More and more, I read about what other people are doing only to be entertained; fringe science material serves that function for me that science fiction used to serve.
I guess I think that the bleeding edge of high tech, in a world run by corrupt institutions, has little potential to improve my life beyond amusement.
And yes, certainly, in an increasingly complex (and thus increasingly inherently fragile and corruptible) world, like today's, we really can't be too careful about scams. Insisting that claims be falsifiable is about the only armor we have left (if we can call it armor).
You might recall that I didn't state categorically that Google couldn't be fooled. I do agree that, since big companies have nore credibility, there is more motivation to scam them. And maybe they are more tempted to scam others as well.
But it seems you are asserting that Google has in fact been scammed in this particular case.
Perhaps. Personally I don't know. To me it looks as if Google is presenting a paper claiming that it has accomplished something surprising with the D-Wave chip that others have been laughing about. But I must admit that I don't understand it. (I don't know how to make a quantum computer, only a few things, such as breaking RSA, that I could do with a QC if I had one.) We'll see.
Personally I am bored of scams; when I log into Slashdot and discuss things in which I am no expert, I am more interested in discussing/interesting/ scenarios. For example, cases in which someone/does/ possess a "capstone" technology -- that is, a missing link which leverages published research -- toward a disruptive technology. And I maintain that if I, at any rate, were the first to invent a "capstone" technology toward self-replicating nanobots or a practical quantum computer -- I would not tell the general public -- not credibly -- before I go about using it to my own profit. This seems like the optimal strategy in the Prisoner's Dilemma. I expect you might agree on this point.
I agree that mere lies sometimes suffice to get what one wants. And I remember what John D. Rockefeller did when he learned his shoeshine boy was trading stocks. But D-Wave somehow got the collaboration of Google. Should we speculate that Google's collaboration is, in turn, another PR stunt? I won't discount that possibility, though personally I tend to give Google more credit than that.
If you have only part of a system, your only options are to publish or patent. If you have the whole system, trade secrets, and some degree of obscurity, may serve you better. And in an "information economy," in which attention, not information, is the scarce good, it is possible to hide something in plain sight. (This holds at least as long as information is growing faster than population!)
Admittedly speculation, and again, my apologies to Karl Popper (although his rules bind engineers less than scientists, if at all). While I have a degree in computer engineering and am an amateur futurist, I am not a QC researcher. For any valuable insights I must credit the 1992 film/Sneakers/ and my classmate who worries that game theory predicts that the first action of the first team to develop self-replicating nanobots (another disruptive technology) would be to assassinate its actual or potential competitors, including himself.:)
If you were to make a "quantum leap" that made quantum computing practical, it might behoove you to send mixed signals with your PR. You would want to attract the attention of a buyer who is:
1. aggressively seeking
2. able to pay for, and
3. able to roll out
such technology; and you would want to be able to offer something like exclusivity to that buyer. But your public demonstrations would have reduced your competitors' R&D costs, by proving that such a thing is possible. If you "throw" your public demonstrations (make yourself seem like a sensationalistic liar), later you can more easily sweep away most credible evidence of your technology. But your truly motivated buyer will notice even your lame demonstration. Your buyer gets the technology, not in complete secrecy, but in relative, practical secrecy, because no public information about the technology is credible.
With apologies to Karl Popper.
Imagine if patent clerks were required to search registries of public-domain and other free-license IP for prior art before issuing a patent. Instead of defensive patenting, IP creators could simply publish their IP to the registry.
Free-IP ideologues could rush to publish all of their wild ideas as public domain, GPL, or whatever, just to make sure no money-grubbing corporation ever gets a patent on it.
Registries might just be such things as SourceForge and CPAN or might be established specially for this purpose, with a record format similar to that of the actual patent registry. Maybe it could be called Not A Patent Server (NAPSER).;-)
Wouldn't this benefit all parties? All that is, except the patent lawyers, USPTO, and the government that is diverting the patent fees for general budgetary needs?
[Antibiotic resistance in GM plants is... an artifact of the manufacturing process.]
But it doesnt have to be. There are alternatives[...]
There has been so much fear-mongering speculation here that I was trying to avoid talking about future possibilities and minority cases. What process is being used most typically, right now, and what should we expect to happen as a result?
[2. When bacteria eat DNA, they can incorporate it, mutating without dividing; this is called transformation:]
Well, eat is the wrong word, but yes otherwise perfectly true, if not extreemly unlikely in uncontrolled environments
Granted, eat is not the right word, just a little cutesie-ism:) But plasmid transfer is an important natural mechanism for horizontal gene transfer. Why do you consider this natural behavior to be unlikely? And do you consider nature to be a "controlled environment?"
This "open source" code sharing makes "random mutation" look pretty slow and inefficient in comparison, doesn't it? I wonder many plagiarists on typewriters would it take to reproduce the works of Shakespeare within the lifetime of the known universe?
[3. DNA from food can linger in the intestines a while.]
I hope you dont eat much food with DNA in it then, becasue you could end up with fish/carrot etc genes in the bacteria living in your gut.
:) Ya know, for some reason, I've never felt that fish and carrot genes were much of a threat to my health. What bugs me is antibiotic resistance.
Of course, antibiotic resistance in gut bacteria might be expected as the norm for anyone who's ever taken the given antibiotic. But I think people should at least know what antibiotics they are "taking." That is, if resistance to a given antibiotic is present in a given food, this should be stated on the label. This should apply to antibiotics given to livestock as well. Have you read much on antibiotic resistance?
Not that I'm so concerned about antibiotic resistance, ultimately. I think that due to widespread resistance, antibiotics may well become generally useless, and we'll turn to competitive exclusion cultures (CEC's, aka bacterial interference or probiotics). We'll use CEC's as adaptive factories of bacteriocins and other "custom" antibiotics"). Call it nature's nanotech, if you will.
-ldg (Liam D. Gray), public health student, former Qualcomm embedded software engineer, BS ECE CMU '95
Given those three facts, the risk and speculation is just that the commensal (normal resident) gut bacteria will take up the antibiotic resistance genes from food, and that pathogenic bacteria will in turn be transformed by the commensals.
In general, I'd love to see more Slashdotters read reading bioscience at PubMed, a service of the (U.S.) National Library of Medicine. There you'll find abstracts of biomed journals, textbooks, genomic and proteomic databases, and free full text of journal articles. Stanford Press's HighWire offers even more free journal articles, as well as all of the abstracts that PubMed indexes.
Perhaps I'm biased, but I think the world needs more nerds to help interpret and synthesize the thousands of pages of biosience research that's being published each week.
-ldg
Liam D. Gray, public health student, former Qualcomm embedded software engineer, BS ECE '95 CMU
Slashdot Mirror
More and more, I read about what other people are doing only to be entertained; fringe science material serves that function for me that science fiction used to serve.
I guess I think that the bleeding edge of high tech, in a world run by corrupt institutions, has little potential to improve my life beyond amusement.
And yes, certainly, in an increasingly complex (and thus increasingly inherently fragile and corruptible) world, like today's, we really can't be too careful about scams. Insisting that claims be falsifiable is about the only armor we have left (if we can call it armor).
You might recall that I didn't state categorically that Google couldn't be fooled. I do agree that, since big companies have nore credibility, there is more motivation to scam them. And maybe they are more tempted to scam others as well.
But it seems you are asserting that Google has in fact been scammed in this particular case.
Perhaps. Personally I don't know. To me it looks as if Google is presenting a paper claiming that it has accomplished something surprising with the D-Wave chip that others have been laughing about. But I must admit that I don't understand it. (I don't know how to make a quantum computer, only a few things, such as breaking RSA, that I could do with a QC if I had one.) We'll see.
Personally I am bored of scams; when I log into Slashdot and discuss things in which I am no expert, I am more interested in discussing /interesting/ scenarios. For example, cases in which someone /does/ possess a "capstone" technology -- that is, a missing link which leverages published research -- toward a disruptive technology. And I maintain that if I, at any rate, were the first to invent a "capstone" technology toward self-replicating nanobots or a practical quantum computer -- I would not tell the general public -- not credibly -- before I go about using it to my own profit. This seems like the optimal strategy in the Prisoner's Dilemma. I expect you might agree on this point.
I agree that mere lies sometimes suffice to get what one wants. And I remember what John D. Rockefeller did when he learned his shoeshine boy was trading stocks. But D-Wave somehow got the collaboration of Google. Should we speculate that Google's collaboration is, in turn, another PR stunt? I won't discount that possibility, though personally I tend to give Google more credit than that.
If you have only part of a system, your only options are to publish or patent. If you have the whole system, trade secrets, and some degree of obscurity, may serve you better. And in an "information economy," in which attention, not information, is the scarce good, it is possible to hide something in plain sight. (This holds at least as long as information is growing faster than population!)
Admittedly speculation, and again, my apologies to Karl Popper (although his rules bind engineers less than scientists, if at all). While I have a degree in computer engineering and am an amateur futurist, I am not a QC researcher. For any valuable insights I must credit the 1992 film /Sneakers/ and my classmate who worries that game theory predicts that the first action of the first team to develop self-replicating nanobots (another disruptive technology) would be to assassinate its actual or potential competitors, including himself. :)
If you were to make a "quantum leap" that made quantum computing practical, it might behoove you to send mixed signals with your PR. You would want to attract the attention of a buyer who is: 1. aggressively seeking 2. able to pay for, and 3. able to roll out such technology; and you would want to be able to offer something like exclusivity to that buyer. But your public demonstrations would have reduced your competitors' R&D costs, by proving that such a thing is possible. If you "throw" your public demonstrations (make yourself seem like a sensationalistic liar), later you can more easily sweep away most credible evidence of your technology. But your truly motivated buyer will notice even your lame demonstration. Your buyer gets the technology, not in complete secrecy, but in relative, practical secrecy, because no public information about the technology is credible. With apologies to Karl Popper.
Imagine if patent clerks were required to search registries of public-domain and other free-license IP for prior art before issuing a patent. Instead of defensive patenting, IP creators could simply publish their IP to the registry.
;-)
Free-IP ideologues could rush to publish all of their wild ideas as public domain, GPL, or whatever, just to make sure no money-grubbing corporation ever gets a patent on it.
Registries might just be such things as SourceForge and CPAN or might be established specially for this purpose, with a record format similar to that of the actual patent registry. Maybe it could be called Not A Patent Server (NAPSER).
Wouldn't this benefit all parties? All that is, except the patent lawyers, USPTO, and the government that is diverting the patent fees for general budgetary needs?
-ldg
But it doesnt have to be. There are alternatives[...]
There has been so much fear-mongering speculation here that I was trying to avoid talking about future possibilities and minority cases. What process is being used most typically, right now, and what should we expect to happen as a result?
[2. When bacteria eat DNA, they can incorporate it, mutating without dividing; this is called transformation:]
Well, eat is the wrong word, but yes otherwise perfectly true, if not extreemly unlikely in uncontrolled environments
Granted, eat is not the right word, just a little cutesie-ism :) But plasmid transfer is an important natural mechanism for horizontal gene transfer. Why do you consider this natural behavior to be unlikely? And do you consider nature to be a "controlled environment?"
This "open source" code sharing makes "random mutation" look pretty slow and inefficient in comparison, doesn't it? I wonder many plagiarists on typewriters would it take to reproduce the works of Shakespeare within the lifetime of the known universe?
[3. DNA from food can linger in the intestines a while.]
I hope you dont eat much food with DNA in it then, becasue you could end up with fish/carrot etc genes in the bacteria living in your gut.
Of course, antibiotic resistance in gut bacteria might be expected as the norm for anyone who's ever taken the given antibiotic. But I think people should at least know what antibiotics they are "taking." That is, if resistance to a given antibiotic is present in a given food, this should be stated on the label. This should apply to antibiotics given to livestock as well. Have you read much on antibiotic resistance?
Not that I'm so concerned about antibiotic resistance, ultimately. I think that due to widespread resistance, antibiotics may well become generally useless, and we'll turn to competitive exclusion cultures (CEC's, aka bacterial interference or probiotics). We'll use CEC's as adaptive factories of bacteriocins and other "custom" antibiotics"). Call it nature's nanotech, if you will.
-ldg (Liam D. Gray), public health student, former Qualcomm embedded software engineer, BS ECE CMU '95
1. Antibiotic resistance in GM plants is intentional, an artifact of the manufacturing process (see parent for reference).
2. When bacteria eat DNA, they can incorporate it, mutating without dividing; this is called transformation :
3. DNA from food can linger in the intestines a while.
Given those three facts, the risk and speculation is just that the commensal (normal resident) gut bacteria will take up the antibiotic resistance genes from food, and that pathogenic bacteria will in turn be transformed by the commensals.
In general, I'd love to see more Slashdotters read reading bioscience at PubMed, a service of the (U.S.) National Library of Medicine. There you'll find abstracts of biomed journals, textbooks, genomic and proteomic databases, and free full text of journal articles. Stanford Press's HighWire offers even more free journal articles, as well as all of the abstracts that PubMed indexes.
Perhaps I'm biased, but I think the world needs more nerds to help interpret and synthesize the thousands of pages of biosience research that's being published each week.
-ldg
Liam D. Gray, public health student, former Qualcomm embedded software engineer, BS ECE '95 CMU