Why not look to this new year? I propose that Slashdot creates a thread on what technology is going to be the technology of the year. Then in a year, we can all look back at this thread and laugh. I'll start. New(ish) technology that will be successful this year:
Crusoe
XML (Could be the year it explodes)
Beowulf (Could also be the year every big company in the world tries it. I know I will!)
Internet on every household appliances (I don't think so!)
IANAL either, but I doubt tracking people without their knowledge is legal in the European Union. There is a law on privacy that all 15 EU countries have signed (but one. the Netherlands. Shame on you! It has been said that the average Dutch person has got some information stored about him in 400 databases! Scary.). This law implies that no data should be kept about someone without his/her knowledge. Unfortunately, who's going to sue anyone? The poor web surfer? I don't think so. We need a consumer association to do it.
how about contributing a small Carribean island in international waters to protect the Bazaar? This sounds cool, but can it actually be done? I know it is possible to buy your own island, but you will still be under the jurisdiction of some country. The question is : Can you buy or get some land outside anybody's jurisdiction! Maybe the solution would be a satellite orbiting the planet, maybe on our 2nd moon;-)
I would add open governements. When they will be as open as the Linux sources, people will have more power to review their actions and decisions. But since governements tend to be corrupted (see Germany for the latest example), and since people don't even bother voting,.....
Some dude said something like: Democracy is the worst type of governement, but we haven't found anything better yet.
I would also add that maybe we should have open companies. Like in "Business" from Iain Banks. You vote to elect your boss. This implies a certain degree of openess. Well, we can all dream!
Third, IMHO, this is because of the Californian judge ruling against the trade secret motion by the film industry. I doubt this. AFAIK, Californian law does not apply in Norway.
Your last point is however perfectly correct. Many people in the US are scared of their governement, the British are scared of losing their democratically elected governement for a faceless EU commission in Brussels. It's time to realise who's got the power. It's not the governement, it's not the administration, it's the large multinational corporations. This poor guy being arrested is a good illustration of this.
The Chime plug-in comes from a computational chemistry company called MDL. It is itself build on the freely available rasmol program which does run on most platforms included Linux. Rasmol is not a plug-in, but it is a brilliant scriptable program.
What do you mean correct? Don't you see something like 11 month....? If you see that, it means their javascript does not take into account that Mitnick will one day be freed (or released anyway). In the case the real date should be (e.g. if he's been released exactly 2 hours ago): - 2 hours
If you see a negative date like that, then yes, it's my Communicator 4.7 on RH6.1 which is bugged (That would be new!)
I don't think it's a y2k bug. More the fact that Mitnick is released today and thus will be (will have been) released : one year - "11 months, 30 days, 19 hours, 14 minutes, 8 seconds". It's just a negative date bug.
Frankly, this is silly. When girls are given barbie dolls and boys are given lego sets, who do you think is more likely to like technology later? A few years ago, AFAIR, an anti-gender stereotype group had broken into a toy store and exchanged all the "speaking-disks" between barbie and ken dolls. The result was that when a parent bought a ken doll for their kid, the ken doll would say "Let's go shopping" in a high-pitched voice and vice-versa for the barbie dolls. This is to illustrate that gender stereotypes are forced onto kids and fathom them to what society wants. Fortunately many people manage to escape these stereotypes, but it's not easy.
Is he funny or scary? You want to meet him at the water tower or something? Please tell us where, I'd love to see you and Katz in a real duel. You could hit him with a Bible and he could counter with Ayn Rand. No. If this guy's real a christian he should just forgive Katz.
They just don't care about their beliefs. To answer your criticisms, I'll say:
Christians have persecuted more people than vice-versa, through the ages and still nowadays (anti-abortion, gay, contraception campaign, to name but a few).
You seem to be pissed-off because Katz does not mention christians, not because he insults them
Anyway, the group the most insulted is not christians but M$ employees!
Although the Court concluded in its findings of fact that Microsoft possesses monopoly power in the market for "Intel-compatible PC operating systems" (Findings 33), the individual facts found by the Court do not establish monopoly power in a relevant antitrust market: (i) under the governing legal principles, the arena of competition relevant to decision of this case extends beyond "Intel-compatible PC operating systems" to encompass all platforms competing for the attention of software developers and users, and (ii) ....blablabla........ 1. The Relevant Product Market in This Case Is Not Restricted to "Intel-Compatible PC Operating Systems." .......blablabla...... On the demand side, consumers looking for computing solutions have an increasing array of alternatives, including, among other options, an Apple Macintosh running the Mac OS or a workstation running some variant of the UNIX operating system. (See, e.g., Findings 21.) Within the next few years, if not already, consumers who use their computers primarily "for storing addresses and schedules, for sending and receiving E-mail, for browsing the Web, and for playing video games" also will be able to choose an "information appliance" such as a handheld personal computer, a "smart" wireless telephone or a television set-top box. (Id. 23.) Consumers likewise may be able to choose a network computer or terminal attached to a server or mainframe computer. (See, e.g., id. 24.) Moreover, "[a]s the bandwidth available to the average user increases, ?portal? Web sites . . . could begin to host full lines of the server-based, personal-productivity applications," thus enabling "increasing numbers of computer users equipped with Web browsers . . . to conduct a significant portion of their computing through these portals" without regard to their underlying operating system. (Id. 27.)
It's interesting that Microsoft in a sense admit that they have a monopoly now, but that in the future they might not.
Let's hope they'll stay faithful to the book. A few years ago, AFAIR, terry pratchett was saying in one of his newsgroups that they had tried to make a film out of one of his discworld novels. Unfortunately the Hollywood producers wanted to change too much of it and at the end it looked like something happening in a small suburban part of the USofA. The producers did not even want the four horsemen of the apocalypse! So they never did it.
From what I remember of Good Omens (I have to read it again) it is (like all terryP books) full of references to some other events, like the Boston tea party for instance. The big risk here is that they will try to dumb it down to make these references less obscure.
My point being that so many have lost their souls chasing the dollar that they appear mad.
How true! I have always found Americans as intellectually poor, with the sole obsession of $'s. I grossly generalise here, but that is the impression many Americans give to Europeans. It is no wonder that psychological problems are more frequent there (USofA) than here (Europe). People in Europe tend to be more concerned with having a stable, enjoyable life than moving up the career ladder. But we should put things into perspective. Maybe one of the problems is that there are too many shrinks, not not enough!
England is so full of CCTV's because in some areas of England, crime rates are ridiculously high. One of the researchers who did this stuff is from Leeds University. I did my PhD there and my car was broken into twice, my house three times and I was attacked once. All that in 4 years. When things get out of hand, special measures have to be taken. I now live in a much quieter part of the world where when a car is stolen, it's headlines in the newspapers. I'd be really pissed off if they start putting CCTV's everywhere here. It all depends on what measures are necessary to keep life livable. That's another way to see things anyway.
It is not that simplistic. A gene sequence is a series of ATCG's. Two different individuals might have a few A's changed to C's or whatever on a given gene. But 99.99% of the gene sequences will be conserved, i.e. the same. Since primates are extremely similar to homo sapiens, there is also an incredible similarity. As an example, I randomly selected part of a monkey gene and compared it to known human genes. And here it comes:
MFRLYVLVMGVSAFTLQPAAHTGAARSCPVRGRHYKREFRLEGEPVALRC PQVPYQLWAS M RLYVLVMGVSAFTLQPAAHTGAARSC RGRHYKREFRLEGEPVALRCPQVPY LWAS MLRLYVLVMGVSAFTLQPAAHTGAARSCRFRGRHYKREFRLEGEPVALRC PQVPYWLWAS
I hope it's formatted correctly. All DNA sequences have been translated into AA sequences. The First sequence is a monkey gene sequence (just the first few AA's), the third sequence is human. The middle sequence is a consensus sequence between the first and third. The monkey and human genes are the same interleukin-1 receptors. You can see that the differences are small.
We'll certainly be able to make them smarter. But since the law on animal testing is very restrictive when it comes to monkeys (sometimes more than on humans!), I doubt it will come soon.
I wonder what OS is the most suitable for primates. Possibly PalmOS. They could use it with their feet
First, computer advances have helped but have not been the main reason for the speed up in sequencing the genome as Mr. Katz said. The main reason was, surprisingly, progress in sequencing technology! Secondly, it might be even more scary than JonKatz wrote. In a few years time (I am not sure exactly when), great apes genomes will also be known. And then if you make a `diff` between human and great ape genome what do you get? A few monkey specific genes that are related to the amount of hairs. And... all the genes that make us smarter than them. So we'll know relatively easily what are the genes linked to intelligence. Scary! Maybe we'll find that most AC first posters are closer to monkeys than we thought. Or probably not!
A draft should be available by spring next year. See this press release from March.
now that they know how to do one of them, the rest should be relativlyeasy to map In fact all chromosomes are now being sequenced. Check this page for details.
I doubt having finished one will make much difference. It's just an interesting milestone.
The problem is not that patents are short lived, they are too long lived. This depends a lot on how long it takes to make a profit from a patent. Drugs are in general patented for 20 years. Since you need 12 years of research and development before putting a new drug on the market, you are left with 5 to 8 years to make the money you spent in 12 years of R&D + the money spent in marketing and distribution. If your patent lasts only, say, 5 years, noone will make new drugs, which is bad for everyone.
Now how about defining the time in internet years? Anybody in favour of defining the time based on the technological rate of change? Real life works differently! Chemicals are still designed by human beings. Yes, a lot of robots are used, but just for dumb things.
I, for one, don't like the idea of a private company owning my gene sequences. They will be able to limit the use of these so only really rich pharmaceutical companies will be able to develop drugs etc and then sell them at huge profits, which isn't realy for the benefit of mankind blah blah blah.
This is an interesting statement. How do you think drugs are made now? Well, they are made by big pharma companies which make (often) a good profit. Drugs are not made for the benefit of mankind. They are made to make money.
When it comes to patenting the use of some genes, we should consider that:
patents are short lived.
A company has no interest in not using its patent. So for some money, other companies will be able to buy patents
patents don't stop anyone from working on whatever is patented. Lawyers always find ways to circumvent patents
On the subject of open source distributed computing for genome data, I am afraid I agree with other people here. There is simply too much data to download. It's a pity, but it won't work. Maybe in a few years time when the problems in genomics will have changed, other problems might be more suitable to this type of computations.
I was not trying to be funny. Many software written for linux are not always translated into French whereas most commercial software (especially from M$) are. Even visual basic is translated into French! The French adminstration will simply not work with English menus, error messages and man pages.
The parent post has been strangely moderated to "funny". I don't think this is funny. It is probably true! There are laws in France making it compulsary for (almost) everything to be written in French, especially in the administration. I wonder if the fact of having so few HowTo's written in French might be a real headache for the French government.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll start. New(ish) technology that will be successful this year:
This sounds cool, but can it actually be done? I know it is possible to buy your own island, but you will still be under the jurisdiction of some country. The question is : Can you buy or get some land outside anybody's jurisdiction! Maybe the solution would be a satellite orbiting the planet, maybe on our 2nd moon
Some dude said something like:
Democracy is the worst type of governement, but we haven't found anything better yet.
I would also add that maybe we should have open companies. Like in "Business" from Iain Banks. You vote to elect your boss. This implies a certain degree of openess. Well, we can all dream!
I doubt this. AFAIK, Californian law does not apply in Norway.
Your last point is however perfectly correct. Many people in the US are scared of their governement, the British are scared of losing their democratically elected governement for a faceless EU commission in Brussels. It's time to realise who's got the power. It's not the governement, it's not the administration, it's the large multinational corporations. This poor guy being arrested is a good illustration of this.
- 2 hours
If you see a negative date like that, then yes, it's my Communicator 4.7 on RH6.1 which is bugged (That would be new!)
It's just a negative date bug.
A few years ago, AFAIR, an anti-gender stereotype group had broken into a toy store and exchanged all the "speaking-disks" between barbie and ken dolls. The result was that when a parent bought a ken doll for their kid, the ken doll would say "Let's go shopping" in a high-pitched voice and vice-versa for the barbie dolls.
This is to illustrate that gender stereotypes are forced onto kids and fathom them to what society wants. Fortunately many people manage to escape these stereotypes, but it's not easy.
You want to meet him at the water tower or something? Please tell us where, I'd love to see you and Katz in a real duel. You could hit him with a Bible and he could counter with Ayn Rand.
No. If this guy's real a christian he should just forgive Katz.
1. The Relevant Product Market in This Case Is Not Restricted to "Intel-Compatible PC Operating Systems."
On the demand side, consumers looking for computing solutions have an increasing array of alternatives, including, among other options, an Apple Macintosh running the Mac OS or a workstation running some variant of the UNIX operating system. (See, e.g., Findings 21.) Within the next few years, if not already, consumers who use their computers primarily "for storing addresses and schedules, for sending and receiving E-mail, for browsing the Web, and for playing video games" also will be able to choose an "information appliance" such as a handheld personal computer, a "smart" wireless telephone or a television set-top box. (Id. 23.) Consumers likewise may be able to choose a network computer or terminal attached to a server or mainframe computer. (See, e.g., id. 24.) Moreover, "[a]s the bandwidth available to the average user increases, ?portal? Web sites . . . could begin to host full lines of the server-based, personal-productivity applications," thus enabling "increasing numbers of computer users equipped with Web browsers . . . to conduct a significant portion of their computing through these portals" without regard to their underlying operating system. (Id. 27.)
It's interesting that Microsoft in a sense admit that they have a monopoly now, but that in the future they might not.
From what I remember of Good Omens (I have to read it again) it is (like all terryP books) full of references to some other events, like the Boston tea party for instance. The big risk here is that they will try to dumb it down to make these references less obscure.
How true! I have always found Americans as intellectually poor, with the sole obsession of $'s. I grossly generalise here, but that is the impression many Americans give to Europeans. It is no wonder that psychological problems are more frequent there (USofA) than here (Europe). People in Europe tend to be more concerned with having a stable, enjoyable life than moving up the career ladder. But we should put things into perspective. Maybe one of the problems is that there are too many shrinks, not not enough!
That's another way to see things anyway.
MFRLYVLVMGVSAFTLQPAAHTGAARSCPVRGRHYKREFRLEGEPVALRC PQVPYQLWASC PQVPYWLWAS
M RLYVLVMGVSAFTLQPAAHTGAARSC RGRHYKREFRLEGEPVALRCPQVPY LWAS
MLRLYVLVMGVSAFTLQPAAHTGAARSCRFRGRHYKREFRLEGEPVALR
I hope it's formatted correctly. All DNA sequences have been translated into AA sequences. The First sequence is a monkey gene sequence (just the first few AA's), the third sequence is human. The middle sequence is a consensus sequence between the first and third. The monkey and human genes are the same interleukin-1 receptors. You can see that the differences are small.
I wonder what OS is the most suitable for primates. Possibly PalmOS. They could use it with their feet
Secondly, it might be even more scary than JonKatz wrote. In a few years time (I am not sure exactly when), great apes genomes will also be known. And then if you make a `diff` between human and great ape genome what do you get? A few monkey specific genes that are related to the amount of hairs. And
Maybe we'll find that most AC first posters are closer to monkeys than we thought. Or probably not!
now that they know how to do one of them, the rest should be relativlyeasy to map
In fact all chromosomes are now being sequenced. Check this page for details.
I doubt having finished one will make much difference. It's just an interesting milestone.
Congratulations to all who participated in its sequencing. We look forward to the first draft of the human genome by spring 2000.
This depends a lot on how long it takes to make a profit from a patent. Drugs are in general patented for 20 years. Since you need 12 years of research and development before putting a new drug on the market, you are left with 5 to 8 years to make the money you spent in 12 years of R&D + the money spent in marketing and distribution. If your patent lasts only, say, 5 years, noone will make new drugs, which is bad for everyone.
Now how about defining the time in internet years? Anybody in favour of defining the time based on the technological rate of change?
Real life works differently! Chemicals are still designed by human beings. Yes, a lot of robots are used, but just for dumb things.
This is an interesting statement. How do you think drugs are made now? Well, they are made by big pharma companies which make (often) a good profit. Drugs are not made for the benefit of mankind. They are made to make money.
When it comes to patenting the use of some genes, we should consider that:
On the subject of open source distributed computing for genome data, I am afraid I agree with other people here. There is simply too much data to download. It's a pity, but it won't work. Maybe in a few years time when the problems in genomics will have changed, other problems might be more suitable to this type of computations.