One thing that you are not considering is that internet users are expending resources to maintain tracking cookies. These resources include CPU cycles, bandwidth, hard drive space, and electricity.
Granted, cookies don't require too much of these resources, but still, the user is expending these resources for the benefit of some marketing company. Moreover, the user often doesn't know they are expending these resources, and they didn't agree to it. Tracking cookies generally arrive on a computer unannounced.
So users are spending resources solely for the financial benefit of some company in an unagreed and uncompensated manner.
I love it when tech writes dumb it down for the masses:
"In this week's edition of NEWSWEEK, we looked at the growing online presence of adware, software that sits on users' hard drives and can slow down the desktop with resource-consuming pop-up ads."
The adware is sitting on the hard-drive? I don't know, there's usually not a lot of space for sitting inside the case. Sitting on top of the monitor, maybe. But probably not the hard drive.
And it slows down the desktop? Well that's a relief! I think I can live with a slow desktop as long as the rest of my apps keep running fast.
I haven't read that book, but it looks interesting.
I have read, and would recommend The Double Helix, by James Watson, which is an account of the discovery of the double helical structure. Some people have criticized Watson and the book for various reasons, but I found it a great read.
Keep Religion in the Church
on
Game with God
·
· Score: 1
Religion has as much place in the video game as it does in the science classroom.
(And I mean that to be half serious, half flamebait.)
I agree with you and I often think about this problem.
A one-dimensional political "spectrum" is not nearly sufficient. Sometimes people speak about a two dimensional (social/economical) political scale, but i don't think that's enough either.
Consider the Myers-Briggs Personality tests that place people in a 4-dimensial personality space (ISTP, ENFP, etc.) Certainly politics are as least as complicated as personality.
Our reductive language of personal politics lowers the quality of our political debate by oversimplifying everything. That's why people get so confused by characters such as John McCain.
And, this simple language interacts with two-party political system. It serves the interests of the two parties to have people thinking about politics one-dimensionally.
This clever side-by-side feature applies to the 8.5 x 11 (letter) and 11 x 17 sizes that are quite common in the US and Canada as well.
I'm not sure about "legal" paper and the rest.
And don't worry everyone, Microsoft is aware of the problem! To quote: "The paper sizes in the United States and Canada (such as letter, legal, and so on) do not satisfy the needs of all users in the world market."
Fear not! They'll solve this problem by embracing and extending the ISO paper-size standard. The new sizes will be MS-A4, MS-A3, etc. Of couse, you will only be able to print to these pages from MS apps, but what else is there?
< / slashdot obligatory off-topic M$ bashing for karma>
Re:Logic, Logic -- Who's Got the Logic?
on
D&D Is 30
·
· Score: 1
I would like to engage this person in a concrete speech situation sometime so we could exchange speech acts about linguistics. What is Pragmatics? by Shaozhong Liu Definition: A subfield of linguistics developed in the late 1970s, pragmatics studies how people comprehend and produce a communicative act or speech act in a concrete speech situation which is usually a conversation (hence *conversation analysis). It distinguishes two intents or meanings in each utterance or communicative act of verbal communication. One is the informative intent or the sentence meaning, and the other the communicative intent or speaker meaning (Leech, 1983; Sperber and Wilson, 1986). The ability to comprehend and produce a communicative act is referred to as pragmatic competence (Kasper, 1997) which often includes one's knowledge about the social distance, social status between the speakers involved, the cultural knowledge such as politeness, and the linguistic knowledge explicit and implicit.
You have to choose regular old-fashioned-radio or WiFi radio
You have to choose Windows or Linux
You have to put your media player on shuffle or listen to one album at a time
And the idea that someone would buy all that gear solely to listen to WiFi radio is hard to believe. People who already have wireless networks are going to be more likely to buy a standalone WiFi radio device.
I totally agree with you. There are lots of albums, new and old, that are great cohesive works of art.
Fortunately, there is no real conflict here, because, after all, shuffle remains an option.
Sometimes, when I'm feeling wishy-washy and unwilling to commit to an album or even a genre, I use shuffle. Usually I end up listening to a few songs till I land in something that grabs my attention. Then I turn off shuffle.
But, if I know what I want to listen to, there's no need to shuffle in the first place.
The annoying thing about this is that it is not engineered to be resistant to pests. It's engineerd to be resistant to Roundup, made by Monsanto. There are lots of other such "Roundup Ready" products, including canola, corn, and soybeans.
The result of this is that farmers and now greenskeepers can douse their fields and fairways with Roundup. The Roundup ready plants survives this chemical shower, and everything else dies.
The problems with this are:
(1) The environmental impact of all this (extra) Roundup being released.
(2) The fact that growers become dependent on Monsanto for Roundup. Monsanto is, in effect, genetically engineering conditions that will lead to a monopoly.
(3) The selective pressures that this will put on all the pests that Roundup is supposed to control. In the same way that staph bacteria have evolved reistance to antibiotics in hospitals, the increased use Roundup will probably lead to the evolution of Roundup resistant superpests.
Obviously Monsanto is more concerned with profiting than the long-term economic and environmental health of the country.
I'm not against genetic engineering per se, but this approach seems to be fraught with pitfalls.
We have noticed that you've recently been talking about "blowing up the president" and "bombing". Several of our agents^H^H^H^H civil-servants are on their way to your house now in a black-helico^H^H^H automobile to ask you about this.
You can essentially do the same thing with certain ATI All-in-Wonder cards. Some of these cards include an FM tuner. It's gonna cost you a few hundred bucks, but you can change the channel and get other features too (DVR, etc.)
The scheduling software is not the greatest. It lacks the elegance of the shell script config file in the parent post. But, it'll record to MP3, so you can use lots of programs to play it back.
I don't know about Mac/Linux support for the card.
Reading this story reminds me why I build my own computers. I order all the components online. Typically the parts comes with a 1 or 3 yr manufacturer's warranty. And as long as you order from a reputable business with a reputation for good support, such as NewEgg, you're set.
Other advantages of this approach:
(1) You can save a fair amount of money.
True, you can get a celeron-based machine for $300 from WalMart, but who knows what corners they're cutting? A lot of the quality of a computer is based on motherboard, type of memory, HDD speed, and other factors that are deemphasized by sellers who focus on CPU speed and HDD size.
(2) You can better customize your components to match your needs: gaming, digital video, entertainment center, whatever. You end up with a higher quality computer for less money.
(3) You don't have to deal with any tech support malarchy.
(4) When (not if) your computer breaks, you get to trouble shoot the problem yourself. In the process, you gain a betterunderstanding of your computer. It can be a great learning process. And, the problem-solving aspect can be fun.
(5) You don't have to replace an entire computer to upgrade it. Adding a new video card or more memory might be all you need. My computer is continually evolving.
The big problem is that, as far as I know, this approach is not feasible for laptops, only desktops. If you need a laptop, you might have to end up dealing with big sellers and their tech support.
Good point. And you know what's going to happen when the next major terrorist attack occurs. The case will be made that the existing security laws weren't strict enough to prevent the attack, and we will have Patriot Act III. Then, we'll all have embedded RFID tags.
It's like the Men in Black franchise, a crappy movie with even crappier sequels. "If you didn't like Patriot Act I, wait till you hear about Patriot Act III, the Revenge of Ashcroft!"
Things are undoubtedly stranger than the original simple models.
Take the examples of alternate splicing of exons, or RNA editing.
Or, my favorite is in the immune system. The immune system must generate lymphocytes that can recognize the something like 10e14 different pathogens that we encounter. There are obviously not enough genes in our genome to individually code for these. So, our immune system shuffles and recombines thousands of "gene segments" to achieve this. This might explain it better.
All of these lead to more gene products than genes, if you use a simple definition of a gene.
The specific virus that Venter et al synthesized is called Bacteriophage phiX174. They probably chose it because it has such a short genome.
In fact, it's genome is so short that at first it confused researchers. It's genome is shorter than it should be. That is, there are fewer codons in the genome than there are amino acids in the virus's proteins. Normally, there would need to be a 1:1 codon:amino-acid ratio.
This lead researchers to the amazing discovery that phiX174 contains "genes within genes" and "overlapping genes". (Link to Genetic Map of phiX174) In several instances, one gene is entirely contained within another gene. In another, there are two genes (A and A*) that overlap with "reading frames" that are off by one.
This discovery challenges notions of what a gene is. With this knowledge, you can't say that a gene is simply a particular region of DNA.
These overlapping genes also call attention to the improbability of the evolution of phiX174. Commonly when a genetic mutation occurs, one base changes. This could affect one amino-acid in the protein for which the gene codes. In phiX174's case, a single base mutation could change 2 amino-acids in 2 proteins. This means that the evolution of these proteins is interdependent. That two functional proteins evolved in this manner is absolutely extraordinary.
Of course, now that it has evolved that way, it gives phiX174 an advantage of genetic economy. It takes less energy to maintain and reproduce a shorter genome. So phiX174 gets more bang for it's genetic buck by overlapping genes in this way.
Actually, viruses do consume energy; they require energy to reproduce. They just don't produce energy on their own. They steal energy and raw materials from their "host" cells.
I'd argue that viruses are alive. They reproduce. They have DNA or RNA genomes. They're just primitive life forms that depend on their hosts.
Slashdot Mirror
One thing that you are not considering is that internet users are expending resources to maintain tracking cookies. These resources include CPU cycles, bandwidth, hard drive space, and electricity.
Granted, cookies don't require too much of these resources, but still, the user is expending these resources for the benefit of some marketing company. Moreover, the user often doesn't know they are expending these resources, and they didn't agree to it. Tracking cookies generally arrive on a computer unannounced.
So users are spending resources solely for the financial benefit of some company in an unagreed and uncompensated manner.
I love it when tech writes dumb it down for the masses:
"In this week's edition of NEWSWEEK, we looked at the growing online presence of adware, software that sits on users' hard drives and can slow down the desktop with resource-consuming pop-up ads."
The adware is sitting on the hard-drive? I don't know, there's usually not a lot of space for sitting inside the case. Sitting on top of the monitor, maybe. But probably not the hard drive.
And it slows down the desktop? Well that's a relief! I think I can live with a slow desktop as long as the rest of my apps keep running fast.
I haven't read that book, but it looks interesting.
I have read, and would recommend The Double Helix, by James Watson, which is an account of the discovery of the double helical structure. Some people have criticized Watson and the book for various reasons, but I found it a great read.
Religion has as much place in the video game as it does in the science classroom.
(And I mean that to be half serious, half flamebait.)
If I were him, I would have implanted it in my appendix. Or maybe my tonsils, or my wisdom teeth, or that mole on my neck...
I agree with you and I often think about this problem.
A one-dimensional political "spectrum" is not nearly sufficient. Sometimes people speak about a two dimensional (social/economical) political scale, but i don't think that's enough either.
Consider the Myers-Briggs Personality tests that place people in a 4-dimensial personality space (ISTP, ENFP, etc.) Certainly politics are as least as complicated as personality.
Our reductive language of personal politics lowers the quality of our political debate by oversimplifying everything. That's why people get so confused by characters such as John McCain.
And, this simple language interacts with two-party political system. It serves the interests of the two parties to have people thinking about politics one-dimensionally.
I'm not sure about "legal" paper and the rest.
And don't worry everyone, Microsoft is aware of the problem! To quote: "The paper sizes in the United States and Canada (such as letter, legal, and so on) do not satisfy the needs of all users in the world market."
Fear not! They'll solve this problem by embracing and extending the ISO paper-size standard. The new sizes will be MS-A4, MS-A3, etc. Of couse, you will only be able to print to these pages from MS apps, but what else is there?
This communicative act of written communication is linked in the Wikipedia entry:
I would like to engage this person in a concrete speech situation sometime so we could exchange speech acts about linguistics.
What is Pragmatics?
by Shaozhong Liu
Definition:
A subfield of linguistics developed in the late 1970s, pragmatics studies how people comprehend and produce a communicative act or speech act in a concrete speech situation which is usually a conversation (hence *conversation analysis). It distinguishes two intents or meanings in each utterance or communicative act of verbal communication. One is the informative intent or the sentence meaning, and the other the communicative intent or speaker meaning (Leech, 1983; Sperber and Wilson, 1986). The ability to comprehend and produce a communicative act is referred to as pragmatic competence (Kasper, 1997) which often includes one's knowledge about the social distance, social status between the speakers involved, the cultural knowledge such as politeness, and the linguistic knowledge explicit and implicit.
You have to choose regular old-fashioned-radio or WiFi radio
You have to choose Windows or Linux
You have to put your media player on shuffle or listen to one album at a time
And the idea that someone would buy all that gear solely to listen to WiFi radio is hard to believe. People who already have wireless networks are going to be more likely to buy a standalone WiFi radio device.
I totally agree with you. There are lots of albums, new and old, that are great cohesive works of art.
Fortunately, there is no real conflict here, because, after all, shuffle remains an option.
Sometimes, when I'm feeling wishy-washy and unwilling to commit to an album or even a genre, I use shuffle. Usually I end up listening to a few songs till I land in something that grabs my attention. Then I turn off shuffle.
But, if I know what I want to listen to, there's no need to shuffle in the first place.
workbox:~magna > mod -h
MOD - Moderate Version 0.9a (2004, Mar 24)
usage: mod [arguments] [-|+]n comment [reason]
moderate the comment (up/down) n points for reason
arguments:
-h print this message
-v print MOD version number
-f force mod, even if no mod points
workbox:~magna > mod +1 8840959 insightfull
mod: unknown reason "insightfull"
workbox:~magna > mod +1 8840959 interesting
mod: you have no moderator points
workbox:~magna > mod -f +1 8840959 interesting
mod: you must be superuser to force a mod
workbox:~magna > su
Password: *************
workbox:~magna > mod -f +1 8840959 interesting
moderation complete
workbox:~magna > nethack &
Good point. I didn't realize that. I thought Roundup was patented.
The annoying thing about this is that it is not engineered to be resistant to pests. It's engineerd to be resistant to Roundup, made by Monsanto. There are lots of other such "Roundup Ready" products, including canola, corn, and soybeans.
The result of this is that farmers and now greenskeepers can douse their fields and fairways with Roundup. The Roundup ready plants survives this chemical shower, and everything else dies.
The problems with this are:
(1) The environmental impact of all this (extra) Roundup being released.
(2) The fact that growers become dependent on Monsanto for Roundup. Monsanto is, in effect, genetically engineering conditions that will lead to a monopoly.
(3) The selective pressures that this will put on all the pests that Roundup is supposed to control. In the same way that staph bacteria have evolved reistance to antibiotics in hospitals, the increased use Roundup will probably lead to the evolution of Roundup resistant superpests.
Obviously Monsanto is more concerned with profiting than the long-term economic and environmental health of the country.
I'm not against genetic engineering per se, but this approach seems to be fraught with pitfalls.
Dear Mr. JFengl,
We have noticed that you've recently been talking about "blowing up the president" and "bombing". Several of our agents^H^H^H^H civil-servants are on their way to your house now in a black-helico^H^H^H automobile to ask you about this.
Sincerely,
Al Jones
Government Employee
You can essentially do the same thing with certain ATI All-in-Wonder cards. Some of these cards include an FM tuner. It's gonna cost you a few hundred bucks, but you can change the channel and get other features too (DVR, etc.)
The scheduling software is not the greatest. It lacks the elegance of the shell script config file in the parent post. But, it'll record to MP3, so you can use lots of programs to play it back.
I don't know about Mac/Linux support for the card.
Chinese, you say... No kidding? Well, I'll be!
;)
Thanks for pointing that out, Mr. Literal!
I think I know what the problem with Google's Chinese site is:
It's mostly just a bunch of question marks:
???? - Google ?? - Google.com in English
(C)2004 Google - ?? 4,285,199,774 ????
Gosh, Google has a good reputation, but with shoddy pages like this, they're not going to make much of a dent in the Chinese search market.
Reading this story reminds me why I build my own computers. I order all the components online. Typically the parts comes with a 1 or 3 yr manufacturer's warranty. And as long as you order from a reputable business with a reputation for good support, such as NewEgg, you're set.
Other advantages of this approach:
(1) You can save a fair amount of money.
True, you can get a celeron-based machine for $300 from WalMart, but who knows what corners they're cutting? A lot of the quality of a computer is based on motherboard, type of memory, HDD speed, and other factors that are deemphasized by sellers who focus on CPU speed and HDD size.
(2) You can better customize your components to match your needs: gaming, digital video, entertainment center, whatever. You end up with a higher quality computer for less money.
(3) You don't have to deal with any tech support malarchy.
(4) When (not if) your computer breaks, you get to trouble shoot the problem yourself. In the process, you gain a betterunderstanding of your computer. It can be a great learning process. And, the problem-solving aspect can be fun.
(5) You don't have to replace an entire computer to upgrade it. Adding a new video card or more memory might be all you need. My computer is continually evolving.
The big problem is that, as far as I know, this approach is not feasible for laptops, only desktops. If you need a laptop, you might have to end up dealing with big sellers and their tech support.
Does this lurid description help NASA make future space flight safer? Does it do anything to advance science or the public good?
All this does is provide an opportunity to rubberneck.
Good point. And you know what's going to happen when the next major terrorist attack occurs. The case will be made that the existing security laws weren't strict enough to prevent the attack, and we will have Patriot Act III. Then, we'll all have embedded RFID tags.
It's like the Men in Black franchise, a crappy movie with even crappier sequels. "If you didn't like Patriot Act I, wait till you hear about Patriot Act III, the Revenge of Ashcroft!"
No microscopes are involved in DNA testing, despite what you may have seen on CSI:Miami.
Although it is funny to imagine:
White coated scientist squinting into eyepiece: "OK, the next one's a T, and then two A's in a row, and then a G, or wait, is that a C? "
Things are undoubtedly stranger than the original simple models.
Take the examples of alternate splicing of exons, or RNA editing.
Or, my favorite is in the immune system. The immune system must generate lymphocytes that can recognize the something like 10e14 different pathogens that we encounter. There are obviously not enough genes in our genome to individually code for these. So, our immune system shuffles and recombines thousands of "gene segments" to achieve this. This might explain it better.
All of these lead to more gene products than genes, if you use a simple definition of a gene.
The specific virus that Venter et al synthesized is called Bacteriophage phiX174. They probably chose it because it has such a short genome.
In fact, it's genome is so short that at first it confused researchers. It's genome is shorter than it should be. That is, there are fewer codons in the genome than there are amino acids in the virus's proteins. Normally, there would need to be a 1:1 codon:amino-acid ratio.
This lead researchers to the amazing discovery that phiX174 contains "genes within genes" and "overlapping genes". (Link to Genetic Map of phiX174) In several instances, one gene is entirely contained within another gene. In another, there are two genes (A and A*) that overlap with "reading frames" that are off by one.
This discovery challenges notions of what a gene is. With this knowledge, you can't say that a gene is simply a particular region of DNA.
These overlapping genes also call attention to the improbability of the evolution of phiX174. Commonly when a genetic mutation occurs, one base changes. This could affect one amino-acid in the protein for which the gene codes. In phiX174's case, a single base mutation could change 2 amino-acids in 2 proteins. This means that the evolution of these proteins is interdependent. That two functional proteins evolved in this manner is absolutely extraordinary.
Of course, now that it has evolved that way, it gives phiX174 an advantage of genetic economy. It takes less energy to maintain and reproduce a shorter genome. So phiX174 gets more bang for it's genetic buck by overlapping genes in this way.
Actually, viruses do consume energy; they require energy to reproduce. They just don't produce energy on their own. They steal energy and raw materials from their "host" cells.
I'd argue that viruses are alive. They reproduce. They have DNA or RNA genomes. They're just primitive life forms that depend on their hosts.
Actually, humans are more likely to die from old age than from "other" causes. This is indicated by a "Type 1 Survivorship Curve".
Other species, such as those with predators, don't tend to die as much from old age.
Of course, there are other "natural factors" besides aging that kill us off.