I keep wanting to use OpenSSH,but it only supports Kerberos IV authentication. It ought to be easy to hack in GSSAPI or Kerb V, but there seems to be some political issue with protocol numbering that keeps this from happening. Search deja for openssh + Kerberos to see what I'm talking about.
The presentation states that OUM is only good for about 10 trillion writes. If I bang on the same bit for a week or two at a rate of (say) 10^7 writes per second, won't it wear out?
Of course, most bits won't see this kind of punishment, but I can imagine data acquisition apps that might trash a few bytes of storage within a year or two or ten. Hopefully the machine's L2 cache would effectively rate-limit writebacks to main memory, but it should still be possible to set up an aliasing situation that would cause a line to be flushed on every write.
Ironically enough, man 1.5g, which is the latest version for Linux, is full of buffer overflows related to piping commands to the shell in the course of building formatted man pages. See BugTraq for details. Typically, an attacker can only get setgid man privileges, but that's sufficient to munge the cached, preformatted man pages to contain arbitrary bits.
To my knowledge, nobody has patched man since the original advisory was released.
Whatever makes you think that OLE and COM would be left with the OS company? AFAICT, the Apps company gets everything except the OS kernels and drivers. Even the core GUI could reasonably be construed to belong the Apps company, so long as the OS company keeps DirectX.
It seems to me that the proposed judgement makes it very easy for MS to shift the vast majority of the Windows APIs to the Apps company. There's certainly precedent (X, Gnome, KDE) for MS to assert that the object management API's and the GUI that make Windows recognizably Windows are not part of the core OS.
Note that nearly all the business restrictions in the proposed judgement apply only to the OS company, so it's in the best interest of MS to leave indispensable Windows API's with the Apps company. No OEM could reasonably claim to sell a Windows desktop without COM, the media libraries, etc etc etc -- and the Apps company isn't restricted in how it can license those bits.
According to the article, the expiring patent is the one on LZW compression. The GIF format is a well-known use of this technology, but there are many others (e.g. TIFF format).
It will be nice to see the LZW patent die once and for all in 2003. Celebration over the expiration of the RSA patent will probably be winding down about then:-).
I saw the makedepend stall too. Here's a fix to xc/config/makedepend/cppsetup.c which breaks the infinite recursion that causes the stall. With this patch, I was able to get past the makedepend phase successfully.
--- cppsetup.c.old Sat Mar 11 21:43:06 2000 +++ cppsetup.c Sat Mar 11 21:43:10 2000 @@ -188,7 +188,7 @@ return 0; do { var = (*s)->s_value; - if (!isvarfirstletter(*var)) + if (!isvarfirstletter(*var) || !strcmp((*s)->s_name, var)) break; s = lookup_variable (ip, var, strlen(var)); } while (s);
In the great tradition of Usenet's "Who would you get to play X if they made a movie?" threads, here are some pieces I'd like to see in Fantasia 20xx, whenever they get around to making it:
1. Bach's suites for unaccompanied cello, either #1 or #2. If you happened to see PBS's "Yo-Yo Ma: Inspired by Bach" series, they already did some interesting CGI work for suite #2. #1 might make a good abstract piece, or else something to do with plants...
2. Rimsky-Korsakov's "Sheherazade", just as long as they don't revive the characters from the Aladdin franchise.
I can think of some others, but these are my top picks. What do you think?
Here's the license agreement that comes with the libmsp software (the not-open-source part of BeamIt). I couldn't find a version on the my.mp3.com web site. In answer to your question: yes, it does contain a provision against reverse engineering.
END USER WEB SITE AND SOFTWARE TERMS AND CONDITIONS OF USE
Welcome to MP3.com's Beam-ItTM service (the "Service"). By subscribing to the Service and/or by downloading MP3.com's Beam-ItTM software (the "Software"), you are agreeing to abide by the terms and conditions of this agreement (the "Agreement"). The terms and conditions of this Agreement may be modified from time to time by MP3.com. Each time you log on to the Service or use the Software you agree to familiarize yourself with the most current version of these terms and conditions. If you continue to access the Service or use the Software, you agree to be bound by the most current version of the terms and conditions..
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(a) In addition to certain third party software which may be required, use of the Service may include downloading the Software, as such Software may be updated from time to time. The MP3.com information and Software, and the content posted on the MP3.com web site is copyrighted and protected by law and international treaty. You may download the Software through a web browser onto a single computer for your personal, non-commercial internal use only. BY DOWNLOADING THIS SOFTWARE YOU ARE AGREEING TO THE TERMS AND CONDITIONS OF THIS AGREEMENT, WHICH SHALL REMAIN IN EFFECT UNTIL YOU UNINSTALL THE SOFTWARE, DESTROY ALL COPIES OF IT AND REMOVE FROM YOUR MY.MP3.COM ACCOUNT ANY REGISTERED CONTENT (DEFINED BELOW) PLACED THERE THROUGH USE OF THE SOFTWARE. IF YOU DO NOT AGREE WITH ANY OF THE TERMS OF THIS AGREEMENT, DO NOT DOWNLOAD OR INSTALL THE SOFTWARE.
(b) You are granted by MP3.com a non-exclusive, non-transferable, non-sublicenseable, license to use the Software solely for connecting to and using the Service in accordance with this Agreement. This is a license, not a transfer of title, and you may not nor permit anyone else to (a) modify the Software or use it for any commercial purpose or public display, performance, sale or rental; (b) decompile, reverse engineer, or disassemble, modify, or create derivative works based on the Software or the documentation in whole or in part; (c) remove any copyright or other MP3.com proprietary notices; (d) transfer the Software to another person. You agree to prevent any copying of the Software that you download for your use from the MP3.com web site.
(c) The Software and all information furnished by MP3.com on the MP3.com web site is copyrighted proprietary material of MP3.com and may not be copied, reproduced, modified, published, posted, transmitted, or distributed in any way, without MP3.com's prior written permission. Except as expressly provided herein, MP3.com and its suppliers do not grant any express or implied right to you under any patents, copyrights, trademarks, trade secret, or other intellectual property rights of MP3.com or its suppliers.
(d) The terms and conditions of this Agreement govern your use of our Software and Service only. You further agree to abide by the terms and conditions of any third party software licenses for other software used by you in conjunction with our Software and Service.
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(a) You will become eligible to use the Service as an end user ("Registered User") upon subscribing to the Service and paying the applicable fee, if any. Registered Users are permitted by MP3.com to register their possession of certain user media (e.g., CDs) containing audio content ("Registered Content") by placing such user media in an applicable information storage and retrieval device (e.g., a CD-ROM drive) and thereby enabling verification of such user media by MP3.com ("Verification"). Upon successful Verification of user media provided by you, the corresponding Registered Content will become available to you for listening via streaming from your My.MP3.com account on the MP3.com web site. In submitting your user media for Verification, you agree to abide by all instructions, rules and directions posted by MP3.com, as well as all laws regarding copyright ownership and use of intellectual property, and you shall be solely responsible for any infringements of third party rights. You represent and warrant that: (i) you are the sole owner of any user media submitted by you for Verification,(ii) you will not submit for Verification any user media not owned by you, (iii) you will not loan, rent, lease or otherwise transfer any user media owned by you to a third party for the purpose of allowing such third party to submit such user media for Verification, (iv) you will not provide your My.MP3.com login name or password to any third party, and you will not allow any third party to access your my.MP3.com account, and (v) if at any time you sell, transfer or otherwise dispose of any user media, you will immediately remove the Registered Content related to such user media from your My.MP3.com. account. You further agree not to copy, reproduce, transmit, distribute or transfer any Registered Content in violation of any third party rights.
(b) You acknowledge that the Registered Content is protected by copyrights, trademarks, and other intellectual and proprietary rights ("Rights"); (ii) these Rights are valid and protected in all media and technologies, whether known or unknown; and (iii) except as explicitly provided otherwise, this Agreement and applicable copyright, trademark, and other laws govern your use of such Registered Content. You agree to comply with any instructions, rules, or directions posted by MP3.com related to such Registered Content.
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BY USING THE BEAM-IT SERVICE, YOU ACKNOWLEDGE THAT YOU HAVE READ THIS AGREEMENT AND AGREE TO BE BOUND BY ITS TERMS AND CONDITIONS. YOU FURTHER AGREE THAT THIS AGREEMENT, WHICH MAY BE MODIFIED FROM TIME TO TIME BY MP3.COM (AND POSTED AT THE MP3.COM WEB SITE) IS THE COMPLETE AND EXCLUSIVE STATEMENT OF THE RIGHTS AND LIABILITIES OF THE PARTIES, AND SUPERSEDES ANY AND ALL PRIOR AND CONTEMPORANEOUS WRITTEN OR ORAL AGREEMENTS EXISTING BETWEEN THE PARTIES WITH RESPECT TO SUCH SUBJECT MATTER. CERTAIN PROVISIONS OF THESE TERMS AND CONDITIONS MAY BE SUPERSEDED BY EXPRESSLY DESIGNATED LEGAL NOTICES OR TERMS LOCATED WITHIN THE MP3.COM WEB SITE.
Depend on the previous layer bits averaging out? Bet I can find special cases that still cause problems.
CD's, like hard disks, use run-length limited (RLL) data encoding to prevent too many 0's or 1's from showing up in a row. Presumably one could devise a similar code for FMD's to ensure that no part of the disk has too many layers with the same value.
Devising compact 2D and 3D RLL codes for holographic storage is actually an interesting (and AFAIK still open) theory problem. A good description of the math involved may be found in the book Symbolic Dynamics and Coding by B. Lind and D. Marcus.
The Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, specifically its Division of Information Technology and Society, is responsible for exhibits on the history of electricity. While digging around their web site, I found this new exhibit (web-only AFAIK):
It includes a section on "Powering the Past" which provides much more balanced coverage of Tesla vs Edison and their respective inventions.
Of course, this doesn't change the fact that the main physical and web exhibits are 100% Edison-centric -- the only hits on "Tesla" from the site's search engine were for the one new exhibit above. While I don't necessarily agree with the idea of recruiting one's third grade classes to forward a private agenda, Mr. Wagner does have a point.
There is no geographical feature named "Coppermine" in California or Oregon according to the USGS's National Mapping Information System or the Census Department's TIGER Mapping Service.
Of course, there are various features named Coppermine in Georgia, Maryland, Missouri, North & South Carolina, New Hampshire, Texas, and Wisconsin.
Inducible expression systems for research use have been around for a while. Judging by the MSNBC article, this is one is novel because, once induced, it stays induced.
However, it's not really correct to think of (most) genes as being "on" or "off"; they are transcribed at a variable level depending on the local concentrations of one or several promoter proteins. The analog networks formed from these elements exhibit a variety of interesting nonlinear behaviors (of which switching is just one example) which help ensure that, for example, your cells divide at a rate just fast enough to replace their dying neighbors and maybe grow your body a bit -- but no faster.
We need to perturb these networks in order to understand them, but knocking out a gene or overexpressing it 1000-fold is like using a nuclear blast to twiddle the current in a sensitive circuit. Our lack of fine control over gene induction is one reason that dissecting gene networks is so hard.
Of course, there are other problems: biological control happens at the RNA [1] and protein [2] levels, not just the gene transcription level. We've got considerably better tech [3] for observing gene transcription than for watching proteins, but it's the proteins (especially the ones that bind to transcriptional promoters) that do the real work. Also, our analytical toolkit for network identification works great for linear systems but isn't so hot in the presence of nonlinearities and feedback.
For more information on how to analyze biological networks, see e.g. the proceedings of the latest Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing at
[1] RNA levels can be controlled not just by tweaking the transcription rate but also through selectively degrading mRNA's and by alternative splicing-out of introns to produce different transcripts.
[2] Proteins can be translated from mRNA and later degraded at variable rates. More importantly for fast responses, they can turn each other on and off through kinase activity (e.g. by adding and removing phosphate groups from particular sites in the protein).
[3] The latest and greatest tech for measuring gene transcription is the cDNA or oligonucleotide microarray. For example, see the GeneChip at www.affymetrix.com. Please don't ask me how quantitatively reliable these methods are -- the answer would only depress you:-).
And one more fun fact about methanol is... it burns with an invisible flame, unlike those nifty little ethanol burners you may remember from chemistry class. Set a puddle of methanol on fire, and all you'll see is a little heat haze.
IIRC, methanol is used to fuel Formula 1 racing cars. The Learning Channel had some interesting footage of drivers leaping out of crashed cars, slapping their clothing, rolling around, and eventually being extinguished by the emergency crew -- all with no visible fire or smoke.
Re:Regarding a cheating client for my.mp3.com
on
MP3.com's Beam-It
·
· Score: 1
Nice work -- I've been wondering about the verification scheme for several days but didn't have a handy sniffer.
I'm interested in what scheme mp3.com is using to compare the ripped data to what they have stored. I hope it's not a simple byte-for-byte comparison, because ripping, especially in the presence of dust and scratches, may not produce repeatable results. I'm guessing that they do something clever because, if the comparison were straightforward equality, they wouldn't have to send all that data to the server; they could send a one-way hash of it to the client instead and do the comparison on the client side.
As to whether the verifier checks different random chunks in each session, consider how much space would be required to store a large amount of unencoded track data on mp3.com's servers, even with standard lossless compression. That suggests that either the queries won't vary much, or that mp3.com has a method to compare sound from the mp3 to the corresponding sound from the CD. I'd be interested to know how such a scheme might work; I assume it would be done in the frequency domain.
I believe that some (USA) web and FTP sites which offer encryption software use reverse DNS + whois lookups to determine if a download request comes from a domain known to be in the U.S.A. I had trouble downloading such software until my ISP added "US" to the street address in its whois entry.
Aside from the fact that NSI has just hosed these sites' authentication mechanisms until they fix their scripts, I wonder how these sites will determine whose registry to check for contact information in the future?
> judging from the current state of artificial > intelligence, i don't see a computer coming up > with an patentable idea any time soon.
I beg to differ.
I once TA'd for an AI professor at Rice U. who worked on automated synthesis of mechanical systems. She did a project with Xerox to design more effective mechano-optical systems for copiers (i.e. the lens/mirror arrangements that get the page image to the reproduction engine). Her software rapidly rediscovered the mechanisms used in all Xerox copiers at the time, then went on to design better ones.
A paper describing the theory behind the software is available at http://www.cs.rice.edu/~devika/red.ps.gz
So, now that all GNU humor files have been collected on its web site, can we possibly remove them from the Emacs distribution tarball and save everyone a few kilobytes? For that matter, how about removing the political screeds, cookie recipes, and the interview with RMS from 1986?
Re:My computer prays every night, and it says...
on
Can Computers Pray?
·
· Score: 1
In a few years, even I, risk-averse personality that I am, might consider the surgery. On the other hand...
My glasses have probably saved me from being hit/poked in the eye by sharp edges and flying objects at least once a year for the last ten years. For this reason (and for reduced weight), I make it a point always to get polycarbonate lenses and titanium frames. I also ask for anti-UV coating, which I figure should reduce the normal cumulative damage to my eyes from years of sunlight (in Seattle? Ok, maybe not).
As another poster noted, there are downsides to glasses: dirt, occasional scratches, and image distortion in your peripheral vision. However, the human visual system is really good at compensating for persistent visual distortion so that you don't notice it. Also, if I turn my head just right, the edge distortion causes an interesting prismatic effect. It's kind of neat wearing a portable spectroscope 8-).
Assuming they can extract the DNA, insert it into an elephant egg, and grow the clone, it will have the nuclear genome of a mammoth... but the mitochondrial genome of an Asian elephant. Hopefully they'll at least sequence the mammoth's mitochondrial genome so that we know what we're missing.
I wonder how many of the important phenotype differences between mammoths and elephants can be (even partly) attributed to mitochondrial mutations?
One of the few obvious changes in this release is the ability to play MP3's. Just what I wanted: yet another MP3 player. OTOH, I shouldn't complain too loudly because the RealAudio and RealVideo support even in the previous alpha version have worked flawlessly for me.
According to the release notes, this version sort of works with Flash content but doesn't yet play Quicktime or AVI files.
Slashdot Mirror
I keep wanting to use OpenSSH,but it only supports Kerberos IV authentication. It ought to be easy to hack in GSSAPI or Kerb V, but there seems to be some political issue with protocol numbering that keeps this from happening. Search deja for openssh + Kerberos to see what I'm talking about.
The presentation states that OUM is only good for about 10 trillion writes. If I bang on the same bit for a week or two at a rate of (say) 10^7 writes per second, won't it wear out?
Of course, most bits won't see this kind of punishment, but I can imagine data acquisition apps that might trash a few bytes of storage within a year or two or ten. Hopefully the machine's L2 cache would effectively rate-limit writebacks to main memory, but it should still be possible to set up an aliasing situation that would cause a line to be flushed on every write.
Ironically enough, man 1.5g, which is the latest version for Linux, is full of buffer overflows related to piping commands to the shell in the course of building formatted man pages. See BugTraq for details. Typically, an attacker can only get setgid man privileges, but that's sufficient to munge the cached, preformatted man pages to contain arbitrary bits.
To my knowledge, nobody has patched man since the original advisory was released.
Whatever makes you think that OLE and COM would be left with the OS company? AFAICT, the Apps company gets everything except the OS kernels and drivers. Even the core GUI could reasonably be construed to belong the Apps company, so long as the OS company keeps DirectX.
It seems to me that the proposed judgement makes it very easy for MS to shift the vast majority of the Windows APIs to the Apps company. There's certainly precedent (X, Gnome, KDE) for MS to assert that the object management API's and the GUI that make Windows recognizably Windows are not part of the core OS.
Note that nearly all the business restrictions in the proposed judgement apply only to the OS company, so it's in the best interest of MS to leave indispensable Windows API's with the Apps company. No OEM could reasonably claim to sell a Windows desktop without COM, the media libraries, etc etc etc -- and the Apps company isn't restricted in how it can license those bits.
According to the article, the expiring patent is the one on LZW compression. The GIF format is a well-known use of this technology, but there are many others (e.g. TIFF format).
:-).
It will be nice to see the LZW patent die once and for all in 2003. Celebration over the expiration of the RSA patent will probably be winding down about then
I'm using XFree86 with twm.
.xsession:
.twmrc:
In my
xmodmap -e "Keycode 115 = F20"
In my
"F20" = : all : f.exec "/usr/local/bin/netscape http://www.slashdot.org &"
Now, whenever I hit the left "Windows" key on my keyboard, I launch Netscape and pull up Slashdot. The moral: RTFM -- you might be surprised!
The only problem is that TWM doesn't seem to support binding a key to the f.menu directive -- I can press all I want, but no menu comes up.
So why did Westinghouse give up sponsorship of the contest anyway? I can't imagine that it was just about the money.
What's next: will Microsoft take over sponsorship of RSI? If that's already happened, don't tell me -- just shoot me now.
Jeremy (RSI '91, but didn't have a project worth submitting to Westinghouse)
I saw the makedepend stall too. Here's a fix to xc/config/makedepend/cppsetup.c which breaks the infinite recursion that causes the stall. With this patch, I was able to get past the makedepend phase successfully.
--- cppsetup.c.old Sat Mar 11 21:43:06 2000
+++ cppsetup.c Sat Mar 11 21:43:10 2000
@@ -188,7 +188,7 @@
return 0;
do {
var = (*s)->s_value;
- if (!isvarfirstletter(*var))
+ if (!isvarfirstletter(*var) || !strcmp((*s)->s_name, var))
break;
s = lookup_variable (ip, var, strlen(var));
} while (s);
In the great tradition of Usenet's "Who would you get to play X if they made a movie?" threads, here are some pieces I'd like to see in Fantasia 20xx, whenever they get around to making it:
1. Bach's suites for unaccompanied cello, either #1 or #2. If you happened to see PBS's "Yo-Yo Ma: Inspired by Bach" series, they already did some interesting CGI work for suite #2. #1 might make a good abstract piece, or else something to do with plants...
2. Rimsky-Korsakov's "Sheherazade", just as long as they don't revive the characters from the Aladdin franchise.
I can think of some others, but these are my top picks. What do you think?
Here's the license agreement that comes with the libmsp software (the not-open-source part of BeamIt). I couldn't find a version on the my.mp3.com web site. In answer to your question: yes, it does contain a provision against reverse engineering.
END USER WEB SITE AND SOFTWARE TERMS AND CONDITIONS OF USE
Welcome to MP3.com's Beam-ItTM service (the "Service"). By subscribing to the Service and/or by downloading MP3.com's Beam-ItTM software (the "Software"), you are agreeing to abide by the terms and conditions of this agreement (the "Agreement"). The terms and conditions of this Agreement may be modified from time to time by MP3.com. Each time you log on to the Service or use the Software you agree to familiarize yourself with the most current version of these terms and conditions. If you continue to access the Service or use the Software, you agree to be bound by the most current version of the terms and conditions..
1. SOFTWARE
(a) In addition to certain third party software which may be required, use of the Service may include downloading the Software, as such Software may be updated from time to time. The MP3.com information and Software, and the content posted on the MP3.com web site is copyrighted and protected by law and international treaty. You may download the Software through a web browser onto a single computer for your personal, non-commercial internal use only. BY DOWNLOADING THIS SOFTWARE YOU ARE AGREEING TO THE TERMS AND CONDITIONS OF THIS AGREEMENT, WHICH SHALL REMAIN IN EFFECT UNTIL YOU UNINSTALL THE SOFTWARE, DESTROY ALL COPIES OF IT AND REMOVE FROM YOUR MY.MP3.COM ACCOUNT ANY REGISTERED CONTENT (DEFINED BELOW) PLACED THERE THROUGH USE OF THE SOFTWARE. IF YOU DO NOT AGREE WITH ANY OF THE TERMS OF THIS AGREEMENT, DO NOT DOWNLOAD OR INSTALL THE SOFTWARE.
(b) You are granted by MP3.com a non-exclusive, non-transferable, non-sublicenseable, license to use the Software solely for connecting to and using the Service in accordance with this
Agreement. This is a license, not a transfer of title, and you may not nor permit anyone else to (a) modify the Software or use it for any commercial purpose or public display, performance, sale or rental; (b) decompile, reverse engineer, or disassemble, modify, or create derivative works based on the Software or the documentation in whole or in part; (c) remove any copyright or other MP3.com proprietary notices; (d) transfer the Software to another person. You agree to prevent any copying of the Software that you download for your use from the MP3.com web site.
(c) The Software and all information furnished by MP3.com on the MP3.com web site is copyrighted proprietary material of MP3.com and may not be copied, reproduced, modified, published, posted, transmitted, or distributed in any way, without MP3.com's prior written permission. Except as expressly provided herein, MP3.com and its suppliers do not grant any express or implied right to you under any patents, copyrights, trademarks, trade secret, or other intellectual property rights of MP3.com or its suppliers.
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Depend on the previous layer bits averaging out? Bet I can find special cases that still cause problems.
CD's, like hard disks, use run-length limited (RLL) data encoding to prevent too many 0's or 1's from showing up in a row. Presumably one could devise a similar code for FMD's to ensure that no part of the disk has too many layers with the same value.
Devising compact 2D and 3D RLL codes for holographic storage is actually an interesting (and AFAIK still open) theory problem. A good description of the math involved may be found in the book Symbolic Dynamics and Coding by B. Lind and D. Marcus.
The Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, specifically its Division of Information Technology and Society, is responsible for exhibits on the history of electricity. While digging around their web site, I found this new exhibit (web-only AFAIK):
e ring/
http://www.si.edu/organiza/museums/nmah/csr/pow
It includes a section on "Powering the Past" which provides much more balanced coverage of Tesla vs Edison and their respective inventions.
Of course, this doesn't change the fact that the main physical and web exhibits are 100% Edison-centric -- the only hits on "Tesla" from the site's search engine were for the one new exhibit above. While I don't necessarily agree with the idea of recruiting one's third grade classes to forward a private agenda, Mr. Wagner does have a point.
There is no geographical feature named "Coppermine" in California or Oregon according to the USGS's National Mapping Information System or the Census Department's TIGER Mapping Service.
Of course, there are various features named Coppermine in Georgia, Maryland, Missouri, North & South Carolina, New Hampshire, Texas, and Wisconsin.
Pray tell, what connection topology would you use for your Beowulf? A hypercubane?
Inducible expression systems for research use have been around for a while. Judging by the MSNBC article, this is one is novel because, once induced, it stays induced.
o nline/
:-).
However, it's not really correct to think of (most) genes as being "on" or "off"; they are transcribed at a variable level depending on the local concentrations of one or several promoter proteins. The analog networks formed from these elements exhibit a variety of interesting nonlinear behaviors (of which switching is just one example) which help ensure that, for example, your cells divide at a rate just fast enough to replace their dying neighbors and maybe grow your body a bit -- but no faster.
We need to perturb these networks in order to understand them, but knocking out a gene or overexpressing it 1000-fold is like using a nuclear blast to twiddle the current in a sensitive circuit. Our lack of fine control over gene induction is one reason that dissecting gene networks is so hard.
Of course, there are other problems: biological control happens at the RNA [1] and protein [2] levels, not just the gene transcription level. We've got considerably better tech [3] for observing gene transcription than for watching proteins, but it's the proteins (especially the ones that bind to transcriptional promoters) that do the real work. Also, our analytical toolkit for network identification works great for linear systems but isn't so hot in the presence of nonlinearities and feedback.
For more information on how to analyze biological networks, see e.g. the proceedings of the latest Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing at
http://www-smi.stanford.edu/projects/helix/psb-
[1] RNA levels can be controlled not just by tweaking the transcription rate but also through selectively degrading mRNA's and by alternative splicing-out of introns to produce different transcripts.
[2] Proteins can be translated from mRNA and later degraded at variable rates. More importantly for fast responses, they can turn each other on and off through kinase activity (e.g. by adding and removing phosphate groups from particular sites in the protein).
[3] The latest and greatest tech for measuring gene transcription is the cDNA or oligonucleotide microarray. For example, see the GeneChip at www.affymetrix.com. Please don't ask me how quantitatively reliable these methods are -- the answer would only depress you
And one more fun fact about methanol is... it burns with an invisible flame, unlike those nifty little ethanol burners you may remember from chemistry class. Set a puddle of methanol on fire, and all you'll see is a little heat haze.
IIRC, methanol is used to fuel Formula 1 racing cars. The Learning Channel had some interesting footage of drivers leaping out of crashed cars, slapping their clothing, rolling around, and eventually being extinguished by the emergency crew -- all with no visible fire or smoke.
Nice work -- I've been wondering about the verification scheme for several days but didn't have a handy sniffer.
I'm interested in what scheme mp3.com is using to compare the ripped data to what they have stored. I hope it's not a simple byte-for-byte comparison, because ripping, especially in the presence of dust and scratches, may not produce repeatable results. I'm guessing that they do something clever because, if the comparison were straightforward equality, they wouldn't have to send all that data to the server; they could send a one-way hash of it to the client instead and do the comparison on the client side.
As to whether the verifier checks different random chunks in each session, consider how much space would be required to store a large amount of unencoded track data on mp3.com's servers, even with standard lossless compression. That suggests that either the queries won't vary much, or that mp3.com has a method to compare sound from the mp3 to the corresponding sound from the CD. I'd be interested to know how such a scheme might work; I assume it would be done in the frequency domain.
I believe that some (USA) web and FTP sites which offer encryption software use reverse DNS + whois lookups to determine if a download request comes from a domain known to be in the U.S.A. I had trouble downloading such software until my ISP added "US" to the street address in its whois entry.
Aside from the fact that NSI has just hosed these sites' authentication mechanisms until they fix their scripts, I wonder how these sites will determine whose registry to check for contact information in the future?
> judging from the current state of artificial
> intelligence, i don't see a computer coming up
> with an patentable idea any time soon.
I beg to differ.
I once TA'd for an AI professor at Rice U. who worked on automated synthesis of mechanical systems. She did a project with Xerox to design more effective mechano-optical systems for copiers (i.e. the lens/mirror arrangements that get the page image to the reproduction engine). Her software rapidly rediscovered the mechanisms used in all Xerox copiers at the time, then went on to design better ones.
A paper describing the theory behind the software is available at
http://www.cs.rice.edu/~devika/red.ps.gz
So, now that all GNU humor files have been collected on its web site, can we possibly remove them from the Emacs distribution tarball and save everyone a few kilobytes? For that matter, how about removing the political screeds, cookie recipes, and the interview with RMS from 1986?
... and let us say, RETURN.
In a few years, even I, risk-averse personality that I am, might consider the surgery. On the other hand...
My glasses have probably saved me from being hit/poked in the eye by sharp edges and flying objects at least once a year for the last ten years. For this reason (and for reduced weight), I make it a point always to get polycarbonate lenses and titanium frames. I also ask for anti-UV coating, which I figure should reduce the normal cumulative damage to my eyes from years of sunlight (in Seattle? Ok, maybe not).
As another poster noted, there are downsides to glasses: dirt, occasional scratches, and image distortion in your peripheral vision. However, the human visual system is really good at compensating for persistent visual distortion so that you don't notice it. Also, if I turn my head just right, the edge distortion causes an interesting prismatic effect. It's kind of neat wearing a portable spectroscope 8-).
"I'd like a nice, thick blue pile for the carpet and a systolic array for the drapes."
"Yes sir -- how many square yards of array would you like?"
Assuming they can extract the DNA, insert it into an elephant egg, and grow the clone, it will have the nuclear genome of a mammoth... but the mitochondrial genome of an Asian elephant. Hopefully they'll at least sequence the mammoth's mitochondrial genome so that we know what we're missing.
I wonder how many of the important phenotype differences between mammoths and elephants can be (even partly) attributed to mitochondrial mutations?
One of the few obvious changes in this release is the ability to play MP3's. Just what I wanted: yet another MP3 player. OTOH, I shouldn't complain too loudly because the RealAudio and RealVideo support even in the previous alpha version have worked flawlessly for me.
According to the release notes, this version sort of works with Flash content but doesn't yet play Quicktime or AVI files.