I'm pretty sure that if we get into this whole distributed computing thing and it gets so big it starts to evolve into a neural network and decides that it should be in charge of us that we should make sure that it is a bunch of Linux boxes that takes over because then everything would be like open and free at least, and we could still wear Tshirts and jeans. Or if not that, then the new net master is OSX based, because then we'd have really cool uniforms and stuff and everyone would have all day to write songs and draw comics. That would be cool. What I don't want is for this Gateway/Windows thing to become sentient, because then we would have a world dominated by an evil Master who numbed out our creative impulses, tortured us with relentless conformity, and controlled all political and economic traffic. Pretty much like it is now, come to think of it.
Screw the OncoMouse. How many people are going to buy one? Science geeks and Poindexters is all. I told DuPont (when they had the rights to it) that the big bucks would be in OncoHamster, OncoRabbit, OncoKitty, and OncoPuppy. Every parent would buy a small mammal for the kids if they were guaranteed that in six months - once the kid stopped feeding it and playing with it and was generally bored with the whole ownership thing, the animal would go off to the big pet shop in the sky.
Man, what a long thread. If only MS was involved in some way, it would expand exponentially until slashdot entered the dictionary as a synonym for "large smoking crater in the ground". But I digress.
I was going to say anything by Bear or Benford, than I thought about the best series of books I have ever read: the Lanny Budd series by Upton Sinclair (follows Lanny from 1914 to 1950s as he moves among the political figures of the times as a spy and an art dealer). The strange thing is, though Sinclair was a rationalist, Lanny runs into inexplicable psychic manifestations from time to time - tying into the Nazi fascination with the occult. Looking back, I think you could consider the series as sort of an alternate history series of SF. Anyway, don't start reading these books unless you want to give up the next several weeks.
From what I have read so far (caveat: none of what I have read has yet been in the scientific literature) what they are doing is taking a whole cell that already exists, removing the native DNA, and replacing it with synthetic DNA to see if they can control the cellular processes with their inserted DNA instructions. This is equivalent to taking a PC and wiping the hard disk of Windows, replacing it with Linux, and seeing how the Linux programs drive the video, memory, speakers, etc. They are not building a PC from scratch.
Replacing the DNA is the easy part. The hard part or creating "life" will be building a cell wall and getting all the receptors and ion channels and all the other embedded transmembrane proteins to work, making sure that the translational mechanisms are there to make proteins from the DNA, etc. The cell is a complex factory.
Probably what will really - to me - qualify as made life will come from using what is known about constructing small vesicles from phospholipids or perhaps synthetic equivalents. A small sphere of a lipid bilayer with one embedded synthetic protein, a short hunk of DNA that codes for that protein, and appropriate RNA to translate the instructions is the minimum requirement. But even then you have to worry about: getting the amino acids through the cell membrane, sequestering them at the assembly area, getting energy to drive the process into the vesicle, and on and on. The simplest cell imaginable is still going to be a huge project - manyfold times more complex than this experiment.
Paul: Bill, how's it hanging? Bill: What's up? Paul: I brought you my latest toy, man. It's a PVR and stuff. Bill: Cool. What's it running, CE? XP? Paul: Linux. Bill: Linux? Linux? You frigging idiot, we're trying to crush Linux! Paul: Since when? Bill: I sent you an email, you retard. Paul: Yeah? You'd better read your own freaking manual, bigshot genius, because you didn't copy me on that. Bill: Crap. Oh, well. That's what I pay all those goddamn lawyers for. Look, I'll buy you out and go Chapter 6 or whatever it is these days. Paul: But...but I don't want you to buy me out. This is my baby. Why don't you go think up something novel on your own? Oh, wait - you can't, can you, Mr. Innovation? Bill: Piss up a stick, Allen. I want that Linux hellspawn dead asap. Paul: Well, you can...what's that rumble? Bill: Sounds like the plumbing. Paul: Wait - don't tell me you turned the hoppers into smart devices. Bill: Yep. Booted them up today, and they haven't been hacked yet. Paul: What time this morning? Bill: About ten minutes ago- (Sounds of exploding geysers, shrill screams, porcelain shattering.)
I've been using this thing called Virtual PC for a while on my 266 G3. Revolutionary! Runs Win95 better than my state of the art Dell Optiplex GXi at work.
See, we use this not only to simulate the weapons but also to simulate the actual attacks. Then our computer and the enemy computer can link up and calculate the damage. And if you live in a city that was eNuked, you would go to the molecular deconstruction booths. The we wouldn't have a nuclear winter, which would suck. The when Kirk shows up, we grab him and duct tape his freaking mouth shut, and we won't let Spock get behind us to pinch our shoulders. This could work.
I remember when the gay community in California was talking about moving numbers to Markleeville, a tiny burg (1K) in the Sierras so they could take over a municipal government and install a gay-friendly regime.
Perhaps these fellows should start small and take over a town first before trying a whole state.
I don't think the Markleeville thing came off, but it was the source of many jokes. To this day I pity anyone who went to Markleeville High.
You can have multiple hypotheses, but not multiple theories. A theory would be a reasonable model that all the available facts and observations did not contradict. If you have so little data that more than one model could still be correct, then they are hypotheses and are not yet mature enough to be theories.
Being that the driving force behind the wide acceptance of every new piece of technology in the history of mankind has been the huge unacknowledged market for pornography, which marketing genius thought that the consumer would take home any hardware that was going to have the stink of Big Judgemental Brother on it?
I work in an industry that supports the very early stages of drug discovery at all the large pharmaceutical companies, so I can give you a different perspective than the author, who is apparently not a chemist.
First of all, the complaint that "Nexium... is essentially AstraZeneca's old heartburn drug Prilosec with a minor chemical twist that allowed the company to extend its patent." is shallow. Prilosec was a racemic mixture - a mixture of two mirror-image molecules with the same atomic connections. This is the old way that bioactive molecules with one or more chiral centers were patented and sold, because it was too expensive or impossible to separate the mixture into its chirally-pure components. Unfortunately, the mechanisms of the body are chiral, and often it is only one of the mirror-images which is the active ingredient. The other enantiomer is at best inactive and at worst toxic, mutagenic, teratogenic, etc. It is only with the chiral preparative and analytical methods and tools available in the last 15 or so years that it has become economically feasible to either prepare only the active enantiomer or to purify away the undesired enantiomer from the mixture. This is what AstraZeneca has done. From Prilosec to Nexium is not a minor chemical twist - it is a profound biochemical change. In the meantime, anyone else could have separated Prilosec into its components and patented only the active enantiomer, which is what a company called Sepracor has been doing. Sepracor is a company specializing in chiral separations. They have been taking patented compounds and isolating and patenting the active ingredient. Sometimes they license the compound back to the original manufacturer, but if the holder of the patent on the racemic mixture doesn't want to pay, Sepracor sells it themselves or in partnership with another firm.
Second, my customers are under constant pressure to shorten the discovery pipeline so that successful drugs can be sold under patent protection for as many years as possible. That means more work for me, luckily. To argue that the patent process is wrong or flawed is to ignore the full shelves in the pharmacy. If it weren't for the patent process, those bottles would be full of roots and bark. (Not that there is anything wrong with roots and bark, just that they may also contain toxic compounds.)
Which reminds me of: third, the author confuses small-molecule patents with biochemical patents. The old school (classical small-molecule therapies) patent system works pretty well. You get some years to make money to fund R&D on new drugs. It is the silly biochemistry and genomic patents which are insane, and the patent office has let them get away with it. From PCR to broad gene therapy claims based only on sequence - that process is as flawed as the software/business model patent crap that is every fifth story on slashdot. This is the area the author should have concentrated on.
Last, the author gives the impression that there are no new areas for drug therapies out there. This is just a lack of effort on his part. Most drugs initiate change in the body by interacting with receptor proteins on the outside of cells. And each type of receptor - the calcium channel, for example - comes in subtypes which may be expressed in different amounts dependint on tissue type or even on different areas of the same organ. Many of the drugs currently in use do not differentiate very well between the receptor subtypes to which it binds or interacts. There is a huge opportunity for development of drugs which are more and more specific to a specific receptor and so demonstrates fewer and fewer side effects - which are manifestations of interactions with other receptors than the family targeted. The combination of high-throughput screening and combinatorial synthesis, both of which are still in their early stages, promise to supply us with many times more drug candidates than classical one-pot organic preparations and one-rat-at-a-time testing of those compounds.
You cannot interpret these finding with the flawed but common view that evolutionary processes "know" where they are going. The cellular process that is trying to protect the mechanisms from going off the track due to mutations does not "know" it is sequestering ammunition for future beneficial mutations. When the population of organisms is then environmentally challenged by some stress, the biological processes go off in all directions, and some combinations of what used to be unproductive or unusable side reactions turn out to contribute to the cell's survival. These traits survive in the population.
It's hard to write about biological systems without anthropomorphizing them - I'm fighting it as I type this. It's how we make natural processes accessible to our understanding of relationships. But you have to be careful not to project desires and motives onto what are after all chemical reactions.
In my informed opinion, this act will only AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA oh my god that was where was I... As I was saying, the legislature failed to take into consideration the Tort Reform Act of AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
Slashdot Mirror
I'm pretty sure that if we get into this whole distributed computing thing and it gets so big it starts to evolve into a neural network and decides that it should be in charge of us that we should make sure that it is a bunch of Linux boxes that takes over because then everything would be like open and free at least, and we could still wear Tshirts and jeans. Or if not that, then the new net master is OSX based, because then we'd have really cool uniforms and stuff and everyone would have all day to write songs and draw comics. That would be cool. What I don't want is for this Gateway/Windows thing to become sentient, because then we would have a world dominated by an evil Master who numbed out our creative impulses, tortured us with relentless conformity, and controlled all political and economic traffic. Pretty much like it is now, come to think of it.
Screw the OncoMouse. How many people are going to buy one? Science geeks and Poindexters is all. I told DuPont (when they had the rights to it) that the big bucks would be in OncoHamster, OncoRabbit, OncoKitty, and OncoPuppy. Every parent would buy a small mammal for the kids if they were guaranteed that in six months - once the kid stopped feeding it and playing with it and was generally bored with the whole ownership thing, the animal would go off to the big pet shop in the sky.
Man, what a long thread. If only MS was involved in some way, it would expand exponentially until slashdot entered the dictionary as a synonym for "large smoking crater in the ground". But I digress.
I was going to say anything by Bear or Benford, than I thought about the best series of books I have ever read: the Lanny Budd series by Upton Sinclair (follows Lanny from 1914 to 1950s as he moves among the political figures of the times as a spy and an art dealer). The strange thing is, though Sinclair was a rationalist, Lanny runs into inexplicable psychic manifestations from time to time - tying into the Nazi fascination with the occult. Looking back, I think you could consider the series as sort of an alternate history series of SF. Anyway, don't start reading these books unless you want to give up the next several weeks.
Exactly which battle was John Wayne in, again?
From what I have read so far (caveat: none of what I have read has yet been in the scientific literature) what they are doing is taking a whole cell that already exists, removing the native DNA, and replacing it with synthetic DNA to see if they can control the cellular processes with their inserted DNA instructions. This is equivalent to taking a PC and wiping the hard disk of Windows, replacing it with Linux, and seeing how the Linux programs drive the video, memory, speakers, etc. They are not building a PC from scratch.
Replacing the DNA is the easy part. The hard part or creating "life" will be building a cell wall and getting all the receptors and ion channels and all the other embedded transmembrane proteins to work, making sure that the translational mechanisms are there to make proteins from the DNA, etc. The cell is a complex factory.
Probably what will really - to me - qualify as made life will come from using what is known about constructing small vesicles from phospholipids or perhaps synthetic equivalents. A small sphere of a lipid bilayer with one embedded synthetic protein, a short hunk of DNA that codes for that protein, and appropriate RNA to translate the instructions is the minimum requirement. But even then you have to worry about: getting the amino acids through the cell membrane, sequestering them at the assembly area, getting energy to drive the process into the vesicle, and on and on. The simplest cell imaginable is still going to be a huge project - manyfold times more complex than this experiment.
I was downtown, tooling along the sidewalk on my Segway, when this moron in a Fanwing who was trying to read email on his simputer crashed into me.
Headlines.s .t ion..
Panic.
Disbelief.
Relief.
Headline
Panic.
Babbling.
Finger-pointing.
Determina
Realization.
Blaming.
Shrieking.
Praying
Dying.
Paul: Bill, how's it hanging?
Bill: What's up?
Paul: I brought you my latest toy, man. It's a PVR and stuff.
Bill: Cool. What's it running, CE? XP?
Paul: Linux.
Bill: Linux? Linux? You frigging idiot, we're trying to crush Linux!
Paul: Since when?
Bill: I sent you an email, you retard.
Paul: Yeah? You'd better read your own freaking manual, bigshot genius, because you didn't copy me on that.
Bill: Crap. Oh, well. That's what I pay all those goddamn lawyers for. Look, I'll buy you out and go Chapter 6 or whatever it is these days.
Paul: But...but I don't want you to buy me out. This is my baby. Why don't you go think up something novel on your own? Oh, wait - you can't, can you, Mr. Innovation?
Bill: Piss up a stick, Allen. I want that Linux hellspawn dead asap.
Paul: Well, you can...what's that rumble?
Bill: Sounds like the plumbing.
Paul: Wait - don't tell me you turned the hoppers into smart devices.
Bill: Yep. Booted them up today, and they haven't been hacked yet.
Paul: What time this morning?
Bill: About ten minutes ago-
(Sounds of exploding geysers, shrill screams, porcelain shattering.)
So the ISS was the "secure and undisclosed location"?
I had no opinion of Ashcroft until the good people of Missouri, who presumable know him best, voted for a dead man instead of him.
I've been using this thing called Virtual PC for a while on my 266 G3. Revolutionary! Runs Win95 better than my state of the art Dell Optiplex GXi at work.
to have coined the rejoinder:
RTFE!
Unless someone else already has. In which case, I'm going to patent it instead.
See, we use this not only to simulate the weapons but also to simulate the actual attacks. Then our computer and the enemy computer can link up and calculate the damage. And if you live in a city that was eNuked, you would go to the molecular deconstruction booths. The we wouldn't have a nuclear winter, which would suck. The when Kirk shows up, we grab him and duct tape his freaking mouth shut, and we won't let Spock get behind us to pinch our shoulders. This could work.
"Bill Gates did exert a great deal of control over MS, however it was still not his singular drive running the company, just his overall vision."
Using BG and vision in the same sentence should get you modded off the number line altogether.
I remember when the gay community in California was talking about moving numbers to Markleeville, a tiny burg (1K) in the Sierras so they could take over a municipal government and install a gay-friendly regime.
Perhaps these fellows should start small and take over a town first before trying a whole state.
I don't think the Markleeville thing came off, but it was the source of many jokes. To this day I pity anyone who went to Markleeville High.
ChemDraw vs. ChemText. That's all you need to know to understand why there is a solid group of chemists who have always been fond of the Mac.
You can have multiple hypotheses, but not multiple theories. A theory would be a reasonable model that all the available facts and observations did not contradict. If you have so little data that more than one model could still be correct, then they are hypotheses and are not yet mature enough to be theories.
Troll? I thought it was at least interesting if not insightful. Wait right there while I get my metamoderating stick....
Being that the driving force behind the wide acceptance of every new piece of technology in the history of mankind has been the huge unacknowledged market for pornography, which marketing genius thought that the consumer would take home any hardware that was going to have the stink of Big Judgemental Brother on it?
I work in an industry that supports the very early stages of drug discovery at all the large pharmaceutical companies, so I can give you a different perspective than the author, who is apparently not a chemist.
First of all, the complaint that "Nexium... is essentially AstraZeneca's old heartburn drug Prilosec with a minor chemical twist that allowed the company to extend its patent." is shallow. Prilosec was a racemic mixture - a mixture of two mirror-image molecules with the same atomic connections. This is the old way that bioactive molecules with one or more chiral centers were patented and sold, because it was too expensive or impossible to separate the mixture into its chirally-pure components. Unfortunately, the mechanisms of the body are chiral, and often it is only one of the mirror-images which is the active ingredient. The other enantiomer is at best inactive and at worst toxic, mutagenic, teratogenic, etc. It is only with the chiral preparative and analytical methods and tools available in the last 15 or so years that it has become economically feasible to either prepare only the active enantiomer or to purify away the undesired enantiomer from the mixture. This is what AstraZeneca has done. From Prilosec to Nexium is not a minor chemical twist - it is a profound biochemical change. In the meantime, anyone else could have separated Prilosec into its components and patented only the active enantiomer, which is what a company called Sepracor has been doing. Sepracor is a company specializing in chiral separations. They have been taking patented compounds and isolating and patenting the active ingredient. Sometimes they license the compound back to the original manufacturer, but if the holder of the patent on the racemic mixture doesn't want to pay, Sepracor sells it themselves or in partnership with another firm.
Second, my customers are under constant pressure to shorten the discovery pipeline so that successful drugs can be sold under patent protection for as many years as possible. That means more work for me, luckily. To argue that the patent process is wrong or flawed is to ignore the full shelves in the pharmacy. If it weren't for the patent process, those bottles would be full of roots and bark. (Not that there is anything wrong with roots and bark, just that they may also contain toxic compounds.)
Which reminds me of: third, the author confuses small-molecule patents with biochemical patents. The old school (classical small-molecule therapies) patent system works pretty well. You get some years to make money to fund R&D on new drugs. It is the silly biochemistry and genomic patents which are insane, and the patent office has let them get away with it. From PCR to broad gene therapy claims based only on sequence - that process is as flawed as the software/business model patent crap that is every fifth story on slashdot. This is the area the author should have concentrated on.
Last, the author gives the impression that there are no new areas for drug therapies out there. This is just a lack of effort on his part. Most drugs initiate change in the body by interacting with receptor proteins on the outside of cells. And each type of receptor - the calcium channel, for example - comes in subtypes which may be expressed in different amounts dependint on tissue type or even on different areas of the same organ. Many of the drugs currently in use do not differentiate very well between the receptor subtypes to which it binds or interacts. There is a huge opportunity for development of drugs which are more and more specific to a specific receptor and so demonstrates fewer and fewer side effects - which are manifestations of interactions with other receptors than the family targeted. The combination of high-throughput screening and combinatorial synthesis, both of which are still in their early stages, promise to supply us with many times more drug candidates than classical one-pot organic preparations and one-rat-at-a-time testing of those compounds.
I thought goatse.cx was a linux site, so I tried to look at it at work. IT is going to check the logs anyday now. You bastards.
You cannot interpret these finding with the flawed but common view that evolutionary processes "know" where they are going. The cellular process that is trying to protect the mechanisms from going off the track due to mutations does not "know" it is sequestering ammunition for future beneficial mutations. When the population of organisms is then environmentally challenged by some stress, the biological processes go off in all directions, and some combinations of what used to be unproductive or unusable side reactions turn out to contribute to the cell's survival. These traits survive in the population.
It's hard to write about biological systems without anthropomorphizing them - I'm fighting it as I type this. It's how we make natural processes accessible to our understanding of relationships. But you have to be careful not to project desires and motives onto what are after all chemical reactions.
Ballmer couldn't outsmart open sores.
In my informed opinion, this act will only AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA oh my god that was where was I ... As I was saying, the legislature failed to take into consideration the Tort Reform Act of AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
Especially since the cost of those walkmans will be billed to the artist as promotional expenses.