The rules for how DNA encodes protiens have been known since before I was born. The evolutionary mapping of how the genes coding different protiens duplicated and evolved into new structures is fairly easy to map out (give or take a brute force algorithm that runs in double-factorial-time to search through all evolutionary trees looking for the one that minimizes the number of mutations required along the way).
So this group has calculated the most likely common ancestor of the gene that now codes for a whole family of protiens, encoded the solution in real DNA, stuck it into bacteria and shown that it actually does produce a protien that they have been able to isolate the actual protien so that they can explore what it does/did.
(the term "articial protien" seems very odd to read - before I think it through, it sounds as though its hinting there is something mystical to "natural" protiens untouched by humans)
Would the US have used nuclear weapons on Iraq if they did it over again given the "proof" of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction?
Does this mean that it's acceptable now for other nations/groups to pre-emptively use weapons of mass destruction if they believe the US is threatening them?
The deep and serious problem I have with the US's vision of a new world order is that it isn't symmetrical: the US is allowing itself to say things and do things it would never accept from others. It might be good game theory for maximizing influence at this moment in history, but it's not really in the spirit of the free and democratic ideal.
What interests me is how good astronomy reporting seems to be compared to all other science reporting. It faces the same guantlet as other articles, avoids the math and loves to fear-monger possible disasters, but somehow it seems to communicate the more-or-less current theories in a way that seems understandable, interesting, even inspiring.
Is it a difference in how the media approaches the subject? Astronomy seems to have an aura of purity (biology seems to only be reported to create ecological or evolutionary flamewars; medicine research sounds more like infomercials than news; engineering... well, doesn't exist in the media). Have astronomers learned how to package their data/analysis in nice neat packages?
There are only three things evolution needs to happen: [1] information which is copied from one generation to the next (genes), [2] different numbers of offspring that survive to reproduce (1 child vs 10) and [3] some level of causation between the information and that difference in numbers of offspring.
Thus, there is strong selective pressure in favour of brains succeptable to philosophies that avoid birth control.
(I'm not sure if I write that as a joke or a sincere prediction)
Er... I was not trying to refer to that particular old-fashioned theory but thanks for the link - my wording in the original post looks really bad when put beside that picture. But I am not willing to throw out the baby with the bathwater - the basic idea is not entirely out of whack - the fetal forms are more strongly conserved than the adult forms. I meant to say that I was uncomfortable with the article's jump that since the adult dinos seemed to have down like baby birds, it seemed a speculative jump that adult dinos would be coloured like adult birds (possible, but very speculative).
( I hope that those giving me a "5, Insightful" understood what I meant:)
There's an old saying: "Ontogeny recapitulated Phylogeny" (or, "baby/fetal X usually looks like X's evolutionary ancestor" - since it's easier for a mutation to successfully edit the adult form than the infant form without causing something else to break).
So if dinosaurs and birds are related, one would expect there to be a lot of similarities to baby birds to down is not surprising. However, I'm not convinced about the immediate leap to a theory of multi-coloured down when chicks are usually mono-unicolour.
Directly or indirectly, a lot of things change the behaviour of their host. Rabies is a pretty dramatic example. Even the common cold does a pretty good job of getting us to cough it out in public.
Is WoW intending to be a permanent world which will have challenges for years to come or is it imagined as a finite game which will eventually be replaced with something new?
Do you imaging player-created content ever being incorporated into the world? ( beyond a group of characters standing around pretending to be an encounter:-)
Do you think there will ever come a day when you GPL the server-side engine?
"Real" money is just a fantasy substance that people barter for. Money is not a fancy piece of paper, it's a delusion, that we all politely buy into to make trading easier.
Like some third-world currency that suffers boutes of inflation and counterfeiting, MMRPG money is ephemeral and unstable, but from a mathematical standpoint, economics does not care if there the resources are real or imagined.
Markets have judged the supply and demand and the perception of inflation/permanence have assigned it a conversion rate. And because there are a great many unknowns in how a game will develop or be managed, the markets may from time to time exhibit irrational exhuberance, have pyramids and bubbles, just like the "real" world.
It's not entirely impossible that some day a court might rule that income tax will have to be charged on game money for the simple reason that there is a market for it - just as if it was money earned in another country.
Your premise is based on the assumption that everyone plays the same game. A MMOG is about a shared universe, not a single game experience. What if the grind of mining basic resources played like tetrus or solitaire - something that was fun on its own, even if the player ignored the rest of the game world?
Once the world and interface into is sophisticated enough, different players develop different objectives, take joy from different things and the worry about obsessive players "doing better" starts to evaporate. (well, at least as must as it does in the real world)
Isn't it a violation of the World Trade organization argreements to sell a product in a foreign market for less than the price in the domestic market? Isn't that the definition of anti-competitive dumping?
Calling for browsers to stop supporting HTML, however, is taking it about three steps too far.
I agree. Document standards need to be thinking about archival timeframes. I don't write web sites that change every day, I write things once and plan to pass them down to the next generation. I want to be able to go back 40 years from now to a family website and still be able to access it. That's far, far more important to me than any wiz-bang formating fad.
( then again, I guess HTML is the fad I embraced in moving away from plaintext. *sigh* )
So if any company believes that the number is accurate, the solution is obvious: arrange a free screening for all your employees outside of normal working hours.
Oh wait... let's just check who paid for this "study" first?
For all the talk about it, I don't think I've ever actually known anyone to do the classic accidental rm -Rf / as root.
I see about one disaster a month where a user toasts their own files. Over the years I've seen three servers destroyed by an admin doing an rm -rf . in the wrong directory (and heard a number more). I've heard second-hand of a million-dollar typo of someone on an admin server with a whole division's NFS directories mounted root-writable.
Statistically, I've concluded that any given person, regardless of intellegence, has a slightly more than one-in-a-million chance per day of doing a potentially machine-toasting typo.
I'm sad to say it but in a mere two episodes, the Doctor Who revival has managed to weave a more interesting temporal war story arc into its background than Enterprise managed in four years.
It's for the same reason that they all speak english: some things are just translated into a form you can understand.
( It's the actual interplanet-kissing getting past the censors that boggles my mind - if you stop and think about it genetically, it's a step further than portraying beastiality ).
Speaking as a Canadian, this is OLD news if you've read between the lines for the last few years.
We already knew there was a kickback scheme. We already knew the minister of Public Works had been dismissed in disgrace from cabinet ("there's something rotten in the state of Denmark" was the running joke several years ago when he was suddenly assigned as ambassidor). And Quebec politics have always been a mess - it's a relic of history slowly giving way to the modern world in fits and spurts.
The sad irony is that Paul Martin (the PM, who took over after all this happened) will likely get slammed across the blogosphere over this despite being the person who has most aggressively sought to shake up the politics of his party - he's the one who called the inquiry in the first place when he could have easily brushed it under the carpet and quietly denied everything. The media and opposition are "shocked" only in the Casa Blanca sense of the word.
So I'm left with a big "so what" reaction to this blog. Yes, there was a massive fraud, but the judge is not trying to hide the truth, he's trying to preserve the fairness of the upcoming criminal trials.
I'm not going call either KDE or gnome "Unix-like" until major distros start packaged them to put config files in a $HOME/var and/or $HOME/etc and stop littering the top level of the home directory with 10-12 different.something files/directories.
I hate having to create a new account and fire up a new desktop just to track down all the dot files created by the latest desktop. Invariably the user who's environment gets corrupted is the one who cannot possibly survive with a default or restored session and wants and has the power to escalate their wishes and ruin my day.
But isn't the highest risk for a social engineering attack at the lowest levels? It's the helpdesks where employees are under heavy presure to "make problems go away" and are faced with an intruder presenting a problem which has a choice between an easy insecure solution that makes the caller happy and problematic bureaucratic solution that will result in yellings and escalations.
I would assume a social engineer is not looking to have their call escalated to higher-ups because the more people who touch the call, the higher the risk of arousing suspicion. The higher-ups will never hear that the incident ever happened until the post-mortum of a successfully detected intrusion.
Back when I was in university, I calculated out how much of a first-year student's tuition actually goes into teaching them. The total funding to the average lecturerer was half the cost of the textbook.
When you're at university, the courses are only a tiny fraction of what your supposed to be getting for your money. The trouble is that the courses are the only thing you get marked on until you reach the real world. (it's easy to get caught in manager-think as a student: I'm measured on X, therefore X is the only thing that's important)
I whole-heartedly agree with the goal. From an end-user point of view, I want licenses I can trust, not subtle variations of fine print. Even the three major liscences seem to really boil down to a one word difference:
Commercial: "You cannot share what you add."
BSD: "You may share what you add."
GPL: "You must share what you add."
( everything else is just limitation on who the rules apply to: "You have to share what you add but I don't have to" or "You must share with me what you add" )
It would also be nice to see the net thrown wider than just software, but rather aim to be a new default framework all "intellectual property".
Proof of life on Mars is becoming strikingly similar to commercial fusion or anti-balistic missile defences - always just another contract down the road. It's not that I have anything against the exploration of Mars, nor do I not appreciate the difficulty of understanding an alien environment, but every time NASA hypes to the public I feel like I'm watching/reading politics, not science.
Slashdot Mirror
The rules for how DNA encodes protiens have been known since before I was born. The evolutionary mapping of how the genes coding different protiens duplicated and evolved into new structures is fairly easy to map out (give or take a brute force algorithm that runs in double-factorial-time to search through all evolutionary trees looking for the one that minimizes the number of mutations required along the way).
So this group has calculated the most likely common ancestor of the gene that now codes for a whole family of protiens, encoded the solution in real DNA, stuck it into bacteria and shown that it actually does produce a protien that they have been able to isolate the actual protien so that they can explore what it does/did.
(the term "articial protien" seems very odd to read - before I think it through, it sounds as though its hinting there is something mystical to "natural" protiens untouched by humans)
Would the US have used nuclear weapons on Iraq if they did it over again given the "proof" of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction?
Does this mean that it's acceptable now for other nations/groups to pre-emptively use weapons of mass destruction if they believe the US is threatening them?
The deep and serious problem I have with the US's vision of a new world order is that it isn't symmetrical: the US is allowing itself to say things and do things it would never accept from others. It might be good game theory for maximizing influence at this moment in history, but it's not really in the spirit of the free and democratic ideal.
What interests me is how good astronomy reporting seems to be compared to all other science reporting. It faces the same guantlet as other articles, avoids the math and loves to fear-monger possible disasters, but somehow it seems to communicate the more-or-less current theories in a way that seems understandable, interesting, even inspiring.
Is it a difference in how the media approaches the subject? Astronomy seems to have an aura of purity (biology seems to only be reported to create ecological or evolutionary flamewars; medicine research sounds more like infomercials than news; engineering ... well, doesn't exist in the media). Have astronomers learned how to package their data/analysis in nice neat packages?
There are only three things evolution needs to happen: [1] information which is copied from one generation to the next (genes), [2] different numbers of offspring that survive to reproduce (1 child vs 10) and [3] some level of causation between the information and that difference in numbers of offspring.
Thus, there is strong selective pressure in favour of brains succeptable to philosophies that avoid birth control.
(I'm not sure if I write that as a joke or a sincere prediction)
Er ... I was not trying to refer to that particular old-fashioned theory but thanks for the link - my wording in the original post looks really bad when put beside that picture. But I am not willing to throw out the baby with the bathwater - the basic idea is not entirely out of whack - the fetal forms are more strongly conserved than the adult forms. I meant to say that I was uncomfortable with the article's jump that since the adult dinos seemed to have down like baby birds, it seemed a speculative jump that adult dinos would be coloured like adult birds (possible, but very speculative).
( I hope that those giving me a "5, Insightful" understood what I meant :)
There's an old saying: "Ontogeny recapitulated Phylogeny" (or, "baby/fetal X usually looks like X's evolutionary ancestor" - since it's easier for a mutation to successfully edit the adult form than the infant form without causing something else to break).
So if dinosaurs and birds are related, one would expect there to be a lot of similarities to baby birds to down is not surprising. However, I'm not convinced about the immediate leap to a theory of multi-coloured down when chicks are usually mono-unicolour.
Directly or indirectly, a lot of things change the behaviour of their host. Rabies is a pretty dramatic example. Even the common cold does a pretty good job of getting us to cough it out in public.
Is WoW intending to be a permanent world which will have challenges for years to come or is it imagined as a finite game which will eventually be replaced with something new?
Do you imaging player-created content ever being incorporated into the world? ( beyond a group of characters standing around pretending to be an encounter :-)
Do you think there will ever come a day when you GPL the server-side engine?
"Real" money is just a fantasy substance that people barter for. Money is not a fancy piece of paper, it's a delusion, that we all politely buy into to make trading easier.
Like some third-world currency that suffers boutes of inflation and counterfeiting, MMRPG money is ephemeral and unstable, but from a mathematical standpoint, economics does not care if there the resources are real or imagined.
Markets have judged the supply and demand and the perception of inflation/permanence have assigned it a conversion rate. And because there are a great many unknowns in how a game will develop or be managed, the markets may from time to time exhibit irrational exhuberance, have pyramids and bubbles, just like the "real" world.
It's not entirely impossible that some day a court might rule that income tax will have to be charged on game money for the simple reason that there is a market for it - just as if it was money earned in another country.
Your premise is based on the assumption that everyone plays the same game. A MMOG is about a shared universe, not a single game experience. What if the grind of mining basic resources played like tetrus or solitaire - something that was fun on its own, even if the player ignored the rest of the game world?
Once the world and interface into is sophisticated enough, different players develop different objectives, take joy from different things and the worry about obsessive players "doing better" starts to evaporate. (well, at least as must as it does in the real world)
Isn't it a violation of the World Trade organization argreements to sell a product in a foreign market for less than the price in the domestic market? Isn't that the definition of anti-competitive dumping?
I'd rather they find the gene for "normal" and weed it out.
"I'm sorry, there's nothing unique about that fetus - are you sure you want to bother carrying it to term?"
There is no better example of how theft dims the magic of the movies for everyone
True, so true. Better to have never seen it at all. Mr. Lucus, I want my childhood dreams back.
I agree. Document standards need to be thinking about archival timeframes. I don't write web sites that change every day, I write things once and plan to pass them down to the next generation. I want to be able to go back 40 years from now to a family website and still be able to access it. That's far, far more important to me than any wiz-bang formating fad.
( then again, I guess HTML is the fad I embraced in moving away from plaintext. *sigh* )
So if any company believes that the number is accurate, the solution is obvious: arrange a free screening for all your employees outside of normal working hours.
Oh wait ... let's just check who paid for this "study" first?
For all the talk about it, I don't think I've ever actually known anyone to do the classic accidental rm -Rf / as root.
I see about one disaster a month where a user toasts their own files. Over the years I've seen three servers destroyed by an admin doing an rm -rf . in the wrong directory (and heard a number more). I've heard second-hand of a million-dollar typo of someone on an admin server with a whole division's NFS directories mounted root-writable.
Statistically, I've concluded that any given person, regardless of intellegence, has a slightly more than one-in-a-million chance per day of doing a potentially machine-toasting typo.
That Cold War temporal thing when NO WHERE.
I'm sad to say it but in a mere two episodes, the Doctor Who revival has managed to weave a more interesting temporal war story arc into its background than Enterprise managed in four years.
Why do all female aliens have boobs?
It's for the same reason that they all speak english: some things are just translated into a form you can understand.
( It's the actual interplanet-kissing getting past the censors that boggles my mind - if you stop and think about it genetically, it's a step further than portraying beastiality ).
Speaking as a Canadian, this is OLD news if you've read between the lines for the last few years.
We already knew there was a kickback scheme. We already knew the minister of Public Works had been dismissed in disgrace from cabinet ("there's something rotten in the state of Denmark" was the running joke several years ago when he was suddenly assigned as ambassidor). And Quebec politics have always been a mess - it's a relic of history slowly giving way to the modern world in fits and spurts.
The sad irony is that Paul Martin (the PM, who took over after all this happened) will likely get slammed across the blogosphere over this despite being the person who has most aggressively sought to shake up the politics of his party - he's the one who called the inquiry in the first place when he could have easily brushed it under the carpet and quietly denied everything. The media and opposition are "shocked" only in the Casa Blanca sense of the word.
So I'm left with a big "so what" reaction to this blog. Yes, there was a massive fraud, but the judge is not trying to hide the truth, he's trying to preserve the fairness of the upcoming criminal trials.
I'm not going call either KDE or gnome "Unix-like" until major distros start packaged them to put config files in a $HOME/var and/or $HOME/etc and stop littering the top level of the home directory with 10-12 different .something files/directories.
I hate having to create a new account and fire up a new desktop just to track down all the dot files created by the latest desktop. Invariably the user who's environment gets corrupted is the one who cannot possibly survive with a default or restored session and wants and has the power to escalate their wishes and ruin my day.
But isn't the highest risk for a social engineering attack at the lowest levels? It's the helpdesks where employees are under heavy presure to "make problems go away" and are faced with an intruder presenting a problem which has a choice between an easy insecure solution that makes the caller happy and problematic bureaucratic solution that will result in yellings and escalations.
I would assume a social engineer is not looking to have their call escalated to higher-ups because the more people who touch the call, the higher the risk of arousing suspicion. The higher-ups will never hear that the incident ever happened until the post-mortum of a successfully detected intrusion.
In a nutshell, more nitrogen was created
um ... is it April 1st?
No, seriously>?
Back when I was in university, I calculated out how much of a first-year student's tuition actually goes into teaching them. The total funding to the average lecturerer was half the cost of the textbook. When you're at university, the courses are only a tiny fraction of what your supposed to be getting for your money. The trouble is that the courses are the only thing you get marked on until you reach the real world. (it's easy to get caught in manager-think as a student: I'm measured on X, therefore X is the only thing that's important)
I whole-heartedly agree with the goal. From an end-user point of view, I want licenses I can trust, not subtle variations of fine print. Even the three major liscences seem to really boil down to a one word difference:
Commercial: "You cannot share what you add."
BSD: "You may share what you add."
GPL: "You must share what you add."
( everything else is just limitation on who the rules apply to: "You have to share what you add but I don't have to" or "You must share with me what you add" )
It would also be nice to see the net thrown wider than just software, but rather aim to be a new default framework all "intellectual property".
Proof of life on Mars is becoming strikingly similar to commercial fusion or anti-balistic missile defences - always just another contract down the road. It's not that I have anything against the exploration of Mars, nor do I not appreciate the difficulty of understanding an alien environment, but every time NASA hypes to the public I feel like I'm watching/reading politics, not science.