Not knowing much about how broadband really works, can someone explain to me why this wouldn't have the same limitations as DSL? So, with DSL there's a restriction on how far someone can be from a main telco box. Intuitively it would seem that broadband over power lines would hve the same issues, thus making it no more appealing to deliver broadband to the boonies than DSL, which the telcos have balked at due to cost.
Thanks
My guess, one of these days one of the Mars rovers will stumble on upon Bikini Bottom, and be treated to the whimsical antics of SpongeBob, Patrick, Plankton, and Squidward. Come on, there's no space helmet wearing sassy squirrels like Sandy on earth. If there were, would I be sitting here typing?
Unless it calls people (OK, myself included), on their cell phone, no one will ever notice. Priorities: 1. The conversation about what bar to meet your friends at, 2. Lighting another cigarette, 3. The road, and finally 4. The radio
The fact that people are willing to take a shot at this takes some serious huevos. When you think about the amount of cash, for one that goes into the design phase alone, sooner or later someone must scratch their head and ask if this is really worth it. Pair that with the need for such nontrivial things as ummm...say...cooking up rocket engines and rocket fuel. Then, last but not least, after you've designed something that seems like it ought to work, cooked up some engines, and a fuselage (not cheap either), you have to convince someone to get in it... Truely amazing. The absolute best of luck, and all my respect to all participating in the contest
I find it hilarious that they did this on a CD by someone who no one has ever heard of. 2 reasons. 1. If they were to do it to a big name person that someone actually listened to, odds are sooner or later the thing would muck up some little 13 year old's computer. You'd have the whole suing a 12 year old fiasco all over again. 2. If they were to do this with someone that people actually listened to, they would HAVE to realize that it would have been about 5 minutes until every 13 year old (whose computers weren't mucked up in situation one) knew how to circumvent copy protection and no longer grows up in a world just accepting that the RIAA owns them. Hmmmm...Not that the RIAA doesn't own them, but that's another story altogether...
Not only that, but for those geeks that can put the laptop down for a second and look for a little loving, you get the added bonus of being in the STD capital of the country. Though they may have lost their status of thaving the higghest Syphilis incedence, they picked up the slack with gonorrhea...
One in 100...not so good...
The obligitory link to the New york times random login generator for those who don't feel the desire to identify yourself (or bother to create a clever alter ego).
These days you actually have to downlad the java script to your computer, because of those clever NYT people, but it's still possible for those who have personal issues with registrations....
The MPAA is supposed to be protecting the interests of the film makers... Shouldn't the individual movie houses that produce the movies have the right to decide how their films get distributed, and furthermore, whether the risk of it showing up on Kazaa or on a street corner is in their best interst? This seems like a pretty clear cut instance of the tail waving the dog.
I was more thinking have it hit [Insert Random Characters].com. It seems like it would be much harder to put the breaks on than an attack to a particular IP address, though, I must confess I'm not an internet security expert by any stretch of the imagination.
Can one get in trouble for launching a DOS attack on an unassigned web address? Do they all by default belong to Veri$ign (OK, I couldn't resist porting the obligitory $, generally reserved for M$), or are they fair game to hit with reckless abandon?
Great... Just what we need. Microsoft has already licked the capitalist world. This is an opportunity for them to take over the socialist world too... I'm sure everyone from the janitors on up are licking their chops, smelling fresh Digital Rights Management revinues...
Scenario 1: OK. Neat. I want one in my house. Wait... Let me think for a second. Fog machine in my house...That will make condensation...Condensation will make my wallboards rot...rotting wallboards will make mildew form...mildew stinks...
Scenario 2: Take your dry ice (knock us back to the stone ages by having ice delivered to our houses every day or so)...Make your fog wall...Lay back and feel the oxygen slowly leave the room...Sleep, sleep my fiend...Die...Dry ice runs out...Oxygen slowly creeps back in...Rot...Stink...
Either way it's going to stink. The only question is whether you'll be there to smell it.
While I'm sure there is still an impending scarcity of phone numbers, I would be really curious to look at the growth curve of in-service phone numbers in the US. While I'm sure there is still, and probably will be for the forseeable future, a net increase in numbers in service, the rate is (I'm guessing) likely to slow. There are 2 reasons right off that I can potentially think of...
1. As there is more electronic transfer of information, the number of FAX numbers in use is probably stagnant, or decreasing. There have been some hurdles such as adoption of electronic signatures, but in the long run, the FAX is probably dead.
2. While internet usage in the home is increasing, there is a net outflow from dialup to broadband. The beauty of broadband is you don't need to either A. Live with no phone service while the teenagers in your house are looking up something awful on the web, or B. fork out the cash for an additional phone line and number.
Does anyone have a good feel for what the realistic saturation date is for US phone lines?
In the long run, I wouldn't be surprised to see cell phones start to deviate more and more from the whole standard of 10 digit phone numbers towards some combination of email address rather than phone number, and VoIP type service. It would be a tough sell, as it would banish one from incoming calls from landline phones, but if the service was cheap enough, it could spur adoption. Good news, it's not neccessarily mutually exclusive from traditional 10 digit service in the shorter term.
A lot of hospitals still require people to turn off cell phones, as they allegedly might have an effect on other equipment. Talk about valuing your own life over others...
I realize and agree that linux, in the long run, can save tremendous amounts of money for a corporation, but there has to be a huge upfront fee to overhaul and implement an entirely new OS and set of apps. I'm neither a guru in the computer industry, nor the airlines (though I keep high level tabs on both), but the timing seems odd, given that the airlines are all hemmoraging money right now...
True, mtDNA is more abundant, but there are also serious limitations which make it A) very uninformative and B) extremely difficult to work with.
A)As others mentioned, mtDNA is strictly (or at least very predominantly) maternally inherited. This is good in that it allows researchers to look back many generations, since there is no recombination (the reassortment portions of genomic DNA in creating sperm and egg cells.) The problem is most of us have very similar mitochondrial DNA. There's actually well over 1% of all people who have identical mitochondrial DNA. In forensics, it's corroborative, but certainly not the one piece of evidence to go to trial with... Same is true in the case of looking across species. While mitochondral DNA has been used to generate phylogenic trees (kinda like a family tree of evolution), the results are merely suggestive of an evolutionary path, and adding in or taking out a couple species can cause a largescale rearrangement in the tree.
The other main reason mtDNA is a last resort for forensics is that it is very difficult to analyze. In addition to sequence differences, there can be insertions or deletions which will kill off DNA sequencing runs. To further convolute the problem, with nuclear DNA, good news is that if you have a substitution of one base with another, any individual will either have 100% one base, 100% the other or a 50-50 mix. With mtDNA, there is no reason for there to be a 50-50 mix if there is a mixture (known as heteroplasmy). The reason is that if mom has a mutation that spontaneously occurs, it doesn't neccessarily take over or instsantly come into some equilibrium over the next generations. To confuse things just a bit more, different tissues in the same animal can have different percentages of heteroplasmy, and it can also bounce around from generation to generation. This is a big problem, as it can make analyzing the data very subjective, and subtracts from the descriminating power. I don't mean to suggest that people were seeing what they wanted to see, but there is a very real possibility that different researchers would analyze the data differently. Again, potentially a problem for the evolutionary trees.
There are two things doing stabdard microsattelite (STR) dna analysis requires. 1. Sufficient quantities of DNA, and 2. sufficient quality. By quality what people are referring to is how fragmented the DNA is. By no means, when one extracts DNA do you expext 46 several hundered million base long strands of DNA. Depending on how prisitne the sample is (is it fresh, has it been burned, was it exposed to tons of sun, has it been frozen, is it just pplain old etc...) you are likely looking at, in bad bad cases on the order of 10s to hundreds of base fragments, to 10 to 100 thousand base at the good end.
Now, just because one has a copy of someone's DNA, that isn't enough. One diploid copy of human DNA is about 6.6 picograms. If that copu of the genome has been fragmented in one of the regions being amplified, the reaction won't work. True, you could get down into the 50 to 100picogram range for input DNA, but what you're doing is taking the statistics and throwing them out the window. Wheras the kits themselves give odds of matching a random person in the 1 in hundreds of millions to 1 in billions, if you're looking at say 100 copies of degraded DNA (0.6ng, or 600pg), you may only have on average 5 or so copies of intact DNA from the given amplification targets. Now the odds that you only see one allele (say from mom'a side) goes WAY up, because random luck might have caused only 1 or no copies of the other allele (from dad) to survive. The result is, you get an amplification that looks like the person has all one sized fragments for that region, whereas they may really have 2.
Don't get me wrong, I think this technology is probably tremendously useful, and can offer the ability to type people for all sorts of things, such as forensics. I merely wanted to point out some of the potential limitations of such a technique if the sample hasn't been stored well. I have a hard time believing DNA is super stable in black ink...
Slashdot Mirror
Not knowing much about how broadband really works, can someone explain to me why this wouldn't have the same limitations as DSL? So, with DSL there's a restriction on how far someone can be from a main telco box. Intuitively it would seem that broadband over power lines would hve the same issues, thus making it no more appealing to deliver broadband to the boonies than DSL, which the telcos have balked at due to cost. Thanks
My guess, one of these days one of the Mars rovers will stumble on upon Bikini Bottom, and be treated to the whimsical antics of SpongeBob, Patrick, Plankton, and Squidward. Come on, there's no space helmet wearing sassy squirrels like Sandy on earth. If there were, would I be sitting here typing?
I would love to see the length of pringles cans used to make the WiFi antenna to get that signal back to earth.
Unless it calls people (OK, myself included), on their cell phone, no one will ever notice. Priorities: 1. The conversation about what bar to meet your friends at, 2. Lighting another cigarette, 3. The road, and finally 4. The radio
If you're willing to get on one of those things, they must be the size of huevos...
The fact that people are willing to take a shot at this takes some serious huevos. When you think about the amount of cash, for one that goes into the design phase alone, sooner or later someone must scratch their head and ask if this is really worth it. Pair that with the need for such nontrivial things as ummm...say...cooking up rocket engines and rocket fuel. Then, last but not least, after you've designed something that seems like it ought to work, cooked up some engines, and a fuselage (not cheap either), you have to convince someone to get in it... Truely amazing. The absolute best of luck, and all my respect to all participating in the contest
There's actually a really cool page with some examples
I find it hilarious that they did this on a CD by someone who no one has ever heard of. 2 reasons. 1. If they were to do it to a big name person that someone actually listened to, odds are sooner or later the thing would muck up some little 13 year old's computer. You'd have the whole suing a 12 year old fiasco all over again. 2. If they were to do this with someone that people actually listened to, they would HAVE to realize that it would have been about 5 minutes until every 13 year old (whose computers weren't mucked up in situation one) knew how to circumvent copy protection and no longer grows up in a world just accepting that the RIAA owns them. Hmmmm...Not that the RIAA doesn't own them, but that's another story altogether...
'You have searched images.google.com fro Heidi+Klum 4,637 times.'... Hope she's not looking down.
Not only that, but for those geeks that can put the laptop down for a second and look for a little loving, you get the added bonus of being in the STD capital of the country. Though they may have lost their status of thaving the higghest Syphilis incedence, they picked up the slack with gonorrhea... One in 100...not so good...
My boss must have their cell phone number too...
2. Sobig
3. Linux
2. Read the page. It has instructions on how to make it work.
3. The easiest way to get it to work would be to save the page source to your computer and open the local copy. Voila! No more page referral
These days you actually have to downlad the java script to your computer, because of those clever NYT people, but it's still possible for those who have personal issues with registrations....
The MPAA is supposed to be protecting the interests of the film makers... Shouldn't the individual movie houses that produce the movies have the right to decide how their films get distributed, and furthermore, whether the risk of it showing up on Kazaa or on a street corner is in their best interst? This seems like a pretty clear cut instance of the tail waving the dog.
I was more thinking have it hit [Insert Random Characters].com. It seems like it would be much harder to put the breaks on than an attack to a particular IP address, though, I must confess I'm not an internet security expert by any stretch of the imagination.
Can one get in trouble for launching a DOS attack on an unassigned web address? Do they all by default belong to Veri$ign (OK, I couldn't resist porting the obligitory $, generally reserved for M$), or are they fair game to hit with reckless abandon?
Great... Just what we need. Microsoft has already licked the capitalist world. This is an opportunity for them to take over the socialist world too... I'm sure everyone from the janitors on up are licking their chops, smelling fresh Digital Rights Management revinues...
OK. Neat. I want one in my house. Wait... Let me think for a second. Fog machine in my house...That will make condensation...Condensation will make my wallboards rot...rotting wallboards will make mildew form...mildew stinks...
Scenario 2:
Take your dry ice (knock us back to the stone ages by having ice delivered to our houses every day or so)...Make your fog wall...Lay back and feel the oxygen slowly leave the room...Sleep, sleep my fiend...Die...Dry ice runs out...Oxygen slowly creeps back in...Rot...Stink...
Either way it's going to stink. The only question is whether you'll be there to smell it.
1. As there is more electronic transfer of information, the number of FAX numbers in use is probably stagnant, or decreasing. There have been some hurdles such as adoption of electronic signatures, but in the long run, the FAX is probably dead.
2. While internet usage in the home is increasing, there is a net outflow from dialup to broadband. The beauty of broadband is you don't need to either A. Live with no phone service while the teenagers in your house are looking up something awful on the web, or B. fork out the cash for an additional phone line and number.
Does anyone have a good feel for what the realistic saturation date is for US phone lines?
In the long run, I wouldn't be surprised to see cell phones start to deviate more and more from the whole standard of 10 digit phone numbers towards some combination of email address rather than phone number, and VoIP type service. It would be a tough sell, as it would banish one from incoming calls from landline phones, but if the service was cheap enough, it could spur adoption. Good news, it's not neccessarily mutually exclusive from traditional 10 digit service in the shorter term.
The after picture was 7 hours after...About 11PM
I used to travel to Columbus for work a lot, and frankly am not surprised to see it dark by 11PM!
Not the greatest night spot on earth IMHO...
A lot of hospitals still require people to turn off cell phones, as they allegedly might have an effect on other equipment. Talk about valuing your own life over others...
I realize and agree that linux, in the long run, can save tremendous amounts of money for a corporation, but there has to be a huge upfront fee to overhaul and implement an entirely new OS and set of apps. I'm neither a guru in the computer industry, nor the airlines (though I keep high level tabs on both), but the timing seems odd, given that the airlines are all hemmoraging money right now...
A)As others mentioned, mtDNA is strictly (or at least very predominantly) maternally inherited. This is good in that it allows researchers to look back many generations, since there is no recombination (the reassortment portions of genomic DNA in creating sperm and egg cells.) The problem is most of us have very similar mitochondrial DNA. There's actually well over 1% of all people who have identical mitochondrial DNA. In forensics, it's corroborative, but certainly not the one piece of evidence to go to trial with... Same is true in the case of looking across species. While mitochondral DNA has been used to generate phylogenic trees (kinda like a family tree of evolution), the results are merely suggestive of an evolutionary path, and adding in or taking out a couple species can cause a largescale rearrangement in the tree.
The other main reason mtDNA is a last resort for forensics is that it is very difficult to analyze. In addition to sequence differences, there can be insertions or deletions which will kill off DNA sequencing runs. To further convolute the problem, with nuclear DNA, good news is that if you have a substitution of one base with another, any individual will either have 100% one base, 100% the other or a 50-50 mix. With mtDNA, there is no reason for there to be a 50-50 mix if there is a mixture (known as heteroplasmy). The reason is that if mom has a mutation that spontaneously occurs, it doesn't neccessarily take over or instsantly come into some equilibrium over the next generations. To confuse things just a bit more, different tissues in the same animal can have different percentages of heteroplasmy, and it can also bounce around from generation to generation. This is a big problem, as it can make analyzing the data very subjective, and subtracts from the descriminating power. I don't mean to suggest that people were seeing what they wanted to see, but there is a very real possibility that different researchers would analyze the data differently. Again, potentially a problem for the evolutionary trees.
Just my 2C
Now, just because one has a copy of someone's DNA, that isn't enough. One diploid copy of human DNA is about 6.6 picograms. If that copu of the genome has been fragmented in one of the regions being amplified, the reaction won't work. True, you could get down into the 50 to 100picogram range for input DNA, but what you're doing is taking the statistics and throwing them out the window. Wheras the kits themselves give odds of matching a random person in the 1 in hundreds of millions to 1 in billions, if you're looking at say 100 copies of degraded DNA (0.6ng, or 600pg), you may only have on average 5 or so copies of intact DNA from the given amplification targets. Now the odds that you only see one allele (say from mom'a side) goes WAY up, because random luck might have caused only 1 or no copies of the other allele (from dad) to survive. The result is, you get an amplification that looks like the person has all one sized fragments for that region, whereas they may really have 2.
Don't get me wrong, I think this technology is probably tremendously useful, and can offer the ability to type people for all sorts of things, such as forensics. I merely wanted to point out some of the potential limitations of such a technique if the sample hasn't been stored well. I have a hard time believing DNA is super stable in black ink...
Just my random thoughts...