> Brewster's Millions 2000:"30 million in a month,
> eh?" *picks up phone* "BUY NORTEL! BUY LINUX!
> TECH TECH TECH!"
If memory serves, one of the provisions in the deal was that Brewster had to get value for his money. I'm not sure buying tech stocks counts.
BTW, did you know that "Brewster's Millions" was originally a novel by George Barr McCutcheon (published 1902), and that according to IMDB it's been made into a movie at least six times? You can read the novel online thanks to UVa's Electronic Text Center.
Several of the complaints posted here about how awful C is as a scripting language indicate that people aren't actually reading the language description for CSS. Among other things:
* Variables must be declared but are untyped.
Like Tcl, everything appears to be a string.
* There are no pointers (though there are
call-by-ref parameters).
* There is no memory management, though there
is a way to dynamically change the size and
dimensions of an array object.
* There are some extensions, such as
exception handling and string concatenation
* There is no "goto" construct.
* There is a limited preprocessor facility
(#ifdef equivalents, but no macros).
Overall, it looks like a rather nice embedded scripting language, though it's not nearly as cool as embedded Scheme:-).
> Oh, and the "natural" pesticide is still in the
> corn when you harvest it. Bummer.
The kinds of pesticides we engineer into plants are unlikely to be harmful to humans, unless they happen to cause allergies. Example: StarLink corn (which recently caused a scandal when it was accidentally used to make taco shells) contains the protein Cry9p, which is only active in the alkaline environment of an insect's stomach (vs the acid environment of ours).
The reason StarLink isn't approved for human consumption is that Cry9p is not broken down by stomach acid. Proteins with that property include many known allergens, though I'm not sure if Cry9p itself has ever been observed to cause an allergic reaction.
This isn't to say that engineering food organisms doesn't entail various risks, but do give the poor biologists *some* credit for thinking of obvious potentials for toxicity.
Another good example of caution in this regard is the Flavr-Savr tomato, which was not approved until its developers showed (among other things) that the modified fruit does not contain more naturally occuring toxins than regular tomatoes. Heck, even non-GMO food can be problematic in this respect -- new potato varieties are now tested for levels of toxic, naturally occurring solanin (the reason you shouldn't eat the green bits!).
NBCi's comment on the FOX adaptation of "Ultraviolet":
"Howard Gordon, the producer of the American version, is reported as saying that he's after a more 'emotional' content, and wants to give the show a more 'soap opera' feel. This gives the
impression that the series will not be as moody or dark as the original UK version."
Oh dear. Now maybe I'm just partial to angst-ridden vampire movies (liked "The Addiction", hated "John Carpenter's Vampires"), but I find this quote distressing to say the least.
Next up from FOX: "The Frost Files", "Thomas the Tank Engine: World's Worst Derailments VI", and... wait for it... "East Enders: 90210".
While watching one of the Tom Baker episodes recently on a very large-screen TV, I was forcefully reminded of the fact that "Dr. Who"'s special effects budget looked to be about 50p / episode, plus whatever the prop guys could scrounge out of the BBC's closets.
An audio-only version has the great advantage that the cheese-ball special effects no longer get in the way of the story. Of course, this is *only* an advantage if the writing is good, but I think the Beeb's radio version of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" demonstrates that quality sci-fi-like material can be presented well in this medium.
OTOH, perhaps the BBC could just subcontract the production design for any "Dr. Who" TV revival to World Productions. I thought they did a nifty job on "Ultraviolet" using only minimal special effects and a few sets reminiscent of USA's "La Femme Nikita" series.
> Maybe in 100 years, computers will be smart
> enough to realize that 1.1+1.1+1.1+...+1.1
> can be computed as 1.1*ULONG_MAX.
\begin{pedant}
Unlikely, given that the value obtained by successive additions and the value obtained by multiplication differ substantially in the 11th decimal place. IEEE floating point numbers are not the same as the real line.
\end{pedant}
Batten down the hatches and hide the women and children -- April 1st is here again. The Register is already in the spirit. Believe nothing you read until, oh, say, Wednesday, just to be safe.
BTW, I wonder if I could use lzip's license on my next source distribution?
NASA is willing to strap a cell phone to their tres expensive rockets filled with sensitive custom electronics, but Continental won't let me use my cell phone in the air. "Oh no, it might interfere with the aircraft's avionics. Besides, you can't use cell phones in flight because they'll see too many cells at once from way up there. Use our AirPhone instead, only $19.99/second!"
I'll bet astronauts don't have to put their seat backs and tray tables in their full upright and locked positions, either. Lucky bastards.
The first bird that perches on these power lines and puts a talon through the insulation is going to get a nasty surprise.
I wonder what the cooling system looks like for these new lines? It seems quite challenging to cool all that cable and prevent any LN2 leakage. More importantly, if a leak happens, and the cable rises above its transition temperature while carrying a large current, there must be some kind of backup system to shunt off the current and prevent the heat generated by the sudden resistance from damaging the cable. Perhaps that's why the ceramic ribbon is wrapped in silver.
I don't do hardware -- would some actual power engineers care to comment on the cable design?
Regardless of the moral and legal implications of this plan, it sounds technically infeasible.
* First, consider the problem of blocking data coming through proxies based outside Germany. I suppose the RPS would have to block all such proxies, *if* they can be found
* Second, the proposal to filter by URL and return a human-readable reply in response to surfing an illegal site (a nice dialog box) seems to imply that filtering would have to be done through a transparent HTTP proxy. Such a proxying service would be extremely resource-intensive and might
cause unexpected problems if the transparency is not perfect.
* Third, there are a variety of countermeasures that site maintainers can take to make it difficult for an automated sniffer to discover illegal content, or, having done so, to properly block just those sites. A simple countermeasure would be to discover the domain or IP block that hosts the sniffers, then deny HTTP requests from that source.
I suppose this scheme might be good enough to discourage casual downloads by the majority of people. It might even be socially acceptable, provided it doesn't cause problems for unblocked sites. However, anyone who cares enough to work around the blocks (which is likely equivalent to the set of people who put up with trawling Napster and Gnutella today) can do so. Not much of a contender in the online arms race, methinks.
Of course, if one only intends to enforce the ban selectively...
Thanks to a couple of people for pointing out to me that similar formal specifications exist for OO languages. For instance, looking at the type systems for the simple L1 and L2 languages described here, with their accompanying soundness proofs, gives me all kinds of warm fuzzies.
I'm having difficulty seeing the novelty of Eidola. It's certainly not the first language to have a basis in a formal semantic calculus -- the lambda calculus for functional languages goes back to the 1930's. Eidola is also not the first to aim at a rich yet provably correct type system.
Standard ML is a language whose type system is formally justified. IIRC, the type system was designed to permit proofs that every program which type-checks successfully satisfies certain correctness and safety properties, e.g. it never accesses a value of one type as if it had another, incompatible type (*). ML has a very competent, freely available implementation (Standard ML of New Jersey) and has been used to write, among other things, a TCP/IP stack, a web server, and its own highly optimizing compiler.
I don't know if anyone has yet tried to reproduce this level of formal justification for the type system of an OO language. ML has polymorphism and type signatures, but I don't think it has any notion of an inheritence hierarchy. If Eidola is the first language to bring such formalism to OO, that would certainly be a nice contribution.
(*) Note that the proof doesn't go in the other direction, ie "every correct program type-checks," because useful notions of correctness are in general undecidable. The ML type-checking rules are provably sound but are not complete.
It's worse than that. Spider web silk isn't just protein. It also contains various other chemicals that keep it from drying out and make it resistant to attack by fungi and other microbes (after all, it is a good source of protein, right)? For details, see
(remove the embedded space in 'webthread' -- curse Slashdot's tiny little editor window.)
The company had better add equivalent protections to their product, or you might find that your spiffy new climbing rope will dry out and fray, or your bullet-proof vest will rot away after the first heavy rain.
At the risk of being redundant, let me attempt to lay out the issue succinctly:
1. If you were to become greviously sick, you most likely could not afford to pay for your health care. The cost to you would be catastrophic.
2. Your insurance company has enough cash that it can afford to pay for you if you get sick. It maintains this state of affairs by setting everyone's premiums so that the company's aggregate expected income is at least 100% of its expected liability. Income above 100% of liability represents the insurer's profits.
3. Given a large enough pool of customers and a comparatively small rate of disease, the company can cover its liability through reasonable (i.e. non-catastrophic) premiums even if it charges everyone the same rate. In this scenario, people with low risk pay higher premiums to subsidize those with high risk. Provided the number of high-risk individuals is small, their extra risk can be spread over the entire customer pool at a minimal cost per person.
4. Alternatively, the insurer can charge higher-risk individuals higher premiums, thereby eliminating the subsidy. Without such subsidies, high-risk individuals may be charged catastrophic premiums and therefore become uninsurable.
Let us assume that the insurer has perfect knowledge of everyone's risk (i.e. the probability that they will get sick). Under what circumstances is it fair(*) to subsidize those with higher risk, rather than making them pay the cost of said risk?
Proposition: "A fair insurer asks its customer pool to subsidize those risks over which the individual has no control, while charging to the individual those risks that she assumes voluntarily." Discuss.
Proposition: "An insurance company seeking to maximize its profit in a competitive setting cannot arbitrarily raise its premiums. It will therefore take every legal measure to lower the aggregate risk of its insured pool. In particular, the company's interests favor denying or charging catastrophic premiums to high-risk individuals, regardless of whether such action is 'fair'(*)."
Discuss.
(*) where "fair" means "consistent with your favorite ethical/moral system."
I can't find the indicated bind9 FAQ, but I just checked my installation of BIND 9.1.0 (which starts named with '-u daemon') and confirmed via 'ps x' that all named threads are in fact running as user 'daemon'. This is with kernel 2.2.18 and Glibc 2.2.1.
Looking at the bind 9.1.0 sources, specifically bin/named/unix/os.c, it appears that the BIND authors have hacked around the pthreads problem using capabilities. The main thread does setuid() early-on, so as to propagate the new uid to its child threads, but reserves for itself the capability to bind to privileged ports. This allows named to launch its child threads before it decides what ports to listen on.
My only problem with this approach is that I don't see where named eventually drops the privileged-port capability later.
> 2) Your clone robs a bank while your a college
> grad and kills everyone in the bank. (your face, > likely your prints)
Actually, identical twins (the natural equivalent of clones) don't have the same fingerprints. There appears to be a large random, non-genetic component to fingerprint formation, so it's doubtful that clones would share fingerprints.
If, on the other hand, the police are looking for DNA evidence, you're hosed. It might be wise to insert some unique sequence markers into your clone's genome so that your attorney can prove (by PCR) that the DNA on the bloody glove isn't yours.
> Also Christean European folklore doesn't
> pre-date the millenia at all, does it?
A lot of "Christian European" folklore has pre-Christian and occasionally non-European roots. On the subject of vampires, read the material on vampire legends of India at this URL:
http://www.zyworld.com/vampirelore/Gallery6.htm
and consider the fact that vampire legends in southeastern Europe were introduced with the Rómany migration in 1000-1300 AD. The ancestors of the Rómany migrated from India to Persia and thence to Asia Minor and Europe. They observed a number of traditional taboos relating specifically to blood and bodily fluids (e.g. not wearing bright red cloth).
Consider: a lot of the "vegetable" rennet used to make cheese in the USA comes from E. coli bacteria which have been genetically modified to produce rennin, an enzyme that is good at curdling milk proteins. Natural rennin comes from the stomachs of calves, and AFAIK the natural and engineered versions of the enzyme are chemically the same (as opposed to, say, curdling enzymes derived from plants, which must be chemically modified before they can be used to make cheese).
I think microbial rennet is considered vegetarian, despite being an enzyme of animal origin. I know that cheese made with can be labeled kosher.
What's dangerous about living in Ulan Bator? Isn't that the capital of Mongolia? It's not a source of newsworthy Bad Stuff, AFAIK -- unless you're allergic to yurts.
The day that large mammals, especially ruminants, learn to fly is the day I'll be investing heavily in extra-strength umbrellas (and possibly helmets).
Hum... I first heard this second-hand from the company attorneys at the Institute for Systems Biology, then saw it repeated in the news. However, a search of the USPTO database for, e.g., "DNA" and "pet food" mostly returned reasonable results (e.g. recombinant enzymes for degrading sugars in feed products).
Since I haven't been able to find such examples, I can only assume that either 1. the patents have been filed but not yet granted or 2. I've been trolled.
The new utility rules were aimed at restricting patents on genetic material. Previously, if a big pharmaceutical company wanted to patent the sequence of a gene or protein but didn't know what its function was, they could make up a completely bogus utility. Two infamous examples are patents which describe the utility of a DNA sequence as "pet food" or "landfill".
Under the new rules, companies can't get away with these shenanigans anymore.
Note that this article is from November 2000. Since that time, of the two big dotcoms mentioned in the article, MyLackey has gone (as the Register so nicely puts it) "titsup.com," while Kozmo has pulled out of some cities and reduced its presence in others.
Now these facts may just indicate poor execution, but perhaps, just perhaps, a company that routinely subjects its employees to the humiliation and lack of respect described in the article will eventually find that its primary asset - its people - have grown to hate and resent it?
ObDogPoop: my parents own a veterinary clinic, so I received a comprehensive education during my childhood summer vacations in the gentle art of retreiving and disposing of canine feces. Yes, it's every bit as bad as the article suggests. It's a shame that I couldn't find a place for that on my CV...
WARNING: according to some mail I subsequently received from the investigators at the Max Planck Genome Intitute, the above sequence is incomplete and was intended only as a private communication within their research group. Please don't download it.
Slashdot Mirror
> Brewster's Millions 2000:"30 million in a month,
> eh?" *picks up phone* "BUY NORTEL! BUY LINUX!
> TECH TECH TECH!"
If memory serves, one of the provisions in the deal was that Brewster had to get value for his money. I'm not sure buying tech stocks counts.
BTW, did you know that "Brewster's Millions" was originally a novel by George Barr McCutcheon (published 1902), and that according to IMDB it's been made into a movie at least six times? You can read the novel online thanks to UVa's Electronic Text Center.
Several of the complaints posted here about how awful C is as a scripting language indicate that people aren't actually reading the language description for CSS. Among other things:
:-).
* Variables must be declared but are untyped.
Like Tcl, everything appears to be a string.
* There are no pointers (though there are
call-by-ref parameters).
* There is no memory management, though there
is a way to dynamically change the size and
dimensions of an array object.
* There are some extensions, such as
exception handling and string concatenation
* There is no "goto" construct.
* There is a limited preprocessor facility
(#ifdef equivalents, but no macros).
Overall, it looks like a rather nice embedded scripting language, though it's not nearly as cool as embedded Scheme
> Oh, and the "natural" pesticide is still in the
> corn when you harvest it. Bummer.
The kinds of pesticides we engineer into plants are unlikely to be harmful to humans, unless they happen to cause allergies. Example: StarLink corn (which recently caused a scandal when it was accidentally used to make taco shells) contains the protein Cry9p, which is only active in the alkaline environment of an insect's stomach (vs the acid environment of ours).
The reason StarLink isn't approved for human consumption is that Cry9p is not broken down by stomach acid. Proteins with that property include many known allergens, though I'm not sure if Cry9p itself has ever been observed to cause an allergic reaction.
This isn't to say that engineering food organisms doesn't entail various risks, but do give the poor biologists *some* credit for thinking of obvious potentials for toxicity.
Another good example of caution in this regard is the Flavr-Savr tomato, which was not approved until its developers showed (among other things) that the modified fruit does not contain more naturally occuring toxins than regular tomatoes. Heck, even non-GMO food can be problematic in this respect -- new potato varieties are now tested for levels of toxic, naturally occurring solanin (the reason you shouldn't eat the green bits!).
NBCi's comment on the FOX adaptation of "Ultraviolet":
... wait for it ... "East Enders: 90210".
"Howard Gordon, the producer of the American version, is reported as saying that he's after a more 'emotional' content, and wants to give the show a more 'soap opera' feel. This gives the
impression that the series will not be as moody or dark as the original UK version."
Oh dear. Now maybe I'm just partial to angst-ridden vampire movies (liked "The Addiction", hated "John Carpenter's Vampires"), but I find this quote distressing to say the least.
Next up from FOX: "The Frost Files", "Thomas the Tank Engine: World's Worst Derailments VI", and
ObDrWho: bring back Lalla Ward!
While watching one of the Tom Baker episodes recently on a very large-screen TV, I was forcefully reminded of the fact that "Dr. Who"'s special effects budget looked to be about 50p / episode, plus whatever the prop guys could scrounge out of the BBC's closets.
An audio-only version has the great advantage that the cheese-ball special effects no longer get in the way of the story. Of course, this is *only* an advantage if the writing is good, but I think the Beeb's radio version of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" demonstrates that quality sci-fi-like material can be presented well in this medium.
OTOH, perhaps the BBC could just subcontract the production design for any "Dr. Who" TV revival to World Productions. I thought they did a nifty job on "Ultraviolet" using only minimal special effects and a few sets reminiscent of USA's "La Femme Nikita" series.
> Maybe in 100 years, computers will be smart
> enough to realize that 1.1+1.1+1.1+...+1.1
> can be computed as 1.1*ULONG_MAX.
\begin{pedant}
Unlikely, given that the value obtained by successive additions and the value obtained by multiplication differ substantially in the 11th decimal place. IEEE floating point numbers are not the same as the real line.
\end{pedant}
I think for this application, greased ferrets might be more effective than pigeons. Time to amend the RFC...
At least if we go to ferrets, we can say that the Internet not only sucks (and blows), but bites as well.
Batten down the hatches and hide the women and children -- April 1st is here again. The Register is already in the spirit. Believe nothing you read until, oh, say, Wednesday, just to be safe.
BTW, I wonder if I could use lzip's license on my next source distribution?
NASA is willing to strap a cell phone to their tres expensive rockets filled with sensitive custom electronics, but Continental won't let me use my cell phone in the air. "Oh no, it might interfere with the aircraft's avionics. Besides, you can't use cell phones in flight because they'll see too many cells at once from way up there. Use our AirPhone instead, only $19.99/second!"
I'll bet astronauts don't have to put their seat backs and tray tables in their full upright and locked positions, either. Lucky bastards.
The first bird that perches on these power lines and puts a talon through the insulation is going to get a nasty surprise.
I wonder what the cooling system looks like for these new lines? It seems quite challenging to cool all that cable and prevent any LN2 leakage. More importantly, if a leak happens, and the cable rises above its transition temperature while carrying a large current, there must be some kind of backup system to shunt off the current and prevent the heat generated by the sudden resistance from damaging the cable. Perhaps that's why the ceramic ribbon is wrapped in silver.
I don't do hardware -- would some actual power engineers care to comment on the cable design?
Regardless of the moral and legal implications of this plan, it sounds technically infeasible.
* First, consider the problem of blocking data coming through proxies based outside Germany. I suppose the RPS would have to block all such proxies, *if* they can be found
* Second, the proposal to filter by URL and return a human-readable reply in response to surfing an illegal site (a nice dialog box) seems to imply that filtering would have to be done through a transparent HTTP proxy. Such a proxying service would be extremely resource-intensive and might
cause unexpected problems if the transparency is not perfect.
* Third, there are a variety of countermeasures that site maintainers can take to make it difficult for an automated sniffer to discover illegal content, or, having done so, to properly block just those sites. A simple countermeasure would be to discover the domain or IP block that hosts the sniffers, then deny HTTP requests from that source.
I suppose this scheme might be good enough to discourage casual downloads by the majority of people. It might even be socially acceptable, provided it doesn't cause problems for unblocked sites. However, anyone who cares enough to work around the blocks (which is likely equivalent to the set of people who put up with trawling Napster and Gnutella today) can do so. Not much of a contender in the online arms race, methinks.
Of course, if one only intends to enforce the ban selectively...
Thanks to a couple of people for pointing out to me that similar formal specifications exist for OO languages. For instance, looking at the type systems for the simple L1 and L2 languages described here, with their accompanying soundness proofs, gives me all kinds of warm fuzzies.
I'm having difficulty seeing the novelty of Eidola. It's certainly not the first language to have a basis in a formal semantic calculus -- the lambda calculus for functional languages goes back to the 1930's. Eidola is also not the first to aim at a rich yet provably correct type system.
Standard ML is a language whose type system is formally justified. IIRC, the type system was designed to permit proofs that every program which type-checks successfully satisfies certain correctness and safety properties, e.g. it never accesses a value of one type as if it had another, incompatible type (*). ML has a very competent, freely available implementation (Standard ML of New Jersey) and has been used to write, among other things, a TCP/IP stack, a web server, and its own highly optimizing compiler.
I don't know if anyone has yet tried to reproduce this level of formal justification for the type system of an OO language. ML has polymorphism and type signatures, but I don't think it has any notion of an inheritence hierarchy. If Eidola is the first language to bring such formalism to OO, that would certainly be a nice contribution.
(*) Note that the proof doesn't go in the other direction, ie "every correct program type-checks," because useful notions of correctness are in general undecidable. The ML type-checking rules are provably sound but are not complete.
It's worse than that. Spider web silk isn't just protein. It also contains various other chemicals that keep it from drying out and make it resistant to attack by fungi and other microbes (after all, it is a good source of protein, right)? For details, see
e bt hread.html
http://www.xs4all.nl/~ednieuw/Spiders/InfoNed/w
(remove the embedded space in 'webthread' -- curse Slashdot's tiny little editor window.)
The company had better add equivalent protections to their product, or you might find that your spiffy new climbing rope will dry out and fray, or your bullet-proof vest will rot away after the first heavy rain.
At the risk of being redundant, let me attempt to lay out the issue succinctly:
1. If you were to become greviously sick, you most likely could not afford to pay for your health care. The cost to you would be catastrophic.
2. Your insurance company has enough cash that it can afford to pay for you if you get sick. It maintains this state of affairs by setting everyone's premiums so that the company's aggregate expected income is at least 100% of its expected liability. Income above 100% of liability represents the insurer's profits.
3. Given a large enough pool of customers and a comparatively small rate of disease, the company can cover its liability through reasonable (i.e. non-catastrophic) premiums even if it charges everyone the same rate. In this scenario, people with low risk pay higher premiums to subsidize those with high risk. Provided the number of high-risk individuals is small, their extra risk can be spread over the entire customer pool at a minimal cost per person.
4. Alternatively, the insurer can charge higher-risk individuals higher premiums, thereby eliminating the subsidy. Without such subsidies, high-risk individuals may be charged catastrophic premiums and therefore become uninsurable.
Let us assume that the insurer has perfect knowledge of everyone's risk (i.e. the probability that they will get sick). Under what circumstances is it fair(*) to subsidize those with higher risk, rather than making them pay the cost of said risk?
Proposition: "A fair insurer asks its customer pool to subsidize those risks over which the individual has no control, while charging to the individual those risks that she assumes voluntarily." Discuss.
Proposition: "An insurance company seeking to maximize its profit in a competitive setting cannot arbitrarily raise its premiums. It will therefore take every legal measure to lower the aggregate risk of its insured pool. In particular, the company's interests favor denying or charging catastrophic premiums to high-risk individuals, regardless of whether such action is 'fair'(*)."
Discuss.
(*) where "fair" means "consistent with your favorite ethical/moral system."
I can't find the indicated bind9 FAQ, but I just checked my installation of BIND 9.1.0 (which starts named with '-u daemon') and confirmed via 'ps x' that all named threads are in fact running as user 'daemon'. This is with kernel 2.2.18 and Glibc 2.2.1.
Looking at the bind 9.1.0 sources, specifically bin/named/unix/os.c, it appears that the BIND authors have hacked around the pthreads problem using capabilities. The main thread does setuid() early-on, so as to propagate the new uid to its child threads, but reserves for itself the capability to bind to privileged ports. This allows named to launch its child threads before it decides what ports to listen on.
My only problem with this approach is that I don't see where named eventually drops the privileged-port capability later.
> 2) Your clone robs a bank while your a college
> grad and kills everyone in the bank. (your face, > likely your prints)
Actually, identical twins (the natural equivalent of clones) don't have the same fingerprints. There appears to be a large random, non-genetic component to fingerprint formation, so it's doubtful that clones would share fingerprints.
If, on the other hand, the police are looking for DNA evidence, you're hosed. It might be wise to insert some unique sequence markers into your clone's genome so that your attorney can prove (by PCR) that the DNA on the bloody glove isn't yours.
> Also Christean European folklore doesn't
> pre-date the millenia at all, does it?
A lot of "Christian European" folklore has pre-Christian and occasionally non-European roots. On the subject of vampires, read the material on vampire legends of India at this URL:
http://www.zyworld.com/vampirelore/Gallery6.htm
and consider the fact that vampire legends in southeastern Europe were introduced with the Rómany migration in 1000-1300 AD. The ancestors of the Rómany migrated from India to Persia and thence to Asia Minor and Europe. They observed a number of traditional taboos relating specifically to blood and bodily fluids (e.g. not wearing bright red cloth).
Consider: a lot of the "vegetable" rennet used to make cheese in the USA comes from E. coli bacteria which have been genetically modified to produce rennin, an enzyme that is good at curdling milk proteins. Natural rennin comes from the stomachs of calves, and AFAIK the natural and engineered versions of the enzyme are chemically the same (as opposed to, say, curdling enzymes derived from plants, which must be chemically modified before they can be used to make cheese).
I think microbial rennet is considered vegetarian, despite being an enzyme of animal origin. I know that cheese made with can be labeled kosher.
What's dangerous about living in Ulan Bator? Isn't that the capital of Mongolia? It's not a source of newsworthy Bad Stuff, AFAIK -- unless you're allergic to yurts.
The day that large mammals, especially ruminants, learn to fly is the day I'll be investing heavily in extra-strength umbrellas (and possibly helmets).
Hum... I first heard this second-hand from the company attorneys at the Institute for Systems Biology, then saw it repeated in the news. However, a search of the USPTO database for, e.g., "DNA" and "pet food" mostly returned reasonable results (e.g. recombinant enzymes for degrading sugars in feed products).
Since I haven't been able to find such examples, I can only assume that either 1. the patents have been filed but not yet granted or 2. I've been trolled.
The new utility rules were aimed at restricting patents on genetic material. Previously, if a big pharmaceutical company wanted to patent the sequence of a gene or protein but didn't know what its function was, they could make up a completely bogus utility. Two infamous examples are patents which describe the utility of a DNA sequence as "pet food" or "landfill".
Under the new rules, companies can't get away with these shenanigans anymore.
Note that this article is from November 2000. Since that time, of the two big dotcoms mentioned in the article, MyLackey has gone (as the Register so nicely puts it) "titsup.com," while Kozmo has pulled out of some cities and reduced its presence in others.
Now these facts may just indicate poor execution, but perhaps, just perhaps, a company that routinely subjects its employees to the humiliation and lack of respect described in the article will eventually find that its primary asset - its people - have grown to hate and resent it?
ObDogPoop: my parents own a veterinary clinic, so I received a comprehensive education during my childhood summer vacations in the gentle art of retreiving and disposing of canine feces. Yes, it's every bit as bad as the article suggests. It's a shame that I couldn't find a place for that on my CV...
WARNING: according to some mail I subsequently received from the investigators at the Max Planck Genome Intitute, the above sequence is incomplete and was intended only as a private communication within their research group. Please don't download it.