As a small addendum to that excellent explanation, I have to ask - how many freaking times do we have to go over this? I mean, in every single article about hard drives or networks, there's a dozen identical threads about this. Every time.
How hard is this? Hard drives and network speeds are always measured in actual base 10 SI units. Always have been, always will be. Always.
Get over it already!
And no one's trying to mislead you - all HD packaging always specifies that "1 GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes", just for smart-asses like you.
Well this is ironic, I'm usually the first to object to the government forcing people to do anything, but your little rant made me think that these "mandatory" (they are not mandatory in the sense that you seem to imply) vaccinations might be a good thing.
Seriously, reread your post - do you seriously think you are in any kind of position to "evaluate the info" here?
Incidentally, if someone has tried to vaccinate you with mercury (against what, mercury poisoning?), I submit that that person does not know what they are doing.
For example, radiation to cure cancer actually increases the probability of some other cancers, introduces problems in progenies (or the possibility thereof).
What's your point? Treatments like radiation and chemotherapy are used on patients with aggressive, malignant tumors. They work on the principle that since tumor cells are dividing rapidly, they are more susceptible to things like radiation and toxins than normal tissue (notice the "more"). So, no, it's not an ideal treatment, but if it increases your slim chance of survival, concerns about "probability" of future cancers probably seem secondary.
Anyway, what does any of that have to do with vaccination? Are you worried that some people will start having radiation therapy prophylactically? I assure you, that's entirely impossible to do.
I say you go get vaccinated against all the cancers and STDs and whatever else is out there and vaccinations are available for TODAY.
What the hell is a cancer vaccine? If some company develops that, they are going to be filthy rich indeed. Now, a vaccine against a virus that may cause cancer, is a bit different.
The only (popular) STDs that vaccines are available for are Hep B (and not C) and HPV. A fair number of people get vaccinated against Hep A/B, and the current hoopla is about HPV.
"This baby is only six months old and she already has one head and two arms; if these trends continue, she'll have 4 heads and 8 arms by the time she's two!"
So, they gave each base-pair a color? What on earth is the point? 98% of that sequence doesn't do anything. And why is a virtually random sequence of pixels of 4 different colors "beautiful"?
I can understand if they took two different genomes from the same species and did some kind of comparison: different colors for matches, indels, translocations, silent/synonymous/non-synonymous SNPs, etc. Or translated the sequence and colored by hydrophobicity/charge/polarity/whatever. Or showed haplotype conservation between species.
At least that would tell you something, this is just a bunch of pixels with no meaning. A vaguely similar thing I've done was to plot plot SNP density (as color intensity) over the genome - but that was for a specific project, I didn't realize such things are "new visions".
This kind of reminds me of property taxes, where someone walks up to your house, says "I reckons she's worth about this much, so you pay me that much", despite the fact that your house is earning you no income and will be taxed anyway when sold or inherited. It doesn't make much sense.
Property tax is not an income tax, so it's irrelevant what kind of income you can derive from your house. The idea is that your local government needs money to do it's thing.
Now, how property taxes are determined is almost completely arbitrary, that I'll agree with.
I was talking about the double strandiness, to me there seems to be enough allele variation for it to be more than mere "redundancy". But yeah, it depends on how you look at it.
Actually, most, if not all, of the mutations in DNA is in the coded section (as opposed to the uncoded section, officially know as "junk"), which makes up about 1/3 of the DNA strand. Thus if we learn to encode data on the "junk" part, it might survive longer.
I'm not following. Mutations happen completely at random, the difference is that there will be selective pressure on the ones in the coding regions (3-5% of the genome, if you are generous), whereas the rest of them do nothing and just float in and out. Most of the time the (coding) mutations will be detrimental, so they are going to be selected against, which is why the coding regions are so highly conserved (makes sense, really).
Are you sure they don't mean '80 / 8 = 10' - an estimate for average English word length? Pretty hight though, I think it's usually about 6 (counting the space, even).
DNA replication has fault tolerance, DNA itself corrupts all the time. Hell, you store it twice in every cell and still have all these problems with integrity (of course that's a large part of what DNA is for, but for computer systems that part is irrelevant).
I just can't see biological systems ever achieving the kind of consistency we expect from computers. Do we really want to go to the good old days of running a computation several times and taking the average result as the answer?
I just asked around and no one here seems to think that your assumption is reasonable.
They, the children - blasted personal pronouns.
Actually, I don't know where you live, but even the other assumption would hold a fair amount of the time in my experience; but I guess that would vary a lot more.
Slashdot Mirror
As a small addendum to that excellent explanation, I have to ask - how many freaking times do we have to go over this? I mean, in every single article about hard drives or networks, there's a dozen identical threads about this. Every time.
How hard is this? Hard drives and network speeds are always measured in actual base 10 SI units. Always have been, always will be. Always.
Get over it already!
And no one's trying to mislead you - all HD packaging always specifies that "1 GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes", just for smart-asses like you.
Do you really think they expect to sell 100's of billions of copies of vista in the next year or so?
Well, have you seen Aero? It looks fantastic!
Maybe disinfest?
Surely the opposite of "insect" is "desect"?
Tell who?
What year is it?
and vaccines typically never need booster shots due to the way vaccines work
Eh, what now?
9. Gardasil is only for women.
So, as a man, what can I do to decrease my chances of getting cervical cancer?
Well this is ironic, I'm usually the first to object to the government forcing people to do anything, but your little rant made me think that these "mandatory" (they are not mandatory in the sense that you seem to imply) vaccinations might be a good thing.
Seriously, reread your post - do you seriously think you are in any kind of position to "evaluate the info" here?
Incidentally, if someone has tried to vaccinate you with mercury (against what, mercury poisoning?), I submit that that person does not know what they are doing.
For example, radiation to cure cancer actually increases the probability of some other cancers, introduces problems in progenies (or the possibility thereof).
What's your point? Treatments like radiation and chemotherapy are used on patients with aggressive, malignant tumors. They work on the principle that since tumor cells are dividing rapidly, they are more susceptible to things like radiation and toxins than normal tissue (notice the "more"). So, no, it's not an ideal treatment, but if it increases your slim chance of survival, concerns about "probability" of future cancers probably seem secondary.
Anyway, what does any of that have to do with vaccination? Are you worried that some people will start having radiation therapy prophylactically? I assure you, that's entirely impossible to do.
I say you go get vaccinated against all the cancers and STDs and whatever else is out there and vaccinations are available for TODAY.
What the hell is a cancer vaccine? If some company develops that, they are going to be filthy rich indeed. Now, a vaccine against a virus that may cause cancer, is a bit different.
The only (popular) STDs that vaccines are available for are Hep B (and not C) and HPV. A fair number of people get vaccinated against Hep A/B, and the current hoopla is about HPV.
I don't think you understand how vaccines work.
Yeah, but then it won't be so unexpected since Turing himself is gay.
He is? What a coincidence that I made that joke entirely by accident!
(btw, I'm pretty sure he's dead)
And, if we're lucky, maybe at some point they can dedge up a Native American with some mediocre qualifications too.
Yeah, next thing you know they'll be giving it to some gay guy.
If that sort of behavior catches on, it will make Google very unhappy, because the role of the search engine will decrease.
Google is a lot better at searching Wikipedia than Wikipedia is.
"This baby is only six months old and she already has one head and two arms; if these trends continue, she'll have 4 heads and 8 arms by the time she's two!"
Why is a comment from someone who hasn't even used the operating system themselves marked insightful?
Because he's talking about the perception of Vista among potential users, not its technical merits? Just a thought.
So, they gave each base-pair a color? What on earth is the point? 98% of that sequence doesn't do anything. And why is a virtually random sequence of pixels of 4 different colors "beautiful"?
I can understand if they took two different genomes from the same species and did some kind of comparison: different colors for matches, indels, translocations, silent/synonymous/non-synonymous SNPs, etc. Or translated the sequence and colored by hydrophobicity/charge/polarity/whatever. Or showed haplotype conservation between species.
At least that would tell you something, this is just a bunch of pixels with no meaning. A vaguely similar thing I've done was to plot plot SNP density (as color intensity) over the genome - but that was for a specific project, I didn't realize such things are "new visions".
There are definitely prettier visualizations out there too: http://acg.media.mit.edu/people/fry/genomevalence
Even this is a lot more informative (I think www.visualcomplexity.com was mentioned on slashdot a couple of years ago).
This is merely a Demon of the First Kind - wake me up when they've built a Demon of the Second Kind, that's much more difficult.
Also, that has got to be the stupidest headline slashdot ever carried. What's next, "Chinese Room built, undergoing testing"?
although French, being a roman language, is indeed similar to Latin
Latin is the only Roman language, you are thinking of Romance language.
This kind of reminds me of property taxes, where someone walks up to your house, says "I reckons she's worth about this much, so you pay me that much", despite the fact that your house is earning you no income and will be taxed anyway when sold or inherited. It doesn't make much sense.
Property tax is not an income tax, so it's irrelevant what kind of income you can derive from your house. The idea is that your local government needs money to do it's thing.
Now, how property taxes are determined is almost completely arbitrary, that I'll agree with.
I was talking about the double strandiness, to me there seems to be enough allele variation for it to be more than mere "redundancy". But yeah, it depends on how you look at it.
Actually, most, if not all, of the mutations in DNA is in the coded section (as opposed to the uncoded section, officially know as "junk"), which makes up about 1/3 of the DNA strand. Thus if we learn to encode data on the "junk" part, it might survive longer.
I'm not following. Mutations happen completely at random, the difference is that there will be selective pressure on the ones in the coding regions (3-5% of the genome, if you are generous), whereas the rest of them do nothing and just float in and out. Most of the time the (coding) mutations will be detrimental, so they are going to be selected against, which is why the coding regions are so highly conserved (makes sense, really).
You know, I've been to Tallinn; I'm not going to be getting jealous of this list just yet.
Why not just say "densest"? Because you could say "having highest densiness" instead.
I've never heard of an 80-bit word architecture.
Are you sure they don't mean '80 / 8 = 10' - an estimate for average English word length? Pretty hight though, I think it's usually about 6 (counting the space, even).
DNA replication has fault tolerance, DNA itself corrupts all the time. Hell, you store it twice in every cell and still have all these problems with integrity (of course that's a large part of what DNA is for, but for computer systems that part is irrelevant).
I just can't see biological systems ever achieving the kind of consistency we expect from computers. Do we really want to go to the good old days of running a computation several times and taking the average result as the answer?
I just asked around and no one here seems to think that your assumption is reasonable.
They, the children - blasted personal pronouns.
Actually, I don't know where you live, but even the other assumption would hold a fair amount of the time in my experience; but I guess that would vary a lot more.