AOL will do extensive business with the PRC, trading my personal info with them, in order to make my life more convenient. And more secure! B/c the CIA will hire "foreign agents" in chinese security firms to help lower costs associated with keeping tabs on american citizens. This will help to shrink our bloated and over-trained intelligence apparatus, lowering my taxes. It's a win/win proposition.
One more draw off the pipe... ah.
Naturally, it will be an open standard; china is a communist country, after all, and for them to do otherwise (since they'll be intimately involved in the whole process, naturaly) would be as hypocritical as for them to hire an American corporation to help them spy on their own citizens.
Uh oh, I think I'm coming down. Here come the spiders.
I just started grad school and I buy myself a game whenever I take a test.
Anyway, someone allready mentioned Civ III, and I second that. A design decision was made that simple-is-good, so in terms of the number of things that exist in the game, techs, units, bells and whistles for units to have, there are far less than in, say, Alpha Centauri. But, it's a big improvement in many, many, fundamental respects - it has whole new dimensions of play, which are simple yet profound. Personally, there are certain realism aspects (taking years for ships to circumnavigate the globe) that really annoy me, but the games very deep. It's also really difficult.
Art of Magic: Magic and Mayhem II is an attempt to make Sacrifice (nearly a great game) playable. Unfortunately, it fails and completely lacks the entrancing graphic artistry of sacrifice, so don't bother.
Pool of Radiance is a cute time waster. The game is a bit buggy, even with the patch, and their implementation of the D&D 3rd. ed rules is deeply flawed in a couple of respects (for those of you who are familiar, it won't let you pick your own skills and feats, and none of the really fun feats are even implemented.) Still, the parts of the game that take place on the surface are gorgeous in a technically uninspired kind of way, and the designs on the monsters and effects are solidly handsome and fun to look at. The big downside of the game is that big parts of it are just a dungeon crawl. There's a lot of very frank discussion abuot the merits of this game on the forums page (link above) which you might read before forking over fifty bucks.
One game that has seen surprisingly little hype is a Diablo clone called Throne of Darkness. The game, while once again not a technical breakthrough in the graphics department, is just beautiful. Really, the graphics are art. They've done something so that everything looks like it was drawn with those ink brushes - it looks like those highly detailed japanese landscape paintings, except unfortunately for the grass which is ugly and over-detailed like in Diablo (ah well). Unfortunately, the game play is just diablo. In fact, it is exactly diablo; Sierra has some kind of deal to copy the engine (I forget where I read this.) You get four guys at once, but the only summonings suck.
Finally, if you don't want to spend money, cosmic encounter online (which I tried to shamelessly promote as a Slashdot story, but it was rejected) is in development, and you can play as several races for free. No flares yet, but still.
I have to say, I can't see how it makes a cost effective alternative to buses.
The NYtimes article which is linked to suggests that corporate campuses are going to somehow use these things to increase corporate mobility.
It seems to me it would be cheaper (and faster, and less risky; what if people hate them?) to have drivers on call with cell phones, if your corporate campus really is big enough to justify this kind of outlay. Also, the thing looks unpleasantly bulky and difficult to store.
Finally, at 12 miles an hour I fail to see how (other than failing to improve your health) these, admittedly neat, toys can compete with bicycles for today's cash strapped (oh, I'm so funny) IT firm (nyuck nyuck) which is clearly there target audience.
Still, if you've got the money and are having trouble recruiting - hell of a perk.
Or am I misunderstanding what's actually going on. Are they simply doing things like creating human hearts in monkeys and the like? As with the tobacco plants we rigged up to create hemoglobin or insulin or whatever? I don't really see a problem with that, I guess.
Yes, that's pretty much what they're doing.
This is a problem that I first saw raised in a shadowrun sourcebook (and yes, I really am a biologist, but that's still the first place I saw it mentioned): you can't grow an organ in isolation. It just doesn't work that way.
Both of the first two are good introductions for an intelligent layman, although they include a lot of info tangential to this discussion.
Finally, scads more info on the general state of this sort of research in japan, if that's what interests people, can be found here.
So, you can do one of several things if you want to produce organs for use in humans:
1) You can grow up an entire human (possibly with the gray matter destroyed, in order to be "humane") and then harvest it for the organs you want. This is the route of choice in the awful future of Shadowrun.
2) You can try and grow an organ in isolation in some kind of synthetic nutrient bath. Long story short: only works for skin or bone, move along.
3) You can genetically modify an animal so that it has organs that humans won't reject. This animal is "part human" in a more real sense than option 4 (which is what the japanese are proposing) because, basically by definition, it has human DNA in every single cell in it's body, so that the organ you want to donate to a human will produce proteins that cause your recipient to think that it's part of his own body.
4) The Japanese proposition. In order to generate the environment which will cause a single human cell to become a human heart, you implant that cell into a babboon, in such a place and in such a way that it will grow into a heart. In this case, you're basically using the baboon as the "nutrient bath" from option 2. There are a whole host of technical hurdles (of course) but I wholeheartedly agree with the previous poster. This is actually less "bothersome" than option 3, and if there's a chance it will work, go for it.
Okay, all of the cool sci fi babble aside, there are a couple of reasons that it might be very difficult to make this - head computers - work.
Firstly, you need space to put the head computer. Dishing out even a thimble full of gray matter has consequences we understand but-poorly; while it's been done in some people who seem okay, there are forms of cognitive damage that are subtle enough (on the verge of what we can objectively detect) that I wouldn't rule out (possibly very subjective) damage from making space for the thing. Hollowing out a section of the skull has it's own associated problems.
There's a big problem with inflammation. A significant number of people are going to be very allergic to whatever material you make your components out of! Low level brain inflammation is very, very bad, in the long run. If there's a "datajack" (an external wire-port for headware from Shadowrun) bacteria are going to try and crawl up it (my now deceased hydrocephallic elder brother needed a procedure called a Shunt, a tube, to drain his brain of fluid. It caused a number of very nasty CNS infections, and it was very very carefully monitered.) These bacteria, even if they never cause full blown CNS gangrene, which is going to happen in some small percentage of.. er.. patients (cyborgs?) are going to further aggravate your inflammation problem, which is a chronic disorder associated with significant reductions in life expectancy and, shudder, organ failure. If there's a 0.01% chance that this toy is going to turn you into a vegetable in 20 years, how many people do you think will go for it?
The surgical procedure to install the things cannot, for example, kill the nerve cell you're trying to plant electrodes on 0.01% of the time, either.
Given all of this, would you want to be the first person this toy was tested on? Given that there's no medical need for the process generally (I can see efforts made to use this to "repair" the mentally retarded) how would you justify the experimental form of the procedure to the AMA?
Finally, in order for these toys to be better than typing-with-electrodes-in-your-muscles, which is a cute trick but not worth the risks I've outlined above, they have to be able to interface with and understand your thoughts, memories, senses or emotions etc., at least on some rudimentary level. In order to do that, we need not-just-one but several major advances in neurobiology. Okay, we now know how to moniter input from and give input to a biological nerve cell - this was always the little technological hurdle in making this sort of toy - the highjump is in which of your billions of nerve cells we attach it to, and why. Since it isn't even going to be the same in every person, not precisely, this is a doubly tall order.
They don't like the Linux Chinese language support. None of the Linux boxes in the lab have chinese installed on them, in any case.
I don't know exactly what they find wrong with it, but Chinese readers who don't use Linux should take a look here; which btw is actually hosted from here and then give comments to people on sourceforge who will, given the attention this is getting, help to develop tools that better fit whatever people's needs are.
The Chinese language is very different from English and features that are hugely convenient for English users can seem irrelevant while things that it would never occur to English users to want, or which are downright inconvenient, are very helpful when you're typing Chinese. This is a situation where Linux needs.... marketing (dum dum dum) and in a terrible way.
I will take a deep breath and I will not flame. Previous posters have covered his penny of philosophy well enough, however:
the reality is that a large minority in their country is made up of radical Wahabi muslims who are fomenting rebellion in Saudi Arabia (and it's not a nice democratic government they want to form, I assure you). These people are partially responsible for the spread of fundamentalist Wahabi-style Islam around the Islamic world. Watch the PBS Frontline documentary that aired on Friday if you can find it showing again - it gave some fabulous insights into this process.
A little historical background is called for here. Firstly, the Saud royal family are, themselves, Wahabis. The Wahabi sect is the Saud royal family's primary source of *support*, and while some Wahabis are fomenting rebellion, most of them are carrying out the oppression that keeps this dictatorship in place.
Like Saddam Hussein in Iraq, these Wahabis, who are indeed the source of most Middle Eastern islamic terrorism, are there because we put them there when the region was taken from the Ottomans after WWI. We've supported them since then because, for obvious reasons, any pro democracy types in Saudi Arabia are staunchly opposed to what we regard as our foreign interests - i.e. robbing the middle east of it's oil wealth. Historically, this combination drove them into the Soviet camp, causing us to support the Saud royal family with even more vigor. So - is all of this islamic terrorism the result of our own (Americas) greed, stupidity and contempt for human life in Afghanistan and elsewhere? Yes, it is!
Re:Its about censorship, not copyright infingement
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Review: Harry Potter
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Okay, I'm a molecular biologist, IAMNAL, but under more traditional copyright law (the kind where individual people have rights, but I digress) if you fail to "defend" your copyright/patent/trademark, it, and I'm aware this varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, becomes void. There are many excellent reasons for this sort of rule and I've always assumed that ICANN's rules included it somehow.... do they? Those of us with legal aptitude can peruse them at www.icann.org, of course.
As a matter of civic.. er... communal pride, this cannot be tolerated.
To quote ICANN's own website:
Decisions under the Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy are subject to challenge by court action. The long list of their outrageous abuses of power can, still, be found here although the text of this particular decision isn't on that page yet, it's back, as I'm sure someone else has posted and I just missed it here.
So, we collect some money and make some phone calls to the ACLU and bring ICANN to court. This is a surrealistic violation of ICANN's own charter, not to mention of our sensibilities, and even if we lose (which we probably will) we should take it to court to generate bad press for them.
www.harrypotterthemovie.com belongs to Amazon?!?!?
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Review: Harry Potter
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you get a link to Amazon, trying to sell you books!
If I posted a criticism on www.harrypottersux.com or www.harrypottersucks.com (both of which are allready taken and under construction, btw) that would be bad and naughty, but Amazon has completely derailed this address and as far as I can tell (from Icanns website) no-one has raised a peep.
"curing cancer" is fodder for the masses, so to speak. It gets peoples attention, and those not familiar with molecular biology can understand that better than a diatribe on why they should help model proteins.
Oh, come on. This is supposed to be a geek/technical forum; people should understand the nature of the thing their commiting resources too (I say again) before they commit them. Geeks, smart people (ideally) will read biology related posts to get educated on the subject, not to get motivated or hyped up.
Rather than say "curing cancer," say "rapidly develop medicines to target newly discovered proteins in newly discovered or recently discovered diseases - and rapidly develop replacement medicines (antibiotics) as old ones become ineffective."
That's much more accurate and certainly not above the level of an intelligent slashdot reader - and if the script kiddies can't decipher it with their m4d ski11z, well, screw 'em (the brats.)
While structural methods certainly have application in cancer treatment, the link is indirect, at best. It is HIV treatment where the really stunning successes for applied structure studies have been made (not a rigorous scientific judgement, of course.)
Before you go and commit your (precious, after all you could give it to Kazaa) bandwidth and CPU cycles to some project, you should take a critical look at how successful it really is, aside from how wonderful any potential successes might be. Certainly, if there were alien transmissions out there (hah) SETI would be, quite frankly, more important than this, and I work in proteomics.
Anyway, check out CASP4 (Critical Assessment of techniques for Structure Prediction, the one that ended Sep of last year) and make your own judgements about how feasable these techniques really are, and about the successes of the stanford team in particular.
Okay, in addition to being unable to descramble cable transmissions (any of you hardcore criminal hacker types write apps for Windows ME? Didn't think so) the program that ATI packages with their video cards failed to generate a neat little.mpeg file of that last tick episode for me to watch while I was wasting time at a faculty research presentation.
<punchline>
So, I'm so sick of this program that I'm through with it. I don't need a Ph.D. that badly.
</punchline explanation="program meaning the PhD program I'm in not the program that runs my ATI card. Get it?">
The RIAA doesn't realize that every time they go after someone, it just increases the visibility of file sharing and gets more people involved.
Actually, the RIAA is learning. In the case of this last suit, they've got the original development company (somewhere in northern europe... iceland? belgium?) which created the software that kazaa (I think the company that's helping in the suit *is* kazaa, actually) and MCM use. The company that developed the software, as far as I can tell, is cooperating with the RIAA in order to ditch the deals they've allready signed and sign a new, presumably more lucrative one, with the RIAA - but not shut down the service, just switch it to fee-based (like napster) with their subscriber base intact.
That said, eDonkey2000 has the best technology, but it has no user base so I use Kazaa instead. Hell yeah it'll clear the 2 million mark. I have two kazaa accounts (one here at work and one at home) going, sometimes simultaneously.
All of these points have been raised the last four or five times this discussion has come up, but:
1. We allready have them.
2. You need to be able to postively identify people.
3. Questionable identification is more of a problem for our privacy than positive information.
4. It's the stockpiling of information on the part of big whatever that needs to be curtailed - not their ability to verify the information that they are allowed to stockpile by having a centralised system for handling IDs.
Who you are, where you live and where you work are all perfectly reasonable things for the government to know! You give this info to the government and the government gives you a card. Very reasonable. The government *has* to be able to know these things in order to carry out the minimal functions of the state, and the only rational reason for someone not to want the government to know these things about them is that they're a criminal. End of story.
That said, Oracle and Sun are big democratic contributors - in spite of Sun's CEO's (what's his name, the thin guy in the hat) claims to be some kind of jesse venturite or something. Unless the Republicans can find someone on their end of the ideological "spectrum" (with rightists and centrists as it's two "extremes") to spearhead the thing, it's going to go nowhere. So, I wouldn't be surprised if some little known tech firm in Austin (probably owned by Enron) comes up with a proposal that everyone on team W thinks is great.
... program would not lend itself in a practical sense to our specialised needs. (quote from link in previous posters article.)
They mocked my research! But I'll show them, I'll show them all! Hordes of highly trained special kitty operatives will spring from my underground base and bring the world to it's knees! Bwah hah hah hah!
I would've gotten away with it, if not for you kids!
I wonder if you could genetically engineer a form of anthrax that didn't kill the cat but did kill people and was released in the cats dander (where it could nonlethaly infect other cats).
... which reveal the CIA's boffins to be as accident-prone as any government institution.
How about the NSA? Sure, the NSA makes mistakes, but it never tries to sick killer felines on people, and none of it's agents collect human ears. More amusing stories of CIA stupidity and brutality can be found here. Not to mention the big brutal stupidity of the CIAs unconscionable behavior in, you guessed it, Afghanistan.
bacteria aren't capable of turning the world into gray goo
Oh, I don't know about that. While I agree that one strain of bacteria couldn't live everywhere and turn everything into gray goo, I wouldn't discount our capacity to destroy the planet with bacteria, three or four strains of them.
Certainly, it would be difficult. Your world destroying bacteria would, among other things, need both massive, highly divergent redundancy in all cellular systems (to provide resistance to antibiotics and viability under diverse chemical and physical conditions) *and* have a generation time of no more than twenty minutes (less than that if we assume that other members of the human race are going to try and stop it) *and* have an unthinkably broad sweet of metabolic enzymes (depending on how much of "everything" you want to turn into goo) and, finally, have a complex, multiply redundant (again) and rapidly acting regulatory system to keep all of these features working at the same time.
Is this a tall order? Yes. Do I think we'll have enough of an understanding of proteomics (the relationship between sequence and function of a protein) to do this by the end of the century? Probably not! By the end of the next century? Yes, I think we will.
More to the point, we have the technology (although it would be hard) to wipe out a significant chunk of the entire human population. A bacteria which, quite simply:
a) exposed no human antigens on it's coat
b) survived endocytosis (being eaten) and continued to replicate inside immune cells (HIV is a *virus*, not a bacteria, but this property is still analogous)
c) was resistant to all presently used antibiotics
d) secreted itself into muscus and saliva before symptoms appeared
There are bacteria that do each of those things. Getting all of those features into one bacterium would be difficult, but it doesn't require any fundamental advance in understanding over what we have now; it's a lot more realistic, as a worry, than a horde of microscopic self replicating Daleks. Just because one apocalyptic future is frankly absurd doesn't mean that our scientific advances in other areas don't allow us to destroy ourselves.
Source code is, however, much prefered if English isin't known by one of the two parties in the exchange. Imagine talking to Microsoft tech support lackies who only spoke Bushman.:)
Are you implying that microsoft tech support lackies can code?!
? - can (Microsoft_employees, Code)
Personally, as a form of personal expression I like prolog.
rocks (This_ruling).
cannot (X,Code):- works_for (X,Microsoft).
In fact, as a form of Satire, expressing yourself in Code trumps copyright! Are you all familiar with the guys in the day who made a snow white+the seven dwarfs gangbang poster and were sued by Disney? They won.
Moderation question - why is no post every funny and insightful?
Firstly, Jon, many to most of the protesters, intellectual elites etc. involved in the anti-globalization movement are "reformed" socialists. Or, not so reformed, as the case may be. They're not going to address questions of who is going to "pay" for things, and how corporations are going to behave in their world order, because such things exist in a thought space which they don't occupy. When they say anti-globalization, what they *really* mean is internationalisation, from the far flung remote left fringe of the political spectrum. Not all of the people in the anti-globalization movement think this way, but the smart ones, the ones inclined to address hypothetical economic questions, are red as lenin.
The last time we had a really major downturn in the business cycle (I think for various reasons, primarily the fundamental self interest and lack of foresight on the part of W's handlers, that this one is going to be major) we (partially) averted the destruction of western, liberal, capitalist society through a significant redistribution of wealth and class power. I'm sure you're familiar with the new deal, the rise of unions, etc.
The real problem with the globalization of world capital is that it is heavily geared toward preventing this sort of correction from happening. Actual rightists are endangering, and not in an eventual sense, the survival of capitalism by stripping it of any ability to exert social conscience.
The reason that the American working class is still happy with their dwindling share of economic resources is not because they're numbed by television. It is because, in historial terms, they have it really good. The ratio of CEO pay to laborers pay is, yes, criminal. However, the american working class (by an large) have TVs and VCRs and shelter and plenty to eat; as long as that's the case they aren't going to be truly riled by how many Rolls Royces Bill Gates owns.
The only way for capitalism to survive is to enforce such a social contract, at the bare minimum, for the three fifths of the world's people who don't presently benefit from it.
While I agree that globalization promises many wonderful things, if we cannot have it on any terms that don't destroy the many, more wonderful and more vital, things which the mixed economics of the 20th Century have achieved; and could achieve in under developed countries if we exported it instead of a globalised corporate state, we have to put the brakes on.
This is a little off topic, but there's some high end (heavy computation) science/research related software (WinBUGS, bayesian inference using Gibbs sampling, is a fine example) which is only supported in windows versions (although I don't know of an instance where no Unix version exists.)
Admittedly, there's a lot more high end research software which only runs on some particular flavor of Unix.
The best legal defense against this is to find a legitimate academic use for p2p. Like the "high press", "high academia" has, although I know this is not justified, a priveleged place in the courts. So, if I'm using a totally open p2p filesharing network to share raw data - which is one of the things that I want to do - and incidentally someone else on the same network is sharing Metallica, then someone who's right to free speech actually counts (a scientist at a respected institution) is being threatened if they try to shut the network down.
Incidentally, one of the biggest problems in meta-analysis of scientific results, the filecabinet full of nulls, could be dealt with through p2p. In general, it is harder to publish null results than it is to publish positive results, so, if you do meta-analysis on many small published studies, the result is skewed away from null. If everyone makes their raw data available on a filesharing network - or a random subset of people inclined to share it not related to who got positive results - this problem goes away.
It resurrects the problem of namespaces mentioned in the article in a big way! When the results of science become politically important (say, tobacco research, health effects of PCPs) you have to worry about people with an interest in the topic releasing false data (this is allready a problem, but we know who they are). You also have to know who someone is because you have to be able to go to them and ask how to verify their results, even unpublished ones, and so on.
Actually, the thing that's most likely to impress them is "self regulation." If the open source community produces it's own, open source, rights management software, which is absurd on the face of it but I'll get back to that, we can say "see, no need for legislation, we're being responsible and doing it ourselves, Senator."
Of course, such software is never going to prevent piracy (someone suggested and ifndef with a strong warning not to change it - do it!) - but the RIAA/MPAA can not make "logical arguments." As soon as logical arguments start being made, their whole deal falls apart. They're waging a legislative war with nonsense and half-truths and we should return in kind. I want my children to grow up in a world more surreal than the one we live in, don't you?
When the Gov't is your employer it acts as a company and not government.
Actually, that's not quite true. It's one of the reasons that right-wingers love subcontractors.
All of the provisions of the bill of rights (for example, equal protection under the law regardless of race) apply uniformly to any government action - including employment. They also (this is a sticky area) may or may not apply to government subcontractors, depending on whether or not that subcontractor is acting as an agent of state authority.
The equal rights act effectively extends that particular clause of the constitution to affect private employers, but the US government would be affected anyway, since the things that authorise the government to have employees are laws, and those laws must be applied equally to everyone.
That's somewhat academic, but what *isn't* academic is that there are a number of laws regarding labor relations that effect only government employees.
As it so happens, few of them (for obvious reasons) interfere with the government taking security precautions against its own employees.
So, yeah, the original poster can like it or lump it, even though government employer is subject to all the restrictions government is always subject to, I'm sure there's precedent that the search and seizure restriction doesn't apply to government employees going to and from work.
Of course, I am assuming that anyone reading this thinks filesharing is great and that Disney is evil; this is true for only about 95% of the Slashdot readership, I'm sure:).
I wouldn't worry about this sort of propoganda actually affecting children's attitudes. It's simply too clumsy (and obvious and contrived.) Children, while many people who make children's programming don't realise this, are not stupid. They can spot something phony and manipulative(which you have to admit that this is, even if you agree that filesharing is wrong) from a mile away.
It's about as likely to drive the next generation of children away from filesharing as all those Captain Planet cartoons where to make people environmentalists. Less likely, since Captain Planet was less obviously hokey.
Slashdot Mirror
Someone take the crack pipe away from Hemos.
Ah.... sweet crack makes it all clear.
AOL will do extensive business with the PRC, trading my personal info with them, in order to make my life more convenient. And more secure! B/c the CIA will hire "foreign agents" in chinese security firms to help lower costs associated with keeping tabs on american citizens. This will help to shrink our bloated and over-trained intelligence apparatus, lowering my taxes. It's a win/win proposition.
One more draw off the pipe... ah.
Naturally, it will be an open standard; china is a communist country, after all, and for them to do otherwise (since they'll be intimately involved in the whole process, naturaly) would be as hypocritical as for them to hire an American corporation to help them spy on their own citizens.
Uh oh, I think I'm coming down. Here come the spiders.
I just started grad school and I buy myself a game whenever I take a test.
Anyway, someone allready mentioned Civ III, and I second that. A design decision was made that simple-is-good, so in terms of the number of things that exist in the game, techs, units, bells and whistles for units to have, there are far less than in, say, Alpha Centauri. But, it's a big improvement in many, many, fundamental respects - it has whole new dimensions of play, which are simple yet profound. Personally, there are certain realism aspects (taking years for ships to circumnavigate the globe) that really annoy me, but the games very deep. It's also really difficult.
Art of Magic: Magic and Mayhem II is an attempt to make Sacrifice (nearly a great game) playable. Unfortunately, it fails and completely lacks the entrancing graphic artistry of sacrifice, so don't bother.
Pool of Radiance is a cute time waster. The game is a bit buggy, even with the patch, and their implementation of the D&D 3rd. ed rules is deeply flawed in a couple of respects (for those of you who are familiar, it won't let you pick your own skills and feats, and none of the really fun feats are even implemented.) Still, the parts of the game that take place on the surface are gorgeous in a technically uninspired kind of way, and the designs on the monsters and effects are solidly handsome and fun to look at. The big downside of the game is that big parts of it are just a dungeon crawl. There's a lot of very frank discussion abuot the merits of this game on the forums page (link above) which you might read before forking over fifty bucks.
One game that has seen surprisingly little hype is a Diablo clone called Throne of Darkness. The game, while once again not a technical breakthrough in the graphics department, is just beautiful. Really, the graphics are art. They've done something so that everything looks like it was drawn with those ink brushes - it looks like those highly detailed japanese landscape paintings, except unfortunately for the grass which is ugly and over-detailed like in Diablo (ah well). Unfortunately, the game play is just diablo. In fact, it is exactly diablo; Sierra has some kind of deal to copy the engine (I forget where I read this.) You get four guys at once, but the only summonings suck.
Finally, if you don't want to spend money, cosmic encounter online (which I tried to shamelessly promote as a Slashdot story, but it was rejected) is in development, and you can play as several races for free. No flares yet, but still.
Sam
I have to say, I can't see how it makes a cost effective alternative to buses.
The NYtimes article which is linked to suggests that corporate campuses are going to somehow use these things to increase corporate mobility.
It seems to me it would be cheaper (and faster, and less risky; what if people hate them?) to have drivers on call with cell phones, if your corporate campus really is big enough to justify this kind of outlay. Also, the thing looks unpleasantly bulky and difficult to store.
Finally, at 12 miles an hour I fail to see how (other than failing to improve your health) these, admittedly neat, toys can compete with bicycles for today's cash strapped (oh, I'm so funny) IT firm (nyuck nyuck) which is clearly there target audience.
Still, if you've got the money and are having trouble recruiting - hell of a perk.
Or am I misunderstanding what's actually going on. Are they simply doing things like creating human hearts in monkeys and the like? As with the tobacco plants we rigged up to create hemoglobin or insulin or whatever? I don't really see a problem with that, I guess.
Yes, that's pretty much what they're doing.
This is a problem that I first saw raised in a shadowrun sourcebook (and yes, I really am a biologist, but that's still the first place I saw it mentioned): you can't grow an organ in isolation. It just doesn't work that way.
Before I even start, let me suggest some background reading:
why transplants are rejected and what genes actually are and a random example of what alternative technologies exist.
Both of the first two are good introductions for an intelligent layman, although they include a lot of info tangential to this discussion.
Finally, scads more info on the general state of this sort of research in japan, if that's what interests people, can be found here.
So, you can do one of several things if you want to produce organs for use in humans:
1) You can grow up an entire human (possibly with the gray matter destroyed, in order to be "humane") and then harvest it for the organs you want. This is the route of choice in the awful future of Shadowrun.
2) You can try and grow an organ in isolation in some kind of synthetic nutrient bath. Long story short: only works for skin or bone, move along.
3) You can genetically modify an animal so that it has organs that humans won't reject. This animal is "part human" in a more real sense than option 4 (which is what the japanese are proposing) because, basically by definition, it has human DNA in every single cell in it's body, so that the organ you want to donate to a human will produce proteins that cause your recipient to think that it's part of his own body.
4) The Japanese proposition. In order to generate the environment which will cause a single human cell to become a human heart, you implant that cell into a babboon, in such a place and in such a way that it will grow into a heart. In this case, you're basically using the baboon as the "nutrient bath" from option 2. There are a whole host of technical hurdles (of course) but I wholeheartedly agree with the previous poster. This is actually less "bothersome" than option 3, and if there's a chance it will work, go for it.
Okay, all of the cool sci fi babble aside, there are a couple of reasons that it might be very difficult to make this - head computers - work.
Firstly, you need space to put the head computer. Dishing out even a thimble full of gray matter has consequences we understand but-poorly; while it's been done in some people who seem okay, there are forms of cognitive damage that are subtle enough (on the verge of what we can objectively detect) that I wouldn't rule out (possibly very subjective) damage from making space for the thing. Hollowing out a section of the skull has it's own associated problems.
There's a big problem with inflammation. A significant number of people are going to be very allergic to whatever material you make your components out of! Low level brain inflammation is very, very bad, in the long run. If there's a "datajack" (an external wire-port for headware from Shadowrun) bacteria are going to try and crawl up it (my now deceased hydrocephallic elder brother needed a procedure called a Shunt, a tube, to drain his brain of fluid. It caused a number of very nasty CNS infections, and it was very very carefully monitered.) These bacteria, even if they never cause full blown CNS gangrene, which is going to happen in some small percentage of.. er.. patients (cyborgs?) are going to further aggravate your inflammation problem, which is a chronic disorder associated with significant reductions in life expectancy and, shudder, organ failure. If there's a 0.01% chance that this toy is going to turn you into a vegetable in 20 years, how many people do you think will go for it?
The surgical procedure to install the things cannot, for example, kill the nerve cell you're trying to plant electrodes on 0.01% of the time, either.
Given all of this, would you want to be the first person this toy was tested on? Given that there's no medical need for the process generally (I can see efforts made to use this to "repair" the mentally retarded) how would you justify the experimental form of the procedure to the AMA?
Finally, in order for these toys to be better than typing-with-electrodes-in-your-muscles, which is a cute trick but not worth the risks I've outlined above, they have to be able to interface with and understand your thoughts, memories, senses or emotions etc., at least on some rudimentary level. In order to do that, we need not-just-one but several major advances in neurobiology. Okay, we now know how to moniter input from and give input to a biological nerve cell - this was always the little technological hurdle in making this sort of toy - the highjump is in which of your billions of nerve cells we attach it to, and why. Since it isn't even going to be the same in every person, not precisely, this is a doubly tall order.
I wouldn't hold your breath.
They don't like the Linux Chinese language support. None of the Linux boxes in the lab have chinese installed on them, in any case.
I don't know exactly what they find wrong with it, but Chinese readers who don't use Linux should take a look here; which btw is actually hosted from here and then give comments to people on sourceforge who will, given the attention this is getting, help to develop tools that better fit whatever people's needs are.
The Chinese language is very different from English and features that are hugely convenient for English users can seem irrelevant while things that it would never occur to English users to want, or which are downright inconvenient, are very helpful when you're typing Chinese. This is a situation where Linux needs.... marketing (dum dum dum) and in a terrible way.
I will take a deep breath and I will not flame. Previous posters have covered his penny of philosophy well enough, however:
the reality is that a large minority in their country is made up of radical Wahabi muslims who are fomenting rebellion in Saudi Arabia (and it's not a nice democratic government they want to form, I assure you). These people are partially responsible for the spread of fundamentalist Wahabi-style Islam around the Islamic world. Watch the PBS Frontline documentary that aired on Friday if you can find it showing again - it gave some fabulous insights into this process.
A little historical background is called for here. Firstly, the Saud royal family are, themselves, Wahabis. The Wahabi sect is the Saud royal family's primary source of *support*, and while some Wahabis are fomenting rebellion, most of them are carrying out the oppression that keeps this dictatorship in place.
Like Saddam Hussein in Iraq, these Wahabis, who are indeed the source of most Middle Eastern islamic terrorism, are there because we put them there when the region was taken from the Ottomans after WWI. We've supported them since then because, for obvious reasons, any pro democracy types in Saudi Arabia are staunchly opposed to what we regard as our foreign interests - i.e. robbing the middle east of it's oil wealth. Historically, this combination drove them into the Soviet camp, causing us to support the Saud royal family with even more vigor. So - is all of this islamic terrorism the result of our own (Americas) greed, stupidity and contempt for human life in Afghanistan and elsewhere? Yes, it is!
Okay, I'm a molecular biologist, IAMNAL, but under more traditional copyright law (the kind where individual people have rights, but I digress) if you fail to "defend" your copyright/patent/trademark, it, and I'm aware this varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, becomes void. There are many excellent reasons for this sort of rule and I've always assumed that ICANN's rules included it somehow.... do they? Those of us with legal aptitude can peruse them at www.icann.org, of course.
As a matter of civic.. er... communal pride, this cannot be tolerated.
To quote ICANN's own website:
Decisions under the Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy are subject to challenge by court action. The long list of their outrageous abuses of power can, still, be found here although the text of this particular decision isn't on that page yet, it's back, as I'm sure someone else has posted and I just missed it here.
So, we collect some money and make some phone calls to the ACLU and bring ICANN to court. This is a surrealistic violation of ICANN's own charter, not to mention of our sensibilities, and even if we lose (which we probably will) we should take it to court to generate bad press for them.
Try going here.
you get a link to Amazon, trying to sell you books!
If I posted a criticism on www.harrypottersux.com or www.harrypottersucks.com (both of which are allready taken and under construction, btw) that would be bad and naughty, but Amazon has completely derailed this address and as far as I can tell (from Icanns website) no-one has raised a peep.
"curing cancer" is fodder for the masses, so to speak. It gets peoples attention, and those not familiar with molecular biology can understand that better than a diatribe on why they should help model proteins.
Oh, come on. This is supposed to be a geek/technical forum; people should understand the nature of the thing their commiting resources too (I say again) before they commit them. Geeks, smart people (ideally) will read biology related posts to get educated on the subject, not to get motivated or hyped up.
Rather than say "curing cancer," say "rapidly develop medicines to target newly discovered proteins in newly discovered or recently discovered diseases - and rapidly develop replacement medicines (antibiotics) as old ones become ineffective."
That's much more accurate and certainly not above the level of an intelligent slashdot reader - and if the script kiddies can't decipher it with their m4d ski11z, well, screw 'em (the brats.)
curing cancer with your spare CPU cycles!!!
While structural methods certainly have application in cancer treatment, the link is indirect, at best. It is HIV treatment where the really stunning successes for applied structure studies have been made (not a rigorous scientific judgement, of course.)
Before you go and commit your (precious, after all you could give it to Kazaa) bandwidth and CPU cycles to some project, you should take a critical look at how successful it really is, aside from how wonderful any potential successes might be. Certainly, if there were alien transmissions out there (hah) SETI would be, quite frankly, more important than this, and I work in proteomics.
Anyway, check out CASP4 (Critical Assessment of techniques for Structure Prediction, the one that ended Sep of last year) and make your own judgements about how feasable these techniques really are, and about the successes of the stanford team in particular.
Okay, in addition to being unable to descramble cable transmissions (any of you hardcore criminal hacker types write apps for Windows ME? Didn't think so) the program that ATI packages with their video cards failed to generate a neat little .mpeg file of that last tick episode for me to watch while I was wasting time at a faculty research presentation.
<punchline>
So, I'm so sick of this program that I'm through with it. I don't need a Ph.D. that badly.
</punchline explanation="program meaning the PhD program I'm in not the program that runs my ATI card. Get it?">
The RIAA doesn't realize that every time they go after someone, it just increases the visibility of file sharing and gets more people involved.
Actually, the RIAA is learning. In the case of this last suit, they've got the original development company (somewhere in northern europe... iceland? belgium?) which created the software that kazaa (I think the company that's helping in the suit *is* kazaa, actually) and MCM use. The company that developed the software, as far as I can tell, is cooperating with the RIAA in order to ditch the deals they've allready signed and sign a new, presumably more lucrative one, with the RIAA - but not shut down the service, just switch it to fee-based (like napster) with their subscriber base intact.
That said, eDonkey2000 has the best technology, but it has no user base so I use Kazaa instead. Hell yeah it'll clear the 2 million mark. I have two kazaa accounts (one here at work and one at home) going, sometimes simultaneously.
And I'm a crazy civil libertarian.
All of these points have been raised the last four or five times this discussion has come up, but:
1. We allready have them.
2. You need to be able to postively identify people.
3. Questionable identification is more of a problem for our privacy than positive information.
4. It's the stockpiling of information on the part of big whatever that needs to be curtailed - not their ability to verify the information that they are allowed to stockpile by having a centralised system for handling IDs.
Who you are, where you live and where you work are all perfectly reasonable things for the government to know! You give this info to the government and the government gives you a card. Very reasonable. The government *has* to be able to know these things in order to carry out the minimal functions of the state, and the only rational reason for someone not to want the government to know these things about them is that they're a criminal. End of story.
That said, Oracle and Sun are big democratic contributors - in spite of Sun's CEO's (what's his name, the thin guy in the hat) claims to be some kind of jesse venturite or something. Unless the Republicans can find someone on their end of the ideological "spectrum" (with rightists and centrists as it's two "extremes") to spearhead the thing, it's going to go nowhere. So, I wouldn't be surprised if some little known tech firm in Austin (probably owned by Enron) comes up with a proposal that everyone on team W thinks is great.
They mocked my research! But I'll show them, I'll show them all! Hordes of highly trained special kitty operatives will spring from my underground base and bring the world to it's knees! Bwah hah hah hah!
I would've gotten away with it, if not for you kids!
I wonder if you could genetically engineer a form of anthrax that didn't kill the cat but did kill people and was released in the cats dander (where it could nonlethaly infect other cats).
How about the NSA? Sure, the NSA makes mistakes, but it never tries to sick killer felines on people, and none of it's agents collect human ears. More amusing stories of CIA stupidity and brutality can be found here. Not to mention the big brutal stupidity of the CIAs unconscionable behavior in, you guessed it, Afghanistan.
bacteria aren't capable of turning the world into gray goo
Oh, I don't know about that. While I agree that one strain of bacteria couldn't live everywhere and turn everything into gray goo, I wouldn't discount our capacity to destroy the planet with bacteria, three or four strains of them.
Certainly, it would be difficult. Your world destroying bacteria would, among other things, need both massive, highly divergent redundancy in all cellular systems (to provide resistance to antibiotics and viability under diverse chemical and physical conditions) *and* have a generation time of no more than twenty minutes (less than that if we assume that other members of the human race are going to try and stop it) *and* have an unthinkably broad sweet of metabolic enzymes (depending on how much of "everything" you want to turn into goo) and, finally, have a complex, multiply redundant (again) and rapidly acting regulatory system to keep all of these features working at the same time.
Is this a tall order? Yes. Do I think we'll have enough of an understanding of proteomics (the relationship between sequence and function of a protein) to do this by the end of the century? Probably not! By the end of the next century? Yes, I think we will.
More to the point, we have the technology (although it would be hard) to wipe out a significant chunk of the entire human population. A bacteria which, quite simply:
a) exposed no human antigens on it's coat
b) survived endocytosis (being eaten) and continued to replicate inside immune cells (HIV is a *virus*, not a bacteria, but this property is still analogous)
c) was resistant to all presently used antibiotics
d) secreted itself into muscus and saliva before symptoms appeared
There are bacteria that do each of those things. Getting all of those features into one bacterium would be difficult, but it doesn't require any fundamental advance in understanding over what we have now; it's a lot more realistic, as a worry, than a horde of microscopic self replicating Daleks. Just because one apocalyptic future is frankly absurd doesn't mean that our scientific advances in other areas don't allow us to destroy ourselves.
Code while you can, for tomorrow you may die.
Source code is, however, much prefered if English isin't known by one of the two parties in the exchange. Imagine talking to Microsoft tech support lackies who only spoke Bushman. :)
:- works_for (X,Microsoft).
Are you implying that microsoft tech support lackies can code?!
? - can (Microsoft_employees, Code)
Personally, as a form of personal expression I like prolog.
rocks (This_ruling).
cannot (X,Code)
In fact, as a form of Satire, expressing yourself in Code trumps copyright! Are you all familiar with the guys in the day who made a snow white+the seven dwarfs gangbang poster and were sued by Disney? They won.
Moderation question - why is no post every funny and insightful?
Firstly, Jon, many to most of the protesters, intellectual elites etc. involved in the anti-globalization movement are "reformed" socialists. Or, not so reformed, as the case may be. They're not going to address questions of who is going to "pay" for things, and how corporations are going to behave in their world order, because such things exist in a thought space which they don't occupy. When they say anti-globalization, what they *really* mean is internationalisation, from the far flung remote left fringe of the political spectrum. Not all of the people in the anti-globalization movement think this way, but the smart ones, the ones inclined to address hypothetical economic questions, are red as lenin.
The last time we had a really major downturn in the business cycle (I think for various reasons, primarily the fundamental self interest and lack of foresight on the part of W's handlers, that this one is going to be major) we (partially) averted the destruction of western, liberal, capitalist society through a significant redistribution of wealth and class power. I'm sure you're familiar with the new deal, the rise of unions, etc.
The real problem with the globalization of world capital is that it is heavily geared toward preventing this sort of correction from happening. Actual rightists are endangering, and not in an eventual sense, the survival of capitalism by stripping it of any ability to exert social conscience.
The reason that the American working class is still happy with their dwindling share of economic resources is not because they're numbed by television. It is because, in historial terms, they have it really good. The ratio of CEO pay to laborers pay is, yes, criminal. However, the american working class (by an large) have TVs and VCRs and shelter and plenty to eat; as long as that's the case they aren't going to be truly riled by how many Rolls Royces Bill Gates owns.
The only way for capitalism to survive is to enforce such a social contract, at the bare minimum, for the three fifths of the world's people who don't presently benefit from it.
While I agree that globalization promises many wonderful things, if we cannot have it on any terms that don't destroy the many, more wonderful and more vital, things which the mixed economics of the 20th Century have achieved; and could achieve in under developed countries if we exported it instead of a globalised corporate state, we have to put the brakes on.
This is a little off topic, but there's some high end (heavy computation) science/research related software (WinBUGS, bayesian inference using Gibbs sampling, is a fine example) which is only supported in windows versions (although I don't know of an instance where no Unix version exists.)
Admittedly, there's a lot more high end research software which only runs on some particular flavor of Unix.
The best legal defense against this is to find a legitimate academic use for p2p. Like the "high press", "high academia" has, although I know this is not justified, a priveleged place in the courts. So, if I'm using a totally open p2p filesharing network to share raw data - which is one of the things that I want to do - and incidentally someone else on the same network is sharing Metallica, then someone who's right to free speech actually counts (a scientist at a respected institution) is being threatened if they try to shut the network down.
Incidentally, one of the biggest problems in meta-analysis of scientific results, the filecabinet full of nulls, could be dealt with through p2p. In general, it is harder to publish null results than it is to publish positive results, so, if you do meta-analysis on many small published studies, the result is skewed away from null. If everyone makes their raw data available on a filesharing network - or a random subset of people inclined to share it not related to who got positive results - this problem goes away.
It resurrects the problem of namespaces mentioned in the article in a big way! When the results of science become politically important (say, tobacco research, health effects of PCPs) you have to worry about people with an interest in the topic releasing false data (this is allready a problem, but we know who they are). You also have to know who someone is because you have to be able to go to them and ask how to verify their results, even unpublished ones, and so on.
Actually, the thing that's most likely to impress them is "self regulation." If the open source community produces it's own, open source, rights management software, which is absurd on the face of it but I'll get back to that, we can say "see, no need for legislation, we're being responsible and doing it ourselves, Senator."
Of course, such software is never going to prevent piracy (someone suggested and ifndef with a strong warning not to change it - do it!) - but the RIAA/MPAA can not make "logical arguments." As soon as logical arguments start being made, their whole deal falls apart. They're waging a legislative war with nonsense and half-truths and we should return in kind. I want my children to grow up in a world more surreal than the one we live in, don't you?
When the Gov't is your employer it acts as a company and not government.
Actually, that's not quite true. It's one of the reasons that right-wingers love subcontractors.
All of the provisions of the bill of rights (for example, equal protection under the law regardless of race) apply uniformly to any government action - including employment. They also (this is a sticky area) may or may not apply to government subcontractors, depending on whether or not that subcontractor is acting as an agent of state authority.
The equal rights act effectively extends that particular clause of the constitution to affect private employers, but the US government would be affected anyway, since the things that authorise the government to have employees are laws, and those laws must be applied equally to everyone.
That's somewhat academic, but what *isn't* academic is that there are a number of laws regarding labor relations that effect only government employees.
As it so happens, few of them (for obvious reasons) interfere with the government taking security precautions against its own employees.
So, yeah, the original poster can like it or lump it, even though government employer is subject to all the restrictions government is always subject to, I'm sure there's precedent that the search and seizure restriction doesn't apply to government employees going to and from work.
Of course, I am assuming that anyone reading this thinks filesharing is great and that Disney is evil; this is true for only about 95% of the Slashdot readership, I'm sure :).
I wouldn't worry about this sort of propoganda actually affecting children's attitudes. It's simply too clumsy (and obvious and contrived.) Children, while many people who make children's programming don't realise this, are not stupid. They can spot something phony and manipulative(which you have to admit that this is, even if you agree that filesharing is wrong) from a mile away.
It's about as likely to drive the next generation of children away from filesharing as all those Captain Planet cartoons where to make people environmentalists. Less likely, since Captain Planet was less obviously hokey.
He's 28 and he hasn't retired yet. Loser.