"...a person must first go to a studio where engineers record 10 to 40 hours of readings. Texts range from business news reports to nonsense babble."
I wouldn't be too concerned about someone faking my voice (yet---wait for next year) this still raises the issue that what we hear and see may no longer be reality at all. This reminds me of the technology that the media is using to insert adds into sports events, and which CBS used to
cover up a NBC billboard during the "millenium" New Years celebration.
It's not too long before we'll be able to completely fake the voice and image of whomever we please. Then it's just the credibility of the source that will matter. Content alone will carry little weight.
I love the intelligent tone of the commentary on Slashdot.
I don't care too much whether MS posted the patch before or after the worm came out, though you're almost certainly right on this point. I'm not trying to bash MS here, and I'm definately not trying to get into the whole "linux rules, down with M$" garbage. Were this an Apache bug the same situation might arise.
Rather, it's obvious that many system administrators have not patched this bug, but certainly with a high profile attack like this one many will. If, instead, there was a more sneaky attack, people might be slower to recognize it as a problem, and hence slower to respond. The end result might not be so spectacular, but might cause more real harm.
I have a hard time getting too excited or upset about this. In fact, I have a hard time feeling that whoever wrote this is all that evil.
Let's look at it this way, someone took a bug that existed in a product and exploited it in a way that made it very clear that it was being exploited. Result: MS publishes a patch. If they were really mallicious they'd make a much more subtle attack that MS wouldn't be so quick to recognize and fix.
As for the horrible things that this will do to us, let me ask you all this: would you rather have an attack like this one that will slow things down, and maybe even shut down a few web sites, or would you like to have someone exploit web servers to get your credit card number?
As a consumer I'd rather do without [insert favorite e-commerce site here] for a while than have to deal with someone stealing my information off of a web site.
Both happen, both get some publicity, but the one that industry cares about is the one that everyone is up in arms about.
However, Russia, for example, doesn't seem to have a comparable law. Although it's wonderful that there are some of us who do give a damn, it's disheartening that we have such an asnine law to begin with.
Disclaimer: IANAMBIPOOTV (I am not a mathematician but I play one on TV)
Someone else may better speak to this.
Randomness is a funny thing. What I mean is that we use the term in several circumstances and we confuse ourselves. In this situation there isn't anything truly random in the sense we normally think of it; the digits are already determined, we just need to look them up (using the formula discussed). This contrasts with what we normally think of as a truly random process such as flipping a coin, waiting for an atomic nucleus to decay, or using a Pop-O-Matic Bubble.
So what do we mean? Somehow we mean that it appears random---that we couldn't just guess and get the next digit.
The way that Baily and friends have formalized this is to say that in the limit all consecutive sequences of length k occur with equal frequency. So, for example, if I look at the first 6 digits of the decimal part,.141592, the sequences of length 3 are 141, 415, 159, 592. These occur with probability 1/4, and the other 996 occur with probablility 0. But, as we look at more and more digits they all become equally frequent, occuring with probability 1/1000. The same happens for all length sequences if we look out far enough.
In computer science we often discuss pseudo-randomness. In this case we start with some number of truly random digits, and then have an algorithm that generates more digits. If no bounded time algorithm can determine that these aren't random, then they are pseudo-random.
Now, whether there's really any randomness in the world or not, that's metaphysics. (Editorial: And metaphysics is crap!)
I'm not even that old, but I remember when the internet scorned commercial enterprise.
Not that I'm against commercial content on the net, but we've gone from a commercial-unfriendly environment to a commercial-friendly one. Now they want to wrest more control from the public hands?
It seems a lot of work, and not terribly interesting thing, to find the factors of some particular large number. Enough cycles and a reasonable algorithm, and someone will (eventually) get it.
Of course, I'm sure that that is not what RSA Labs is hoping for. What would be much more interesting is if someone can come up with a method that doesn't take a massive number of cycles and could be quickly used on any such number.
Or more interesting yet, prove that one needs to work their butt off to factor it.
If one could either one, the prize would be much more than 200 grand.
Sure. The point is that XML is only a file format. The data it represents is vaguely semi-structured. Of course, one needs a query/update language on top of that (and some other good stuff) on top of that to make a database---there have been many proposed. In the relational world there is no standard file format. One could represent relational data in XML pretty trivially, though.
- XML Schema is also very poor on data modelling, because it has no separation between a structural schema (which element goes inside the other) and a semantic schema (what each element means, when placed inside another)
DTDs are problematic because they just provide a grammar for the structure of an XML document. XML Schema tries hard to provide a strong notion of type. For example, I could define a type called Person and let several tags, say manager and employee both have that type.
- How do you represent shared resource in XML; such as an author of several modules ?
Sort-of. It's hard to represent graphs in XML. Unlike semi-structured data, which is a graph, XML is, at its core, a tree description language. One can define graphs with IDs and IDREFS, but it's a pain.
- How do you distinguish such an author for another author with the same name ?
This seems like a key problem---you'd have the same issue in the relational world. To separate two authors with the same name you need more information to make a key.
The biggest problem I see for XML as a data description language is that it's way too complicated for what it does. To represent semi-structured data, which is what we seem to want here, all you need is a simple graph description language. XML, however, does this with three types of edges (subelement, attribute, and IDREF) and has other features (eg., mixed content) that are hard to figure out what to do with from a database perspective. (From a document description point of view things like mixed content make a lot of sense.)
The other problem, one induced partly from the inherent complexity of XML, is that the standards that are growing up are horrendeously complicated. For example, the 300 page monster that is XML Schema.
Look, did Mitnick get screwed by the government? Probably. Is he still getting screwed? Okay, sure. But does that mean that everything he says is intelligent or insightful? Hell, no.
To publicise the injustice done against Mitnick seems like a good idea to me. If he, or anyone else were to make a newsworthy comment, then it should be reported. But to base a story on one paragraph of some interview with him---especially such an asnine one!?
Mitnick is not my god. I don't even particularly look up to the man. I don't much like what happened to him, but that alone does not make him a man whose opinions particulary valid, interesting, or important.
There are two mistakes that were made here, but the big one is being made by everyone. Note: I am not, never was, and never will be, an apologist for MS, but I do think that the major error made in this situation is not confined to them.
The thing that everyone seems to be focusing on is that when an attatchment is opened, it is automatically run. In current systems, this is a big mistake for obvious reasons. Executing helper programs to handle attatchments is a good thing---I *want* to be able to see JPEGs when they come in without having to load up xv on my own---but one should *never* set up the system so that an incoming attatchment can cause arbitrary actions to be taken on their machine. Allowing this by defaulting to run VB scripts, or any scripts, was a mistake by MS, but this could have happened on *NIX as well if someone were to ship a misconfigured mail reader.
The more fundemental issue is that when I run a program on any of these major systems (WinNT, *NIX, MacOS) that program executes with all the permissions that *I* have. In reality, I very rarely want that to happen. How often does my CD player need to overwrite my.cshrc file? How often does vi have to send mail? In reality, *any* program I run could have a bug which deletes all of my files, mailed President Clinton a threatening letter, and dialed 911 on my modem.
Really, every program I run should be executed with the least permissions needed to get the job done. Very rarely is this the same as running with all the permissions that I have. This mechanism should be built in and enforced by the OS from the ground up, but does not exist in any major OS right now. The best alternative I can think of is Java, which can only try to fix what the OS failed to provide.
The only bugs that the MS products have in this case are (1) having stupid default behaviour, and (2) making their system work like everyone else's.
Does it bug me that various governments around the world want to snoop on my private communications? Yessir! Is there anything that will stop them? I seriously doubt it.
I think that we need to take a serious look at the way that we think about communicating over public media. When you send something out over the internet, you have no control over who reads it along the way. The same goes for cellular phones, and to a lesser extend conventional phones as well.
Why on earth is it illegal for me to record a cellular phone call, for example? After all *they're* the ones bombarding me with *their* photons. Why can't I just record what they are? It's silly.
If you want to keep something private encrypt it. By default you really ought encrypt everything. Why not?
I seriously believe that we as a community have to get over the "BigBrother/BigCorporations/MrIdiotWithAScanner is watching me" complex in situations where we can easily keep them from doing so.
time, space and the scalability of wet chemistry
on
RNA Computer
·
· Score: 3
Firs, a minor point: I believe that the problem that Adelman solved was a seven node Hamiltonian path problem. This is like the TSP, but formulated as a decision problem: given a directed graph, is there *any* path from point A to point B that visits all the nodes once.
Not to detract from Adelman's work---it was a very pretty algorithm, and it did prove the principle that this COULD be done---but it didn't really give a practicle way of solving the problem. All it did was spread the computations out over a large number of processors.
Think about it this way: Of course I can solve an NP hard algorithm in polynomial time---just give me an exponential number of processors.
What Adelman's algorithm did, and what it looks like these Princeton researchers did, was create every possible solution as a nucleotide (RNA or DNA) strand, and then select out the correct ones. Although I haven't thought about the problem that the Princeton researchers have tackled, with the Ham-path problem, there are potentially n^n possible sequences *of the right length* that have to be searched. When the sequences are made, however, many others will be made as well. That's quite a few if the problem gets to be of any size at all.
As the size gets up to anything "reasonably hard" the amount a fluid required to simply keep the DNA/RNA in solution will get prohibitively large, and now we have to be able to do chemistry on them. These basic operations that are typically done on DNA/RNA, like PCR, gel electrophoresis, and probing, are usually done on *microliters* of solution, not megaliters. This is why the only things researchers have been able to do so far is these "toy" examples.
My feeling is that the problem with all of this work is that all of the algorithms (that I've seen) rely on the same basic scheme: encode all the solutions and then in a massively parallel way fish out the correct one. What's probably going to be needed to yield anything practicle is for someone to figure out a way for the nucleotide to be an active part of the computation, rather than a passive encoding device. This is most likely going to take a while, since the only operations we can do to these molecules are the ones we can FIND proteins to do for us. Once protein engineering gets better, we may be able to do more.
A question I have: Since this model of computation is not super-Turing, why are all of these researchers trying to tackle NP-complete problems? They'll run into the same exponential blowups that conventional machines do. It seems that it might be more productive to look into ways to harness the vast potential parallelism to handle large instances of P-time algorithms in a more efficient manner. Just a thought.
Mergesort runs in O(nlogn) time in both the average and worst case (in fact, every case...), and can certainly be done on arrays. (Although I don't think it can be done in place, so you need 2n total storage.)
The insight here is that every time mergesort partitions the list, it splits it in half. Quicksort could be unlucky and only cleave off the first element of the list at each recursive step, at which case it really degrades into selection sort, which takes O(n^2) time.
There are nifty ways of doing quicksort that do it in place, so there's no need for extra storage, and, since it does take O(nlogn) time in the average case, it is a favorite for people with large quantities of data.
This is probably the exact reason we've seen such a boon in this kind of advertising. The technology is already available to remove the ad breaks from a show. It will not be that long before it's a common thing, so they have to start inserting the ads into the show to have them seen. We can't (yet) do anything about those.
They'll have to watch themselves for two reasons: first, they have to be careful not to annoy their viewers to the point that they turn off, and second, they have to make sure that their news shows maintain credibility.
For me they've already failed on both points, which is one reason I don't have a TV.
So CBS has decided that it will digitally edit in these ads. This technology has been available for some time already and has been used in things like hockey games and car races for a while now.
I think the issue is that we can no longer view video, even live video, as fact. This has long been the case with photographs. Why do we still trust newspapers like the New York Times or the Washington Post? We trust them because experience has shown that when they say "this is how it is" they end up being right. This holds for the text they print as well as the images.
CBS has chosen to insert these computer altered videos into their production, so when they tell us "this is how it is" we have experience that tells us "it probably isn't", so we really ough not trust them.
This is the risk that the media faces when they do something like this---CBS has lost a lot of credibility by their actions.
I can say for sure that I will not be getting my news from CBS if I can avoid it. Do I think that we need a full blown boycot of CBS? I don't know, but I would encourage anyone I know who's interested in getting real news to avoid them. I just don't think they can be trusted.
I guess I don't understand why a company would be able to patent a gene in the first place. I can understand patenting algorithms, since they are a process that was invented by someone, but the genes which are present aren't being invented by these companies, they were evolved over millions of years.
\begin{weak analogy}
What if I were to find a new species. This species exists naturally in the world. Can I patent it? What does this even mean? Is that species not allowed to reproduce without the companies permission? Is no one else allowed to use the species without the companies permission?
It seems to me that this is like the patenting of genes. It makes no sense either.
This may have already been said, but my quick scan of the messages could have easily missed it.
Depending on your definition of life you can get by with a lot less than a couple of hundred genes. Sure, bacteria may need more, but there are many a virus with a lot less than a hundred genes.
My bio is a bit rusty, but if I recall, tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) has 3 genes.
Now, granted, a virus needs a host to replicate, but many people do consider them alive.
If you consider a prion alive, then you can, in fact, get by with 0 genes. All you need is a protein.
I have a toshiba laptop with one of those trackpoint pointing devices in the middle of the keyboard. I love it, since I can move around without ever removing my hands from the keyboard. Does anyone make a keyboard like this for a desktop machine?
There are times when it's important to have fast running code, but perl offers features that you _really_ want (i.e. text processing routines). I'm no perl guru, but I understand that perl is compiled on the fly when you run it, which incurs quite a performance hit.
Has there been any thought/work on making a regular ol' compiler for code where you can't take the performance hit that the normal perl cycle takes?
I'm not a big fan of NT by any means, but this is just silly. As many have said, it would be easy to rig _any_ system so that it booted slowly.
What I'm curious about is if anyone has hard numbers comparing NT/Linux/BSDs/etc. boot times on systems that are running similar configurations. It's fun to bash Microsoft---hell, I enjoy it---but I'd prefer to see what the actual state of affairs is.
Slashdot Mirror
I wouldn't be too concerned about someone faking my voice (yet---wait for next year) this still raises the issue that what we hear and see may no longer be reality at all. This reminds me of the technology that the media is using to insert adds into sports events, and which CBS used to cover up a NBC billboard during the "millenium" New Years celebration.
It's not too long before we'll be able to completely fake the voice and image of whomever we please. Then it's just the credibility of the source that will matter. Content alone will carry little weight.
I don't care too much whether MS posted the patch before or after the worm came out, though you're almost certainly right on this point. I'm not trying to bash MS here, and I'm definately not trying to get into the whole "linux rules, down with M$" garbage. Were this an Apache bug the same situation might arise.
Rather, it's obvious that many system administrators have not patched this bug, but certainly with a high profile attack like this one many will. If, instead, there was a more sneaky attack, people might be slower to recognize it as a problem, and hence slower to respond. The end result might not be so spectacular, but might cause more real harm.
Let's look at it this way, someone took a bug that existed in a product and exploited it in a way that made it very clear that it was being exploited. Result: MS publishes a patch. If they were really mallicious they'd make a much more subtle attack that MS wouldn't be so quick to recognize and fix.
As for the horrible things that this will do to us, let me ask you all this: would you rather have an attack like this one that will slow things down, and maybe even shut down a few web sites, or would you like to have someone exploit web servers to get your credit card number?
As a consumer I'd rather do without [insert favorite e-commerce site here] for a while than have to deal with someone stealing my information off of a web site.
Both happen, both get some publicity, but the one that industry cares about is the one that everyone is up in arms about.
However, Russia, for example, doesn't seem to have a comparable law. Although it's wonderful that there are some of us who do give a damn, it's disheartening that we have such an asnine law to begin with.
Someone else may better speak to this.
Randomness is a funny thing. What I mean is that we use the term in several circumstances and we confuse ourselves. In this situation there isn't anything truly random in the sense we normally think of it; the digits are already determined, we just need to look them up (using the formula discussed). This contrasts with what we normally think of as a truly random process such as flipping a coin, waiting for an atomic nucleus to decay, or using a Pop-O-Matic Bubble.
So what do we mean? Somehow we mean that it appears random---that we couldn't just guess and get the next digit.
The way that Baily and friends have formalized this is to say that in the limit all consecutive sequences of length k occur with equal frequency. So, for example, if I look at the first 6 digits of the decimal part, .141592, the sequences of length 3 are 141, 415, 159, 592. These occur with probability 1/4, and the other 996 occur with probablility 0. But, as we look at more and more digits they all become equally frequent, occuring with probability 1/1000. The same happens for all length sequences if we look out far enough.
In computer science we often discuss pseudo-randomness. In this case we start with some number of truly random digits, and then have an algorithm that generates more digits. If no bounded time algorithm can determine that these aren't random, then they are pseudo-random.
Now, whether there's really any randomness in the world or not, that's metaphysics. (Editorial: And metaphysics is crap!)
Not that I'm against commercial content on the net, but we've gone from a commercial-unfriendly environment to a commercial-friendly one. Now they want to wrest more control from the public hands?
blah...
(shudder)
There's actually a million dollar prize for solving that one. I guess if you solve it the right way you should be able to quickly claim your 1.6 mil.
That we know of. Prove it.
(And then we can all rest a bit easier when we use RSA, for example.)
Of course, I'm sure that that is not what RSA Labs is hoping for. What would be much more interesting is if someone can come up with a method that doesn't take a massive number of cycles and could be quickly used on any such number.
Or more interesting yet, prove that one needs to work their butt off to factor it.
If one could either one, the prize would be much more than 200 grand.
Sure. The point is that XML is only a file format. The data it represents is vaguely semi-structured. Of course, one needs a query/update language on top of that (and some other good stuff) on top of that to make a database---there have been many proposed. In the relational world there is no standard file format. One could represent relational data in XML pretty trivially, though.
- XML Schema is also very poor on data modelling, because it has no separation between a structural schema (which element goes inside the other) and a semantic schema (what each element means, when placed inside another)
DTDs are problematic because they just provide a grammar for the structure of an XML document. XML Schema tries hard to provide a strong notion of type. For example, I could define a type called Person and let several tags, say manager and employee both have that type.
- How do you represent shared resource in XML; such as an author of several modules ?
Sort-of. It's hard to represent graphs in XML. Unlike semi-structured data, which is a graph, XML is, at its core, a tree description language. One can define graphs with IDs and IDREFS, but it's a pain.
- How do you distinguish such an author for another author with the same name ?
This seems like a key problem---you'd have the same issue in the relational world. To separate two authors with the same name you need more information to make a key.
The biggest problem I see for XML as a data description language is that it's way too complicated for what it does. To represent semi-structured data, which is what we seem to want here, all you need is a simple graph description language. XML, however, does this with three types of edges (subelement, attribute, and IDREF) and has other features (eg., mixed content) that are hard to figure out what to do with from a database perspective. (From a document description point of view things like mixed content make a lot of sense.)
The other problem, one induced partly from the inherent complexity of XML, is that the standards that are growing up are horrendeously complicated. For example, the 300 page monster that is XML Schema.
I don't know if this has been linked to, but the EFF has an article
on the arrest, complete with contacts for an EFF attorney on the matter.
Look, did Mitnick get screwed by the government? Probably. Is he still getting screwed? Okay, sure. But does that mean that everything he says is intelligent or insightful? Hell, no.
To publicise the injustice done against Mitnick seems like a good idea to me. If he, or anyone else were to make a newsworthy comment, then it should be reported. But to base a story on one paragraph of some interview with him---especially such an asnine one!?
Mitnick is not my god. I don't even particularly look up to the man. I don't much like what happened to him, but that alone does not make him a man whose opinions particulary valid, interesting, or important.
There are two mistakes that were made here, but the big one is being made by everyone. Note: I am not, never was, and never will be, an apologist for MS, but I do think that the major error made in this situation is not confined to them.
.cshrc file? How often does vi have to send mail? In reality, *any* program I run could have a bug which deletes all of my files, mailed President Clinton a threatening letter, and dialed 911 on my modem.
The thing that everyone seems to be focusing on is that when an attatchment is opened, it is automatically run. In current systems, this is a big mistake for obvious reasons. Executing helper programs to handle attatchments is a good thing---I *want* to be able to see JPEGs when they come in without having to load up xv on my own---but one should *never* set up the system so that an incoming attatchment can cause arbitrary actions to be taken on their machine. Allowing this by defaulting to run VB scripts, or any scripts, was a mistake by MS, but this could have happened on *NIX as well if someone were to ship a misconfigured mail reader.
The more fundemental issue is that when I run a program on any of these major systems (WinNT, *NIX, MacOS) that program executes with all the permissions that *I* have. In reality, I very rarely want that to happen. How often does my CD player need to overwrite my
Really, every program I run should be executed with the least permissions needed to get the job done. Very rarely is this the same as running with all the permissions that I have. This mechanism should be built in and enforced by the OS from the ground up, but does not exist in any major OS right now. The best alternative I can think of is Java, which can only try to fix what the OS failed to provide.
The only bugs that the MS products have in this case are (1) having stupid default behaviour, and (2) making their system work like everyone else's.
Does it bug me that various governments around the world want to snoop on my private communications? Yessir! Is there anything that will stop them? I seriously doubt it.
I think that we need to take a serious look at the way that we think about communicating over public media. When you send something out over the internet, you have no control over who reads it along the way. The same goes for cellular phones, and to a lesser extend conventional phones as well.
Why on earth is it illegal for me to record a cellular phone call, for example? After all *they're* the ones bombarding me with *their* photons. Why can't I just record what they are? It's silly.
If you want to keep something private encrypt it. By default you really ought encrypt everything. Why not?
I seriously believe that we as a community have to get over the "BigBrother/BigCorporations/MrIdiotWithAScanner is watching me" complex in situations where we can easily keep them from doing so.
Firs, a minor point: I believe that the problem that Adelman solved was a seven node Hamiltonian path problem. This is like the TSP, but formulated as a decision problem: given a directed graph, is there *any* path from point A to point B that visits all the nodes once.
Not to detract from Adelman's work---it was a very pretty algorithm, and it did prove the principle that this COULD be done---but it didn't really give a practicle way of solving the problem. All it did was spread the computations out over a large number of processors.
Think about it this way: Of course I can solve an NP hard algorithm in polynomial time---just give me an exponential number of processors.
What Adelman's algorithm did, and what it looks like these Princeton researchers did, was create every possible solution as a nucleotide (RNA or DNA) strand, and then select out the correct ones. Although I haven't thought about the problem that the Princeton researchers have tackled, with the Ham-path problem, there are potentially n^n possible sequences *of the right length* that have to be searched. When the sequences are made, however, many others will be made as well. That's quite a few if the problem gets to be of any size at all.
As the size gets up to anything "reasonably hard" the amount a fluid required to simply keep the DNA/RNA in solution will get prohibitively large, and now we have to be able to do chemistry on them. These basic operations that are typically done on DNA/RNA, like PCR, gel electrophoresis, and probing, are usually done on *microliters* of solution, not megaliters. This is why the only things researchers have been able to do so far is these "toy" examples.
My feeling is that the problem with all of this work is that all of the algorithms (that I've seen) rely on the same basic scheme: encode all the solutions and then in a massively parallel way fish out the correct one. What's probably going to be needed to yield anything practicle is for someone to figure out a way for the nucleotide to be an active part of the computation, rather than a passive encoding device. This is most likely going to take a while, since the only operations we can do to these molecules are the ones we can FIND proteins to do for us. Once protein engineering gets better, we may be able to do more.
A question I have: Since this model of computation is not super-Turing, why are all of these researchers trying to tackle NP-complete problems? They'll run into the same exponential blowups that conventional machines do. It seems that it might be more productive to look into ways to harness the vast potential parallelism to handle large instances of P-time algorithms in a more efficient manner. Just a thought.
Mergesort runs in O(nlogn) time in both the average and worst case (in fact, every case...), and can certainly be done on arrays. (Although I don't think it can be done in place, so you need 2n total storage.)
The insight here is that every time mergesort partitions the list, it splits it in half. Quicksort could be unlucky and only cleave off the first element of the list at each recursive step, at which case it really degrades into selection sort, which takes O(n^2) time.
There are nifty ways of doing quicksort that do it in place, so there's no need for extra storage, and, since it does take O(nlogn) time in the average case, it is a favorite for people with large quantities of data.
This is probably the exact reason we've seen such a boon in this kind of advertising. The technology is already available to remove the ad breaks from a show. It will not be that long before it's a common thing, so they have to start inserting the ads into the show to have them seen. We can't (yet) do anything about those.
They'll have to watch themselves for two reasons: first, they have to be careful not to annoy their viewers to the point that they turn off, and second, they have to make sure that their news shows maintain credibility.
For me they've already failed on both points, which is one reason I don't have a TV.
So CBS has decided that it will digitally edit in these ads. This technology has been available for some time already and has been used in things like hockey games and car races for a while now.
I think the issue is that we can no longer view video, even live video, as fact. This has long been the case with photographs. Why do we still trust newspapers like the New York Times or the Washington Post? We trust them because experience has shown that when they say "this is how it is" they end up being right. This holds for the text they print as well as the images.
CBS has chosen to insert these computer altered videos into their production, so when they tell us "this is how it is" we have experience that tells us "it probably isn't", so we really ough not trust them.
This is the risk that the media faces when they do something like this---CBS has lost a lot of credibility by their actions.
I can say for sure that I will not be getting my news from CBS if I can avoid it. Do I think that we need a full blown boycot of CBS? I don't know, but I would encourage anyone I know who's interested in getting real news to avoid them. I just don't think they can be trusted.
I guess I don't understand why a company would be able to patent a gene in the first place. I can understand patenting algorithms, since they are a process that was invented by someone, but the genes which are present aren't being invented by these companies, they were evolved over millions of years.
\begin{weak analogy}
What if I were to find a new species. This species exists naturally in the world. Can I patent it? What does this even mean? Is that species not allowed to reproduce without the companies permission? Is no one else allowed to use the species without the companies permission?
It seems to me that this is like the patenting of genes. It makes no sense either.
\end{weak analogy}
Can anyone help me here?
This may have already been said, but my quick scan of the messages could have easily missed it.
Depending on your definition of life you can get by with a lot less than a couple of hundred genes. Sure, bacteria may need more, but there are many a virus with a lot less than a hundred genes.
My bio is a bit rusty, but if I recall, tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) has 3 genes.
Now, granted, a virus needs a host to replicate, but many people do consider them alive.
If you consider a prion alive, then you can, in fact, get by with 0 genes. All you need is a protein.
I have a toshiba laptop with one of those trackpoint pointing devices in the middle of the keyboard. I love it, since I can move around without ever removing my hands from the keyboard. Does anyone make a keyboard like this for a desktop machine?
There are times when it's important to have fast running code, but perl offers features that you _really_ want (i.e. text processing routines). I'm no perl guru, but I understand that perl is compiled on the fly when you run it, which incurs quite a performance hit.
Has there been any thought/work on making a regular ol' compiler for code where you can't take the performance hit that the normal perl cycle takes?
-zook
I'm not a big fan of NT by any means, but this is just silly. As many have said, it would be easy to rig _any_ system so that it booted slowly.
What I'm curious about is if anyone has hard numbers comparing NT/Linux/BSDs/etc. boot times on systems that are running similar configurations. It's fun to bash Microsoft---hell, I enjoy it---but I'd prefer to see what the actual state of affairs is.
-zook
I don't know what this is about Google and banner ads, but if people hate them that much, stop whining and filter them out!