> The tough thing about entering the compbio world, specifically in industry, is that truly engineering style gene programming type jobs (what the previous poster is alluding to) are few for now. I have a biotech degree from an engineering school and focused on compbio as my specialty.
Sure - but I'd say that puts you in the same position as the MIT hackers in the late '60s. If the field develops as I (expect/hope) it to, that's a very good place to be, both in terms of future career development and in terms of the potential to "learn new stuff" or "change the world", particularly if you're just about to enter university.
> Hard core soft-eng types may find a slower moving, less structured environment for pursuing their goals of writing the first biological computer than they envision.
I should also have clarified that I'm not convinced that "biological computers" (that is, Turing machines or massively-parallel non-deterministic problem-solving machines) are gonna be the Next Big Thing. (They might be, but I'm not yet convinced.)
I'm increasingly convinced, however, that going the other way - hacking DNA and running it as if it were code, should enable the production of gobs of useful genetically-modified organisms, which I think has a much higher probability of being the Next Big Thing. Think "build bugs that can generate vaccines" (already being done), "make a fish's skin able to do photosynthesis" (wacky idea off the top of my head to eliminate plankton from the food chain), or human-modding (like the guys who tried to cure CF by h4x0r1ng lung cells with viruses, although the hack didn't work.)
Those hacks were done using cut-and-paste techniques without a lot of real understanding about how DNA "code" really runs. Sorta like cargo-cult programming - you don't know what the code does, but it's close to what you wanna do, so you cut and paste the whole module at a time and see what it does. The kinds of hacks that could be done once we really know how DNA works, would make these pale in comparison. (I dunno, say, double the human brain size with upscaled intelligence, add huge eyeballs that can see in the infrared, or use the current eye and hack it to see UV, user-controllable meat/machine interfaces - graft silicon onto/into flesh for additional math sk1llz, engineer a set of symbiotic organisms to act as a second immune system, etc. etc. etc... and in short, make possible all that wacky sci-fi stuff that gives geeks hard-ons and bioethicists nightmares:-)
> I'm not flaming you here, but suppose that I would confront you with an assembler program where something that at one point was data was suddenly executed, but only after some repair algorithm in some other part of the program made some seemingly nonsensical changes to it?
Grok - the lack of distinction between code and data is something that one doesn't see much of now (compiled languages, sane practices), but I've seen stuff like that back in the day.
So in answer to your specific question, I'd say "OK, some self-modifying code. Cool hack!" if it were code, and "Whoa, evolution's cooler than I thought" when I hear of it being discovered in DNA:-)
(And nope, your comment wasn't taken as a flame - like I said, I went the CS route, and as a result, I have very little current bio-clue. Others on the thread have done a better job than I in linking "code" and "DNA". Much like the blind man and the elephant, I'm coming from a "code only" perspective and pretty much missing the boat when I try to talk about it (i.e. make common errors of fact when trying to highlight the isomorphisms between CS and bio). And biologists when I was a kid came from a "biology only" perspective and missed the boat (i.e. didn't see what are, to me, obvious isomorphisms).
Those with bio-clue and a coder's perspective can bring a lot to the party. (And y'all rock:)
> It's junk DNA not because we don't know what it does, but because it's never accessed at all.
Cool. I didn't know we had that level of ability when it came to profiling DNA code. (In fact, I almost exposed more of my biotech non-cluefulness by saying "It'd be way cool if someone wrote a DNA profiler, so that we knew what chunks of code were/weren't accessed during a typical organism's lifespan".
I retract my "Junk ain't necessarily junk" statement.
I also agree that the other interesting thing is "Well, it may never be expressed, but what would it do if it were" - I'm given to understand that we have some (unused) sequences in common with organisms hundreds of millions of years old, or older. Granted, running fish code in the human hardware platform is like running Apple ][ 6502 on a C-64; it'll crash pretty hard:) But it's neat to know that some of the code is still there, having been copied mostly-faithfully, over all these millenia.
> And perhaps the hottest issue of all: Is there anything
inherently wrong with pursuing this avenue? What may be
some of the consequences?
To hell the luddites. Hack the genome.
With apologies to Steven Levy:
1) Access to the genome, and anything which might teach you
something about the way life works, should be unlimited
and total. Always yield to the Hands-On Imperative.
2) All information should be free.
3) Mistrust authority- promote de-centralization.
4) Hackers should be judged by their Hacking, not bogus criteria such
as degrees, age, race, or position.
5) You can create art, beauty and even life by hacking DNA.
6) Genetic hacking can change your life for the better.
As a guy who cut his teeth disassembling 6502 and 6809 code way back in the day (we're talking old-school, run the disassembler and walk out with 100-200 pages of paper), I still get a laugh out of the idea that 99% of our genome is "junk DNA".
The first hour or two of disassembling was figuring out where the code was, and where the data was.
The next day or so of poring over those printouts were spent mapping out where the entry/exit points for subroutines were.
I got to the point where I could guess where game graphics were, just by looking for oddly repeating patterns in the "data" areas. (Yup, in binary, those 8-byte sequences make up the bitmaps for the characters "A", "B", "C"...")
"Oh, XX AA XX BB XX CC, somewhere near XXDD in memory space. Must be a list of pointers to something."
"Oh, XXAA, XXBB and XXCC all start with the same byte, and that byte is XXAA minus XXBB (or XXBB minus XXCC). Now I know how big each element in the structure is."
And so on. The first day or two of hacking would result in me figuring out about 10% of what the data was for.
The other 90% was the hard part, typically requiring running some coke, poking at the data, and running the code again to see what changed. "Maze wall moved here, then things crashed when I tried to walk through it."
Sure, 99% of our genome might be junk. There were plenty of areas of address space that contained "data" that was never accessed, even with the tight code written in the 8-bit days.
But when I found a string of bytes I didn't understand, the working assumption that usually went better for me was that "I don't know what this stuff does", not "these bytes are random".
I'll bet that 90% of the genome is never executed nor referenced as data. (Evolution's a messier programmer, and there's 4.5 billion years of cruft!) But I'll bet that a lot of that "junk" is just code we haven't reverse-engineered yet.
Ramblings over - to the poster, all of the ideas in this post are probably ancient history (and poorly-written at that - you can tell I have no bio background), but it's nice to see I'm not completely off my rocker.
I went the CS route because when they taught biology in high school, it was seen as preparation for "become a doctor". Nothing wrong with doctors, but I was interested in more interested in hacking and figured it would be a long time, if ever, before we could manipulate DNA the way I could manipulate bits on a machine. (I've been pleasantly surprised with the way things turned out, though!:)
CS grads are a dime a dozen in the job market; I like my job, but career-wise, the field's been played out. If you're about to go into college, and especially if you like to reverse-engineer stuff "because it's fun", get into bioinformatics, computational biology, and do your CS as a minor. At least, that's what I'd do if I were gonna start over.
> Does this mean we need an alternative fuel for an alternative fuel?
Uranium. It's basically heavily-reprocessed hydrogen, but it packs a lot more energy per unit volume, and there are no greenhouse gases or ozone-depletion effects.
Note that producing U from H2 is even less efficient than producing H2 from H20 and electricity. To make U, you typically have to start with about 10-20 solar masses of hydrogen, let it simmer for 50 million years, and then blow the star to smithereens, frying everything within a light year or two. A miniscule fraction of a billionth of the resulting mess will be uranium, and of that, 99% of it is the crappy kind.
Thankfully, enough folks went through the energy-wasting process of creating the uranium on our behalf, that there's plenty of U lying around for the taking, even here on li'l ol' Earth.
> "Hey there, howzit? Listen, we need someone to go to Mars and do some scientific-type stuff. Thing is, there's only a 50% chance you'll make it back alive." > > I'd be the FIRST one in line, how about you?
"Hey, mister-second-in-line! You can ride shotgun, but no butting in!"
> > ased on their previous adherence to launch schedules, the December 18th launch date translates to an actual launch sometime around April 15th, 2004. > >[...] > > Perhaps the U.S. treasury needs the kick in the ass....
Which is why the original AC figured it'd be delayed until April 15th!
But to get serious for a moment, I'd gladly fly on an unmodified Challenger or Columbia if NASA (had enough spare orbiters) let me. Hey, space is hard, and 98% odds of coming back home are still pretty good for the ride of a lifetime.
But given the enormous political pressure NASA is going to be under to make this Dec. 18, 2003 deadline, even I wouldn't take this flight. The temptation to ignore safety procedures and hope for the best is simply too high.
> No. Neo chose the other door because of his love for Trinity, a variable that wasn't present in the five previous incarnations. This was also explained in the movie. Did you actually see the movie?
It's Slashdot. "Love" is a Hollywood contrivance and "too obvious" an answer for any action. It has to be about the code:)
I'll stick with (a modified version of) my story. Neo1..5 figured the Architect was (a) just a glorified Agent trying to trick them into not reloading the matrix ("the Oracle didn't tell you"), or (b) decided that even if the Architect was telling the truth) there was no Source behind Door #1, crashing the AIs with Door #2 would result in the extinction of humanity), so they were screwed either way and figured it was better to reload the matrix ("the Oracle doesn't know").
Neo6 (due to the new variable; we don't know who really built Trinity into the metaMatrix) figured "bugger it all, maybe I can hack metaMatrix and save humanity anyways".
(Of course, if the "machines take over" world of the metaMatrix is also not the real world... well, that's for the sequel, I guess.)
> so if you mount it above your bed you and your loved one could either watch a porno, or be the porno.
"SWEENY!", screamed the shrewish voice from the telescreen. "325921 SWEENY-37! Yes, you! Bend lower, please! You can do better than that. You're not trying. Lower, please. That's better, comrade. Now stand at ease, the whole squad, and watch me."
> He should try this in "Real Life". There's money, power, romance, derring-do... It's a rush.
No thanks. It's as boring as the Sims, but it's even slower, and the speed-up key can only be used once a day, and it only works at night, when you're at home trying to game, rather than you just pusshing fast-forward during the day when nobody's home!
And the list of defects goes on. Like, there's no fucking save/restore feature either! Set up a menage-a-trois with your boss' wife and just one lousy goat, and you might as well pull out the old.45 and start again.
No way, man, "RL" is teh sux0r. I wouldn't even warez it.
> The boy gives Neo another spoon as he's leaving Zion,
Oh, crap, that's what I get for punching in a reply before reading all 500 articles:) Thanks for saying it better than I did. (And I did miss the "he fights for us!?" thing. Thanks!)
> Is there really this war between humans and the machines, or is it part of a larger scheme of control operated by other humans?
I'm surprised nobody picked up on the kid in the early part of the movie who handed Neo the spoon.
Neo1 through Neo5 decided the Architect was lying, and gambled that "the source" or whatever would set 'em free. (Instead, it was just a trap that "reloaded" the Matrix, like Ghosting a drive. OK, bug caught. Reinstall.)
Neo6 figured the Architect might not be lying. So screw it, pop through the second door and see what happens. Maybe the Architect's worried that meta-Matrix will crash (which would suck for him and for humanity, if that's where the AIs actually "live"). Or maybe not. We (the viewers) and Neo6 don't have enough information to say.
But sure enough, when Neo6 goes back into what he thought was the "real world", "there is [still] no spoon". Zion, the seekers, everything he thought was real was just a higher-level matrix, destroyed and reloaded five times before. It's just another level of control.
So Movie III is gonna be Neo6, who jumped into the meta-Matrix and just discovered that There Is No Spoon, versus (or working with!) the "free" version of Agent Smith, who somehow figured out a different way to jump from the Matrix into the meta-Matrix.
Wonder how Free Agent Smith (he's half-AI, half-newsreader?:) will react when he finds out that what he's been programmed to believe is the "real world of the machines", and that he thought he was defending when he got Zion whacked, is also just a higher-level Matrix.
> It raises the question that it's not impossible that we ourselves are in some kind of simulation, or are indeed simulated. There would be no way to tell, which perhaps is the problem that the Egyptian censors have with the film.
"It raises the question", heck, for the offended religion in question, you coulda stopped there.:)
> If nothing really is real, then nothing really matters and you're left with the philosophy of the marquis-de-sade. Not something any civilised society really wants.
Not quite. If nothing really is real, then nothing "really" matters and you're left with having to (as the Oracle put it) "make up your own damn mind" on how to live. IMO that's something many societies could benefit from, and something most religious societies are extremely threatened by.
> I could also create a new fruit drink called Unix or a toilet papaer brand called SCO with no trademark problems.
Oh, I get it. You're trying to get me to say "no, no! A SCO-branded toilet paper could be confused for SCO's operating system", when in fact, nobody would ever confuse the two.
If it's sultanoslack's SCO toilet paper, you use it to wipe the crusties and squishies from your ass. Obvious. And if it comes from those lawsuit-happy Caldera guys, you wouldn't put it anywhere near your ass. Because as stank-ass as it may be after six cans of Old Milwaukee and a double burrito, your shit's too good for that Caldera stuff, man.
In other news today, why can't Open Group sue SCO for trademark dilution? I mean, if we take SCO at their word - if we agree that SCO makes UNIX(tm), surely this UNIX(tm) stuff must be something that sucks. Where's the Open Group in defending the UNIX trademark against that?:)
Speaking of which, why can't RICO be used against spammers?
I mean, there's plenty of police departments and schools in every county that could use a fresh set of computers.
In impoverished states like Floriduh (which seem to have higher concentrations of con artists of all stripes, including spammers), there's probably even more need at the local level for a reliable source of "used" hardware.
(Just make damn sure to wipe the disks. And use some lysol on the keyboards. Imagine giving your school 30 computers that had Spammer on 'em. Eew:-)
> The FTC is not a secret government agency. We know its there.
> >The NSA is a secretive government agency, but it too is not secret (though they like to pretend)
And while we're at it, the evidence that should be sufficient to start a spam investigation ain't exactly secret either.
I mean, if Osama bin Laden's minions in Floriduh had been sending 50,000,000 mails a day saying "CL1K HERE 4 HOT PL4N3 THRUSTIN BETWEEN BIG DOUBLE TOWER SEKS!", every day for six months, maybe the INS would have woken up too.
(Naaw, you're right. Still the INS we're talking about, so probably not.)
But if your scam involves telling 50,000,000 people what a scumbag you are, worrying about the FTC "secretly" investigating you oughta be the least of your worries.
So I say give the FTC a few million bucks and let 'em go medieval on 'em.
I can't go undercover and investigate the links between spam rings, organized crime, pyramid scammers, software pirates, and illegal pharmacies in South Floriduh, because I'm not a law enforcement officer.
The FTC and FBI, and anyone they properly deputize, are authorized to investigate, and I say more power to 'em.
> How many Joe Sixpacks are there with $1M in the bank?
Well, for starters, any of 'em living in California who own a house they bought before the boom:)
> Why the hell do Americans always think that the class they actually belong to is several notches higher than it really is? Maybe 5% of the population save that much. Given that many/most Americans get into heavy debt (mortgages, credit cards, etc), I would say that it is
pretty fucking repugnant that you're asking those of us who do manage our incomes wisely to subsidize the spend-and-consume binging of those who don't.
> Unless you earn a ton of money but live in a shitty house and drive a shitty car and have your kids go to a community college, you simply aren't going to save much money.
But ain't y'all high-taxin' granola-munchin' sorta folks s'posed to be all fer that "sustainability" and against "consumerism" stuff anyways?:)
OK, that last bit of trollbait was uncalled for. But in all seriousness, what you describe is exactly how Joe Sixpack drags himself out of the gutter and ends up with seven digits in his bank. Most millionaires today are first-generation millionaires. Read the (solidly apolitical, unlike my/. rantings!) book "The Millionaire Next Door" for insights on why. (Or just skim some reviews or the first chapter.)
> unlikely that anyone except very rich people save that much cash. In fact, most of the middle class probably spends all of what it earns.
And if it weren't paying 40% marginal income tax (6.5% SS, 1.65% Medicare, 25% Federal, 9.3% Kalifornia, Single filer, anywhere from $40-80K), maybe they'd be able to afford a home:)
Comes down to equality of opportunity again. Do I have a megabuck? Nope. Will I have a megabuck? At these tax levels, probably not. Do I want to have a megabuck? You betcha. Will I be pissed off if I work my ass off, get that megabuck, only to have half of it taken away from my heirs (be they my spawn or a favored charitable organization) at death? Doubly so.
The $KILOBUCKS (and hopefully $MEGABUCK) in my bank account are mine, I earned them, so I get to say what happens to them. The $GIGABUCKS (and hopefully $KILOBUCKS:) in Bill Gates' bank account are not mine, I didn't earn them, so I don't get to say what happens to them. What part of "private property" is so hard for these people understand?
> What, you want to be buried with it? Oh, and leaving all the money to the children untaxed is a good way to enforce a class system...
Actually, an inheritance tax is one of the best ways to enforce a class system.
The Kennedys will still be loaded 5 generations from now. (Even if they can't spell "accountant", all they have to do is wait until age 70 and marry a 35-year-old, which is easy to do when you're as loaded as the typical Kennedy:-)
Joe Sixpack's estate, after he worked his ass off and died of a heart attack with $1M in the bank on his 65th birthday, will have nothing left after two generational transfers to his only child ($500,000) and his grandkids ($250,000), let alone five.
> If US companies don't like collecting EU taxes, then they can just stop selling goods to
EU citizens - it would do a world of good to the economies of EU companies.
Yep. And if the EU doesn't wanna sell to US companies, the US should just make that stop too. Do a world of good to the economies of US companies.
And the Tackheaddian (2003 GDP $1.94) economy would do even better without trade with non-Tackheaddians.
Yahoo! Global trade war! Tariffs for everyone! Make it at home or do without! No Nokia cell phone handsets for you Japanese, no Samsung cell phones for you Americans, and the French can use Minitel for their computers and damn well like it! Everybody's economy... wins?
> So what if it hurts US retailers? When you consider that they have to ship goods X thousand miles, they should never have been competitive anyway without tax evasion on the part of their customers.
What if the US retailer sells bits, not atoms?
How do you tax the "importation" of (commercial) software? Bits aren't just code, either - what if it's just access to a web site (your Slashdot subscription?)
> Nonsense, that's the exact opposite of the reality. Where on earth did you get that idea? Strongly progressive income taxing acts as a way to even out income. That means reducing the number of poor people, which means giving them and their children reasonable chances to advance towards prosperity.
No, it reduces the number of rich people by preventing middle class people from becoming rich.
Seriously. If your family makes $20000, and you pay no tax (as is presently the case in the US), how does the fact that a guy making $50000 pays 33%, and a guy making $200K pays 38%, make you any richer?
It may make you likely to vote for politicians who'll hike income taxes (hey, you don't pay any, let the other guy pay!:-), but it ain't gonna make you rich. The US is, ironically, a good example of why this is so. The bottom half of the population effectively pays around 5-10% of the income tax. The top half pays the 90-95%. Is there somehow less poverty because of this?
> Evening out income results in social equality and equal opportunity, which is the basis of true democracy. That's the basic idea behind European social democratic ideology, to my understanding. Ironically, equal opportunity is also the required basis for economic liberalist ideology, so I'm not quite sure what they're whining about.
You confuse equality of opportunity ("everyone can get rich, some will, some won't") with equality of results ("social equality", "social justice", or "evening out income"). The two types of equality are emphatically not the same thing. I would argue that one is the antithesis of the other.
> The proper function of government should be to regulate the economy to prevent a boom-bust cycle from occuring.
Yessir, and that's why standards of living in US post-Carter, the UK post-Thatcher, Poland post-Walesa, and Hong Kong at any time since its founding, are sooooo much lower, whereas France post-Mitterand and Sweden are the economic engines of the WOOOORLD! Smelly but tasty cheese, decent wine, and Volvos for everyone!:-)
OK, I'll get serious for a bit.
VAT on software sux0rz because for many small shops, the cost of compliance may well exceed any VAT they collect, and the small shops in question aren't even getting any benefit from the VAT. Effectively, VAT on online purchases acts like a tariff - a EU citizen you can't buy from a small vendor in the States, you gotta buy from a small vendor in the EU. For things made of atoms, shipping costs provide a reasonable incentive to shop local. For things made of bits, there's no reason it should matter where the vendor's located.
In general, I prefer consumption taxes to income taxes. Problem is, it's easy to get a government to pass a consumption tax, but it's bloody hell trying to get a government to phase out an income tax.
As a case, in point, Bush runs a great risk of making the same mistake Reagan made, which was to use his political capital to cut income taxes (good), without being sure he had enough political capital to also browbeat Congress into cutting spending (bad). With the current Congress narrowly divided and hotly partisan, it can't happen this term; a larger (10 seats, maybe 5, but a hell of a lot more than a 50/50 tie!) Republican majority in the Senate will be required for Bush to have a hope in hell of fixing the spending half of the budget during his 2004-2008 term.
> Sounds like a possiblity that someone copied the code from SCO. But if SCO management knew about this then they are leaving themselves wide open to huge countersuit from IBM. There is the possibility that SCO copied the code to save time. But I doubt SCO would be so stupid to pull such a stunt. But even if IBM copied the code SCO's agreement with Linodows nullifies any claim SCO had. Anyways how is SCO going to prove who contributed what code to Linux. SCO has yet to even indicate what Linux distro the SCO code was copied to...........
That's good for either a (+1, Informative) or a (+1, Funny).
(Aaw, fuggit, it's the SCO lawsuit. I can't tell the difference any more:)
> Timothy is suggesting that SCO may have copied (presumably GPLed) code from Linux into their proprietary Unix[tm]. If true, the repurcussions could be, erm, quite interesting.
Well of course, this explains everything!
Now we know why SCO's so sure those copyright terrorists at IBM are using SCO's proprietary code in Linux! Because SCO put it there:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Sure - but I'd say that puts you in the same position as the MIT hackers in the late '60s. If the field develops as I (expect/hope) it to, that's a very good place to be, both in terms of future career development and in terms of the potential to "learn new stuff" or "change the world", particularly if you're just about to enter university.
> Hard core soft-eng types may find a slower moving, less structured environment for pursuing their goals of writing the first biological computer than they envision.
I should also have clarified that I'm not convinced that "biological computers" (that is, Turing machines or massively-parallel non-deterministic problem-solving machines) are gonna be the Next Big Thing. (They might be, but I'm not yet convinced.)
I'm increasingly convinced, however, that going the other way - hacking DNA and running it as if it were code, should enable the production of gobs of useful genetically-modified organisms, which I think has a much higher probability of being the Next Big Thing. Think "build bugs that can generate vaccines" (already being done), "make a fish's skin able to do photosynthesis" (wacky idea off the top of my head to eliminate plankton from the food chain), or human-modding (like the guys who tried to cure CF by h4x0r1ng lung cells with viruses, although the hack didn't work.)
Those hacks were done using cut-and-paste techniques without a lot of real understanding about how DNA "code" really runs. Sorta like cargo-cult programming - you don't know what the code does, but it's close to what you wanna do, so you cut and paste the whole module at a time and see what it does. The kinds of hacks that could be done once we really know how DNA works, would make these pale in comparison. (I dunno, say, double the human brain size with upscaled intelligence, add huge eyeballs that can see in the infrared, or use the current eye and hack it to see UV, user-controllable meat/machine interfaces - graft silicon onto/into flesh for additional math sk1llz, engineer a set of symbiotic organisms to act as a second immune system, etc. etc. etc... and in short, make possible all that wacky sci-fi stuff that gives geeks hard-ons and bioethicists nightmares :-)
Grok - the lack of distinction between code and data is something that one doesn't see much of now (compiled languages, sane practices), but I've seen stuff like that back in the day.
So in answer to your specific question, I'd say "OK, some self-modifying code. Cool hack!" if it were code, and "Whoa, evolution's cooler than I thought" when I hear of it being discovered in DNA :-)
(And nope, your comment wasn't taken as a flame - like I said, I went the CS route, and as a result, I have very little current bio-clue. Others on the thread have done a better job than I in linking "code" and "DNA". Much like the blind man and the elephant, I'm coming from a "code only" perspective and pretty much missing the boat when I try to talk about it (i.e. make common errors of fact when trying to highlight the isomorphisms between CS and bio). And biologists when I was a kid came from a "biology only" perspective and missed the boat (i.e. didn't see what are, to me, obvious isomorphisms).
Those with bio-clue and a coder's perspective can bring a lot to the party. (And y'all rock :)
Cool. I didn't know we had that level of ability when it came to profiling DNA code. (In fact, I almost exposed more of my biotech non-cluefulness by saying "It'd be way cool if someone wrote a DNA profiler, so that we knew what chunks of code were/weren't accessed during a typical organism's lifespan".
I retract my "Junk ain't necessarily junk" statement.
I also agree that the other interesting thing is "Well, it may never be expressed, but what would it do if it were" - I'm given to understand that we have some (unused) sequences in common with organisms hundreds of millions of years old, or older. Granted, running fish code in the human hardware platform is like running Apple ][ 6502 on a C-64; it'll crash pretty hard :) But it's neat to know that some of the code is still there, having been copied mostly-faithfully, over all these millenia.
To hell the luddites. Hack the genome.
With apologies to Steven Levy:
1) Access to the genome, and anything which might teach you something about the way life works, should be unlimited and total. Always yield to the Hands-On Imperative.
2) All information should be free.
3) Mistrust authority- promote de-centralization.
4) Hackers should be judged by their Hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position.
5) You can create art, beauty and even life by hacking DNA.
6) Genetic hacking can change your life for the better.
The first hour or two of disassembling was figuring out where the code was, and where the data was.
The next day or so of poring over those printouts were spent mapping out where the entry/exit points for subroutines were.
I got to the point where I could guess where game graphics were, just by looking for oddly repeating patterns in the "data" areas. (Yup, in binary, those 8-byte sequences make up the bitmaps for the characters "A", "B", "C"...")
"Oh, XX AA XX BB XX CC, somewhere near XXDD in memory space. Must be a list of pointers to something."
"Oh, XXAA, XXBB and XXCC all start with the same byte, and that byte is XXAA minus XXBB (or XXBB minus XXCC). Now I know how big each element in the structure is."
And so on. The first day or two of hacking would result in me figuring out about 10% of what the data was for.
The other 90% was the hard part, typically requiring running some coke, poking at the data, and running the code again to see what changed. "Maze wall moved here, then things crashed when I tried to walk through it."
Sure, 99% of our genome might be junk. There were plenty of areas of address space that contained "data" that was never accessed, even with the tight code written in the 8-bit days.
But when I found a string of bytes I didn't understand, the working assumption that usually went better for me was that "I don't know what this stuff does", not "these bytes are random".
I'll bet that 90% of the genome is never executed nor referenced as data. (Evolution's a messier programmer, and there's 4.5 billion years of cruft!) But I'll bet that a lot of that "junk" is just code we haven't reverse-engineered yet.
Ramblings over - to the poster, all of the ideas in this post are probably ancient history (and poorly-written at that - you can tell I have no bio background), but it's nice to see I'm not completely off my rocker.
I went the CS route because when they taught biology in high school, it was seen as preparation for "become a doctor". Nothing wrong with doctors, but I was interested in more interested in hacking and figured it would be a long time, if ever, before we could manipulate DNA the way I could manipulate bits on a machine. (I've been pleasantly surprised with the way things turned out, though! :)
CS grads are a dime a dozen in the job market; I like my job, but career-wise, the field's been played out. If you're about to go into college, and especially if you like to reverse-engineer stuff "because it's fun", get into bioinformatics, computational biology, and do your CS as a minor. At least, that's what I'd do if I were gonna start over.
Uranium. It's basically heavily-reprocessed hydrogen, but it packs a lot more energy per unit volume, and there are no greenhouse gases or ozone-depletion effects.
Note that producing U from H2 is even less efficient than producing H2 from H20 and electricity. To make U, you typically have to start with about 10-20 solar masses of hydrogen, let it simmer for 50 million years, and then blow the star to smithereens, frying everything within a light year or two. A miniscule fraction of a billionth of the resulting mess will be uranium, and of that, 99% of it is the crappy kind.
Thankfully, enough folks went through the energy-wasting process of creating the uranium on our behalf, that there's plenty of U lying around for the taking, even here on li'l ol' Earth.
>
> I'd be the FIRST one in line, how about you?
"Hey, mister-second-in-line! You can ride shotgun, but no butting in!"
>
>[...]
>
> Perhaps the U.S. treasury needs the kick in the ass....
Which is why the original AC figured it'd be delayed until April 15th!
But to get serious for a moment, I'd gladly fly on an unmodified Challenger or Columbia if NASA (had enough spare orbiters) let me. Hey, space is hard, and 98% odds of coming back home are still pretty good for the ride of a lifetime.
But given the enormous political pressure NASA is going to be under to make this Dec. 18, 2003 deadline, even I wouldn't take this flight. The temptation to ignore safety procedures and hope for the best is simply too high.
It's Slashdot. "Love" is a Hollywood contrivance and "too obvious" an answer for any action. It has to be about the code :)
I'll stick with (a modified version of) my story. Neo1..5 figured the Architect was (a) just a glorified Agent trying to trick them into not reloading the matrix ("the Oracle didn't tell you"), or (b) decided that even if the Architect was telling the truth) there was no Source behind Door #1, crashing the AIs with Door #2 would result in the extinction of humanity), so they were screwed either way and figured it was better to reload the matrix ("the Oracle doesn't know").
Neo6 (due to the new variable; we don't know who really built Trinity into the metaMatrix) figured "bugger it all, maybe I can hack metaMatrix and save humanity anyways".
(Of course, if the "machines take over" world of the metaMatrix is also not the real world... well, that's for the sequel, I guess.)
"SWEENY!", screamed the shrewish voice from the telescreen. "325921 SWEENY-37! Yes, you! Bend lower, please! You can do better than that. You're not trying. Lower, please. That's better, comrade. Now stand at ease, the whole squad, and watch me."
No thanks. It's as boring as the Sims, but it's even slower, and the speed-up key can only be used once a day, and it only works at night, when you're at home trying to game, rather than you just pusshing fast-forward during the day when nobody's home!
And the list of defects goes on. Like, there's no fucking save/restore feature either! Set up a menage-a-trois with your boss' wife and just one lousy goat, and you might as well pull out the old
No way, man, "RL" is teh sux0r. I wouldn't even warez it.
Oh, crap, that's what I get for punching in a reply before reading all 500 articles :) Thanks for saying it better than I did. (And I did miss the "he fights for us!?" thing. Thanks!)
I'm surprised nobody picked up on the kid in the early part of the movie who handed Neo the spoon.
Neo1 through Neo5 decided the Architect was lying, and gambled that "the source" or whatever would set 'em free. (Instead, it was just a trap that "reloaded" the Matrix, like Ghosting a drive. OK, bug caught. Reinstall.)
Neo6 figured the Architect might not be lying. So screw it, pop through the second door and see what happens. Maybe the Architect's worried that meta-Matrix will crash (which would suck for him and for humanity, if that's where the AIs actually "live"). Or maybe not. We (the viewers) and Neo6 don't have enough information to say.
But sure enough, when Neo6 goes back into what he thought was the "real world", "there is [still] no spoon". Zion, the seekers, everything he thought was real was just a higher-level matrix, destroyed and reloaded five times before. It's just another level of control.
So Movie III is gonna be Neo6, who jumped into the meta-Matrix and just discovered that There Is No Spoon, versus (or working with!) the "free" version of Agent Smith, who somehow figured out a different way to jump from the Matrix into the meta-Matrix.
Wonder how Free Agent Smith (he's half-AI, half-newsreader? :) will react when he finds out that what he's been programmed to believe is the "real world of the machines", and that he thought he was defending when he got Zion whacked, is also just a higher-level Matrix.
> It raises the question that it's not impossible that we ourselves are in some kind of simulation, or are indeed simulated. There would be no way to tell, which perhaps is the problem that the Egyptian censors have with the film.
"It raises the question", heck, for the offended religion in question, you coulda stopped there. :)
> If nothing really is real, then nothing really matters and you're left with the philosophy of the marquis-de-sade. Not something any civilised society really wants.
Not quite. If nothing really is real, then nothing "really" matters and you're left with having to (as the Oracle put it) "make up your own damn mind" on how to live. IMO that's something many societies could benefit from, and something most religious societies are extremely threatened by.
(And IMNSHO, that's a feature, not a bug :)
Oh, I get it. You're trying to get me to say "no, no! A SCO-branded toilet paper could be confused for SCO's operating system", when in fact, nobody would ever confuse the two.
If it's sultanoslack's SCO toilet paper, you use it to wipe the crusties and squishies from your ass. Obvious. And if it comes from those lawsuit-happy Caldera guys, you wouldn't put it anywhere near your ass. Because as stank-ass as it may be after six cans of Old Milwaukee and a double burrito, your shit's too good for that Caldera stuff, man.
In other news today, why can't Open Group sue SCO for trademark dilution? I mean, if we take SCO at their word - if we agree that SCO makes UNIX(tm), surely this UNIX(tm) stuff must be something that sucks. Where's the Open Group in defending the UNIX trademark against that? :)
Speaking of which, why can't RICO be used against spammers?
I mean, there's plenty of police departments and schools in every county that could use a fresh set of computers.
In impoverished states like Floriduh (which seem to have higher concentrations of con artists of all stripes, including spammers), there's probably even more need at the local level for a reliable source of "used" hardware.
(Just make damn sure to wipe the disks. And use some lysol on the keyboards. Imagine giving your school 30 computers that had Spammer on 'em. Eew :-)
>
>The NSA is a secretive government agency, but it too is not secret (though they like to pretend)
And while we're at it, the evidence that should be sufficient to start a spam investigation ain't exactly secret either.
I mean, if Osama bin Laden's minions in Floriduh had been sending 50,000,000 mails a day saying "CL1K HERE 4 HOT PL4N3 THRUSTIN BETWEEN BIG DOUBLE TOWER SEKS!", every day for six months, maybe the INS would have woken up too. (Naaw, you're right. Still the INS we're talking about, so probably not.)
But if your scam involves telling 50,000,000 people what a scumbag you are, worrying about the FTC "secretly" investigating you oughta be the least of your worries.
So I say give the FTC a few million bucks and let 'em go medieval on 'em.
I can't go undercover and investigate the links between spam rings, organized crime, pyramid scammers, software pirates, and illegal pharmacies in South Floriduh, because I'm not a law enforcement officer.
The FTC and FBI, and anyone they properly deputize, are authorized to investigate, and I say more power to 'em.
"Woohoo! More Targitz! We need more targets! Bring it on, Earth pussies!"
- Field Marshall Xenu, First Martian Air Defence Force!
Well, for starters, any of 'em living in California who own a house they bought before the boom :)
> Why the hell do Americans always think that the class they actually belong to is several notches higher than it really is? Maybe 5% of the population save that much. Given that many/most Americans get into heavy debt (mortgages, credit cards, etc), I would say that it is
pretty fucking repugnant that you're asking those of us who do manage our incomes wisely to subsidize the spend-and-consume binging of those who don't.
> Unless you earn a ton of money but live in a shitty house and drive a shitty car and have your kids go to a community college, you simply aren't going to save much money.
But ain't y'all high-taxin' granola-munchin' sorta folks s'posed to be all fer that "sustainability" and against "consumerism" stuff anyways? :)
OK, that last bit of trollbait was uncalled for. But in all seriousness, what you describe is exactly how Joe Sixpack drags himself out of the gutter and ends up with seven digits in his bank. Most millionaires today are first-generation millionaires. Read the (solidly apolitical, unlike my /. rantings!) book "The Millionaire Next Door" for insights on why. (Or just skim some reviews or the first chapter.)
> unlikely that anyone except very rich people save that much cash. In fact, most of the middle class probably spends all of what it earns.
And if it weren't paying 40% marginal income tax (6.5% SS, 1.65% Medicare, 25% Federal, 9.3% Kalifornia, Single filer, anywhere from $40-80K), maybe they'd be able to afford a home :)
Comes down to equality of opportunity again. Do I have a megabuck? Nope. Will I have a megabuck? At these tax levels, probably not. Do I want to have a megabuck? You betcha. Will I be pissed off if I work my ass off, get that megabuck, only to have half of it taken away from my heirs (be they my spawn or a favored charitable organization) at death? Doubly so.
The $KILOBUCKS (and hopefully $MEGABUCK) in my bank account are mine, I earned them, so I get to say what happens to them. The $GIGABUCKS (and hopefully $KILOBUCKS :) in Bill Gates' bank account are not mine, I didn't earn them, so I don't get to say what happens to them. What part of "private property" is so hard for these people understand?
Actually, an inheritance tax is one of the best ways to enforce a class system.
The Kennedys will still be loaded 5 generations from now. (Even if they can't spell "accountant", all they have to do is wait until age 70 and marry a 35-year-old, which is easy to do when you're as loaded as the typical Kennedy :-)
Joe Sixpack's estate, after he worked his ass off and died of a heart attack with $1M in the bank on his 65th birthday, will have nothing left after two generational transfers to his only child ($500,000) and his grandkids ($250,000), let alone five.
Yep. And if the EU doesn't wanna sell to US companies, the US should just make that stop too. Do a world of good to the economies of US companies.
And the Tackheaddian (2003 GDP $1.94) economy would do even better without trade with non-Tackheaddians.
Yahoo! Global trade war! Tariffs for everyone! Make it at home or do without! No Nokia cell phone handsets for you Japanese, no Samsung cell phones for you Americans, and the French can use Minitel for their computers and damn well like it! Everybody's economy... wins?
What if the US retailer sells bits, not atoms?
How do you tax the "importation" of (commercial) software? Bits aren't just code, either - what if it's just access to a web site (your Slashdot subscription?)
No, it reduces the number of rich people by preventing middle class people from becoming rich.
Seriously. If your family makes $20000, and you pay no tax (as is presently the case in the US), how does the fact that a guy making $50000 pays 33%, and a guy making $200K pays 38%, make you any richer?
It may make you likely to vote for politicians who'll hike income taxes (hey, you don't pay any, let the other guy pay! :-), but it ain't gonna make you rich. The US is, ironically, a good example of why this is so. The bottom half of the population effectively pays around 5-10% of the income tax. The top half pays the 90-95%. Is there somehow less poverty because of this?
> Evening out income results in social equality and equal opportunity, which is the basis of true democracy. That's the basic idea behind European social democratic ideology, to my understanding. Ironically, equal opportunity is also the required basis for economic liberalist ideology, so I'm not quite sure what they're whining about.
You confuse equality of opportunity ("everyone can get rich, some will, some won't") with equality of results ("social equality", "social justice", or "evening out income"). The two types of equality are emphatically not the same thing. I would argue that one is the antithesis of the other.
Yessir, and that's why standards of living in US post-Carter, the UK post-Thatcher, Poland post-Walesa, and Hong Kong at any time since its founding, are sooooo much lower, whereas France post-Mitterand and Sweden are the economic engines of the WOOOORLD! Smelly but tasty cheese, decent wine, and Volvos for everyone! :-)
OK, I'll get serious for a bit.
VAT on software sux0rz because for many small shops, the cost of compliance may well exceed any VAT they collect, and the small shops in question aren't even getting any benefit from the VAT. Effectively, VAT on online purchases acts like a tariff - a EU citizen you can't buy from a small vendor in the States, you gotta buy from a small vendor in the EU. For things made of atoms, shipping costs provide a reasonable incentive to shop local. For things made of bits, there's no reason it should matter where the vendor's located.
In general, I prefer consumption taxes to income taxes. Problem is, it's easy to get a government to pass a consumption tax, but it's bloody hell trying to get a government to phase out an income tax.
As a case, in point, Bush runs a great risk of making the same mistake Reagan made, which was to use his political capital to cut income taxes (good), without being sure he had enough political capital to also browbeat Congress into cutting spending (bad). With the current Congress narrowly divided and hotly partisan, it can't happen this term; a larger (10 seats, maybe 5, but a hell of a lot more than a 50/50 tie!) Republican majority in the Senate will be required for Bush to have a hope in hell of fixing the spending half of the budget during his 2004-2008 term.
That's good for either a (+1, Informative) or a (+1, Funny).
(Aaw, fuggit, it's the SCO lawsuit. I can't tell the difference any more :)
Well of course, this explains everything!
Now we know why SCO's so sure those copyright terrorists at IBM are using SCO's proprietary code in Linux! Because SCO put it there :-)