Kodak Ektar 100, which was launched about 2 years ago, is maybe the closest current film to what you're suggesting. It's very fine-grained and designed for scanning, though you only get ISO 100, and the chemistry is standard C41 colour negative (which realistically it has to be - nobody is going to do R&D on an entirely new film process at this point, and finding decent local processing is already hard enough):
'I like the fact that the EXIF data has the camera serial number. Over the years, I've used a number of different cameras. Even multiple versions of the same model. It's nice to have that information in the database. Giving it to anyone else is another issue entirely.'
Yes, distribution is the issue. I use Nikon dSLRs, where the embedded serial number has a couple of interesting consequences:
First, the serial number is used as one of the keys used by recent cameras to encrypt Nikon's 'MakerNote' metadata (the other keys are the 'shutter count' and Nikon's secret key, which has fortunately been cracked and is available in the dcraw and ExifTool source). The MakerNote holds some useful pieces of data, including the 'as shot' white balance value required for 'correct' processing of Nikon's NEF raw files (Adobe made a lot of fuss about this until Nikon gave them a decryption 'mini-SDK' that could be incorporated into Photoshop). If the serial number has been stripped from the NEF, the MakerNote can no longer be decoded. You can't therefore distribute a fully-functional NEF without leaving in the serial number.
Second, anyone with access to one of your files containing the serial number can, e.g., use it to register on Nikon's support site (possibly preventing you doing so later), or even make a malicious fake report that a camera bearing that serial number has been stolen.
'But here again, the onus is on the individual to know how to deal with one's complex modern objects. For EXIF data, it's easy to strip entirely or individually.'
I think a lot of people won't realise the serial number is embedded at all (I can't see it using Nikon's own View NX software, only with 3rd party software like ExifTool), and if they do, it may not be obvious how to get rid of it, or the possible problems that doing so may cause.
I came across that link on Ben Goldacre's site, where he mentions a study from the 60s that (carefully) told the patients they were just getting sugar pills:
"Mr Doe... we have a week between now and your next appointment, and we would like to do something to give you some relief from your symptoms. Many different kinds of tranquillisers and similar pills have been used for conditions such as yours, and many of them have helped. Many people with your kind of condition have also been helped by what are sometimes called 'sugar pills', and we feel that a so-called sugar pill may help you, too. Do you know what a sugar pill is? A sugar pill is a pill with no medicine in it at all. I think this pill will help you as it has helped so many others. Are you willing to try this pill?"
'...the entire genome is only 850,000,000 bytes which is 810.6MB'
That's about right - the reference assembly from UCSC is 778Mb in their standard.2bit format. That's just a single sequence for each autosomal chromosome plus one each of X and Y, though - you'll need to allow about double that to store your full dipoid genome, so better buy a 2Gb flash drive. On the other hand, if you take the reference sequence as a given and only store the differences between it and yours, you only need about 4Mb!:
But raw sequence data is a different matter. To call each base confidently everything has to be sequenced multiple times (it's normal to go for something like 40x coverage on an Illumina machine). And you'll probably have to deal with the files as uncompressed ascii text (or gzip/bz2 at best). When you start analysing the data, you'll need a lot more space to store the alignments to the reference sequence, and you'll need some reasonable computing power to do the processing (which may well take longer than generating the data).
'In Southeast Asia, the Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) continues to pose a threat to US and Western interests in Indonesia and the Philippines, where JI is colluding with the Abu Sayyaf Group and possibly the MILF.'
'The plan is to allow parents to 'opt out' of the sites and they will then be blocked at the source, rather than using conventional parental controls...Adults who wish to view the material would have to choose to 'opt in'.'
'He hopes to introduce a system that would enable parents to ask internet service providers (ISPs) to block adult sites at source, rather than relying on parental controls that they need to set themselves...Adults using the internet connection would then have to specifically 'opt in' if they want to view pornography.'
So Vaizey (and right now it's just him having a chat with the IPSs, not government policy) wants a scheme where parents can REQUEST a default filter for their connection, but Dad can opt back in when he's 'working late' at the PC.
Nearly 90% of violent criminals are known to carry the 'SRY' gene. Hitler, Stalin, Osama bin Laden and all 19 of the 9/11 terrorists are believed to have been SRY carriers. Even worse, the majority of the population in countries like Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan (but not the UK, France or Canada) have a copy of this dangerous gene! While the full results have not been released, it is thought that the genome sequence of Ozzy Osborne, which also revealed evidence of Neanderthal ancestry, contains SRY.
'The only letter to reach him during the week he has spent in the prison's segregation unit was a slip telling him that a copy of Time magazine sent to him had been destroyed as the cover bore his photo, Mr Stephens said...The American news publication pictured Assange on the front with an image of the US stars and stripes flag gagging him.'
Just to mess with him, the prison should let him have the new issue with everything from this story except the words 'Person of the year' redacted.
'This is the only website I've ever had to block a submitter on, and kdawson the ONLY author I've ever had to block on any website because every submission I read from them annoyed me or was blatantly complete bollocks.'
'Is this suggesting the bacteria might have piggybacked on an meteor? Could it have developed naturally on Earth?'
There's no particular evidence of an extra-terrestrial origin. It actually grows better when fed phosphate rather than arsenate, and the sequence of one of its ribosomal RNA genes places its pedigree in the known family tree of related organisms - see p7 of their supplementary data pdf (should be accessible to non-subscribers):
'Yeah, but a human has ~3 billion base pairs. IANACS, but with 2 bits per base, so one byte represents 4 bases, so it's roughly equivalent to 750 megabytes. That's pretty impressive compression to shrink to 50 megs (which I agree, is a lot of data).'
Indeed. The 2-bit encoded human genome available from UCSC runs to 778Mb, or a conventional gzipped ASCII file is 905Mb. Better compression is an active area of research. Depending on the complexity of the input sequence and the compression algorithm, various values in the 1-2 bits/base pair range have been quoted, see e.g.:
This trick relies on comparison to a known standard reference sequence, and therefore doesn't say anything about the information content of the genome in general (so it's no good for Kurzweil's argument).
'Then again, if you skim the "junk DNA" (which may or may not really be junk), you can shrink it quite a bit'
If you include only protein-coding genes and discard the rest as 'junk', you can get to around Kurzweil's number in uncompressed ASCII. But that really is cheating. There's lots going on outside the proteome:
He's made some pretty dubious claims about the present, too, like the whole thing about the human genome being compressible to as little as 50 Mb, about an order of magnitude better than anyone has managed without cheating (e.g. by just compressing the diff to the reference sequence, or ignoring non-coding sequences). Publish the algorithm!
'An iPhone costs something like USD 400 - 500 if you buy it with no subscription directly from Apple, so the price isn't actually all that unreasonable.'
We could go further and say that the profit margin on the iPhone is almost certainly much higher than on this phone. Apple sells the 32Gb iPhone for £600 in the UK, but the equivalent Touch for £250. Bet there's nothing like a £350 difference in component costs! Prices, as usual, are set by what the market will bear for the finished product, not the manufacturing cost.
'the internet works just how it works. to be sure to have some packets go faster then others... dont they need to inspect every packet, see who send it and then decide to put some on the slow lane?'
They'll be using a sophisticated 'packet redirection' technique, where packets will be re-routed to alternate addresses as required. Speed of delivery will not be prioritized, but packet inspection by third parties will be explicity avoided so that the recipient does not incur expensive overheads. Mr Vaizey recently prototyped this algorithm in his constituency, though there seem to have been some difficulties in the initial implementation:
'Pre-registration is now open for the newest truly global and recognizable domain name extension to come along in years:.co -- It's used everywhere as an abbreviation for Company, Corporation, and Commerce. Let it vault your company into the global Internet marketplace!
Here's your chance to grab domain names that have been taken for years with the.com extension. Pre-registration includes application periods for trademark holders and others.'
Slashdot Mirror
Kodak Ektar 100, which was launched about 2 years ago, is maybe the closest current film to what you're suggesting. It's very fine-grained and designed for scanning, though you only get ISO 100, and the chemistry is standard C41 colour negative (which realistically it has to be - nobody is going to do R&D on an entirely new film process at this point, and finding decent local processing is already hard enough):
http://www.kodak.com/eknec/PageQuerier.jhtml?pq-path=13328
Kodak at one point made an automated Kodachrome minilab, the K-Lab, which was intended to make processing more widely available:
http://www.kodak.com/global/en/consumer/products/klabs/index.shtml
Unfortunately it never really took off, and one was up for sale for several years with no takers:
http://www.rockymountainfilm.com/equipment/klab.htm
The day before it waa due to be scrapped, an enthusiast stepped in and bought it, and is now hoping to get it running again:
http://www.kodachromeproject.com/forum/showthread.php?t=674
Obtaining the necessary processing chemicals, especially the proprietary dye couplers, is the major barrier to making this happen.
'I like the fact that the EXIF data has the camera serial number. Over the years, I've used a number of different cameras. Even multiple versions of the same model. It's nice to have that information in the database. Giving it to anyone else is another issue entirely.'
Yes, distribution is the issue. I use Nikon dSLRs, where the embedded serial number has a couple of interesting consequences:
First, the serial number is used as one of the keys used by recent cameras to encrypt Nikon's 'MakerNote' metadata (the other keys are the 'shutter count' and Nikon's secret key, which has fortunately been cracked and is available in the dcraw and ExifTool source). The MakerNote holds some useful pieces of data, including the 'as shot' white balance value required for 'correct' processing of Nikon's NEF raw files (Adobe made a lot of fuss about this until Nikon gave them a decryption 'mini-SDK' that could be incorporated into Photoshop). If the serial number has been stripped from the NEF, the MakerNote can no longer be decoded. You can't therefore distribute a fully-functional NEF without leaving in the serial number.
Second, anyone with access to one of your files containing the serial number can, e.g., use it to register on Nikon's support site (possibly preventing you doing so later), or even make a malicious fake report that a camera bearing that serial number has been stolen.
'But here again, the onus is on the individual to know how to deal with one's complex modern objects. For EXIF data, it's easy to strip entirely or individually.'
I think a lot of people won't realise the serial number is embedded at all (I can't see it using Nikon's own View NX software, only with 3rd party software like ExifTool), and if they do, it may not be obvious how to get rid of it, or the possible problems that doing so may cause.
'No, but he has been consistently portrayed as egoistic, self-aggrandizing asshole.'
I thought his portrayal in the movie was particularly unfair:
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_pS7sKjlzwFg/TPwPmfCfr4I/AAAAAAAAGb4/DBJefMu1DMA/s1600/477f056f3ada.jpg
The Onion, as usual, has the scoop:
http://www.theonion.com/articles/fda-approves-sale-of-prescription-placebo,1606/
I came across that link on Ben Goldacre's site, where he mentions a study from the 60s that (carefully) told the patients they were just getting sugar pills:
"Mr Doe ... we have a week between now and your next appointment, and we would like to do something to give you some relief from your symptoms. Many different kinds of tranquillisers and similar pills have been used for conditions such as yours, and many of them have helped. Many people with your kind of condition have also been helped by what are sometimes called 'sugar pills', and we feel that a so-called sugar pill may help you, too. Do you know what a sugar pill is? A sugar pill is a pill with no medicine in it at all. I think this pill will help you as it has helped so many others. Are you willing to try this pill?"
http://www.badscience.net/2008/03/all-bow-before-the-might-of-the-placebo-effect-it-is-the-coolest-strangest-thing-in-medicine/
http://www.leecrandallparkmd.net/researchpages/placebo1.html
'Clinical research on people who got better following his regiment.'
Maybe they just benefited from the military discipline, or all the fresh air and exercise?
'...the entire genome is only 850,000,000 bytes which is 810.6MB'
That's about right - the reference assembly from UCSC is 778Mb in their standard .2bit format. That's just a single sequence for each autosomal chromosome plus one each of X and Y, though - you'll need to allow about double that to store your full dipoid genome, so better buy a 2Gb flash drive. On the other hand, if you take the reference sequence as a given and only store the differences between it and yours, you only need about 4Mb!:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18996942
But raw sequence data is a different matter. To call each base confidently everything has to be sequenced multiple times (it's normal to go for something like 40x coverage on an Illumina machine). And you'll probably have to deal with the files as uncompressed ascii text (or gzip/bz2 at best). When you start analysing the data, you'll need a lot more space to store the alignments to the reference sequence, and you'll need some reasonable computing power to do the processing (which may well take longer than generating the data).
Yes, but why are they wasting time on this nonsense when they could be investigating serious threats like the Moro Islamic Liberation Front?:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moro_Islamic_Liberation_Front
The Director of Central Intelligence was aware of their activities at least 5 years ago!:
https://www.cia.gov/news-information/speeches-testimony/2005/Goss_testimony_02162005.html
'In Southeast Asia, the Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) continues to pose a threat to US and Western interests in Indonesia and the Philippines, where JI is colluding with the Abu Sayyaf Group and possibly the MILF.'
For perhaps the only time in living memory, the Daily Mail has one of the more measured articles about this:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1339926/Internet-pornography-Parents-allowed-block-sexual-imagery.html
'The plan is to allow parents to 'opt out' of the sites and they will then be blocked at the source, rather than using conventional parental controls...Adults who wish to view the material would have to choose to 'opt in'.'
The Metro is even clearer:
http://www.metro.co.uk/news/850896-new-porn-controls-for-children-on-internet-planned-by-government
'He hopes to introduce a system that would enable parents to ask internet service providers (ISPs) to block adult sites at source, rather than relying on parental controls that they need to set themselves...Adults using the internet connection would then have to specifically 'opt in' if they want to view pornography.'
So Vaizey (and right now it's just him having a chat with the IPSs, not government policy) wants a scheme where parents can REQUEST a default filter for their connection, but Dad can opt back in when he's 'working late' at the PC.
Will the audio warnings also be implemented?:
http://www.theonion.com/articles/orange-alert-sirens-to-blow-24-hours-a-day-in-majo,135/
Nearly 90% of violent criminals are known to carry the 'SRY' gene. Hitler, Stalin, Osama bin Laden and all 19 of the 9/11 terrorists are believed to have been SRY carriers. Even worse, the majority of the population in countries like Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan (but not the UK, France or Canada) have a copy of this dangerous gene! While the full results have not been released, it is thought that the genome sequence of Ozzy Osborne, which also revealed evidence of Neanderthal ancestry, contains SRY.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SRY
http://social.jrank.org/pages/1253/Violent-Crime-Gender-Differences-in-Violent-Crime-Offenders.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_sex_ratio
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/nov/05/ozzy-osbourne-genes-sequenced-genome
'The very good model shots of the city of the future are full of biplanes and cars that look like model-T Fords.'
That's not silly, that's just the Gernsback Continuum:
http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/it/1988/1/1988_1_34.shtml
Pepsi, the Choice of a New Generation! - CITATION NEEDED.
Assange probably doesn't know yet:
http://www.metro.co.uk/news/850389-wikileaks-founder-julian-assange-slams-visa-mastercard-and-paypal
'The only letter to reach him during the week he has spent in the prison's segregation unit was a slip telling him that a copy of Time magazine sent to him had been destroyed as the cover bore his photo, Mr Stephens said...The American news publication pictured Assange on the front with an image of the US stars and stripes flag gagging him.'
Just to mess with him, the prison should let him have the new issue with everything from this story except the words 'Person of the year' redacted.
'This is the only website I've ever had to block a submitter on, and kdawson the ONLY author I've ever had to block on any website because every submission I read from them annoyed me or was blatantly complete bollocks.'
You must be new here:
http://www.theobvious.com/archive/1999/03/25.html
Might also be worth installing something like WoT to reduce the chance of downloading a trojaned version in the first place:
http://www.mywot.com/en/scorecard/downloadvlcplayer.org
'Is this suggesting the bacteria might have piggybacked on an meteor? Could it have developed naturally on Earth?'
There's no particular evidence of an extra-terrestrial origin. It actually grows better when fed phosphate rather than arsenate, and the sequence of one of its ribosomal RNA genes places its pedigree in the known family tree of related organisms - see p7 of their supplementary data pdf (should be accessible to non-subscribers):
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/suppl/2010/12/01/science.1197258.DC1/Wolfe-Simon-SOM.pdf
'Yeah, but a human has ~3 billion base pairs. IANACS, but with 2 bits per base, so one byte represents 4 bases, so it's roughly equivalent to 750 megabytes. That's pretty impressive compression to shrink to 50 megs (which I agree, is a lot of data).'
Indeed. The 2-bit encoded human genome available from UCSC runs to 778Mb, or a conventional gzipped ASCII file is 905Mb. Better compression is an active area of research. Depending on the complexity of the input sequence and the compression algorithm, various values in the 1-2 bits/base pair range have been quoted, see e.g.:
http://fabrice.lefessant.net/papers/cpm2005.pdf
But that still leaves you far short of Kurzweil's supposed compression ratio, unless you allow this sort of cheating:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18996942
This trick relies on comparison to a known standard reference sequence, and therefore doesn't say anything about the information content of the genome in general (so it's no good for Kurzweil's argument).
'Then again, if you skim the "junk DNA" (which may or may not really be junk), you can shrink it quite a bit'
If you include only protein-coding genes and discard the rest as 'junk', you can get to around Kurzweil's number in uncompressed ASCII. But that really is cheating. There's lots going on outside the proteome:
http://scienceblogs.com/transcript/2007/02/dinner_with_the_transcription.php
So you have to deal with all 3 billion bp.
He's made some pretty dubious claims about the present, too, like the whole thing about the human genome being compressible to as little as 50 Mb, about an order of magnitude better than anyone has managed without cheating (e.g. by just compressing the diff to the reference sequence, or ignoring non-coding sequences). Publish the algorithm!
This site is generally more comprehensive, and has lots of screenshots (though can't see TopView, which is maybe just as well):
http://toastytech.com/guis/
'An iPhone costs something like USD 400 - 500 if you buy it with no subscription directly from Apple, so the price isn't actually all that unreasonable.'
We could go further and say that the profit margin on the iPhone is almost certainly much higher than on this phone. Apple sells the 32Gb iPhone for £600 in the UK, but the equivalent Touch for £250. Bet there's nothing like a £350 difference in component costs! Prices, as usual, are set by what the market will bear for the finished product, not the manufacturing cost.
'the internet works just how it works. to be sure to have some packets go faster then others...
dont they need to inspect every packet, see who send it and then decide to put some on the slow lane?'
They'll be using a sophisticated 'packet redirection' technique, where packets will be re-routed to alternate addresses as required. Speed of delivery will not be prioritized, but packet inspection by third parties will be explicity avoided so that the recipient does not incur expensive overheads. Mr Vaizey recently prototyped this algorithm in his constituency, though there seem to have been some difficulties in the initial implementation:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/mps-expenses/5340043/Ed-Vaizey-had-2000-furniture-delivered-to-wrong-address-MPs-expenses.html
Soylent Graphene is people!
If Google, or any other company in the Bay Area, thinks their employees might need suicide nets, then they should probably be funding these:
http://www.sfexaminer.com/local/Funding-for-Golden-Gate-Bridge-suicide-net-proves-elusive-52559197.html
Yes, no mistake. They were pushing this even before it became available for sale:
http://community.godaddy.com/godaddy/co-claim-your-opportunity/
'Pre-registration is now open for the newest truly global and recognizable domain name extension to come along in years: .co -- It's used everywhere as an abbreviation for Company, Corporation, and Commerce. Let it vault your company into the global Internet marketplace!
Here's your chance to grab domain names that have been taken for years with the .com extension. Pre-registration includes application periods for trademark holders and others.'