We all know exactly what's going to happen when one of the simulations shows something interesting. It'll be snapped up and patented as soon as the data block hits their servers. You? You'll get a micropayment. If you're lucky, they'll mention your name. If you're the first one ever to find something useful, you'll get publicity shots. Royalties from the patent? Yeah, right. You run these screen savers and all you're doing is helping a greedy bastard get rich.
Yeah, right, like you would actually deserve fame and fortune for the extremely challenging task of running a program. It only seems fair that the creators of the program would get that, no?
(Yes, I'm sure there are some ethical and altruistic biomedical profiteers out there, but my observation is that they're mostly just bastards.)
Tell you what -- next time you get some sort of infection, don't support one of these greedy profiteers by buying antibiotics. No, die a painful and gruesome death, and by doing so, send a strong message to these bastards.
Besides being an expert cryptographer, Friedman was the world expert on the Voynich Manuscript, which is probably the closest thing in the real world to those weird books mentioned in Lovecraft's stories. Perhaps granting this patent is only the government's way of belatedly thanking Friedman for his work in preventing the Great Old Ones from returning.
I have not worn a watch since about 1989, and I have never been in a situation where I wished I had one. The need for a timepiece on your wrist is a complete illusion.
My Palm Pilot calculator does math, trig, financial (TVM), logic, statistics, as well as time, weight, length, area, temperature, volume, power/energy and currency conversions. Try to integrate on your HP/Ti calc.
He meant integrate, as in calculus, which is something TI and HP calculators do quite well. While there is no reason why a symbolic math program couldn't be written for a Palm Pilot, I haven't seen one -- it would be considerbly harder to write than trivial unit conversion programs.
Canada is no longer the answer. Perhaps once Canada was an enlightened social democracy on par with Sweden, but it is rapidly becoming merely a clone of the US.
f you don't like the laws, get them changed; laws are part of the social contract, and you can't obey them selectively. I would suggest reading Locke's Second Treatise for more eloquent discussion about this, as i can hardly do it justice.
Despite Locke's empty theorizing, the best way to get a law changed is to disobey it. Basically what happens is when enough people break a law for a long enough period of time, the law first becomes unenforced, and secondly repealed. For example, in the last century, most communities had laws governing what was appropriate clothing to wear in public and what was acceptable sexual behavior in private. Today, such laws have mostly been repealed; not generally because of any organized effort to get them changed, but simply because they seem so out of touch with current behavior as to seem silly.
Intelligent life (AFAWK) has not been around for long enough for you to be able to say this. The evolutionary advantage of intelligence has yet to be determined. Come back in a billion years and we'll talk.
Perhaps no intelligent life at at will exist then. That's certainly a possibility too. I used the rather facetious example of squid people to remind one that if future intelligent races of life exist on Earth, there is no reason to believe that they will be (like the "Star Child" in 2001) descendants of humanity.
Besides which, I'm sure some forms of bacteria have survived essentially unchanged on such timescales.
No. As someone with a doctorate in microbiology, I can assure you that bacteria actually evolve faster than eukaryotes.
Of course, at the time the Sun dies, human beings will no longer exist, despite many bad SF novels to the contrary. I'm not talking about nuclear wars or environmental collapse (although certainly, those are possible), I'm simply talking about simple biological evolution. Species simply don't last billions of years. Let the intelligent squid-people of the future become calamari -- we don't owe them a cent.
The interviewee seems to love the phrase "quality experience" yet never defines it. What exactly is a "quality experience" and why would his method provide it?
Well, if you consider that one of the most successful natural language parsers created was the Zork parser, which ran just dandy on 48K 1Mhz home computers in 1981, probably not.
(For those not familar with the Zork parser, it could understand sentences like "Take all but the blue gem from the chest and then go north")
Sure, it was a well-written paper and it raises many interesting points. But I wonder just what this guy's grounding in the real world is?
Well, he is a professor, and while people in the private sector like to sneer at academics for not having a job in "the real world", the fact is that academics generate a constant stream of intellectual property (that's their job), and so I rather think in terms of intellectual property, academia is the "real world".
Human beings were designed (how that occurred is another flamefest;) to run best on meat.
This is a scam, and it's completely unsubstantiated.
No, it is quite substantiated, if you know anything at all about evolution. Look at the teeth of a cow. Look at the teeth of a tiger. Which set of teeth is more like human teeth? Which animal is a vegetarian? If humans evolved to be vegetarians, all their teeth would be molars. This is not the case. Additionally, cows have rumens and can digest grass. Humans don't, and can't. If you are a vegetarian, you probably know that you have to be careful to eat the right things to get all your amino acids. This is generally not a problem for organisms that evolved to be vegetarians.
Having said this, I agree that people have right to be vegetarians, just like they have a right to be Christians or whatever. Still, I can't help but think the world would be a better place if more people at least considered science when making decisions about their lifestyles
It's one of those parallel worlds novels, in which many different versions of the world exist, some better and some worse than ours. In one of the better ones, the radios display the name of the song and artist (yeah, yeah, computer CD and MP3 players can do this now). So what does this have to do with this article? Well, according to the web site, the proposed radios will have this feature.
Actually, DNA compression is a topic of interest, not only from the standpoint of saving disk space, but also for analyzing the sequence -- areas that compress differently may have different functional roles. You can read a paper on the subject by some people I know here
Although the article doesn't really explain it, what this programmer did was write a contig assembly program -- a program that tries to find the most likely ordering of the fragments in the raw sequence data.
While it is very impressive that a programmer was able to write a contig assembly program in four weeks, and that it only took three days to assemble the entire genome, I really doubt that this particular assembly of the genome is going to be definitive. People like Gene Meyers and Phil Green have devoted years to developing such programs, and I think the results of their programs, although probably taking more than three days to run, are likely to yield more accurate results.
Commercial software is typically designed for the simple purpose of making money
Exactly. But the author claims that commercial software is created to solve a problem that the customers have. That's nonsense. If it solves a problem, great. But if it causes problems, that's even better from a commercial perspective, because then the company can sell a fix to the problem.
I bet you feel absolutely no pain at the murder of plants you eat every day. And as a microbiologist, I have to remind you of the millions of bacteria that must die for your yogurt, and likewise the millions of yeast cells that must die for your beer, wine, and bread.
You might claim that well, plants and microbes are lower organisms and thus don't count. But all these organisms respond to stimuli, and so at some very basic level can "think" and "feel". They simply are less cute than mammals because they aren't furry, and so don't have an army of fuzzy-minded defenders. Get back to me when you can tell me how heterotrophic organisms like humans can live in any other way than by killing other life forms. Meanwhile, being consigned to living off death, I'll choose the most tasty dead things for my meals. Not to mention live, but soon to be dead in my stomach things, like draft beer.
The sad fact is that while DVDs (having the ability to have multiple soundtracks) could be an excellent resource for people learning foreign languages, region encoding means that most languages will be unavailable to the user. For example, in North America, English, French, and Spanish are generally the only soundtracks (and even the only subtitles) available.
Slashdot Mirror
We all know exactly what's going to happen when one of the simulations shows something interesting. It'll be snapped up and patented as soon as the data block hits their servers. You? You'll get a micropayment. If you're lucky, they'll mention your name. If you're the first one ever to find something useful, you'll get publicity shots. Royalties from the patent? Yeah, right. You run these screen savers and all you're doing is helping a greedy bastard get rich.
Yeah, right, like you would actually deserve fame and fortune for the extremely challenging task of running a program. It only seems fair that the creators of the program would get that, no?
(Yes, I'm sure there are some ethical and altruistic biomedical profiteers out there, but my observation is that they're mostly just bastards.)
Tell you what -- next time you get some sort of infection, don't support one of these greedy profiteers by buying antibiotics. No, die a painful and gruesome death, and by doing so, send a strong message to these bastards.
Besides being an expert cryptographer, Friedman was the world expert on the Voynich Manuscript, which is probably the closest thing in the real world to those weird books mentioned in Lovecraft's stories. Perhaps granting this patent is only the government's way of belatedly thanking Friedman for his work in preventing the Great Old Ones from returning.
I have not worn a watch since about 1989, and I have never been in a situation where I wished I had one. The need for a timepiece on your wrist is a complete illusion.
I can only assume you never ride public buses.
My Palm Pilot calculator does math, trig, financial (TVM), logic, statistics, as well as time, weight, length, area, temperature, volume, power/energy and currency conversions. Try to integrate on your HP/Ti calc.
He meant integrate, as in calculus, which is something TI and HP calculators do quite well. While there is no reason why a symbolic math program couldn't be written for a Palm Pilot, I haven't seen one -- it would be considerbly harder to write than trivial unit conversion programs.
Canada is no longer the answer. Perhaps once Canada was an enlightened social democracy on par with Sweden, but it is rapidly becoming merely a clone of the US.
"Parts of Word, internally, use a p-code engine because it's more compact"
That's first time I've heard the adjective "compact" applied to the ultimate in bloatware. Even Emacs looks compact compared to Word.
f you don't like the laws, get them changed; laws are part of the social contract, and you can't obey them selectively. I would suggest reading Locke's Second Treatise for more eloquent discussion about this, as i can hardly do it justice.
Despite Locke's empty theorizing, the best way to get a law changed is to disobey it. Basically what happens is when enough people break a law for a long enough period of time, the law first becomes unenforced, and secondly repealed. For example, in the last century, most communities had laws governing what was appropriate clothing to wear in public and what was acceptable sexual behavior in private. Today, such laws have mostly been repealed; not generally because of any organized effort to get them changed, but simply because they seem so out of touch with current behavior as to seem silly.
...but only one of the organisms tested is actually a bacterium (D. radiodurans). The archaea aren't true bacteria.
Intelligent life (AFAWK) has not been around for long enough for you to be able to say this. The evolutionary advantage of intelligence has yet to be determined. Come back in a billion years and we'll talk.
Perhaps no intelligent life at at will exist then. That's certainly a possibility too. I used the rather facetious example of squid people to remind one that if future intelligent races of life exist on Earth, there is no reason to believe that they will be (like the "Star Child" in 2001) descendants of humanity.
Besides which, I'm sure some forms of bacteria have survived essentially unchanged on such timescales.
No. As someone with a doctorate in microbiology, I can assure you that bacteria actually evolve faster than eukaryotes.
Of course, at the time the Sun dies, human beings will no longer exist, despite many bad SF novels to the contrary. I'm not talking about nuclear wars or environmental collapse (although certainly, those are possible), I'm simply talking about simple biological evolution. Species simply don't last billions of years. Let the intelligent squid-people of the future become calamari -- we don't owe them a cent.
The interviewee seems to love the phrase "quality experience" yet never defines it. What exactly is a "quality experience" and why would his method provide it?
Well, if you consider that one of the most successful natural language parsers created was the Zork parser, which ran just dandy on 48K 1Mhz home computers in 1981, probably not.
(For those not familar with the Zork parser, it could understand sentences like "Take all but the blue gem from the chest and then go north")
Sure, it was a well-written paper and it raises many interesting points. But I wonder just what this guy's grounding in the real world is?
Well, he is a professor, and while people in the private sector like to sneer at academics for not having a job in "the real world", the fact is that academics generate a constant stream of intellectual property (that's their job), and so I rather think in terms of intellectual property, academia is the "real world".
But, IIRC West End Games already has role playing system based on the Star Wars universe.
West End Games has gone bankrupt, and while it is trying to reorganize, Wizards of the Coast really does now own the rights to Star Wars.
Are you guys smoking something? Cmdr Topic *specifically* mentioned sharing his computer in the article.
Human beings were designed (how that occurred is another flamefest ;) to run best on meat.
This is a scam, and it's completely unsubstantiated.
No, it is quite substantiated, if you know anything at all about evolution. Look at the teeth of a cow. Look at the teeth of a tiger. Which set of teeth is more like human teeth? Which animal is a vegetarian? If humans evolved to be vegetarians, all their teeth would be molars. This is not the case. Additionally, cows have rumens and can digest grass. Humans don't, and can't. If you are a vegetarian, you probably know that you have to be careful to eat the right things to get all your amino acids. This is generally not a problem for organisms that evolved to be vegetarians.
Having said this, I agree that people have right to be vegetarians, just like they have a right to be Christians or whatever. Still, I can't help but think the world would be a better place if more people at least considered science when making decisions about their lifestyles
No, replicants can withstand cold.
Political attire channel? About power ties, Armani suits, etc? Seems like it could get rather dull.
It's one of those parallel worlds novels, in which many different versions of the world exist, some better and some worse than ours. In one of the better ones, the radios display the name of the song and artist (yeah, yeah, computer CD and MP3 players can do this now). So what does this have to do with this article? Well, according to the web site, the proposed radios will have this feature.
Actually, DNA compression is a topic of interest, not only from the standpoint of saving disk space, but also for analyzing the sequence -- areas that compress differently may have different functional roles. You can read a paper on the subject by some people I know here
Although the article doesn't really explain it, what this programmer did was write a contig assembly program -- a program that tries to find the most likely ordering of the fragments in the raw sequence data.
While it is very impressive that a programmer was able to write a contig assembly program in four weeks, and that it only took three days to assemble the entire genome, I really doubt that this particular assembly of the genome is going to be definitive. People like Gene Meyers and Phil Green have devoted years to developing such programs, and I think the results of their programs, although probably taking more than three days to run, are likely to yield more accurate results.
Commercial software is typically designed for the simple purpose of making money
Exactly. But the author claims that commercial software is created to solve a problem that the customers have. That's nonsense. If it solves a problem, great. But if it causes problems, that's even better from a commercial perspective, because then the company can sell a fix to the problem.
What happens when someone runs into a wall or lamp post at 25MPH? Or worse, hits another pedestrian?
Nothing good, but then bicyclists can go 25MPH too, and can also crash into walls and pedestrians.
I bet you feel absolutely no pain at the murder of plants you eat every day. And as a microbiologist, I have to remind you of the millions of bacteria that must die for your yogurt, and likewise the millions of yeast cells that must die for your beer, wine, and bread.
You might claim that well, plants and microbes are lower organisms and thus don't count. But all these organisms respond to stimuli, and so at some very basic level can "think" and "feel". They simply are less cute than mammals because they aren't furry, and so don't have an army of fuzzy-minded defenders. Get back to me when you can tell me how heterotrophic organisms like humans can live in any other way than by killing other life forms. Meanwhile, being consigned to living off death, I'll choose the most tasty dead things for my meals. Not to mention live, but soon to be dead in my stomach things, like draft beer.
The sad fact is that while DVDs (having the ability to have multiple soundtracks) could be an excellent resource for people learning foreign languages, region encoding means that most languages will be unavailable to the user. For example, in North America, English, French, and Spanish are generally the only soundtracks (and even the only subtitles) available.