An ordinary Mass Spec need not be assembled in clean room conditions - it may be industry practice anyway. It wouldn't hurt to do so, and if you were prepared to announce the discovery of martian life, I'd certainly keep the internal components as clean as possible to avert any accusations of contamination. However, for most Mass Spec this is not necesarry - the weekend before last we disassembled a Mass Spec, put it back together again - we washed the exterior surface of the rods with isopropyl alchohol, since they needed cleaning, and we avoided getting fingerprints on anything, but otherwise we just put whatever components we were disassembling down on the (fairly dirty, actually) lab bench, and now it works fine.
My experience is entirely with GC (gas chromatograph) Mass Spec, but basically, in order for something to show up in your detector, it has to be vaporised. Gunk and dead cells that accrue, even on the internal surfaces, of the Mass Spec components can alter some component's magnetic properties (which must be exquisitely precise) but, generally, don't get vaporised, have no net charge and can't be pulled to the detector.
Of course, if you're sifting the soil for every known biological molecule, and thus trying every possible charge/mass ratio, the risk that some contaminant WILL spontaneously vaporise (especially after whatever radioactive abuse it encountered during space travel, and presumably cooking up to a fair temperature on re-entry) is, I suppose, considerable.
I make a singular exception for the Osbournes (I'd watch the old candid camera, if it was on). The problem with reality TV is not that there's something inherently wrong with the prospect - after all, documentaries are reality TV, fundamentally. The problem is that most "reality TV" is: 1) Despicable. (Mean-spirited, materialistic, what have you.) 2) Stupid. 3) Boring. 4) Fake.
Now, the Osbournes is positively humanistic. Uplifting, even. Ozzie's little family is also authentically funny, not to mention smarter than the people on the reality TV shows. I suspect that the osbournes show is substantially faked, as well, but I'll let that pass.
JUDGE: Would that you could render this extermination unnecessary by renouncing this method of illegal decryption! JOHANSEN: No, Your Honor, it cannot be. I don't think much of our profession, but, contrasted with respectability, it is comparatively honest. No, Your Honor, I shall live and die a Pirate King. (SONG -- PIRATE KING) JOHANSEN: Oh, better far to live and die Under the flightless bird I fly, Than play a corporate raider's part With a pirate head and a pirate heart. Away to the cheating world go you, Where pirates all are well-to-do; But I'll be true to the song I sing, And live and die a Pirate King. For I am a Pirate King! And it is, it is a glorious thing To be a Pirate King! For I am a Pirate King! SLASHDOTTERS:You are! Hurrah for the Pirate King! JOHANSEN:And it is, it is a glorious thing To be a Pirate King. SLASHDOTTERS:It is! Hurrah for the Pirate King! (Inserted to avoid lameness filter.) Hurrah for the Pirate King! JOHANSEN:When I sally forth to seek my prey I help myself in a royal way. I rip a few more flicks, it's true, Than a well-bred hacker ought to do; But many a hack with a first-class clone, If he wants to call his warez his own, Must manage somehow to get through More lines of code than e'er I do, For I am a Pirate King! And it is, it is a glorious thing To be a Pirate King! For I am a Pirate King! SLASHDOTTERS:You are! Hurrah for the Pirate King! JOHANSEN:And it is, it is a glorious thing To be a Pirate King. SLASHDOTTERS:It is! Hurrah for the Pirate King! (the lameness filter, to avoid, inserted.) Hurrah for the Pirate King! (exeunt.)
I was serious about the beneficial effect. If legislators see a consensus that ICANN is "bad" - from civil liberties groups, from the domain registrars who are ICANN's clients and provide ICANN with funding - then ICANN is unlikely to be given the total domination of the www that they desire.
According to a colleague at Rutgers: Hand-held electronic devices that rely on high-frequency sound to repel mosquitoes have become surprisingly popular in recent years.... Scientific studies have repeatedly shown that electronic mosquito repellers do not prevent host seeking mosquitoes from biting. In most cases, the claims made by distributors border on fraud.
While your downloading this software, if you buy a NYC landmark from me, I'll throw in a set of Mr. Chiu's immortality rings at no extra charge!
Quit being Pussies, build a moonbase
on
Back to the Moon?
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Mining the moon for use on Earth is never going to be a winning proposition. Re-entry into earth's atmosphere is just too expensive.
However, we should to move our space fabrication facilities to the moon. That's the way to lower our launch costs, in the long run. It is a lower G environment, it provides an additional slingshot for launches into the rest of the solar system, and, given a sufficient initial capital investment, energy on the moon will be cheaper than energy on the surface of the earth.
Before that's practical, we need a thorough, ground based, resource survey of the whole sattelite. In order to do that, we need a permanent base with facilities to fuel, service and repair all of the robots doing the lunar surveys.
We have the technology. We should stop dinking around, pony up the cash, and do it.
Wherever "open computing" survives will become the dominant cultural force of the next century.
The United States is in a position to maintain cultural hegemony over the whole world - if we don't kill the free exchange of culture in order to make a quick buck.
If we do, I predict, within a couple of generations, that other parts of the world will have outpaced us. Killing open computing will destroy our best way-out of the recent doldrums in popular movies and music.
Well, when you ask "what is the point of Anime", you should keep in mind that it's one of the largest culture-outputs of a nation of 130 million people (and Taiwan and Korea are starting to make it,) so there's a great deal of variety.
Personally, I find Anime, particularly Cowboy Bebop, aesthetically pleasing. If you like good Camera Work more than substance in your movies (I do - I loved Minority Report even though I thought the plot was, frankly, stupid. I liked The Fugitive primarily for the cinematography, although it had many other good points,) than I recommend Cowboy Bebop.
It is Eye Candy.
Incidentally, I've seen priated copies of the Movie (good quality DivX,) and it's not better than the show. If you like the show, you'll like the movie, but the animation is about the same - a little more polished, but not a drastic improvement.
1) You have to decide if their violating your privacy constitutes harming you. I think it does. So, just like drug makers can't sell you poison (doing you harm,) the phone company can't sell your phone records to people who want information on you. The harm is, I will grant, less severe, but it is still harm.
2) The guv'mint provides a regulatory backdrop that makes the telephone system possible. The system was built by Bell, originally, but with government help. If there were really more than one system - if, say, Sprint and AT&T customers could not call each other - than you might expect less guarantees about their behavior. As it is, they are selling access to the single, public, telephone network. They should not be in a position to dictate the terms under which that network can be accessed.
3) In the past, your phone records have been more-or-less private. This is a PRECEDENT. Precedent is more powerful than logic; if you engage in an illogical business practice long enough that people expect you to do it, you can't stop. Unfortunately, this principle has no force of written law, but as a practical guideline it pops up all the time.
"No, Your Honor, the children were just making Killer Robots. We had no idea it wouldn't be safe."
I'm amazed that the school's legal department allows this kind of thing. Battlebots are probably safer than rocketry (which my elementary school wouldn't let us do for legal reasons) but still, the potential is there for serious injury. It's probably easier to get this sort of thing allowed in High School. I wonder how heavily they emphasise safety? Based on my quick review of the two rules documents, they've at least had the good sense not to allow guns, bombs or cattleprods. Also, the Robot has to be safe to handle while off; but that may not be enough protection - I realize the stuff in the shop room down the hall is actually far more dangerous, but it doesn't involve the sanctioned game of using it as a weapon.
Play careful, Kids! Don't ruin the fun for future generations by chopping any of your toes off.
Also, just once incident of a robot with a chainsaw chasing screaming teenagers down a hallway would put a quick end to the program, I'd assume.
As other posters have pointed out, the virus to infect cancer cells is too risky; in order to work, such a virus would have to be engineered to sidestep the body's own defenses. At that rate, there is too much risk it might go "wild" and start attacking other cells.
Virii that attack bacteria (which are more typically called Phage) exist extensively in nature. They are one of the classic tools of molecular biology, well studied and characterised. Some strains are also nearly 100% lethal as they exist in nature. We are unlikely to improve on the lethality of phage with direct meddling - that is to say, by rewriting individual nucleotides one at a time (why below). In any case, in order to get all of the bacteria in your body with phage, your body would have to be inundanted with the phage. The phage don't hurt you, but you're body doesn't know that! The phage would send you into a state called Septic Shock, as you're own immune system's panic response killed you. We might engineer phage that don't set off our alarms - this has other risks, and this custom virus technology doesn't really help do this (yet.)
I'm trying to include a minimum of background, so here I go - genes/DNA (a code of 4 monomers) code for proteins (composed of 20 monomers, the code is somewhat degenerate.) The sequence of these monomers determine the shape of the protein - some of these monomers contain polar (vinegar-like) groups which want to be on the outside of the protein, touching water, some of them contain oily (like olive oil in salad dressing) groups which want to be on the inside, touching eachother. Other, more complex factors also come into play, making the relationship between sequence and three dimensional structure (which determines function) highly opaque. The ability to predict how a 13 monomer long protein is shaped, and thus what it will do, is beyond our present capability.
You could make up a sequence up the top of your head, but you'd have no way of knowing what it would actually do!
This means that when you genetically engineer an organism you don't even want (generally) to type genetic changes into a keyboard. You want to import large, complicated pieces of DNA from another organism, and clone (move) the DNA into the organism you're tinkering with.
There are situations where DNA you want is not available - for example, if I wanted DNA from the Ebola virus, I could not get it. There are other situations where you want to make single point changes in DNA, in order to see what happens (if, for example, you want to know if the single peptide you changed is important in the function of the protein.) However, this technology won't (if I understand it correctly) let you do that - their duplication of the virus genome was EXACTLY precise enough to get live virus; any errors in their DNA sequence that didn't render the virus nonviable wouldn't be caught.
The upshot? This isn't a tremendous advance in our ability to customise organisms. With refinements, it might be, but right now all you would use it for is to get DNA that you don't have physical access too.
ALERT: Intrusion attempt detected! User Liora mistyped his password!
the rate of false-positives is high enough that
ALERT: Account Liora has recieved login attempts from three different IPs in the past 12 hours!
you stop paying attention; unlike with AIDS testing (which has a very high false positive rate) the user is simply likely to ignore the system even if real threats occur
ALERT: 1,262 attempts to login as user "root" in past 7 seconds!
So it becomes desirable to lower the false positive rate to a manageable level, WHATEVER the rate of false negatives is, because otherwise you won't actually catch anything.
The purpose of the AIDS test is to assure you that you don't have AIDS. False negatives are unacceptable, false positives can be dealt with.
The purpose of the IDS is not to prevent intrusions - that would be nice, but it's not going to happen. The purpose of the IDS is to identify the (coloquially) hackers, so that you can retaliate against them / deter them, before they get you too many times, or get too many different people once. To do this, you need a deterence-level set of positives which is small enough (and true positive rich enough) for you to actually act on them.
Oh, and because I get off on it when people with agree with me: this is no substitute for real, human-level, security measures. Someone who expects any system of this kind to protect them from lousy sysadmin decisions deserves the rusty metal sodomy they will no doubt recieve.
(incidentally, a "White Elepehant" is an expensive, useless project.)
Why detonate a land mine with another explosive when you can use a laser! Lasers work nearly as well, and are merely many hundreds of times more expensive!
From the article: the operator will then switch on the main beam which will either explode or evaporate the explosives
Quick physics lesson. The explosive force of a conventional explosive is provided by the change-of-state to a gas. Air has a density of roughly 1 kg/cubic m. Most solids and liquids have a density of 1g/cubic cm, or 1000 kg/cubic m. So, when you vaporise something, you get a lump of gas which is compressed roughly 1000-fold.
The upshot? Vaporising the explosive = setting the explosive off! There is no way prevent landmines from detonating by vaporising them; they won't turn into harmless little poofs, they'll fucking explode. Unless they propose that this laser vaporises the landmine slowly/gently - which is patently absurd. So, you might as well set them off with a grenade.
Somebody with friends in the defense establishment has developed yet another practical (which does not mean useful or advisable, and certainly doesn't mean cost-effective) laser system, and they're trying to find some excuse to sell it.
This thing looks like the Crusader look like a good use of taxpayer money.
He isn't, is he?
on
High Score
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· Score: 3, Funny
You are not Spike Lee.
Have you ever actually seen Jon Katz? Sure, there are a couple of photos on the web, but those could be anybody. Using Concordance (the software used to unmask Joe Klein as the author of primary colors; also used to classify works of literature) I have concluded that, in fact, Jon Katz IS Spike Lee. Or at least that these articles and the screen plays attributed to Spike Lee were written by the same person. It explains so much, I'm surprised it didn't occur to me earlier.
What about the enemies of GNOME? We, the members of COBOLD, oppose project GNOME, their GUI, and all that they stand for! We will not rest until every member of the GNOME development team of lies in a shallow grave. Our leader, COBOL-commander, will overthrow the present order by military force, and restore the glorious days of punchcards and Cobol! Co-bolllll!
As for the "friends" of GNOME - we suggest you cower in terror lest you share the developers fate!
Incidentally, the classic "Kobold" was a spirit of the home or hearth - Kobe holt = hut goblin. The dog-headed lizardmen from D&D are, as many D&D things are, an artifact of somebody's supplementary artwork, and have no "basis" in mythology (although the guy who did the drawings for the Monster Manual is as qualified to make up mythology as anybody; it was all made up at some point.)
A diet high in saturated fat can raise your LDL, which can get damaged; this doesn't make you fat, however.
The important thing to remember is that it isn't what calories, but how many.
The Atkins diet induces a state called Ketosis (as in Ketone) where the products of fat breakdown (for energy) accumulate and cannot be used to make more energy; these products act as apetite suppressants and help people diet. A breakdown product of sugars (it happens to be called pyruvate) allows you to metabolise these ketones. So, if you eat fat but no sugar, the fat can't be burned for as many calories and produces compounds that help suppress your appetite.
This may not have beneficial effects on your health. My Dad (who is a nutritionist) is extremely leary of it - not because it won't make you lose weight (it will,) but because it may not have overall beneficial effects on your health.
The thing that demonstrably has a beneficial effect is EXERCISE.
In the case of Type II diabetes, which is muchw worse to get than heart disease, even very mild interventions (150 minutes of activity per week, slight reduction in Caloric intake) cut the risk of getting diabetes by 58%.
That's not a great big shock for doctors, but it is for the weight-loss industry, which is trying to convince you that you have to be thin to be healthy. You do not; if you're obese, your health benefits from being thinner, but even a (relatively, very slight) drop in weight can be of great benefit.
Maybe you really were negligent, maybe you didn't fix the steps even though you knew they were cracked, does that justify an unreasonable award?
That depends. If a reasonable award will motivate other shopkeepers to keep their steps repaired, then no, an unreasonable reward is not required. It depends a lot on how often these companies get caught. If a company only has a 1% chance of being caught doing X, then when they are caught the punitive cost must be hundreds of times the marginal benefit of doing X, or it isn't enough of a deterrent. Billing irregularities in the telecom industry happen all the time, and only a fraction are ever prosecuted. Therefore, when they are, the punitive damages need to be huge.
If you have to drive one company out of business to keep an entire industry in line, you should do it. If you have some other means of reigning in the rampant corporate lawlessness in this country, I'd like to hear it.
Companies can go under, and people can lose their jobs. Them's the breaks. I'll stand by the argument that more people will have better jobs if corporations obey the law; if some companies have to be punitively destroyed, so be it.
Q: Well, that's not bad. Can it model the behavior of biological molecules? A: You betcha.
Q: Still, that's rather pedestrian. Can it find large prime numbers? A: Numbers so big we can't even say them.
Q: Hmm.. almost there. Can it evaluate complex object-relational predicates to get me EXACTLY the porn I want? A: Er..... Yes.
Q: Excellent! Now we're talking. From the output, can we say conclusively that all of the porn which I want has been found? A: Please go away.
Q: What about porn that I don't want - gay porn, scatalogical stuff. Can you guarantee I won't get that? A: Fine, yes. It predicts what you want from your past behavior and is always right. Happy?
Q: Isn't that an invasion of my privacy? A: Arghhh!
This $27 million dollar figure isn't enough. In order to deter this sort of practice - to make sure companies don't do it - you need a ridiculous fine.
Remember when that woman was awarded a hundred million dollars for scalding herself with McDonald's coffee? It was reduced somewhat on appeal. Was that ridiculous? Yes.
However, every coffee cup in the country had a "don't burn yourself" warning attached to it for some time.
If you apply that same logic to something important - as opposed to scalding coffee which is utterly trite - you can get similar results. Fine 'em a billion dollars. They've got it; and if you do that they won't dare try this again for a while.
1) You take two liters of water, and add fifty grams of sugar to one liter, and fifty grams of neotame to the other (actually, I think they'd start out with less than that, but bear with me) you give people glasses and ask them which is sweeter? Then, you "lower the dose" of neotame until it's a wash (half of your sample says the sugar water is sweeter, half says the neotame.)
2) You could directly measure the rate at which sweet-taste cells fire (signal the brain) when exposed to a given concentration of the stuff, compared with a set amount (1 Molar, say) of sugar. If 1/13,000 M of Neotame gives the same response as 1M sugar, it's 13,000 times sweeter than sugar. I don't know enough about this technically to know exactly what they'd do, but they'd probably remove the taste cells from the rat and measure the response directly/electrically.
3) You could purify the extracellular domain of the sugar receptors in your taste-bud cells. Then, you'd measure the binding affinity for the compound to the receptor. Assuming every binding event gives an equal amount of sweetness, if Neotame has 13,000 times the binding constant of Sugar, it is 13,000 times sweeter (you need 1/13,000 as much to get a given amount of sweetneses.)
Now, my big problem with nutrasweet is the god damned aftertaste, which is foul. If this replacement doesn't taste metallic (whatever you want to call it), I'll drink it by the gallon.
Thousands of companies in over 100 countries rely on WorldCom for Internet access, including the Defense Department and the State Department.
Okay, I'm confused... is the State Department a company, or a country?
Did he say that deliberately, as a statement/joke? Somehow, I don't think so.
Is proof-reading a lost art, which AP archeologists speculate about in their broken english?
Is he an idiot business journalist who doesn't even know the word "agency"? The men in suits who work for the guv'mint aren't businessmen, they're "public servants." Can you say public servant?
I know this doesn't seem the most significant thing to get up in arms about, but it's part of a whole phenomenon where the journalists getting broad distribution are good old fashioned stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
An ordinary Mass Spec need not be assembled in clean room conditions - it may be industry practice anyway. It wouldn't hurt to do so, and if you were prepared to announce the discovery of martian life, I'd certainly keep the internal components as clean as possible to avert any accusations of contamination. However, for most Mass Spec this is not necesarry - the weekend before last we disassembled a Mass Spec, put it back together again - we washed the exterior surface of the rods with isopropyl alchohol, since they needed cleaning, and we avoided getting fingerprints on anything, but otherwise we just put whatever components we were disassembling down on the (fairly dirty, actually) lab bench, and now it works fine.
My experience is entirely with GC (gas chromatograph) Mass Spec, but basically, in order for something to show up in your detector, it has to be vaporised. Gunk and dead cells that accrue, even on the internal surfaces, of the Mass Spec components can alter some component's magnetic properties (which must be exquisitely precise) but, generally, don't get vaporised, have no net charge and can't be pulled to the detector.
Of course, if you're sifting the soil for every known biological molecule, and thus trying every possible charge/mass ratio, the risk that some contaminant WILL spontaneously vaporise (especially after whatever radioactive abuse it encountered during space travel, and presumably cooking up to a fair temperature on re-entry) is, I suppose, considerable.
I make a singular exception for the Osbournes (I'd watch the old candid camera, if it was on). The problem with reality TV is not that there's something inherently wrong with the prospect - after all, documentaries are reality TV, fundamentally. The problem is that most "reality TV" is:
1) Despicable. (Mean-spirited, materialistic, what have you.)
2) Stupid.
3) Boring.
4) Fake.
Now, the Osbournes is positively humanistic. Uplifting, even. Ozzie's little family is also authentically funny, not to mention smarter than the people on the reality TV shows. I suspect that the osbournes show is substantially faked, as well, but I'll let that pass.
JUDGE: Would that you could render this extermination unnecessary by renouncing this method of illegal decryption!
JOHANSEN: No, Your Honor, it cannot be. I don't think much of our profession, but, contrasted with respectability, it is comparatively honest. No, Your Honor, I shall live and die a Pirate King.
(SONG -- PIRATE KING)
JOHANSEN: Oh, better far to live and die
Under the flightless bird I fly,
Than play a corporate raider's part
With a pirate head and a pirate heart.
Away to the cheating world go you,
Where pirates all are well-to-do;
But I'll be true to the song I sing,
And live and die a Pirate King.
For I am a Pirate King!
And it is, it is a glorious thing
To be a Pirate King!
For I am a Pirate King!
SLASHDOTTERS:You are!
Hurrah for the Pirate King!
JOHANSEN:And it is, it is a glorious thing
To be a Pirate King.
SLASHDOTTERS:It is!
Hurrah for the Pirate King!
(Inserted to avoid lameness filter.)
Hurrah for the Pirate King!
JOHANSEN:When I sally forth to seek my prey
I help myself in a royal way.
I rip a few more flicks, it's true,
Than a well-bred hacker ought to do;
But many a hack with a first-class clone,
If he wants to call his warez his own,
Must manage somehow to get through
More lines of code than e'er I do,
For I am a Pirate King!
And it is, it is a glorious thing
To be a Pirate King!
For I am a Pirate King!
SLASHDOTTERS:You are!
Hurrah for the Pirate King!
JOHANSEN:And it is, it is a glorious thing
To be a Pirate King.
SLASHDOTTERS:It is!
Hurrah for the Pirate King!
(the lameness filter, to avoid, inserted.)
Hurrah for the Pirate King!
(exeunt.)
I was serious about the beneficial effect. If legislators see a consensus that ICANN is "bad" - from civil liberties groups, from the domain registrars who are ICANN's clients and provide ICANN with funding - then ICANN is unlikely to be given the total domination of the www that they desire.
Here is proof that raw, unrelenting, undiluted greed can cause people to do, not good exactly, but things with a net beneficial effect.
According to a colleague at Rutgers: .... Scientific studies have repeatedly shown that electronic mosquito repellers do not prevent host seeking mosquitoes from biting. In most cases, the claims made by distributors border on fraud.
Hand-held electronic devices that rely on high-frequency sound to repel mosquitoes have become surprisingly popular in recent years
While your downloading this software, if you buy a NYC landmark from me, I'll throw in a set of Mr. Chiu's immortality rings at no extra charge!
Mining the moon for use on Earth is never going to be a winning proposition. Re-entry into earth's atmosphere is just too expensive.
However, we should to move our space fabrication facilities to the moon. That's the way to lower our launch costs, in the long run. It is a lower G environment, it provides an additional slingshot for launches into the rest of the solar system, and, given a sufficient initial capital investment, energy on the moon will be cheaper than energy on the surface of the earth.
Before that's practical, we need a thorough, ground based, resource survey of the whole sattelite. In order to do that, we need a permanent base with facilities to fuel, service and repair all of the robots doing the lunar surveys.
We have the technology. We should stop dinking around, pony up the cash, and do it.
Wherever "open computing" survives will become the dominant cultural force of the next century.
The United States is in a position to maintain cultural hegemony over the whole world - if we don't kill the free exchange of culture in order to make a quick buck.
If we do, I predict, within a couple of generations, that other parts of the world will have outpaced us. Killing open computing will destroy our best way-out of the recent doldrums in popular movies and music.
Well, when you ask "what is the point of Anime", you should keep in mind that it's one of the largest culture-outputs of a nation of 130 million people (and Taiwan and Korea are starting to make it,) so there's a great deal of variety.
Personally, I find Anime, particularly Cowboy Bebop, aesthetically pleasing. If you like good Camera Work more than substance in your movies (I do - I loved Minority Report even though I thought the plot was, frankly, stupid. I liked The Fugitive primarily for the cinematography, although it had many other good points,) than I recommend Cowboy Bebop.
It is Eye Candy.
Incidentally, I've seen priated copies of the Movie (good quality DivX,) and it's not better than the show. If you like the show, you'll like the movie, but the animation is about the same - a little more polished, but not a drastic improvement.
Well, yes and no.
1) You have to decide if their violating your privacy constitutes harming you. I think it does. So, just like drug makers can't sell you poison (doing you harm,) the phone company can't sell your phone records to people who want information on you. The harm is, I will grant, less severe, but it is still harm.
2) The guv'mint provides a regulatory backdrop that makes the telephone system possible. The system was built by Bell, originally, but with government help. If there were really more than one system - if, say, Sprint and AT&T customers could not call each other - than you might expect less guarantees about their behavior. As it is, they are selling access to the single, public, telephone network. They should not be in a position to dictate the terms under which that network can be accessed.
3) In the past, your phone records have been more-or-less private. This is a PRECEDENT. Precedent is more powerful than logic; if you engage in an illogical business practice long enough that people expect you to do it, you can't stop. Unfortunately, this principle has no force of written law, but as a practical guideline it pops up all the time.
"No, Your Honor, the children were just making Killer Robots. We had no idea it wouldn't be safe."
I'm amazed that the school's legal department allows this kind of thing. Battlebots are probably safer than rocketry (which my elementary school wouldn't let us do for legal reasons) but still, the potential is there for serious injury. It's probably easier to get this sort of thing allowed in High School. I wonder how heavily they emphasise safety? Based on my quick review of the two rules documents, they've at least had the good sense not to allow guns, bombs or cattleprods. Also, the Robot has to be safe to handle while off; but that may not be enough protection - I realize the stuff in the shop room down the hall is actually far more dangerous, but it doesn't involve the sanctioned game of using it as a weapon.
Play careful, Kids! Don't ruin the fun for future generations by chopping any of your toes off.
Also, just once incident of a robot with a chainsaw chasing screaming teenagers down a hallway would put a quick end to the program, I'd assume.
As other posters have pointed out, the virus to infect cancer cells is too risky; in order to work, such a virus would have to be engineered to sidestep the body's own defenses. At that rate, there is too much risk it might go "wild" and start attacking other cells.
Virii that attack bacteria (which are more typically called Phage) exist extensively in nature. They are one of the classic tools of molecular biology, well studied and characterised. Some strains are also nearly 100% lethal as they exist in nature. We are unlikely to improve on the lethality of phage with direct meddling - that is to say, by rewriting individual nucleotides one at a time (why below). In any case, in order to get all of the bacteria in your body with phage, your body would have to be inundanted with the phage. The phage don't hurt you, but you're body doesn't know that! The phage would send you into a state called Septic Shock, as you're own immune system's panic response killed you. We might engineer phage that don't set off our alarms - this has other risks, and this custom virus technology doesn't really help do this (yet.)
I'm trying to include a minimum of background, so here I go - genes/DNA (a code of 4 monomers) code for proteins (composed of 20 monomers, the code is somewhat degenerate.) The sequence of these monomers determine the shape of the protein - some of these monomers contain polar (vinegar-like) groups which want to be on the outside of the protein, touching water, some of them contain oily (like olive oil in salad dressing) groups which want to be on the inside, touching eachother. Other, more complex factors also come into play, making the relationship between sequence and three dimensional structure (which determines function) highly opaque. The ability to predict how a 13 monomer long protein is shaped, and thus what it will do, is beyond our present capability.
You could make up a sequence up the top of your head, but you'd have no way of knowing what it would actually do!
This means that when you genetically engineer an organism you don't even want (generally) to type genetic changes into a keyboard. You want to import large, complicated pieces of DNA from another organism, and clone (move) the DNA into the organism you're tinkering with.
There are situations where DNA you want is not available - for example, if I wanted DNA from the Ebola virus, I could not get it. There are other situations where you want to make single point changes in DNA, in order to see what happens (if, for example, you want to know if the single peptide you changed is important in the function of the protein.) However, this technology won't (if I understand it correctly) let you do that - their duplication of the virus genome was EXACTLY precise enough to get live virus; any errors in their DNA sequence that didn't render the virus nonviable wouldn't be caught.
The upshot? This isn't a tremendous advance in our ability to customise organisms. With refinements, it might be, but right now all you would use it for is to get DNA that you don't have physical access too.
Well, that's true, unless
ALERT: Intrusion attempt detected! User Liora mistyped his password!
the rate of false-positives is high enough that
ALERT: Account Liora has recieved login attempts from three different IPs in the past 12 hours!
you stop paying attention; unlike with AIDS testing (which has a very high false positive rate) the user is simply likely to ignore the system even if real threats occur
ALERT: 1,262 attempts to login as user "root" in past 7 seconds!
So it becomes desirable to lower the false positive rate to a manageable level, WHATEVER the rate of false negatives is, because otherwise you won't actually catch anything.
The purpose of the AIDS test is to assure you that you don't have AIDS. False negatives are unacceptable, false positives can be dealt with.
The purpose of the IDS is not to prevent intrusions - that would be nice, but it's not going to happen. The purpose of the IDS is to identify the (coloquially) hackers, so that you can retaliate against them / deter them, before they get you too many times, or get too many different people once. To do this, you need a deterence-level set of positives which is small enough (and true positive rich enough) for you to actually act on them.
Oh, and because I get off on it when people with agree with me: this is no substitute for real, human-level, security measures. Someone who expects any system of this kind to protect them from lousy sysadmin decisions deserves the rusty metal sodomy they will no doubt recieve.
With Lasers on their heads!
(incidentally, a "White Elepehant" is an expensive, useless project.)
Why detonate a land mine with another explosive when you can use a laser! Lasers work nearly as well, and are merely many hundreds of times more expensive!
From the article: the operator will then switch on the main beam which will either explode or evaporate the explosives
Quick physics lesson. The explosive force of a conventional explosive is provided by the change-of-state to a gas. Air has a density of roughly 1 kg/cubic m. Most solids and liquids have a density of 1g/cubic cm, or 1000 kg/cubic m. So, when you vaporise something, you get a lump of gas which is compressed roughly 1000-fold.
The upshot? Vaporising the explosive = setting the explosive off! There is no way prevent landmines from detonating by vaporising them; they won't turn into harmless little poofs, they'll fucking explode. Unless they propose that this laser vaporises the landmine slowly/gently - which is patently absurd. So, you might as well set them off with a grenade.
Somebody with friends in the defense establishment has developed yet another practical (which does not mean useful or advisable, and certainly doesn't mean cost-effective) laser system, and they're trying to find some excuse to sell it.
This thing looks like the Crusader look like a good use of taxpayer money.
You are not Spike Lee.
Have you ever actually seen Jon Katz? Sure, there are a couple of photos on the web, but those could be anybody.
Using Concordance (the software used to unmask Joe Klein as the author of primary colors; also used to classify works of literature) I have concluded that, in fact, Jon Katz IS Spike Lee. Or at least that these articles and the screen plays attributed to Spike Lee were written by the same person. It explains so much, I'm surprised it didn't occur to me earlier.
What about the enemies of GNOME? We, the members of COBOLD, oppose project GNOME, their GUI, and all that they stand for! We will not rest until every member of the GNOME development team of lies in a shallow grave. Our leader, COBOL-commander, will overthrow the present order by military force, and restore the glorious days of punchcards and Cobol! Co-bolllll!
As for the "friends" of GNOME - we suggest you cower in terror lest you share the developers fate!
Incidentally, the classic "Kobold" was a spirit of the home or hearth - Kobe holt = hut goblin. The dog-headed lizardmen from D&D are, as many D&D things are, an artifact of somebody's supplementary artwork, and have no "basis" in mythology (although the guy who did the drawings for the Monster Manual is as qualified to make up mythology as anybody; it was all made up at some point.)
Etymology of Gnome.
Etymology of Kobold. Search the page for "cobalt".
Swiss air traffic control just orders the planes to crash into each other; keeping the air above southern europe free of aircraft.
Comma, duh.
A diet high in saturated fat can raise your LDL, which can get damaged; this doesn't make you fat, however.
The important thing to remember is that it isn't what calories, but how many.
The Atkins diet induces a state called Ketosis (as in Ketone) where the products of fat breakdown (for energy) accumulate and cannot be used to make more energy; these products act as apetite suppressants and help people diet. A breakdown product of sugars (it happens to be called pyruvate) allows you to metabolise these ketones. So, if you eat fat but no sugar, the fat can't be burned for as many calories and produces compounds that help suppress your appetite.
This may not have beneficial effects on your health. My Dad (who is a nutritionist) is extremely leary of it - not because it won't make you lose weight (it will,) but because it may not have overall beneficial effects on your health.
The thing that demonstrably has a beneficial effect is EXERCISE.
In the case of Type II diabetes, which is muchw worse to get than heart disease, even very mild interventions (150 minutes of activity per week, slight reduction in Caloric intake) cut the risk of getting diabetes by 58%.
That's not a great big shock for doctors, but it is for the weight-loss industry, which is trying to convince you that you have to be thin to be healthy. You do not; if you're obese, your health benefits from being thinner, but even a (relatively, very slight) drop in weight can be of great benefit.
Maybe you really were negligent, maybe you didn't fix the steps even though you knew they were cracked, does that justify an unreasonable award?
That depends. If a reasonable award will motivate other shopkeepers to keep their steps repaired, then no, an unreasonable reward is not required. It depends a lot on how often these companies get caught. If a company only has a 1% chance of being caught doing X, then when they are caught the punitive cost must be hundreds of times the marginal benefit of doing X, or it isn't enough of a deterrent. Billing irregularities in the telecom industry happen all the time, and only a fraction are ever prosecuted. Therefore, when they are, the punitive damages need to be huge.
If you have to drive one company out of business to keep an entire industry in line, you should do it. If you have some other means of reigning in the rampant corporate lawlessness in this country, I'd like to hear it.
Companies can go under, and people can lose their jobs. Them's the breaks. I'll stand by the argument that more people will have better jobs if corporations obey the law; if some companies have to be punitively destroyed, so be it.
I'm a Troll?
Er.... I apologise to any members of the queer community who find my desire to avoid gay porn offensive.
If there's a scatalogical community they can go ahead and be offended, I don't care.
Q: Can we use it to predict the weather?
A: Yes.
Q: Well, that's not bad. Can it model the behavior of biological molecules?
A: You betcha.
Q: Still, that's rather pedestrian. Can it find large prime numbers?
A: Numbers so big we can't even say them.
Q: Hmm.. almost there. Can it evaluate complex object-relational predicates to get me EXACTLY the porn I want?
A: Er..... Yes.
Q: Excellent! Now we're talking. From the output, can we say conclusively that all of the porn which I want has been found?
A: Please go away.
Q: What about porn that I don't want - gay porn, scatalogical stuff. Can you guarantee I won't get that?
A: Fine, yes. It predicts what you want from your past behavior and is always right. Happy?
Q: Isn't that an invasion of my privacy?
A: Arghhh!
Because companies are in it for the money.
This $27 million dollar figure isn't enough. In order to deter this sort of practice - to make sure companies don't do it - you need a ridiculous fine.
Remember when that woman was awarded a hundred million dollars for scalding herself with McDonald's coffee? It was reduced somewhat on appeal. Was that ridiculous? Yes.
However, every coffee cup in the country had a "don't burn yourself" warning attached to it for some time.
If you apply that same logic to something important - as opposed to scalding coffee which is utterly trite - you can get similar results. Fine 'em a billion dollars. They've got it; and if you do that they won't dare try this again for a while.
There are three ways.
1) You take two liters of water, and add fifty grams of sugar to one liter, and fifty grams of neotame to the other (actually, I think they'd start out with less than that, but bear with me) you give people glasses and ask them which is sweeter? Then, you "lower the dose" of neotame until it's a wash (half of your sample says the sugar water is sweeter, half says the neotame.)
2) You could directly measure the rate at which sweet-taste cells fire (signal the brain) when exposed to a given concentration of the stuff, compared with a set amount (1 Molar, say) of sugar. If 1/13,000 M of Neotame gives the same response as 1M sugar, it's 13,000 times sweeter than sugar. I don't know enough about this technically to know exactly what they'd do, but they'd probably remove the taste cells from the rat and measure the response directly/electrically.
3) You could purify the extracellular domain of the sugar receptors in your taste-bud cells. Then, you'd measure the binding affinity for the compound to the receptor. Assuming every binding event gives an equal amount of sweetness, if Neotame has 13,000 times the binding constant of Sugar, it is 13,000 times sweeter (you need 1/13,000 as much to get a given amount of sweetneses.)
Now, my big problem with nutrasweet is the god damned aftertaste, which is foul. If this replacement doesn't taste metallic (whatever you want to call it), I'll drink it by the gallon.
I'd like to see the Japanese make a better on one of those.
Thousands of companies in over 100 countries rely on WorldCom for Internet access, including the Defense Department and the State Department.
Okay, I'm confused... is the State Department a company, or a country?
Did he say that deliberately, as a statement/joke? Somehow, I don't think so.
Is proof-reading a lost art, which AP archeologists speculate about in their broken english?
Is he an idiot business journalist who doesn't even know the word "agency"? The men in suits who work for the guv'mint aren't businessmen, they're "public servants." Can you say public servant?
I know this doesn't seem the most significant thing to get up in arms about, but it's part of a whole phenomenon where the journalists getting broad distribution are good old fashioned stupid.