'The United States, Japan and the People's Republic are "civilized" right? Those three countries have "institutionalised murder a.k. as capital punishment."'
Interesting that you mention Japan and not, for example, Iran, Saudi Arabia, N Korea, or Afghanistan. An impartial observer looking at a list of countries that actively use the death penalty would probably notice that few of them are exactly shining examples of democracy:
with developing countries ruled by authoritarian regimes being the rule rather than the exception. You do mention China (the pioneer of Execution Vans) where capital offences include VAT fraud, smuggling, and signing a rubber cheque:
When nearly every mature democracy in a developed country has rejected capital punishment, is membership of the (increasingly exclusive) club of countries that practise it ('civilized' or not) something to be particularly proud of?
'It amazes me that none of these responses addresses the basic needs or the fact that the BBC may be faced with losing some premium content providers if this doesn't go into effect. It's bad alright but what's your suggested solution to this (perceived) problem?'
Here's one. Call the content providers' bluff. Right now, the BBC and other UK broadcasters transmit vast quantities of third party programming, free to air, in unencrypted digital formats. Somehow, the providers still seem to be willing to make their material available to the large and lucrative UK market. There's no particular reason why the gradual transition to HD should alter this situation in any significant way, except that the providers have seen an opportunity to lobby for restrictions advantageous only to them, and someone at the BBC has decided to roll over by proposing a misguided 'solution' that's pretty obviously in direct opposition to the spirit of the existing license. I'd like to think this is some Machiavellian token attempt to pander to the providers, giving the Beeb plausible deniability when the proposal is rejected, but sadly it looks like they were actually serious. A longer and better advertised consulation process wouldn't have hurt, either. I heard about it only on the last day of the process, and it looks like my response didn't make the deadline:
"I read with some concern the document at http://www.ofcom.org.uk/tv/ifi/tvlicensing/enquiry/ofcom_bbc.pdf which describes a proposed change to the licence of the PSB3 mutiplex. I note that the requested 'solution...is understood to be acceptable to content owners', but that no attempt appears to have been made to ensure that it is acceptable to 'content consumers' (or 'viewers', as we used to call them).
As far as the viewer is concerned, there is no meaningful disctinction between a 'free to air' scheme with an additional requirement to enforce 'content management arrangements', and the type of fully encrypted 'free to view' system prohibited by the current licence. Both systems place similar constraints on the viewer's ability to enjoy the 'content' without arbitrary restrictions, and would (for example) make access to these broadcasts impossible from equipment controlled by software available under popular Free and Open Source licences (which are incompatible with the proposed terms of access to the lookup tables).
The request for such an amendment is a transparent attempt to circumvent the terms and intent of the existing licence, and I strongly urge Ofcom to reject it."
The older article covers very different technology (basically just attaching a cell phone camera to a simple fluorescence microscope with conventional optics). But both devices supposedly address a similar problem (whether either does this usefully in practice is another issue).
'Including those that have been "stolen" by their *living* authors? That would be the most radical public domain position I've ever heard. I would support "Death + zero days" or "incentives to release to PD" or some such, but I can't imagine forcing things into the public domain for living authors.'
Actually, the current situation in the UK is that the copyright on sound recordings expires after 50 years (quite a few labels here have legitimately released material from the 50s and earlier, often doing a better job of claening up and packaging the recordings than the original copyright holder). We'd expect this to start happening to the Beatles in around 2013, but the music industry's tame EU politicians are in the process of deciding otherwise:
Within the next decade, whole genome sequencing, which has already come down in price from several billion to $50,000 USD, is almost certainly going to become affordable enough to be used a a routine diagnostic procedure, enabling true personalised medicine (a '$1000 genome' is widely predicted). Do you think that filing your genome with an insurance company is placing it in the 'right hands'?
'"pre-existing conditions" are only a problem because, for some reason, insurance isn't structured such that the insurer you had at the time of diagnosis is responsible for that condition and its complications from then on.'
I believe 'for some reason' here translates as 'because it might reduce profits'.
'So there needs to be an option to have continuous coverage from the time of conception.'
'The little dongly things I am concerned with (and they are by no means the only species of little dongly things with which the micro-electronics world is infested) are the external power adaptors which laptops and palmtops and external drives and cassette recorders and telephone answering machines and powered speakers and other incredibly necessary gizmos need to step down the mains AC supply from either 120 volts or 240 volts to 6 volts DC. Or 4.5 volts DC. Or 9 volts DC. Or 12 volts DC. At 500 milliamps. Or 300 milliamps. Or 1200 milliamps. They have positive tips and negative sleeves on their plugs, unless they are the type that has negative tips and positive sleeves. By the time you multiply all these different variables together you end up with a fairly major industry which exists, so far as I can tell, to fill my cupboards with little dongly things none of which I can ever positively identify without playing gizmo pelmanism. The usual method of finding a little dongly thing that actually matches a gizmo I want to use is to go and buy another one, at a price that can physically drive the air from your body...It's hard to imagine that some of the mightiest brains on the planet, fuelled by some of the finest pizza that money can buy, haven't at some point thought 'Wouldn't it be easier if we all just standardised on one type of DC power supply?'...I strongly suspect that if you stuck a hardware engineer in a locked room for a couple of days and taunted him with the smell of pepperoni, he'd probably be able to think of a way of making whatever gizmo (maybe even the new gizmo Pro, which I've heard such good things about) it is he's designing, work to a standard DC low-power supply.'
'Basically they don't want to label themselves as Libertarian because that would foolishly scare away potential non-Libertarians from reading their work. Instead they rely on their publications to speak for their views instead of a label with baggage'
Or because they're a rather blatant front organization rolling out astroturf for various vested interests, and their paymasters might not be terribly keen on the label:
'The Heartland Institute, in particular, is a poster child for deception. This coin-operated "think tank" specializes in aping industry talking points to downplay global warming, oppose health care reform and attack Net Neutrality. Its Fortune 500 clients include Philip Morris USA, the ExxonMobil Corporation and major telecommunications companies...When asked to report the sources of its funding, Heartland President Joseph L Bast said Heartland "now keeps confidential the identities of all our donors" because revealing it would give fodder to those who want to "abuse a sincere effort at transparency."'
'Popular knowledge agrees.'
Looks more like they astroturfed their own wikipedia article, too. Why are we even taking their 'opinions' seriously?
For standard flu vaccines, the speed of production depends on quite a few steps, some of which can be carried out in parallel (e.g. clinical trials can start before all batches are made), while others need to be done in series (e.g. bulk production can't start until growth conditions are optimised):
One advantage of the VLP approach is that you can produce the relevant proteins in standard biotech 'factory' organisms, which avoids the laborious and time-consuming process of culturing live virus in hens' eggs. Reverse-transcribing the viral RNA is no big deal - this happens in the initial phase of characterising a new virus in any case (for sequencing etc.) long before vaccine production begins.
'"It's in your face on the screen," said Dr. Donald Rucker, chief medical officer for Siemens, a manufacturer of CT scanners.'
'CT technicians are trained to monitor dose levels, and some hospitals conduct checks before every scan..."There are other places where the techs might be operating more as button-pushers," said Dr. Geoffrey Rubin, a professor of radiology at Stanford University. "The user becomes a little blind to these numbers."'
Possibly! But I suspect (hope?) not. People putting dodgy indie-coded unchecked LPs in their iTunes libraries isn't Apple's problem. People downloading them from the ITMS is, which I'd guess is the real issue. Apple has no problem with 3rd party media and metadata in general, including non-iTunes movies and album art. Of course they don't allow unapproved 3rd party _applications_, which you could argue would include a complex LP. If and when these things run directly on iPods, we might see:
(6) Cleverly hacked-together non-music applications based on the LP format.
If this format actually takes off and Apple insists on charging labels $10,000 per LP, expect:
(1) A lot more user-packaged LPs like the Tryad album. For proprietary recordings, these could be distributed minus the tracks without incurring the wrath of the more clueful artists and their labels (though some will inevitably get upset).
(2) Official complete LPs available for purchase via band and label websites or 3rd party distributors, or as free downloadable add-ons for already purchased tracks.
(3) Interactive CDs containing the LP files ready to import.
(4) Several competing point and click tools to generate your own LP from tagged mp3s, cover art, lyrics, band photos and videos, ideally harvesting existing online sources like the various album art and lyrics databases, YouTube, etc.
I'm not really convinced. The iTunes DRM scheme was suspiciously convenient for Apple in establishing its initial market position by locking the content to the hardware - I suspect they didn't argue terribly hard with the music industry at that point. The iPhone exclusivity deals also work very well for them, as they get monthly payments from the service providers which may well exceed the profits from the phone itself:
Here in the UK you can in fact buy an officially unlocked phone from retailers like play.com. The 32Gb 3GS goes for an eye-watering 900 GBP, over $1400 USD (for comparison, a 32Gb iPod Touch goes for 235 GBP at the same shop). I suspect we won't see cheap officially unlocked iPhones any time soon...
'Except that the Internet providers have similar anticompetitive traits. In a typical US city there are at most 2 serious internet providers. Sometimes there is only one. Sometimes they got there by bribing the local officials for an exclusivity deal. (I used to live in a place where Comcast had done this...)'
That sucks for you. In my town in the UK, I can choose from about 15 providers (even though I wouldn't touch some of them with a bargepole!). The local loop unbundling legislation (all EU countries have some form of this) seems to do a reasonable job at providing a framework for fair competition.
'So, to spread the traffic across multiple networks, Sprint and the others need to build... a lot lot more new towers, of a different technology than they currently use.'
Because this makes much more sense than (God forbid!) Apple sticking a CDMA chip in some of their phones for compatibility with other networks. You know, like the other hardware companies do. Apple would presumably have already done this if their initial talks with Verizon before the launch of the first iPhone had been fruitful (3G would still be required for overseas models). In any case, infrastructure upgrades to new technology are inevitable in the fairly short term (like Verizon's move to LTE), as consumers start to demand more mobile bandwidth than the current networks provide.
'Build more towers. Increase capacity. Uncle Sam has doled out a lot of money over the last couple decades to build infrastructure. Build it. Cut dividend payouts a little bit, and build the infrastructure up. Maybe cut executive and management pay a little bit.'
Or (and call me crazy for such a ludicrous idea) end the purely greed-motivated exclusivity deal that dumps all the traffic on a single network in the first place. Imagine a bizarre alternative universe where Apple stuck to being a hardware & software vendor, without attempting to squeeze even more cash from the deal in network kickbacks every month, and the networks themselves knew their place as Dumb Pipes who just provided bandwidth. Pretty much how the rest of the internet works, come to think of it.
'If you think that fast and cheap DNA reading applies only (or even mostly) to monitoring of individuals, you do not have a real grasp of the scope and applicability of DNA sequencing.'
Indeed. For a great summary of what some of the people who really do grasp it think, check out the answers to Nature Genetics' question of the year in 2007 - 'What would you do if it became possible to sequence the equivalent of a full human genome for only $1,000?':
Right now, commercial genome sequencing is about $50,000 USD with the Solexa/Illumina system. Several teams are currently competing for a $10 million USD Genomics X-Prize, which will bring it down to the $10,000 USD level:
You can't accuse them of being under-ambitious (e.g., from Reveo: "The ultimate mission of this proposed program is to commercialize an instrument in 5-10 years that will cost less than a $1000 and sequence the whole genome and simultaneously the epigenome (methylation code) nearly error free in a minute for pennies per genome.").
'You could argue that the entire purpose of mankind is to acquire, and then use to his benefit, information. This has been the ongoing work of mankind since the dawn of mankind.'
Better hope we don't finish it any time soon, then:
'Technology will continue to make food production cheaper. We haven't even expanded into the oceans and large cities like Tokyo are still fairly rare on the earth's surface. We might have to give up some luxury foods for more efficiently produced goods.'
Slashdot Mirror
'The same could be said about salt as the US possess far more salt than is necessary to kill every mammal on the planet many times over.
I believe the US agreed never to use this option at the SALT talks back in the 70s.
'Actually, a large number of people rating MP3 higher than FLAC suggests that they noticed a difference between the two encodings and preferred MP3.'
Which has in fact been claimed to be the case, at least with younger people:
http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/03/the-sizzling-sound-of-music.html
'The United States, Japan and the People's Republic are "civilized" right? Those three countries have "institutionalised murder a.k. as capital punishment."'
Interesting that you mention Japan and not, for example, Iran, Saudi Arabia, N Korea, or Afghanistan. An impartial observer looking at a list of countries that actively use the death penalty would probably notice that few of them are exactly shining examples of democracy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment#Global_distribution
with developing countries ruled by authoritarian regimes being the rule rather than the exception. You do mention China (the pioneer of Execution Vans) where capital offences include VAT fraud, smuggling, and signing a rubber cheque:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimes_punishable_by_death_in_the_People's_Republic_of_China
When nearly every mature democracy in a developed country has rejected capital punishment, is membership of the (increasingly exclusive) club of countries that practise it ('civilized' or not) something to be particularly proud of?
'Apparently some people have gone as far as calling death threats to a "Director of Policy and Enforcement for Xbox LIVE" and his wife'
This guy seems pretty annoyed, too:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfkDxF2kn1I
I hope he doesn't do anything silly.
'It amazes me that none of these responses addresses the basic needs or the fact that the BBC may be faced with losing some premium content providers if this doesn't go into effect. It's bad alright but what's your suggested solution to this (perceived) problem?'
Here's one. Call the content providers' bluff. Right now, the BBC and other UK broadcasters transmit vast quantities of third party programming, free to air, in unencrypted digital formats. Somehow, the providers still seem to be willing to make their material available to the large and lucrative UK market. There's no particular reason why the gradual transition to HD should alter this situation in any significant way, except that the providers have seen an opportunity to lobby for restrictions advantageous only to them, and someone at the BBC has decided to roll over by proposing a misguided 'solution' that's pretty obviously in direct opposition to the spirit of the existing license. I'd like to think this is some Machiavellian token attempt to pander to the providers, giving the Beeb plausible deniability when the proposal is rejected, but sadly it looks like they were actually serious. A longer and better advertised consulation process wouldn't have hurt, either. I heard about it only on the last day of the process, and it looks like my response didn't make the deadline:
"I read with some concern the document at
http://www.ofcom.org.uk/tv/ifi/tvlicensing/enquiry/ofcom_bbc.pdf
which describes a proposed change to the licence of the PSB3 mutiplex. I
note that the requested 'solution...is understood to be acceptable to
content owners', but that no attempt appears to have been made to
ensure that it is acceptable to 'content consumers' (or 'viewers', as
we used to call them).
As far as the viewer is concerned, there is no meaningful disctinction
between a 'free to air' scheme with an additional requirement to
enforce 'content management arrangements', and the type of fully
encrypted 'free to view' system prohibited by the current licence.
Both systems place similar constraints on the viewer's ability to
enjoy the 'content' without arbitrary restrictions, and would (for
example) make access to these broadcasts impossible from equipment
controlled by software available under popular Free and Open Source
licences (which are incompatible with the proposed terms of access to
the lookup tables).
The request for such an amendment is a transparent attempt to
circumvent the terms and intent of the existing licence, and I
strongly urge Ofcom to reject it."
'Was this not already covered here on /.?'
The older article covers very different technology (basically just attaching a cell phone camera to a simple fluorescence microscope with conventional optics). But both devices supposedly address a similar problem (whether either does this usefully in practice is another issue).
'Including those that have been "stolen" by their *living* authors? That would be the most radical public domain position I've ever heard. I would support "Death + zero days" or "incentives to release to PD" or some such, but I can't imagine forcing things into the public domain for living authors.'
Actually, the current situation in the UK is that the copyright on sound recordings expires after 50 years (quite a few labels here have legitimately released material from the 50s and earlier, often doing a better job of claening up and packaging the recordings than the original copyright holder). We'd expect this to start happening to the Beatles in around 2013, but the music industry's tame EU politicians are in the process of deciding otherwise:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/04/eu-extends-musical-copyrights-by-20-years-eyes-movies-next.ars
GE is actually a suprisingly diverse company:
http://www.nbc.com/30-rock/exclusives/30R_GEWigChart.pdf
'Insurance companies aren't the "wrong hands."'
The US Congress (for example) begs to differ:
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d110:HR00493:@@@L&summ2=m&
Within the next decade, whole genome sequencing, which has already come down in price from several billion to $50,000 USD, is almost certainly going to become affordable enough to be used a a routine diagnostic procedure, enabling true personalised medicine (a '$1000 genome' is widely predicted). Do you think that filing your genome with an insurance company is placing it in the 'right hands'?
'"pre-existing conditions" are only a problem because, for some reason, insurance isn't structured such that the insurer you had at the time of diagnosis is responsible for that condition and its complications from then on.'
I believe 'for some reason' here translates as 'because it might reduce profits'.
'So there needs to be an option to have continuous coverage from the time of conception.'
You mean like this?:
http://www.nhs.uk/NHSEngland/aboutnhs/Pages/About.aspx
'Wake me up when Google voice is available outside the US.'
Well, your messages might be available pretty much everywhere:
http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2009/10/19/random-users-google-voice-mail-is-searchable-by-anyone/
Now all we need is a universal standard of (in the words of Douglas Adams) 'little dongly things' for everything else:
http://www.douglasadams.com/dna/980707-03-a.html
'The little dongly things I am concerned with (and they are by no means the only species of little dongly things with which the micro-electronics world is infested) are the external power adaptors which laptops and palmtops and external drives and cassette recorders and telephone answering machines and powered speakers and other incredibly necessary gizmos need to step down the mains AC supply from either 120 volts or 240 volts to 6 volts DC. Or 4.5 volts DC. Or 9 volts DC. Or 12 volts DC. At 500 milliamps. Or 300 milliamps. Or 1200 milliamps. They have positive tips and negative sleeves on their plugs, unless they are the type that has negative tips and positive sleeves. By the time you multiply all these different variables together you end up with a fairly major industry which exists, so far as I can tell, to fill my cupboards with little dongly things none of which I can ever positively identify without playing gizmo pelmanism. The usual method of finding a little dongly thing that actually matches a gizmo I want to use is to go and buy another one, at a price that can physically drive the air from your body...It's hard to imagine that some of the mightiest brains on the planet, fuelled by some of the finest pizza that money can buy, haven't at some point thought 'Wouldn't it be easier if we all just standardised on one type of DC power supply?'...I strongly suspect that if you stuck a hardware engineer in a locked room for a couple of days and taunted him with the smell of pepperoni, he'd probably be able to think of a way of making whatever gizmo (maybe even the new gizmo Pro, which I've heard such good things about) it is he's designing, work to a standard DC low-power supply.'
'Basically they don't want to label themselves as Libertarian because that would foolishly scare away potential non-Libertarians from reading their work. Instead they rely on their publications to speak for their views instead of a label with baggage'
Or because they're a rather blatant front organization rolling out astroturf for various vested interests, and their paymasters might not be terribly keen on the label:
http://mediacitizen.blogspot.com/2009/08/unmasking-astroturf.html
'The Heartland Institute, in particular, is a poster child for deception. This coin-operated "think tank" specializes in aping industry talking points to downplay global warming, oppose health care reform and attack Net Neutrality. Its Fortune 500 clients include Philip Morris USA, the ExxonMobil Corporation and major telecommunications companies...When asked to report the sources of its funding, Heartland President Joseph L Bast said Heartland "now keeps confidential the identities of all our donors" because revealing it would give fodder to those who want to "abuse a sincere effort at transparency."'
'Popular knowledge agrees.'
Looks more like they astroturfed their own wikipedia article, too. Why are we even taking their 'opinions' seriously?
For standard flu vaccines, the speed of production depends on quite a few steps, some of which can be carried out in parallel (e.g. clinical trials can start before all batches are made), while others need to be done in series (e.g. bulk production can't start until growth conditions are optimised):
http://www.who.int/csr/disease/swineflu/notes/h1n1_vaccine_20090806/en/index.html
One advantage of the VLP approach is that you can produce the relevant proteins in standard biotech 'factory' organisms, which avoids the laborious and time-consuming process of culturing live virus in hens' eggs. Reverse-transcribing the viral RNA is no big deal - this happens in the initial phase of characterising a new virus in any case (for sequencing etc.) long before vaccine production begins.
'How hard would it have been to stick a dosimeter in the machine after the change and run it though a test'
Supposedly the actual dose would have been displayed on the machine's screen (I wonder how prominently?):
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-cedars-sinai14-2009oct14,0,5065886.story
'"It's in your face on the screen," said Dr. Donald Rucker, chief medical officer for Siemens, a manufacturer of CT scanners.'
'CT technicians are trained to monitor dose levels, and some hospitals conduct checks before every scan..."There are other places where the techs might be operating more as button-pushers," said Dr. Geoffrey Rubin, a professor of radiology at Stanford University. "The user becomes a little blind to these numbers."'
Possibly! But I suspect (hope?) not. People putting dodgy indie-coded unchecked LPs in their iTunes libraries isn't Apple's problem. People downloading them from the ITMS is, which I'd guess is the real issue. Apple has no problem with 3rd party media and metadata in general, including non-iTunes movies and album art. Of course they don't allow unapproved 3rd party _applications_, which you could argue would include a complex LP. If and when these things run directly on iPods, we might see:
(6) Cleverly hacked-together non-music applications based on the LP format.
which Apple might not be happy about...
If this format actually takes off and Apple insists on charging labels $10,000 per LP, expect:
(1) A lot more user-packaged LPs like the Tryad album. For proprietary recordings, these could be distributed minus the tracks without incurring the wrath of the more clueful artists and their labels (though some will inevitably get upset).
(2) Official complete LPs available for purchase via band and label websites or 3rd party distributors, or as free downloadable add-ons for already purchased tracks.
(3) Interactive CDs containing the LP files ready to import.
(4) Several competing point and click tools to generate your own LP from tagged mp3s, cover art, lyrics, band photos and videos, ideally harvesting existing online sources like the various album art and lyrics databases, YouTube, etc.
I'm not really convinced. The iTunes DRM scheme was suspiciously convenient for Apple in establishing its initial market position by locking the content to the hardware - I suspect they didn't argue terribly hard with the music industry at that point. The iPhone exclusivity deals also work very well for them, as they get monthly payments from the service providers which may well exceed the profits from the phone itself:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-9803657-37.html
Here in the UK you can in fact buy an officially unlocked phone from retailers like play.com. The 32Gb 3GS goes for an eye-watering 900 GBP, over $1400 USD (for comparison, a 32Gb iPod Touch goes for 235 GBP at the same shop). I suspect we won't see cheap officially unlocked iPhones any time soon...
'Except that the Internet providers have similar anticompetitive traits. In a typical US city there are at most 2 serious internet providers. Sometimes there is only one. Sometimes they got there by bribing the local officials for an exclusivity deal. (I used to live in a place where Comcast had done this...)'
That sucks for you. In my town in the UK, I can choose from about 15 providers (even though I wouldn't touch some of them with a bargepole!). The local loop unbundling legislation (all EU countries have some form of this) seems to do a reasonable job at providing a framework for fair competition.
'So, to spread the traffic across multiple networks, Sprint and the others need to build... a lot lot more new towers, of a different technology than they currently use.'
Because this makes much more sense than (God forbid!) Apple sticking a CDMA chip in some of their phones for compatibility with other networks. You know, like the other hardware companies do. Apple would presumably have already done this if their initial talks with Verizon before the launch of the first iPhone had been fruitful (3G would still be required for overseas models). In any case, infrastructure upgrades to new technology are inevitable in the fairly short term (like Verizon's move to LTE), as consumers start to demand more mobile bandwidth than the current networks provide.
'Build more towers. Increase capacity. Uncle Sam has doled out a lot of money over the last couple decades to build infrastructure. Build it. Cut dividend payouts a little bit, and build the infrastructure up. Maybe cut executive and management pay a little bit.'
Or (and call me crazy for such a ludicrous idea) end the purely greed-motivated exclusivity deal that dumps all the traffic on a single network in the first place. Imagine a bizarre alternative universe where Apple stuck to being a hardware & software vendor, without attempting to squeeze even more cash from the deal in network kickbacks every month, and the networks themselves knew their place as Dumb Pipes who just provided bandwidth. Pretty much how the rest of the internet works, come to think of it.
'Or starring Jeffrery Dahmer on an episode of Iron Chef.'
Or Issei Sagawa. Oh, wait...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Issei_Sagawa
'He has also written restaurant reviews for the Japanese magazine Spa'
http://blogcritics.org/scitech/article/cooking-with-nico-issei-and-jane/
'In Japan he is now a well-known author, and frequent talk show guest. And a frequent guest on cooking shows.'
'You can write something meaningful in 250 words, but it takes a lot more skill than doing it in 500 words. Every word has to count for so much more.'
I think this guy was going for 250, but ran over by 13:
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Gettysburg_Address
Fail!
Lucky it wasn't something important, like an MIT application.
'If you think that fast and cheap DNA reading applies only (or even mostly) to monitoring of individuals, you do not have a real grasp of the scope and applicability of DNA sequencing.'
Indeed. For a great summary of what some of the people who really do grasp it think, check out the answers to Nature Genetics' question of the year in 2007 - 'What would you do if it became possible to sequence the equivalent of a full human genome for only $1,000?':
http://www.nature.com/ng/qoty/index.html
Right now, commercial genome sequencing is about $50,000 USD with the Solexa/Illumina system. Several teams are currently competing for a $10 million USD Genomics X-Prize, which will bring it down to the $10,000 USD level:
http://genomics.xprize.org/
You can't accuse them of being under-ambitious (e.g., from Reveo: "The ultimate mission of this proposed program is to commercialize an instrument in 5-10 years that will cost less than a $1000 and sequence the whole genome and simultaneously the epigenome (methylation code) nearly error free in a minute for pennies per genome.").
'You could argue that the entire purpose of mankind is to acquire, and then use to his benefit, information. This has been the ongoing work of mankind since the dawn of mankind.'
Better hope we don't finish it any time soon, then:
http://lucis.net/stuff/clarke/9billion_clarke.html
'Technology will continue to make food production cheaper. We haven't even expanded into the oceans and large cities like Tokyo are still fairly rare on the earth's surface. We might have to give up some luxury foods for more efficiently produced goods.'
But Soylent Green is People!