The article only mentions cutting the DNA and then "allowing the body's natural repair processes" to do the rest - it seems that this technique could also be useful in inserting genes at precise locations in DNA instead of letting viruses and bacteria insert genetic material wherever they please? I am no genetic engineer, can anyone comment?
Actually it is a reasonable problem for satellites at the moment. There is an international community that tracks satellites and debris, one reason for tracking is for course correction using small retros, another is tracking geological movement on the earth, and another is to move satellites out of the way of debris. The ranging can be done with radar, but the company that I worked for did laser ranging, which has some pretty cool technology, timing light pulses down to about 3mm! A link is here: http://www.eos-aus.com/satellite_laser_ranging.htm.
One of the future hopefuls was (and I believe still is) to set up a laser that is powerful and focussed enough to ablate material on the debris to knock it off course and have it burn up in the atmosphere.
Imperial measurements are kind of like that old pair of underpants. I know they are comfortable and familiar, and in some ways your closest friend, but they are also full of holes and won't survive another wash. It is time to retire them to the garage as a rag and get yourself some new ones - they might feel uncomfortable and foreign at first, but they will grow on you (not literally, of course).
I have always found it intriguing that the US both celebrates the day of its independance from the British empire and continues to use old British units of measurement.
Our PM has a bit of a history of making statements that are not based on fact to advance his political career and win votes. Part of his reluctance to admit any kind of environmental responsibility revolves about maintaining the support of electorates that rely heavily on logging and coal mining.
I don't know if we need to be too worried just yet, according to the article they are not sure yet wether they are able to create this effect without an aurora already occuring, which would immediately limit where the technology can be used. Then they need acres of antennas, and a 1 megawatt generator, and only got green speckles - presumably only once every 7.5 seconds when the radio pulse was sent up. Since the system relies on radio waves it is probably not going to have decent enough focus to paint the sky with how much you need a refreshing Coca Cola.
Interesting from a physics point of view, but I can't see advertising executives scrambling over each other to get to this one.
I have been using Skype for a little over a month, and one feature (on the Linux version at least) that would be great is to manually set the port that it uses by default - I can get it to change for that session, but it picks a new one on restart, which makes setting up your ADSL modem so that you can have a direct route from caller to caller a bit of a pain. If they fixed that little problem, then I would have no complaints.
It is true, there are "girls" out there to talk to. I regularly use Skype to talk to a girl I met online. Her name is Bruce. Her voice is just so husky from a throat infection. We are going to meet in real life one day real soon!
My father has a few of my grandfathers old tools that he etched his name into using acid. His method (which I am told was fairly common) was to clean the surface, cover liberally with grease, and then use something thin with a rounded end, like the handle of a fine paintbrush to write his name in the grease so that the metal has the grease cleaned away where he has written. Paint with a strong solution of acid, leave for a few minutes, and you have an acid etched signature.
I recall when I first came out of high school and joined an IT company who were paying my way through uni - I thought that I must seriously be missing something when I was in meetings and managers would refer to the leveraging of the e-enabling sector. It took me at least a year before I realised that each manager was just repeating what the one above them said, and by the time it had filtered down to me I was looking for meaning where there was none.
The cable has a series of kites attached, so that the kites on one side are providing just enough lift to support themselves and thier section of cable, while on the other side they are providing maximum lift, so the tension in the cable would be minimal at the top, maximum at the bottom of the cable on the lift side.
That is a good point - if we are to focus in on the case of the pedophile (getting off-topic, I know), then my concern would be more for the child than the parent, the parent has established that they cannot meet even the lowest of community expectations arround children. So in this case I would say that yes, the parent has lost entitlement to be involved in a childs events, and it is certainly very unfortunate if the child suffers as a result.
Unfortunately when people are punished sometimes it will have an effect on those arround them, however that does not mean that the punishment is so flawed that it should not be applied. In the case of people being banned from the internet, this kind of punishment might mean that somebody could loose thier job, causing financial hardship on thier family. While I certainly acknowledge that external effects need to be taken into account, we must remember that it is the individual that commited the crime, and so the punishment was brought onto themselves, while the court is simply applying punishments that (hopefully) fit the crime.
If a person is convicted of pedophile behaviour with a child he/she met in the shopping mall, do they the judges ban them from shopping malls? If they met them at a McDonalds, do they get banned from fast food restaraunts? Not that I am aware of.
A court is able to ban people from certain places, using the pedophile example the courts might order that the person not go within x metres of a school for example (in Australia at least, I imagine the same applies elsewhere).
I agree with your point that with the migration of many services to the internet that, over time, banning one from the internet becomes a more and more severe sentence to impose, and presumably that would be taken into account when imposing the sentence, in much the same way that if someone is convicted of drunk driving a court may take into account wether they require a drivers license for work, and perhaps give community service or fines instead of suspension of thier license.
On the subject of a sentence being "toothless", I don't think many people would disagree that this kind of sentence is hard to enforce, but some of the power of this kind of technique is the punishment you will receive if you are caught breaking the ban - using the parent/child example it is a lot like when a punishment came with a warning that if you were caught again, you would feel the full weight of thier authority:)
A package like Mathematica might be inappropriate to present to everybody on a high school math class, but for somebody who is likely to become involved in mathematics at a tertiary level surely there is some utility in them being familiar with this kind of package, and at very least there is no harm in it.
Plotting a few points might be suitable for many concepts, like displaying the behaviour of a low order polynomial, but what about the behaviour of a function like sin(1/x) as it approaches 0? I tutor quite a few first year mathematics courses, and based on many students understanding of the behaviour of quite simple functions I would encourage anyone in late highschool who was interested to play with a math package.
Just fake it out, and you have carte blanche to commit whatever crimes you want, with the state's own "evidence" of your whereabouts to clear you at any given time...
That brings up another interesting angle, create a little program that regularly visits child porn sites and other content that is illegal here, saves offensive material on the users hard drive, and sends fake reports off to the police.
Trying to be positive, I would hope that it encourages development and production of cleaner technologies within the countries that have agreed to it. This should lower the cost of being green to all countries.
I am actually doing my PhD with one of the guys who started Iterated Systems, which was the company that did the fractal image compression used in the first of the Encarta cds. One of the really big problems with fractal image compression is the encoding is very difficult, especially compared to doing something like JPEG.
If you are interested in the mathematics behind the concept, do a search for the Collage theorem, by Michael Barnsley.
Slashdot Mirror
The article only mentions cutting the DNA and then "allowing the body's natural repair processes" to do the rest - it seems that this technique could also be useful in inserting genes at precise locations in DNA instead of letting viruses and bacteria insert genetic material wherever they please? I am no genetic engineer, can anyone comment?
Actually it is a reasonable problem for satellites at the moment. There is an international community that tracks satellites and debris, one reason for tracking is for course correction using small retros, another is tracking geological movement on the earth, and another is to move satellites out of the way of debris. The ranging can be done with radar, but the company that I worked for did laser ranging, which has some pretty cool technology, timing light pulses down to about 3mm! A link is here: http://www.eos-aus.com/satellite_laser_ranging.htm .
One of the future hopefuls was (and I believe still is) to set up a laser that is powerful and focussed enough to ablate material on the debris to knock it off course and have it burn up in the atmosphere.
Imperial measurements are kind of like that old pair of underpants. I know they are comfortable and familiar, and in some ways your closest friend, but they are also full of holes and won't survive another wash. It is time to retire them to the garage as a rag and get yourself some new ones - they might feel uncomfortable and foreign at first, but they will grow on you (not literally, of course).
You're an engineer, right..?
I have always found it intriguing that the US both celebrates the day of its independance from the British empire and continues to use old British units of measurement.
Our PM has a bit of a history of making statements that are not based on fact to advance his political career and win votes. Part of his reluctance to admit any kind of environmental responsibility revolves about maintaining the support of electorates that rely heavily on logging and coal mining.
I don't know if we need to be too worried just yet, according to the article they are not sure yet wether they are able to create this effect without an aurora already occuring, which would immediately limit where the technology can be used. Then they need acres of antennas, and a 1 megawatt generator, and only got green speckles - presumably only once every 7.5 seconds when the radio pulse was sent up. Since the system relies on radio waves it is probably not going to have decent enough focus to paint the sky with how much you need a refreshing Coca Cola.
Interesting from a physics point of view, but I can't see advertising executives scrambling over each other to get to this one.
I have been using Skype for a little over a month, and one feature (on the Linux version at least) that would be great is to manually set the port that it uses by default - I can get it to change for that session, but it picks a new one on restart, which makes setting up your ADSL modem so that you can have a direct route from caller to caller a bit of a pain. If they fixed that little problem, then I would have no complaints.
It is true, there are "girls" out there to talk to. I regularly use Skype to talk to a girl I met online. Her name is Bruce. Her voice is just so husky from a throat infection. We are going to meet in real life one day real soon!
My father has a few of my grandfathers old tools that he etched his name into using acid. His method (which I am told was fairly common) was to clean the surface, cover liberally with grease, and then use something thin with a rounded end, like the handle of a fine paintbrush to write his name in the grease so that the metal has the grease cleaned away where he has written. Paint with a strong solution of acid, leave for a few minutes, and you have an acid etched signature.
I recall when I first came out of high school and joined an IT company who were paying my way through uni - I thought that I must seriously be missing something when I was in meetings and managers would refer to the leveraging of the e-enabling sector. It took me at least a year before I realised that each manager was just repeating what the one above them said, and by the time it had filtered down to me I was looking for meaning where there was none.
There is a good picture at http://www.ockels.nl/Introduction.htm (from http://www.laddermill.com/, which somebody else posted).
That is a good point - if we are to focus in on the case of the pedophile (getting off-topic, I know), then my concern would be more for the child than the parent, the parent has established that they cannot meet even the lowest of community expectations arround children. So in this case I would say that yes, the parent has lost entitlement to be involved in a childs events, and it is certainly very unfortunate if the child suffers as a result.
Unfortunately when people are punished sometimes it will have an effect on those arround them, however that does not mean that the punishment is so flawed that it should not be applied. In the case of people being banned from the internet, this kind of punishment might mean that somebody could loose thier job, causing financial hardship on thier family. While I certainly acknowledge that external effects need to be taken into account, we must remember that it is the individual that commited the crime, and so the punishment was brought onto themselves, while the court is simply applying punishments that (hopefully) fit the crime.
A court is able to ban people from certain places, using the pedophile example the courts might order that the person not go within x metres of a school for example (in Australia at least, I imagine the same applies elsewhere).
I agree with your point that with the migration of many services to the internet that, over time, banning one from the internet becomes a more and more severe sentence to impose, and presumably that would be taken into account when imposing the sentence, in much the same way that if someone is convicted of drunk driving a court may take into account wether they require a drivers license for work, and perhaps give community service or fines instead of suspension of thier license.
On the subject of a sentence being "toothless", I don't think many people would disagree that this kind of sentence is hard to enforce, but some of the power of this kind of technique is the punishment you will receive if you are caught breaking the ban - using the parent/child example it is a lot like when a punishment came with a warning that if you were caught again, you would feel the full weight of thier authority :)
A package like Mathematica might be inappropriate to present to everybody on a high school math class, but for somebody who is likely to become involved in mathematics at a tertiary level surely there is some utility in them being familiar with this kind of package, and at very least there is no harm in it.
Plotting a few points might be suitable for many concepts, like displaying the behaviour of a low order polynomial, but what about the behaviour of a function like sin(1/x) as it approaches 0? I tutor quite a few first year mathematics courses, and based on many students understanding of the behaviour of quite simple functions I would encourage anyone in late highschool who was interested to play with a math package.
Scilab might not be a bad choice either - http://scilabsoft.inria.fr/. It is available for both *nix and Windows, and is quite powerful.
Not everybody thinks that, I think that everyone there is a marionette puppet with variations on the voice of Trey Parker.
Trying to be positive, I would hope that it encourages development and production of cleaner technologies within the countries that have agreed to it. This should lower the cost of being green to all countries.
I am actually doing my PhD with one of the guys who started Iterated Systems, which was the company that did the fractal image compression used in the first of the Encarta cds. One of the really big problems with fractal image compression is the encoding is very difficult, especially compared to doing something like JPEG. If you are interested in the mathematics behind the concept, do a search for the Collage theorem, by Michael Barnsley.