Check out Online Mendelian Links in Man This is a database of 14000 human traits known to be genetic. Many have been mapped to specfic genes, or at least to within limited regions of a chromosome. Look up PTC tasting, cystic fibrosis, or sickle cell anemia for example.
Pick any 3 of these 14000 entries. Critique the experimental evidence, explaining why you think it is bullshit (links to the literature are provided for each entry). We await your response with baited breath.
Oh, I quite agree, it is a design decision and a sensible one. I've certainly been called on to rescue a number of systems where the root or admin password had been forgotten. However that doesn't stop it from being a "bug" in the broader sense of exhibiting undesired/unexpected behavior to the user. I think the underlying trouble is that user's requirements are contradictory.
Users want their system to be secure, but they also want recovery after a disk crash or loss of an encryption key to be easy. This may turn a straighforward encryption problem into a complex key mangement system, difficult to administer, and possibly full of security holes.
While this exact bug may not apply to Windows 2000, there is a whole family of nearly identical attack schemes that apply to Windows 2000 (and LINUX and SOLARIS, and OS/2, and AS/400, and...). For example were you aware that there are NTFS device drivers for MSDOS? Just pop a MSDOS boot floppy with this driver into your Windows 2000 box, and et voila, complete access to all the files on the hard disk.
As so many have pointed out on this thread, you need to physically secure your machines, and if you have files that absolutely, positively must be kept confidenteial, you need to encrypt them.
I think you are overlooking the strong link between the public's support of the manned space program and their support for space science. In my observation, most folks are really only interested in the arcana of plasma physics and planetary processes only insofar as in some person is actually going to visit the other planets some day. I think the movie The Right Stuff captured this very well: "No Buck Rogers, no bucks!"
Neither of you are correct. Marconi applied for a British patent on the use of radio waves for communication in 1896. Tesla filed a similar American patent in 1897, and was granted patents 645,576 and 649,621. Marconi applied for US patents in 1900 and was initially turned down, at least partially on the basis of Tesla's prior patents. Marconi took his case to court, and the US patent office eventually overturned its prior rulings. In 1904 Marconi was granted a US patent for wireless comminication. Lawsuits between Tesla and Marconi ensued. In 1943 the US Supreme Court upheld the priority of Tesla's patent.
Re:No it was Tesla...Marconi is a Marketer
on
Tuxedo Park
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· Score: 1
The article that started this thread claimed was that Loomis invented RADAR and LORAN, not radio, the invention of radio came up as a digression.
From the quick checking I did, it looks like Loomis did invent LORAN, and he made major contributions to the managment of the MIT Radiation laboratory, but he certainly didn't invent RADAR. The best claim to the invention of RADAR seems to be Robert Alexander Watson-Watt. He was granted a British patent for locating aircraft using radio reflection in 1935.
Nope. Watson became the director of CSHL in 1969 and has been associated with it ever since.
Watson and Crick did their work on the structure of DNA at Cambridge University in the UK. The X-ray crystallography data they used was produced by Franklin and Wilkins at Kings College in London.
Re:No it was Tesla...Marconi is a Marketer
on
Tuxedo Park
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· Score: 2, Funny
If we want to get into the gory details, radio waves were predicted by the electromagnetic field theory of James Clerk Maxwell in 1864. They were first demonstrated in the laboratory in 1887 by Heinrich Hertz. Marconi began his experiments with radio in 1894 and he obtained a British patent in 1896. Tesla obtained an American patent in 1897. Marconi applied for an American patent in 1900, but it was denied because of Tesla's prior work.
In 1901 Marconi made the first successful radio transmission across the Atlantic in 1901. In 1904 the US patent office reversed its previous decisions and granted Marconi a US patent. In 1909 Marconi received the Nobel prize for "contributions to wireless telegraphy". This apparently frosted Tesla's shorts, and he filed suit for infringement. In 1943 the US patent office finally upheld Tesla's earlier patent.
It seems to me that it is reasonable to honor both Tesla and Marconi as inventors of radio. If you really want to get picky, it seems to me that Marconi's British patent gives him priority (which bring us back to the start of this sub-thread).
before Marconi, 2-way radios were used for communication only, Marconi figured out how to use them for entertainment. Marconi was not an inventor, he was an entrepreneur...and the first corporate pirate...and a big bastard.
As shown above Tesla and Marconi made their contributions almost simultaneously. Before Marconi (and Tesla), there weren't any 2-way radios. Radio as entertainment didn't arrive until 1920 (KDKA). This is 25 years after Marconi began his work on radio, and 11 years after he was awarded the Nobel prize.
Re:Don't be silly, it had to be an American!
on
Tuxedo Park
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· Score: 1
Watson WAS an American.
Marconi invented wireless radio, not the telephone. Bell and Gray independently invented the telephone in the 1870s. Macroni's work came almost 30 years later.
Your intended point is well taken, but you undercut yourself when you screw up your history so badly.
You are right, that does not prove Natural Selection. It proves that mutations can be lethal.
Umm no, the mutants that come through a screen are the ones that survive, not the ones that die. Dead flies don't breed true.
A paper that you might find of interest is a study of adaptive mutations in E Coli in Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 2001 Jan 30;98(3):1113-7. In brief, microsatellite markers are used to detect spontaneous mutations, and then trace their effect on fitness over 1000 generations.
WHAT experimental tests? There has never been such a thing, never has an observation been made, that if it hadn't, would have falsified the myth of Evolution by Natural Selection. If you know of such a falsification test, please refer me to the paper; if you can think of such an experiment youself, please do describe it.
This is not perhaps what you are looking for, but to my mind one of the great observational tests of evolution by natural selection was the post-Darwin debate over the age of the earth and solar system. The Darwinians thought the earth had to be billions of years old to provide the time needed to develop the observed diversity of life. The astronomers and physicists (led notably by Lord Kelvin), argued for a young earth because no known energy supply could keep the sun burning for billions of years. The discovery of fusion put paid to that argument, and the physicsts and astronomers by and large fell in with the Darwinists.
Can you give me the ref of a paper describing a true attempt to falsify the idea of Evolution by Natural Selection? Not evolution itself, mind you, that is ``descent with modification'', but ``descent with modification because of Natural Selection''.
I don't have a paper reference at hand, but it would seem to me that most exercises in genetic screening actually double as tests of natural selection. For example, take a bunch of fruit flies, zap 'em with x-rays so you get lots of mutants, get rid of the ones that don't have the phenotype you are looking for, and repeat until you get true-breeding flies with the desired phenotype. Sound like "descent with modification because of natural selection" to me. I suppose you could quibble over the "naturalness" of the selection, but then by that definition no laboratory experiment could examine "natural" selection.
1. Try to figure out through logic in which part of the code the bug could have occurred
To be sure, a debugger is no substitute for really understanding the language, the API, and the program, but a debugger can be a useful learning tool to correct misconceptions about language features, APIs, etc.
2. Use printf()'s to track the progress from the main structures to their branches until I've found the malfunctioning function or code snippet.
3. If the error isn't obvious, I insert printf()'s that tell the location in the code or values of variables, until I've been able to find the bad statement.
How is inserting printf statments more indicitive of sophistication and intelligence then inserting break points in a debugger? It seems to me that you are simply going through a lot of needless edit/compile/run cycles, when the same information could be obtained in one cycle with a debugger.
We'll just skip over the fact that the document cited is of pretty dubious provenance:
Vogel was at a rummage sale conducted by the Christ Evangelical Lutheran Church. At the bottom of a box of equipment, which had been donated to the church, he found a photocopied document taken from Los Alamos Laboratories in the Autumn of 1944 - a few months after the Port Chicago explosion. The document is entitled, "History of 10,000 ton gadget."
In what sense is a list of steps in a nuclear explosion evidence, let alone strong evidence, that the Port Chicago blast was caused by an atomic bomb? The only marginally relevant item is number 11, which states that a nuclear blast would form a mushroom cloud like the Port Chicago blast did. As many posters have noted large detonations of conventional explosions produce musroom clouds. Saying that a looks like b does not imply that b is a. At the time the memo was purported to have been written, nobody had seen a nuclear explosion, so it hardly seems sinister to me that they would compare the expected results to a recent, well-observed event.
The source article draws all sorts of sinister implications from the fact that figures from Los Alamos were involved in the investigation of the Port Chicago disaster. A simpler alternative hypothesis is that Los Alamos had sucked up a good number of the allies' experts on high explosives. Since they were desperately trying to build a novel explosive to use as a weapon, don't you think they might have had more then a passing interest in examples of really large explosions?
This article and the one last week claiming that we are all going to be killed by audio compression algorithms make me wonder if Slashdot is angling to take over Art Bell's niche supplying boogeyman stories.
Thanks for an interesting reference. The full memo of the US Strategic Bombing Survey is available online at the Truman Library. The language used in the memo seems to me more equivocal then Galbraith's statments in the interview with Terkel. Consider:
The war minister and the two chiefs of staff opposed unconditional surrender. The impact of the Hiroshima attack was to bring further urgency and lubrication to the machinery of achieving peace, primarily by contributing to a situation which permitted the prime minister to bring the Emperor overtly and directly into a position where his decision for immediate acceptance of the Potsdam declaration could be used to override the remaining objectors. Thus, although the atomic bombs changed no votes of the Supreme War Direction Council oncerning the Potsdam terms, they did foreshorten the war and expedite the peace.
and
Indubitably the Hiroshima bomb and the rumor derived from interrogation of an American prisoner (B-29 pilot) who stated that an atom bomb attack on Tokyo was scheduled for 12 August introduced urgency in the minds of the government and magnified the pressure behind its moves to end the war.
and
There is little point in attempting more precisely to impute Japan's unconditional surrender to any one of the numerous causes which jointly and cumulatively were responsible for Japan's disaster.
The memo does conclude that surrender was inevitable even without an invasion, and without the use of the atomic bomb. However, it does seem to assume the continued conventional bombing of the Japanese mainland, something Galbraith fails to mention in his comments to Terkel. "Bomber" Harris in the UK and LeMay in the US had long been making optimistic claims about the power of conventional bombing to end the war. Could this memo be part of the the same school?
Beats the heck out of me. I suppose they might have hidden their secret master plan for ripping off the cable company inside the VCR. Or maybe they are going to be charged with illeagally copying video tapes too.
Due process doesn't mean that the police will never excede their authority, it just means the accused has recourse when they do. They can now go back to the judge who issued the search warrant and argue that the VCR was not, or should not have been covered in the search warrant.
The original article states that search warrants were served, meaning that FBI or local police had to go before a judge and testify that they had probable cause to beleive a crime had been committed, and detail the items they thought would provide evidence of the crime. There's your due process. In the course of the search they may have exceded the scope of the warrant, but the due process for that is for their attorneys to challenge the results of the search in court.
It may suck, and it may be foolish, but if the article is accurate it is not violation of due process.
I've alway thought that antibiotics in animal feed was an obviously bad idea, but it suddenly occurs to me that I've been overestimating its implact.
It does seem reasonable that bacteria might develop resistance to the antibiotics actually put in animal feed, but will that affect resistance to antibiotics not used in feed? I would assume that Vanomycin is not used in feed, so I have to wonder how animal feed antibiotics could have any impact on the appearance of Vanomycin resistant bacteria.
There's easy and then there's easy. Certainly the gun-type bomb is easier to build then an implosion bomb. That doesn't mean that it is a piece of cake. Among other problems uranium is pyrophoric, which means you have to do your machining in an oxygen free environment. I don't think your typical neighborhood machine shop runs sealed lathes pressurised with N2.
I believe that in most states prosecutors won't touch a case unless the system has a warning statement in the login interface saying something like "This computer network is the property of the XYZZY organization and only XYZZY and its members are allowed to use it."
So, no, you don't have to line your walls with aluminum to block the signal from leaving your premises, but you do have to warn people in a reasonable way that it is not a public network.
This seems to me not dissimilar from the way trespass law is enforced. You usually can't get someone arrested and prosecuted for trespass for crossing your vacant lot unless the lot is fenced and posted with "No Trespassing" signs. On the other hand, the fence can be a length of twine between bamboo stakes but folks are required to respect it.
For your first example you have chosen one of the few human activities that almost automatically produces a mutual benefit. Even in this case things often aren't always so simple. Surely you've heard complaints about selfish lovers who got their rocks off and then rolled over and went to sleep, or lovers that went all sulky when their partner wouldn't indulge them in a night of passion just because they had a continuum mechanics final at 7AM the next morning.
Money is just an abstraction for measuring the allocation of resources and the fairness of exchanges. Certainly, most of us can navigate our personal relationships without getting bogged down in this level of abstraction. However, since there are 6 billion people in the world today, most of our interactions are going to be with strangers, and when dealing with strangers it is pretty darned convenient to have a shared, abstract, impersonal system of valuing goods and time. Certainly by the time your start swapping metric tons of leucine and megaliters of heating oil among hundreds of producers an abstraction like money is essential.
Like any technology money has bugs and downsides. It may even be a technology that needs to be replaced. However, you can't just wave away the underlying issues. How do we measure the allocation of resources? How do we fairly exchange goods and services of widely disparate natures and from widely disparate origins?
What stops the user from dropping whatever cash they think is justified, putting it in an envelope and sending it to the developer anonymously?
The fact that so few people actually do this is indicative that most of this discussion is really post hoc rationalization of the common desire to get something for nothing.
The user clearly has at least one other choice: not to use the software if they think it overpriced. In some cases they may also have the choice of using other, more correctly priced software.
I'll return to the close of my original comment:
questions of legality and economics aside, isn't it exploitive, bad karma, or at least rude to benefit from someone else's labor without providing a benefit to them?
Slashdot Mirror
Check out Online Mendelian Links in Man This is a database of 14000 human traits known to be genetic. Many have been mapped to specfic genes, or at least to within limited regions of a chromosome. Look up PTC tasting, cystic fibrosis, or sickle cell anemia for example.
Pick any 3 of these 14000 entries. Critique the experimental evidence, explaining why you think it is bullshit (links to the literature are provided for each entry). We await your response with baited breath.
Oh, I quite agree, it is a design decision and a sensible one. I've certainly been called on to rescue a number of systems where the root or admin password had been forgotten. However that doesn't stop it from being a "bug" in the broader sense of exhibiting undesired/unexpected behavior to the user. I think the underlying trouble is that user's requirements are contradictory.
Users want their system to be secure, but they also want recovery after a disk crash or loss of an encryption key to be easy. This may turn a straighforward encryption problem into a complex key mangement system, difficult to administer, and possibly full of security holes.
While this exact bug may not apply to Windows 2000, there is a whole family of nearly identical attack schemes that apply to Windows 2000 (and LINUX and SOLARIS, and OS/2, and AS/400, and ...). For example were you aware that there are NTFS device drivers for MSDOS? Just pop a MSDOS boot floppy with this driver into your Windows 2000 box, and et voila, complete access to all the files on the hard disk.
As so many have pointed out on this thread, you need to physically secure your machines, and if you have files that absolutely, positively must be kept confidenteial, you need to encrypt them.
I think you are overlooking the strong link between the public's support of the manned space program and their support for space science. In my observation, most folks are really only interested in the arcana of plasma physics and planetary processes only insofar as in some person is actually going to visit the other planets some day.
I think the movie The Right Stuff captured this very well: "No Buck Rogers, no bucks!"
Neither of you are correct. Marconi applied for a British patent on the use of radio waves for communication in 1896. Tesla filed a similar American patent in 1897, and was granted patents 645,576 and 649,621. Marconi applied for US patents in 1900 and was initially turned down, at least partially on the basis of Tesla's prior patents. Marconi took his case to court, and the US patent office eventually overturned its prior rulings. In 1904 Marconi was granted a US patent for wireless comminication. Lawsuits between Tesla and Marconi ensued. In 1943 the US Supreme Court upheld the priority of Tesla's patent.
See Who Invented Radio? for a quick summary of this controversy.
The article that started this thread claimed was that Loomis invented RADAR and LORAN, not radio, the invention of radio came up as a digression.
From the quick checking I did, it looks like Loomis did invent LORAN, and he made major contributions to the managment of the MIT Radiation laboratory, but he certainly didn't invent RADAR. The best claim to the invention of RADAR seems to be Robert Alexander Watson-Watt. He was granted a British patent for locating aircraft using radio reflection in 1935.
Nope. Watson became the director of CSHL in 1969 and has been associated with it ever since.
Watson and Crick did their work on the structure of DNA at Cambridge University in the UK. The X-ray crystallography data they used was produced by Franklin and Wilkins at Kings College in London.
In 1901 Marconi made the first successful radio transmission across the Atlantic in 1901. In 1904 the US patent office reversed its previous decisions and granted Marconi a US patent. In 1909 Marconi received the Nobel prize for "contributions to wireless telegraphy". This apparently frosted Tesla's shorts, and he filed suit for infringement. In 1943 the US patent office finally upheld Tesla's earlier patent.
It seems to me that it is reasonable to honor both Tesla and Marconi as inventors of radio. If you really want to get picky, it seems to me that Marconi's British patent gives him priority (which bring us back to the start of this sub-thread).
As shown above Tesla and Marconi made their contributions almost simultaneously. Before Marconi (and Tesla), there weren't any 2-way radios. Radio as entertainment didn't arrive until 1920 (KDKA). This is 25 years after Marconi began his work on radio, and 11 years after he was awarded the Nobel prize.
Watson WAS an American.
Marconi invented wireless radio, not the telephone. Bell and Gray independently invented the telephone in the 1870s. Macroni's work came almost 30 years later.
Your intended point is well taken, but you undercut yourself when you screw up your history so badly.
A paper that you might find of interest is a study of adaptive mutations in E Coli in Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 2001 Jan 30;98(3):1113-7. In brief, microsatellite markers are used to detect spontaneous mutations, and then trace their effect on fitness over 1000 generations.
In what sense is a list of steps in a nuclear explosion evidence, let alone strong evidence, that the Port Chicago blast was caused by an atomic bomb? The only marginally relevant item is number 11, which states that a nuclear blast would form a mushroom cloud like the Port Chicago blast did. As many posters have noted large detonations of conventional explosions produce musroom clouds. Saying that a looks like b does not imply that b is a. At the time the memo was purported to have been written, nobody had seen a nuclear explosion, so it hardly seems sinister to me that they would compare the expected results to a recent, well-observed event.
The source article draws all sorts of sinister implications from the fact that figures from Los Alamos were involved in the investigation of the Port Chicago disaster. A simpler alternative hypothesis is that Los Alamos had sucked up a good number of the allies' experts on high explosives. Since they were desperately trying to build a novel explosive to use as a weapon, don't you think they might have had more then a passing interest in examples of really large explosions?
This article and the one last week claiming that we are all going to be killed by audio compression algorithms make me wonder if Slashdot is angling to take over Art Bell's niche supplying boogeyman stories.
The language used in the memo seems to me more equivocal then Galbraith's statments in the interview with Terkel.
Consider: and
and The memo does conclude that surrender was inevitable even without an invasion, and without the use of the atomic bomb. However, it does seem to assume the continued conventional bombing of the Japanese mainland, something Galbraith fails to mention in his comments to Terkel. "Bomber" Harris in the UK and LeMay in the US had long been making optimistic claims about the power of conventional bombing to end the war. Could this memo be part of the the same school?
Beats the heck out of me. I suppose they might have hidden their secret master plan for ripping off the cable company inside the VCR. Or maybe they are going to be charged with illeagally copying video tapes too.
Due process doesn't mean that the police will never excede their authority, it just means the accused has recourse when they do. They can now go back to the judge who issued the search warrant and argue that the VCR was not, or should not have been covered in the search warrant.
The original article states that search warrants were served, meaning that FBI or local police had to go before a judge and testify that they had probable cause to beleive a crime had been committed, and detail the items they thought would provide evidence of the crime. There's your due process. In the course of the search they may have exceded the scope of the warrant, but the due process for that is for their attorneys to challenge the results of the search in court.
It may suck, and it may be foolish, but if the article is accurate it is not violation of due process.
I've alway thought that antibiotics in animal feed was an obviously bad idea, but it suddenly occurs to me that I've been overestimating its implact.
It does seem reasonable that bacteria might develop resistance to the antibiotics actually put in animal feed, but will that affect resistance to antibiotics not used in feed? I would assume that Vanomycin is not used in feed, so I have to wonder how animal feed antibiotics could have any impact on the appearance of Vanomycin resistant bacteria.
Yes, but the 2nd law of Thermodynamics guarantees that eventually this won't do us any good.
There's easy and then there's easy. Certainly the gun-type bomb is easier to build then an implosion bomb. That doesn't mean that it is a piece of cake. Among other problems uranium is pyrophoric, which means you have to do your machining in an oxygen free environment. I don't think your typical neighborhood machine shop runs sealed lathes pressurised with N2.
There's easy and then there's easy. If you have the engineering infrastructure capable of building and maintaining a jet fighter
I believe that in most states prosecutors won't touch a case unless the system has a warning statement in the login interface saying something like "This computer network is the property of the XYZZY organization and only XYZZY and its members are allowed to use it."
So, no, you don't have to line your walls with aluminum to block the signal from leaving your premises, but you do have to warn people in a reasonable way that it is not a public network.
This seems to me not dissimilar from the way trespass law is enforced. You usually can't get someone arrested and prosecuted for trespass for crossing your vacant lot unless the lot is fenced and posted with "No Trespassing" signs. On the other hand, the fence can be a length of twine between bamboo stakes but folks are required to respect it.
For your first example you have chosen one of the few human activities that almost automatically produces a mutual benefit. Even in this case things often aren't always so simple. Surely you've heard complaints about selfish lovers who got their rocks off and then rolled over and went to sleep, or lovers that went all sulky when their partner wouldn't indulge them in a night of passion just because they had a continuum mechanics final at 7AM the next morning.
Money is just an abstraction for measuring the allocation of resources and the fairness of exchanges. Certainly, most of us can navigate our personal relationships without getting bogged down in this level of abstraction. However, since there are 6 billion people in the world today, most of our interactions are going to be with strangers, and when dealing with strangers it is pretty darned convenient to have a shared, abstract, impersonal system of valuing goods and time. Certainly by the time your start swapping metric tons of leucine and megaliters of heating oil among hundreds of producers an abstraction like money is essential.
Like any technology money has bugs and downsides. It may even be a technology that needs to be replaced. However, you can't just wave away the underlying issues. How do we measure the allocation of resources? How do we fairly exchange goods and services of widely disparate natures and from widely disparate origins?
What stops the user from dropping whatever cash they think is justified, putting it in an envelope and sending it to the developer anonymously?
The fact that so few people actually do this is indicative that most of this discussion is really post hoc rationalization of the common desire to get something for nothing.
The user clearly has at least one other choice: not to use the software if they think it overpriced. In some cases they may also have the choice of using other, more correctly priced software.
I'll return to the close of my original comment:
questions of legality and economics aside, isn't it exploitive, bad karma, or at least rude to benefit from someone else's labor without providing a benefit to them?