They seriously did this at U of M? Yup! This took place 1 or 2 years ago; and you still have to go thru a lot of paperwork and justify why you need a mac when you want to buy one with your grant money! for a windows machine, a simple call gets it delivered to your lab Did they touch the Linux / Unix labs??
No, we still have some off those, well last time I checked at the CS building, I am in biology however. I still have access to some Unix servers too.
BTW, "Université de Montréal" (UdeM in short) is the name of the school, unlike Concordia or McGill. This means you can't call it University of Montreal (or UofM), whereas you can speak of université McGill.
but the same year he started providing grant money for research at my university, they signed an exclusivity agreement with microsoft... that means that they started dismantling the mac equiped labs (we would have no more if some faculty members had not fought against it!), and that it is now a hassle for researchers to buy macs with their own research grants! Giving away a few hundred thousand dollars here and there in exchange for valuble contracts does not seem so charitable to me!
I Totally agree... however, considering the number of times I litterally dragged my parents in there when they brought me to Disneyland as a (very young) kid, I should be more 'patient' with that ride.
ha, hell, no, I'd just love a FPS in there now that I have that damm song stuck in my head. Aaaarrrggghhh !
Non, moi je parle français!
(No, I speak french)
But, yes, I have many "united statian" cultural references. However, I think that anybody, anywhere , that as an interest in sci-fi and a computer and that understands english as possibly heard of Firefly.
I must stand up for my fellow quebecois and canadian geeks! We love Firefly (which my geek runned video store has), were really pissed when the series was cancelled, and are eagerly waiting for Serenity to come out!
I do not believe the vast majority of undergraduate biology students to whom I teach are be geeks. Most of them carry these things in their pocket or backpack! Previously, the only people I knew that had one where geeks!
If you use multiple computers to do your day's work, this is certainly an affordable and practical solution.. and people in this situation are doing it!
Actually, if you'd RTFA, you will find out *why* there is a publication ban on this particular issue. Here is a clue:
Gomery slapped a ban on Brault's testimony last week to ensure the Montreal ad exec would be able to find an unbiased jury for his fraud trial set for next month.
They have 'free' pop access and forwarding. You have to sign to something called 'Yahoo! Delivers', which will send you 'product information' one to three times a week. I just tried signing up for it by selecting 'send me info only for topics I select below' and not selecting any topic below! I'll see how it goes!
Darwin's theory of evolution, and the evolutionnary synthesis of the beginning of the 20th century, however widely accepted by the scientific community and massivelly corroborated by independent observations, remain a theory, not a fact!
Even your analogy with gravity doesn't work! Altought it is a fact that If I have something in my hand and let it go it falls to the ground, the theory of gravity explains why and how this happens, not that it happens!
Scientific facts are uninteresting by themselves, they are just things that we can observe given the proper tools. Theories, however, are complex sets of hypothesis that try to explain natural phenomenon and that have survived the test of time! Theories are way more interesting than facts! If a theory is a building, then the bricks are hypotheses.. the facts are simply the raw clay!
They *have* music! just because it's not mainstream and you don't know the artists (many of which have international carreers btw! - all the ninjatunes artists for example) doesn't mean it's crap. You don't have to like the music they sell! But you can't say there's no music there either!
"i wonder which specific DNA sequence they use, since it should be present in all species and sufficiently divergent to discriminate between species."
True if they actually want to infer a phylogeny of all those species (the so-called Tree of Life). Choosing the adequate data is only one of the problems for those seeking to do this, among other you have huge computational problems (give use faster computers please!) as well as biological problems such as: is the history of life adequatly represented by a tree ? (if the answer is no, the computanional problems get worse since networks are much more complex than trees).
Also, incongruence can arise not only because different data sets are used, but also because different optimality criteria are used in phylogenetic reconstruction. Evolutionnary biologists have used and still use today a plethora of different such criteria as implemented in the many distance methods (clustering and least-squares), maximum parsimony methods, maximum likelihood methods and now bayesian methods (check out Joe Felsenstein's page to see some of the software available to phylogeneticists).
However the authors seems to only want to identify species. From their web site : "DNA-based systems promise to revolutionize the task of identification by providing reliable, inexpensive, and rapid diagnoses of species identiy".
Finally, remember that classification (puting organisms in russian dolls that are called species, genus, family, order, class and phylum) and phylogeny (infering the phyletic relationship between groups of living organisms, usually in the form of a branching diagram - i.e. what you refer to in your comment) are not the same thing. Classification tend to be based on phylogeny, but they need no be.
True : The theory of evolution is a theory. But do not forget that a scientific theory is a complex set of hypotheses that have not been falsified and that have been corroborated by multiple independent observations. "Theory" is not a negative term in science!
False : The so-called intelligent design "theory" and all forms of creationnism are NOT scientific theories. A scientific theory must have one quality that is often forgotten: it must be possible to prove that it (or any of the hypothesis that it contains) is wrong, to falsify it. Since it is impossible to prove that God (or any other supreme being) does not exist, it is also impossible to prove that creationnism is wrong within a scientific framework.
This is a thus a pointless debate because evolutionnary biologists are talking about science, while creationnists are talking about faith. Science and faith should be clearly separated. end of story.
It seems strange that the article mentions the "eco-friendly city of Curitiba" when all this building is really doing is wasting energy to get these floors turning !
Good thinking.. but you should'nt divide by 300 millions, only by the number of people who actually got spammed in the exercice. I seriously doubt that they managed to spam every US citizen or that all US citizens have email for that matter!
Well, I haven't done the math myself, but the article about the U.S. electoral college on wikipedia reports that "In theory even in a pure two-party race, a candidate could win the election by receiving only 23% of all popular votes, if these were distributed in an (for him/her) ideal way."
How's that for a majority to impose itself on a minority? I wonder! Even if those numbers aren't exact, you've got it wrong! The danger with the electoral college is that a minority can impose itself on the majority, as has been the case for the last 4 years.
a simple flash of a photo ID card (which many teenagers don't have)
Strange.
Up here in the colder reaches of North America we have free health care provided by the state. To benefit from this you need your medicare card... which is issued to you by the provincial governments at birth, and sports you picture and birthdate! need more official photo ID?
Anyway, these kids usually also have a school ID with picture and all, don't they ?
or a more detailed user database, with its inherent privacy concerns
Why the database ? Asking for ID to buy/rent a game is no different from asking for ID to get movie tickets or beer. Do movie theatres and convenience shops maintain databases of what movies you see and what brand of beer you buy most often ?
Practical issues put aside, I don't see why this is a problem. Kids are, well, kids. As a society we have a right, and an obligation, to make some decisions about what is acceptable or not for the majority of them. If you want to make a different one for your kids as an individual, go ahead and do it ! go and buy/rent them the game.
Slashdot Mirror
They seriously did this at U of M?
Yup! This took place 1 or 2 years ago; and you still have to go thru a lot of paperwork and justify why you need a mac when you want to buy one with your grant money! for a windows machine, a simple call gets it delivered to your lab
Did they touch the Linux / Unix labs??
No, we still have some off those, well last time I checked at the CS building, I am in biology however. I still have access to some Unix servers too.
BTW, "Université de Montréal" (UdeM in short) is the name of the school, unlike Concordia or McGill. This means you can't call it University of Montreal (or UofM), whereas you can speak of université McGill.
he might be a great guy and all ...
but the same year he started providing grant money for research at my university, they signed an exclusivity agreement with microsoft... that means that they started dismantling the mac equiped labs (we would have no more if some faculty members had not fought against it!), and that it is now a hassle for researchers to buy macs with their own research grants! Giving away a few hundred thousand dollars here and there in exchange for valuble contracts does not seem so charitable to me!
Check out this remake of episode IV:
Grocery Store Wars: The Organic Rebellion
I Totally agree... however, considering the number of times I litterally dragged my parents in there when they brought me to Disneyland as a (very young) kid, I should be more 'patient' with that ride.
ha, hell, no, I'd just love a FPS in there now that I have that damm song stuck in my head. Aaaarrrggghhh !
Non, moi je parle français!
(No, I speak french) But, yes, I have many "united statian" cultural references. However, I think that anybody, anywhere , that as an interest in sci-fi and a computer and that understands english as possibly heard of Firefly.
no one outside the USA has seen this serie
I must stand up for my fellow quebecois and canadian geeks! We love Firefly (which my geek runned video store has), were really pissed when the series was cancelled, and are eagerly waiting for Serenity to come out!
A sampling of only undergrad bio students isn't a very good sampling of the US population as a whole
Altought you have a valid point, this is funny because I live (and teach) in Canada.
I do not believe the vast majority of undergraduate biology students to whom I teach are be geeks. Most of them carry these things in their pocket or backpack! Previously, the only people I knew that had one where geeks!
If you use multiple computers to do your day's work, this is certainly an affordable and practical solution.. and people in this situation are doing it!
Actually, if you'd RTFA, you will find out *why* there is a publication ban on this particular issue. Here is a clue:
Gomery slapped a ban on Brault's testimony last week to ensure the Montreal ad exec would be able to find an unbiased jury for his fraud trial set for next month.
And, by the way, what we want to acces 1GB of mail is IMAP acces, not POP3!
They have 'free' pop access and forwarding. You have to sign to something called 'Yahoo! Delivers', which will send you 'product information' one to three times a week. I just tried signing up for it by selecting 'send me info only for topics I select below' and not selecting any topic below! I'll see how it goes!
Darwin's theory of evolution, and the evolutionnary synthesis of the beginning of the 20th century, however widely accepted by the scientific community and massivelly corroborated by independent observations, remain a theory, not a fact!
Even your analogy with gravity doesn't work! Altought it is a fact that If I have something in my hand and let it go it falls to the ground, the theory of gravity explains why and how this happens, not that it happens!
Scientific facts are uninteresting by themselves, they are just things that we can observe given the proper tools. Theories, however, are complex sets of hypothesis that try to explain natural phenomenon and that have survived the test of time! Theories are way more interesting than facts! If a theory is a building, then the bricks are hypotheses.. the facts are simply the raw clay!
They *have* music! just because it's not mainstream and you don't know the artists (many of which have international carreers btw! - all the ninjatunes artists for example) doesn't mean it's crap.
You don't have to like the music they sell! But you can't say there's no music there either!
Why not buy from DRM-free online music stores like Bleep?
Twelwe hours later.... instant...
??? what's wrong with a good old tent?? I can put one up in just a few minutes! Are these thing sturdier? Ligther?
Appart from the fact that this is cool, is it really going to be of any use? i wonder!
"i wonder which specific DNA sequence they use, since it should be present in all species and sufficiently divergent to discriminate between species."
True if they actually want to infer a phylogeny of all those species (the so-called Tree of Life). Choosing the adequate data is only one of the problems for those seeking to do this, among other you have huge computational problems (give use faster computers please!) as well as biological problems such as: is the history of life adequatly represented by a tree ? (if the answer is no, the computanional problems get worse since networks are much more complex than trees).
Also, incongruence can arise not only because different data sets are used, but also because different optimality criteria are used in phylogenetic reconstruction. Evolutionnary biologists have used and still use today a plethora of different such criteria as implemented in the many distance methods (clustering and least-squares), maximum parsimony methods, maximum likelihood methods and now bayesian methods (check out Joe Felsenstein's page to see some of the software available to phylogeneticists).
However the authors seems to only want to identify species. From their web site : "DNA-based systems promise to revolutionize the task of identification by providing reliable, inexpensive, and rapid diagnoses of species identiy".
Finally, remember that classification (puting organisms in russian dolls that are called species, genus, family, order, class and phylum) and phylogeny (infering the phyletic relationship between groups of living organisms, usually in the form of a branching diagram - i.e. what you refer to in your comment) are not the same thing. Classification tend to be based on phylogeny, but they need no be.
This is only partly insightful:
True : The theory of evolution is a theory. But do not forget that a scientific theory is a complex set of hypotheses that have not been falsified and that have been corroborated by multiple independent observations. "Theory" is not a negative term in science!
False : The so-called intelligent design "theory" and all forms of creationnism are NOT scientific theories. A scientific theory must have one quality that is often forgotten: it must be possible to prove that it (or any of the hypothesis that it contains) is wrong, to falsify it. Since it is impossible to prove that God (or any other supreme being) does not exist, it is also impossible to prove that creationnism is wrong within a scientific framework.
This is a thus a pointless debate because evolutionnary biologists are talking about science, while creationnists are talking about faith. Science and faith should be clearly separated. end of story.
I guess you meant "as successful and unpopular" as IE
Hum. A robot could destroy a plane in either of the following cases:
1) if it's a drone
2) if destroying said plane would cause less human suffering/deaths then not destroying it (0th law comes to mind)
One robot controlling others? reminds me of this short story by this obscur sci-fi writer...
woups, sorry, got to go and catch that rabbit!
It seems strange that the article mentions the "eco-friendly city of Curitiba" when all this building is really doing is wasting energy to get these floors turning !
totaly ridiculous
Good thinking.. but you should'nt divide by 300 millions, only by the number of people who actually got spammed in the exercice. I seriously doubt that they managed to spam every US citizen or that all US citizens have email for that matter!
This would probably bring the figures up a bit.
Well, I haven't done the math myself, but the article about the U.S. electoral college on wikipedia reports that "In theory even in a pure two-party race, a candidate could win the election by receiving only 23% of all popular votes, if these were distributed in an (for him/her) ideal way."
How's that for a majority to impose itself on a minority? I wonder! Even if those numbers aren't exact, you've got it wrong! The danger with the electoral college is that a minority can impose itself on the majority, as has been the case for the last 4 years.
This is how the patriot act affects me, crazy!
Earlier estimates had placed the number of genomes at around 44,000 - or even as high as 100,000.
Genome = the full complement of genetic material of one species
Gene = one particular string of information in the genome that performs a particular function (including coding proteins, but not limited to that)
So the number of genomes equals the number of species, and the number of human genomes is one! No surprises there.
Is this a simple problem of copy-editing, or a lack of comprehension of biological concepts ?
a simple flash of a photo ID card (which many teenagers don't have)
... which is issued to you by the provincial governments at birth, and sports you picture and birthdate! need more official photo ID?
Anyway, these kids usually also have a school ID with picture and all, don't they ?
Strange.
Up here in the colder reaches of North America we have free health care provided by the state. To benefit from this you need your medicare card
or a more detailed user database, with its inherent privacy concerns
Why the database ? Asking for ID to buy/rent a game is no different from asking for ID to get movie tickets or beer. Do movie theatres and convenience shops maintain databases of what movies you see and what brand of beer you buy most often ?
Practical issues put aside, I don't see why this is a problem. Kids are, well, kids. As a society we have a right, and an obligation, to make some decisions about what is acceptable or not for the majority of them. If you want to make a different one for your kids as an individual, go ahead and do it ! go and buy/rent them the game.