Perhaps this is because of the purpose terrorism was invented for. After all the main goal is not to destroy a few buildings or kill some people, but to introduce fear. And until now thus scheme has been perfectly successful. The way to win the "war" against terrorism is to stop the fear, not to increase it by constantly introducing new expensive and inefficient security measures.
Being Polish I'd like to emphasise, that ideas of democracy and freedom didn't come to the east after the Cold War. Our constitution (1791) was second in the world. The idea of personal freedom and democracy have been present in our society since sixteenth century. Try and remember what was happening in the west during that period.
Russian history is also little known in the west, but Russia hasn't been always an authocratic monarchy or communist dictatorship.
Don't mod parent down. Unfortunately it is true. VAT is not like sales tax. It is overcomplicated, tends to have plenty of loopholes and creates enormous bureaucracy. And bureucracy is like cancer. It will always find new ways to grow by introducing new, usually absurd, regulations.
BTW How many slashdotters know that carrot is a fruit according to EU law?
In my country (Poland) a few years ago they decided that they should put VAT (value added tax) on free software. They found some law that enables tax officials to reassess value of goods if they seem underpriced. They assumed value of a Linux distro to be a price (not value of course) of Windows Server and for Open Office of MS Office Pro. Fortunately all media ridiculed this idea and they backed off.
You forgot about the most important property of free software. It is free. It gives you freedom to contribute, to use, to develop. Government financing removes the most essential freedom, the right of not being involved. 90% of people do not care about free software. If the government participates in financing it they will pay for it from their taxes. Don't you think that it depriving from freedom in its name. We should urge government to buy free software instead of proprietary but ONLY if it is more cost effective.
Actually "innocent until proven guilty" still applies here. Therefore it is their's problem to find the killer. You would, of course, be a prime suspect, and while being questioned you could either tell who had a gun or refuse to answer such question.
I'm just trying to show you a difference between price and tax. If you can find a gas station where you would only a price of gas without tax that's fine (such illegal gas station really exist in central Europe where people are poor and gas prices are like in EU - almost twice as much as in US) . Otherwise it's obviously a theft, because gas station owner bought this gas not to become a tax collector, but to sell it with a profit.
To answer your next message. There is no extra tax (like in gas) in the price of a CD (yet) but this price is artificially inflated by a monopolistic organization.
I agree with you but this time your argumentation sucks.
You somewhat attribute a very strong thesis to yout adversary which I doubt he believes in. There is no reason in this but rethorics.
In fact the case is not that simple. I agree that music companies are losing profit because of copyright infringment. I agree that it can be considered as a kind of theft. But these companies are a kind of monopoly (oligopoly) and this is wrong. The high price of CDs becomes almost like a tax. Taxes have a different nature though. Not paing taxes is a crime but not a theft. Why? Because, it is government that uses law and force to take our money from us with or without our consent. If somebody comes to you on the street and kindly asks you for your wallet or else... You can either give him your money or expect consequences but the choice is yours and both are morally equal.
Let anybody choose for himself if CDs have real market prices or have an artificial tax imposed on them.
Counting method
on
Genome Surprise
·
· Score: 2, Informative
As far as I know, there is no easy method to distinguish a gene from other parts of DNA sequence. In order to get such an estimate heurictic algorithms that look for characteristic patterns in the sequence are used. Therefore it is hard to say about proofs. These are only estimates, which can be more or less justified. Searching methods are of course tested on other organisms which are better known (e.g. Drosophilia), but we are not really aware of differences and similarities in gene expression of mentioned fruit fly and human.
Besides the number of genes doesn't have to determine anything. It is just the number of different proteins that can be produced in the living cell. What makes an organism really complex is how and when these proteins are produced and this is determined by gene expression which is poorly understood. It can be compared to different methods of encoding. 8 bits are 8 different signals but offer 256 different combinations. If "complexity" of a living organism is exponential to the number of genes, than one gene makes a difference.
There is a simple technology letting employees make long distance or international calls from home. They call the company (local call) and after entering a code, get a dialtone and make another call. Would it be also illegal?
I wonder if people who voted for this bill had a clue what it really means.
There are two major problems to overcome before we will be able to design a new life form from scratch.
1. Protein folding: We believe that protein structure is determined by its sequence (i.e. two proteins having same sequence have the same structure in physiological conditions). Therefore to design new proteins of desired structure we need to "predict" its sequence. Such research has been in progress for 30 years, since 10 years it has been biennaly evaluated at Critical Assesment of Structure Prediction(CASP). After last one we can say that failure at CASP is no longer guaranteed, but a lot has to be done.
2. Gene regulation: Even if we would know which proteins are needed to sustain life of the organism being designed, we need to provide information when such proteins are needed. This mechanism in living cell is called gene regulation. Most of the cell's DNA is used for that purpose in a way we poorly understand. It is even hard to point regions responsible for expression of a particular gene. Current research in this field is mostly finding examples (i.e. finding ways some particular genes are regulated).
There are also technical difficulties in genome assembly that have been mentioned already.
To sum up: If Venter is going to use known proteins and copy known genes (with their alleged promotor regions) it will be comparable to "copy-paste" programming. And if it's done in a decade I don't believe it will shed much light on essential problems I mentioned above.
I work for the Lab ran by Departament of Energy. We have lots of old but still usable computers (on PII 500 level). The only problem is that they cannot be taken offsite for security reasons, and nobody wants them on-site. The security is so tight that when harddrive in one of new Dell boxes had to be replaced, the old broken one couldn't be taken by the serviceman (which is the usual policy).
The problem is thas institutions like this have the biggest stores of old crap and nothing can be done with this.
Old computers either still have enough juice to be usable, or are so old that they are gaining value for collectors (check prices of some Sinclair models). So charity or eBay seem to be better solutions than paying somebody to take stuff away.
This post will probably be treated as flamebait or worse (if somebody will read it of course) but I can't resist.
In my opinion the problem is not with this war itself, but political actions leading to it. America has the most powerful army in the world. One tenth of it would be enough to conquer Europe. Nevertheless such powerful country is afraid of some little dictator. Come on! Saddam's regime is bad, but it cannot harm the US.
There are goals to be achieved by this war: oil, some sort of stability in the Middle East, removing threats to US allies in the region. These are real reasons, and they should be named! History knows many cases of just and unjust wars, but to my best knowledge US have only fought on the good side (maybe except Kosovo). Now I am afraid that this war will set a bad precedent.
Maybe this is a stupid question, but what is the point of enabling such feature as running executable code received in an e-mail? I know what everybody on Slashdot think (except for those 1337 H4X0RZ who find this useful). I just want to know the answer from inventor of this "feature".
and supported by four elephants standing on a giant turtle.
In the artile she is proud of putting emphasis on the history of science more than actual facts. What's the point of going through mistakes and theories proven false. It might make the book interesting in the same manner as any other story, but this is SCIENCE. The primary goal is to communicate current (or valid) concepts and ideas instead of those already obsolete. The history of discoveries is also important but only for those who are interested. Besides teaching many theories instead of one can make some kids confused.
It's very nice they fix their OS, but WHY ARE THEY FORCING PEOPLE TO THIS UPDATE?
This is fundamentally wrong, not just fixing things.
You seem to forget that the only reason for OS existence is to run apps, an the safest OS is the one for which the set of apps compatible with it is EMPTY.
Besides if I bought Win'95 to run a particular app, and after their fix it doesn't work any more, can I return the whole thing? What EULA's on patches will say, I wonder.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps this is because of the purpose terrorism was invented for. After all the main goal is not to destroy a few buildings or kill some people, but to introduce fear. And until now thus scheme has been perfectly successful. The way to win the "war" against terrorism is to stop the fear, not to increase it by constantly introducing new expensive and inefficient security measures.
Please be so kind, and give us an example of a communist country, where citizens are happy with the system, and would object to change.
Not that citizens' will matters in such cases.
Being Polish I'd like to emphasise, that ideas of democracy and freedom didn't come to the east after the Cold War. Our constitution (1791) was second in the world. The idea of personal freedom and democracy have been present in our society since sixteenth century. Try and remember what was happening in the west during that period. Russian history is also little known in the west, but Russia hasn't been always an authocratic monarchy or communist dictatorship.
Don't mod parent down. Unfortunately it is true. VAT is not like sales tax. It is overcomplicated, tends to have plenty of loopholes and creates enormous bureaucracy. And bureucracy is like cancer. It will always find new ways to grow by introducing new, usually absurd, regulations.
BTW How many slashdotters know that carrot is a fruit according to EU law?
In my country (Poland) a few years ago they decided that they should put VAT (value added tax) on free software. They found some law that enables tax officials to reassess value of goods if they seem underpriced. They assumed value of a Linux distro to be a price (not value of course) of Windows Server and for Open Office of MS Office Pro.
Fortunately all media ridiculed this idea and they backed off.
It never crashed on me.
But I run it on Linux.
You forgot about the most important property of free software. It is free. It gives you freedom to contribute, to use, to develop.
Government financing removes the most essential freedom, the right of not being involved. 90% of people do not care about free software. If the government participates in financing it they will pay for it from their taxes. Don't you think that it depriving from freedom in its name.
We should urge government to buy free software instead of proprietary but ONLY if it is more cost effective.
Actually "innocent until proven guilty" still applies here. Therefore it is their's problem to find the killer. You would, of course, be a prime suspect, and while being questioned you could either tell who had a gun or refuse to answer such question.
I skimmed through the introduction to the book and it seems that they mostly complain about applications, not Unix OS itself.
I'm just trying to show you a difference between price and tax. If you can find a gas station where you would only a price of gas without tax that's fine (such illegal gas station really exist in central Europe where people are poor and gas prices are like in EU - almost twice as much as in US) . Otherwise it's obviously a theft, because gas station owner bought this gas not to become a tax collector, but to sell it with a profit.
To answer your next message. There is no extra tax (like in gas) in the price of a CD (yet) but this price is artificially inflated by a monopolistic organization.
I agree with you but this time your argumentation sucks.
You somewhat attribute a very strong thesis to yout adversary which I doubt he believes in. There is no reason in this but rethorics.
In fact the case is not that simple. I agree that music companies are losing profit because of copyright infringment. I agree that it can be considered as a kind of theft. But these companies are a kind of monopoly (oligopoly) and this is wrong. The high price of CDs becomes almost like a tax. Taxes have a different nature though. Not paing taxes is a crime but not a theft. Why? Because, it is government that uses law and force to take our money from us with or without our consent. If somebody comes to you on the street and kindly asks you for your wallet or else... You can either give him your money or expect consequences but the choice is yours and both are morally equal.
Let anybody choose for himself if CDs have real market prices or have an artificial tax imposed on them.
As far as I know, there is no easy method to distinguish a gene from other parts of DNA sequence. In order to get such an estimate heurictic algorithms that look for characteristic patterns in the sequence are used. Therefore it is hard to say about proofs. These are only estimates, which can be more or less justified. Searching methods are of course tested on other organisms which are better known (e.g. Drosophilia), but we are not really aware of differences and similarities in gene expression of mentioned fruit fly and human.
Besides the number of genes doesn't have to determine anything. It is just the number of different proteins that can be produced in the living cell. What makes an organism really complex is how and when these proteins are produced and this is determined by gene expression which is poorly understood. It can be compared to different methods of encoding. 8 bits are 8 different signals but offer 256 different combinations. If "complexity" of a living organism is exponential to the number of genes, than one gene makes a difference.
If these devices are going to be held in hand, they better be lighter then air.
Next step is to find prime numbers differing by 1.
There is a simple technology letting employees make long distance or international calls from home. They call the company (local call) and after entering a code, get a dialtone and make another call.
Would it be also illegal?
I wonder if people who voted for this bill had a clue what it really means.
There are two major problems to overcome before we will be able to design a new life form from scratch.
1. Protein folding:
We believe that protein structure is determined by its sequence (i.e. two proteins having same sequence have the same structure in physiological conditions). Therefore to design new proteins of desired structure we need to "predict" its sequence. Such research has been in progress for 30 years, since 10 years it has been biennaly evaluated at Critical Assesment of Structure Prediction(CASP). After last one we can say that failure at CASP is no longer guaranteed, but a lot has to be done.
2. Gene regulation:
Even if we would know which proteins are needed to sustain life of the organism being designed, we need to provide information when such proteins are needed. This mechanism in living cell is called gene regulation. Most of the cell's DNA is used for that purpose in a way we poorly understand. It is even hard to point regions responsible for expression of a particular gene. Current research in this field is mostly finding examples (i.e. finding ways some particular genes are regulated).
There are also technical difficulties in genome assembly that have been mentioned already.
To sum up:
If Venter is going to use known proteins and copy known genes (with their alleged promotor regions) it will be comparable to "copy-paste" programming. And if it's done in a decade I don't believe it will shed much light on essential problems I mentioned above.
Write code abroad, and compile in US
I work for the Lab ran by Departament of Energy. We have lots of old but still usable computers (on PII 500 level). The only problem is that they cannot be taken offsite for security reasons, and nobody wants them on-site. The security is so tight that when harddrive in one of new Dell boxes had to be replaced, the old broken one couldn't be taken by the serviceman (which is the usual policy).
The problem is thas institutions like this have the biggest stores of old crap and nothing can be done with this.
Old computers either still have enough juice to be usable, or are so old that they are gaining value for collectors (check prices of some Sinclair models). So charity or eBay seem to be better solutions than paying somebody to take stuff away.
This post will probably be treated as flamebait or worse (if somebody will read it of course) but I can't resist.
In my opinion the problem is not with this war itself, but political actions leading to it. America has the most powerful army in the world. One tenth of it would be enough to conquer Europe. Nevertheless such powerful country is afraid of some little dictator. Come on! Saddam's regime is bad, but it cannot harm the US.
There are goals to be achieved by this war: oil, some sort of stability in the Middle East, removing threats to US allies in the region. These are real reasons, and they should be named! History knows many cases of just and unjust wars, but to my best knowledge US have only fought on the good side (maybe except Kosovo). Now I am afraid that this war will set a bad precedent.
Each version of Windows is a completely new product. Maybe instead of patches we will have a new version every Monday.
Maybe this is a stupid question, but what is the point of enabling such feature as running executable code received in an e-mail? I know what everybody on Slashdot think (except for those 1337 H4X0RZ who find this useful). I just want to know the answer from inventor of this "feature".
s/feature/bug/g if $OS=="Windows"
Is this possible to use this heat (for recharging batteries for instance) instead of dispersing it.
It is energy after all.
and supported by four elephants standing on a giant turtle.
In the artile she is proud of putting emphasis on the history of science more than actual facts. What's the point of going through mistakes and theories proven false. It might make the book interesting in the same manner as any other story, but this is SCIENCE. The primary goal is to communicate current (or valid) concepts and ideas instead of those already obsolete. The history of discoveries is also important but only for those who are interested. Besides teaching many theories instead of one can make some kids confused.
It's very nice they fix their OS, but WHY ARE THEY FORCING PEOPLE TO THIS UPDATE?
This is fundamentally wrong, not just fixing things.
You seem to forget that the only reason for OS existence is to run apps, an the safest OS is the one for which the set of apps compatible with it is EMPTY.
Besides if I bought Win'95 to run a particular app, and after their fix it doesn't work any more, can I return the whole thing? What EULA's on patches will say, I wonder.