I notices something a bit silly.. No matter how many times you respond to a spam it simply auto-respods that to unsubscribe you need to email a different account. And it keeps you as an active customer.
Now what if I took a spam-reply address such as admin_jxgny@globalnet.hr and left to the data-miners.. The auto-reply would reply to an auto-reply which would then auto-reply back and loop, in a slow burn of spamming resources.
So remember add some auto-reply bots to your sigs..
I would find it much more efficient to look at dates that are stacked vertically, so I can scroll up or scroll down through the year. Weeks could be delineated by simple horizontal lines, and months by lightly shaded background colors.
Now your brain has been made fully compliant to the slashdot standard of simple horizontal lines, and monster scrolling.
Honestly now that I have spent enought time on slashdot, I want the slashdot style interface for my personal calendar, slashdot green and all. Sure you need a few different icons, and a link that says "tomorrows news".
Another thing I want is some trickier scheduling, If I want to water my plant every three days, it's what I want, If I want to feed my cat every ten days, I want to be able to schedule it, not that a cat would let you pull that kind of thing. If I feel like knowing when a full moon is out and the crazies are out, the calendar should be good about it.
And it should bug me on my cell when I haven't checked my calendar in a reasonable timeframe. Oh and I want it to only do it for things I mark as important, and possibly set some things to send a text reminder without a warning.
A scheduling agent would be nice once they get the schedules happy.
Nothing to freakishly hard, but nothing that really does it for me yet.
I still see some slashdot green here.... what kind of wider audience the colorblind? The people who dont vomit at pink and green, this is a small portion of the populace... What has been wrought?
The I cant think of anything good folks are jacked. All that needs to be done is to watch what people do at work. Then develop a way to simplify it. Does someone fold laundry all day, develop a robot to handle it. Does someone sew shoes all day, automate it. Is there some poor coder out there hunting down a bug that is simply hard to see (ie wrong loop variable), build an IDE that makes the problem JUMP out at her. Some items are just needed, ie a much more mature version of google, that can prod more information out of the web pages, and the searcher.
Sometimes having a human do something is a nicer experience, but replacing our tedious duties with machines seems like a fine way to make life a little more livable.
MD is sexy for the journals. The real beauty of the simulation is that it provides a picture as to how something occurs over short timesteps. You can peek in at a protein as it moves, and watch what the computer thinks will happen. MD is also nice because you can change out molecules and run with modified conditions.
As far as force field calculations go, it depends on the protein, however I'd jump up and down for an efficient and accurate force field system.
I'm betting that as the simulation gets larger, the artifacts become less important to the large picture, and that the large scale interactions can drown out the noise( pure intuition YMMV ). And in this case, determining the assembly of TMV, it's the most convincing game in town.
I don't see this having any real impact for a long while yet.
How about this, imagine that you have a metabolic disorder such as diabetes, hypoglycemia, hyperthyroidism, etc...
With a bit of engineering you could induce color changes in a few skin cells in "minute time" where specfic darkening would occur in a regular grid, perhaps on the inside of your wrist, gauging your blood chemistry. The dots would need to be applied like tatoos, and each dot would need a specific mix, and the dots would need to be re-applied probably every couple weeks/months depending on the proteins used (assuming they would skip the shorter lived proteins or use plasmids).
This is pretty do-able. But I agree that there is some contingency planning involved.
The amount of "antibiotic pollution" is insignifigant compared to the naturally produced antibiotics in the soil. Microbes that live in the soil can get an advantage by producing antimicrobials. So the bugs just make poisons and learn defenses, and if the threat is gone they lose some resistance to be a faster growing bug. There are millions of bacteria in a handfull of soil, And there is a bunch of soil on the planet, so even if we dumped 10 million pounds of antibiotics per year into the environment it would be pretty insignificant.
It looks like they arent making a batery in the traditional sense. Theyre using/building an ion channel, (the picture is blurry but it looks about right). So there isnt battery acid to deal with, and it isnt really a battery. That being said, the body can treat it like a battery because it makes ion gradients that can be tapped anyway.
short and simple answer is that the battery should be nearly harmless. If it breaks down it might be a bit of a drag on the local metabolism. And assuming that the protien isnt some sort of prion precursor (unlikely for a membrane protien) it should be safe.
If I were going for every cell, Id probably piggyback on the Calcium or Potassium channel promoter. But I havent found exactly which promoter they used.
Surviving a heart attack still has it's issues. The heart makes some adaptations that make the cells affected less reliant on oxygen. The problem is that those cells become much less efficient. So you have a chunk of the heart that has lost some of it's endurance function in order to be a bit better at not dying the next time you down a big mac. So these nano fibers arent going to fix you on the ER table, but will reduce the amount of cells that are low endurance during recovery.
The sample size isnt too bad, if you have a good correlation. Cutting open that many mice and giving them heart attacks can take some work. Then you need to let them recover, then you need to "harvest" the mice and examine their hearts.
Storm
Scientists, the leading cause of cancer in lab rats.
Maybe they can sythesize something which is able to bond to Fibronectin? If they flooded the bloodstream with it, it could use up all the landing pads and effectively block the cancer from attaching anywhere.
Kinda like a Denial of Service on a molecular level...?
One problem that I know off the top of my head is that blocking fibronectin is going to impair mental function. Fibronectin is used in the brain to bind polysialic acid, a "grease for the neurons". So if you bind up the fibronectin, your neurons cant get greasier and slip around when you try and connect some new ideas. Mice have a tough time trying to remember mazes without "mental grease".
My gut tells me that messing with fibronectin is probably a very bad thing.
The easiest way to get this done is via an itterated filter method.
You itterate through the thousands of 10 letter words.
filter the each word to reduce the possible words left for the next column, and itterate through those. By the fourth column the chances get pretty slim.. So your looking at about a n^2 log N runtime... which isnt quick but it is doable for a reasonable dictionary size.
Storm
Go watch "The 6th Day", and then tell me that tissue printers arent going to leave a tracking mark. With RIAA and copyrights, It's probably going to be manditory.
Storm
Viruses can pull a bunch of tricks, Some phages (viral cousins) like T4 have a cool needle, spiderleg arrangement, others change shape once they bind to their victim.
Others are designed to be engulfed (eaten) like HIV. They bind to a receptor, and the cell decides that they need to be eaten (a process formally called endocytosis (sp?)).
Now as far as the pictures go, it can give a nice clue as to how they touch the cell. A call isnt just a flat surface, it's a big fuzzy mess of recognition glycoprotiens for all sorts of things. However the flu binds to the cell presents a target for potential drugs. If this flu is doing something novel then it needs to be understood as soon as possible. And getting a photo is a one way to notice if something funny is going on.
You might notice some tree like structures in some of the photos I'm betting those are glycoprotiens, those can be pretty important.
Storm
Even ignoring the side effects of DDT, they have sprayed it in Africa before, and there was political garbage going on, so the areas sprayed were a patchwork. This caused a monster of a problem, Africa has signifigant amounts of DDT resistant mosquitoes, more than enough to keep Malaria alive and kicking in Africa. So DDT can dampen an area for a bit, but it wont hold for the long run
So now were going to need a good mix of pesticides, and the ability to spray the areas where we have these mosquitos, without leaving pockets of Malaria. There would also need to be heavy changes to prevent standing water, covering watering-holes with screens, draining swamp areas near towns and villages, agressive treatement of malaria to prevent human carriers.
NetHack is a game. It is old, it uses ascii graphics. It is turn based, some creatures can make multiple attacks per turn
The genre is DND style fantasy
The programmers added a huge amount of flexibility into the game, you can eat things you kill, you can weild anything as a weapon, from a sword, to a can of tinned beef. You can dip things into your potions.
There were/are addicts. Some of the thrill of the game is that you couldnt build an invunerable character. The chances of death in game were almost certain. Even with careful fighting, you end up bumping into some sort of owlbear or falling into a spiked pit. You can die from eating bad food, or from starving, or overeating. You can cast spells drunk or halucinating, but it probably wont work right. You can have a pet, and train it. The programmers have though of a almost everything.
What's unfortunate in the US is the pitiful state of scientific literacy makes is easy to subvert voters with propaganda, everything from religious fundamentalism to superstitious pseudoscience like astrology and psychic phenomena. Go ask an average guy on the street to explain basic concepts of chemistry, physics, medicine or astronomy, and you'll see what I mean. All those TVs, microwaves and cell phones may as well run on magic for all they care.
Go ask the average scientist in the lab to explain basic astrology, and simple phrenology, and poof totally clueless. Making the Scientist easily swayed by everything from scientific accuracy, to formal logic. Heck making a tea leaf argument to a scientist is like talking to a brick wall.
Hey, the building of a character takes a freakload of time, and watching it just get ganked by some anal-renentive twit is really quite frustrating. Posting something to livejournal isnt going to get jack for exposure. Posting to the frontpage of slashdot is a quick way to have a ton of exposure. He owns it, so he gets the perks.
Rob is a celeb, because he owns something that you could ask the average nerd on the street about, and expect to get some thumbs up. So it's really bad to really tork off a guy who can give you bad press. It's like cheating the local news "scambusting" reporter, you can do it, but your gonna pay.
It's not just virtual identities that get tossed in the trash for being questionable.
Maybe the article was intended for those Indian cogs in the wheel. or rather maybe it should be. The age where location has meaning is eroding. Just because were losing jobs to people overseas doesnt mean that we assume that they should work a sweatshop either.
I would be more concerned about H5N1 - it is an avian influenza that has been in the news lately.
Not sure what 5HN1 is....
H5N1 is a designation for a flu virus.
Currently the virus can spread from bird to bird and from bird to human. However it does NOT spread from human to human
When the virus infects humans there is a very high fatality rate, and a brutal morbidity(needing hospitilization) rate. This is the first strain (N1) of its type (H5) that we have encountered, so vaccines can't be produced.
There is a fear that this "bird flu" H5N1 will mutate into a strain that can jump from human to human. This is a very real fear, as flu is known to make these jumps. Even conservative estimates place the death toll in the millions if a Human to Human H5N1 flu emerges.
Tamiflu and Releenza are anti-virals that have been suggested as treatments for H5N1, however there are some reports that these treatments have been inneffective, with only mild attenuation of viral load. However Tamiflu and Releenza are the only available known treatments available, and these drugs are in short supply.
The overload attack does have some merit. However it wont be "for all time" or even close. The best analog would be a skunk, their odor is detectable to humans in similar quantities. Thier odor is really offensive in higher quantities. However the smell of skunk can be cleaned to a reasonable level in a short amount of time, depending on what got "sprayed". For instance a couch, your gonna have to pitch it, the smell is there for good. If it's your dog, you might try tomato juice before pitching the dog.
So what I'm saying is that it can be blasted, but the recovery time should be reasonable. That means that the airports will need to take some precautions like not having big fluffy couches around that will carry the "smell" for months.
Of course I am not a chemist, I just felt like having a Cliff Claven moment.
If I had to rebuild technology from scratch, we'd have steam engines, electric lighting, AM radio and basic switched circuits. Those researching and designing the next generation would know enough to avoid many of the pitfalls of the last century, and so would get to WWII-era computers, FM radio and automobiles fairly quickly. Given enough resources, I could probably get back to something approaching modern technology within my lifetime.
Wow, dang wow.... Now I've had some conceited thoughts, but not like this. Just getting to the iron age would be a bit of a push. Locating (and recognizing) a suitable ore that is fine enough to work, but not so large that you need to crush it. Building a vessle that can handle the temperatures that are needed to reduce Iron. Hacking up enough wood to do this without real tools. Working iron without an anvil (you gotta pour the first anvil). Taming wild animals over the course of years. Determining the correct time of year to plant crops. Determining the years that locusts will swarm so you can plan accordingly. Finding proper medicines for common ailments (infected burns when you'll be playing with fire might cut down that lifetime). Managing to get survivable clothing (a dead carcass isnt leather till it's tanned, otherwise it decays in short order). Sure building a shelter isnt too harsh, but making it animal proof might be harder. Getting storage of food down can be a bear too. Salt is a trick to find if your in a non-costal reigon. Oh and some diplomacy might be in order if some tribal elder thinks that your corrupting the youth too much with your unholy shiny metal ways. Plus being the only guy that uses soap, you might come off as a bit of a priss.
We spent $849,000 on an Itanium cluster and have recently found ourselves SOL since it's a dying architecture.
You can't even run Java on them.
ok, Where to begin...
First, spending a million bucks on a machine that doesnt meet your needs. I hope there is an accountant ready to spank someone over this.
Second, using Java in a massivly parallel fashion.. Last I knew there wasnt a MPI or PVM port that used Java, plus it kinda defeats the purpose of having big hardware running a slower language(yes I know compiled java can be fast, but Nowhere like near metal C ).
Third, Giving up on a hellfire machine.... Really dont Boo-hoo that you cant make it run java, open a book, code some C++ and make the thing work. If you have a problem for it to solve, then solve it, heck use a cross compiler to translate your java core over to c-c++ if you feel the urge. Itanium is a brutally fast architecture, and until it's mips/watts ratio drops well below the norm, your buisness case for scrapping it is going to be tough.
Slashdot Mirror
Now what if I took a spam-reply address such as admin_jxgny@globalnet.hr and left to the data-miners.. The auto-reply would reply to an auto-reply which would then auto-reply back and loop, in a slow burn of spamming resources.
So remember add some auto-reply bots to your sigs..
Storm ________ sp4mbot address acdftigy@ntlworld.com
because some people practice what they preach
Storm
Honestly now that I have spent enought time on slashdot, I want the slashdot style interface for my personal calendar, slashdot green and all. Sure you need a few different icons, and a link that says "tomorrows news".
Another thing I want is some trickier scheduling, If I want to water my plant every three days, it's what I want, If I want to feed my cat every ten days, I want to be able to schedule it, not that a cat would let you pull that kind of thing. If I feel like knowing when a full moon is out and the crazies are out, the calendar should be good about it.
And it should bug me on my cell when I haven't checked my calendar in a reasonable timeframe. Oh and I want it to only do it for things I mark as important, and possibly set some things to send a text reminder without a warning.
A scheduling agent would be nice once they get the schedules happy. Nothing to freakishly hard, but nothing that really does it for me yet.
Storm
Storm
Sometimes having a human do something is a nicer experience, but replacing our tedious duties with machines seems like a fine way to make life a little more livable.
Storm
As far as force field calculations go, it depends on the protein, however I'd jump up and down for an efficient and accurate force field system. I'm betting that as the simulation gets larger, the artifacts become less important to the large picture, and that the large scale interactions can drown out the noise( pure intuition YMMV ). And in this case, determining the assembly of TMV, it's the most convincing game in town.
Storm
How about this, imagine that you have a metabolic disorder such as diabetes, hypoglycemia, hyperthyroidism, etc...
With a bit of engineering you could induce color changes in a few skin cells in "minute time" where specfic darkening would occur in a regular grid, perhaps on the inside of your wrist, gauging your blood chemistry. The dots would need to be applied like tatoos, and each dot would need a specific mix, and the dots would need to be re-applied probably every couple weeks/months depending on the proteins used (assuming they would skip the shorter lived proteins or use plasmids).
This is pretty do-able. But I agree that there is some contingency planning involved.
Storm
Storm
short and simple answer is that the battery should be nearly harmless. If it breaks down it might be a bit of a drag on the local metabolism. And assuming that the protien isnt some sort of prion precursor (unlikely for a membrane protien) it should be safe.
Storm
If I were going for every cell, Id probably piggyback on the Calcium or Potassium channel promoter. But I havent found exactly which promoter they used.
The sample size isnt too bad, if you have a good correlation. Cutting open that many mice and giving them heart attacks can take some work. Then you need to let them recover, then you need to "harvest" the mice and examine their hearts.
Storm
Scientists, the leading cause of cancer in lab rats.
My gut tells me that messing with fibronectin is probably a very bad thing.
Storm
The easiest way to get this done is via an itterated filter method. You itterate through the thousands of 10 letter words. filter the each word to reduce the possible words left for the next column, and itterate through those. By the fourth column the chances get pretty slim.. So your looking at about a n^2 log N runtime... which isnt quick but it is doable for a reasonable dictionary size. Storm
Go watch "The 6th Day", and then tell me that tissue printers arent going to leave a tracking mark. With RIAA and copyrights, It's probably going to be manditory. Storm
Viruses can pull a bunch of tricks, Some phages (viral cousins) like T4 have a cool needle, spiderleg arrangement, others change shape once they bind to their victim. Others are designed to be engulfed (eaten) like HIV. They bind to a receptor, and the cell decides that they need to be eaten (a process formally called endocytosis (sp?)). Now as far as the pictures go, it can give a nice clue as to how they touch the cell. A call isnt just a flat surface, it's a big fuzzy mess of recognition glycoprotiens for all sorts of things. However the flu binds to the cell presents a target for potential drugs. If this flu is doing something novel then it needs to be understood as soon as possible. And getting a photo is a one way to notice if something funny is going on. You might notice some tree like structures in some of the photos I'm betting those are glycoprotiens, those can be pretty important. Storm
So now were going to need a good mix of pesticides, and the ability to spray the areas where we have these mosquitos, without leaving pockets of Malaria. There would also need to be heavy changes to prevent standing water, covering watering-holes with screens, draining swamp areas near towns and villages, agressive treatement of malaria to prevent human carriers.
Storm
The genre is DND style fantasy
The programmers added a huge amount of flexibility into the game, you can eat things you kill, you can weild anything as a weapon, from a sword, to a can of tinned beef. You can dip things into your potions.
There were/are addicts. Some of the thrill of the game is that you couldnt build an invunerable character. The chances of death in game were almost certain. Even with careful fighting, you end up bumping into some sort of owlbear or falling into a spiked pit. You can die from eating bad food, or from starving, or overeating. You can cast spells drunk or halucinating, but it probably wont work right. You can have a pet, and train it. The programmers have though of a almost everything.
Storm
ok there goes my week.
Rob is a celeb, because he owns something that you could ask the average nerd on the street about, and expect to get some thumbs up. So it's really bad to really tork off a guy who can give you bad press. It's like cheating the local news "scambusting" reporter, you can do it, but your gonna pay.
It's not just virtual identities that get tossed in the trash for being questionable.
Stormy Knight
switch 1, leave alone
switch 2, flip, wait 5 minutes, unflip.
switch 3, flip at the unflip.
Run to room, check temps/states of all bulbs.
1 is either hot/on or cold/off.
2 is either warm/on, or warm/off
3 is either Hot/off, or Cold/on.
Storm
Maybe the article was intended for those Indian cogs in the wheel. or rather maybe it should be. The age where location has meaning is eroding. Just because were losing jobs to people overseas doesnt mean that we assume that they should work a sweatshop either.
Currently the virus can spread from bird to bird and from bird to human. However it does NOT spread from human to human
When the virus infects humans there is a very high fatality rate, and a brutal morbidity(needing hospitilization) rate. This is the first strain (N1) of its type (H5) that we have encountered, so vaccines can't be produced. There is a fear that this "bird flu" H5N1 will mutate into a strain that can jump from human to human. This is a very real fear, as flu is known to make these jumps. Even conservative estimates place the death toll in the millions if a Human to Human H5N1 flu emerges.
Tamiflu and Releenza are anti-virals that have been suggested as treatments for H5N1, however there are some reports that these treatments have been inneffective, with only mild attenuation of viral load. However Tamiflu and Releenza are the only available known treatments available, and these drugs are in short supply.
Hope this helps
Storm
So what I'm saying is that it can be blasted, but the recovery time should be reasonable. That means that the airports will need to take some precautions like not having big fluffy couches around that will carry the "smell" for months.
Of course I am not a chemist, I just felt like having a Cliff Claven moment.
Storm
Wow, dang wow.... Now I've had some conceited thoughts, but not like this. Just getting to the iron age would be a bit of a push. Locating (and recognizing) a suitable ore that is fine enough to work, but not so large that you need to crush it. Building a vessle that can handle the temperatures that are needed to reduce Iron. Hacking up enough wood to do this without real tools. Working iron without an anvil (you gotta pour the first anvil). Taming wild animals over the course of years. Determining the correct time of year to plant crops. Determining the years that locusts will swarm so you can plan accordingly. Finding proper medicines for common ailments (infected burns when you'll be playing with fire might cut down that lifetime). Managing to get survivable clothing (a dead carcass isnt leather till it's tanned, otherwise it decays in short order). Sure building a shelter isnt too harsh, but making it animal proof might be harder. Getting storage of food down can be a bear too. Salt is a trick to find if your in a non-costal reigon. Oh and some diplomacy might be in order if some tribal elder thinks that your corrupting the youth too much with your unholy shiny metal ways. Plus being the only guy that uses soap, you might come off as a bit of a priss.
Storm
You can't even run Java on them.
ok, Where to begin...
First, spending a million bucks on a machine that doesnt meet your needs. I hope there is an accountant ready to spank someone over this.
Second, using Java in a massivly parallel fashion.. Last I knew there wasnt a MPI or PVM port that used Java, plus it kinda defeats the purpose of having big hardware running a slower language(yes I know compiled java can be fast, but Nowhere like near metal C ).
Third, Giving up on a hellfire machine.... Really dont Boo-hoo that you cant make it run java, open a book, code some C++ and make the thing work. If you have a problem for it to solve, then solve it, heck use a cross compiler to translate your java core over to c-c++ if you feel the urge. Itanium is a brutally fast architecture, and until it's mips/watts ratio drops well below the norm, your buisness case for scrapping it is going to be tough.
Storm