Not an official definition here, but it's nanometer scale engineering.
So is all chemistry. But not all chemistry gets to be called "nanotech". I personally do 'engineering at the nanometer scale', yet within an area which is not graced by the 'nanotech' buzzword (enzymatic catalysis). But I have no sour grapes about that.
Because as I said: the term is complete nonsense. If you apply your skills to one area it's 'nanotech' when applying the exact same skills to a different area isn't. A good portion of the people I studied chemistry with once-upon-a-time are now in various forms of 'nanotech', but I don't know a single one of them who thinks there's anything special about 'nanotech' which distinguishes it from what everyone else is doing within their respective fields.
It's a buzzword. A bullshit term. Marketspeak. There is no definition except in some kind of vague perception among those who buy into the hype. And so everyone who is anywhere near that perception will naturally define themselves as 'nanotech' to get funding.
Because that is what it's all about: Funding and marketing. The term 'nanotech' has no particular value to the people actually in science. It's too vauge.
Saying that the above application is "nanotech" is something like calling a parking lot "architecture".
Truely spoken by someone who believes the hype and thinks there somehow is a fundamental difference between 'nanotech' and other areas of chemistry, solid-state physics and friends.
Ok, well since someone apparently disagreed with that statement enough to mod it down, could someone in the pro-liquid-N2 camp perhaps tell me what's so efficient about using liquid N2?
Enlighten me as to where liquid N2 is being used for cooling electronics in industry as well. Given that industry tends to be very interested in efficiency, examples shouldn't be hard to find?
Only that they are. Precisely because industry is interested in efficiency, and not in geek-points.
Nanotech is a buzzword. It doesn't really mean anything. It's never meant anything. It's just a new word used by chemists, solid state physicists, and others to get funding and excitement around the same stuff they've been doing for quite some time.
Uh, yes it is. It's a nuclear process and not a chemical one.
No matter how we produce energy, we are doing so at the expense of the environmental balance that made sophisticated life on Earth possible to begin with.
A chemical balance. Not a nuclear one. Or do you care to explain how you think the ratio of helium-to-hydrogen was essential in creating life? Keep in mind that helium dissipatates from the atmosphere.
So Linux is open for modification and distribution..... as long as Linus feels that you aren't harming his trademark? [sarcasm] Wow, that's certainly open.[/sarcasm]
How does the trademark stop you from modifying and distributing Linux freely? The only thing it stops you from is using the name "Linux" commercially in ways he doesn't like.
Big. Difference.
You can't make your own OSS spreadsheet program either and name it "Microsoft Excel".
I guess with Linux's userbase (both corporate and private) continuing to grow, Linus (or at least a lawyer working on his behalf) feels that perhaps they need to begin regulating Linux a bit more closely.
FYI: "Linux" was trademarked in 1996 by a lawyer who didn't have anything to do with Linux and then proceeded to ask for royalties from companies using it.
After a legal scuffle, Linus Torvalds was assigned the copyright in 1997 (So this is news?), and has licensed it since. The Linux Mark Institute has been around for years as well. (Can't recall exactly when they started, but archive.org dates their page to at least 2002).
"Linux" is a term with commercial potential. If Linus didn't own the trademark, someone else would (and did). And they would hardly charge any less.
Homo erectus didn't have a society totally dependant on electronics for it's economics and machines to feed it's population. Of course we'll survive a reversal, but it won't be pleasant for those involved. What a load of nonsense!
Electronics and machinery are not dependent on the orientation of the earths magnetic field. Why on earth would they be that?
The earth's magnetic field is about 50 microteslas in strength. I have personally seen computers operate happily in static fields over 10 times stronger than that. (although the CRT displays tend to get warped after long periods of time)
"some people" are mostly psychologists out to sell books.
IQ is a load of bunk. So is EQ. The whole notion of what we call human intelligence can be described in one, two or even 10 simple, easily quantified parameters is stupid and unscientific.
The idea that emotion and intelligence (or: Sense and Sensibility) are two distinct things is antique philosophical claptrap, with little justification in reality.
Results in neurology (a real science, as opposed to most psychology) indicate that not only are these things nondistinct, but rather that human emotions provide the foundation for what we call 'intelligence', even of the abstract kind. Read, for instance Descartes' Error, by Antonio Damasio.
First, saying that a film is better the more faithful it is to the original material is only true if you assume the book is always better.
While that is often the case in practice, it's not some law of nature. And there are some pretty big examples of the contrary. For instance, just about everything Stanely Kubrick did ("2001", "A Clockwork Orange", "The Shining") is generally considered a greater work within their field of cinema than the books they were based on were within their respective fields.
Second, "Faithful" doesn't need to be in the literal sense either. A film can be completely faithful to its source and still take large license.
See Coppola's "Apocalypse now" versus its source, Conrad's "Heart of Darkness". The best adaptation ever made, IMHO. It's a brilliant, classic, film, based on a brilliant, classic, book. But they have little in common superficially. The Kongo river of the 1800s is now the Mekong in the 1960s. The critique of colonialism is now a critique of war. But it's still the same story. It's still the same characters making the same journey. The same ideas and the same atmosphere.
The same goes for all good art. Do you really need an all-male cast and an Elizabethan theatre to do a good rendition of Shakespeare? I don't think so.
So you can make an adaptation of a book where nothing is the same (superficially) and still do a wonderful job. And conversely you can make an adaptiation where every scene and line is intact, but which still is bleak and soulless.
And that last point is always said with almost an air of superiority, like there's an underlying "I didn't do well at math and I'm successful, why did you waste your time?" - often enough people will actually come out and say that too. I'm sure any other mathematicians here on Slashdot can testify to much the same thing. There is a deep deated cultural belief that mathematics isn't important
I disagree. I mean, first off: Some people are simply assholes, and there's no accounting for that.
But apart from that, I disagree. While I'm not too sure about how important maths are considered to be, I do believe there is a deap-seated belief that mathematics equals intelligence. If you're good at math, you're smart. If you're not good at math, you're not smart.
This is a stereotype, and it's based on a very narrow and inaccurate view of what constitutes "intelligence". And I don't think people in the fields of science and engineering do enough to counteract that stereotype.
I think people in the sci/eng fields tend to underestimate the inferiority a lot of people feel due to this. I know I used to. There are simply lots of very intelligent people out there who don't feel intelligent simply because they weren't that great at math back in school.
So I think a lot of what you are witnessing isn't people berating mathematics, but rather a backlash against a perceived air of superiority. Much in the same way as if you told someone "I own a Lamborghini" and they reacted "Well, I don't really care for cars. As long as it gets you from point A to point B, I say.".
Is it unfair that people infer a feeling of superiority? Yes it is. But that's what happens with stereotypes, they cut both ways.
Mathematics is important. But I think it is suffering from a level of dramatization which is detrimental. Kids will try math and if they don't succeed at it immediately, they come to conclude that they're just not "smart" enough, and move on to other subjects.
Math is important. But that importance has lead it to be associated far too much with "intelligence". Math is just like any other subject: You get better at it with practice. But it is unlike other subjects in how it builds upon itself. If you miss out at the start, it makes it increasingly harder to catch up.
if the driver is a device that will allow the circumvention of a system designed to protect copyrighted information, that makes the implementation of it a breach of the DMCA, no?
No. You are reading it backwards. A circumvention device is defined as something which:
has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title
The DMCA does not define everything as a circumvention device unless it is for interoperability. It defines everything as a circumvention device which has no purpose other than that.
And I cannot see how, by any stretch of the imagination, a driver or program allowing you to display content (ANY content) on a high-def monitor could be found to not have significant non-infringing purpose or use.
It's not an issue of displaying anything, it's of displaying particular resolutions. If you can display something, you are interoperating just fine.
That's a complete bullshit reading of the law. Why the heck would "interoperability" mean anything less than full interoperability? Cite some case-law which supports that position.
It's put forth as a copy protection scheme, end to end protection.
That doesn't change the fact that there is significant non-infringing use here. Namely to display something, anything on the monitor.
Sure, you might be able to get around by claiming the RE for interoperability portion of the DMCA,
Might? Of course you will. If being able to use a piece of hardware with your own software isn't what was meant by "interoperability" in the DMCA, then what did they mean?
but how many OSS projects have that sort of funding?
If you can't fund you're defense against barratry, that makes you are doing illegal?
Besides which, there's the EFF. And even people who didn't have the EFF behind them have prevailed in cases wich were far less clear-cut. (DVD-Jon)
illegal to decrypt encrypted intelectual property without permission.
No. It's illegal to circumvent a copyright-protection device. That may or may not have something to do with encryption, but it has nothing to do with a device-driver for a monitor.
you have some DMCA thing over there that bans it. we don't even have software patents.
If you're talking about Europe, the EUCD has more or less the same anti-circumvention rules as the DMCA.
I mentioned Darrin York because he recently gave a presentation on semi-empirical QM potentials.
I think you meant MM potentials, right? (QM methods don't work with arbitrary potentials.)
The potential is very accurate, but only for phosphorylation reactions. Then he performs QM/MM simulations using the semi-empirical force field, which is much faster now that the original ab initio calculations have already been completed.
I didn't quite get what you meant here; "if he already knows the PES, what's the point in the simulation?" But looking in his JACS paper I see what you mean, he's doing a dynamics simulation. (Hadn't heard of him though. I've met Chris Cramer from the same University once or twice. If you know the guy. (he's pretty big in the field))
there's always a ton of saddle nodes around the transition state 'region'.
Right. But the inaccuracy of DFT methods is about 3-7 kcal/mol, so you really won't be able to find or distinguish between nearby transition-states or find the exact state. It's (IMHO) only good enough to distingish between different mechanisms, not to find the exact pathway of one.
Less even. Largest our group has done is about 120.
The current solution to that problem is to use a hybrid Quantum Mechanic / Molecular Mechanic (QM/MM) method that only uses ab initio calculations for the atoms located near the catalytic site and use regular molecular dynamic simulations for all other atoms.
Right. But MM is not ab-initio, and DFT QM isn't either if you're a purist. And you still need a reliable structure:)
So, you're right when you say "you cannot make an ab-initio model", but if the end goal is to _predict_ the dynamics of a whole cell then one doesn't need to perform quantum calculations _on everything_. And the calculations don't need to be performed at the same time.
Absolutely. But that's pretty much in line with my original point: That even though we do not know exactly what is going on at every given moment, we don't really need that information either. And it doesn't mean we don't have a 'deeper understanding' of what's going on.
Now, of course, there's experimental data out there so we don't need to in silico predict _everything_.
That's not quite true though. For instance, say you want to predict how a certain foreign substance interacts in the cell environment. Which is a rather important scenario to drug companies, to say the least. Then you'd have to go off and do a huge number of experiments to get parameters for that substance. In the end, you're better off just feeding it to a rat and waiting to see what happens.
For non-empirical models of chemical reaction kinetics, look up 'transition path sampling'. It's a way to sample the possible reaction mechanisms of a reaction and calculate kinetics. You need to perform a lot of sampling so it's currently limited to quickly occurring reactions (but it has recently worked on calculating the kinetics of small protein folding). The method does require that the reaction mechanism is known (ie. what the reaction coordinates are).
It requires a full potential energy surface to work with. And that would be either empirical (MM, which is incapable of breaking/forming bonds) or non-empirical (QM, which is way too expensive to do any kind of PES scanning).
Nobody I know of using QM or QM/MM for reaction mechanisms uses an automated procedure.
For the hybrid QM/MM stuff, look up 'Darrin York'. Well, my own research group does this already.;)
That stuff still needs some sort of reaction coordinate defined, but the simulations don't assume anything about the catalysis process itself.
Well saying that you need the reaction coordinate (of the transition-state, presumably) means that you already know (or assume) what the reaction mechanism is, as you said yourself. And either you automate that search (too expensive), or you use your chemistry skills to make some qualified guesses and do the calculation to see if they're viable.
But we do not have a 'black box' where you can put in the arbitrary substances A and B, choose a temperature and solvent and find out what they will do to eachother.
When you're working with thousands of atoms, it's hard to determine at which point did the substrate turn into product/etc.
That's wrong though. The transition-state is easily defined: The highest-energy point on the substrate-to-product pathway. This can be verified even for a single coordinate, just as for any function: Zero derivative of energy W.R.T coordinates, and a negative second-derivative. The numbers will also tell you which atoms are the ones actually reacting. (Now the transition-state isn't always the limiting factor in the kinetics. It could be a very fast reaction limited by diffusion for instance, but that's a different story)
"We do not have a model which reliably predicts some of the most simple chemical reactions, much less those in biochemistry."
That may have been true 30 years ago, but it's not now. In fact, we can predict the dynamics of biological processes, such as gene expression, signal transduction, and metabolism. The hard part about predicting these systems is that _there are so many components_.
No, it is still correct today. E.g. the Arrhenius equation describes the dynamics of most chemical reactions. That doesn't mean it describes the actual reaction mechanism.
Yes, you can predict the dynamics of those few (but central) processes that have been studied. But that's something different to what I was talking about. That's a situation where you know the what the component does and are wondering about the how of how they all interact together.
What I was talking about is the prediction of the what and not the how. For instance, given a DNA sequence for an enzyme, you cannot predict its structure. (yet)
And even given the structure, you cannot predict the function an enzyme. (ab initio, anyway. Homology comparisons can help do it of course. But since we're talking 'deep understanding' here, I take it to mean ab initio)
We can't know the mechanism offhand either. In fact, some of the most well studied enzymes in existance still have unknown reaction mechanisms. You can't predict how the enzyme will interact with any given substrate.
So basically, what I'm said and am saying now is that there is absolutely no way you can build an ab-initio model of a cell in the forseeable future.
That doesn't mean that you can't make abstractions and make simplified models which are useful. But you cannot make an ab-initio model based on physics, which is what I was talking about.
Now, if you can tell me a non-empirical model which will accurately provide information about chemical reaction kinetics, I'd like to know about it. Because that's what I do research in.
Much of biological science consists hacking, trial and error, dubious statistics, and manipulating life with cheap tricks and without deep understanding.
That ain't right. It's the procedure and methods which are trial-and-error, hacking and statistics. Not the understanding. Biologists and biochemists know what's going on in a cell. What they cannot do, is manipulate that stuff directly.
Cells are very very small things. DNA is very sensitive matter. There is simply no method to insert a given piece of DNA into a single cell, and such a method would be very difficult to develop. At the same time, there isn't a huge need for such a method, when you can easily reproduce a few billion cells, use a crude brute-force attempt to get the DNA into them, and then sort out the ones where this failed.
Ok. That's the cell biology part. That is pretty well-understood. What is not understood as well is more complex creatures. Like humans and other highly evolved creatures. But that's a different story, and beyond the scope here.
But I wonder if there is there a deeper 'theory' of biology analogous to least action principles in physics, that could be illuminated by mathematics?
Biology follows the principles of physics. It's all explainable by chemistry, which in turn is explained by physics. But if what you mean is there a simple mathematical model for Biology like there is for Newtonian physics, then: Absolutely not, it's too complex a system.
Using Newtonian physics to describe a billiards ball is simple. But if you have a million billiard balls in a room whizzing around, then you have a problem which it'll take you a supercomputer to solve. In biology not only do you have more than a million different billiard balls, the underlying physical model is far more complex: Quantum physics.
We do not have a model which reliably predicts some of the most simple chemical reactions, much less those in biochemistry.
But that doesn't mean we don't have a 'deeper' understanding of what's going on, any less than saying we don't have a 'deeper' understanding of what the million billiard balls are doing.
As much as we techies usually investigate things, we kind of dropped the ball on this one.
"We" dropped the ball? Nobody dropped the ball. What happened was that the usual gang of zealots quickly decided that in their world of black-and-white, that this was in the black, and promptly went off to find further 'evidence' supporting that position.
People actually in the know, know that "Linux" is trademarked, and has been for years. The Linux Mark Institute has been around for years. The only real news here was that thanks to the Linux Australia group, they were now enforcing that trademark in Australia too.
I code Free Software, but I am not a zealot. Most people I know who code Free Software are not zealots. And I have no wish whatsoever to be associated with them. In my opinion they are the scourge of the FOSS community.
They are those who contribute nothing, but view themselves as contributing by bashing anyone who is 'against' them. And they define themselves as part of the FOSS community.
Guess what? Digging up irrelevant personal information about someone in order to discredit them is always wrong. No matter what cause you're advocating.
That goes for Mrs. O'Gara's 'uncovering' of Groklaw's PJ, but also to those Groklaw and Slashdot posters who, for instance, like to speculate over Noorda's daughter's suicide, something which is far more disrespectful and morally reprehensible in my opinion.
Is reverse-engineering software necessarily illegal?
No. Reverse-engineering is legal. But not as legal as it once was, since the DMCA bans the circumvention of copyright protection devices, except for interoperability purposes.
Has a precedent been set in the software world that would apply to this?
Yes and no. There is a good amount of legal precedent from before, e.g. Vault Corp. v. Quaid Software Ltd, which held that reverse-engineering was legal, even though there was an EULA prohibiting it. This was even for a copyright-protection circumvention device. (a program which would copy copy-protected floppies)
But that ruling is from before the DMCA, and probably isn't as relevant anymore.
The thing is, the DMCA is rather new, so there isn't a lot of precedent defining exactly what qualifies as 'interoperability purposes'. Nor is the idea of a 'copyright protection device' very well defined yet. Which is why there are lots of eager lawsuits trying to strech this to cover everything.
I think Real could probably make a good argument that it's for interoperability purposes. But since it's not well-defined, they're right to be cautious.
In Europe, things are somewhat clearer. Council directive 91/250/EEC, article 6 also allows reverse-engineering for interoperability purposes, and defines those purposes somewhat better than US law.
It's worth mentioning that stopping reverse-engineering through copyright law is only possible if the subject material is copyrightable to begin with. And people tend to overestimate how much of a program is copyrightable. For instance, an API is either not in itself copyrightable (Computer Associates v. Altai) or, duplicating it is allowed through fair-use (Sega v. Accolade).
1) Someone puts up a website that irritates your corporation 2) File a frivolous lawsuit against the website 3) Wait until Slashdot picks up the resulting story 4) Watch the site go down in flames due to the subsequent slashdotting. 5) Objective achived, site is offline!
Slashdot - greater threat to free speech than the DMCA?:)
Grepping in the source of 2.6.19, the status seems to be that out of 7200.c files, 6800 of the have some form of GPL notice in them, and the rest don't.
Out of the 6800 who do, 2400 of them actually do have the "..any later version.." form of the GPL license statement.
Slashdot Mirror
Not an official definition here, but it's nanometer scale engineering.
So is all chemistry. But not all chemistry gets to be called "nanotech". I personally do 'engineering at the nanometer scale', yet within an area which is not graced by the 'nanotech' buzzword (enzymatic catalysis). But I have no sour grapes about that.
Because as I said: the term is complete nonsense. If you apply your skills to one area it's 'nanotech' when applying the exact same skills to a different area isn't. A good portion of the people I studied chemistry with once-upon-a-time are now in various forms of 'nanotech', but I don't know a single one of them who thinks there's anything special about 'nanotech' which distinguishes it from what everyone else is doing within their respective fields.
It's a buzzword. A bullshit term. Marketspeak. There is no definition except in some kind of vague perception among those who buy into the hype. And so everyone who is anywhere near that perception will naturally define themselves as 'nanotech' to get funding.
Because that is what it's all about: Funding and marketing. The term 'nanotech' has no particular value to the people actually in science. It's too vauge.
Saying that the above application is "nanotech" is something like calling a parking lot "architecture".
Truely spoken by someone who believes the hype and thinks there somehow is a fundamental difference between 'nanotech' and other areas of chemistry, solid-state physics and friends.
Ok, well since someone apparently disagreed with that statement enough to mod it down, could someone in the pro-liquid-N2 camp perhaps tell me what's so efficient about using liquid N2?
Enlighten me as to where liquid N2 is being used for cooling electronics in industry as well. Given that industry tends to be very interested in efficiency, examples shouldn't be hard to find?
Only that they are. Precisely because industry is interested in efficiency, and not in geek-points.
So why is anything being called nanotech?
Nanotech is a buzzword. It doesn't really mean anything. It's never meant anything. It's just a new word used by chemists, solid state physicists, and others to get funding and excitement around the same stuff they've been doing for quite some time.
Using liquid nitrogen or dry ice to cool your computer has nothing to do with "high efficiency cooling".
It's rice. And it's stupid. And it has nothing to do with cooling your machine in a practical or efficient manner.
Fusion really isn't very different.
Uh, yes it is. It's a nuclear process and not a chemical one.
No matter how we produce energy, we are doing so at the expense of the environmental balance that made sophisticated life on Earth possible to begin with.
A chemical balance. Not a nuclear one. Or do you care to explain how you think the ratio of helium-to-hydrogen was essential in creating life? Keep in mind that helium dissipatates from the atmosphere.
So Linux is open for modification and distribution..... as long as Linus feels that you aren't harming his trademark? [sarcasm] Wow, that's certainly open.[/sarcasm]
How does the trademark stop you from modifying and distributing Linux freely? The only thing it stops you from is using the name "Linux" commercially in ways he doesn't like.
Big. Difference.
You can't make your own OSS spreadsheet program either and name it "Microsoft Excel".
I guess with Linux's userbase (both corporate and private) continuing to grow, Linus (or at least a lawyer working on his behalf) feels that perhaps they need to begin regulating Linux a bit more closely.
FYI: "Linux" was trademarked in 1996 by a lawyer who didn't have anything to do with Linux and then proceeded to ask for royalties from companies using it.
After a legal scuffle, Linus Torvalds was assigned the copyright in 1997 (So this is news?), and has licensed it since. The Linux Mark Institute has been around for years as well. (Can't recall exactly when they started, but archive.org dates their page to at least 2002).
"Linux" is a term with commercial potential. If Linus didn't own the trademark, someone else would (and did). And they would hardly charge any less.
Homo erectus didn't have a society totally dependant on electronics for it's economics and machines to feed it's population. Of course we'll survive a reversal, but it won't be pleasant for those involved.
What a load of nonsense!
Electronics and machinery are not dependent on the orientation of the earths magnetic field. Why on earth would they be that?
The earth's magnetic field is about 50 microteslas in strength. I have personally seen computers operate happily in static fields over 10 times stronger than that.
(although the CRT displays tend to get warped after long periods of time)
"some people" are mostly psychologists out to sell books.
IQ is a load of bunk. So is EQ. The whole notion of what we call human intelligence can be described in one, two or even 10 simple, easily quantified parameters is stupid and unscientific.
The idea that emotion and intelligence (or: Sense and Sensibility) are two distinct things is antique philosophical claptrap, with little justification in reality.
Results in neurology (a real science, as opposed to most psychology) indicate that not only are these things nondistinct, but rather that human emotions provide the foundation for what we call 'intelligence', even of the abstract kind.
Read, for instance Descartes' Error, by Antonio Damasio.
First, saying that a film is better the more faithful it is to the original material is only true if you assume the book is always better.
While that is often the case in practice, it's not some law of nature. And there are some pretty big examples of the contrary. For instance, just about everything Stanely Kubrick did ("2001", "A Clockwork Orange", "The Shining") is generally considered a greater work within their field of cinema than the books they were based on were within their respective fields.
Second, "Faithful" doesn't need to be in the literal sense either. A film can be completely faithful to its source and still take large license.
See Coppola's "Apocalypse now" versus its source, Conrad's "Heart of Darkness". The best adaptation ever made, IMHO. It's a brilliant, classic, film, based on a brilliant, classic, book. But they have little in common superficially. The Kongo river of the 1800s is now the Mekong in the 1960s. The critique of colonialism is now a critique of war. But it's still the same story. It's still the same characters making the same journey. The same ideas and the same atmosphere.
The same goes for all good art. Do you really need an all-male cast and an Elizabethan theatre to do a good rendition of Shakespeare? I don't think so.
So you can make an adaptation of a book where nothing is the same (superficially) and still do a wonderful job. And conversely you can make an adaptiation where every scene and line is intact, but which still is bleak and soulless.
And that last point is always said with almost an air of superiority, like there's an underlying "I didn't do well at math and I'm successful, why did you waste your time?" - often enough people will actually come out and say that too. I'm sure any other mathematicians here on Slashdot can testify to much the same thing. There is a deep deated cultural belief that mathematics isn't important
I disagree. I mean, first off: Some people are simply assholes, and there's no accounting for that.
But apart from that, I disagree. While I'm not too sure about how important maths are considered to be, I do believe there is a deap-seated belief that mathematics equals intelligence. If you're good at math, you're smart. If you're not good at math, you're not smart.
This is a stereotype, and it's based on a very narrow and inaccurate view of what constitutes "intelligence". And I don't think people in the fields of science and engineering do enough to counteract that stereotype.
I think people in the sci/eng fields tend to underestimate the inferiority a lot of people feel due to this. I know I used to. There are simply lots of very intelligent people out there who don't feel intelligent simply because they weren't that great at math back in school.
So I think a lot of what you are witnessing isn't people berating mathematics, but rather a backlash against a perceived air of superiority. Much in the same way as if you told someone "I own a Lamborghini" and they reacted "Well, I don't really care for cars. As long as it gets you from point A to point B, I say.".
Is it unfair that people infer a feeling of superiority? Yes it is. But that's what happens with stereotypes, they cut both ways.
Mathematics is important. But I think it is suffering from a level of dramatization which is detrimental. Kids will try math and if they don't succeed at it immediately, they come to conclude that they're just not "smart" enough, and move on to other subjects.
Math is important. But that importance has lead it to be associated far too much with "intelligence". Math is just like any other subject: You get better at it with practice. But it is unlike other subjects in how it builds upon itself. If you miss out at the start, it makes it increasingly harder to catch up.
if the driver is a device that will allow the circumvention of a system designed to protect copyrighted information, that makes the implementation of it a breach of the DMCA, no?
No. You are reading it backwards. A circumvention device is defined as something which:
has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title
The DMCA does not define everything as a circumvention device unless it is for interoperability. It defines everything as a circumvention device which has no purpose other than that.
And I cannot see how, by any stretch of the imagination, a driver or program allowing you to display content (ANY content) on a high-def monitor could be found to not have significant non-infringing purpose or use.
It's not an issue of displaying anything, it's of displaying particular resolutions. If you can display something, you are interoperating just fine.
That's a complete bullshit reading of the law. Why the heck would "interoperability" mean anything less than full interoperability? Cite some case-law which supports that position.
You're just making up reasons as you go along.
It's put forth as a copy protection scheme, end to end protection.
That doesn't change the fact that there is significant non-infringing use here. Namely to display something, anything on the monitor.
Sure, you might be able to get around by claiming the RE for interoperability portion of the DMCA,
Might? Of course you will. If being able to use a piece of hardware with your own software isn't what was meant by "interoperability" in the DMCA, then what did they mean?
but how many OSS projects have that sort of funding?
If you can't fund you're defense against barratry, that makes you are doing illegal?
Besides which, there's the EFF. And even people who didn't have the EFF behind them have prevailed in cases wich were far less clear-cut. (DVD-Jon)
illegal to decrypt encrypted intelectual property without permission.
No. It's illegal to circumvent a copyright-protection device. That may or may not have something to do with encryption, but it has nothing to do with a device-driver for a monitor.
you have some DMCA thing over there that bans it. we don't even have software patents.
If you're talking about Europe, the EUCD has more or less the same anti-circumvention rules as the DMCA.
Care to explain how that would be illegal?
Because it isn't.
I mentioned Darrin York because he recently gave a presentation on semi-empirical QM potentials.
I think you meant MM potentials, right? (QM methods don't work with arbitrary potentials.)
The potential is very accurate, but only for phosphorylation reactions. Then he performs QM/MM simulations using the semi-empirical force field, which is much faster now that the original ab initio calculations have already been completed.
I didn't quite get what you meant here; "if he already knows the PES, what's the point in the simulation?" But looking in his JACS paper I see what you mean, he's doing a dynamics simulation. (Hadn't heard of him though. I've met Chris Cramer from the same University once or twice. If you know the guy. (he's pretty big in the field))
there's always a ton of saddle nodes around the transition state 'region'.
Right. But the inaccuracy of DFT methods is about 3-7 kcal/mol, so you really won't be able to find or distinguish between nearby transition-states or find the exact state. It's (IMHO) only good enough to distingish between different mechanisms, not to find the exact pathway of one.
Ab initio calculations are limited to ~200 atoms.
:)
;)
/etc.
Less even. Largest our group has done is about 120.
The current solution to that problem is to use a hybrid Quantum Mechanic / Molecular Mechanic (QM/MM) method that only uses ab initio calculations for the atoms located near the catalytic site and use regular molecular dynamic simulations for all other atoms.
Right. But MM is not ab-initio, and DFT QM isn't either if you're a purist. And you still need a reliable structure
So, you're right when you say "you cannot make an ab-initio model", but if the end goal is to _predict_ the dynamics of a whole cell then one doesn't need to perform quantum calculations _on everything_. And the calculations don't need to be performed at the same time.
Absolutely. But that's pretty much in line with my original point: That even though we do not know exactly what is going on at every given moment, we don't really need that information either. And it doesn't mean we don't have a 'deeper understanding' of what's going on.
Now, of course, there's experimental data out there so we don't need to in silico predict _everything_.
That's not quite true though. For instance, say you want to predict how a certain foreign substance interacts in the cell environment. Which is a rather important scenario to drug companies, to say the least. Then you'd have to go off and do a huge number of experiments to get parameters for that substance. In the end, you're better off just feeding it to a rat and waiting to see what happens.
For non-empirical models of chemical reaction kinetics, look up 'transition path sampling'. It's a way to sample the possible reaction mechanisms of a reaction and calculate kinetics. You need to perform a lot of sampling so it's currently limited to quickly occurring reactions (but it has recently worked on calculating the kinetics of small protein folding). The method does require that the reaction mechanism is known (ie. what the reaction coordinates are).
It requires a full potential energy surface to work with. And that would be either empirical (MM, which is incapable of breaking/forming bonds) or non-empirical (QM, which is way too expensive to do any kind of PES scanning).
Nobody I know of using QM or QM/MM for reaction mechanisms uses an automated procedure.
For the hybrid QM/MM stuff, look up 'Darrin York'.
Well, my own research group does this already.
That stuff still needs some sort of reaction coordinate defined, but the simulations don't assume anything about the catalysis process itself.
Well saying that you need the reaction coordinate (of the transition-state, presumably) means that you already know (or assume) what the reaction mechanism is, as you said yourself. And either you automate that search (too expensive), or you use your chemistry skills to make some qualified guesses and do the calculation to see if they're viable.
But we do not have a 'black box' where you can put in the arbitrary substances A and B, choose a temperature and solvent and find out what they will do to eachother.
When you're working with thousands of atoms, it's hard to determine at which point did the substrate turn into product
That's wrong though. The transition-state is easily defined: The highest-energy point on the substrate-to-product pathway. This can be verified even for a single coordinate, just as for any function: Zero derivative of energy W.R.T coordinates, and a negative second-derivative. The numbers will also tell you which atoms are the ones actually reacting.
(Now the transition-state isn't always the limiting factor in the kinetics. It could be a very fast reaction limited by diffusion for instance, but that's a different story)
"We do not have a model which reliably predicts some of the most simple chemical reactions, much less those in biochemistry."
That may have been true 30 years ago, but it's not now. In fact, we can predict the dynamics of biological processes, such as gene expression, signal transduction, and metabolism. The hard part about predicting these systems is that _there are so many components_.
No, it is still correct today. E.g. the Arrhenius equation describes the dynamics of most chemical reactions. That doesn't mean it describes the actual reaction mechanism.
Yes, you can predict the dynamics of those few (but central) processes that have been studied. But that's something different to what I was talking about. That's a situation where you know the what the component does and are wondering about the how of how they all interact together.
What I was talking about is the prediction of the what and not the how. For instance, given a DNA sequence for an enzyme, you cannot predict its structure. (yet)
And even given the structure, you cannot predict the function an enzyme. (ab initio, anyway. Homology comparisons can help do it of course. But since we're talking 'deep understanding' here, I take it to mean ab initio)
We can't know the mechanism offhand either. In fact, some of the most well studied enzymes in existance still have unknown reaction mechanisms. You can't predict how the enzyme will interact with any given substrate.
So basically, what I'm said and am saying now is that there is absolutely no way you can build an ab-initio model of a cell in the forseeable future.
That doesn't mean that you can't make abstractions and make simplified models which are useful. But you cannot make an ab-initio model based on physics, which is what I was talking about.
Now, if you can tell me a non-empirical model which will accurately provide information about chemical reaction kinetics, I'd like to know about it. Because that's what I do research in.
Much of biological science consists hacking, trial and error, dubious statistics, and manipulating life with cheap tricks and without deep understanding.
That ain't right. It's the procedure and methods which are trial-and-error, hacking and statistics. Not the understanding. Biologists and biochemists know what's going on in a cell. What they cannot do, is manipulate that stuff directly.
Cells are very very small things. DNA is very sensitive matter. There is simply no method to insert a given piece of DNA into a single cell, and such a method would be very difficult to develop. At the same time, there isn't a huge need for such a method, when you can easily reproduce a few billion cells, use a crude brute-force attempt to get the DNA into them, and then sort out the ones where this failed.
Ok. That's the cell biology part. That is pretty well-understood. What is not understood as well is more complex creatures. Like humans and other highly evolved creatures. But that's a different story, and beyond the scope here.
But I wonder if there is there a deeper 'theory' of biology analogous to least action principles in physics, that could be illuminated by mathematics?
Biology follows the principles of physics. It's all explainable by chemistry, which in turn is explained by physics. But if what you mean is there a simple mathematical model for Biology like there is for Newtonian physics, then: Absolutely not, it's too complex a system.
Using Newtonian physics to describe a billiards ball is simple. But if you have a million billiard balls in a room whizzing around, then you have a problem which it'll take you a supercomputer to solve. In biology not only do you have more than a million different billiard balls, the underlying physical model is far more complex: Quantum physics.
We do not have a model which reliably predicts some of the most simple chemical reactions, much less those in biochemistry.
But that doesn't mean we don't have a 'deeper' understanding of what's going on, any less than saying we don't have a 'deeper' understanding of what the million billiard balls are doing.
As much as we techies usually investigate things, we kind of dropped the ball on this one.
"We" dropped the ball? Nobody dropped the ball. What happened was that the usual gang of zealots quickly decided that in their world of black-and-white, that this was in the black, and promptly went off to find further 'evidence' supporting that position.
People actually in the know, know that "Linux" is trademarked, and has been for years. The Linux Mark Institute has been around for years. The only real news here was that thanks to the Linux Australia group, they were now enforcing that trademark in Australia too.
I code Free Software, but I am not a zealot. Most people I know who code Free Software are not zealots. And I have no wish whatsoever to be associated with them. In my opinion they are the scourge of the FOSS community.
They are those who contribute nothing, but view themselves as contributing by bashing anyone who is 'against' them. And they define themselves as part of the FOSS community.
Guess what? Digging up irrelevant personal information about someone in order to discredit them is always wrong. No matter what cause you're advocating.
That goes for Mrs. O'Gara's 'uncovering' of Groklaw's PJ, but also to those Groklaw and Slashdot posters who, for instance, like to speculate over Noorda's daughter's suicide, something which is far more disrespectful and morally reprehensible in my opinion.
End rant.
Creating a Y-junction nanotube is 5 years old. But the news here isn't that they created a Y-junction nanotube.
The news here is that they created a Y-junction nanotube with a metal particle at the junction which caused it to function as a transistor.
The inevitable smart-ass question of "Oh, but that electricity has to come from somewhere!!".
Consider this:
Energy content of gasoline: ~45 MJ/kg
Density of gasoline: 737 kg/m3
1 cubic meter = 264.172051 gallons, equals 2.79 MJ/gallon.
Now 1 kWh is exactly 3.6 MJ. Electricity costs (let's exaggerate) 30 cents per kWh.
What do you pay for gas?
Now add to that the facts that:
1) It is easier to clean up a handfull of power-plants than a millions cars distributed over the whole country.
2) Electricity doesn't have to come from fossil fuel sources
3) Even if it does, power plants still produce energy more efficiently than an automobile engine.
Is reverse-engineering software necessarily illegal?
No. Reverse-engineering is legal. But not as legal as it once was, since the DMCA bans the circumvention of copyright protection devices, except for interoperability purposes.
Has a precedent been set in the software world that would apply to this?
Yes and no. There is a good amount of legal precedent from before, e.g. Vault Corp. v. Quaid Software Ltd, which held that reverse-engineering was legal, even though there was an EULA prohibiting it. This was even for a copyright-protection circumvention device. (a program which would copy copy-protected floppies)
But that ruling is from before the DMCA, and probably isn't as relevant anymore.
The thing is, the DMCA is rather new, so there isn't a lot of precedent defining exactly what qualifies as 'interoperability purposes'. Nor is the idea of a 'copyright protection device' very well defined yet. Which is why there are lots of eager lawsuits trying to strech this to cover everything.
I think Real could probably make a good argument that it's for interoperability purposes. But since it's not well-defined, they're right to be cautious.
In Europe, things are somewhat clearer. Council directive 91/250/EEC, article 6 also allows reverse-engineering for interoperability purposes, and defines those purposes somewhat better than US law.
It's worth mentioning that stopping reverse-engineering through copyright law is only possible if the subject material is copyrightable to begin with. And people tend to overestimate how much of a program is copyrightable. For instance, an API is either not in itself copyrightable (Computer Associates v. Altai) or, duplicating it is allowed through fair-use (Sega v. Accolade).
IANAL.
Hmm..
:)
1) Someone puts up a website that irritates your corporation
2) File a frivolous lawsuit against the website
3) Wait until Slashdot picks up the resulting story
4) Watch the site go down in flames due to the subsequent slashdotting.
5) Objective achived, site is offline!
Slashdot - greater threat to free speech than the DMCA?
Grepping in the source of 2.6.19, the status seems to be that out of 7200 .c files, 6800 of the have some form of GPL notice in them, and the rest don't.
Out of the 6800 who do, 2400 of them actually do have the "..any later version.." form of the GPL license statement.