"anyone familiar with Wikipedia who's capable of reading between the lines is going to give a big "WTF" and assume El Reg is making up controversy where none exists."
They are. Bagley is a huge troll, and no objective person could possibly believe his "contributions" to Wikipedia (spamming, using spyware to infect admins) were positive. Surprise surprise, he got banned. This is not news, except in that the Reg is trolling Wikipedia trying to make news out of a non-story.
"I think it's necessary for those who are in decision making positions step out from behind the shadows and start making decisions in a more transparent way as part of some sort of formal Wiki council."
Employee of overstock.com spams Wikipedia, uses lots of sockpuppets to avoid being blocked, and uses spyware to infect at least one user. Wikipedia blocks him. The Reg writes an article defending said employee and attacking Wikipedia (which Slashdot promptly reposts).
Yes, everything you said is correct. However, there is not a one:one mapping between DNA and proteins - it's many:one. Multiple codons (a grouping of three sequential DNA bases) can code for the same amino acid. Therefore, having the proteins does not tell you what the DNA is, but having the DNA tells you what the proteins are.
Also, proteins don't break down just at "cooking" temperatures. Like all chemical bonds, all that is required is environmental energy (which varies in time as a bell curve around the average temperature) sufficient to break the bond. When the average temperature is high (like when you're cooking), you don't have to wait very long to get some random variation that breaks the bond. But if you wait a long, long time (like 160 million years), chances are at some point during that time the environmental energy will randomly vary high enough to break the bond. Thus, proteins degrade over thousands and millions of years simply as a function of age.
Nucleic acids are more stable than protein (e.g, requiring more energy to break the bond). As a result, it is harder for that random fluctuation to break nucleic acid bonds. So, if paleontologists find protein that has survived for millions of years (like they did in this case), that strongly suggests there should be nucleic acid there too.
This isn't the first time they've gotten soft tissue from a dinosaur. A few years ago, they were trying to haul some dinosaur bones from a dig site by helocopter, but the bones wouldn't fit. After trying to solve the problem several ways, they made the agonized decision to break some of the largest bones. When they broke them open, they found soft tissue in one of them (I think it was a femur). A friend of mine (getting his phd in bioinfomatics) mentioned that they had managed to extract dinosaur proteins from this, and that because proteins are much more unstable then nucleic acids, it was entirely likely that they could extract dinosaur DNA from the specimen.
I use #wikipedia on Freenode almost every day. Posting logs from that channel to the internet is strictly prohibited, and if we find someone doing it, we ban them. Now I tend to cycle through lots of nicks there, most of which had 0 google hits when I started using them. Now they get dozens of hits (like this one) and that's because of these logging bots that post to the internet.
If packets start showing up at one end of the connection that were not send by the other, they had to have been added en-route. This can occur naturally, as a result of IP-level fragmentation in the network, or it can be done deliberately, as Comcast and the great firewall of China do. IP-level fragmentation occurs because a packet is too large and it is being cut into fragments to improve performance; as I understand it, in practice on the real internet, it's actually pretty rare. On the other hand, if those packets that mysteriously show up are TCP-resets, then it's (IMO) an entirely reasonable assumption to make that they were put there by someone wishing to interrupt the traffic stream.
"But you still have to learn how to drive" - yes, this is quite true, you have to learn how to *OPERATE* the tool. That doesn't mean you
Operating a computer requires knowing how to use a mouse and keyboard. And realistically, a word processor, spread sheet, presentation program (powerpoint), and email client, and web browser. And frankly, most people under the age of 60 in industrialized countries know all of these.
The hallmark of good design is that people don't have to know how it works under the hood. How many people who drive cars on a daily basis can describe the basics of what is going on in the engine? (And, I should point out - cars are much more mature technology than computers - simpler and generally better understood)
That attitude, which is effectively equivalent to the RTFM attitude many people in the open source community take towards operating system interface design, is IMO the singular biggest obstacle to widespread linux adoption. Also (at the risk of starting an OS evangalism flamewar), it is the reason Ubuntu has become so very popular so recently. Ubuntu gets the design principles right, starting with a well-thought out package manager (admittedly copied from Debian).
A lot of people here in the comments are saying they can't make heads or tails of this summary, so I'll summarize it: (1) Bennet, a guy who makes a hobby of suing spammers, gets an email with the subject line 'Reminder: Link exchange with your site http://slashdot.org/ offering a link exchance with his website. (2) He sues spammer under Washington state laws against misleading commercial email (3) The spammer argues in court that it's a personal email. Bennet argues that nobody who knows him would think he owned slashdot, and that therefore it is not personal. Judge rules in favor of spammer, saying that the email was a "personal email" and thus does not qualify under the law. An alternative reading of said ruling could imply that he (Bennet) owns slashdot.
I wouldn't go that far. The big players in this - Sony, Toshiba, Microsoft, Paramount - are very big and diversified companies. Losing will cost them money, but not bankrupt them.
It's greed because instead of being content to try to get the industry to agree on a standard (which would have resulted in a fully functional market, in which everyone makes a fair profit) they decided to try to standardize in their own proprietary formats, resulting in a confused market that people stay away from - and nobody profits. That's greed, by definition.
This comes down to greed, pure and simple. Rather than sitting down and coming to a standard acceptable industry-wide, these corporations decided to go it alone and try to beat the other guys in a format war. The result has been market confusion. I heard one NPR analyst estimate that this format war has reduced the market for next-gen DVDs by 90% - in other words, 90% of potential consumers stay away until the war has a clear winner. And there's no end in sight. I hope the format war continues on indefinitely, to teach companies a lesson not to do this in the future.
(As the original submitter of this article) For the applicability in US law, you guys might want to listen to this session recording from Wikimania 2006.
DING! You've hit the nail on the head - routers (even big ones) are fairly cheap unless you want to do fancy look-inside processing on them, which methinks is exactly what is going on here. Now if only I had mod points for you...
I take issue with your implication that "tech savvy" means is the same thing as "I enjoy this technology". I think it would be much better to define it as technical plasticity - the ability to learn to competently use new technologies. And by that definition, yes, I think younger generations are much more tech savvy than older people. You might not like text messaging, but you figured out how to do it -- which is something most older people can't figure out for themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
"anyone familiar with Wikipedia who's capable of reading between the lines is going to give a big "WTF" and assume El Reg is making up controversy where none exists."
They are. Bagley is a huge troll, and no objective person could possibly believe his "contributions" to Wikipedia (spamming, using spyware to infect admins) were positive. Surprise surprise, he got banned. This is not news, except in that the Reg is trolling Wikipedia trying to make news out of a non-story.
"I think it's necessary for those who are in decision making positions step out from behind the shadows and start making decisions in a more transparent way as part of some sort of formal Wiki council."
They do. (I'm on it)
Employee of overstock.com spams Wikipedia, uses lots of sockpuppets to avoid being blocked, and uses spyware to infect at least one user. Wikipedia blocks him. The Reg writes an article defending said employee and attacking Wikipedia (which Slashdot promptly reposts).
Yes, everything you said is correct. However, there is not a one:one mapping between DNA and proteins - it's many:one. Multiple codons (a grouping of three sequential DNA bases) can code for the same amino acid. Therefore, having the proteins does not tell you what the DNA is, but having the DNA tells you what the proteins are.
Also, proteins don't break down just at "cooking" temperatures. Like all chemical bonds, all that is required is environmental energy (which varies in time as a bell curve around the average temperature) sufficient to break the bond. When the average temperature is high (like when you're cooking), you don't have to wait very long to get some random variation that breaks the bond. But if you wait a long, long time (like 160 million years), chances are at some point during that time the environmental energy will randomly vary high enough to break the bond. Thus, proteins degrade over thousands and millions of years simply as a function of age.
Nucleic acids are more stable than protein (e.g, requiring more energy to break the bond). As a result, it is harder for that random fluctuation to break nucleic acid bonds. So, if paleontologists find protein that has survived for millions of years (like they did in this case), that strongly suggests there should be nucleic acid there too.
Oh if I only had some mod points...
Also, in case anyone missed it, a few months back, some researchers extracted enough woolly mammoth DNA from mammoth hairs to sequence it
This isn't the first time they've gotten soft tissue from a dinosaur. A few years ago, they were trying to haul some dinosaur bones from a dig site by helocopter, but the bones wouldn't fit. After trying to solve the problem several ways, they made the agonized decision to break some of the largest bones. When they broke them open, they found soft tissue in one of them (I think it was a femur). A friend of mine (getting his phd in bioinfomatics) mentioned that they had managed to extract dinosaur proteins from this, and that because proteins are much more unstable then nucleic acids, it was entirely likely that they could extract dinosaur DNA from the specimen.
Banned from the channel, yes, but not from the site.
Whoops: like this one
I use #wikipedia on Freenode almost every day. Posting logs from that channel to the internet is strictly prohibited, and if we find someone doing it, we ban them. Now I tend to cycle through lots of nicks there, most of which had 0 google hits when I started using them. Now they get dozens of hits (like this one) and that's because of these logging bots that post to the internet.
If packets start showing up at one end of the connection that were not send by the other, they had to have been added en-route. This can occur naturally, as a result of IP-level fragmentation in the network, or it can be done deliberately, as Comcast and the great firewall of China do. IP-level fragmentation occurs because a packet is too large and it is being cut into fragments to improve performance; as I understand it, in practice on the real internet, it's actually pretty rare. On the other hand, if those packets that mysteriously show up are TCP-resets, then it's (IMO) an entirely reasonable assumption to make that they were put there by someone wishing to interrupt the traffic stream.
You're thinking of Yahya Ayyash (I know because I wrote most of Wikipedia's article on him)
"But you still have to learn how to drive" - yes, this is quite true, you have to learn how to *OPERATE* the tool. That doesn't mean you
Operating a computer requires knowing how to use a mouse and keyboard. And realistically, a word processor, spread sheet, presentation program (powerpoint), and email client, and web browser. And frankly, most people under the age of 60 in industrialized countries know all of these.
The hallmark of good design is that people don't have to know how it works under the hood. How many people who drive cars on a daily basis can describe the basics of what is going on in the engine? (And, I should point out - cars are much more mature technology than computers - simpler and generally better understood)
That attitude, which is effectively equivalent to the RTFM attitude many people in the open source community take towards operating system interface design, is IMO the singular biggest obstacle to widespread linux adoption. Also (at the risk of starting an OS evangalism flamewar), it is the reason Ubuntu has become so very popular so recently. Ubuntu gets the design principles right, starting with a well-thought out package manager (admittedly copied from Debian).
Ask, and ye shall recieve. I didn't have any trouble making sense of it, but I guess that puts me in the minority.
A lot of people here in the comments are saying they can't make heads or tails of this summary, so I'll summarize it:
(1) Bennet, a guy who makes a hobby of suing spammers, gets an email with the subject line 'Reminder: Link exchange with your site http://slashdot.org/ offering a link exchance with his website.
(2) He sues spammer under Washington state laws against misleading commercial email
(3) The spammer argues in court that it's a personal email. Bennet argues that nobody who knows him would think he owned slashdot, and that therefore it is not personal. Judge rules in favor of spammer, saying that the email was a "personal email" and thus does not qualify under the law. An alternative reading of said ruling could imply that he (Bennet) owns slashdot.
Hope that clears things up for everyone.
For those of you who missed the reference, ding!
I wouldn't go that far. The big players in this - Sony, Toshiba, Microsoft, Paramount - are very big and diversified companies. Losing will cost them money, but not bankrupt them.
It's greed because instead of being content to try to get the industry to agree on a standard (which would have resulted in a fully functional market, in which everyone makes a fair profit) they decided to try to standardize in their own proprietary formats, resulting in a confused market that people stay away from - and nobody profits. That's greed, by definition.
This comes down to greed, pure and simple. Rather than sitting down and coming to a standard acceptable industry-wide, these corporations decided to go it alone and try to beat the other guys in a format war. The result has been market confusion. I heard one NPR analyst estimate that this format war has reduced the market for next-gen DVDs by 90% - in other words, 90% of potential consumers stay away until the war has a clear winner. And there's no end in sight. I hope the format war continues on indefinitely, to teach companies a lesson not to do this in the future.
Truth is an absolute defense against libel/slander/defemation in some - but not all - jurisdictions. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defamation#Truth
(As the original submitter of this article) For the applicability in US law, you guys might want to listen to this session recording from Wikimania 2006.
DING! You've hit the nail on the head - routers (even big ones) are fairly cheap unless you want to do fancy look-inside processing on them, which methinks is exactly what is going on here. Now if only I had mod points for you...
I take issue with your implication that "tech savvy" means is the same thing as "I enjoy this technology". I think it would be much better to define it as technical plasticity - the ability to learn to competently use new technologies. And by that definition, yes, I think younger generations are much more tech savvy than older people. You might not like text messaging, but you figured out how to do it -- which is something most older people can't figure out for themselves.
The graph he refers to is here