RNA is fantastically complex compared to what the ancestor self-replicator likely was. Possibly a lipid-bound peptide, 2 or 3 dozen amino acids long.
RNA actually isn't all that complex. Assuming you can get the four basic nucleotides to form, of course. Moreover, it has all of the information necessary for replication to occur located within itself. Unfortunatly, there is no known mechanism for protiens (or lipids) to self replicate that doesn't involve the use of RNA. So, unless there is some method for replication that has since been lost, you would need RNA molecules anyway to perform the structured assembly of proteins according to an information bearing template.
That's not life. Amino acids can form proteins - to use the body-as-computer analogy, even if we assume DNA was formed and maintained at stable/favorable conditions, you've got the equivalent of a hard drive with an OS installed -
It's more likely that the earliest forms of life were nothing more than RNA strands with the ability to self replicate. It's already well known that RNA plays a significant role in the most critical cellular functions (replication and protein synthesis) whereas the protein role in these functions is secondary. This hypothesis is commonly refered to as the RNA World hypothesis.
The other half of this, separation of life from non-life, was most likley brought about by another set of events, codified into the so called Lipid World hypothesis.
Finally, as far as homeostatis, every cell on the planet expends a considerable amount of energy carefully regulating its internal environment. There's nothing magical about a multi-cellular organism that obsolves it from this critical role. As you sit reading this, fully 2/3 of the energy being expended by your brain is going directly to maintaining a specific Na+/K+ concentration gradient. The same is true for the bacteria on your skin, but to a slightly lesser extent.
Re:Give credit where credit is due.
on
Revising the GPL
·
· Score: 1
all the OSI did was write their rules for license acceptance such that they could place the GPL on a list of approved licenses
Anaconda must be viable. Could the next version use it?
Unfortunatly, Anaconda does not work on the vast majority of architectures that Debian supports. Progeny currently uses anaconda as it's installer, but they only support i386.
debian-installer has hooks for supporting FD based installers, but as of this moment, no one has written such a beast. [Not that it's all that big of a deal anyway, as you can basically install Debian by just repeatedly pressing enter.]
Anyway, this question is well covered in the D-I FAQ.
Partitioning in particular is difficult (as always)
There is actually an automated partitioner. If you look at the 18th slide you can see where you can select "automatically partition disks" to have the installer do it for you.
As far as the Ubuntu installer goes, you're actually looking at the exact same installer, just with fewer questions asked.
Assuming that it is genetic, then why hasn't it been selected against? Does gayness confer some advantage?
There are numerous hypotheses as to the nature of the comparative advantage to having a certain percentage of homosexual individuals in a population.
My personal favorite, although not as favored in the field, is kin selection, where the presence of offspring who do not reproduce themselves but instead increase the fitness of the parent and the ability of the parent to transmit genes successfully into successive generations.
Finally, the phenotype of homosexuality isn't necessarily expressed purely from genes, or purely from environment. It is quite likely that there is both a genetic component, and an evironmental component to the trait, just like there is with almost every other phenotype out there.
Not to say too much on this subject, but if you're actually interested in how science is able to do what science does, (the philosophical framework of what science is, in other words,) it's time to read Karl Popper's Logic of Scientific Discovery
One of my current favorite gems from his work:
[A] theory is falsifiable [(and therefore scientific) only] if the
class of its potential falsifiers is not empty.
-- Sir Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Section 21
Yeah. After submitting I realized that likely was probably too strong of a word to use there. Whether the odds were greater than 50% is up to you to decide, I guess. I wouldn't have been surprised either way.
Either way I hope we won't see similar instances of disenfranchisement afflicting people who wish to vote for any of the candidates or measures facing US citizens on November 2nd.
But the consortium, looking at a broader group of rejected ballots than those covered in the court decisions, 175,010 in all, found that Mr. Gore might have won if the courts had ordered a full statewide recount of all the rejected ballots.
Thus, if Gore had won the Supreme Court decision, he still would have lost. However, if 175k rejected ballots had been reinvestigated, it's likely that he would have won.
I'd think good security would be one of the most important factors in a well-wired campus.
Probably not, actually, since there shouldn't be much stuff there that requires securing, and the stuff that does (grades, personal information, payroll, etc.) shouldn't matter to the educational experience of the university.
In fact, in my experience, misguided attempts at security are much more stifling than occasional breakins would be.
Not sure if you'll be able to get it, but the typical method of dealing with this madness is to ask for an Americano. No instant coffee mess, and then you only have to bother with the fact that they'll still try to push steamed milk on you. [Maybe ask for steamed soy milk to really screw with them...]
Reminds me of the madness of trying to get a vegitarian white castle burger. "You want a burger? Without meat?"
I don't think even Linus himself could save a company with 1 windows license.
Probably not... but he (or one of the tens of thousands of other GNU/Linux system administrators) could easily save a company with no windows licenses.
What will happen is that taxpayers will fund the research, and then drug companies will take the result of this research and gouge the public that paid for it to begin with.
You seem to be assuming that the majority of the research that is being curtailed is that of major drug companies. Not so. Most major drug companies are quite capable of conducting such experiments on their own without government funding. What this curtails is the ability of Universities to conduct such research, which will end up with the situation that you are concerned about actually coming to fruition.
If the use of government funding to create IP which was then turned around and sold back to consumers is a big deal, then the proper approach is to curtail the IP rights stemming from such funding, rather than stopping the research itself. Not surprisingly, neither the Democrats or the Republicans seem to be interested in controlling the licensing of IP stemming from government funding.
Transcription by RNA polymerase II in Saccharomyces cerevisiae and in humans is widespread, even in genomic regions that do not encode proteins. The purpose of such intergenic transcription is largely unknown, although it can be regulatory. We have discovered a role for one case of intergenic transcription by studying the S. cerevisiae SER3 gene. Our previous results demonstrated that transcription of SER3 is tightly repressed during growth in rich medium. We now show that the regulatory region of this gene is highly transcribed under these conditions and produces a non-protein-coding RNA (SRG1). Expression of the SRG1 RNA is required for repression of SER3. Additional experiments have demonstrated that repression occurs by a transcription-interference mechanism in which SRG1 transcription across the SER3 promoter interferes with the binding of activators. This work identifies a previously unknown class of transcriptional regulatory genes. [From the abstract]
Not being an expert in S. cerivisiae myself, I'm not totally sure exactly what SER3 does, but it looks like they've located a novel regulation form in the upstream regulatory element at -583 (SRG1) which produces an RNA which competes with transcription factors necessary for transcription of SER3 . [In effect, yet another rather interesting mode of genetic repression in yeast.]
Until recently though, math and systems theory have not been strengths of biologists in general - when I was in school, biology was what people took to be able to do science without a lot of math. Ask a biologist about Laplace, Linvill or Liapunov and you'll get a blank stare - which is truly scary if they're mucking around with living feedback systems being spread into the broader environment. There's still a generation that probably needs to be purged before the profession can be deemed "systems theory aware".
Oh please. You're conflating your high school biology teacher with serious research biologists, biochemists, genetisists, and biophysicists. Worse, you're using an ill-informed mainstream article to do your misdirection without even bothering to read the original article in question.
Clearly there is room for improvement in our understanding of all of these fields, which is why people doing biological research have been teaming up with computer scientists, mathematicians, physicists, and statisticians. I personally straddle a few of these fields every time I hoist a test tube and then analyze the data that comes back from it.
For a linux distro, I'd say the standard location should be where the LSB says it is, which from what I've seen Slackware tends to follow a lot closer than Debian.
By default, Debian Policy stays in sync with the LSB. However, there are a few places where the LSB is suboptimal, so Debian documents the differences in policy, and does the right thing. Is there a particular set of files that you're talking about that you feel is in the wrong place?
Actually, I typically install things via "installpkg ---.tgz" and upgrading things via "upgradepkg ---.tgz". When I install from source, I use "configure; make; checkinstall 'make install'". This makes a package out of it that I can easily install, remove, upgrade, whatever I want.
And here, I do the following to upgrade or install a package: dpkg -i foo.deb;
Or: aptitude update && aptitude upgrade;
Finally, if I need to build and something from source, it's as simple as:
apt-get source foo; apt-get install build-essential fakeroot; apt-get builddep foo; cd foo-*; # Change how./configure or make or R CMD is called $EDITOR debian/rules; # Build the.deb fakeroot debian/rules binary; # install the.deb dpkg -i../foo_*.deb
There's nothing magical there at all. The rules file calls make in the build target, and everything else happens automatically. [Now, if you don't know how to modify a make file, perhaps you shouldn't be building stuff from source?]
Debian's new social contract simply says that it will not depend upon non-free goods of any sort--not that it won't be provided.
Debian's Social Contract has always said that it won't depend upon non-free software. Unless you're one of the people who think that software != data, nothing has really changed at all.
In fact, the only possible new class of works that this covers is documentation and things like images, not firmware or anything else. Those have always been (rather non-controversially) covered by the Social Contract and Debian Free Software Guidelines.
Federal courts specifically outlaw wallet chains, most likely because they've had issues with them before, not to mention the noise the things make when people are seating in the hard wooden seats adorning most courts.
State courts may or may not depending on the jurisdiction.
how can debian know that this key is worth trusting". This is (probably) solvable, but still quite hard.
Before a Debian Developer enters the project the key they will use for signing has to be signed by another Debian Developer. You'll note that many Debian Developers are strongly connected on the various keysigning lists, so it is pretty hard for the key to be faked and verified by multiple people.
Finally, the NM process itself is the ultimate arbitrator of who enters Debian. A prospective developer gets evaluated by multiple people before he or she actually becomes a developer.
While still not foolproof, these techniques combined help reduce the lack of accountability and the lack of trust in the system. [Of course, in the end, you really need to go out and sign and get your key signed by a Debian Developer (or a couple) so you can join the web of trust and the strongly connected set too.]
I'm sure I'm being naive, but isn't it illegal to have the odds of winning different inside the machine as to the ones advertised on the outside?
Slot machines typically don't have their payout rate (or odds) stamped on the front. In fact, I've never, ever seen one with it. For most modern slots, you have to look inside at the games rom to even determine the payout rate. Payoff rates also tend to vary from machine to machine even within the same line. (That is, the machines to the left and right of a machine might have totally different payout rates.) In Nevada at least, the Gaming board checks the roms for aproval, but really is only concerned with the fact that the games are truely random and aren't cheating the player.
And for those of you even thinking about playing slots, a friend of the family used to have a one armed bandit in their collection (when slots were legal in California.) Even set at the highest payout rate, the bandit more than paid their kids allowance. I suggest a nice game of blackjack or poker instead.
Actually, I was just lazy and assumed that people would use pubmed to search for Altschul et al. J Mol Biol. 1990 Oct 5;215(3):403-10.
The BLAST manpage is more helpful, and contains a brief description of the algorithm. The algorithm incorporates certain assumptions about biological sequences that are not reflected in computer code. A good bit can be reduced to simple Bayesian logic.
The actual paper is IMO, much more usefull than the manpage for understanding the algorithm acurately. However, if you actually want to use BLAST, you best read the man page.
The actual scoring table, which determines the cost of mismatch, match, gap starting, and gap elongation, can be reduced to bayesian logic, but the core of the algorithm is simply optimal local alignment based on a score table, nothing more.
First of, small nitpick: BLAST doesn't look for homology. It looks for identity. Homology refers to a speciation event separating two genes. On the basis of identity, you might hypothesize homology, but mere identity doesn't necessarily lead to homology. Translation: it's not possible to have homology between two sequences of the same species which an ORGN{HUM} BLAST, FE, will turn up. (Yes, for those of you keeping score, I've made the error before, and you'll ocassionally see this mistake in publications.)
BLAST is designed to deal with a specific set of optimal string alignment problems, namely the matching of nucleotide to nucleotide or amino acid to amino acid. (Actually it's even narrower than that. It's really good at finding a match of a small sequence against a database of millions because of the way it idexes the database... but you can read the paper describing it if you really want to know.) It acts on the assumption that any change is as valid as any other change (ignoring secondary, tertiary and quatenary structure.) Because of this, it's not well suited to determining distances between two code bases where what the code says actually has testable meaning.
In this case, we're pretty much stuck to wandering through the code samples by hand with judicious use of grep and diff.
The only drawback is that tall people (taller than 6'1" or so) will probably find the driver's seat uncomfortable.
Until you get much above 6'5", the seat is pretty comfortable (at least in the Legacy Outbacks). Of course, I don't know of any cars besides the 7 series which are comfortable to drive when you are taller than 6'5". [If it's really a big deal, you can just reweld the seat frame farther back.]
Slashdot Mirror
The other half of this, separation of life from non-life, was most likley brought about by another set of events, codified into the so called Lipid World hypothesis.
Finally, as far as homeostatis, every cell on the planet expends a considerable amount of energy carefully regulating its internal environment. There's nothing magical about a multi-cellular organism that obsolves it from this critical role. As you sit reading this, fully 2/3 of the energy being expended by your brain is going directly to maintaining a specific Na+/K+ concentration gradient. The same is true for the bacteria on your skin, but to a slightly lesser extent.
debian-installer has hooks for supporting FD based installers, but as of this moment, no one has written such a beast. [Not that it's all that big of a deal anyway, as you can basically install Debian by just repeatedly pressing enter.]
Anyway, this question is well covered in the D-I FAQ.
As far as the Ubuntu installer goes, you're actually looking at the exact same installer, just with fewer questions asked.
My personal favorite, although not as favored in the field, is kin selection, where the presence of offspring who do not reproduce themselves but instead increase the fitness of the parent and the ability of the parent to transmit genes successfully into successive generations.
Some of the others can be found through a trivial google search, like here: http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB403.html (Unfortunatly, some of the author's citations are wrong.)
Finally, the phenotype of homosexuality isn't necessarily expressed purely from genes, or purely from environment. It is quite likely that there is both a genetic component, and an evironmental component to the trait, just like there is with almost every other phenotype out there.
One of my current favorite gems from his work:
Either way I hope we won't see similar instances of disenfranchisement afflicting people who wish to vote for any of the candidates or measures facing US citizens on November 2nd.
The ruling on the field stands.
In fact, in my experience, misguided attempts at security are much more stifling than occasional breakins would be.
Reminds me of the madness of trying to get a vegitarian white castle burger. "You want a burger? Without meat?"
"Yes"
"A burger without meat? Let me find my manager"
If the use of government funding to create IP which was then turned around and sold back to consumers is a big deal, then the proper approach is to curtail the IP rights stemming from such funding, rather than stopping the research itself. Not surprisingly, neither the Democrats or the Republicans seem to be interested in controlling the licensing of IP stemming from government funding.
Clearly there is room for improvement in our understanding of all of these fields, which is why people doing biological research have been teaming up with computer scientists, mathematicians, physicists, and statisticians. I personally straddle a few of these fields every time I hoist a test tube and then analyze the data that comes back from it.
And here, I do the following to upgrade or install a package:
dpkg -i foo.deb;
Or:
aptitude update && aptitude upgrade;
Finally, if I need to build and something from source, it's as simple as:
There's nothing magical there at all. The rules file calls make in the build target, and everything else happens automatically. [Now, if you don't know how to modify a make file, perhaps you shouldn't be building stuff from source?]
Debian's Social Contract has always said that it won't depend upon non-free software. Unless you're one of the people who think that software != data, nothing has really changed at all.
In fact, the only possible new class of works that this covers is documentation and things like images, not firmware or anything else. Those have always been (rather non-controversially) covered by the Social Contract and Debian Free Software Guidelines.
Federal courts specifically outlaw wallet chains, most likely because they've had issues with them before, not to mention the noise the things make when people are seating in the hard wooden seats adorning most courts.
State courts may or may not depending on the jurisdiction.
Finally, the NM process itself is the ultimate arbitrator of who enters Debian. A prospective developer gets evaluated by multiple people before he or she actually becomes a developer.
While still not foolproof, these techniques combined help reduce the lack of accountability and the lack of trust in the system. [Of course, in the end, you really need to go out and sign and get your key signed by a Debian Developer (or a couple) so you can join the web of trust and the strongly connected set too.]
And for those of you even thinking about playing slots, a friend of the family used to have a one armed bandit in their collection (when slots were legal in California.) Even set at the highest payout rate, the bandit more than paid their kids allowance. I suggest a nice game of blackjack or poker instead.
The actual scoring table, which determines the cost of mismatch, match, gap starting, and gap elongation, can be reduced to bayesian logic, but the core of the algorithm is simply optimal local alignment based on a score table, nothing more.
First of, small nitpick: BLAST doesn't look for homology. It looks for identity. Homology refers to a speciation event separating two genes. On the basis of identity, you might hypothesize homology, but mere identity doesn't necessarily lead to homology. Translation: it's not possible to have homology between two sequences of the same species which an ORGN{HUM} BLAST, FE, will turn up. (Yes, for those of you keeping score, I've made the error before, and you'll ocassionally see this mistake in publications.)
BLAST is designed to deal with a specific set of optimal string alignment problems, namely the matching of nucleotide to nucleotide or amino acid to amino acid. (Actually it's even narrower than that. It's really good at finding a match of a small sequence against a database of millions because of the way it idexes the database... but you can read the paper describing it if you really want to know.) It acts on the assumption that any change is as valid as any other change (ignoring secondary, tertiary and quatenary structure.) Because of this, it's not well suited to determining distances between two code bases where what the code says actually has testable meaning.
In this case, we're pretty much stuck to wandering through the code samples by hand with judicious use of grep and diff.