And who, exactly, would you put in her place? The Mad Monk? Or do you want Howard back?
Going by our experience with the Internet censorship thing, I'd say your best bet is to letterbomb Q&A. Tim Wilson is coming up soon; he should have a pretty strong opinion on this.
And thirding. I wouldn't say it's "one of the nicest GUI libraries", but if you're a Java person who wants to write Javascript, it's by far the cleanest option.
No, the religious martyrs die because they suffer from a debilitating infectious mental illness otherwise known as faith.
It's usually considered gauche to do this on Slashdot, but in this case, I must ask you for your psychiatric qualifications or the qualifications of the person who made that diagnosis.
I consider it an insult to physicists when new agers throw around words like "energy" and "vibration". Psychiatrists deserve the same defence when others misuse perfectly good scientific words like "mental illness" or "delusion". Indeed, it's less excusable if the person perpetrating the misuse claims to be on the side of science.
Religion, like sexual orientation, is part of a person's identity. The main difference is that religion is more malleable than sexual orientation, at least in theory.
Consider ethnicity. For the purpose of this post I'm going to define "race" as a loosely-defined phenotype (including, for example, skin colour) which we understand to be correlated with having ancestors from some region of the world, and "ethnicity" as a similarly loosely-defined cultural heritage to which a person feels they belong. "Race" is not really malleable, but "ethnicity" is, at least in principle. However, we correctly understand ethnicity as being part of a person's identity. The fact that you can change it is beside the point.
People can and do suffer horrific atrocities because of how they self-identify, even if that self-identification could in principle be altered..
I don't think that second-hand sales are a problem. I'm just pointing out that even some of the best games can be completed (for some definition of "completed") within a typical rental period.
I see the used games market as rental - it probably is harder to rent a game (like a movie) because you might want to play it for longer than a day, so you buy it and then sell it as used for less.
FWIW, my ten-year-old daughter just completed Portal 2 in five days, less than the one-week rental period. Probably serves me right for letting her know that walkthroughs exist. And admittedly this isn't including finding all of the easter eggs, playing the co-op mode or going through all the commentaries. Still, there's one data point for you.
I think that bitching about used games is ridiculous, but this point does have to be acknowledged. If you buy a mercedes that's 2 years old, it is qualitatively less valuable because of wear and tear. If you buy a game that's 2 years old, unless it's damaged beyond repair, it'll have roughly the same quality as a new disc. The bits don't change.
I think you're confusing quality with value. The quality is the same, but the value does decline over time because there is value in novelty, as well as Blinn's Law.
If it helps, consider that nobody would be willing to put down the 1992-era cover price, let alone adjusted for inflation, on a brand new imprint of Sonic the Hedgehog 2. It simply does not have the same value as it did in 1992.
But regardless you can be pretty sure you are losing something when someone buys used versus new, [...]
No, that's not true. People can and do buy games in knowing that they can resell or trade it later. A game that you can't resell less useful, and hence worth less, than one that you can. The inability to resell will certainly result in fewer sales.
Exactly how many is an open question, but if you'll take an anecdote, the most reselling and second-hand purchasing that I've seen (and done) is with kids' games. These are routinely traded when kids outgrow them.
One more thing: Don't forget the rental market. I've bought AUD$25 second-hand games on a whim, but I've never put down AUD$70 on a game that I haven't played (possibly on someone else's machine) first.
Ah, but incriminating evidence of what? She might be completely innocent of what she's charged with but guilty of something else. In fact, she probably is, and so are you.
I guess the bit about kiddie porn is a response to the grandparent post, as to my post your argument seems to be stretched.
That's correct, but I also wanted to make the general point that, apart from something like child pornography, there is no such thing as an illegal file. A music track, on the other hand, isn't inherently legal or illegal. That depends on who has it and what they're doing with it.
I suppose it could happen but really down any of those artists using MegaUpload to distribute their stuff were the ones sending DMCA take down requests and if they were I would expect they would note that they were okay with MegaUpload distributing the file on another part of the site.
Generally speaking, it's not artists who send DMCA takedown requests. Ever heard of Righthaven? Or UMG trying to take down the Megaupload song?
Of course, copyright trolls aren't that common; it's usually the middle men, labels and studios, who send DMCA takedowns, sometimes against the wishes of artists. There's also the inter-jurisdictional issue that a work may be under copyright in the USA but not in the country of the user or Megaupload's servers. There is precedent for this sort of thing happening. It's reasonable to assume that Megaupload got its fair share of bogus DMCA requests as well as legitimate ones.
However, I should reiterate my point: By itself, I consider this practice to be arguably reasonable, but the feds are painting this as one part of a pattern of deliberate bending and breaking of the law. It can and should be understood in the context of everything else that Megaupload may have done.
When they got a complaint about the file, they only removed the URI in the complaint, when they knew or reasonably could have known they were still making the same content available on another part of their site.
Child pornography is illegal, in the sense that nobody is legally allowed to have it or distribute it. Copyrighted material, on the other hand, isn't inherently illegal. Just because one person is not legally allowed to distribute a copy doesn't mean that nobody else is. Nor is this hypothetical, given the number of musicians who are noting that they distribute their own work via Megaupload.
That's not to say that those who ran Megaupload didn't deliberately bend and/or break the law. Just that this, taken by itself, is arguably neither illegal nor morally wrong.
I am not a biologist, but I am a bioinformatician. So I can BS about combinatorics slightly more convincingly.
Even though de novo assembly for most medical diagnostic purposes is a waste of time, I should point out that most de novo assemblers (including ours) split up long reads into short reads for error correction, then piece the reads back together. In that sense, if all you want to do is find SNPs or other small variants, read length is irrelevant given the same coverage, especially compared to the biasses introduced during sample prep and PCR.
Having said that, the comparison probably isn't fair. Ion Torrent will probably never beat SOLiD on quality. Its selling point is always going to be price, which is why it may be feasible to put one in every consumer pathology lab (though not in every GP surgery).
Sequencing a human genome is not going to tell you whether you are infected with a pathogen, and it won't identify the pathogen. To do that, you will need to isolate the organism and sequence it that way.
Actually, you may not need to isolate the organism at all. If you really had a "just stick a sample in the machine"-type reader (which this box isn't), and copy of a few human reference genomes and a library of known pathogens, you could separate the reads just using simple statistics. We do this today with mixtures such as gut flora samples or cancer xenografts with varying degrees of success. The statistical models are getting better every day, though.
Of course, what constitutes an "infection" is partly context. You're supposed to have a lot of e. coli. What matters is where it is.
Also, having the genome of an organism does not automatically make it easier to determine things like antibiotic resistance.
True enough. The "genes" for antibiotic resistance often turn out to be plasmids. Chances are that a lot of your gut flora are already resistant to various antibiotics, so looking for those plasmids won't necessarily help you determine whether or not the pathogen is.
You're completely right about sample prep. It's not like you can just bleed into the machine and results an hour later.
On read length, though, a few hundred nt is probably fine for 90+% of diagnostic tasks, given that we have lots of reference human genomes already. Unless it's a cancer biopsy (and sometimes not even then), any sample processed in a doctor's surgery or consumer pathology lab doesn't need to be assembled de novo. Alignment plus statistics will probably do the job just fine.
Another application where long reads aren't really needed is identifying infections. At the moment, if you walk into a doctor's surgery with flu-like symptoms, your doctor is essentially guessing whether it's a virus or bacterium. If we could tell that within a day, there'd be far less antibiotic misuse.
The problem is that if you define a sufficiently sophisticated AI as "not life", it might define you as being "not life". You might be nothing more than a sophisticated abacus, or something which could in principle be simulated on one. We honestly don't know.
Having said that, your last sentence is 100% absolutely correct.
I said there was only one elected president denied nomination by their party. According to the links you gave, the other three took office because the elected president died in office or retired.
So basically, only one elected President in history has been denied nomination by their party, and none since the advent of primaries. That doesn't seem like something I'd pin my hopes on.
Help me out here, since you obviously know more US history than I (unsurprising, since I'm not American). The only case I'm aware of in the 20th century or later is LBJ, who actually declined the nomination. Even Hoover was re-nominated, wasn't he?
I have an alternative, non-violent suggestion. You could use social media to let everyone know where the TSA are that morning. Then send a team of people to Occupy that location and generally do anything which a) is legal, and b) keeps the TSA busy while the rest of the city can get on with their day.
Let me suggest some alternate advice: Get yourself registered as a Republican and vote in the primaries for Ron Paul.
I'm not American, let alone a member of a major political party there. But my reasoning is this: There's no way that anyone but Obama can be nominated on the Democratic side. There's no way that any of the Republican nominees can win the election. The best you can do is try to change the topics that get discussed in the media. Ron Paul is a loon, but at least he'll ask the right questions in the debates.
Slashdot Mirror
And who, exactly, would you put in her place? The Mad Monk? Or do you want Howard back?
Going by our experience with the Internet censorship thing, I'd say your best bet is to letterbomb Q&A. Tim Wilson is coming up soon; he should have a pretty strong opinion on this.
And thirding. I wouldn't say it's "one of the nicest GUI libraries", but if you're a Java person who wants to write Javascript, it's by far the cleanest option.
No, the religious martyrs die because they suffer from a debilitating infectious mental illness otherwise known as faith.
It's usually considered gauche to do this on Slashdot, but in this case, I must ask you for your psychiatric qualifications or the qualifications of the person who made that diagnosis.
I consider it an insult to physicists when new agers throw around words like "energy" and "vibration". Psychiatrists deserve the same defence when others misuse perfectly good scientific words like "mental illness" or "delusion". Indeed, it's less excusable if the person perpetrating the misuse claims to be on the side of science.
Religion, like sexual orientation, is part of a person's identity. The main difference is that religion is more malleable than sexual orientation, at least in theory.
Consider ethnicity. For the purpose of this post I'm going to define "race" as a loosely-defined phenotype (including, for example, skin colour) which we understand to be correlated with having ancestors from some region of the world, and "ethnicity" as a similarly loosely-defined cultural heritage to which a person feels they belong. "Race" is not really malleable, but "ethnicity" is, at least in principle. However, we correctly understand ethnicity as being part of a person's identity. The fact that you can change it is beside the point.
People can and do suffer horrific atrocities because of how they self-identify, even if that self-identification could in principle be altered..
I don't think that second-hand sales are a problem. I'm just pointing out that even some of the best games can be completed (for some definition of "completed") within a typical rental period.
I just bought the Ultimate Genesis Collection. My kids have been enjoying it immensely.
I see the used games market as rental - it probably is harder to rent a game (like a movie) because you might want to play it for longer than a day, so you buy it and then sell it as used for less.
FWIW, my ten-year-old daughter just completed Portal 2 in five days, less than the one-week rental period. Probably serves me right for letting her know that walkthroughs exist. And admittedly this isn't including finding all of the easter eggs, playing the co-op mode or going through all the commentaries. Still, there's one data point for you.
I think that bitching about used games is ridiculous, but this point does have to be acknowledged. If you buy a mercedes that's 2 years old, it is qualitatively less valuable because of wear and tear. If you buy a game that's 2 years old, unless it's damaged beyond repair, it'll have roughly the same quality as a new disc. The bits don't change.
I think you're confusing quality with value. The quality is the same, but the value does decline over time because there is value in novelty, as well as Blinn's Law.
If it helps, consider that nobody would be willing to put down the 1992-era cover price, let alone adjusted for inflation, on a brand new imprint of Sonic the Hedgehog 2. It simply does not have the same value as it did in 1992.
But regardless you can be pretty sure you are losing something when someone buys used versus new, [...]
No, that's not true. People can and do buy games in knowing that they can resell or trade it later. A game that you can't resell less useful, and hence worth less, than one that you can. The inability to resell will certainly result in fewer sales.
Exactly how many is an open question, but if you'll take an anecdote, the most reselling and second-hand purchasing that I've seen (and done) is with kids' games. These are routinely traded when kids outgrow them.
One more thing: Don't forget the rental market. I've bought AUD$25 second-hand games on a whim, but I've never put down AUD$70 on a game that I haven't played (possibly on someone else's machine) first.
Ah, but incriminating evidence of what? She might be completely innocent of what she's charged with but guilty of something else. In fact, she probably is, and so are you.
I guess the bit about kiddie porn is a response to the grandparent post, as to my post your argument seems to be stretched.
That's correct, but I also wanted to make the general point that, apart from something like child pornography, there is no such thing as an illegal file. A music track, on the other hand, isn't inherently legal or illegal. That depends on who has it and what they're doing with it.
I suppose it could happen but really down any of those artists using MegaUpload to distribute their stuff were the ones sending DMCA take down requests and if they were I would expect they would note that they were okay with MegaUpload distributing the file on another part of the site.
Generally speaking, it's not artists who send DMCA takedown requests. Ever heard of Righthaven? Or UMG trying to take down the Megaupload song?
Of course, copyright trolls aren't that common; it's usually the middle men, labels and studios, who send DMCA takedowns, sometimes against the wishes of artists. There's also the inter-jurisdictional issue that a work may be under copyright in the USA but not in the country of the user or Megaupload's servers. There is precedent for this sort of thing happening. It's reasonable to assume that Megaupload got its fair share of bogus DMCA requests as well as legitimate ones.
However, I should reiterate my point: By itself, I consider this practice to be arguably reasonable, but the feds are painting this as one part of a pattern of deliberate bending and breaking of the law. It can and should be understood in the context of everything else that Megaupload may have done.
When they got a complaint about the file, they only removed the URI in the complaint, when they knew or reasonably could have known they were still making the same content available on another part of their site.
Child pornography is illegal, in the sense that nobody is legally allowed to have it or distribute it. Copyrighted material, on the other hand, isn't inherently illegal. Just because one person is not legally allowed to distribute a copy doesn't mean that nobody else is. Nor is this hypothetical, given the number of musicians who are noting that they distribute their own work via Megaupload.
That's not to say that those who ran Megaupload didn't deliberately bend and/or break the law. Just that this, taken by itself, is arguably neither illegal nor morally wrong.
We hereby demand that you cease and desist use of the words "hands on the car", which are owned by Viacom.
I am not a biologist, but I am a bioinformatician. So I can BS about combinatorics slightly more convincingly.
Even though de novo assembly for most medical diagnostic purposes is a waste of time, I should point out that most de novo assemblers (including ours) split up long reads into short reads for error correction, then piece the reads back together. In that sense, if all you want to do is find SNPs or other small variants, read length is irrelevant given the same coverage, especially compared to the biasses introduced during sample prep and PCR.
Having said that, the comparison probably isn't fair. Ion Torrent will probably never beat SOLiD on quality. Its selling point is always going to be price, which is why it may be feasible to put one in every consumer pathology lab (though not in every GP surgery).
Sequencing a human genome is not going to tell you whether you are infected with a pathogen, and it won't identify the pathogen. To do that, you will need to isolate the organism and sequence it that way.
Actually, you may not need to isolate the organism at all. If you really had a "just stick a sample in the machine"-type reader (which this box isn't), and copy of a few human reference genomes and a library of known pathogens, you could separate the reads just using simple statistics. We do this today with mixtures such as gut flora samples or cancer xenografts with varying degrees of success. The statistical models are getting better every day, though.
Of course, what constitutes an "infection" is partly context. You're supposed to have a lot of e. coli. What matters is where it is.
Also, having the genome of an organism does not automatically make it easier to determine things like antibiotic resistance.
True enough. The "genes" for antibiotic resistance often turn out to be plasmids. Chances are that a lot of your gut flora are already resistant to various antibiotics, so looking for those plasmids won't necessarily help you determine whether or not the pathogen is.
You're completely right about sample prep. It's not like you can just bleed into the machine and results an hour later.
On read length, though, a few hundred nt is probably fine for 90+% of diagnostic tasks, given that we have lots of reference human genomes already. Unless it's a cancer biopsy (and sometimes not even then), any sample processed in a doctor's surgery or consumer pathology lab doesn't need to be assembled de novo. Alignment plus statistics will probably do the job just fine.
Another application where long reads aren't really needed is identifying infections. At the moment, if you walk into a doctor's surgery with flu-like symptoms, your doctor is essentially guessing whether it's a virus or bacterium. If we could tell that within a day, there'd be far less antibiotic misuse.
The problem is that if you define a sufficiently sophisticated AI as "not life", it might define you as being "not life". You might be nothing more than a sophisticated abacus, or something which could in principle be simulated on one. We honestly don't know.
Having said that, your last sentence is 100% absolutely correct.
I said there was only one elected president denied nomination by their party. According to the links you gave, the other three took office because the elected president died in office or retired.
What the article doesn't say:
So basically, only one elected President in history has been denied nomination by their party, and none since the advent of primaries. That doesn't seem like something I'd pin my hopes on.
Help me out here, since you obviously know more US history than I (unsurprising, since I'm not American). The only case I'm aware of in the 20th century or later is LBJ, who actually declined the nomination. Even Hoover was re-nominated, wasn't he?
Hasn't worked yet. Sure, the Tea Party (after a good start) was bought out by The Man. But Occupy isn't even close to done yet.
"You've got to non-violently resist for your right to party." -- Boitel Boys
It's apparently snappier in Spanish.
I have an alternative, non-violent suggestion. You could use social media to let everyone know where the TSA are that morning. Then send a team of people to Occupy that location and generally do anything which a) is legal, and b) keeps the TSA busy while the rest of the city can get on with their day.
Let me suggest some alternate advice: Get yourself registered as a Republican and vote in the primaries for Ron Paul.
I'm not American, let alone a member of a major political party there. But my reasoning is this: There's no way that anyone but Obama can be nominated on the Democratic side. There's no way that any of the Republican nominees can win the election. The best you can do is try to change the topics that get discussed in the media. Ron Paul is a loon, but at least he'll ask the right questions in the debates.