I'd hate to know how you'd feel if you were French and actually had to live with the knowledge that not only did your country surrender to Germany without a fight...
At least I could seek comfort in the knowledge that the US, in all its world-dominating glory, wouldn't even exist if it wasn't for my country. (plus, can you really expect France to take care of the Germans every time?)
BTW, if your country was invaded, you would be cowering behind those "jingoist jerks", you hypocrite.
Somehow I reeally doubt it, for some crazy reason the "jingoist jerks" are never the first ones to line up to grab a rifle and defend the country. Go figure.
Point is, constantly bragging about something that other people did 50 years ago gets tiresome pretty quickly (besides, I'm Russian, so let's not get into the whole "Who won WWII" thing:) ).
Um, what about all the discussions on anything related to biology or evolution (you know, the theory)? Those are pretty much the *definition* of one-sided.
It's a little hard to have a multi-sided discussion about the theory of evolution (as a whole), since there is currently no alternative theory for the "other side" to take. Specific aspects/new findings about the theory generate a lot of (often interesting) debate that is anything but one-sided.
This sounds like the prevailing misconception on Wikipedia that their NPOV policy dictates that all viewpoints that have ever been raised, including the most outlandish fringe theories, have equal weight and deserve equal time. That is simply not the case.
Basically, please remember that there are lands beyond your horizon.
So you are saying that there was one person that used it six years ago?
And why would you want a "learning language" that you will never use again? Niche languages that are good at specific tasks (Fortran, etc) are one thing, but Pascal is just an outdated procedural language - the only thing keeping it going at this point is nostalgia.
but as far as I know, the "spooky action at a distance" has a measurable effect and could very well be used to transmit information
It doesn't, and it can't. About half the posts in this thread explain why.
As for "speed", as far as I understand it, it's supposed to be instantaneous, so yeah, infinitely faster than light. Too bad you can't use it to transmit information.
This statistics supports with a P value of 0.07328 the hypothesis that the corrupted countries were more likely to vote for approval
Since when does a p-value of 0.07 reject the null hypothesis?
Also, I love preaching the correlation/causality mantra as much as anyone, but it seems a little superfluous here - does anyone really think that Transparency International's CPI actually caused those countries to vote in a certain way?
Dude, this is Slashdot, it doesn't have a ridiculous policy on "Forbidden Words", nor the ridiculous belief that replacing some letters with symbols somehow robs words of their meaning.
You take a huge complex chain, you decide that the sequence of base pairs in the chain is significant, but you decide that breaking this chain into two pieces is not significant?
The sequence is only significant for small, self-contained (more or less, that's one of those vague things) regions; you can generally rearrange them without incident, it's only if the break happens to land on an important region that you are in trouble.
If it's so insignificant then why is it (usually) replicated so consistently? If a chromosome just randomly breaks somewhere, will a centromere just automagically form in the center of the two pieces so that they can replicate themselves the next time the cell decides to divide?
Sure it's maintained for a specific species, part of it probably is conservation and part is probably that that's just how the replication mechanism works. The point was that between species essentially the same chunks of DNA are rearranged into completely different chromosomes, looking at their number gives you no information; that's what I meant by "meaningless". How centromeres get formed is a fun question, that I don't know (for many species they aren't at the center, btw).
We know that trivial little things like deleting the wrong portion of a chromosome can have pretty big effects (e.g. mental retardation, other physical changes too) so it seems that there's more than random breakage to account for.
I am not sure what you mean. Deleting a portion of a chromosome obviously deletes the genes contained there and can lead to severe effects, that's pretty self-explanatory. So?
re: bold moves - people already think they're entitled to create artificial life, that seems pretty bold. I think it's smarter to understand more about the life that already exists, before going off and creating something totally new...
So you are saying it's more responsible to create a human embryo with a severely compromised genome and grow it to some unspecified stage of development (you want to observe phenotypic changes, so I'm guessing you'll need a pretty developed fetus), rather than creating a self-replicating bacterium with a minimum set of genes? There's a reason these types of experiments are done in yeast, worms, and flies. Also, you do realize it's not going to be "something totally new," but rather the common minimum functional set from the simplest organisms that's "packaged" artificially?
I think it would be interesting to take a person's stem cell and try to remove all the "junk DNA" from the nucleus
Uh huh, and how exactly do you propose to do that? (also, doing this on a human seems like a pretty bold move)
People tend to throw around "junk DNA" without really specifying what they mean. For humans, we know that about 1.5% is coding, about 4% is highly conserved (so, probably very important) and we suspect that a fair amount more is involved in transcription regulation (there's been a lot of activity in that particular area recently), but we have a very faint idea of how much that would be. I saw a talk a few weeks ago where they claimed that nearly all non-coding DNA is involved in this function; that's not a widely held view, though.
It seems likely that since there are so few actual genes and they are so sensitive to mutation, then a highly redundant and more "flexible" mechanism for transcription regulation is one of the primary mechanisms for evolution.
So yeah, I am not sure where the popular perception that non-coding DNA is considered to do nothing comes from.
Oh, and as someone already pointed out, the number of chromosomes a particular organism has is completely meaningless (chickens have 78, some primitive plants have hundreds or even thousands).
Automatic type coercion is, in general, a good thing -- it removes clutter (in the form of unnecessary function calls).
Eh? Java is statically typed (well, for primitives, anyway), I'm not sure how you envisage automatic coercion here. And not requiring parentheses for method calls would make most Java code unreadable (and probably unparseable).
Java is just not a concise language, you must be thinking of something else.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd hate to know how you'd feel if you were French and actually had to live with the knowledge that not only did your country surrender to Germany without a fight...
:) ).
At least I could seek comfort in the knowledge that the US, in all its world-dominating glory, wouldn't even exist if it wasn't for my country. (plus, can you really expect France to take care of the Germans every time?)
BTW, if your country was invaded, you would be cowering behind those "jingoist jerks", you hypocrite.
Somehow I reeally doubt it, for some crazy reason the "jingoist jerks" are never the first ones to line up to grab a rifle and defend the country. Go figure.
Point is, constantly bragging about something that other people did 50 years ago gets tiresome pretty quickly (besides, I'm Russian, so let's not get into the whole "Who won WWII" thing
Um, what about all the discussions on anything related to biology or evolution (you know, the theory)? Those are pretty much the *definition* of one-sided.
It's a little hard to have a multi-sided discussion about the theory of evolution (as a whole), since there is currently no alternative theory for the "other side" to take. Specific aspects/new findings about the theory generate a lot of (often interesting) debate that is anything but one-sided.
This sounds like the prevailing misconception on Wikipedia that their NPOV policy dictates that all viewpoints that have ever been raised, including the most outlandish fringe theories, have equal weight and deserve equal time. That is simply not the case.
Basically, please remember that there are lands beyond your horizon.
So you are saying that there was one person that used it six years ago?
And why would you want a "learning language" that you will never use again? Niche languages that are good at specific tasks (Fortran, etc) are one thing, but Pascal is just an outdated procedural language - the only thing keeping it going at this point is nostalgia.
You can ask for the source, but you cannot bring them to court.
Hmm, looks to me like he asked them for the source and did not bring them to court. What's the problem?
You start with random recording schedules and breed them off one another based on user provided success metrics.
The programming execs are way ahead of you on this one: most networks already implement the first part of that algorithm.
I mean, come on, there actually were some words in that summary that were not "Web 2.0"!
How do you expect to get anywhere with this emerging technology if only a quarter of the words in your text are "Web 2.0"?
but as far as I know, the "spooky action at a distance" has a measurable effect and could very well be used to transmit information
It doesn't, and it can't. About half the posts in this thread explain why.
As for "speed", as far as I understand it, it's supposed to be instantaneous, so yeah, infinitely faster than light. Too bad you can't use it to transmit information.
I don't get it...
I believe that's grounds for a permanent ban from Slashdot...
My point is, there are ways you can get that rebate without incurring any cost to you.
Unless you count time and dignity.
(Oddly enough, I place both of those above a nigh-free CDR spindle)
Okay, but the Xenomorphs of the Alien series of movies weren't eels.
That is the single stupidest thing I've read today (though it's still pretty early).
virtual conferences in (please don't laugh) Second Life.
I'm sorry, but it's just not possible to accommodate your request there.
Who the hell vacations in the US, anyway?
We are known for the abundance of wealth, belligerence, and fat people, not so much things to see and nice places to relax.
This statistics supports with a P value of 0.07328 the hypothesis that the corrupted countries were more likely to vote for approval
Since when does a p-value of 0.07 reject the null hypothesis?
Also, I love preaching the correlation/causality mantra as much as anyone, but it seems a little superfluous here - does anyone really think that Transparency International's CPI actually caused those countries to vote in a certain way?
Dude, this is Slashdot, it doesn't have a ridiculous policy on "Forbidden Words", nor the ridiculous belief that replacing some letters with symbols somehow robs words of their meaning.
Say it with me: the group is called "Fuck Islam".
You know, fuck whom? Fuck web designers that think that a) screwing with your cursor is acceptable, and b) a cross-hair is a good cursor for links.
(also fuck people with pointless blogs, but that's kind of a standing sentiment)
There's a difference between having a dominant religion and having a list of "officially recognized" ones.
Actually I am serious. Both of those incidents happened. Excuse me if I value my constitutional rights.
You seem to value your douchebaggery even more.
You take a huge complex chain, you decide that the sequence of base pairs in the chain is significant, but you decide that breaking this chain into two pieces is not significant?
The sequence is only significant for small, self-contained (more or less, that's one of those vague things) regions; you can generally rearrange them without incident, it's only if the break happens to land on an important region that you are in trouble.
If it's so insignificant then why is it (usually) replicated so consistently? If a chromosome just randomly breaks somewhere, will a centromere just automagically form in the center of the two pieces so that they can replicate themselves the next time the cell decides to divide?
Sure it's maintained for a specific species, part of it probably is conservation and part is probably that that's just how the replication mechanism works. The point was that between species essentially the same chunks of DNA are rearranged into completely different chromosomes, looking at their number gives you no information; that's what I meant by "meaningless". How centromeres get formed is a fun question, that I don't know (for many species they aren't at the center, btw).
We know that trivial little things like deleting the wrong portion of a chromosome can have pretty big effects (e.g. mental retardation, other physical changes too) so it seems that there's more than random breakage to account for.
I am not sure what you mean. Deleting a portion of a chromosome obviously deletes the genes contained there and can lead to severe effects, that's pretty self-explanatory. So?
re: bold moves - people already think they're entitled to create artificial life, that seems pretty bold. I think it's smarter to understand more about the life that already exists, before going off and creating something totally new...
So you are saying it's more responsible to create a human embryo with a severely compromised genome and grow it to some unspecified stage of development (you want to observe phenotypic changes, so I'm guessing you'll need a pretty developed fetus), rather than creating a self-replicating bacterium with a minimum set of genes? There's a reason these types of experiments are done in yeast, worms, and flies. Also, you do realize it's not going to be "something totally new," but rather the common minimum functional set from the simplest organisms that's "packaged" artificially?
I think it would be interesting to take a person's stem cell and try to remove all the "junk DNA" from the nucleus
Uh huh, and how exactly do you propose to do that? (also, doing this on a human seems like a pretty bold move)
People tend to throw around "junk DNA" without really specifying what they mean. For humans, we know that about 1.5% is coding, about 4% is highly conserved (so, probably very important) and we suspect that a fair amount more is involved in transcription regulation (there's been a lot of activity in that particular area recently), but we have a very faint idea of how much that would be. I saw a talk a few weeks ago where they claimed that nearly all non-coding DNA is involved in this function; that's not a widely held view, though.
It seems likely that since there are so few actual genes and they are so sensitive to mutation, then a highly redundant and more "flexible" mechanism for transcription regulation is one of the primary mechanisms for evolution.
So yeah, I am not sure where the popular perception that non-coding DNA is considered to do nothing comes from.
Oh, and as someone already pointed out, the number of chromosomes a particular organism has is completely meaningless (chickens have 78, some primitive plants have hundreds or even thousands).
Hieroglyphs.
"Hieroglyphic" is an adjective. Is that so hard?
Qualified Quail?
That could actually work, I think...
Jackass Jaguar
That one might cause confusion. Fitting though.
We do build a fair number of capitols, but I am not sure that trend really defines our society.
Man, it used to be that people didn't RTFA--now they don't even read past the title.
I didn't even finish reading the title, my response was "Hell yeah, Google 0wnz!"
Automatic type coercion is, in general, a good thing -- it removes clutter (in the form of unnecessary function calls).
Eh? Java is statically typed (well, for primitives, anyway), I'm not sure how you envisage automatic coercion here. And not requiring parentheses for method calls would make most Java code unreadable (and probably unparseable).
Java is just not a concise language, you must be thinking of something else.