return, direct or indirect, then it's not worth it.
So let me repeat, I think we should be careful when companies apply free market rules to powerful technologies like genetic engineering. Particularly in cases where they are creating a self-replicating organism.
It's all about the Benjamins
on
Monsanto and PCBs
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The reasoning here:
PREMISE A - Corporations only care about profit and nothing else. After all, without profit they're not going to be around for very long. And they seem capable of doing anything to protect the profitable product lines (see Pinkertons beat up union organizers, PCB cover-up, Microsoft strong-arm tactics, Just Following Orders, etc.)
PREMISE B - We're capable of manufacturing products of incredible potency: carcinogenic chemicals, genetically modified organisms, and someday self-replicating nanotech bots that can reduce North America to chum.
PREMISE C - Corporations tend to be the ones manufacturing these products.
PREMISE D - Some of these products have a negative impact on our quality and length of life, the number of limbs our children are born with, and the aesthetics of the world around us.
CONCLUSION - Perhaps we should be a little worried about the impact free market rules have on the world around us and our own livelihoods. When corporations have the ability to let loose technological advancements purely in the name of profit, the results may be less than desirable.
I noticed it because I have an interest in public health and sanitation, so I was surprised that he, as a chef and someone who ran a restaurant, did so. Clearly, BF was psyched and a cutting board isn't sacrosanct, but walking around on your kitchen prep surfaces isn't a great idea.
I thought Flay was way too cocky during that first match-up. That and the fact that he stood up on his own chopping board (gross!) leads me to hope that he gets slammed this second time around.
I was heartbroken to learn that, despite wild popularity, the show had ceased in Japan except for the occasional special episode. Iron Chef was on for six years, so I guess it'll be a few more years before we come to the end.
Slashdot Mirror
It's open source and then some. You'll be able to pick it up from the NIH and a number of other places, on government tabs no less.
Good luck compiling it though.
By the way, here's a more official press release.
That said, assuming the ISP isn't acting in concert with law enforcement, they're allowed to do whatever they want to keep out RIAA. RIAA would only have rights to pursue recourse if they had a contract with the ISP in some vendor-customer relationship. The ISP's actions don't constitute an attack against RIAA, although I'm sure RIAA would love to spin it that way.
Your requirement that the attacker have two neurons has already disqualified the RIAA from mounting such an attack.
I like the second option better.
Damnit, the main reason I got into molecular biology was because I wanted to make people scream and run in fear from my terrible creations. Oh and, of course, I'd have to die a Frankensteinian death as well.
Except it's not.
The advances in molecular biology and genetics analysis create reams and reams of information that needs to be analyzed, that's a simple fact of the matter.
You can't fake bioinformatics. Either you're technically skilled and know what you're doing or you don't. This is stuff that's subject to close scrutiny and peer review. The market is small and a very particular niche.
Yeah, there's been hype about it, but it's not something that can easily mushroom overnight. You have to invest significant amounts of time in research and education to work in the field. Yes everyone wants to do it and people are going to get rich, but it's going to be hard to have a bioinformatics 'gold rush'.
The hype will eventually die away as bioinformatics becomes a more everyday fact of genetics and molecular biology. It's just that right now the convergence of biology and computing is exciting and heady stuff. Still, it is most real.
Hehehe... Kudos to you, you're the first to notice.
Because machines are more expensive than research technicans.
Plus some of these techniques are a bit of an art.
See, I've got a microbiology degree and a good deal of computer science under my belt. I'm working a research technician job that's 50% wet lab work and 50% bioinformatics computation work. The job is great really because I get to do both and the people I'm working with are very enthusiastic and young, plus I think doing the wet benchwork is very key.
You're right, the lab work can be very boring, but by the same token programming on big projects can be pretty mind numbing too. It's when you can live on the edge of both that it gets interesting, but that's a rare combination to find in one person.
I've been around a lot of different people trying to get into bioinformatics. You have biologists who are trying to learn the programming and software skills. They have a hard time adapting to thinking in binary and not fearing computers in general. Then you have computer science and IT people trying to pick up some molecular biology. They have a hard time grasping the messy world of genetics and cell biology.
It boils down to this. If you have the wet lab skills, you have cred with the molecular biologists. If you can program, you have cred with the computation people. It pays to have both.
That's a great idea.
And how about in real life? Like contractors should roam the streets and randomly break into peoples' houses to fix things. No biggie right? If you come home and there are guys in tool belts breaking down your walls and moving your stuff around, you should welcome them with open arms, right?
Oh and we should absolve these roving contractor crews from any associated liablities too. After all, they're doing it for the good of all.
In the meantime, I'll stick with downloading and implementing fixes from trusted sources, and hiring bonded and insured contractors.
W00t! No more pipetting.
This has some very useful applications. I work in a genetics lab doing a lot of molecular biology work with primate genomes.
It's still a needle in a haystack issue. We deal with nanograms of DNA suspended in microliters of liquids. The microliter is pretty much the limit of what we can manually manipulate, anything less and it gets damn expensive. As it is, there's a lot of suspending, centrifuging, and shaking going on in the lab; a lot of work and time to manipulate a very small amount of material.
If I could just load my sample onto a microfluidics device and 'manipulate' everything by executing commands, life would be much easier. You'd probably avoid a lot of loss and contamination issues with this type of technology. The amounts of expensive reagents used could be reduced significantly. It'd be like a tiny tiny molecular biology lab in a box.
Those are just some of the research possiblities. I'm sure you could have a 'farm' of these microfluidics devices to do production level work.
It's not in any trouble at all.
OpenBSD is less of a fortress and more of a flexible defense. In this case, even though the integrity of the centralized source code was compromised, any end-user who accessed it via the ports tree was immediately tipped off that something wasn't kosher. They could then communicate this to other users and the maintainers of OpenBSD and thus make this attack known to the public within hours of it happening. And due to the ease of updating that the ports tree provides, the maintainers of OpenBSD can correct this problem very quickly. This sort of suppleness provides for the best kind of broadband defense, whereas a "fortress" cannot brook much weakness in any of its parts and is far more brittle. Had users not been able to see the disparity (via MD5 sums), or not been able to communicate it to their fellow users, or not have been able to easily obtain a clean copy, then the problem may have been easily transmitted to a large number of operating OpenBSD machines. As it was, the problem got nipped at the bud.
This event would be the sort of reason why security-conscious people should stick with OpenBSD.
The microbes shall inherit the earth. If you thought cockroaches were durable, you got bacteria that live in the guts of cockroaches too.
Momma warned me not to become a microbiologist, but I did anyways. She did her fellowship in infectious disease after all.
Yeah, it probably is just a big coincidence, but the FBI *still* hasn't figured out who mailed out all that lovely anthrax last year. And that's a bit disturbing.
For those in the biological sciences who do this kind of stuff, this is pretty old news. It was pretty obvious when they "announced" the completion that they had barely finished anything. Annotating the sequence information to include meaningful protein expression and gene regulation data will take many more years. It has come to light that the disparity between the Human Genome Project's version of the genome and Celera's version of the genome is pretty wide. This means that both sides missed something. Unfortunately, the political push to announce overpowered fact.
While by the present count, there seem to be too few genes, there are many other mechanisms to be explored, including alternative splicing, where the previously inviolable gene unit gets reorganized to generate different proteins, as well as ways to discover more genes. I have no doubt that the dynamics of genetic expression are far more complex than we know now.
DNA may be a linear string of data, but the interactions it makes with enzymes, cellular structures, and other molecules are massively parallel.
I know it's hard to imagine evolutionary time, where things require a few hundred thousand years to be relevant, but really this assertion that we have stopped evolving is so much crap.
Modern medicine and sanitation are pretty much developments of the last two thousand years (the Romans had pretty elaborate sewer and aqueduct systems), while speedy air and land travel has only been around for a hundred years. These really only register as a blip on the scale of evolutionary time. During this blip, we are doing well and reunited as a species (reproductively speaking). This by itself is not significant enough to alter our rate of evolution. Subpopulations of many species go through these cycles and are still "actively evolving". More significantly, the incredible technological changes we are generating in such short order will have an unpredictable impact on the environment around us and thus our own survival. We may think that our lives are becoming more stable, but this does not come without alteration to the world around us.
While it may seem that we are conquering nature, we are doing nothing less than ensuring the struggle of nature continues.
Of course they've got something to hide. Even the most squeaky clean company around will realize that if you put a thousand lawyers into your archive room, they'll come up with something to file a lawsuit over, whether or not there's something to actually sue over. Documents that sit around past their useful life are just begging for a supoena.
It's a cell, not a gene.
And this research is preliminary enough that to lock it down under IP law would kill any chance of it having a significant impact on either the organization's bottom line or mankind's well-being.
So what about the rumors that Connery was going to be in this fourth Indy movie too? I mean, he is suppose to live forever now, isn't he?
Clearly the author is viewing things through Google Goggles.
Let me be clear here.
I don't think I was calling for the end of the corporate system or the end of capitalism, nor was I implying that communist societies have none of these problems. I have no doubt that biotechnology can yield beneficial results for mankind and nature. It takes a shitload of money to fuel that kind of research and private firms are good at raising that sort of money and pushing for moneymaking results.
I'm a researcher in this area, so I have a grasp of how genetic engineering technology is both advanced and primitive. There is a lot of raw power to be harnessed here. Along with this comes a significant risk because organisms tend to reproduce and spread their genes in ways we cannot foresee. Plants specifically are very adept at horizontal transfer and can spread genes, engineered or not, to other plant species easily.
I've also spent time as a business analyst, so I have a sense of how profit-driven companies have to be to survive and prosper. If it doesn't have a return, direct or indirect, then it's not worth it.
So let me repeat, I think we should be careful when companies apply free market rules to powerful technologies like genetic engineering. Particularly in cases where they are creating a self-replicating organism.
The reasoning here:
PREMISE A - Corporations only care about profit and nothing else. After all, without profit they're not going to be around for very long. And they seem capable of doing anything to protect the profitable product lines (see Pinkertons beat up union organizers, PCB cover-up, Microsoft strong-arm tactics, Just Following Orders, etc.)
PREMISE B - We're capable of manufacturing products of incredible potency: carcinogenic chemicals, genetically modified organisms, and someday self-replicating nanotech bots that can reduce North America to chum.
PREMISE C - Corporations tend to be the ones manufacturing these products.
PREMISE D - Some of these products have a negative impact on our quality and length of life, the number of limbs our children are born with, and the aesthetics of the world around us.
CONCLUSION - Perhaps we should be a little worried about the impact free market rules have on the world around us and our own livelihoods. When corporations have the ability to let loose technological advancements purely in the name of profit, the results may be less than desirable.
And not only that, we also enjoy exporting our American crap to other countries!
I don't think those are acceptable either.
Hey relax.
I noticed it because I have an interest in public health and sanitation, so I was surprised that he, as a chef and someone who ran a restaurant, did so. Clearly, BF was psyched and a cutting board isn't sacrosanct, but walking around on your kitchen prep surfaces isn't a great idea.
Eh screw it...
I thought Flay was way too cocky during that first match-up. That and the fact that he stood up on his own chopping board (gross!) leads me to hope that he gets slammed this second time around.
I was heartbroken to learn that, despite wild popularity, the show had ceased in Japan except for the occasional special episode. Iron Chef was on for six years, so I guess it'll be a few more years before we come to the end.
Plenty more shocking details over at the unofficial IC site.