According to
the NCBI, the chromosome for M. Genitalium
is circular. Some proteins are produced by
transcribing one way around the circle, and others
are produced by transcibing the other way.
My question is, does the DNA encoding the conterclockwise proteins
overlap with the DNA encoding the clockwise
proteins? If so, then
you can't rip out one without damaging the other.
I randomly looked at a few by clicking on the
aforementioned link and I did see some
overlaps; for example, MG264 and MG265 overlap.
According to
GeneQuiz, the entire genome of this
creature is only 0.58 Mb (which I presume stands
for mega-bases). About 3/4 of the genes have
guesses about their function, to varying degrees
of certainty.
It's also interesting that this bacterium uses
a non-standard transcription. The latter
reference above says "UGA, normally a stop codon, in this organism encodes for the amino acid tryptophan.". Does anyone know how common this
is?
If you start with, say, 20 lbs of supersonic
projectile, and then you zap it with a laser,
you still have 20 lbs of something moving with
about the
same average velocity as before.
Thus, if you want to protect the target, you either
have to vaporise the entire projectile so the
momentum
is dispelled by the air, or maybe it's an
explosive shell and the laser persuaded it to
explode
(which is another way of vaporising it, I suppose).
Breaking
it in two or poking a hole in it wouldn't be
sufficient.
Does anyone know exactly what they meant by
the laser "destroying" the projectile?
I think his algorithm would decide that all
of the non-words like "xClick" were uninteresting.
The most
interesting words would probably
be in the header. This would still give
a decent chance of recognizing the spam, since
spammers tend to use a host to send multiple spams.
Hmm, the next step in the arms race would be to
reject a mail that has too many words that have
never been seen before.
means they gotta keep spending cash which they may not have in the future.
They'll have cash for this sort of maintenance
if the patient
care trust fund gets sufficiently positive ROI and
they don't embezzle it.
When they get enough patients, it makes economic
sense
to rearrange the storage into a large room with
styrofoam insulation, instead of a bunch of
dewars with vacuum. After this they won't have
any urgent maintenance to do.
The Cryonics Institute uses a different storage technology
that isn't so vulnerable to urgent failures.
However, it does seem to require more regular
maintenance. Six of one, seethrough pyjamas.
but they must have their heads in the sand regarding corporate motives
The bylaws of the patient care trust fund
at Alcor
say that the custodians of the trust have to
be signed up for cryonics with Alcor,
and have a relative
who is in storage at Alcor. Having
a relative in the can is significant motivation
to be reasonable.
My refrigerator broke down while I was out of town last week all full of dead things (beef, chicken, etc)... nothing really reanimated but the stench still lingers.
They use dewars full of liquid nitrogen. If
they aren't refilled, they're good for a few
weeks before all the liquid nitrogen evaporates.
Every few years (or is it decades?) the vacuum in a dewar fails
and they have to move the patients to an empty one
they keep around for this purpose. Lots
of thermocouples attached to alarms.
Even if they manage to bring you back, chances are that they cannot make you immortal. You will eventually die. Again.
Well, probably not from the same sort of thing you
died from the first time. Since there will be
cracks
(but not ice crystals) from the cooling after the vitrification, and most patients either have no body or a very
messed up body (only the brain and head are
vitrified), bringing one
back seems to me to be a bigger trick than reversing aging. Without aging, there will
be less death, and the death that does happen will
happen differently.
Why would anyone want to relive that?
If the cost of having two lifespans is dieing
twice, I think it's worth it. Life is about
living (that is, getting the things done
you want to get done), not the details of how it ends. If
the second lifetime isn't worth the discomfort
of the second death, then the first lifetime probably
wasn't worth the discomfort the first time around
either; in that case one should
seize control of the process and make sure the
first and only end is painless.
Are you really alive to make your post
only because
suicide is too uncomfortable?
As long as the service of being cryogenically preserved is a commodity, unsubsidized by the government or most insurance,...
You can pay for it with life insurance, but
that's not a subsidy.
...the rich, prominent, and powerful will be the people self selected to undergo the service.
These people will also set up bank trusts, etc. to preserve their interests as they lie dead and frozen. They will influence politics to preserve their property rights as they lie dead, concentrating more and more property and political control in the hands of the dead and their trustees.
I can even imagine the trusteeships being battered back and forth in the marketplace, as the companies that control the wealth of the dead compete with each other.
All in all a fucked up scenario.
Your example doesn't support what you want it
to support. The example says that cryonics
funding will work for the people who choose to
participate in it, in a capitalist society. The
desired conclusion is that cryonics will fail in a capitalist society. Huh?
...we must make cryogenics a state supported medical service available to all...
It is available to most, if you pay for it
with life insurance. Given that 99.999% of
the people who can afford it don't want it,
it seems premature to demand that it be
socialized to make it available to everyone.
In Java, all objects are optional. They can be
null. The compiler doesn't help you keep track
of which ones may be null and which ones are never
null, so either you have to assert that each
pointer is non-null as you follow it, or your
code is vulnerable to getting NullPointerException's
(henceforth NPE's)
at any time. The assert only helps things a little:
instead of failing with a stack trace that
says a NPE happened somewhere in your method (it
won't tell you where if it's compiled code!), your
assert can put a string in the thrown exception
to tell you the line where the NPE happened.
There is a much better way.
Objective CAML
and other ML-like languages have parametric polymorphism. Objects by default are never optional. If you want an optional object of type
Foo, then you declare it as Foo option.
'a option is a polymorphic data type.
The type parameter name is 'a. The type value of the type
parameter is Foo in this example.
This way, the compiler can enforce that the
non-optional objects are always present.
Parametric polymorphism buys you a lot more, of
course, but the NPE's are the most
irritating thing about Java I'm aware of.
Unlike most other programming languages with
parametric polymorphism, Objective CAML also
supports object-oriented programming.
If it's the latter, can any of you linux gurus tell me what is the current "accepted" solution for making backups. Not archives or images, backups.
Mondoarchive clearly doesn't do disk imaging. I'm not clear on the distinction you're making here between backups and archives. The issues mentioned in the abovementioned
post from Linus are:
Backing up without unmounting disks. Mondoarchive does fine with that.
Altering atimes and ctimes. I haven't checked this so I don't know what Mondoarchive does with them.
Mondoarchive can do incremental backups.
Internally it uses afio for all of its work.
The Seattle Times
link says he put his code into the public domain,
but the freshmeat link
says the code is subject to the MIT/X consortium
license. So what's the issue here?
In the 1920's and 1930's after people had enough of the "wild west", bank robberies and mob hits in the US the police found a way to deter such things and it is mostly still working today.
I would like to read more about what brought
an end to the Wild West. Can you
or anyone else provide a reference?
The U. S. has a culture with more trust and
honesty than many others. Until now I had
guessed that it was a combination of luck and
the culture being established mostly by
people with a Christian religious background.
If instead it was brought into being by effective
law enforcement in the early 20th century, that
holds out more hope for the countries that don't
have a high-trust culture. China comes to mind.
It devalues people as a whole knowing they can be grown, harvested and otherwise manipulated as parts.
I'll assume that by "can" you mean physical
possibility.
It's already true that people can be grown,
harvested,and manipulated as parts. For example,
it is possible to conceive somebody in the normal
way, grow them until the kidneys are big enough,
and kill the person, harvesting the kidneys
for transplant. This would be illegal, of
course. It hasn't been
done to my knowledge, and I'm
not recommending it.
My point is that it is ridiculous to claim
that we have
to stop a technology because it would allow
people to discover something they should already
know if they have any sense.
Anyone else who emails you gets an autoreponse, "I don't know you. To ensure that you're a real human being, you'll to need to run the postage program to get the result for the code ABAASDFFEFEF".
I run code like that, but simpler. The email
you will get will essentially give you a trivial
Turing test. At the moment the test is to put
a specific string in the subject line, but if people start to spoof that, I'll change it.
The senders email client can handle this autoreponse automatically, shielding the sender from needing to deal with it
That's an advantage of the proposed scheme that
my email doesn't share. On the other hand,
my email scheme is unilaterally implementable
and the person at the other end doesn't have to
trust or read any program I write.
The poster anticipated correctly. The original
link is unusable at the moment.
If SlashDot let me configure my account with a delay
(so I see only stories that are X hours old, and
X is configurable by me for my account), then I'd set X to maybe 6.4023 (or some other random number )
and not have to cope with sites being down
from the slashdot effect so much.
If they had gave people a default random value for
X, then this slashdotting effect would go away altogether for most users. People who really want
the latest could configure their account to set X
to zero.
They can find your ISP if they discover the
IP adddress and time that the offending information
was sent from. If you're the only user
of your ISP, then finding the ISP means finding you.
You have to say that your ISP has a bunch of users
and it deletes enough log information to make
it impossible to figure out who did what after
the fact.
The contest rules were unclear. Are the hollow
hockey-puck like things real mines
that will blow up your robot if you don't
detect it, or just pieces of plastic?
Slashdot Mirror
My question is, does the DNA encoding the conterclockwise proteins overlap with the DNA encoding the clockwise proteins? If so, then you can't rip out one without damaging the other. I randomly looked at a few by clicking on the aforementioned link and I did see some overlaps; for example, MG264 and MG265 overlap.
According to GeneQuiz, the entire genome of this creature is only 0.58 Mb (which I presume stands for mega-bases). About 3/4 of the genes have guesses about their function, to varying degrees of certainty.
It's also interesting that this bacterium uses a non-standard transcription. The latter reference above says "UGA, normally a stop codon, in this organism encodes for the amino acid tryptophan.". Does anyone know how common this is?
Thus, if you want to protect the target, you either have to vaporise the entire projectile so the momentum is dispelled by the air, or maybe it's an explosive shell and the laser persuaded it to explode (which is another way of vaporising it, I suppose).
Breaking it in two or poking a hole in it wouldn't be sufficient.
Does anyone know exactly what they meant by the laser "destroying" the projectile?
Hmm, the next step in the arms race would be to reject a mail that has too many words that have never been seen before.
When they get enough patients, it makes economic sense to rearrange the storage into a large room with styrofoam insulation, instead of a bunch of dewars with vacuum. After this they won't have any urgent maintenance to do.
The Cryonics Institute uses a different storage technology that isn't so vulnerable to urgent failures. However, it does seem to require more regular maintenance. Six of one, seethrough pyjamas.
Sigh. Newbies always have the same questions..
Are you really alive to make your post only because suicide is too uncomfortable?
There is a much better way. Objective CAML and other ML-like languages have parametric polymorphism. Objects by default are never optional. If you want an optional object of type Foo, then you declare it as Foo option. 'a option is a polymorphic data type. The type parameter name is 'a. The type value of the type parameter is Foo in this example.
This way, the compiler can enforce that the non-optional objects are always present.
Parametric polymorphism buys you a lot more, of course, but the NPE's are the most irritating thing about Java I'm aware of.
Unlike most other programming languages with parametric polymorphism, Objective CAML also supports object-oriented programming.
- Backing up without unmounting disks. Mondoarchive does fine with that.
- Altering atimes and ctimes. I haven't checked this so I don't know what Mondoarchive does with them.
Mondoarchive can do incremental backups. Internally it uses afio for all of its work.The Seattle Times link says he put his code into the public domain, but the freshmeat link says the code is subject to the MIT/X consortium license. So what's the issue here?
The U. S. has a culture with more trust and honesty than many others. Until now I had guessed that it was a combination of luck and the culture being established mostly by people with a Christian religious background. If instead it was brought into being by effective law enforcement in the early 20th century, that holds out more hope for the countries that don't have a high-trust culture. China comes to mind.
It's already true that people can be grown, harvested,and manipulated as parts. For example, it is possible to conceive somebody in the normal way, grow them until the kidneys are big enough, and kill the person, harvesting the kidneys for transplant. This would be illegal, of course. It hasn't been done to my knowledge, and I'm not recommending it.
My point is that it is ridiculous to claim that we have to stop a technology because it would allow people to discover something they should already know if they have any sense.
Here is Google's translation of Microsoft's letter.
There's a Mosix package in Debian. What is the difference between this project and the one that produced the Debian package?
If SlashDot let me configure my account with a delay (so I see only stories that are X hours old, and X is configurable by me for my account), then I'd set X to maybe 6.4023 (or some other random number ) and not have to cope with sites being down from the slashdot effect so much.
If they had gave people a default random value for X, then this slashdotting effect would go away altogether for most users. People who really want the latest could configure their account to set X to zero.
The next evolutionary step after the Warhol Worm is the Flash Worm and the Extortion Worm.
TightVNC is available here.
They can find your ISP if they discover the IP adddress and time that the offending information was sent from. If you're the only user of your ISP, then finding the ISP means finding you. You have to say that your ISP has a bunch of users and it deletes enough log information to make it impossible to figure out who did what after the fact.
The contest rules were unclear. Are the hollow hockey-puck like things real mines that will blow up your robot if you don't detect it, or just pieces of plastic?