However, this proposal reads to me less like a solution to ICANN's well documented track records of cronyism and broken promises, and more like a US powergrab, orchestrated by Republicans who oppose international institutions on principle - a position which has certain merits but which ought to be promoted honestly. Of course, I may be jumping to conclusions since no specifics of the bill are yet available.
For all u eurotrash: In the US, instead of Eurosceptics, we have Republicans, who, instead of hating the EU, hate the UN. American leftists generally support the UN and oppose the WTO. We don't have an international umbrella organisation for both ends of the political spectrum to despise (unless you count the federal guvmint.)
Let's save time and say that the human genome is a round 750 MB (it's about 3 gigabases, each base is two bits, so it's 750 MB.)
It cost about US $300 million. The project cost of 3 bil, bandied about, is the amount we expect to spend in the period from about 1990 to 2005 (reference, search page for "billion") on projects related to Genomics, which is the study of biological sequences, not just the human genome but a wealth of other information (including information about protein structures and the like - I generated four gigs of analytical information just this afternoon.)
Regardless, if you say that the fruit of the $300 million spent directly on the human genome is ONLY the human genome, and not all of the other data (such as correlations with other genomes which is what I was evaluating today, or the information about the number of genes, etc.) it still works out to about $US 0.40 a byte (300 bil over 750 MB). Dear, but not even in the running for most expensive data ever.
A pricing problem - do you pay for the source code, or the binary? If you're paying for the source code, I'm sure somebody, sometime, charged a full years salary to develop a Perl program 70 or 80 ASCII characters long. It could run hundreds of dollars a byte, easy.
Given these precedents for spoofing and the extraordinary measures record labels undertake to prevent music piracy, it's easy to wonder why spoofing, or even more invasive tactics, aren't used more. - Salon Article
Because geeks aren't just expensive to retain; we're also difficult to hire for "invasive tactics".
To your average geek, "Hacker for the RIAA" ranks even lower than the sysadmin at Monsterhut. We may have achieved a veneer of profesionalism and a healthy contempt for the juvenile antics of "black hats," but deep within the subconscious of every SAGE-certified, ethics conscious techie echoes the annoying, high pitched laughter of their l33t f03; tormeting his dreams with fevered promises of glory from electronic vandalism.
On the other hand, doing dishonest work for the man appeals to no such rebellious inclinations.
The RIAA would LOVE to deploy fleets of sophisticated viruses, send out worms to delete their files, and so on. The only reason they don't is because they can't hire enough talent to actually do it. The number of people the RIAA could convince to do this for them pales in comparison to the number of teenagers who will do it out of sheer unfocused malice. The RIAA's efforts to destroy filesharing barely register as a blip against the backdrop of random pranksterism.
The upshot - your scruples makes a difference! Don't go work for the RIAA; hold out for a job with dignity. It does make a difference.
On the other hand, judge not lest you yourself be judged. Before you heap too much condecension on the 13 year old bragging on the IRC channel where you're trying to talk about anime, go dig up some of your old posts from when you were that age.
many scholars argue that without effective guarantees of civil liberties, elections do not constitute democracy, and that a procedural minimum for defining democracy must include not only elections, but reasonably broad guarantees of basic civil rights-e.g., freedom of speech, assembly, and association. -Democracy 'with Adjectives', by D. Collier and S. Levitsky
The paper I link to (which is academic but pretty accessible - I'm a biologist, not a political scientist) is about military juntas in south america, not Aussies.
I raise this point because I think John Howard (the prime minister of Australia) is Australian for Hitler. A modern Democracy can survive all matter of scuminess, but if this proposal goes through, Australia will need an adjective (such as crpyto or pseudo) to qualify their form of government.
I think that it is good that they are not presuming a hard, definite distinction between the various things people call a blog and "real news."
After all, a journalist who writes a story is just commiting their own observations to print. Is this so very different from linking to what someone else wrote? By placing the links in a certain order, by carrying certain stories (but never the ones I submit:)), and not carrying others, the person who simply maintains a links page does a very similar service. What other people are saying, even if the thing they are saying is news, is news in-and-of-itself. Calling it mindless link propagation as Michael does, reflects an unjustified contempt for a whole avenue of expression.
Personal experiences in a personal journal are news to somebody. After all, NY Times Editorials are definitely news. I don't see a hard distinction here.
Discussion sites may not reflect public opinion in a "scientific" fashion, but they do reflect public opinion, and public opinion is news. Anecdotes, often shared on such sites, are also news. They can also propogate links and contain excerpts from people's personal ruminations (like what you are reading right now.)
Since all of these things are news, they are all webpages with news. Having temporarily accepted Michael's sub-division, I now reject it, and from hereon out I will just say blogs.
They'll also debate whether blogs are "a sensible medium for doing journalism, and what does that mean?"
Feh! What horseshit. Who cares? I think people should spend less time debating what things mean, and more time being ironic. If you can wildly contradict yourself in a single sentence, that is best, but cognitive dissonance can only be a good thing, however long your text may run.
If it isn't a legitimate medium for doing journalism, we need to find a way to legitimise it, because people are going, increasingly, to be getting their information from blogs. Unless you want to take the stance that what people read and think is not legitimate (common in academia) you've got no choice.
The studios have to have figured out that anything that allows fair use allows swapping on Kazaa. For that matter, without fundamentally crippling the hardware, anything that allows VIEWING allows swapping on Kazaa, and I think the CBDTPA makes clear that they understand that, as well, at least some of them.
They're in a much better position to demand some kind of legislation if they can't get an agreement out of the tech industry.
So, they WANT these meetings to end in failure so they can get legislation b/c the tech industry is refusing to self regulate. The tech industry isn't going to agree to anything that hurts their bottom line, and that means content on demand (in some form) is here to stay. Only legislation can save the studio's sorry business model from widespread civil disobedience. So, either one side or another gets fooled (who thinks the Disney people can get the better of AMD in technobabble armwrestling? I know who I'd bet on.) or nobody gets fooled and it's settled as legislation.
If they could find a compromise where all the corporations make out like bandits and all the consumers get screwed, they would have made it already!
Warning: Do not read if you are not Zaphod Beeblebrox.
Okay, 10 ^ 80 fundamental particles. That's a lot.
Then, 10 ^ 90 bits, or 10 ^ 10 bits per particle.
Those 10 ^ 10 bits each particle possesses, can express a meager 2 ^ 10 ^ 10 = 10 ^ 3 billion or so possible values (since 2 ^ 10 = 10 ^ 3). Let's assume that the universe is a cube, with a "resolution" of 10 ^ -24 meters (electrons don't really have a radius, but when you try to measure it all you can say is that it's less than 10 ^ -18 meters, a millionth of that seems safe.)
So, 10 ^ 3 billion numbers can represent positions on three dimensional axese 10 ^ 1 billion "units" long - that's the cubed root.
Even if our pixel is only 10 ^ -24 meters across, we only lose 24 (to meters) and 16 (to light years) decimal orders of magnitude, so that's describes a cube 10 ^ (1 billion - 40) light years on a side.
Realizing that my overclocked, water cooled Duron, which I had thought was so l33t, is nothing compared to the infinite cosmos upon which it is only a tiny speck, I go insane, and start thinking about relativity.
Okay, to say that events that occur at different points in space is actually meaningless. Relativistically nonsensical. It's may be a requirement at the quantum scale, or it may fuzz out somehow from the heizenberg uncertainty principle (which applies to time as well as space,) but anyway - with no real concept of simultaneity shared by different bits of the great computer, how does the universe get anything done? Maybe, the universal background radiation isn't just something we use as a clock, maybe it REALLY IS A CLOCK - a synchronizing pulse.
You've moved your bathroom to your computer, or vice versa.
You've overclocked everything with a transistor; you're watercooling them.
Now, you have a use for all that warm water; it makes a comfortable wash that keeps you hygienic, and prevents you from getting a rash from sitting in front of your computer, on your toilet, for 72 hours at a stretch.
The Art of Design is all about taking harmonious advantage of the resources already available to you. It is all about turning your tower into a bidet.
This was years ago, WAY before my time, there was some helicase they tried to use - I think it was viral (hepatitis?). You could partially inactivate it by dialyzing stuff in or out of the reaction mixture.
I wouldn't propose using it, but it was tried. IIRC, you could go through maybe three or four cycles per day, and you had to be at the bench the whole time. I just pulled a blank on the medline search, though (it worked so poorly that the attempt was never published? I just don't know). Come to think of it, I'm sure it would work better to denature with heat and just add more enzyme after each reannealing.
The only reason I know about this is b/c my molec. bio. prof. talked about it when I was an undergrad.
You can also run the denaturation reaction enzymatically at lower temperatures, it just takes too long. It's true that it doesn't have to do with the speed of polymerization.
b/c RNA is what's used as a primer in an actual living organism, so I thought it would be less confusing. You are double correct, however - it would have been clearer if I had simply left all mention of RNA out, in addition to more in line with how PCR is actually done.
Does one of those links explain how the hell we got from "Say, this long strand of weakly held together goo looks interesting" to A thermophile (heat loving organism), thermus aquaticus, provided a polymerase?
It will all be revealed in Neal Stephenson's next book.
Okay, sorry that wasn't clear. The Polymerase from a person or an e. coli bacterium works only at room temperature (and thereabouts), so the PCR reaction goes too slowly to be useful. The Polymerase from these thermophiles works at high temperatures, so it goes fast enough for you to acutally use it.
DNA, as I'm sure we all know, is double stranded. One strand is a complement of the other. A complements T and C complements G. So, if one strand is: 5' ATTTC 3'
then the other strand is: 3' TAAAG 5'
The DNA is "read" from 5' to 3'. 5' and 3' refer to particular atoms on the sugar backbone that are attached to one another via a phosphate.
When DNA is replicated, you split it into two strands: 5' ATTTC 3' and 5' GAAAT 3'
(notice that the two complements read in opposite directions)
and each strand has it's complement added.
5' ATTTC 3' and 5' GAAAT 3' 3' TAAAG 3' and 3' CTTTA 5'
The problem with this is, in order for this happen to DNA, you need an RNA "primer." This primer is a complement to the beggining of what you want to replicate. So, for example, if you have (RNA bases I'm putting in bold. U is the same as T:)
UAA
floating around in solution, which compliments ATT, then any sequence beggining with ATT will be replicated, but other sequences will NOT be replicated, because no RNA primer is available to get them started.
So, if you have a whole mess of DNA, including a piece that you're interested in, which reads:
You get a chain reaction; the sequence flanked by the complements of the two things you add (the sequence printed above) is replicated, and then the replication product is replicated, and so on and so on. Other sequences, which are flanked by only one compliment (only ATTTG, say) will be replicated occasionally, but there replication products cannot in turn replicate, so you get no chain reaction.
A thermophile (heat loving organism), thermus aquaticus, provided a polymerase (an enzyme which polymerises, that is to say replicates sequences of, nucleic acids like DNA and RNA) that works extremely fast at high temperatures. In general, the higher the temperature you run a reaction at, the faster it goes. However, most biological enzymes (from, say, a person) cease to function when temperatures rise (this is one of the ways heat kills you.) Thermophiles, bacteria that live in geysers and in volcanic ocean vents, have evolved enzymes that continue to function at higher temperatures.
- new germs are being genetically enginered (so they do not exist in nature );
Bugs that eat gasoline already exist in nature. The bugs discussed in the first link I posted are natural organisms that already get in people's fuel lines and eat their gas. When you genetically engineer an organism - which I've done on several occasions, thank you very much - you use proteins that already exist in some other organism (hence the more proper term, "transgenic" - meaning genes that have been moved from place to place) you don't create enirely new proteins. Therefore, you are simply recombining features that exist in natural organisms. This can result in destructive new combinations (HIV that spread like ebola is theoretically possible, for example) but you can't do much novel chemistry - you're stuck with the chemistry you already have.
An organism genetically engineered to be hardier, so that it might consume the fuel in enemy depots, would be (extremely) unlikely to survive deep underground where our fuel reserves are. It is possible that it might get into our public gas stations and destroy some fuel that way, but, based on the metabolism of the organism (it would still require OXYGEN; fermentation, that is to say, eating without oxygen, of those hydrocarbons is already ongoing) it simply wouldn't be a threat to world fuel supply.
A *plastic* eating microbe, depending upon which type of plastic it ate, might be a major threat to industrial society. I don't take the metal corroding microbes seriously.
I used the word virus because "deadly-virus-escaping" is more a press cliche... Hope most people got the irony.
I appreciated that it was an attempt at humor. The critical point - the reason I was yelling at Timothy and not at 1gor (original poster) - is that I don't think Timothy did.
It was a factually confusing joke which shouldn't have been carried, or should have been labeled as a joke by the editor.
- "We, Environmentalists" are rude and might use some Valuim...:))
You got it all wrong! I'm razzing him, but it's all about the love! Can't you see that? What are you, stupid? Jesus, there's no point in even talking about the love to someone as ignorant and debased as you are. Just do us all a favor and shut up.:)
And like every other story on slashdot, it was approved by the editor that posted it. Timothy, in this case.
When a newspaper prints something factually incorrect, it is the editor who takes final responsibility for printing it. Timothy made a damned stupid editorial decision, which reflects an ignorance of highschool level science - I also conclude that he sympathathises with the pigheaded viewpoint of the individual whose story he chose to carry.
Yes, I'm aware that, in a certain sense, the posting is "factually correct," since it really is what the original poster said. However, you and I both know that's bullshit.
Imagine an escaped virus destroying the Earth's oil reserves and its whole industrial potential? Curiously, the military may implement the environmentalists' ultimate dream!
Let me clue you in on what it is that the fuel eaten by these bacteria (not viruses) eventually breaks down into - water and carbon dioxide. This is a more controlled form of a process better known as FIRE.
Flame of yet another kind: Timothy, you are an idiot. Even as a joke that was a grade A stupid thing to say. It reflects poorly on you as an editor and as a human being. If you don't know the difference between a virus and a bacterium shut your cornhole.
We, Environmentalists, object to gasoline being burned (turned into Carbon Dioxide) faster than it is deposited in peat marshes and such. I don't want to rehash the global warming argument here, so don't y'all even start.
The fact that the gasoline, while burned, does useful work, instead of, say, fueling the growth of a manmade organism, does not bother anyone.
You can find out more about Hydrocarbon Utilizing Microbes (HUMs) here. The document is fully accessible to a non-scientist. The people at Brooks Air Force base, who are/would be (?) developing these fuel eating microbes for offensive use have already made use of them in a peaceful context. Again, the press release is non technical. Personally, I find this to be admirable work - they're using them to clean up petrochemical contamination of soil and groundwater, which is an underappreciated ecological problem. I'm not terribly worried about these organisms going out of control and eating the world's petrochemical reserves. They exist in nature already in various forms and have not done that.
Well, the puzzles could require some kind of cooperation. That wouldn't be too hard. You could even introduce some kind of variable elements, to keep it interesting. If the puzzle doesn't change from game to game, either randomly or depending on what other people do, this would get really annoying, of course, since some jerk who already knew the whole puzzle would just race through it.
Most likely, you'll just have to coordinate lever pulling with someone in another room, which would be just like Myst only with the added frustration, I mean fun, of online social interaction.
If they did this right they would've looked to good, simple/innovative, mutiplayer boardgames for inspiration.
Clue - where there was some information (needed to solve the mystery) that only certain players could get, and you have to pool the info, that could be cool.
Settlers of Katan - there could be items (not just information) that you need from other players, but you have to trade other stuff you actually need (or may need) to get it. An economy of items (where you need X of each item over the course of the game, maybe) could be interesting.
Slasher - one of the other players IS the villain; the identity of the evil one is actually determined during the course of play.
Features introduced by other players could be worked into the puzzles, somehow. This would be incredibly difficult to do in an interesting way; it would also require a level of interaction with the environment well beyond what was present in the The Manhole (anyone else remember The Manhole?)
Myst has beautiful artwork, but I've always had this problem where you don't inject anything into the game; you might as well be watching a movie, to my mind (not intended as a Troll.) This would be a good opportunity for them to remedy that with a vengeance - not only would you alter the storyline in a real way, but so would a bunch of other people.
People say "the internet will change the way the world works!" and I say "yeah, right", because people who say that sort of thing (often involving the non-word "paradigm") don't even know what a packet is. "It's shifted the whole paradigm for the sex movie industry", I say derisively.
Well, this, and by this I mean the whole imbroglio where Dr. Villanueva is now the cause celebre of the open source movement, could never have happened without all that international packet switching, and the culture that has grown up around it, and this is very significant.
This isn't a fake economic event - like stock quotes. This isn't a manufactured cultural event with no social or political relevance - like the pop music we're swapping. This isn't the sophistry of most modern political news which is nothing more than the latest lies to promote your own self interest.
This is real and genuine and the internet has made it possible.
Don't hold back now...
on
Review: U-571
·
· Score: 2
Jeez, stop sugar coating and tell us what you really think.
I understand - and I believe - that the movie is bad, but you should stop hammering on the fact (liken unto the ice pick in the eye which was Robin Williams' performance in Patch Adams) around halfway through, when it ceases to be funny.
First half of the review - excellent; humor, wit, verve. Second half of the review disappoints, ceases to be fresh.
Any time he comes onto the stage I just wanna stand up and shout "Yeah! Let's hear it for evil!"
His performances in this film and as Suruman (in LOTR) have inspired me so much that I'm going to go out and do terrible things to many, many innocent people, because when it comes down to it, good is weak, and evil is strong.
At first, I thought playing a semi-sympathetic misguided villain might be a stretch for Christopher, but he's just so delightfully vile it doesn't matter. His stage presence makes the appeal of the Dark Side all to clear.
As experience has shown - suckering a major company with X does not mean X is true.
That said, actually, I believe this could work. The "efficiency" claim, however, is somewhat bogus. Quoth their webpage: to a projected 70-80% of the maximum (Carnot) theoretical efficiency for heat pumps. Conventional refrigerators operate at up to 50% efficiency and current thermoelectric systems (Peltier Effect) operate at 5-8% efficiency.
The Carnot efficiency is not 100%; it is (Th-Tc)/Th x 100%. Th is the temp of "hot" half of the engine cycle and Tc is the cold. Both are in kelvin. So, if your car engine runs at 400K (boiling water) on the compression stroke and 300K (freezing water) on the expansion stroke the maximum efficiency you can theoretically get is 25%.
Now, they seem to be comparing the percentage-of-theoretical efficiency that their device gets with the actual efficiency of other devices. The upshot is that I believe refrigerators also run at about 80-90% of the Carnot efficiency, which is 50% actual efficiency, but I might be making a mistake.
I suppose this maps somehow to a total kinetic energy operator for the individual electrons they are moving (1 minute chemistry - heat is "thermal motion", the degree to which particles are bouncing around. Every "observable" feature of a particle - position, kinetic energy, momentum, and so on - is actually "random", and is related to the "wave function" of the particle, which is a function that tells you the probability of finding the particle at any given position, by an operator, the position operator is the number 1, which is itself a function that maps from a set of algebraic functions to a set of algebraic functions. The math for these operators is hoary as all hell, not analytically soluble, and they can generally only be dealt with pproximately/computationally.)
Clearly - and I'm talking about the second law of thermodynamics, here - they can't actually convert environmental heat into an electrical potential. A heat differential, on the other hand, could very well be done, so they might be usable (in the long run) as a way to generate electricity while venting waste heat from nuclear reactors and the like.
Most of the bacteria in the oil and sweat on your fingertips are perfectly benign; other people are covered in bacteria, but they are not septic. You can touch them. Even if they are all sweaty....
The bacteria in someone's other excretions - especially saliva, feces and the delightful sexual juices - are potentially infectious. Blood is more likely to contain viruses (since blood borne bacteria generally kill you stone dead). Unless the other person has a staph infection on their fingertips, the bacteria on their keyboard are not. Even the infectious stuff in snot, which often ends up on people's fingertips, is also (usually) viral and, in any case, generally killed by being dried out.
The fact is - most of the organisms that remain infectious after being dried out live in your scat.
Whatever the bacteria count on a desk, I'd recommend eating off of one over eating off a toilet, which is likely to harbor some small number of bacteria (or other parasites) that favor the human digestive tract.
This is not to say that staph infections are not a real problem; especially in hospitals, which (generally) do use disinfectant soap. I am saying that alarm over the bacteria on your desk is premature.
Researchers also separated office workers into two groups: one group used disinfectant wipes to clean their desks, phones and computers; the other group did not.
Reee-lly! What an interesting project. I wonder who funded it? I have some other observations about people who clean their desks with sanitizing wipes, but I'll leave the psychoanalysis to the professionals.
I think it's real sporting of them. By identifying themselves as the organization responsible for the messages (not mereley the source of the messages), do they not open themselves to legal action? Shielding their customers, who are small-fry (anything other than AOL/TW, including most countries) by definition.
Seriously, this has all the hallmarks of (rather clever) disgruntled employee sabotage. How much attention do you think the higher-ups at rr even pay to their UseNET service? How closely do you think it is monitered? I'm betting very little and not-at-all. It could be weeks before they really notice/understand, even now.
If I still had UseNET flamewars^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hdiscussions, I'd be really pissed; I have roadrunner.
So that our sightless post-apocalyptic descendents can discern the danger as they undulate along the ground on their many legs. Also, it needs to be pulsed out in high-frequency morse code so that they can use their sonar to avoid it.
Also, if they really want to deter Mad Maxx, they should point out that it contains no gasoline.
*I* think it's every bit as silly as the Salon article makes it out to be. It's cool, but it's still stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
Everyone knows ICANN is scum. See also this and this.
And of course the UDRP is dreadful.
However, this proposal reads to me less like a solution to ICANN's well documented track records of cronyism and broken promises, and more like a US powergrab, orchestrated by Republicans who oppose international institutions on principle - a position which has certain merits but which ought to be promoted honestly. Of course, I may be jumping to conclusions since no specifics of the bill are yet available.
For all u eurotrash: In the US, instead of Eurosceptics, we have Republicans, who, instead of hating the EU, hate the UN. American leftists generally support the UN and oppose the WTO. We don't have an international umbrella organisation for both ends of the political spectrum to despise (unless you count the federal guvmint.)
Let's save time and say that the human genome is a round 750 MB (it's about 3 gigabases, each base is two bits, so it's 750 MB.)
It cost about US $300 million. The project cost of 3 bil, bandied about, is the amount we expect to spend in the period from about 1990 to 2005 (reference, search page for "billion") on projects related to Genomics, which is the study of biological sequences, not just the human genome but a wealth of other information (including information about protein structures and the like - I generated four gigs of analytical information just this afternoon.)
Regardless, if you say that the fruit of the $300 million spent directly on the human genome is ONLY the human genome, and not all of the other data (such as correlations with other genomes which is what I was evaluating today, or the information about the number of genes, etc.) it still works out to about $US 0.40 a byte (300 bil over 750 MB). Dear, but not even in the running for most expensive data ever.
A pricing problem - do you pay for the source code, or the binary? If you're paying for the source code, I'm sure somebody, sometime, charged a full years salary to develop a Perl program 70 or 80 ASCII characters long. It could run hundreds of dollars a byte, easy.
Given these precedents for spoofing and the extraordinary measures record labels undertake to prevent music piracy, it's easy to wonder why spoofing, or even more invasive tactics, aren't used more. - Salon Article
Because geeks aren't just expensive to retain; we're also difficult to hire for "invasive tactics".
To your average geek, "Hacker for the RIAA" ranks even lower than the sysadmin at Monsterhut. We may have achieved a veneer of profesionalism and a healthy contempt for the juvenile antics of "black hats," but deep within the subconscious of every SAGE-certified, ethics conscious techie echoes the annoying, high pitched laughter of their l33t f03; tormeting his dreams with fevered promises of glory from electronic vandalism.
On the other hand, doing dishonest work for the man appeals to no such rebellious inclinations.
The RIAA would LOVE to deploy fleets of sophisticated viruses, send out worms to delete their files, and so on. The only reason they don't is because they can't hire enough talent to actually do it. The number of people the RIAA could convince to do this for them pales in comparison to the number of teenagers who will do it out of sheer unfocused malice. The RIAA's efforts to destroy filesharing barely register as a blip against the backdrop of random pranksterism.
The upshot - your scruples makes a difference! Don't go work for the RIAA; hold out for a job with dignity. It does make a difference.
On the other hand, judge not lest you yourself be judged. Before you heap too much condecension on the 13 year old bragging on the IRC channel where you're trying to talk about anime, go dig up some of your old posts from when you were that age.
many scholars argue that without effective guarantees of civil liberties, elections do not constitute democracy, and that a procedural minimum for defining democracy must include not only elections, but reasonably broad guarantees of basic civil rights-e.g., freedom of speech, assembly, and association.
-Democracy 'with Adjectives', by D. Collier and S. Levitsky
The paper I link to (which is academic but pretty accessible - I'm a biologist, not a political scientist) is about military juntas in south america, not Aussies.
I raise this point because I think John Howard (the prime minister of Australia) is Australian for Hitler. A modern Democracy can survive all matter of scuminess, but if this proposal goes through, Australia will need an adjective (such as crpyto or pseudo) to qualify their form of government.
I think that it is good that they are not presuming a hard, definite distinction between the various things people call a blog and "real news."
:)), and not carrying others, the person who simply maintains a links page does a very similar service. What other people are saying, even if the thing they are saying is news, is news in-and-of-itself. Calling it mindless link propagation as Michael does, reflects an unjustified contempt for a whole avenue of expression.
After all, a journalist who writes a story is just commiting their own observations to print. Is this so very different from linking to what someone else wrote? By placing the links in a certain order, by carrying certain stories (but never the ones I submit
Personal experiences in a personal journal are news to somebody. After all, NY Times Editorials are definitely news. I don't see a hard distinction here.
Discussion sites may not reflect public opinion in a "scientific" fashion, but they do reflect public opinion, and public opinion is news. Anecdotes, often shared on such sites, are also news. They can also propogate links and contain excerpts from people's personal ruminations (like what you are reading right now.)
Since all of these things are news, they are all webpages with news. Having temporarily accepted Michael's sub-division, I now reject it, and from hereon out I will just say blogs.
They'll also debate whether blogs are "a sensible medium for doing journalism, and what does that mean?"
Feh! What horseshit. Who cares? I think people should spend less time debating what things mean, and more time being ironic. If you can wildly contradict yourself in a single sentence, that is best, but cognitive dissonance can only be a good thing, however long your text may run.
If it isn't a legitimate medium for doing journalism, we need to find a way to legitimise it, because people are going, increasingly, to be getting their information from blogs. Unless you want to take the stance that what people read and think is not legitimate (common in academia) you've got no choice.
The studios have to have figured out that anything that allows fair use allows swapping on Kazaa. For that matter, without fundamentally crippling the hardware, anything that allows VIEWING allows swapping on Kazaa, and I think the CBDTPA makes clear that they understand that, as well, at least some of them.
They're in a much better position to demand some kind of legislation if they can't get an agreement out of the tech industry.
So, they WANT these meetings to end in failure so they can get legislation b/c the tech industry is refusing to self regulate. The tech industry isn't going to agree to anything that hurts their bottom line, and that means content on demand (in some form) is here to stay. Only legislation can save the studio's sorry business model from widespread civil disobedience. So, either one side or another gets fooled (who thinks the Disney people can get the better of AMD in technobabble armwrestling? I know who I'd bet on.) or nobody gets fooled and it's settled as legislation.
If they could find a compromise where all the corporations make out like bandits and all the consumers get screwed, they would have made it already!
Warning: Do not read if you are not Zaphod Beeblebrox.
Okay, 10 ^ 80 fundamental particles. That's a lot.
Then, 10 ^ 90 bits, or 10 ^ 10 bits per particle.
Those 10 ^ 10 bits each particle possesses, can express a meager 2 ^ 10 ^ 10 = 10 ^ 3 billion or so possible values (since 2 ^ 10 = 10 ^ 3). Let's assume that the universe is a cube, with a "resolution" of 10 ^ -24 meters (electrons don't really have a radius, but when you try to measure it all you can say is that it's less than 10 ^ -18 meters, a millionth of that seems safe.)
So, 10 ^ 3 billion numbers can represent positions on three dimensional axese 10 ^ 1 billion "units" long - that's the cubed root.
Even if our pixel is only 10 ^ -24 meters across, we only lose 24 (to meters) and 16 (to light years) decimal orders of magnitude, so that's describes a cube 10 ^ (1 billion - 40) light years on a side.
Realizing that my overclocked, water cooled Duron, which I had thought was so l33t, is nothing compared to the infinite cosmos upon which it is only a tiny speck, I go insane, and start thinking about relativity.
Okay, to say that events that occur at different points in space is actually meaningless. Relativistically nonsensical. It's may be a requirement at the quantum scale, or it may fuzz out somehow from the heizenberg uncertainty principle (which applies to time as well as space,) but anyway - with no real concept of simultaneity shared by different bits of the great computer, how does the universe get anything done? Maybe, the universal background radiation isn't just something we use as a clock, maybe it REALLY IS A CLOCK - a synchronizing pulse.
You've moved your bathroom to your computer, or vice versa.
You've overclocked everything with a transistor; you're watercooling them.
Now, you have a use for all that warm water; it makes a comfortable wash that keeps you hygienic, and prevents you from getting a rash from sitting in front of your computer, on your toilet, for 72 hours at a stretch.
The Art of Design is all about taking harmonious advantage of the resources already available to you. It is all about turning your tower into a bidet.
This was years ago, WAY before my time, there was some helicase they tried to use - I think it was viral (hepatitis?). You could partially inactivate it by dialyzing stuff in or out of the reaction mixture.
I wouldn't propose using it, but it was tried. IIRC, you could go through maybe three or four cycles per day, and you had to be at the bench the whole time. I just pulled a blank on the medline search, though (it worked so poorly that the attempt was never published? I just don't know). Come to think of it, I'm sure it would work better to denature with heat and just add more enzyme after each reannealing.
The only reason I know about this is b/c my molec. bio. prof. talked about it when I was an undergrad.
Actually, it does have to do with speed.
You can also run the denaturation reaction enzymatically at lower temperatures, it just takes too long. It's true that it doesn't have to do with the speed of polymerization.
b/c RNA is what's used as a primer in an actual living organism, so I thought it would be less confusing. You are double correct, however - it would have been clearer if I had simply left all mention of RNA out, in addition to more in line with how PCR is actually done.
Does one of those links explain how the hell we got from "Say, this long strand of weakly held together goo looks interesting" to A thermophile (heat loving organism), thermus aquaticus, provided a polymerase?
It will all be revealed in Neal Stephenson's next book.
Okay, sorry that wasn't clear. The Polymerase from a person or an e. coli bacterium works only at room temperature (and thereabouts), so the PCR reaction goes too slowly to be useful. The Polymerase from these thermophiles works at high temperatures, so it goes fast enough for you to acutally use it.
I'm capped, and yet I still whore.
DNA, as I'm sure we all know, is double stranded. One strand is a complement of the other. A complements T and C complements G. So, if one strand is:
5' ATTTC 3'
then the other strand is:
3' TAAAG 5'
The DNA is "read" from 5' to 3'. 5' and 3' refer to particular atoms on the sugar backbone that are attached to one another via a phosphate.
When DNA is replicated, you split it into two strands:
5' ATTTC 3' and 5' GAAAT 3'
(notice that the two complements read in opposite directions)
and each strand has it's complement added.
5' ATTTC 3' and 5' GAAAT 3'
3' TAAAG 3' and 3' CTTTA 5'
The problem with this is, in order for this happen to DNA, you need an RNA "primer." This primer is a complement to the beggining of what you want to replicate. So, for example, if you have (RNA bases I'm putting in bold. U is the same as T:)
UAA
floating around in solution, which compliments ATT, then any sequence beggining with ATT will be replicated, but other sequences will NOT be replicated, because no RNA primer is available to get them started.
So, if you have a whole mess of DNA, including a piece that you're interested in, which reads:
5' ATTTG (long space........) TCGTC 3'
3' TAAAC (long space........) AGGAG 5'
and you add:
TAAAC and TCGTC
You get a chain reaction; the sequence flanked by the complements of the two things you add (the sequence printed above) is replicated, and then the replication product is replicated, and so on and so on. Other sequences, which are flanked by only one compliment (only ATTTG, say) will be replicated occasionally, but there replication products cannot in turn replicate, so you get no chain reaction.
More history here.
A thermophile (heat loving organism), thermus aquaticus, provided a polymerase (an enzyme which polymerises, that is to say replicates sequences of, nucleic acids like DNA and RNA) that works extremely fast at high temperatures. In general, the higher the temperature you run a reaction at, the faster it goes. However, most biological enzymes (from, say, a person) cease to function when temperatures rise (this is one of the ways heat kills you.) Thermophiles, bacteria that live in geysers and in volcanic ocean vents, have evolved enzymes that continue to function at higher temperatures.
- new germs are being genetically enginered (so they do not exist in nature );
:)
Bugs that eat gasoline already exist in nature. The bugs discussed in the first link I posted are natural organisms that already get in people's fuel lines and eat their gas. When you genetically engineer an organism - which I've done on several occasions, thank you very much - you use proteins that already exist in some other organism (hence the more proper term, "transgenic" - meaning genes that have been moved from place to place) you don't create enirely new proteins. Therefore, you are simply recombining features that exist in natural organisms. This can result in destructive new combinations (HIV that spread like ebola is theoretically possible, for example) but you can't do much novel chemistry - you're stuck with the chemistry you already have.
An organism genetically engineered to be hardier, so that it might consume the fuel in enemy depots, would be (extremely) unlikely to survive deep underground where our fuel reserves are. It is possible that it might get into our public gas stations and destroy some fuel that way, but, based on the metabolism of the organism (it would still require OXYGEN; fermentation, that is to say, eating without oxygen, of those hydrocarbons is already ongoing) it simply wouldn't be a threat to world fuel supply.
A *plastic* eating microbe, depending upon which type of plastic it ate, might be a major threat to industrial society. I don't take the metal corroding microbes seriously.
I used the word virus because "deadly-virus-escaping" is more a press cliche... Hope most people got the irony.
I appreciated that it was an attempt at humor. The critical point - the reason I was yelling at Timothy and not at 1gor (original poster) - is that I don't think Timothy did.
It was a factually confusing joke which shouldn't have been carried, or should have been labeled as a joke by the editor.
- "We, Environmentalists" are rude and might use some Valuim...:))
You got it all wrong! I'm razzing him, but it's all about the love! Can't you see that? What are you, stupid? Jesus, there's no point in even talking about the love to someone as ignorant and debased as you are. Just do us all a favor and shut up.
And like every other story on slashdot, it was approved by the editor that posted it. Timothy, in this case.
When a newspaper prints something factually incorrect, it is the editor who takes final responsibility for printing it. Timothy made a damned stupid editorial decision, which reflects an ignorance of highschool level science - I also conclude that he sympathathises with the pigheaded viewpoint of the individual whose story he chose to carry.
Yes, I'm aware that, in a certain sense, the posting is "factually correct," since it really is what the original poster said. However, you and I both know that's bullshit.
Imagine an escaped virus destroying the Earth's oil reserves and its whole industrial potential? Curiously, the military may implement the environmentalists' ultimate dream!
Let me clue you in on what it is that the fuel eaten by these bacteria (not viruses) eventually breaks down into - water and carbon dioxide. This is a more controlled form of a process better known as FIRE.
Flame of yet another kind: Timothy, you are an idiot. Even as a joke that was a grade A stupid thing to say. It reflects poorly on you as an editor and as a human being. If you don't know the difference between a virus and a bacterium shut your cornhole.
We, Environmentalists, object to gasoline being burned (turned into Carbon Dioxide) faster than it is deposited in peat marshes and such. I don't want to rehash the global warming argument here, so don't y'all even start.
The fact that the gasoline, while burned, does useful work, instead of, say, fueling the growth of a manmade organism, does not bother anyone.
You can find out more about Hydrocarbon Utilizing Microbes (HUMs) here. The document is fully accessible to a non-scientist. The people at Brooks Air Force base, who are/would be (?) developing these fuel eating microbes for offensive use have already made use of them in a peaceful context. Again, the press release is non technical. Personally, I find this to be admirable work - they're using them to clean up petrochemical contamination of soil and groundwater, which is an underappreciated ecological problem. I'm not terribly worried about these organisms going out of control and eating the world's petrochemical reserves. They exist in nature already in various forms and have not done that.
The New Scientist has an older article about the fuel eating bugs, or, more specifically, about the circumstances surrounding the release of documents discussing the bugs; I think this may have come up on slashdot before but I searched just now and didn't find it. The sunshine project also has an article about there efforts to get the documents released.
Well, the puzzles could require some kind of cooperation. That wouldn't be too hard. You could even introduce some kind of variable elements, to keep it interesting. If the puzzle doesn't change from game to game, either randomly or depending on what other people do, this would get really annoying, of course, since some jerk who already knew the whole puzzle would just race through it.
Most likely, you'll just have to coordinate lever pulling with someone in another room, which would be just like Myst only with the added frustration, I mean fun, of online social interaction.
If they did this right they would've looked to good, simple/innovative, mutiplayer boardgames for inspiration.
Clue - where there was some information (needed to solve the mystery) that only certain players could get, and you have to pool the info, that could be cool.
Settlers of Katan - there could be items (not just information) that you need from other players, but you have to trade other stuff you actually need (or may need) to get it. An economy of items (where you need X of each item over the course of the game, maybe) could be interesting.
Slasher - one of the other players IS the villain; the identity of the evil one is actually determined during the course of play.
Features introduced by other players could be worked into the puzzles, somehow. This would be incredibly difficult to do in an interesting way; it would also require a level of interaction with the environment well beyond what was present in the The Manhole (anyone else remember The Manhole?)
Myst has beautiful artwork, but I've always had this problem where you don't inject anything into the game; you might as well be watching a movie, to my mind (not intended as a Troll.) This would be a good opportunity for them to remedy that with a vengeance - not only would you alter the storyline in a real way, but so would a bunch of other people.
This is all a real blow to my cynicism.
People say "the internet will change the way the world works!" and I say "yeah, right", because people who say that sort of thing (often involving the non-word "paradigm") don't even know what a packet is. "It's shifted the whole paradigm for the sex movie industry", I say derisively.
Well, this, and by this I mean the whole imbroglio where Dr. Villanueva is now the cause celebre of the open source movement, could never have happened without all that international packet switching, and the culture that has grown up around it, and this is very significant.
This isn't a fake economic event - like stock quotes. This isn't a manufactured cultural event with no social or political relevance - like the pop music we're swapping. This isn't the sophistry of most modern political news which is nothing more than the latest lies to promote your own self interest.
This is real and genuine and the internet has made it possible.
Jeez, stop sugar coating and tell us what you really think.
I understand - and I believe - that the movie is bad, but you should stop hammering on the fact (liken unto the ice pick in the eye which was Robin Williams' performance in Patch Adams) around halfway through, when it ceases to be funny.
First half of the review - excellent; humor, wit, verve. Second half of the review disappoints, ceases to be fresh.
Any time he comes onto the stage I just wanna stand up and shout "Yeah! Let's hear it for evil!"
His performances in this film and as Suruman (in LOTR) have inspired me so much that I'm going to go out and do terrible things to many, many innocent people, because when it comes down to it, good is weak, and evil is strong.
At first, I thought playing a semi-sympathetic misguided villain might be a stretch for Christopher, but he's just so delightfully vile it doesn't matter. His stage presence makes the appeal of the Dark Side all to clear.
require extraordinary wads of cash money.
As experience has shown - suckering a major company with X does not mean X is true.
That said, actually, I believe this could work. The "efficiency" claim, however, is somewhat bogus. Quoth their webpage:
to a projected 70-80% of the maximum (Carnot) theoretical efficiency for heat pumps. Conventional refrigerators operate at up to 50% efficiency and current thermoelectric systems (Peltier Effect) operate at 5-8% efficiency.
The Carnot efficiency is not 100%; it is (Th-Tc)/Th x 100%. Th is the temp of "hot" half of the engine cycle and Tc is the cold. Both are in kelvin. So, if your car engine runs at 400K (boiling water) on the compression stroke and 300K (freezing water) on the expansion stroke the maximum efficiency you can theoretically get is 25%.
Now, they seem to be comparing the percentage-of-theoretical efficiency that their device gets with the actual efficiency of other devices. The upshot is that I believe refrigerators also run at about 80-90% of the Carnot efficiency, which is 50% actual efficiency, but I might be making a mistake.
I suppose this maps somehow to a total kinetic energy operator for the individual electrons they are moving (1 minute chemistry - heat is "thermal motion", the degree to which particles are bouncing around. Every "observable" feature of a particle - position, kinetic energy, momentum, and so on - is actually "random", and is related to the "wave function" of the particle, which is a function that tells you the probability of finding the particle at any given position, by an operator, the position operator is the number 1, which is itself a function that maps from a set of algebraic functions to a set of algebraic functions. The math for these operators is hoary as all hell, not analytically soluble, and they can generally only be dealt with pproximately/computationally.)
Clearly - and I'm talking about the second law of thermodynamics, here - they can't actually convert environmental heat into an electrical potential. A heat differential, on the other hand, could very well be done, so they might be usable (in the long run) as a way to generate electricity while venting waste heat from nuclear reactors and the like.
Then, at long last, the TV is watching YOU!
Most of the bacteria in the oil and sweat on your fingertips are perfectly benign; other people are covered in bacteria, but they are not septic. You can touch them. Even if they are all sweaty....
The bacteria in someone's other excretions - especially saliva, feces and the delightful sexual juices - are potentially infectious. Blood is more likely to contain viruses (since blood borne bacteria generally kill you stone dead). Unless the other person has a staph infection on their fingertips, the bacteria on their keyboard are not. Even the infectious stuff in snot, which often ends up on people's fingertips, is also (usually) viral and, in any case, generally killed by being dried out.
The fact is - most of the organisms that remain infectious after being dried out live in your scat.
Whatever the bacteria count on a desk, I'd recommend eating off of one over eating off a toilet, which is likely to harbor some small number of bacteria (or other parasites) that favor the human digestive tract.
This is not to say that staph infections are not a real problem; especially in hospitals, which (generally) do use disinfectant soap. I am saying that alarm over the bacteria on your desk is premature.
Researchers also separated office workers into two groups: one group used disinfectant wipes to clean their desks, phones and computers; the other group did not.
Reee-lly! What an interesting project. I wonder who funded it? I have some other observations about people who clean their desks with sanitizing wipes, but I'll leave the psychoanalysis to the professionals.
Dr. Gerba has also done work on how anti-bacterial kitchen supplies reduce of risk for disease (html courtesy of google.) Search the document for "Gerba".
Hell, take a look at his press coverage overall.
I think it's real sporting of them. By identifying themselves as the organization responsible for the messages (not mereley the source of the messages), do they not open themselves to legal action? Shielding their customers, who are small-fry (anything other than AOL/TW, including most countries) by definition.
Seriously, this has all the hallmarks of (rather clever) disgruntled employee sabotage. How much attention do you think the higher-ups at rr even pay to their UseNET service? How closely do you think it is monitered? I'm betting very little and not-at-all. It could be weeks before they really notice/understand, even now.
If I still had UseNET flamewars^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hdiscussions, I'd be really pissed; I have roadrunner.
So that our sightless post-apocalyptic descendents can discern the danger as they undulate along the ground on their many legs. Also, it needs to be pulsed out in high-frequency morse code so that they can use their sonar to avoid it.
Also, if they really want to deter Mad Maxx, they should point out that it contains no gasoline.
*I* think it's every bit as silly as the Salon article makes it out to be. It's cool, but it's still stupid.
"No Treasure Here!"
Sigh.