Dr. Wu inserted a gene that makes a single faulty enzyme in protein metabolism. Mosquitoes can't manufacture the amino acid lysine. Unless they're continually supplied with lysine by us, they'll slip into a coma and die."
What parts of "chromosomal crossover" and the "law of independent assortment" don't you understand?
Genes that start out together - even on the same chromosome - don't stay that way.
Why not make a super blood sucker that just thinks humans are the worst food choice on the menu?
For starters, because mosquitoes, as blood-seeking missiles, have a guidance system too simple to discriminate between targets.
Further, an added mechanism, if it were possible, would be costly in nutrition and provide only the negative "benefit" of reducing their feeding opportunities. This would make the mosquitoes with it less fit than those without. So it would be selected against in the wild population.
Why, in stead of nitrogen enriched air, use carbondioxyde (CO2) gas? CO2 is not flammable and doesn't attack the hardware and reduces fire hazard just like nitorgen gas (N2).
Because then you WOULD kill people who walked in.
The breathing reflex is regulated by the amount of CO2 in the blood of a particular artery. They'd hyperventilate and pass out.
... water was pumped into cooling towers and then dumped in rivers. The cooling process de-oxygenated the water and this obviously meant the 'poisoning' of rivers (fish unable to breathe etc).
Why not run the water through a fountain or something like the aerator on a faucet to re-oxygenate it on its way back to the stream? (Or bubble compressed air through it, or just deliver it as a waterfall?)
This might be safe for humans, but is it optimal for normal functioning. With a lower oxygen content, won't your lungs need to labor more to recover oxygen, and/or wouldn't your work ability be impaired somewhat (sleepiness etc) but the oxygen-poor air?
Yes, initially. But if you do it long-term then, like someone who moves to a high altitude, you'll build up more hemoglobin and be just fine.
Takes a few weeks. (Red cell turnover is about a month so figure somewhere between the full month and a couple weeks.)
But somebody who moves to high altitude is there 24/7. I don't know whether you'd build up the full amount of extra red cells only being there during working hours.
People cook out up in Estes Park at 9-13K all the time. Maybe dude needs to refill his lighter...
It isn't just the partial pressure of oxygen that's important for fire. It's also the partial pressure of nitrogen. Nitrogen cools the reaction without contributing to it.
So having the partial pressure of oxygen appropriate to 6,000 feet while having even greater than sea-level partial pressure of nitrogen could well keep a fire from burning (at least in some fuels) and make it much harder than usual to get one started even in things (like magnesium) that would be happy to burn in this atmosphere (or even in pure nitrogen).
Meanwhile the human body is mostly interested in the partial pressure of oxygen and carbon dioxide. Walking into the data center would be like suddenly going from local altitude to 6,000 feet (minus the ear-pops and potential for a case of pressure-related issues). You'd run a little less "brightly" than usual. Live in such conditions 24/7 for a month or so and you'll build up additional hemoglobin in your blood until (like people who live at altitude) you're just fine. (I don't know if you'll get back to "full power" living in them 8/5, though.)
Well, if your read the patent, it's for triply-linked lists
True.
False (though it includes them).
It's patenting stringing the list together with two, three, or more sets of pointers that string it in different orders, with the implication that the orders are unrelated.
The patent explicitly excludes all prior art (without bothering to name any). One would expect that this would include the venerable doubly-linked list (where the orders ARE related - one being the reverse of the other).
So it is just slightly less ridiculous than the headline makes it out to be. For crying out loud, I implemented various sorting methods on my linked lists by adding multiple pointers to them two decades ago as a teenager, and I don't believe for a second that I was doing anything remarkable at all.
Which would be prior art. The patent explicitly excludes all prior art (without bothering to name any). One would expect that this would include the doubly
What I find amazing is that the patent office granted a patent seems on the general principle of stringing lists together in multiple orders with distinct pointers yet explicitly disclaiming all existing instances of stringing lists together in multiple orders - thus claiming all future uses of this general principle. By acknowledging that such prior art exists the patent seems to be admitting that the design technique is already in use.
It shouldn't surprise us that GRB's don't behave as we thought. Nearly everything we think we know about them is based upon assumptions and speculation that are only minimally supported by evidence. There is potential for error at every single step of this process.
In fact the whole idea is to sometimes find out surprising things that find flaws in the old models and give information to drive the creation of more accurate models. (One definition of information transfer is how much the receiver is surprised. B-) )
That's what we're spending all this money for: To come up with physics that more closely matches the real universe. To do this we have to know what's NOT matching in the old models.
(For those - ideally few of the slashdot participants - who gripe that it's being spent at all: At some point the improved models will almost certainly produce some new and useful technologies and/or end squandering of resources on the pursuit of dead-ends. Of course you can't know up front WHAT technologies it will affect. That's part of what you're finding out.;)
... there has ALWAYS been a way to reverse a DMCA takedown notice, in fact the DMCA tells you how to do it as it's included in the act. [recipe deleted]
Seems to me that an ISP that takes down a customer's content in response to a DMCA takedown notice should provide a notice to the customer that includes (in addition to the complainant's identity and address so customer can sue HIM) a recipe for making the response required to let the ISP put the content back up.
Come now why is this anecdotal evidence relevant to the conversation at hand?
The above comment might lead to a lot more little guys zorching big corporations in the pocket book when said big corporations have used copyrighted works without permission.
For instance: FOSS authors might find circumstances where they could invoke the DMCA against a company that incorporated their work in a product distributed without source code by a company that refuses to come clean.
Make enough pain for companies with bucks on the line and you may find more lobbying against DMCA. Meanwhile, guys with big money for big lawyers will be fighting back - and anything THEY come up with can be cloned for use against the MAFIAA.
Since the real point of going against DMCA abusers is to eliminate (at least) the abuse potential of DMCA, getting more big guns fighting on that side of the battle is on-topic.
... they don't want to let a PC go out the door without an operating system on it. That lets them prove that it works, and it gives them SOME means of troubleshooting
So ship it with a live CD with diagnostic tools for the PC and all its peripherals. You could then build boxes that can be tested in the field without reference to the OS (if any) installed on it - and gain economy of scale by building a single platform that can be shipped with any of a number of OSes - or bare - without impacting your hardware support costs.
You can build the live CD on Linux, *BSD, freeDOS, or some other free and open OS and avoid paying any OS tax on that, too. Once built, you just have the mass-production per-CD cost - pennies.
Of course that means it can't test peripherals that don't have non-Windows drivers. Boo hoo! But you'd normally have windows installed on any box with Windows-only peripherals. Meanwhile, if you want to do that multi-OS box it would likely have only FOSS-supported peripherals, which would create an incentive for component manufacturers to arrange FOSS support - by opening their own drivers, supplying enough information for others to write drivers, or at least publish binary blobs under a redistribution-OK license.
... American industry was actually founded on the VIOLATION of English IP law - breaking the mercantilist system that attempted to limit the colonists to producing raw materials for, and buying finished products from, British companies.
A state of affairs which, too, outlasted its initial purpose and eventually became a hinderance to development of the aesthetic and scientific arts.
I note that it would hardly be surprising if the current developing countries might see the "harmonized" world patent/copyright/DRM regime as a similar attempt to keep them in a similar condition: effective colonies of the developed world, selling only raw materials, buying finished products, drained of resources and wealth, never able to break the cycle by industrializing.
Especially at a time when the "global warming" scare has lead developed world politicians and activists to pressure the developing world not to build fuel-driven industrial processes and use only much more costly (factor of 3 or more) wind and solar power systems.
You know a few weeks ago at Blackhat in DC some guy from a RFID card company, HID, came out to tell the crowd why they had sued one of the presenters off the floor. He got up in front of a podium and told everyone that America is founded on patent law.
That's especially ludicrous since American industry was actually founded on the VIOLATION of English IP law - breaking the mercantilist system that attempted to limit the colonists to producing raw materials for, and buying finished products from, British companies.
... does this mean that if you transfer a video file (which might or might not be something that you own the copyright for), and it happens to pass through the wrong DSL modem, the modem will alter the bits in the file to embed the watermark[?]
If it systematically alters the bits of a user's payload at all (especially if it's in a way that passes the usual redundancy checks) it's "data corruption".
I'd be interesting to see what happens if somebody sues an ISP who provides one of these modems with their service for willful failure to provide the advertised "internet service".
Meanwhile:
- I bet we're seeing a downside of ownership of ISPs by media conglomerates: The "content" section driving a degradation of the ISP section's services.
- Watch for tweaks to the transport protocols to detect this sort of tampering and abort it.
Kennedy starting the Vietnam military action would be a bit bizarre, given that as Eisenhower was president at the time.
On Eisenhower's watch the Geneva Conference arranged for the French to leave and the country to be temporarily partitioned into two administrative districts prior to reunification elections. The Northern was run by Ho Chi Min's faction (which grew from the WW II resistance) and the south by Diem. This was post-Korean-war and the heyday of the Cold War and the Domino Theory.
Ho's original resistance group had been Communist and the government he set up ditto. He'd hoped for US support as an anti-colonialist, but his communist connection during the cold war wrecked that. The Chinese supported Ho, and the US supported the Diem regime with supplies and military advisers. When the Deim regime refused to hold reunification elections on schedule the US went along, and didn't drop him as he consolidated his hold on the South by oppressing and/or killing his opposition - including the Buddhist majority. During the last two years of Eisenhower's presidency the north finally started a guerrilla infiltration to hook up with southern resistance movements, forming the NFL about a month after Kennedy's election and a month before his inauguration.
Under Kennedy the US didn't arrange either the promised reunification elections or non-faked south-only elections to replace the southern government with one having majority support. (Diem was part of the small Catholic faction, viewed by much of the population as a continuation of the French colonial occupation.) Instead the US massively increased the number of "advisors" and changed their role to direct military assistance (switching them from teachers to soldiers in thin disguise. The state department and CIA (over the objections of the US military) did preside over a regime change - a military coup that assassinated Diem and repced him with a quick succession of Juntas, ending with the South in the hands of generals with connections to their organized crime. Kennedy was assassinated about three weeks after Diem.
LBJ switched to direct overt military aid, ramped the war up with US forces composed mainly of draftees. (This dovetailed with his "Great Society" programs: The Selective Service System "solved" the "problem" of the baby boomers hitting the job market in a lump by "channeling" them into government-desired occupations with the threat of the draft - pushing large numbers of them into college educations rather than hitting the job market for high school graduates en masse.)
This case was not decided by a judge. It was settled out of court.
I may be wrong, but I'm fairly certain that there is no legal precedent set when someone settles.
You're correct. (The fact that he settled may make others more likely to cave. But it doesn't establish any law that courts look at for those that don't settle.)
... with shallow pockets. Once the precedent is established you use it to go after people (scumbags or otherwise) with deeper pockets.
That's why prosecutors start a child molester, if possible, when they're prosecuting the first case under a new censorship law.
Works just as well for the good guys:
- Start with some idiot who both exposed himself in public as part of a scam and used bogus DMCA takedown notices. Get the precedent established that bogus DMCA takedown notices are wrong and you can be punished for them.
- Next go after somebody who used bogus takedown notices without exposing himself or committing other previous (but somehow related) scams, but DID cause a bunch of financial and/or other damage by his activities. Establish that he has to pay for the damage plus a penalty.
President Kennedy wanned you all about this check the video.
That wouldn't be the same President Kennedy who uttered the immortal fascist slogan "Ask not what your country can do for YOU, ask what you cn do for YOUR COUNTRY?" would it?
The one who started the Vietnam military action?
Just checking. (Last time I looked, that was the only US President Kennedy around, despite tries by two of his brothers.)
Many of the classified documents on p2p networks...are merely bogus with repetitive loops of non-classified material.
In fact, when a classified document becomes particularly popular, the CIA floods the network with bogus info and entire documents of redacted text.
Any bets on whether the KaZaA install allegedly publishing the classified information was actually a disinformation operation in the first place - with the Dept of Homeland Security warning part of the operation?
"Oh, DEAR! Some idiots installed KaZaA on machines with REAL, GENUINE, USEFUL to ENEMIES classified information and it LEAKED! Oh the HORROR! (Snicker.)"
Slashdot Mirror
Dr. Wu inserted a gene that makes a single faulty enzyme in protein metabolism. Mosquitoes can't manufacture the amino acid lysine. Unless they're continually supplied with lysine by us, they'll slip into a coma and die."
What parts of "chromosomal crossover" and the "law of independent assortment" don't you understand?
Genes that start out together - even on the same chromosome - don't stay that way.
Why not make a super blood sucker that just thinks humans are the worst food choice on the menu?
For starters, because mosquitoes, as blood-seeking missiles, have a guidance system too simple to discriminate between targets.
Further, an added mechanism, if it were possible, would be costly in nutrition and provide only the negative "benefit" of reducing their feeding opportunities. This would make the mosquitoes with it less fit than those without. So it would be selected against in the wild population.
They want Smalltalk back.
And they're welcome to it. B-)
Why, in stead of nitrogen enriched air, use carbondioxyde (CO2) gas? CO2 is not flammable and doesn't attack the hardware and reduces fire hazard just like nitorgen gas (N2).
Because then you WOULD kill people who walked in.
The breathing reflex is regulated by the amount of CO2 in the blood of a particular artery. They'd hyperventilate and pass out.
... water was pumped into cooling towers and then dumped in rivers. The cooling process de-oxygenated the water and this obviously meant the 'poisoning' of rivers (fish unable to breathe etc).
Why not run the water through a fountain or something like the aerator on a faucet to re-oxygenate it on its way back to the stream? (Or bubble compressed air through it, or just deliver it as a waterfall?)
This might be safe for humans, but is it optimal for normal functioning. With a lower oxygen content, won't your lungs need to labor more to recover oxygen, and/or wouldn't your work ability be impaired somewhat (sleepiness etc) but the oxygen-poor air?
Yes, initially. But if you do it long-term then, like someone who moves to a high altitude, you'll build up more hemoglobin and be just fine.
Takes a few weeks. (Red cell turnover is about a month so figure somewhere between the full month and a couple weeks.)
But somebody who moves to high altitude is there 24/7. I don't know whether you'd build up the full amount of extra red cells only being there during working hours.
People cook out up in Estes Park at 9-13K all the time. Maybe dude needs to refill his lighter...
It isn't just the partial pressure of oxygen that's important for fire. It's also the partial pressure of nitrogen. Nitrogen cools the reaction without contributing to it.
So having the partial pressure of oxygen appropriate to 6,000 feet while having even greater than sea-level partial pressure of nitrogen could well keep a fire from burning (at least in some fuels) and make it much harder than usual to get one started even in things (like magnesium) that would be happy to burn in this atmosphere (or even in pure nitrogen).
Meanwhile the human body is mostly interested in the partial pressure of oxygen and carbon dioxide. Walking into the data center would be like suddenly going from local altitude to 6,000 feet (minus the ear-pops and potential for a case of pressure-related issues). You'd run a little less "brightly" than usual. Live in such conditions 24/7 for a month or so and you'll build up additional hemoglobin in your blood until (like people who live at altitude) you're just fine. (I don't know if you'll get back to "full power" living in them 8/5, though.)
Well, if your read the patent, it's for triply-linked lists
True.
False (though it includes them).
It's patenting stringing the list together with two, three, or more sets of pointers that string it in different orders, with the implication that the orders are unrelated.
The patent explicitly excludes all prior art (without bothering to name any). One would expect that this would include the venerable doubly-linked list (where the orders ARE related - one being the reverse of the other).
So it is just slightly less ridiculous than the headline makes it out to be. For crying out loud, I implemented various sorting methods on my linked lists by adding multiple pointers to them two decades ago as a teenager, and I don't believe for a second that I was doing anything remarkable at all.
Which would be prior art. The patent explicitly excludes all prior art (without bothering to name any). One would expect that this would include the doubly
What I find amazing is that the patent office granted a patent seems on the general principle of stringing lists together in multiple orders with distinct pointers yet explicitly disclaiming all existing instances of stringing lists together in multiple orders - thus claiming all future uses of this general principle. By acknowledging that such prior art exists the patent seems to be admitting that the design technique is already in use.
Perhaps for this particular sample, we caught the glimpse of a stellar pole?
If it's emitted directionally perhaps you can only observe it when you're looking at a pole.
It shouldn't surprise us that GRB's don't behave as we thought. Nearly everything we think we know about them is based upon assumptions and speculation that are only minimally supported by evidence. There is potential for error at every single step of this process.
In fact the whole idea is to sometimes find out surprising things that find flaws in the old models and give information to drive the creation of more accurate models. (One definition of information transfer is how much the receiver is surprised. B-) )
That's what we're spending all this money for: To come up with physics that more closely matches the real universe. To do this we have to know what's NOT matching in the old models.
(For those - ideally few of the slashdot participants - who gripe that it's being spent at all: At some point the improved models will almost certainly produce some new and useful technologies and/or end squandering of resources on the pursuit of dead-ends. Of course you can't know up front WHAT technologies it will affect. That's part of what you're finding out.;)
... But that was a few years back.
I guess that, post 9/11, Sheiks have become Chic.
... there has ALWAYS been a way to reverse a DMCA takedown notice, in fact the DMCA tells you how to do it as it's included in the act. [recipe deleted]
Seems to me that an ISP that takes down a customer's content in response to a DMCA takedown notice should provide a notice to the customer that includes (in addition to the complainant's identity and address so customer can sue HIM) a recipe for making the response required to let the ISP put the content back up.
Come now why is this anecdotal evidence relevant to the conversation at hand?
The above comment might lead to a lot more little guys zorching big corporations in the pocket book when said big corporations have used copyrighted works without permission.
For instance: FOSS authors might find circumstances where they could invoke the DMCA against a company that incorporated their work in a product distributed without source code by a company that refuses to come clean.
Make enough pain for companies with bucks on the line and you may find more lobbying against DMCA. Meanwhile, guys with big money for big lawyers will be fighting back - and anything THEY come up with can be cloned for use against the MAFIAA.
Since the real point of going against DMCA abusers is to eliminate (at least) the abuse potential of DMCA, getting more big guns fighting on that side of the battle is on-topic.
... they don't want to let a PC go out the door without an operating system on it. That lets them prove that it works, and it gives them SOME means of troubleshooting
So ship it with a live CD with diagnostic tools for the PC and all its peripherals. You could then build boxes that can be tested in the field without reference to the OS (if any) installed on it - and gain economy of scale by building a single platform that can be shipped with any of a number of OSes - or bare - without impacting your hardware support costs.
You can build the live CD on Linux, *BSD, freeDOS, or some other free and open OS and avoid paying any OS tax on that, too. Once built, you just have the mass-production per-CD cost - pennies.
Of course that means it can't test peripherals that don't have non-Windows drivers. Boo hoo! But you'd normally have windows installed on any box with Windows-only peripherals. Meanwhile, if you want to do that multi-OS box it would likely have only FOSS-supported peripherals, which would create an incentive for component manufacturers to arrange FOSS support - by opening their own drivers, supplying enough information for others to write drivers, or at least publish binary blobs under a redistribution-OK license.
A state of affairs which, too, outlasted its initial purpose and eventually became a hinderance to development of the aesthetic and scientific arts.
I note that it would hardly be surprising if the current developing countries might see the "harmonized" world patent/copyright/DRM regime as a similar attempt to keep them in a similar condition: effective colonies of the developed world, selling only raw materials, buying finished products, drained of resources and wealth, never able to break the cycle by industrializing.
Especially at a time when the "global warming" scare has lead developed world politicians and activists to pressure the developing world not to build fuel-driven industrial processes and use only much more costly (factor of 3 or more) wind and solar power systems.
You know a few weeks ago at Blackhat in DC some guy from a RFID card company, HID, came out to tell the crowd why they had sued one of the presenters off the floor. He got up in front of a podium and told everyone that America is founded on patent law.
That's especially ludicrous since American industry was actually founded on the VIOLATION of English IP law - breaking the mercantilist system that attempted to limit the colonists to producing raw materials for, and buying finished products from, British companies.
... does this mean that if you transfer a video file (which might or might not be something that you own the copyright for), and it happens to pass through the wrong DSL modem, the modem will alter the bits in the file to embed the watermark[?]
If it systematically alters the bits of a user's payload at all (especially if it's in a way that passes the usual redundancy checks) it's "data corruption".
I'd be interesting to see what happens if somebody sues an ISP who provides one of these modems with their service for willful failure to provide the advertised "internet service".
Meanwhile:
- I bet we're seeing a downside of ownership of ISPs by media conglomerates: The "content" section driving a degradation of the ISP section's services.
- Watch for tweaks to the transport protocols to detect this sort of tampering and abort it.
Is someone going to call Al Gore and get his opinion on this?
These days all he'd be interested in is how much power it consumed.
Kennedy starting the Vietnam military action would be a bit bizarre, given that as Eisenhower was president at the time.
On Eisenhower's watch the Geneva Conference arranged for the French to leave and the country to be temporarily partitioned into two administrative districts prior to reunification elections. The Northern was run by Ho Chi Min's faction (which grew from the WW II resistance) and the south by Diem. This was post-Korean-war and the heyday of the Cold War and the Domino Theory.
Ho's original resistance group had been Communist and the government he set up ditto. He'd hoped for US support as an anti-colonialist, but his communist connection during the cold war wrecked that. The Chinese supported Ho, and the US supported the Diem regime with supplies and military advisers. When the Deim regime refused to hold reunification elections on schedule the US went along, and didn't drop him as he consolidated his hold on the South by oppressing and/or killing his opposition - including the Buddhist majority. During the last two years of Eisenhower's presidency the north finally started a guerrilla infiltration to hook up with southern resistance movements, forming the NFL about a month after Kennedy's election and a month before his inauguration.
Under Kennedy the US didn't arrange either the promised reunification elections or non-faked south-only elections to replace the southern government with one having majority support. (Diem was part of the small Catholic faction, viewed by much of the population as a continuation of the French colonial occupation.) Instead the US massively increased the number of "advisors" and changed their role to direct military assistance (switching them from teachers to soldiers in thin disguise. The state department and CIA (over the objections of the US military) did preside over a regime change - a military coup that assassinated Diem and repced him with a quick succession of Juntas, ending with the South in the hands of generals with connections to their organized crime. Kennedy was assassinated about three weeks after Diem.
LBJ switched to direct overt military aid, ramped the war up with US forces composed mainly of draftees. (This dovetailed with his "Great Society" programs: The Selective Service System "solved" the "problem" of the baby boomers hitting the job market in a lump by "channeling" them into government-desired occupations with the threat of the draft - pushing large numbers of them into college educations rather than hitting the job market for high school graduates en masse.)
Thanks. (I've fixed it - and slashdot will fix it retroactively.)
This case was not decided by a judge. It was settled out of court.
I may be wrong, but I'm fairly certain that there is no legal precedent set when someone settles.
You're correct. (The fact that he settled may make others more likely to cave. But it doesn't establish any law that courts look at for those that don't settle.)
... with shallow pockets. Once the precedent is established you use it to go after people (scumbags or otherwise) with deeper pockets.
That's why prosecutors start a child molester, if possible, when they're prosecuting the first case under a new censorship law.
Works just as well for the good guys:
- Start with some idiot who both exposed himself in public as part of a scam and used bogus DMCA takedown notices. Get the precedent established that bogus DMCA takedown notices are wrong and you can be punished for them.
- Next go after somebody who used bogus takedown notices without exposing himself or committing other previous (but somehow related) scams, but DID cause a bunch of financial and/or other damage by his activities. Establish that he has to pay for the damage plus a penalty.
- THEN take on the MAFIAA.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of those!
...
(One, two, three, four,
one,) And he was
BLInded by the
light (two, three,) wrapped
up, like a deuce, another
runner in the night. (four,
President Kennedy wanned you all about this check the video.
That wouldn't be the same President Kennedy who uttered the immortal fascist slogan "Ask not what your country can do for YOU, ask what you cn do for YOUR COUNTRY?" would it?
The one who started the Vietnam military action?
Just checking. (Last time I looked, that was the only US President Kennedy around, despite tries by two of his brothers.)
Many of the classified documents on p2p networks...are merely bogus with repetitive loops of non-classified material.
In fact, when a classified document becomes particularly popular, the CIA floods the network with bogus info and entire documents of redacted text.
Any bets on whether the KaZaA install allegedly publishing the classified information was actually a disinformation operation in the first place - with the Dept of Homeland Security warning part of the operation?
"Oh, DEAR! Some idiots installed KaZaA on machines with REAL, GENUINE, USEFUL to ENEMIES classified information and it LEAKED! Oh the HORROR! (Snicker.)"