I'm still waiting for someone to give me a good defination of neocon, a word I believe many use simply because they pundits they happen to listen to or read use the word all the time.
I was particularly fond of this explanation from a Slashdot comment posted quite a while back.
Personally, despite me generally being center-left on economics, I sometimes find myself thinking that a flat tax wouldn't be such a bad idea, so long as there was a huge flat-rate exemption — say, the first $50,000 per year per earner goes untaxed. (The actual number would have to track some reasonably un-riggable measure of inflation, of course.)
Of course, with an exemption that high, the actual rates would have to be huge to make up for it, so I seriously doubt that the plutocratic players would go for it.
You aren't really giving a shit about him, you're showing courtesy for your own benefit.
What else is there? No, really. What else is there?
ALL kindness is ultimately self-centered. At its best, kindness is the application of the Golden Rule (or equivalent): be kind to other people, because you yourself would like kindness in return. At its worst, kindness is a way of manipulating people into giving you what you want.
Humanism — kindness based on reason — is the realization that people working together are, on average, better off than people working separately. That is, being kind to other people benefits you personally, especially if you earn a reputation for being kind.
Being kind because it gives you a warm feeling — kindness based on instinct — is just the crystallization of Humanism's lessons into genetic form.
Even religious motivations for kindness are self-centered. Religions teach that you personally will benefit if you are kind, or that you personally will suffer if you are not, or some combination of the two. After all, no religion would tell you, "God would prefer you to be nice to everybody, but you'll go to Heaven and be eternally blissful no matter what you do. Even if you eat babies and kick puppies, you don't even need to feel remorse or ask forgiveness or anything."
Actually, now that I think about it, that sounds about like what Fred Phelps believes about himself and his church/family...
... Information always and ONLY arises in a mind...
Bullshit. Meaning always and only arises in a mind. Information, however, is not the same thing as meaning.
Information is what it is because it is surprising, i.e. you cannot predict it in advance. Order is the complete absence of information; an orderly system is easily predicted. It makes no sense whatsoever to say that you need "1) energy and 2) information" to reduce entropy. Why would you need information, only to remove it moments later? It's like saying you need matches and water to create fire.
You're correct that entropy/information is not mass/energy. It is a property that arises from mass/energy — in particular, it's a property of aggregates of mass/energy. You're also absolutely correct that exactly duplicating something doesn't add any information.
However, you're equally, absolutely incorrect about mutation. Mutations do induce novel functionality, because they do increase information. Our DNA is filled with genes upon genes that are near-duplicates of one another — where one gene was duplicated into two copies (a transposition), then the extra copy was free to mutate for generations down the line without disrupting life. Eventually, many such genes become useful, precisely because of the new information added by mutation. It requires a selection process, Natural Selection in this case, to sort through that information and determine how much of it is useful. This is because, although information is inherently surprising, it is not inherently useful.
I could tell you that I'm wearing a navy blue shirt. I've just increased your information, since you could not have predicted that fact in advance. However, this information is quite likely useless to you. Odds are that you won't remember it five minutes from now, much less will you pass on the story of the navy blue shirt to your grandchildren. But switch out the story of the navy blue shirt for the story of Jesus (or Siddhartha Gautama, or whoever) and watch how the results change!
Likewise, mutation increases the information in the shared gene pool of a species. However, most of this information is useless to the species. Odds are that the individual organism which carries this mutation won't last five minutes, much less pass it on to its grandchildren. But switch out one mutation for another — one that lets the organism have slightly more children on average — and watch how the results change!
Information is constantly being created, because entropy is constantly increasing. Mutation — random changes to genetic information — is the process by which information/entropy becomes inheritable. Natural selection is the process by which undesirable information/entropy is weeded out.
In specific application to the RNA World hypothesis, the process of primitive nucleic acids spontaneously polymerizing into a new RNA chain created/stored information, and the fact that some of them could promote their duplication better than others caused those RNA chains to dominate the prebiotic environment.
The current theory of how current DNA+protein life came to be is the "RNA World" hypothesis. In this theory, originally all life was based on RNA wrapped in lipid "cell membranes". RNA acted both as the self-replicating genetic material, and as the enzymes that powered the cell. When proteins were first produced, they were produced by RNA enzymes, which is why to this today ribosomes are still made of RNA enzymes (ribozymes), even though the rest of the cellular machinery has been taken over by (more efficient) protein. Once protein-based life existed, it outcompeted the older RNA-based life, which went extinct.
Um, weren't methane and ammonia the critical components of Earth's atmosphere in the currently accepted theory of abiogenesis? Earth retained those chemicals, too, and they were critical for the rise of anaerobic life.
Also, Venus is actually just slightly smaller than Earth, so if Venus's large size caused it to retain methane and ammonia...
The problem is that some companies, like Novell, made a deal that pisses off the FSF fanatics, even though there is ZERO evidence of any harm actually coming from that deal either now or in the future.
The only reason the patent covenant could possibly exist is that Microsoft has plans to sue Linux users (or contributors, or distributions) in the future. Considering that in all likelihood they funded SCO's rampaging meltdown, they don't seem to have any moral qualms with the idea. Worse yet, unlike SCO's copyright claims, Microsoft might actually get somewhere with patent claims, because writing a clean-room implementation doesn't shield you from patent law.
Frankly, Novell's management made a huge mistake in not realizing any of this when they signed the deal. If they have any brains, they'll realize that trying to negotiate with Microsoft to change the terms of the deal would be far easier than maintaining GPLv2 forks. (After all, the patent covenant granted by Microsoft is supposedly a value provided to Novell. If Microsoft refused to take back this thing of supposed value, they'd expose themselves for what they are: would-be saboteurs trying to force a poison-pill down the Linux community's throat.)
I believe serialize() preserves references -- it certainly does in PHP5 -- and (as mentioned elsewhere in the discussion) several PHP applications unserialize() remote data (notably phpBB).
Now, since the bug is apparently PHP4 only (gigabytes worth of references notwithstanding), the Big Question is whether or not the PHP4 unserialize() restores references.
Noooo. "Theist" doesn't imply "abuser of physics vocabulary".
Theistic philosophy has its own vocabulary, and a long tradition stretching back to St. Thomas Aquinas in the 1200's, Greek scholars before that, Jewish scholars before that, Hindu scholars before that, and so on. However, any actual theistic philosopher -- a philosopher of any stripe, I should say -- knows better than to borrow physics jargon and pass it off as their own, especially without actually understanding what the physics jargon means. (After all, explaining a position with the jargon of philosophy is hard enough without throwing physics jargon into the mix.) That's not to say that I actually find the theist position compelling -- if that were so, I wouldn't be an atheist, would I? -- but I do acknowledge that the theist position is compatible with reality, and I respect their well-reasoned beliefs.
The New Age movement, on the other hand, presumably started off when some people read too much pulp sci-fi without the critical, skeptical perspective required to appreciate the "sci" part. "Energy", for instance, is probably the single most abused physics word by New Agers. I'm not "projecting hostile energy" right now. I'm tapping on a keyboard. What little energy I'm using to type is transformed into heat and remains in the room with me, and no amount of hugging a piece of quartz will make that fact not so.
The most frustrating part of the New Age mindset is that it's not entirely bogus. It takes some kernels of truth from philosophy and psychology, distills them into a system of folk wisdom, then wraps it all up in physics jargon so that it sounds "scientific". People see little glimpses of truth, and they conclude that the belief system as a whole is Truth, allowing the New Age mindset to perpetuate itself. Rather than encouraging people to question and probe the belief system, groupthink is enforced using the traditional means (ostracizing anyone who dares question it). In that manner, it shares some disturbing similarities with Fundamentalism, and -- just as with Fundamentalism -- I don't respect any system of belief that falls apart when a little bit of reason is applied to it.
If you're not actually a New Ager, that sucks for you, because you're using their vocabulary and perpetuating their abuses of science. I'd suggest you go read an actual physics book.
Sometimes I regret being an atheist, because otherwise I'd pray to God and ask him to smite the New Agers who prattle off physics words with no concept of what they mean.
A "dimension" (in mathematics/physics) is a direction you can go, and most importantly a direction in which you can measure a distance between two places using numbers. In dimensions of space, we use units like "inches" and "miles" and "wavelengths of Cesium-133". In dimensions of time, we use units like "seconds" and "months" and "hyperfine transitions of Cesium-133".
What's more, despite the apparent differences between a "space" dimension and a "time" dimension, they're fairly similar when you sit down and try to measure them, since they're both dimensions. Since the speed of light in a vacuum is, by definition, the fastest speed possible, one light-second of distance in space is equal to one second of distance in time. Use the right units, and c is equal to 1.
Let's suppose "self aware matter" dimensions exist. What, pray tell, is an appropriate unit of measurement in a "self aware matter" dimension? How do you know how far you've traveled in a "self aware matter" dimension? Which units correspond to c, allowing you to ignore them? Supposing a "self aware matter" dimension is measured in millisouls (defined as, say, the length of a dung beetle in this mysterious self-awareness direction), how many millisouls per second does light travel through a "self aware matter" dimension?
Shockingly, I actually played the original SNES Mario Kart first, but I prefer the N64 sequel. The graphics are horribly dated these days, but the gameplay was (and remains) superb.
The Wal-Mart Benefits website (currently down), beyond being a UI disaster, has dire warnings plastered all over the place regarding browsers that don't conform to the anti-standards snobbery of the web designers. One of the most critical sections of the website, the ability to view pay stubs online, is strictly IE-only. My Mac-using BF, who is otherwise a Camino zealot, keeps an antiquated and likely insecure copy of IE5.5/Mac on his computer, for no other purpose than to view his pay stubs.
I find it disturbing that you find it disturbing. I was nodding along with the GP, and most of what I know about explosives comes from watching various television series starring Richard Dean Anderson.
Flash is in the ballpark of 1,000 times slower than RAM. Flash is measured in MB/s, while RAM is measured in GB/s. From what I've seen, Flash is actually a bit slower than a decent hard drive for sustained reads/writes. (Flash is far better at random reads/writes since it has no moving parts.) On the downside, Flash also wears out a bit each time you write to it (unlike RAM or hard drives).
I personally like the graffiti association. If labels are for personal use, but tags are in public view, then the graffiti connection is surprisingly relevant.
This, of course, explains slownewsday and whocares (to pick examples from this very article), as well as the fud vs. notfud turf wars...
Wikipedia links to this page of Ishihara plates, which is pretty thorough. There's also sites like VisCheck, which can take an existing image or webpage and simulate viewing it with color blindness.
Why are so many nerds on Slashdot prolific drinkers of alcohol? Don't you know it kills the brain and is bad for your liver? Why would you purposely damage your own body?
Because it's fun?
Honestly, alcohol isn't that bad for you so long as you treat it with respect. Yeah, it's bad for your liver (if you get drunk every weekend) and it's bad for your brain (if you get drunk every weekend). But the liver regenerates if you give it enough time to recuperate, and the brain is constantly churning and rewiring itself anyways. So long as you drink in moderation, and you don't let yourself drive after drinking, you're pretty much guaranteed to die of something else long before you even notice any long-term effects of responsible alcohol use.
Now, mind you, a lot of people self-medicate with alcohol when they'd be better off using, say, Paxil instead -- a scenario that pretty much paves the way for alcohol abuse -- but that's a problem that wouldn't actually be solved by simply taking the alcohol away.
But suppose she took the time to educate herself about St John's Wort before she started taking it, and she's fully aware that it's an abortifacient. She's not in a particular hurry to get pregnant with her boyfriend/husband/whoever, so she has no problem with taking the stuff for now. However, she and her boyfriend/husband/whoever have sex on a regular basis without a condom, and she's not on the pill. She generally tries to make him wear a condom when she suspects she's fertile, but she doesn't particularly mind if they do have a baby, either, so she doesn't go for something more consistent like the Pill.
So, it's a grave matter (in your view), and it's done with full knowledge (she's educated herself about the implications). So the remaining question: does that qualify as deliberate consent? She certainly knows that watching a calendar by itself isn't 100% accurate, so she's aware that, each time she menstruates, it might be a miscarriage in disguise thanks to the St John's Wort. Taking the first two questions as answered, this would be morally equivalent to pointing a machine gun into a school cafeteria and firing at random, wouldn't it? Just because you're not aiming at the particular targets that get hit doesn't mean the act wasn't deliberate.
In order to harvest embryonic stem cells (as my feeble mind understands it), an embryo must be coaxed to divide and start to grow. At a certain point, it has to be destroyed to harvest the stem cells. It's that destruction of a growing embryo that is the problem. People like me equate that to an abortion, but it's no longer about women's choice, but experimentation and profit.
That's the sticking point, though, isn't it? It's not "the woman's choice", because it's not in a woman. There is no woman. We're not talking about terminating a pregnancy (abortion), because there is no pregnancy to terminate. The cells are coaxed to divide in a petri dish, not in a womb. The resulting ball of cells is torn apart for stem cells at an age of a few days -- before it has split into a placenta and what might have become a baby.
It's important to note here that we're talking about a ball of cells: no heartbeat (no heart), no EEG (no brain), and -- unless you're willing to go out on a rather flimsy limb -- no soul.
If you'd argue over the last one: the ball of cells doesn't have the potential to become one baby. It could also form identical twins, or hypothetically more. Which baby gets the one and only soul that God put there at conception? Do they share the same soul? Or does one of the babies get an "after-market" soul? Or does one of the babies miss out on the whole "soul" business, and grow up without one? Or suppose God put two souls there, knowing with certainty that the ball of cells would have become twins: why would God put two souls in there knowing that researchers were going to harvest stem sells from it?
This is the point where most theologists invoke Free Will, which raises more problems than it solves. Suppose God puts the appropriate number of souls into the ball of cells, and it's Free Will that allows Man to sin by murdering the cells. What does God do in the event the mother-to-be is taking St John's Wort, not knowing that she is pregnant or that St John's Wort is an abortifacient? Is the mother sinning because she killed the child(ren), however unknowingly? Or does God forsee this, and not put any souls into the ball of cells, preventing the mother from unwittingly harming them? Is the mother sinning if she knows that St John's Wort is an abortifacient and has sex anyway? In law, that'd be the difference between an accident and involuntary manslaughter. Suppose the mother has the Free Will to take a drug that, if taken, will cause the ball of cells to split into twins (as an unexpected side effect), but remain a unified child if she doesn't. Does God put two souls into one ball of cells, just in case? Or does God look past her Free Will and determine the actual number of souls required? If He can see past her choice, do we really have Free Will in the first place?
What's more, each of those harvested stem cells itself has the potential to become a baby. In essence, that's what "totipotent" means: the potential to become anything. That's why embryonic stem cells are so medically important: no other stem cells are known to be totipotent. Not umbilical, not placental, none. If we're very lucky and the speculations in the article are correct, there might be totipotent stem cells in the amniotic fluid -- but each of those totipotent stem cells could still develop into a baby if you implanted it into an unoccupied womb (possibly with some coaxing). That raises questions of its own.
Does each totipotent stem cell get a soul of its own? Is each of those souls murdered when you coax the stem cell into becoming, for instance, liver tissue? Or does the liver have its own soul now? If you grow a liver from stem cells and transplant it into a patient, does the patient have two souls now? If he becomes an alcoholic and develops cirrhosis, is that murder? None of these questions are actually avoided by obtaining totipotent stem
They're not removing all prions. The cows probably wouldn't function at all if they did that. They're removing the one particular protein whose abnormal prion form causes BSE.
From the sound of the story, I assume that he started in deep water. The Biblical story has Jesus & Friends on a boat when the water-walking happens, so perhaps he was emulating that...
The "decision" is in the algorithm - in how mutation can happen. I don't think we really know it works entirely. We know that because of a lack of certain enzymes, mutation is more likely, but are certain sections of the DNA more susceptable to mutation than others? Further, are there less redundancies in one area than in another that wuold therefore mean that some mutations are more likely than others?
Given what has been said about M2, I'd guess that the answer to one of those last two questions must be yes. The mutation algorithm (i.e. natural selection, redundancy, and all that) "decides" that certain bits of the cell really need to be left alone, while other bits can be tweaked because its possible that a lot of values may produce good results.
To your questions: No and no. (Both of those "no"'s have strings attached, but they're "no"'s in the sense that you're thinking.)
There is no algorithm used for deliberately causing mutation during the act of copying a gene. Copy mutation happens because the correct algorithm sometimes fails, not because of normal functioning. Changes in temperature and pH cause the copying enzymes to lose their shape, which allows random errors. This is why the body's innate immune response (fever and inflammation) works -- fever and inflammation (heat) cause an increase in the rate of DNA/RNA copying errors, bacteria/viruses are copying their DNA/RNA at a breakneck pace compared to human cells, and therefore the mutations affect the invading bacteria/viruses more than the human host. If there are too many mutations per daughter bacterium/virus, not enough daughters survive to the next generation.
The thing is, we really do know how DNA/RNA is copied. We've got simple but working computer simulations of eukaryote DNA polymerase, a good idea of the differences in how other polymerases work, as well as a functional understanding of how the proofreading/repair enzymes work. People also use these enzymes in labwork every day, all the time. We know what they do, even when we're not always certain of how they do it. And from what we know, we can say with certainty that the only time when the DNA/RNA sequence itself can trip up the copying equipment is when you have long stretches of a repeating sequence, because DNA/RNA sometimes slips, and if there's a long, repeating stretch it can convince the copying enzymes that they've re-gained synchronization when they haven't. However, because long stretches of repeating DNA/RNA always occur in the non-coding regions, those mutations make the DNA/RNA strand shorter/longer, but otherwise don't matter. (A gene with a repeating DNA/RNA sequence wouldn't do anything, because it wouldn't form a useful shape. It would either be a long, tangled strand [a repeated hydrophilic amino acid] or a clumped, tangled ball [a repeated hydrophobic amino acid]. Different proteins from the same gene would have inconsistent shapes because of the tangles, so the proteins would be useless as enzymes.)
The thing is, it's straightforward to prove using Computer Science that the copying enzyme cannot deliberately make errors upon recognizing some undiscovered, more complex sequence. The enzyme simply doesn't have enough memory, and it's not even Turing-complete -- it's really more akin to a finite automaton, a state machine. It can't remember what it's already seen; it can only see the DNA/RNA in front of it, and thus only the DNA/RNA in front of it can trigger an error.
Any deliberate mutation of DNA/RNA has to come from another enzyme that operates on the DNA/RNA independently of the copying/proofreading/repair enzymes.
A deliberate mutation-inducing enzyme, if one exists, might have an anti-sense RNA template attached that binds to DNA in specially marked "mutation-friendly" areas.
Genetic drift is mutation. Gene flow only happens if there's already been a mutation (even if it's an ancient one that's been isolated for a long time). Ultimately, all evolution happens due to mutation.
the change could happen as a direct result of the new vaccine because the very nature of viruses forces them to evolve for survival, OR it could happen as a completely unrelated event (happening simply because it was already time for this particular protein to naturally evolve)
There's no such thing in nature. Proteins don't "decide" to evolve, and DNA doesn't "decide" to mutate. All evolution happens because of random mutations in DNA -- random in terms of where the mutation is, what the mutation does, and when the mutation occurs -- followed by the proliferation (or not) of that mutation due to natural selection.
(There are some minor exceptions to the randomness of mutation, such as alternative mRNA splicing and certain regions of DNA that trip up the replication process, but they can be ignored for this discussion.)
In the case of influenza, mutations happen at an extremely rapid rate: the influenza genome is made of single-stranded RNA (no backup copy) and is copied by a viral transcriptase without the aid of any proofreading enzymes (no verification happens when copies are made). This means that the average mutation rate is roughly 1 per virus, on average. That's an insane mutation rate -- moreso since the genome of any RNA virus is almost 100% genes -- and it only works because influenza creates so many copies of itself in each infected cell.
Now, not knowing anything about the M2 protein's history except for what's in the article, the fact that the M2 protein has remained nearly the same for the last 100 years -- despite all these rapid mutations -- means that the dominant M2 protein is being strongly selected for. That means that viruses with a different M2 don't spread very well, as compared to viruses with the most popular M2. This suggests that, even if a newer vaccine causes the immune system to target only the currently popular M2, the viruses that escape the vaccine will be less effective than any influenza strain of the last 100 years.
(Of course, "worse for influenza" doesn't necessarily equate to "better for humans". It could be that the reason the current M2 is so popular is that it doesn't kill as many human hosts as the older M2s, which benefits both humans and influenza. But, given what the Wikipedia article says about M2's function, the smart money is that switching to the older M2 will impede the virus's ability to infect a cell, which is a win for humans.)
Slashdot Mirror
I was particularly fond of this explanation from a Slashdot comment posted quite a while back.
Personally, despite me generally being center-left on economics, I sometimes find myself thinking that a flat tax wouldn't be such a bad idea, so long as there was a huge flat-rate exemption — say, the first $50,000 per year per earner goes untaxed. (The actual number would have to track some reasonably un-riggable measure of inflation, of course.)
Of course, with an exemption that high, the actual rates would have to be huge to make up for it, so I seriously doubt that the plutocratic players would go for it.
What else is there? No, really. What else is there?
ALL kindness is ultimately self-centered. At its best, kindness is the application of the Golden Rule (or equivalent): be kind to other people, because you yourself would like kindness in return. At its worst, kindness is a way of manipulating people into giving you what you want.
Humanism — kindness based on reason — is the realization that people working together are, on average, better off than people working separately. That is, being kind to other people benefits you personally, especially if you earn a reputation for being kind.
Being kind because it gives you a warm feeling — kindness based on instinct — is just the crystallization of Humanism's lessons into genetic form.
Even religious motivations for kindness are self-centered. Religions teach that you personally will benefit if you are kind, or that you personally will suffer if you are not, or some combination of the two. After all, no religion would tell you, "God would prefer you to be nice to everybody, but you'll go to Heaven and be eternally blissful no matter what you do. Even if you eat babies and kick puppies, you don't even need to feel remorse or ask forgiveness or anything."
Actually, now that I think about it, that sounds about like what Fred Phelps believes about himself and his church/family...
... Information always and ONLY arises in a mind ...
Bullshit. Meaning always and only arises in a mind. Information, however, is not the same thing as meaning.
Information is what it is because it is surprising, i.e. you cannot predict it in advance. Order is the complete absence of information; an orderly system is easily predicted. It makes no sense whatsoever to say that you need "1) energy and 2) information" to reduce entropy. Why would you need information, only to remove it moments later? It's like saying you need matches and water to create fire.
You're correct that entropy/information is not mass/energy. It is a property that arises from mass/energy — in particular, it's a property of aggregates of mass/energy. You're also absolutely correct that exactly duplicating something doesn't add any information.
However, you're equally, absolutely incorrect about mutation. Mutations do induce novel functionality, because they do increase information. Our DNA is filled with genes upon genes that are near-duplicates of one another — where one gene was duplicated into two copies (a transposition), then the extra copy was free to mutate for generations down the line without disrupting life. Eventually, many such genes become useful, precisely because of the new information added by mutation. It requires a selection process, Natural Selection in this case, to sort through that information and determine how much of it is useful. This is because, although information is inherently surprising, it is not inherently useful.
I could tell you that I'm wearing a navy blue shirt. I've just increased your information, since you could not have predicted that fact in advance. However, this information is quite likely useless to you. Odds are that you won't remember it five minutes from now, much less will you pass on the story of the navy blue shirt to your grandchildren. But switch out the story of the navy blue shirt for the story of Jesus (or Siddhartha Gautama, or whoever) and watch how the results change!
Likewise, mutation increases the information in the shared gene pool of a species. However, most of this information is useless to the species. Odds are that the individual organism which carries this mutation won't last five minutes, much less pass it on to its grandchildren. But switch out one mutation for another — one that lets the organism have slightly more children on average — and watch how the results change!
What is information? Shannon entropy, which is very closely related to thermodynamic entropy (the latter being a specific case of the former).
Information is constantly being created, because entropy is constantly increasing. Mutation — random changes to genetic information — is the process by which information/entropy becomes inheritable. Natural selection is the process by which undesirable information/entropy is weeded out.
In specific application to the RNA World hypothesis, the process of primitive nucleic acids spontaneously polymerizing into a new RNA chain created/stored information, and the fact that some of them could promote their duplication better than others caused those RNA chains to dominate the prebiotic environment.
The current theory of how current DNA+protein life came to be is the "RNA World" hypothesis. In this theory, originally all life was based on RNA wrapped in lipid "cell membranes". RNA acted both as the self-replicating genetic material, and as the enzymes that powered the cell. When proteins were first produced, they were produced by RNA enzymes, which is why to this today ribosomes are still made of RNA enzymes (ribozymes), even though the rest of the cellular machinery has been taken over by (more efficient) protein. Once protein-based life existed, it outcompeted the older RNA-based life, which went extinct.
Um, weren't methane and ammonia the critical components of Earth's atmosphere in the currently accepted theory of abiogenesis? Earth retained those chemicals, too, and they were critical for the rise of anaerobic life.
Also, Venus is actually just slightly smaller than Earth, so if Venus's large size caused it to retain methane and ammonia...
The problem is that some companies, like Novell, made a deal that pisses off the FSF fanatics, even though there is ZERO evidence of any harm actually coming from that deal either now or in the future.
The only reason the patent covenant could possibly exist is that Microsoft has plans to sue Linux users (or contributors, or distributions) in the future. Considering that in all likelihood they funded SCO's rampaging meltdown, they don't seem to have any moral qualms with the idea. Worse yet, unlike SCO's copyright claims, Microsoft might actually get somewhere with patent claims, because writing a clean-room implementation doesn't shield you from patent law.
Frankly, Novell's management made a huge mistake in not realizing any of this when they signed the deal. If they have any brains, they'll realize that trying to negotiate with Microsoft to change the terms of the deal would be far easier than maintaining GPLv2 forks. (After all, the patent covenant granted by Microsoft is supposedly a value provided to Novell. If Microsoft refused to take back this thing of supposed value, they'd expose themselves for what they are: would-be saboteurs trying to force a poison-pill down the Linux community's throat.)
I believe serialize() preserves references -- it certainly does in PHP5 -- and (as mentioned elsewhere in the discussion) several PHP applications unserialize() remote data (notably phpBB).
Now, since the bug is apparently PHP4 only (gigabytes worth of references notwithstanding), the Big Question is whether or not the PHP4 unserialize() restores references.
Noooo. "Theist" doesn't imply "abuser of physics vocabulary".
Theistic philosophy has its own vocabulary, and a long tradition stretching back to St. Thomas Aquinas in the 1200's, Greek scholars before that, Jewish scholars before that, Hindu scholars before that, and so on. However, any actual theistic philosopher -- a philosopher of any stripe, I should say -- knows better than to borrow physics jargon and pass it off as their own, especially without actually understanding what the physics jargon means. (After all, explaining a position with the jargon of philosophy is hard enough without throwing physics jargon into the mix.) That's not to say that I actually find the theist position compelling -- if that were so, I wouldn't be an atheist, would I? -- but I do acknowledge that the theist position is compatible with reality, and I respect their well-reasoned beliefs.
The New Age movement, on the other hand, presumably started off when some people read too much pulp sci-fi without the critical, skeptical perspective required to appreciate the "sci" part. "Energy", for instance, is probably the single most abused physics word by New Agers. I'm not "projecting hostile energy" right now. I'm tapping on a keyboard. What little energy I'm using to type is transformed into heat and remains in the room with me, and no amount of hugging a piece of quartz will make that fact not so.
The most frustrating part of the New Age mindset is that it's not entirely bogus. It takes some kernels of truth from philosophy and psychology, distills them into a system of folk wisdom, then wraps it all up in physics jargon so that it sounds "scientific". People see little glimpses of truth, and they conclude that the belief system as a whole is Truth, allowing the New Age mindset to perpetuate itself. Rather than encouraging people to question and probe the belief system, groupthink is enforced using the traditional means (ostracizing anyone who dares question it). In that manner, it shares some disturbing similarities with Fundamentalism, and -- just as with Fundamentalism -- I don't respect any system of belief that falls apart when a little bit of reason is applied to it.
If you're not actually a New Ager, that sucks for you, because you're using their vocabulary and perpetuating their abuses of science. I'd suggest you go read an actual physics book.
<rant>
Sometimes I regret being an atheist, because otherwise I'd pray to God and ask him to smite the New Agers who prattle off physics words with no concept of what they mean.
A "dimension" (in mathematics/physics) is a direction you can go, and most importantly a direction in which you can measure a distance between two places using numbers. In dimensions of space, we use units like "inches" and "miles" and "wavelengths of Cesium-133". In dimensions of time, we use units like "seconds" and "months" and "hyperfine transitions of Cesium-133".
What's more, despite the apparent differences between a "space" dimension and a "time" dimension, they're fairly similar when you sit down and try to measure them, since they're both dimensions. Since the speed of light in a vacuum is, by definition, the fastest speed possible, one light-second of distance in space is equal to one second of distance in time. Use the right units, and c is equal to 1.
Let's suppose "self aware matter" dimensions exist. What, pray tell, is an appropriate unit of measurement in a "self aware matter" dimension? How do you know how far you've traveled in a "self aware matter" dimension? Which units correspond to c, allowing you to ignore them? Supposing a "self aware matter" dimension is measured in millisouls (defined as, say, the length of a dung beetle in this mysterious self-awareness direction), how many millisouls per second does light travel through a "self aware matter" dimension?
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Shockingly, I actually played the original SNES Mario Kart first, but I prefer the N64 sequel. The graphics are horribly dated these days, but the gameplay was (and remains) superb.
The Wal-Mart Benefits website (currently down), beyond being a UI disaster, has dire warnings plastered all over the place regarding browsers that don't conform to the anti-standards snobbery of the web designers. One of the most critical sections of the website, the ability to view pay stubs online, is strictly IE-only. My Mac-using BF, who is otherwise a Camino zealot, keeps an antiquated and likely insecure copy of IE5.5/Mac on his computer, for no other purpose than to view his pay stubs.
I find it disturbing that you find it disturbing. I was nodding along with the GP, and most of what I know about explosives comes from watching various television series starring Richard Dean Anderson.
Flash is in the ballpark of 1,000 times slower than RAM. Flash is measured in MB/s, while RAM is measured in GB/s. From what I've seen, Flash is actually a bit slower than a decent hard drive for sustained reads/writes. (Flash is far better at random reads/writes since it has no moving parts.) On the downside, Flash also wears out a bit each time you write to it (unlike RAM or hard drives).
I personally like the graffiti association. If labels are for personal use, but tags are in public view, then the graffiti connection is surprisingly relevant.
This, of course, explains slownewsday and whocares (to pick examples from this very article), as well as the fud vs. notfud turf wars...
Wikipedia links to this page of Ishihara plates, which is pretty thorough. There's also sites like VisCheck, which can take an existing image or webpage and simulate viewing it with color blindness.
Because it's fun?
Honestly, alcohol isn't that bad for you so long as you treat it with respect. Yeah, it's bad for your liver (if you get drunk every weekend) and it's bad for your brain (if you get drunk every weekend). But the liver regenerates if you give it enough time to recuperate, and the brain is constantly churning and rewiring itself anyways. So long as you drink in moderation, and you don't let yourself drive after drinking, you're pretty much guaranteed to die of something else long before you even notice any long-term effects of responsible alcohol use.
Now, mind you, a lot of people self-medicate with alcohol when they'd be better off using, say, Paxil instead -- a scenario that pretty much paves the way for alcohol abuse -- but that's a problem that wouldn't actually be solved by simply taking the alcohol away.
But suppose she took the time to educate herself about St John's Wort before she started taking it, and she's fully aware that it's an abortifacient. She's not in a particular hurry to get pregnant with her boyfriend/husband/whoever, so she has no problem with taking the stuff for now. However, she and her boyfriend/husband/whoever have sex on a regular basis without a condom, and she's not on the pill. She generally tries to make him wear a condom when she suspects she's fertile, but she doesn't particularly mind if they do have a baby, either, so she doesn't go for something more consistent like the Pill.
So, it's a grave matter (in your view), and it's done with full knowledge (she's educated herself about the implications). So the remaining question: does that qualify as deliberate consent? She certainly knows that watching a calendar by itself isn't 100% accurate, so she's aware that, each time she menstruates, it might be a miscarriage in disguise thanks to the St John's Wort. Taking the first two questions as answered, this would be morally equivalent to pointing a machine gun into a school cafeteria and firing at random, wouldn't it? Just because you're not aiming at the particular targets that get hit doesn't mean the act wasn't deliberate.
That's the sticking point, though, isn't it? It's not "the woman's choice", because it's not in a woman. There is no woman. We're not talking about terminating a pregnancy (abortion), because there is no pregnancy to terminate. The cells are coaxed to divide in a petri dish, not in a womb. The resulting ball of cells is torn apart for stem cells at an age of a few days -- before it has split into a placenta and what might have become a baby.
It's important to note here that we're talking about a ball of cells: no heartbeat (no heart), no EEG (no brain), and -- unless you're willing to go out on a rather flimsy limb -- no soul.
If you'd argue over the last one: the ball of cells doesn't have the potential to become one baby. It could also form identical twins, or hypothetically more. Which baby gets the one and only soul that God put there at conception? Do they share the same soul? Or does one of the babies get an "after-market" soul? Or does one of the babies miss out on the whole "soul" business, and grow up without one? Or suppose God put two souls there, knowing with certainty that the ball of cells would have become twins: why would God put two souls in there knowing that researchers were going to harvest stem sells from it?
This is the point where most theologists invoke Free Will, which raises more problems than it solves. Suppose God puts the appropriate number of souls into the ball of cells, and it's Free Will that allows Man to sin by murdering the cells. What does God do in the event the mother-to-be is taking St John's Wort, not knowing that she is pregnant or that St John's Wort is an abortifacient? Is the mother sinning because she killed the child(ren), however unknowingly? Or does God forsee this, and not put any souls into the ball of cells, preventing the mother from unwittingly harming them? Is the mother sinning if she knows that St John's Wort is an abortifacient and has sex anyway? In law, that'd be the difference between an accident and involuntary manslaughter. Suppose the mother has the Free Will to take a drug that, if taken, will cause the ball of cells to split into twins (as an unexpected side effect), but remain a unified child if she doesn't. Does God put two souls into one ball of cells, just in case? Or does God look past her Free Will and determine the actual number of souls required? If He can see past her choice, do we really have Free Will in the first place?
What's more, each of those harvested stem cells itself has the potential to become a baby. In essence, that's what "totipotent" means: the potential to become anything. That's why embryonic stem cells are so medically important: no other stem cells are known to be totipotent. Not umbilical, not placental, none. If we're very lucky and the speculations in the article are correct, there might be totipotent stem cells in the amniotic fluid -- but each of those totipotent stem cells could still develop into a baby if you implanted it into an unoccupied womb (possibly with some coaxing). That raises questions of its own.
Does each totipotent stem cell get a soul of its own? Is each of those souls murdered when you coax the stem cell into becoming, for instance, liver tissue? Or does the liver have its own soul now? If you grow a liver from stem cells and transplant it into a patient, does the patient have two souls now? If he becomes an alcoholic and develops cirrhosis, is that murder? None of these questions are actually avoided by obtaining totipotent stem
They're not removing all prions. The cows probably wouldn't function at all if they did that. They're removing the one particular protein whose abnormal prion form causes BSE.
From the sound of the story, I assume that he started in deep water. The Biblical story has Jesus & Friends on a boat when the water-walking happens, so perhaps he was emulating that...
To your questions: No and no. (Both of those "no"'s have strings attached, but they're "no"'s in the sense that you're thinking.)
There is no algorithm used for deliberately causing mutation during the act of copying a gene. Copy mutation happens because the correct algorithm sometimes fails, not because of normal functioning. Changes in temperature and pH cause the copying enzymes to lose their shape, which allows random errors. This is why the body's innate immune response (fever and inflammation) works -- fever and inflammation (heat) cause an increase in the rate of DNA/RNA copying errors, bacteria/viruses are copying their DNA/RNA at a breakneck pace compared to human cells, and therefore the mutations affect the invading bacteria/viruses more than the human host. If there are too many mutations per daughter bacterium/virus, not enough daughters survive to the next generation.
The thing is, we really do know how DNA/RNA is copied. We've got simple but working computer simulations of eukaryote DNA polymerase, a good idea of the differences in how other polymerases work, as well as a functional understanding of how the proofreading/repair enzymes work. People also use these enzymes in labwork every day, all the time. We know what they do, even when we're not always certain of how they do it. And from what we know, we can say with certainty that the only time when the DNA/RNA sequence itself can trip up the copying equipment is when you have long stretches of a repeating sequence, because DNA/RNA sometimes slips, and if there's a long, repeating stretch it can convince the copying enzymes that they've re-gained synchronization when they haven't. However, because long stretches of repeating DNA/RNA always occur in the non-coding regions, those mutations make the DNA/RNA strand shorter/longer, but otherwise don't matter. (A gene with a repeating DNA/RNA sequence wouldn't do anything, because it wouldn't form a useful shape. It would either be a long, tangled strand [a repeated hydrophilic amino acid] or a clumped, tangled ball [a repeated hydrophobic amino acid]. Different proteins from the same gene would have inconsistent shapes because of the tangles, so the proteins would be useless as enzymes.)
The thing is, it's straightforward to prove using Computer Science that the copying enzyme cannot deliberately make errors upon recognizing some undiscovered, more complex sequence. The enzyme simply doesn't have enough memory, and it's not even Turing-complete -- it's really more akin to a finite automaton, a state machine. It can't remember what it's already seen; it can only see the DNA/RNA in front of it, and thus only the DNA/RNA in front of it can trigger an error.
Any deliberate mutation of DNA/RNA has to come from another enzyme that operates on the DNA/RNA independently of the copying/proofreading/repair enzymes.
A deliberate mutation-inducing enzyme, if one exists, might have an anti-sense RNA template attached that binds to DNA in specially marked "mutation-friendly" areas.
Genetic drift is mutation. Gene flow only happens if there's already been a mutation (even if it's an ancient one that's been isolated for a long time). Ultimately, all evolution happens due to mutation.
There's no such thing in nature. Proteins don't "decide" to evolve, and DNA doesn't "decide" to mutate. All evolution happens because of random mutations in DNA -- random in terms of where the mutation is, what the mutation does, and when the mutation occurs -- followed by the proliferation (or not) of that mutation due to natural selection.
(There are some minor exceptions to the randomness of mutation, such as alternative mRNA splicing and certain regions of DNA that trip up the replication process, but they can be ignored for this discussion.)
In the case of influenza, mutations happen at an extremely rapid rate: the influenza genome is made of single-stranded RNA (no backup copy) and is copied by a viral transcriptase without the aid of any proofreading enzymes (no verification happens when copies are made). This means that the average mutation rate is roughly 1 per virus, on average. That's an insane mutation rate -- moreso since the genome of any RNA virus is almost 100% genes -- and it only works because influenza creates so many copies of itself in each infected cell.
Now, not knowing anything about the M2 protein's history except for what's in the article, the fact that the M2 protein has remained nearly the same for the last 100 years -- despite all these rapid mutations -- means that the dominant M2 protein is being strongly selected for. That means that viruses with a different M2 don't spread very well, as compared to viruses with the most popular M2. This suggests that, even if a newer vaccine causes the immune system to target only the currently popular M2, the viruses that escape the vaccine will be less effective than any influenza strain of the last 100 years.
(Of course, "worse for influenza" doesn't necessarily equate to "better for humans". It could be that the reason the current M2 is so popular is that it doesn't kill as many human hosts as the older M2s, which benefits both humans and influenza. But, given what the Wikipedia article says about M2's function, the smart money is that switching to the older M2 will impede the virus's ability to infect a cell, which is a win for humans.)