The only thing special about my refutation of Anfinsen in 1989, it turns out, is that it was a non-biological refutation, pssibly the first. A little statistics drawn from the meager dna and protein sequences available in 1989 (they fit on a few floppies) was enough to prove that codon choice, when there is more than one codon for an amino acid, influences the secondary structure of the protein at that loocation.
As to stop codons, if you had three halt instructions in an unknown assembly language, the decision that they are all the same and interchangeable might be assumed risky by programers, and there is biological evidence that this decision is wrong. (just google).
This would be important if the unknown assembly language was for some important program which we knew very little about and was of great consequent to our existence..
But since it's jst the genetis code, hell, lets just hack it and see what happens!
I get tired of having to repeat this warning every time this idea is rediscovered, but those are NOT wasted codons, and this scheme could hardly fail to cause catastrophic consequences if it gets into the wild. Over the years people have been discovering there is less and less 'junk' DNA, and everything in the code has a meaning. The stop codons are in all probability different. and someone is going to say 'oops' in a few years, when we wipe out all or part of life on earth.
Right on. The whole thing was a plot to keep Obama off the TV talking about the crooks who stole all the money five years ago and have just gotten stronger. Obama was on TV but only a few minutes and not on the evening news (unless I missed it) And the two pictures of the suspect were of two completely different people. And the second shooter was relegated to the grassy knoll.
I have some Neanderthal DNA and I want reparations from the Homo Sapiens who stole my birthright. A billion would be fine, even though it represents just a pittance compared to the contributions of my people, which was stolen from us.
This article and http://threatpost.com/crypto-gains-ramp-up-calls-to-get-ahead-of-inevitable-rsa-algorithm-downfall/101560 both imply that we need to jump to ECC and get off of RSA. Since there are direct quotes from Mr. Stamos in one of these articles, it sounds like he is the source of the confusion. Actually the recent advances weaken ECC more than RSA, and RSA is only weakened if the discrete log advances are followed by similar advances in factoring. There is no known theoretical reason for this to be guaranteed to happen, but folklore shows that it has indeed happened in the past: discrete log breakthroughs are intertwined with factoring breakthroughs, but there are only vague handwaving explanations about why this should be true.
So the problem is that RSA may well break soon, but ECC is already to some extent broken by Joux et al. Any advice to throw out RSA in favor of ECC seems wrong to me. What you really need is a totally new potentially hard problem to base new crypto algorithms on, and you maybe only have months to come up with the idea, and then only a few years to get the idea into practice, or else it's a return to snailmail if we haven't completely dismantled it before then.
SDN makes hacking and covering tracks so, so, so, much more potent, quicker, and easier. Now you don't just have the NSA to be afraid of. As with the entire history of the Internet, they will not worry about security until their baby has grown into a giant, and then they will attempt to tack some kind of loincloth on it and declare it secure.
OK, let's say these senators are correct and the document has fallacies.
And they say they cannot say what the fallacies are because it would release classified information?
WELL NOW THE NSA CANNOT CORRECT THE DOCUMENT OR SOMEONE WHO KNOWS 'diff' CAN FIGURE OUT THE CLASSIFIED INFORMATION.
The senators should not have made this public. It is almost as if they did release classified information. Are they that stupid? Or are they that smart?
thinking outside the 3d printer box, ever since viewing the endless suburbs in the texas towns I have envisioned something substantially bigger than the vehicle that transports the space shuttle to the launch pad, advancing through the countryside, ingesting woods, grasslands, soil, and rock, and out the other end comes a suburban street with driveways and houses in move-in-ready state. Materiel for plumbing and electricity might have to be transported into the monster.
For Moore, OK, the thing could recycle the rubble back into homes, adding storm shelters of course.
I've been watching for the unmanned aerial technology to develop sufficiently so they could eliminate TV helicopters from the Tour de France and other televised bicycle races, before the inevitable flaming crash, and also so that the energy use is more in line with what the riders are outputting. With a UAV they could also eliminate those pesky motorcycles (not all of them, just the TV ones the riders draft off of) and get some great new angles.
Now, if we eliminate the team cars and replace them with slightly larger unmanned helicopters capable of carrying a mechanic or spare parts....
Or, can a robot riderless domestique be far behind?
1. Your lack of understanding of mammalian biology is apalling. 2. But there is discrimination aplenty here. This perk is for YOUNG(ish) people of child-bearing age. These people are presumably healthy too. As they can no longer work from home, they are presumably not handicapped to the extent that commuting is difficult for them, and do not have dependents with disabilities at home. As high-tech places tend to encourage way more than 40 hours per week, these young, healthy people tend to burn out as they get older. As they burn out and leave the company, Yahoo keeps a young employee profile, reducing their health insurance costs, saving them more than the cost of the perk. So we have age discrimination, not sex discrimination.
Very interesting. My specialty is mathematics and I am somewhat of a science critic, so I shouldn't have an opinion but that has never stopped me before.
What OTHER complex chemicals are found in the dust clouds in the universe?
While there is naturally an interest in detecting our own Earth-based type of life, I feel we can get distracted by DNA-centric prejudice and may be missing out on the chemical precursors of other types of life that may even predominate in the universe.
hopefully the malware will be called 'snakes'. people are already spoofing GPS, and countermeasures which don't require new satellites are not too good.
actually if i was going to bring down a plane i would prefer to do it from a nice apartment near the end of a runway, or better yet a parking garage. that way i could watch or tweet the crash without having to sacrifice much on my end.
the guy who crashed his plane into the austin irs office a few years ago could have just as easily rigged the plane up to fly pilotless if he had waited a few years. 'fly the friendly skies.'
let's not regulate the internet. let's instead try to retrofit every piece of hardware on the internet to handle a vastly messy solution to the ip address exhaustion problem, called ipv6, which has in its favor that it is very expensive, is now and will create more security holes than it fixes, and solves a problem that could have been solved much more easily at the ISP level without everyone needing to change all their stuff out. Damn the government for thinking up ipv6! What? It was designed by academics and hardware vendors? Not the government? Well damn the government for letting them do this anyway!
the thing is 17 light-hours away from us or 17 light-hours +/- 8 minutes from the sun. The edge of the solar system is supposed to be the oort cloud at about 1 light-year away So voyager has another 12 years or so to get one light day away, and even assuming it maintains the same speed, another 364.25 times 50 years, to reach the oort cloud, so check this space in another 18000 years. if we start now we could have a camera orbiting alpha centauri by then, even on a voyager-sized budget, using a solar or magnetic sail, and the pictures would start coming back 4 years later
I really wasn't expecting the age issue to be a big deal as I've always performed well for over 30 years and got the best job of my life, doing head-down programming, at 55.
But the economy and the extra seven years since I was last in the market seem to have made a big difference.
Start a real company for a couple hundred bucks. It's good experience and looks better than 'unemployed' on a resume.
Create your company's web site and get it hosted for a few bucks a month.
Fill in the gaps with online free courses. They show your mind is still working. Google 'MOOC' for the latest, but coursera.org is one I've benefitted from.
If you want a challenge that will prepare you to be a consultant and you can drop when something better comes along, consider substitute teaching.
I'm in the same boat as you and want to thank everyone for their hopeful comments.
The Lance Armstrong solution: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmzeKNiMkAs Of course he would have to be moved up out of the basement. Off-topic, still a Lance fan, he never failed a drug test during the event so what is the problem. This is as stupid as disqualifying the Olympic badminton players for losing on purpose, within the rules, to improve their chances of medaling. Cycling and long-distance running are brain sports. You calculate when to draft and when to sprint. You work within the rules. You don't do maximum exertion all the time. Ditto any sport where there are multiple heats before the finals, disqualify anyone who paces themselves?
Mars life has about as much chance of surviving in an earth bacterium in an earth lab as we have surviving in the Martian environment. Either that or it will go all andromeda strain, so make sure to have some alcoholics around to trigger the self destruct switch before it escapes.
Does the nuclear industry have a program where scientists proposing to put something on the moon get paid for adding in a nuclear reactor to the plan? Or is NASA in the nuclear industry's pocket? Are big rocket makers also into nukes? Gee! GE!
That half of the moon is in the sun 14 out of every 28 days, even though it is the 'dark' side. I cannot believe a humongous set of batteries would cost/weigh less than a nuclear reactor, and it definitely would be easier to maintain. There are numerous other options for energy storage and retrieval, which would be more appropriate and make more use of found materials on the Moon. Solar cell manufacture on the Moon, from lunar materials, is another technology it would be very good to master.
this actually happened on July 28, as may have been noticed by others.
these guards are not public employees as some seem to be trying to assert.
as someone who lives near enough to Y-12 to be incinerated if anyone has a bad day out there, I am afraid these contractors would turn tail and run in the face of a real attack. The only reason there are not highly trained and motivated Marines guarding the place instead of the fat, old, lazy wighams is a long standing desire by DOE to do its own thing independently of DOD. I for one would be very happy if DOE started its own elite guard school, or farmed it out to the military, and got rid of the hessians.
with a private contractor motivated by money rather than patriotism you always have to wonder how cheaply the security force could be bought off, and the whole cookie jar ripped off or destroyed, leaving us with no cookies at all or having to make the unfortunately-worded request 'please send back our nuclear warheads as quickly as possible'.
although i doubt it i hope the cookie jar is really a honeypot designed to lure in the bad guys, while the real nukes are in an abandoned bowling alley somewhere.
one of the articles linked in the post does mention asteroids, and in truth, if an asteroid on a collision course or near miss was to intersect the radar signal, you would get several milliseconds, perhaps even a second, of pucker time before the event was over.
If we're on the Moon, it would be nice to be as self-supporting as possible, it would be nice to have a rail-gun to get off the surface of the moon with no fuel, just energy. This can be manufactured on the moon. Producing solar cells of any efficiency from lunar materials should be the top priority.
As for living on the dark side, microwave beams up to lunar-orbiting satellites and back down to ground stations should be another priority.
The less we have to contract for from terrestrial corporations, and the more that can be produced on the moon, the bigger the techno payback we get.
Nuke power on the moon is so 20th century. Grow food using all-lunar technology. Generate air, etc., from moon tech. Then if/when we blow ourselves up the lunar colony won't need to worry about spare parts or resupply. Third priority, get to be able to fab robots from lunar materials. Chip fab should have some advantages in a vacuum environment, lots of other technologies needed or replacements for those technologies needed.
Slashdot Mirror
The only thing special about my refutation of Anfinsen in 1989, it turns out, is that it was a non-biological refutation, pssibly the first. A little statistics drawn from the meager dna and protein sequences available in 1989 (they fit on a few floppies) was enough to prove that codon choice, when there is more than one codon for an amino acid, influences the secondary structure of the protein at that loocation.
As to stop codons, if you had three halt instructions in an unknown assembly language, the decision that they are all the same and interchangeable might be assumed risky by programers, and there is biological evidence that this decision is wrong. (just google).
This would be important if the unknown assembly language was for some important program which we knew very little about and was of great consequent to our existence..
But since it's jst the genetis code, hell, lets just hack it and see what happens!
I get tired of having to repeat this warning every time this idea is rediscovered, but those are NOT wasted codons, and this scheme could hardly fail to cause catastrophic consequences if it gets into the wild. Over the years people have been discovering there is less and less 'junk' DNA, and everything in the code has a meaning. The stop codons are in all probability different. and someone is going to say 'oops' in a few years, when we wipe out all or part of life on earth.
It may be true that Google autocorrects snowden' to 'snowman' as someone pointed out today.
Whether or not, check out the old movie 'The Falcon and The Snowman' about some goofy teems selling US secrets to the Soviets.
We all agree the KGB is a lot more honest and open that the NSA, or Google, Apple, or Microsoft for that matter. Yep,give the scumbag a medal!!!!!
Right on. The whole thing was a plot to keep Obama off the TV talking about the crooks who stole all the money five years ago and have just gotten stronger.
Obama was on TV but only a few minutes and not on the evening news (unless I missed it) And the two pictures of the suspect were of two completely different people. And the second shooter was relegated to the grassy knoll.
All this to control a news cycle. Scared yet?
from fracking, warming permafrost, and warming oceans. i wonder if they considered it. it could cause runaway warming.
I have some Neanderthal DNA and I want reparations from the Homo Sapiens who stole my birthright. A billion would be fine, even though it represents just a pittance compared to the contributions of my people, which was stolen from us.
This article and http://threatpost.com/crypto-gains-ramp-up-calls-to-get-ahead-of-inevitable-rsa-algorithm-downfall/101560 both imply that we need to jump to ECC and get off of RSA. Since there are direct quotes from Mr. Stamos in one of these articles, it sounds like he is the source of the confusion. Actually the recent advances weaken ECC more than RSA, and RSA is only weakened if the discrete log advances are followed by similar advances in factoring. There is no known theoretical reason for this to be guaranteed to happen, but folklore shows that it has indeed happened in the past: discrete log breakthroughs are intertwined with factoring breakthroughs, but there are only vague handwaving explanations about why this should be true.
So the problem is that RSA may well break soon, but ECC is already to some extent broken by Joux et al. Any advice to throw out RSA in favor of ECC seems wrong to me. What you really need is a totally new potentially hard problem to base new crypto algorithms on, and you maybe only have months to come up with the idea, and then only a few years to get the idea into practice, or else it's a return to snailmail if we haven't completely dismantled it before then.
See http://www.treefrogenterprises.com/research/funwithecc.html for more.
SDN makes hacking and covering tracks so, so, so, much more potent, quicker, and easier. Now you don't just have the NSA to be afraid of. As with the entire history of the Internet, they will not worry about security until their baby has grown into a giant, and then they will attempt to tack some kind of loincloth on it and declare it secure.
OK, let's say these senators are correct and the document has fallacies.
And they say they cannot say what the fallacies are because it would release classified information?
WELL NOW THE NSA CANNOT CORRECT THE DOCUMENT OR SOMEONE WHO KNOWS 'diff' CAN FIGURE OUT THE CLASSIFIED INFORMATION.
The senators should not have made this public. It is almost as if they did release classified information. Are they that stupid? Or are they that smart?
thinking outside the 3d printer box, ever since viewing the endless suburbs in the texas towns I have envisioned something substantially bigger than the vehicle that transports the space shuttle to the launch pad, advancing through the countryside, ingesting woods, grasslands, soil, and rock, and out the other end comes a suburban street with driveways and houses in move-in-ready state. Materiel for plumbing and electricity might have to be transported into the monster.
For Moore, OK, the thing could recycle the rubble back into homes, adding storm shelters of course.
I've been watching for the unmanned aerial technology to develop sufficiently so they could eliminate TV helicopters from the Tour de France and other televised bicycle races, before the inevitable flaming crash, and also so that the energy use is more in line with what the riders are outputting. With a UAV they could also eliminate those pesky motorcycles (not all of them, just the TV ones the riders draft off of) and get some great new angles.
Now, if we eliminate the team cars and replace them with slightly larger unmanned helicopters capable of carrying a mechanic or spare parts....
Or, can a robot riderless domestique be far behind?
1. Your lack of understanding of mammalian biology is apalling.
2. But there is discrimination aplenty here. This perk is for YOUNG(ish) people of child-bearing age. These people are presumably healthy too. As they can no longer work from home, they are presumably not handicapped to the extent that commuting is difficult for them, and do not have dependents with disabilities at home. As high-tech places tend to encourage way more than 40 hours per week, these young, healthy people tend to burn out as they get older. As they burn out and leave the company, Yahoo keeps a young employee profile, reducing their health insurance costs, saving them more than the cost of the perk.
So we have age discrimination, not sex discrimination.
Granted, it COULD be an accident or a non-cyber insider attack.
If it was not, would there be any evidence left? Could someone out there start looking?
Are we still checking the parts for cargo containers from N. Korea, which may be radioactive and/or ticking?
Or did we get distracted by the pressure cooker bomb?
Or were we distracted by the argument over whether they could put a nuke on a missile?
Very interesting. My specialty is mathematics and I am somewhat of a science critic, so I shouldn't have an opinion but that has never stopped me before.
What OTHER complex chemicals are found in the dust clouds in the universe?
While there is naturally an interest in detecting our own Earth-based type of life, I feel we can get distracted by DNA-centric prejudice and may be missing out on the chemical precursors of other types of life that may even predominate in the universe.
As a meta-scientist I looked for people working on this and was relieved to find Lee Cronin http://www.ted.com/talks/lee_cronin_making_matter_come_alive.html but he isn't too interested in extraterrestrial life, he just wants to create his own inorganic life.
I'm just as interested in what other complex chemicals could be found on meteorites.
Since you are a grad student I thought it would be good to ping you on this. You could become the Galileo of non-carbon-based astrobiology.
There could be such life lurking very near to us in the solar system, but if we aren't looking for it, it could find us before we find it.
hopefully the malware will be called 'snakes'. people are already spoofing GPS, and countermeasures which don't require new satellites are not too good.
actually if i was going to bring down a plane i would prefer to do it from a nice apartment near the end of a runway, or better yet a parking garage. that way i could watch or tweet the crash without having to sacrifice much on my end.
the guy who crashed his plane into the austin irs office a few years ago could have just as easily rigged the plane up to fly pilotless if he had waited a few years. 'fly the friendly skies.'
let's not regulate the internet. let's instead try to retrofit every piece of hardware on the internet to handle a vastly messy solution to the ip address exhaustion problem, called ipv6, which has in its favor that it is very expensive, is now and will create more security holes than it fixes, and solves a problem that could have been solved much more easily at the ISP level without everyone needing to change all their stuff out. Damn the government for thinking up ipv6! What? It was designed by academics and hardware vendors? Not the government? Well damn the government for letting them do this anyway!
Not the full article, I quit after I got this far. There's a thing called Google out on the internet that often can find you free sources for paywalled material in just a few keystrokes.
http://phys.org/news/2012-12-thorium-proliferation-nuclear-wonder-fuel.html
the thing is 17 light-hours away from us or 17 light-hours +/- 8 minutes from the sun.
The edge of the solar system is supposed to be the oort cloud at about 1 light-year away
So voyager has another 12 years or so to get one light day away, and even assuming it maintains the same speed, another 364.25 times 50 years, to reach the oort cloud, so check this space in another 18000 years. if we start now we could have a camera orbiting alpha centauri by then, even on a voyager-sized budget, using a solar or magnetic sail, and the pictures would start coming back 4 years later
I really wasn't expecting the age issue to be a big deal as I've always performed well for over 30 years and got the best job of my life, doing head-down programming, at 55.
But the economy and the extra seven years since I was last in the market seem to have made a big difference.
Start a real company for a couple hundred bucks. It's good experience and looks better than 'unemployed' on a resume.
Create your company's web site and get it hosted for a few bucks a month.
Fill in the gaps with online free courses. They show your mind is still working. Google 'MOOC' for the latest, but coursera.org is one I've benefitted from.
If you want a challenge that will prepare you to be a consultant and you can drop when something better comes along, consider substitute teaching.
I'm in the same boat as you and want to thank everyone for their hopeful comments.
The Lance Armstrong solution:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmzeKNiMkAs
Of course he would have to be moved up out of the basement.
Off-topic, still a Lance fan, he never failed a drug test during the event so what is the problem. This is as stupid as disqualifying the Olympic badminton players for losing on purpose, within the rules, to improve their chances of medaling. Cycling and long-distance running are brain sports. You calculate when to draft and when to sprint. You work within the rules. You don't do maximum exertion all the time. Ditto any sport where there are multiple heats before the finals, disqualify anyone who paces themselves?
Mars life has about as much chance of surviving in an earth bacterium in an earth lab as we have surviving in the Martian environment. Either that or it will go all andromeda strain, so make sure to have some alcoholics around to trigger the self destruct switch before it escapes.
Does the nuclear industry have a program where scientists proposing to put something on the moon get paid for adding in a nuclear reactor to the plan? Or is NASA in the nuclear industry's pocket? Are big rocket makers also into nukes? Gee! GE!
That half of the moon is in the sun 14 out of every 28 days, even though it is the 'dark' side. I cannot believe a humongous set of batteries would cost/weigh less than a nuclear reactor, and it definitely would be easier to maintain. There are numerous other options for energy storage and retrieval, which would be more appropriate and make more use of found materials on the Moon. Solar cell manufacture on the Moon, from lunar materials, is another technology it would be very good to master.
this actually happened on July 28, as may have been noticed by others.
these guards are not public employees as some seem to be trying to assert.
as someone who lives near enough to Y-12 to be incinerated if anyone has a bad day out there, I am afraid these contractors would turn tail and run in the face of a real attack. The only reason there are not highly trained and motivated Marines guarding the place instead of the fat, old, lazy wighams is a long standing desire by DOE to do its own thing independently of DOD. I for one would be very happy if DOE started its own elite guard school, or farmed it out to the military, and got rid of the hessians.
with a private contractor motivated by money rather than patriotism you always have to wonder how cheaply the security force could be bought off, and the whole cookie jar ripped off or destroyed, leaving us with no cookies at all or having to make the unfortunately-worded request 'please send back our nuclear warheads as quickly as possible'.
although i doubt it i hope the cookie jar is really a honeypot designed to lure in the bad guys, while the real nukes are in an abandoned bowling alley somewhere.
one of the articles linked in the post does mention asteroids, and in truth, if an asteroid on a collision course or near miss was to intersect the radar signal, you would get several milliseconds, perhaps even a second, of pucker time before the event was over.
If we're on the Moon, it would be nice to be as self-supporting as possible, it would be nice to have a rail-gun to get off the surface of the moon with no fuel, just energy.
This can be manufactured on the moon. Producing solar cells of any efficiency from lunar materials should be the top priority.
As for living on the dark side, microwave beams up to lunar-orbiting satellites and back down to ground stations should be another priority.
The less we have to contract for from terrestrial corporations, and the more that can be produced on the moon, the bigger the techno payback we get.
Nuke power on the moon is so 20th century. Grow food using all-lunar technology. Generate air, etc., from moon tech. Then if/when we blow ourselves up the lunar colony won't need to worry about spare parts or resupply. Third priority, get to be able to fab robots from lunar materials. Chip fab should have some advantages in a vacuum environment, lots of other technologies needed or replacements for those technologies needed.
Did you see the little squiggly mark, also known as a question mark? Cool your jets.