Of course what we're talking about in this case is not *embronic* stem cells but bone marrow from the the boy's own body. So there not really any moral question in that regard.
Other than that, the technique doesn't strike me as groundbreaking, merely a novel use of existing techniques. It not really a case of 'moral imperative to cure an obscure disease' but more, 'it would probably be easy to do this'. If the knowedge is available to help someone, as rare as SCIDS is, shouldn't we just do it? I guess it's easy to wax philosophic when it doesn't affect you.
As far and cancer and whatnot, yes it's true there are high risk activities, but people get sick that aren't in high risk groups. It's easy to look at statistics and say 'X causes Y' but in reality, on a case by case basis, it's not so cut and dried. But why insist on any moral imperative at all? The truth is that being sick sucks, why don't we show a little compassion?
I'm in molecular biology, and I've actaully thought about this before. 1 in 200 people get hiv but don't die from aids because of a faulty cell receptor that prevents the virus from infecting the cell. If one was to use a retrovirus vector with the faulty gene inserted.. that just might confer resistance. Just an idea anyway.
In a way, Gates' comments make sense. I have to call you on this one because I think he's telling the truth (in parts of what he says). Think about it. MS didn't release WinXP to fix bugs in win2k, did they? No, WinXP is way buggier and slower, but has more features. The bugs then get fixed with service packs. Win2k runs quite well for me thank you.
And then he says:
"There are no significant bugs in our released software that any significant number of users want fixed."
You could argue that that's statiscally true, if, say, there are a million users, 1000 bugs that each randomly affect 1000 computers.
More importantly, he could easily argue what you define as a 'bug'. Is an awkward aspect of the interface considered a bug? Maybe, maybe not. Also when you're dealing with a huge number of hardware and software vendors with there own buggy software, it really compunds the problem. In fact now that I think about it, I'd say 90% of the problems I've had through the years with MS OSs has been with buggy drivers and hardware.
If you are aware that the FBI may be watching what you are doing on a particular system, then would you use that system for illicit purposes anyway? Or if you specifically were using your computer for illicit purposes, would you try to circumvent those FBI security measures?
It sounds to me like the only people that this is going to affect are the people who aren't going to be trying to get away with anything.. ie 'I don't care if I can detect if Magic Lantern is on my computer because I'm not doing anything wrong'.
If someone is too stupid to realize this then they're going to get caught anyway so what's the big deal? It's like people who think no one can log their web surfing when they log into their proxy at work. If I found someone surfing porn at work I would fire them not because I care that they are looking at porn, but because if they are to stupid to realize that I can watch what they are doing, then I don't want them working for me. It's quite stunning those supposed 'experts' that click on weird email attachments and bring down the whole system. These people know better. An idea would be to send out an email like that that looks like a trojon but in the.doc file attachment just says, "Hi. You know you shouldn't click on these things. It's takes a week to get the system back when you do. You're fired, please clean out your desk."
Ok, so I'm on a pointless rant, but the point is that this monitoring seems to be pointless. So I guess they can do whatever they want.
What horrors would one had to commit to provoke such an attack? Don't assume a true heart of evil in those terrorists. Even with my less-than-exhastive knowledge of US foreign policy, such acts don't seem entirely unforeseen.
Which brings me to my next point:
Do the comments by former important NATO dude et Al.. seem somewhat blaise and unsurprised? Why is this? I see two cases, either they've been preparing for this sort of attack for quite some time and it final happen regardless of the safeguards.. or.. these attempts have been happening unbeknownst to public and the security agencies have been sticking their fingers in a dam that's about to collapse..
Which brings me to my final point..
I certainly hope that this is the end and not the beginning. The US is a prideful and patriotic country. If the president and military leaders value the safety and lives of their people, perhaps compassion and sober reflection for the innocents thus killed is in order, and not prideful, vengeful crys of bloodlust.
In the pro column there's a strong case for decrease in the use pesticides. In the con column there's companies that would love to sell crop seed with super high yields that grow super fast that are infertile. This would trap farmers into buying one (patented) variety of seed in order to remain competitive, and force them to keep buying it. There's also a danger of engineering a crop that requires a certain specific fertilizer (they will sell you) to grow. The other only very real danger to people in mixing DNA is for people with food allergies. A few molecules of a food allergen can kill someone.
Ultimately, I hate to be the pestimist, but for all the ballyhoo over how great genetically modfied foods are, I think the knowedge and techiques will be abused by companies in order to make more money.
"Scientist recently discovered that radiation causes genetic mutations. These and other groundbreaking discoveries in the pages of the medical journal 'Duh'."
I remember writing a paper about life in space and reading paper where scientists had found ATP (adenosine triphosphate, a source of energy), ubiquidous and necessary for life on Earth.. Furthermore that on early Earth that the surrounding environment was the only source of ATP. Early primative life could not produce their own ATP, the ability to synthasis ATP as an energy source evolved later. Also I think that there is evidence of RNA in space.. I'm not sure about that though.
Finding carbon rings in space is nothing new. These Nasa scientists are reveiling their lack of knowledge about biology getting all excite about finding benzene and water in space. The central paradigm of molecular biology (DNA->RNA->amino acid) would seem to indicate that the first protolife was in the form of RNA, which can join without the help of enzymes.. RNA itself can fact can act as a enzyme. Amino acids, were probably created 'de novo' by the organism or incorporated into the organism later..
Oh no.. if everything's encrypted some hacker will be forced to spend two afternoons cracking it!
How about an alternate future scenario:
Major record companies begin to be crushed by the yoke of their own oppression as they realize with the advent of the internet and inexpensive recording equipment, that artists can record and promote themselves without signing draconian recording contracts. In fact it's already happening. There's recards labels called net labels, and like anything else on the internet, anyone can start one.
Of the gigs of mp3s that I have on my computer I don't have a single 'illegal' one. And all the music I have comes with a creativity and freshness that you just don't find in mainstream music anymore. The RIAA can put that in there pipe and smoke it.
Of course the RIAA is trying to combat this by encrypting future DVD-audio *NOT* to combat piracy but to force an independant artist to pay the RIAA to press cds.. but with cds sticking arounf for a while and mp3s this is pretty much a moot point.
For a long time MS has been trying to convince us that the windows9X platform is an OS, which of course it is not. It is a shell. It sits on top of dos and there is a number of old dos real mode drivers etc.. that will run fine in windows.. An old driver to read ntfs partitions under dos is one that I can think of.. dos cd-rom drivers and that sort of thing would work fine too.. To this day Windows98 contains some old 16-bit code.. and will drop into real mode to run old drivers or old software.. One fact lost to antiquity is that from pentium pros onwards windows98 is slower than NT/2000 because the intel processors from that point were optimized for pure 32-bit instructions.. Anyway.. win2k is much better platform IMO.. I'm really happy with it.
Taking out dos windows in winME isn't fooling anyone.
Probably wouldn't work so well..
on
Biotransistors
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· Score: 2
The researchers of this or whatever are really oversimplifying the issue.
Plant metabolism isn't my big thing but what happens in a photosynthetic plant is there's a stacks of photo sensitive organelles called thylakoids. In the membrane of the thylakoids there is chrolophyll which basically has a set of repeating single and double bonds and when the light strikes it, it bumps one of the bonds into a higher energy resonant structure. Then the cholophyll falls back down to its the lower energy, the energy which is in the form of a bond, not a free electron as in electricity in a wire, is carried to a membrane bound set of protiens where the electron is ultimately supplied by H20. There is a electron transfering moleule called NAD+ which transports electrons. The energy provided by the bonds is ultimately tranfered to the NAD+ which is reduced to NADH and O2 is liberated as a gas. So we not talking about a flow of elctrons like in a wire. The electron is bound up in another molecule.. Which will ultimately be used to create a H+ gradient to drive the production of ATP.
I can see using chlorophyll as a light sensitive device.. but I can't see the use of the whole cell as a light sensitive device, it simply wasn't designed with that purpose in mind.. And it seems like an opportunity to get at the electron would be far down the line and would create so much latency (I may be wrong about that)that it wouldn't be usedful in elcetronic devices.
It's an interesting idea but I think the propects for encorporating oraganics and electronics lie with using small numbers of molecules.. For instance chlorophyll may have some applications as an optical device of some sort.
If the courts consider Napster's primary purpose to be pirating, then by that arguement, guns should be outlawed too. After all, Their only purpose is to shoot people.
Actually I'm glad that Napster is illegal. Things are only 'cool' then they're illegal.
Napster probably won't go on the way it is.
on
Two-Faced Napster?
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· Score: 2
Assuming that the guy running the show is a smart guy, Napster won't be going on being a 'free music trading' service for much longer. What Napster is is a name, and Napster gained a hell of a lot of name brand recognition with all this legal trouble.. The kind of brand recognition that you can't buy. Napster is a household name, and they didn't have to pay a red cent in advertising to get that name. Napster very well could be shut down and re-started as a totally legitimate, corporate system for distributing music. Lame yes, but it could happen.
Remember ICQ. Those guys sold it for like 200 million dollars to aol. What were they selling? A name. That's all. Name recoginition right now is hardest and most sought after commodity on the interent. Get it and you have it made for life.
It would probably be earier just to create the same result yourself then 'hacking' the modified crop. Of course there are those that want this kind of gene modification patentalbe. Can ou imagine? It would surprise me if it happens. For the the good of all mankind I think there should be no patents allowed on genetic material.
Many of the big concerns over gene splicing have to do with the introducing allergens into unrelated species. For instance if you were to splice the right strawberry gene into another species someone allergic to strawberries may then be allergic to whAtever you spliced the gene into. For people with serious allergies this creates a lot of uncertainly. There is people that could die from this kind of thing. Hence the need for proper labelling.
Why gene splicing is bad in crops IMO is because a company will do somthing like make a crap grow bigger and faster then add another gene to prevent second generation propagation of the crap. Therefore making that people dependant upon buying those seeds. Gene manipulation for crops right now really is just market manipulation.
Another point to consider is the number of chemicals that are used to grow crops. IMO it's a far better alternative to splice a some insect gene into a crop genome to give it resistance to pests then spray it with strong carcenogens and nerve-affecting chemicals like they do now. The former is far more innocuous.
If you're going to put monitoring equipment everywhere under that assumption that it actually works, then that puts the imputus strongly on these devices for proving that I'm guilty.
If anyone is stupid enough to organize major criminal activities through e-mail then they deserve to be caught just for their stupidness. Just like someone shoplifting in an obviously camera infested area.
However. If I find someway of bypassing your security measures that whatever law enforcement will become increasingly reliant apon, then I never did it, did I? I get away scott free.
Militant advertising is a whole other matter. I like how search engines now target advertising based on what you use for search criteria. I guess as long as the advertisers are aware of the growing resentment against them and that people now are probably more likely to associate negative feelings to a product in an ad.. at least moreso with our generation. I don't any of us are fooled by advertising any more.. This isn't the 50's.. As long as they're aware of that, then everything is fine. There's three main ways of presenting advertising: eliciting positive feelings i the viewer, 'reverse psychology' (our stuff sucks, don't buy it), and shock value (Calvin Klein is good at that one) but the younger generations have been so saturated and desensitived to media in general and advertising specifically that they would probably have to smear baby guts on the wall to get my attention anyway.
DNA that is transcribed into RNA and hence into proteins is read off of only one strand. There are recognition sequences to determine the beginning and end points of transcription. Also DNA has a 'direction' 5'->3' so you can tell which direction is which. I'm sure whatever ind of software the transcription guys use recoginzes this.
As for second point our DNA is for the most part almost identical. We need to have 99.9% of the same parts in order to run properly, i.e. everyone's gene sequence for hemoglobin is the same. So there is almost no variation in most of the genes in which mutations would be lethal or at least very bad. The genes that do allow variation.. i.e. eye color, are of a very small percentage and variation is allowed within those genes..
Actually we can 'compile' the code because we know all the enymnes (polymerases) etc that turn the dna into rna then into proteins, and we know how they work.
So the higher level building block would be the resultant amino acid sequence... Then the functional protein..
'Random' is not a good word to use when talking about genetic material. What influences that decide what information carries on through the generations isn't a result of randomness.. Although base-pair mutations do happen in a generally 'random' way. If a protein is rendered non-functional due to a mutation the other copy of the gene is still functional. Hence non-functional or seeming detrimental genes are carried through time until either they turn out to be an advantage at some point, or a whole new trait emerges. If you study genetics for some time you begin to realize that 'mistakes' or abberations are the pool by which functional innovations occur. Judging genetic fitness on a basically arbitrary basis i.e. anyone saying one trait is the prefered or 'correct' trait are demonstating their misunderstanding how evolution works. There are numerous examples of this. There's the classic sickle-cell enemia example, and those people that carry a defect in a specific protien so the hiv is unable to attach to and infect their cells.. hence, they are immune.
Due to the billions of individuals.. Aside from other factors, randomness occurs within the context of the individual but not within the context of the popluation. Populations and species evolve or remain at a genetic equilibium for very systematic reasons.
What you describe though seems to be a case of prosecuting someone for finding or otherwise knowing how to retrive some piece of information. The issue over decss and napster etc, etc.. is the issue of stopping the information at it's source.. i.e. sueing the guy putting it out there in the first place. If you you don't know the origin then all you would have with this system is a thousands of servers with collections of random pads.. you would have to sue *everyone*.. obviously that isn't realistic.
Not really because you use MD5 on the pads then make the signature the file name.. People can distribute all the corrupt pads they want but you know right away that they aren't authentic.
The point is that no one can accuse anyone else of copyright infringment because on you have 'pads' of random data.. The cryptography people don't seem to understand that this has nothing to do with ultimatly being secure because the lists of pads will be distributed anyway.. basically the point is that there is no legal basis to fight this. And it's so stupidly easy to impliment this system that even an idiot i.e. even me, could do it. Now we just need a good distribution system.. something that's anonymous but unlike napster is not dependant on the individual servers.. then each person just designated a arbitrary amount of pad space and bandwidth and the pads are sent to other random computers based on some sort of neural net type of load balancing so the entire system is not dependant on any of the individual parts but more on the flux of people always online.. hmm.. I'm realizing the significance of this.. wow.. I'm going go have a shower and think about this more..
1. In addition to the 330,000 people tracked down and individually sued for copyright infringment, everyone who has ever copied a Metallica album should also be sued. Of course all those individual cases would clog the legal system for a hundred years so they would have to have mass trials like here in Vancouver after the Clayoquot protests, but on a much larger scale. Metallica should recieve the value of the copyrights and punitive damages which should amount to somthing like one billion billion trillion dollars. At which point society would collapse into anarchy because the money doesn't exist.
2. Napster should be held responisble for all those people's actions because people have no freedom of choice and were forced to use it. Napster should also be held responisble for any person that listens to a Metallica song that is downloaded through Napster or subsquently copies that music after the fact in perpetuety. Once again these damages would total to 1 billion billion trillion dollars. One day after Napster is put out of commision someone else releases a program that does exactly the same thing, it's popularity explodes and the cycle begins again. Eventually Metallica is legallity entitled to all the money in the universe.
If I was going to start a record company, I wouldn't charge $15 for 50c cd and a little slip of paper. What I would probably make that release at like 15% over cost or something.. and free to distribute.. Encode and release the entire album probably in AAC 128VBR or something so it sounds perfect.. free to d/l and distribute.. At this point it would probably be cheaper for an individual to buy the cd then to burn a copy.. You could burn the encoded files cd but you would still have to use a whole cd to burn to cd that's readable by regular cd players. Then.. I might sell another version in a fancy box, throw a book in there and some stickers, stick a hologram on it or something.. For like $20.. Also I would release a limited pressings for $30 that was maybe engraved and made a funny color. Then I'd throw a coupon in there you can mail in to order a dvd full of videos and and a poster signed by the band for maybe another $20.. Record companies used to do this sort of thing more but most don't seem to bother now. Even boxed sets these days are cheap and lame.. I think the answer to the problem for record companies is to give people something that they can't get for free for there money instead of milking copyrights to the extreme like they do now. Those days are over.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course what we're talking about in this case is not *embronic* stem cells but bone marrow from the the boy's own body. So there not really any moral question in that regard.
Other than that, the technique doesn't strike me as groundbreaking, merely a novel use of existing techniques. It not really a case of 'moral imperative to cure an obscure disease' but more, 'it would probably be easy to do this'. If the knowedge is available to help someone, as rare as SCIDS is, shouldn't we just do it? I guess it's easy to wax philosophic when it doesn't affect you.
As far and cancer and whatnot, yes it's true there are high risk activities, but people get sick that aren't in high risk groups. It's easy to look at statistics and say 'X causes Y' but in reality, on a case by case basis, it's not so cut and dried. But why insist on any moral imperative at all? The truth is that being sick sucks, why don't we show a little compassion?
I'm in molecular biology, and I've actaully thought about this before. 1 in 200 people get hiv but don't die from aids because of a faulty cell receptor that prevents the virus from infecting the cell. If one was to use a retrovirus vector with the faulty gene inserted.. that just might confer resistance. Just an idea anyway.
In a way, Gates' comments make sense. I have to call you on this one because I think he's telling the truth (in parts of what he says). Think about it. MS didn't release WinXP to fix bugs in win2k, did they? No, WinXP is way buggier and slower, but has more features. The bugs then get fixed with service packs. Win2k runs quite well for me thank you.
And then he says:
"There are no significant bugs in our released software that any significant number of users want fixed."
You could argue that that's statiscally true, if, say, there are a million users, 1000 bugs that each randomly affect 1000 computers.
More importantly, he could easily argue what you define as a 'bug'. Is an awkward aspect of the interface considered a bug? Maybe, maybe not. Also when you're dealing with a huge number of hardware and software vendors with there own buggy software, it really compunds the problem. In fact now that I think about it, I'd say 90% of the problems I've had through the years with MS OSs has been with buggy drivers and hardware.
If you are aware that the FBI may be watching what you are doing on a particular system, then would you use that system for illicit purposes anyway? Or if you specifically were using your computer for illicit purposes, would you try to circumvent those FBI security measures?
.doc file attachment just says, "Hi. You know you shouldn't click on these things. It's takes a week to get the system back when you do. You're fired, please clean out your desk."
It sounds to me like the only people that this is going to affect are the people who aren't going to be trying to get away with anything.. ie 'I don't care if I can detect if Magic Lantern is on my computer because I'm not doing anything wrong'.
If someone is too stupid to realize this then they're going to get caught anyway so what's the big deal? It's like people who think no one can log their web surfing when they log into their proxy at work. If I found someone surfing porn at work I would fire them not because I care that they are looking at porn, but because if they are to stupid to realize that I can watch what they are doing, then I don't want them working for me. It's quite stunning those supposed 'experts' that click on weird email attachments and bring down the whole system. These people know better. An idea would be to send out an email like that that looks like a trojon but in the
Ok, so I'm on a pointless rant, but the point is that this monitoring seems to be pointless. So I guess they can do whatever they want.
Every American should think about the following:
.. or .. these attempts have been happening unbeknownst to public and the security agencies have been sticking their fingers in a dam that's about to collapse..
What horrors would one had to commit to provoke such an attack? Don't assume a true heart of evil in those terrorists. Even with my less-than-exhastive knowledge of US foreign policy, such acts don't seem entirely unforeseen.
Which brings me to my next point:
Do the comments by former important NATO dude et Al.. seem somewhat blaise and unsurprised? Why is this? I see two cases, either they've been preparing for this sort of attack for quite some time and it final happen regardless of the safeguards
Which brings me to my final point..
I certainly hope that this is the end and not the beginning. The US is a prideful and patriotic country. If the president and military leaders value the safety and lives of their people, perhaps compassion and sober reflection for the innocents thus killed is in order, and not prideful, vengeful crys of bloodlust.
In the pro column there's a strong case for decrease in the use pesticides. In the con column there's companies that would love to sell crop seed with super high yields that grow super fast that are infertile. This would trap farmers into buying one (patented) variety of seed in order to remain competitive, and force them to keep buying it. There's also a danger of engineering a crop that requires a certain specific fertilizer (they will sell you) to grow. The other only very real danger to people in mixing DNA is for people with food allergies. A few molecules of a food allergen can kill someone.
Ultimately, I hate to be the pestimist, but for all the ballyhoo over how great genetically modfied foods are, I think the knowedge and techiques will be abused by companies in order to make more money.
"Scientist recently discovered that radiation causes genetic mutations. These and other groundbreaking discoveries in the pages of the medical journal 'Duh'."
I remember writing a paper about life in space and reading paper where scientists had found ATP (adenosine triphosphate, a source of energy), ubiquidous and necessary for life on Earth.. Furthermore that on early Earth that the surrounding environment was the only source of ATP. Early primative life could not produce their own ATP, the ability to synthasis ATP as an energy source evolved later. Also I think that there is evidence of RNA in space.. I'm not sure about that though.
Finding carbon rings in space is nothing new. These Nasa scientists are reveiling their lack of knowledge about biology getting all excite about finding benzene and water in space. The central paradigm of molecular biology (DNA->RNA->amino acid) would seem to indicate that the first protolife was in the form of RNA, which can join without the help of enzymes.. RNA itself can fact can act as a enzyme. Amino acids, were probably created 'de novo' by the organism or incorporated into the organism later..
Oh no.. if everything's encrypted some hacker will be forced to spend two afternoons cracking it!
How about an alternate future scenario:
Major record companies begin to be crushed by the yoke of their own oppression as they realize with the advent of the internet and inexpensive recording equipment, that artists can record and promote themselves without signing draconian recording contracts. In fact it's already happening. There's recards labels called net labels, and like anything else on the internet, anyone can start one.
Of the gigs of mp3s that I have on my computer I don't have a single 'illegal' one. And all the music I have comes with a creativity and freshness that you just don't find in mainstream music anymore. The RIAA can put that in there pipe and smoke it.
Of course the RIAA is trying to combat this by encrypting future DVD-audio *NOT* to combat piracy but to force an independant artist to pay the RIAA to press cds.. but with cds sticking arounf for a while and mp3s this is pretty much a moot point.
For a long time MS has been trying to convince us that the windows9X platform is an OS, which of course it is not. It is a shell. It sits on top of dos and there is a number of old dos real mode drivers etc.. that will run fine in windows.. An old driver to read ntfs partitions under dos is one that I can think of.. dos cd-rom drivers and that sort of thing would work fine too.. To this day Windows98 contains some old 16-bit code.. and will drop into real mode to run old drivers or old software.. One fact lost to antiquity is that from pentium pros onwards windows98 is slower than NT/2000 because the intel processors from that point were optimized for pure 32-bit instructions.. Anyway.. win2k is much better platform IMO.. I'm really happy with it.
Taking out dos windows in winME isn't fooling anyone.
The researchers of this or whatever are really oversimplifying the issue.
Plant metabolism isn't my big thing but what happens in a photosynthetic plant is there's a stacks of photo sensitive organelles called thylakoids. In the membrane of the thylakoids there is chrolophyll which basically has a set of repeating single and double bonds and when the light strikes it, it bumps one of the bonds into a higher energy resonant structure. Then the cholophyll falls back down to its the lower energy, the energy which is in the form of a bond, not a free electron as in electricity in a wire, is carried to a membrane bound set of protiens where the electron is ultimately supplied by H20. There is a electron transfering moleule called NAD+ which transports electrons. The energy provided by the bonds is ultimately tranfered to the NAD+ which is reduced to NADH and O2 is liberated as a gas. So we not talking about a flow of elctrons like in a wire. The electron is bound up in another molecule.. Which will ultimately be used to create a H+ gradient to drive the production of ATP.
I can see using chlorophyll as a light sensitive device.. but I can't see the use of the whole cell as a light sensitive device, it simply wasn't designed with that purpose in mind.. And it seems like an opportunity to get at the electron would be far down the line and would create so much latency (I may be wrong about that)that it wouldn't be usedful in elcetronic devices.
It's an interesting idea but I think the propects for encorporating oraganics and electronics lie with using small numbers of molecules.. For instance chlorophyll may have some applications as an optical device of some sort.
If the courts consider Napster's primary purpose to be pirating, then by that arguement, guns should be outlawed too. After all, Their only purpose is to shoot people.
Actually I'm glad that Napster is illegal. Things are only 'cool' then they're illegal.
Assuming that the guy running the show is a smart guy, Napster won't be going on being a 'free music trading' service for much longer. What Napster is is a name, and Napster gained a hell of a lot of name brand recognition with all this legal trouble.. The kind of brand recognition that you can't buy. Napster is a household name, and they didn't have to pay a red cent in advertising to get that name. Napster very well could be shut down and re-started as a totally legitimate, corporate system for distributing music. Lame yes, but it could happen.
Remember ICQ. Those guys sold it for like 200 million dollars to aol. What were they selling? A name. That's all. Name recoginition right now is hardest and most sought after commodity on the interent. Get it and you have it made for life.
It would probably be earier just to create the same result yourself then 'hacking' the modified crop. Of course there are those that want this kind of gene modification patentalbe. Can ou imagine? It would surprise me if it happens. For the the good of all mankind I think there should be no patents allowed on genetic material.
Crap. Heh. I meant Crop of course :)
Many of the big concerns over gene splicing have to do with the introducing allergens into unrelated species. For instance if you were to splice the right strawberry gene into another species someone allergic to strawberries may then be allergic to whAtever you spliced the gene into. For people with serious allergies this creates a lot of uncertainly. There is people that could die from this kind of thing. Hence the need for proper labelling.
Why gene splicing is bad in crops IMO is because a company will do somthing like make a crap grow bigger and faster then add another gene to prevent second generation propagation of the crap. Therefore making that people dependant upon buying those seeds. Gene manipulation for crops right now really is just market manipulation.
Another point to consider is the number of chemicals that are used to grow crops. IMO it's a far better alternative to splice a some insect gene into a crop genome to give it resistance to pests then spray it with strong carcenogens and nerve-affecting chemicals like they do now. The former is far more innocuous.
If you're going to put monitoring equipment everywhere under that assumption that it actually works, then that puts the imputus strongly on these devices for proving that I'm guilty.
If anyone is stupid enough to organize major criminal activities through e-mail then they deserve to be caught just for their stupidness. Just like someone shoplifting in an obviously camera infested area.
However. If I find someway of bypassing your security measures that whatever law enforcement will become increasingly reliant apon, then I never did it, did I? I get away scott free.
Militant advertising is a whole other matter. I like how search engines now target advertising based on what you use for search criteria. I guess as long as the advertisers are aware of the growing resentment against them and that people now are probably more likely to associate negative feelings to a product in an ad.. at least moreso with our generation. I don't any of us are fooled by advertising any more.. This isn't the 50's.. As long as they're aware of that, then everything is fine. There's three main ways of presenting advertising: eliciting positive feelings i the viewer, 'reverse psychology' (our stuff sucks, don't buy it), and shock value (Calvin Klein is good at that one) but the younger generations have been so saturated and desensitived to media in general and advertising specifically that they would probably have to smear baby guts on the wall to get my attention anyway.
DNA that is transcribed into RNA and hence into proteins is read off of only one strand. There are recognition sequences to determine the beginning and end points of transcription. Also DNA has a 'direction' 5'->3' so you can tell which direction is which. I'm sure whatever ind of software the transcription guys use recoginzes this.
As for second point our DNA is for the most part almost identical. We need to have 99.9% of the same parts in order to run properly, i.e. everyone's gene sequence for hemoglobin is the same. So there is almost no variation in most of the genes in which mutations would be lethal or at least very bad. The genes that do allow variation.. i.e. eye color, are of a very small percentage and variation is allowed within those genes..
Actually we can 'compile' the code because we know all the enymnes (polymerases) etc that turn the dna into rna then into proteins, and we know how they work.
So the higher level building block would be the resultant amino acid sequence... Then the functional protein..
'Random' is not a good word to use when talking about genetic material. What influences that decide what information carries on through the generations isn't a result of randomness.. Although base-pair mutations do happen in a generally 'random' way. If a protein is rendered non-functional due to a mutation the other copy of the gene is still functional. Hence non-functional or seeming detrimental genes are carried through time until either they turn out to be an advantage at some point, or a whole new trait emerges. If you study genetics for some time you begin to realize that 'mistakes' or abberations are the pool by which functional innovations occur. Judging genetic fitness on a basically arbitrary basis i.e. anyone saying one trait is the prefered or 'correct' trait are demonstating their misunderstanding how evolution works. There are numerous examples of this. There's the classic sickle-cell enemia example, and those people that carry a defect in a specific protien so the hiv is unable to attach to and infect their cells.. hence, they are immune.
Due to the billions of individuals.. Aside from other factors, randomness occurs within the context of the individual but not within the context of the popluation. Populations and species evolve or remain at a genetic equilibium for very systematic reasons.
But by that time we'll have super-intellegent robot slaves to do menial jobs like programming.
What you describe though seems to be a case of prosecuting someone for finding or otherwise knowing how to retrive some piece of information. The issue over decss and napster etc, etc.. is the issue of stopping the information at it's source.. i.e. sueing the guy putting it out there in the first place. If you you don't know the origin then all you would have with this system is a thousands of servers with collections of random pads.. you would have to sue *everyone*.. obviously that isn't realistic.
Not really because you use MD5 on the pads then make the signature the file name.. People can distribute all the corrupt pads they want but you know right away that they aren't authentic.
The point is that no one can accuse anyone else of copyright infringment because on you have 'pads' of random data.. The cryptography people don't seem to understand that this has nothing to do with ultimatly being secure because the lists of pads will be distributed anyway.. basically the point is that there is no legal basis to fight this. And it's so stupidly easy to impliment this system that even an idiot i.e. even me, could do it. Now we just need a good distribution system.. something that's anonymous but unlike napster is not dependant on the individual servers.. then each person just designated a arbitrary amount of pad space and bandwidth and the pads are sent to other random computers based on some sort of neural net type of load balancing so the entire system is not dependant on any of the individual parts but more on the flux of people always online.. hmm.. I'm realizing the significance of this.. wow.. I'm going go have a shower and think about this more..
I think what should happen is one of two things:
1. In addition to the 330,000 people tracked down and individually sued for copyright infringment, everyone who has ever copied a Metallica album should also be sued. Of course all those individual cases would clog the legal system for a hundred years so they would have to have mass trials like here in Vancouver after the Clayoquot protests, but on a much larger scale. Metallica should recieve the value of the copyrights and punitive damages which should amount to somthing like one billion billion trillion dollars. At which point society would collapse into anarchy because the money doesn't exist.
2. Napster should be held responisble for all those people's actions because people have no freedom of choice and were forced to use it. Napster should also be held responisble for any person that listens to a Metallica song that is downloaded through Napster or subsquently copies that music after the fact in perpetuety. Once again these damages would total to 1 billion billion trillion dollars. One day after Napster is put out of commision someone else releases a program that does exactly the same thing, it's popularity explodes and the cycle begins again. Eventually Metallica is legallity entitled to all the money in the universe.
If I was going to start a record company, I wouldn't charge $15 for 50c cd and a little slip of paper. What I would probably make that release at like 15% over cost or something.. and free to distribute.. Encode and release the entire album probably in AAC 128VBR or something so it sounds perfect.. free to d/l and distribute.. At this point it would probably be cheaper for an individual to buy the cd then to burn a copy.. You could burn the encoded files cd but you would still have to use a whole cd to burn to cd that's readable by regular cd players. Then.. I might sell another version in a fancy box, throw a book in there and some stickers, stick a hologram on it or something.. For like $20.. Also I would release a limited pressings for $30 that was maybe engraved and made a funny color. Then I'd throw a coupon in there you can mail in to order a dvd full of videos and and a poster signed by the band for maybe another $20.. Record companies used to do this sort of thing more but most don't seem to bother now. Even boxed sets these days are cheap and lame.. I think the answer to the problem for record companies is to give people something that they can't get for free for there money instead of milking copyrights to the extreme like they do now. Those days are over.