If there wasn't any benefit these genes gave, common sense would suggest they'd have died out long ago.
Yeah, like the genes for Mucoviscidosis.... (which, until the 60s, killed off most patients by the age of 4).
Common sense != science. Common sense tells us that the Earth is flat and that time is absolute. At any rate, it is well known that Jewish populations are ridden with peculiar genetic diseases, just like any other relatively small, closed community. Accumulation of recessive genes results in higher rates of genetic defects. The non-PC term is "inbreeding".
Having not read TFA, I can't comment on the study itself. But "common sense" arguments should be avoided like the Plague in genetics.
In the movies and TV shows, all aliens have pretty much the same brainpower.
In the movies and TV shows, all aliens of human-like intelligence have humanoid shapes: bipeds, slightly less than 2 metres tall, two arms, two legs, a head with two eyes and a mouth, etc.
In Star Trek, the aliens are, for all practical purposes, humanoids. In the absence of historic or genetic data, a naturalist would probably classify the Klingons as close cousins of humans.
I mean, even Jar Jar and the Gungans (a supposedly amphibian species spending most of its time under water) have essentially human characteristics !
What would be the chance of anything like that happening in a real universe ?
How many countries on THIS planet have the tech to "obliterate, enslave or cook" most of the rest of the population?
One.
And if the question is "How many countries on THIS planet have the tech to obliterate, enslave or cook most of the rest of the population without suffering severe losses in the process", then the answer is "None".
It might put things into perspective. You seem to rely on moral, ethics and common sense to prevent total domination of one group upon another. The problem is that people do not behave rationally when they are afraid, and us-versus-them wars are essentially exemple of self-reinforcing cycles (one A kills a B, so a few Bs kill a few As, so many As kill many Bs...). Israel-Palestine, Chechnia-Russia, ex-Yugoslavia, you name it.
The other thing to keep in mind is that "enslaving" is not an option in the long term. Sooner or later the slaves rebel. Colonialism is an example of this. Either you realise it and go away in a reasonably orderly fashion (as the English did most of the time), or you're in for a long, painful, ugly struggle in which you have simply no chance to prevail (the French in Algeria, possibly the ugliest war ever fought by a Western democracy).
The only solution is obliteration, either by destruction, or by expulsion, or by assimilation. And this kind of things happens all the time.
Oh, BTW, pray remind us what happened to American Indians ?
just as we would find it immoral to withhold food from anyone if food were freely replicable and distributable (the farmers' business plans notwithstanding)
IKTIS (I Know This Is Slashdot), but this analogy is just plain ridiculous.
The purpose of agriculture is precisely to achieve dumb replication. A potato is always a potato. Once you have a machine that spontaneously makes potatoes out of thin air, farmers become irrelevant because the copying machine does exactly their job: mass-scale reproduction of a given product.
Art and knowledge, on the other hand, are all about variety. Two different pieces of information are not equivalent. Even if you have a machine that can copy any single painting or any piece of music, you'll still want to have people to create new paintings and new music. Or do you really think that Xerox and Fraunhofer have made both professions irrelevant, just like the potato-machine would make farmers irrelevant ?
There lies the difference. This is why we want to keep restrictions on the flow of information. If we had a potato-making machine, we wouldn't care about the farmer's business plan, as you say. But even though we have Xerox machines and MP3 compression, we still care about the artists' and writers' business plan, because we want new artists and writers to come up and be able to obtain retribution for their work (possibly earn a living out of it) instead of flipping burgers or cleaning toilets. Capice ?
I'm surprised by how infrequently I see this argument articulated, even among free-culture types.
Duh! Your failed analogy summarises all that is wrong with the "free-culture types".
First it was "Weapons of Mass Destruction", next it will be "Computers of Mass Distribution", with a war proposed by the movie/music industry...
No need for that. I mean, who on Earth would argue that Camembert cheese is not a weapon of mass destruction ? And they have tons of it ! Hell, somebody set them up the bomb before all their gases are belong to us !
You can't just calculate the energy of the whole ocean and then say, "we are only taking 1%, so it must be OK"
-1 Thermodynamically challenged.
This system does not extract any energy from the ocean. This system pumps cold oceanic water from the ocean, then uses the natural flow of heat (thermal energy) from the warm atmosphere to the cold water. Thermal energy always flows from hot to cold.
The end result is a slightly colder atmosphere and slightly warmer water. When the water goes back to the ocean, its heat is dissipated into, guess what ? You got it. The atmosphere.
Instead of fighting thermodynamics and using increadibly wasteful compression machines to generate some "coolness", we harness thermodynamics and the natural flow of thermal energy from hot to cold. The cost is only that of pumping water from the ocean, which is cheap once you prime the pump (think of a big siphon).
Note that this is only for the "aircond" part. Not sure about the potential for exctracting useful amounts of mechanical power, though.
(though I personally beleive that placating evil is to become evil yourself)
You are a victim of a delusion that seems to be endemic in the US.
"There are Bad Guys [tm] out there (ok). We want to fight the Bad Guys (still ok). Therefore we must impose sanctions on their countries that only harm ordinary people and help the Bad Guys keep control of their populations (wtf ?). Oh, and if you disagree with us you're a Bad Guy too (double-wtf ?)"
These guys are evil. Therefore I must smite them. I don't care about the consequences of my actions in the real world. I don't care if what I do will actually strengthen my opponents (see also Islamic fundamentalism, paragraph "How to fight terrorism by invading a moslem country that is not involved in terrorism in order to turn it into a terrorist heaven and give a propaganda boost to said terrorists by helping them recruit more volunteers than they ever dreamed of").
I smite the bad guys and everything will be alright. Like in the movies, you see.
Any resemblance with the case of a recently deposed Arab dictator might not be entirely fortuitous. Except that the Arab dictator in question did receive significant financial and technical support from the West (US included) for quite a while at the beginning of his Evil Overlord carreer.
Oh, and with the added difference that, whatever you think of Castro, when it comes to comparing sheer number of victims, he probably lags two or three orders of magnitude behind the forementioned Arab dictator.
Not that Europe would necessarily do any better if they were The Hyperpower [(c) Hubert Vedrine], but still, that's a bit annoying.
perhaps the government and corporate organizations of America shouldn't have that much access to our private lives.
I understand what you mean, but please note that none of the situations you mentioned had anything to do with private life.
1- Credit card. To use a credit card you are using the CC company's network. They let you use their property, but it's still theirs to use as they please within the terms of the contract.
2- CCTV in a shop. A shop is the property of the shop's owner (well quite often it is rented, but you get the idea). When you enter a shop you are not in public space, you are in a private space that happens to belong to someone else. They let you enter their property, but they have the right to set reasonable conditions for it. Filming people who enter your property does not seem exceedingly unreasonable to me.
I don't know if this patent is evil, but if sure as hell deserves a +5 informative.
It contains an awful lot of information about genetic analysis and allele identification, including references of seminal articles about such techniques as PCR and such.
And if it is true that this guy was first to figure out that 1) there is order in non-coding DNA and 2) this order can be used to gain access to coding DNA, then I don't see what's wrong with this patent in itself.
Thomas -
Re:Its only the bad things we head about?
on
Safari vs. KHTML
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· Score: 4, Insightful
That's a problem for KDE, but does Apple not have the right to do what they want with their patches
Of course they bloody do. That's called a fork ! And freedom to fork is the most important aspect of OSS - in fact enforcing and maintaining this freedom to fork is the central aim of the GPL.
Apple quite simply forked Safari. This happens all the time in the OSS world. Hello, does anyone really expect that X.org patches will remain 100% compatible with the XFree86 code structure ad aeternam ?
Could someone please tell me what exactly the problem is in the Apple-Safari case ?
There is a simple criterion that separates trivial self-replication (as in crystals that grow and break, then grow again, etc.) from interesting self-replication (as in living beings). This criterion was introduced by Von Neumann more than 50 years ago. An interesting self-replicating system is one that has the possibility to evolve, and to reach arbitrary levels of complexity.
The simple way to do that is to have a "plan" (the genome) that can be read by a "constructor" (the rest of the machine) which follows the plan for building a copy of itself, including the plan. Modifications in the plan lead to modifications in the result. That sounds obvious to us, but Von Neumann wrote about those things more than a decade before the structure of DNA was elucidated.
It also means that the constructor must be, or contain, a Turing machine - a universal computer, making it able to construct anything that can be mechanically constructed out of a program. In living beings, the Turing machine is the result of the complex interactions between proteins that regulate each other's transcriptions and activity. Again, this is obvious to us, but only because Monod and Jacob discovered it in the 70s.
That's why Von Neumann had to invent a very complex structure in a very complex cellular automaton to obtain a really "self-replicating" system (in the interesting sense). That's also why Chris Langton's self-replicating loops are not really "interestingly" self-replicating. And that's why the structures in TFA are even less interestingly self-replicating. Hell, they have to rely on ready-made modules ! They are not even on the same level as simple self-replicating patterns in the Game of Life, wince in the Game of Life new "modules" are constantly created.
The defining factor of life is not self-replication on the global scale. It is the fact that this self-replication occurs by constant self-building. Living systems can build themselves, not out of ready-made modules (babies aren't built by patching together bits of arms, legs, brains, etc) but by breaking down external materials, extracting energy from their environment, then using it to build themselves, in apparent complete contempt the 2nd law of thermodynamics (the key word here is apparent - every single reaction in living beings is completely compatible with the laws of physics, otherwise it wouldn't take place - duh!). Even though the resulting compounds are thermodynamically very unfavorable, they persist because they are constantly replenished by the set of chemical reactions known as "life", which can essentially be defined as autocatalysis resulting in structures with a capacity for evolution.
Hod Lipson is a really great researcher. His work on developmental systems for evolutionary design of structure is so cool it hurts. But I think he and his guys might want to tone down the comparisons with biological self-replication. Right now the structures they have are not even on the same level as the simple patterns that you can see in the Game of Life !
Which you have to ask, why not just use emule/edonkey network?
Hell, why not use a Gnutella2, as Shareazaa does ?
Gnutella2 is a smaller network but is still pretty large, and it has the advantage of much shorter queues. Edonkey is cool for very large files which you don't mind waiting for, or for rare files. Gnutella2 is ideal for smaller files which you want to download quickly.
The more these guys work on decentralising BT, the closer you get to just being a less efficient and less established clone of emule. Whats the point?
Swarm management in Bittorrent is much more advanced than in edonkey/gnutella clients. The latter do have "swarming" possibilities in that you can download from multiple sources, but seem to have only primitive "retribution" system, etc.
If someone could set an Edonkey/Gnutella-like system and incorporate Bittorrent's efficient swarm management in it, that would make a killing p2p network. The question is: why do these people insist on developing their own isolated software instead of using established protocols and systems ? Just merge Bittorrent and gnutella/edonkey and be done with it.
surely at some point you'd find Pi is a repeating number.
You post is vague, so I assume you mean "there is a N such that the sequence of digits N+1 to 2*N+1 of Pi is identical to the sequence of digits 1 to N of Pi."
If Pi is normal (actually you probably don't need full normality) this is true.
A truly random number would never repeat a sequence no matter how many digits were in the sequence.
A truly random number will MOST DEFINITELY repeat itself, at least in the way described above.
If the digits are truly random then at any N, there is a non-zero probability that the N next digits will be the same as the N previous ones. This probability decreases very fast as N grows, but it is never 0. Since the probability is not 0, if you wait long enough, it is quite simply bound to happen at some point. Doh !
I sincerely hope that you don't understand "repeating" number as "periodical" number. I know US schools suck at teaching maths, but hopefully not that hard !
Just seed a copy of "One night in Dvorak" on major P2P networks, and P2P instantly becomes the second cause of mortality in the English-speaking world right behind suicide by monitor ingestion...
You are trying to make an informative comment based on facts instead of rumours. Furthermore, it appears that you actually understand what you are talking about, which hints at the possibility that you might have exerted cognitive activity before posting your comment. Such a behaviour can simply not be tolerated. Your Slashdot account will be terminated within the next 24 hours. Please make your way to the nearest exit. Thank you.
To put it bluntly, what has allowed us to become what we are today has much more to do with hygene. Just look at third world countries, their hygene level and child mortality.
Yeah. And that's why they have much slower population growth than Western countries. Oh wait...
Man, I think you are severely confused about evolution as well. Evolution is based on differential gene propagation. It has nothing to do with our well-being. Poorer countries have much faster population growth than richer countries. Therefore, in terms of evolution, right now, third world countries are the winners. We are the losers. In the current environment, poverty is a selective advantage.
Anyway, this is completely irrelevant. Poverty and modern hygiene are not genetic traits ! For a long period of time Asian nations had a much higher level of hygiene than the West. Besides, third world countries have a low level of hygiene, yet even that is significantly better than what people had in prehistoric times; in other words, over evolutionary timescales, modern Western hygiene is quite simply insignificant.
it isn't military power which is gonna bring peace to the world: it's people all over the world having a comfortable standard of living which is gonna do that.
It will certainly help. On the other hand, Bin Laden came from one of the richest families in Saudi Arabia, and almost all of the 9/11 terrorists were upper-class, western-educated professionals. Radovan Karadzic, mastermind of the Bosnian Serbs during the war in Yougaslavia, is a poet. Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouges were western-educated intellectuals.
Modern Europe is a demonstration that development and integration can prevent "traditional" wars; but against fanaticism, keeping a big stick under your bed is still your best protection.
It depends on what "accessible" means. I think these guys misunderstood the motivation behind Google's effort. Google is here to organise information - not to provide it: Google Print is only there to allow you to find books that match your searches, not to read them.
Try just about any book search on Google, even about old ones. Try Austen's Sense and Sensibility. Try Hobbes' Leviathan. Whatever. Google Print will point you to a modern, copyrighted edition of the book. You will only be able to browse a few pages.
Contrast with the Gallica project at the Bibliotheque Nationale de France: thousands of digitised books, freely accessible from beginning to end, most in scanned image format, but many in full ASCII text. And Gallica is much older than Google Print (in Internet time it's about one or two generations older), though not as old as the Gutenberg project.
Judging from his language, the French dude seems to think that Google Print is a scaled-up, English-language Gallica. It isn't. But if European libraries get their act together and start a project to make literally millions of books freely accessible for all in all European languages, hey, I'm all for it !
And Iran would be pacifist if we never got involved in their history. They had a moderate government with some elements of capitalism. But then the USA decided to help Hussien, we sold him all the arms he needed to attack Iran for over a decade. And we let the Shah get expelled, for a very rigid Kohmeni.
I think you are a bit confused about the particulars, though your general point is correct.
Act I: Iran has a popular, secular, western-educated leader, Mohammed Mossadegh. Unfortunately this leader happens to brush American and British governments the wrong way, to the point of actually nationalising local oil companies (shock ! horror !)
Obviously our luminaries of freedom and democracy can not tolerate such an attack on western businessmen's rights. So they organise a coup to get rid of Mossadegh and put the Shah into power, leading to a few years of a rather brutal dictatorship. That's Act II.
Act III: At some point the Iranians got really pissed about it and started a revolution. This revolution was driven by two main forces: socialist intellectuals and islamic fundamentalists. As soon as the Shah was overthrown, the islamists simply eliminated the socialists and used their fanaticised support base to crush upon any kind of dissent.
Just a bit later, Saddam launched a war against Iran for seemingly no reason - but with thorough US and western backing, at least in the beginning (hey, he's against the Mollahs, so he's a good guy, right ?). One million dead. Only when reports of atrocities emerged (gasing of Kurdish populations) did the west begin to reconsider their support for Saddam.
Iranians hate the US, period. But this deep resentment against America was not instillated by their government - only exploited as a way to strengthen their power (since the Iranian government is the most outspoken opponent of the US on the world stage, anyone who dissents with the Iranian government can conveniently be called an agent of the US). Iranians have good reasons to dislike the US. By removing a moderate, popular government from office out of short-term considerations, they opened the way for a much more brutal, oppressive and dangerous regime in the end.
I am appalled by atheists exploiting success of science (which neither presumes nor denies existence of God, so far, at least)
Science does not and cannot disprove God (i.e. the idea of a supernatural Creator): such a concept is beyond science altogether. It is not possible to prove or disprove the fact that the world was initially created by a sentient being.
However science, or even plain common sense, puts a lot of strain on religions, that is, particular teachings based on sacred revelations.
Religion consists in switching off your brain and believing the unbelievable. Not only that, but believing in one particular set of unbelievable things, to the exclusion of any other. Hint: What is the difference between a religion and a cult, except for size and political impact ?
I would even go as far as to say that such coattailing is more cowardly act than oppressing minority beliefs under the authority of a powerful Church
Show me a preacher burnt at the stake (as in real fire and real charred flesh, not metaphorically) by a council of scientists and I'll agree with you.
It's highly likely that Jesus had a wife. There's strong evidence to show that Jesus had Rabbii training, and strong evidence that his wife was Mary Magdelene, aka Mary of Bethany (yes, the one and same person). During that era, it was extremely unusual for a jewish male to not be married, and a Rabbii had to be married. It was basically a 'law'.
Voodoo theology. See the wikipedia article for a level-headed description of the matter.
The Roman Catholic church has long sought to hide the line of Jesus, spread by Mary Magdelene when she moved to the area of Marseilles.
Actually, in the area of Arles, in a locality which is now known as the Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer (I should know, I'm from there). Together with Martha, Mary of Bethany, Salome, and Lazarus, among others. Then Lazarus went on to become bishop of Marseilles, Martha went to kill a monster that wreaked havoc in Tarascon, and Magdalene ended her life in the Sainte-Baume moutains.
This happens to be one of the many popular legends that flourished in medieval folk christianism. One of the early bishops of Marseilles was actually called Lazarus, but there is no relation with the resurrected one. Similar stuff occured all over Europe, e.g. Saint-Denis, patron saint of France, has been wrongly identified with Denys the Areopagite. In my own city, Arles, the legendary first bishop Trophimus has been identified with the homonymous disciple of Paul mentioned in the New Testament.
While many such confusions may have arisen out of sincere self-delusion, one should keep in mind that holy relics (which attracted pilgrims in droves) were extremely important at the time, both in terms of prestige and of plain commercial interest. Exposing the relic of a Father of the Church was much more profitable, in any sense, than some obscure 3rd century bishop.
The deal with Clovis was renegged less than 100 years after his death, removing the line of the Menengoverians by the assassination of Dagobert II.
You are an ignorant ass. The Merovingians faded into irrelevance out of sheer incompetence. They were replaced by the descendents of Charles Martel (then a kind of "prime minister", in charge of the actual work of running the empire), not by cunning or assassination, but simply because the guy saved the country and the rest of Europe from Arab domination - which brings us to your next point...
Add to the fact that the Roman Catholic church is highly intolerant of other religions - the murder and war against the Saracens in the 11th century
Look, man, I have no particular sympathy for Catholicism, but you should remember that the relationship between Christian Europe and the Moslem world has been one of constant invasions and counter-invasions - and the Saracens called the first shots in the 7th-8th centuries, until they got their arses kicked big time by Charles Martel, and were driven out by his successors, the Carolingians - eponymous to Martel's grandson, a certain Charlemagne.
When you add up aggressions and atrocities from both sides, all you can say is that there's no winner - only a few million losers.
Slashdot Mirror
If there wasn't any benefit these genes gave, common sense would suggest they'd have died out long ago.
Yeah, like the genes for Mucoviscidosis.... (which, until the 60s, killed off most patients by the age of 4).
Common sense != science. Common sense tells us that the Earth is flat and that time is absolute. At any rate, it is well known that Jewish populations are ridden with peculiar genetic diseases, just like any other relatively small, closed community. Accumulation of recessive genes results in higher rates of genetic defects. The non-PC term is "inbreeding".
Having not read TFA, I can't comment on the study itself. But "common sense" arguments should be avoided like the Plague in genetics.
Thomas-
In the movies and TV shows, all aliens have pretty much the same brainpower.
In the movies and TV shows, all aliens of human-like intelligence have humanoid shapes: bipeds, slightly less than 2 metres tall, two arms, two legs, a head with two eyes and a mouth, etc.
In Star Trek, the aliens are, for all practical purposes, humanoids. In the absence of historic or genetic data, a naturalist would probably classify the Klingons as close cousins of humans.
I mean, even Jar Jar and the Gungans (a supposedly amphibian species spending most of its time under water) have essentially human characteristics !
What would be the chance of anything like that happening in a real universe ?
Thomas-
How many countries on THIS planet have the tech to "obliterate, enslave or cook" most of the rest of the population?
One.
And if the question is "How many countries on THIS planet have the tech to obliterate, enslave or cook most of the rest of the population without suffering severe losses in the process", then the answer is "None".
It might put things into perspective. You seem to rely on moral, ethics and common sense to prevent total domination of one group upon another. The problem is that people do not behave rationally when they are afraid, and us-versus-them wars are essentially exemple of self-reinforcing cycles (one A kills a B, so a few Bs kill a few As, so many As kill many Bs...). Israel-Palestine, Chechnia-Russia, ex-Yugoslavia, you name it.
The other thing to keep in mind is that "enslaving" is not an option in the long term. Sooner or later the slaves rebel. Colonialism is an example of this. Either you realise it and go away in a reasonably orderly fashion (as the English did most of the time), or you're in for a long, painful, ugly struggle in which you have simply no chance to prevail (the French in Algeria, possibly the ugliest war ever fought by a Western democracy).
The only solution is obliteration, either by destruction, or by expulsion, or by assimilation. And this kind of things happens all the time.
Oh, BTW, pray remind us what happened to American Indians ?
Thomas-
# Guns, and Indy saying how much he hates them.
Excuse me ? Are we talking about Indiana "do you fancy saber dance all you like I'll just shoot you down with my gun thank you very much" Jones here ?
Thomas--
The Indiana Jones franchise:
- The most popular director on Earth, Steven Spielberg
- The box office record holder, George Lucas
- The coolest actor on Earth, Harisson Ford. I mean, you can't argue with a 60 years old guy who beds Calista Flockhart, right ?
- The single best original music theme in entire film history (ta ta-ta taaaa, ta ta-taaaa...)
Now the question is: will all this be enough to disprove the age-old theory according to which the best trilogies come up in three parts ?...
Thomas-
just as we would find it immoral to withhold food from anyone if food were freely replicable and distributable (the farmers' business plans notwithstanding)
IKTIS (I Know This Is Slashdot), but this analogy is just plain ridiculous.
The purpose of agriculture is precisely to achieve dumb replication. A potato is always a potato. Once you have a machine that spontaneously makes potatoes out of thin air, farmers become irrelevant because the copying machine does exactly their job: mass-scale reproduction of a given product.
Art and knowledge, on the other hand, are all about variety. Two different pieces of information are not equivalent. Even if you have a machine that can copy any single painting or any piece of music, you'll still want to have people to create new paintings and new music. Or
do you really think that Xerox and Fraunhofer have made both professions irrelevant, just like the potato-machine would make farmers irrelevant ?
There lies the difference. This is why we want to keep restrictions on the flow of information. If we had a potato-making machine, we wouldn't care about the farmer's business plan, as you say. But even though we have Xerox machines and MP3 compression, we still care about the artists' and writers' business plan, because we want new artists and writers to come up and be able to obtain retribution for their work (possibly earn a living out of it) instead of flipping burgers or cleaning toilets. Capice ?
I'm surprised by how infrequently I see this argument articulated, even among free-culture types.
Duh! Your failed analogy summarises all that is wrong with the "free-culture types".
Thomas-
First it was "Weapons of Mass Destruction", next it will be "Computers of Mass Distribution", with a war proposed by the movie/music industry...
No need for that. I mean, who on Earth would argue that Camembert cheese is not a weapon of mass destruction ? And they have tons of it ! Hell, somebody set them up the bomb before all their gases are belong to us !
Thomas-
You can't just calculate the energy of the whole ocean and then say, "we are only taking 1%, so it must be OK"
-1 Thermodynamically challenged.
This system does not extract any energy from the ocean. This system pumps cold oceanic water from the ocean, then uses the natural flow of heat (thermal energy) from the warm atmosphere to the cold water. Thermal energy always flows from hot to cold.
The end result is a slightly colder atmosphere and slightly warmer water. When the water goes back to the ocean, its heat is dissipated into, guess what ? You got it. The atmosphere.
Instead of fighting thermodynamics and using increadibly wasteful compression machines to generate some "coolness", we harness thermodynamics and the natural flow of thermal energy from hot to cold. The cost is only that of pumping water from the ocean, which is cheap once you prime the pump (think of a big siphon).
Note that this is only for the "aircond" part. Not sure about the potential for exctracting useful amounts of mechanical power, though.
Thomas-
(though I personally beleive that placating evil is to become evil yourself)
You are a victim of a delusion that seems to be endemic in the US.
"There are Bad Guys [tm] out there (ok). We want to fight the Bad Guys (still ok). Therefore we must impose sanctions on their countries that only harm ordinary people and help the Bad Guys keep control of their populations (wtf ?). Oh, and if you disagree with us you're a Bad Guy too (double-wtf ?)"
These guys are evil. Therefore I must smite them. I don't care about the consequences of my actions in the real world. I don't care if what I do will actually strengthen my opponents (see also Islamic fundamentalism, paragraph "How to fight terrorism by invading a moslem country that is not involved in terrorism in order to turn it into a terrorist heaven and give a propaganda boost to said terrorists by helping them recruit more volunteers than they ever dreamed of").
I smite the bad guys and everything will be alright. Like in the movies, you see.
Any resemblance with the case of a recently deposed Arab dictator might not be entirely fortuitous. Except that the Arab dictator in question did receive significant financial and technical support from the West (US included) for quite a while at the beginning of his Evil Overlord carreer.
Oh, and with the added difference that, whatever you think of Castro, when it comes to comparing sheer number of victims, he probably lags two or three orders of magnitude behind the forementioned Arab dictator.
Not that Europe would necessarily do any better if they were The Hyperpower [(c) Hubert Vedrine], but still, that's a bit annoying.
Thomas-
perhaps the government and corporate organizations of America shouldn't have that much access to our private lives.
I understand what you mean, but please note that none of the situations you mentioned had anything to do with private life.
1- Credit card. To use a credit card you are using the CC company's network. They let you use their property, but it's still theirs to use as they please within the terms of the contract.
2- CCTV in a shop. A shop is the property of the shop's owner (well quite often it is rented, but you get the idea). When you enter a shop you are not in public space, you are in a private space that happens to belong to someone else. They let you enter their property, but they have the right to set reasonable conditions for it. Filming people who enter your property does not seem exceedingly unreasonable to me.
Thomas-
I don't know if this patent is evil, but if sure as hell deserves a +5 informative.
It contains an awful lot of information about genetic analysis and allele identification, including references of seminal articles about such techniques as PCR and such.
Link
And if it is true that this guy was first to figure out that 1) there is order in non-coding DNA and 2) this order can be used to gain access to coding DNA, then I don't see what's wrong with this patent in itself.
Thomas -
That's a problem for KDE, but does Apple not have the right to do what they want with their patches
Of course they bloody do. That's called a fork ! And freedom to fork is the most important aspect of OSS - in fact enforcing and maintaining this freedom to fork is the central aim of the GPL.
Apple quite simply forked Safari. This happens all the time in the OSS world. Hello, does anyone really expect that X.org patches will remain 100% compatible with the XFree86 code structure ad aeternam ?
Could someone please tell me what exactly the problem is in the Apple-Safari case ?
Thomas-
There is a simple criterion that separates trivial self-replication (as in crystals that grow and break, then grow again, etc.) from interesting self-replication (as in living beings). This criterion was introduced by Von Neumann more than 50 years ago. An interesting self-replicating system is one that has the possibility to evolve, and to reach arbitrary levels of complexity.
See Barry McMullin's paper or Tim Taylor's thesis.
The simple way to do that is to have a "plan" (the genome) that can be read by a "constructor" (the rest of the machine) which follows the plan for building a copy of itself, including the plan. Modifications in the plan lead to modifications in the result. That sounds obvious to us, but Von Neumann wrote about those things more than a decade before the structure of DNA was elucidated.
It also means that the constructor must be, or contain, a Turing machine - a universal computer, making it able to construct anything that can be mechanically constructed out of a program. In living beings, the Turing machine is the result of the complex interactions between proteins that regulate each other's transcriptions and activity. Again, this is obvious to us, but only because Monod and Jacob discovered it in the 70s.
That's why Von Neumann had to invent a very complex structure in a very complex cellular automaton to obtain a really "self-replicating" system (in the interesting sense). That's also why Chris Langton's self-replicating loops are not really "interestingly" self-replicating. And that's why the structures in TFA are even less interestingly self-replicating. Hell, they have to rely on ready-made modules ! They are not even on the same level as simple self-replicating patterns in the Game of Life, wince in the Game of Life new "modules" are constantly created.
The defining factor of life is not self-replication on the global scale. It is the fact that this self-replication occurs by constant self-building. Living systems can build themselves, not out of ready-made modules (babies aren't built by patching together bits of arms, legs, brains, etc) but by breaking down external materials, extracting energy from their environment, then using it to build themselves, in apparent complete contempt the 2nd law of thermodynamics (the key word here is apparent - every single reaction in living beings is completely compatible with the laws of physics, otherwise it wouldn't take place - duh!). Even though the resulting compounds are thermodynamically very unfavorable, they persist because they are constantly replenished by the set of chemical reactions known as "life", which can essentially be defined as autocatalysis resulting in structures with a capacity for evolution.
Hod Lipson is a really great researcher. His work on developmental systems for evolutionary design of structure is so cool it hurts. But I think he and his guys might want to tone down the comparisons with biological self-replication. Right now the structures they have are not even on the same level as the simple patterns that you can see in the Game of Life !
it'll import, but editing and saving in a non-MS format will have problems. Expect MS to treat it like ANSI text.
If government impose open formats, they'll use them extensively.
If they use them extensively, they'll want to make complex documents with them.
If MS-Office can't make complex document in the mandatory format, AND if there is an alternative, they'll get ditched.
Thomas-
Which you have to ask, why not just use emule/edonkey network?
Hell, why not use a Gnutella2, as Shareazaa does ?
Gnutella2 is a smaller network but is still pretty large, and it has the advantage of much shorter queues. Edonkey is cool for very large files which you don't mind waiting for, or for rare files. Gnutella2 is ideal for smaller files which you want to download quickly.
The more these guys work on decentralising BT, the closer you get to just being a less efficient and less established clone of emule. Whats the point?
Swarm management in Bittorrent is much more advanced than in edonkey/gnutella clients. The latter do have "swarming" possibilities in that you can download from multiple sources, but seem to have only primitive "retribution" system, etc.
If someone could set an Edonkey/Gnutella-like system and incorporate Bittorrent's efficient swarm management in it, that would make a killing p2p network. The question is: why do these people insist on developing their own isolated software instead of using established protocols and systems ? Just merge Bittorrent and gnutella/edonkey and be done with it.
Thomas-
surely at some point you'd find Pi is a repeating number.
You post is vague, so I assume you mean "there is a N such that the sequence of digits N+1 to 2*N+1 of Pi is identical to the sequence of digits 1 to N of Pi."
If Pi is normal (actually you probably don't need full normality) this is true.
A truly random number would never repeat a sequence no matter how many digits were in the sequence.
A truly random number will MOST DEFINITELY repeat itself, at least in the way described above.
If the digits are truly random then at any N, there is a non-zero probability that the N next digits will be the same as the N previous ones. This probability decreases very fast as N grows, but it is never 0. Since the probability is not 0, if you wait long enough, it is quite simply bound to happen at some point. Doh !
I sincerely hope that you don't understand "repeating" number as "periodical" number. I know US schools suck at teaching maths, but hopefully not that hard !
Thomas-
I know nothing! I just click all the links on a slashdot page and hope for the best!
How do you deal with the permanent impression of the Goatse guy on your retina ?...
Thomas -
Just seed a copy of "One night in Dvorak" on major P2P networks, and P2P instantly becomes the second cause of mortality in the English-speaking world right behind suicide by monitor ingestion...
Thomas-
You are trying to make an informative comment based on facts instead of rumours. Furthermore, it appears that you actually understand what you are talking about, which hints at the possibility that you might have exerted cognitive activity before posting your comment. Such a behaviour can simply not be tolerated. Your Slashdot account will be terminated within the next 24 hours. Please make your way to the nearest exit. Thank you.
Thomas-
To put it bluntly, what has allowed us to become what we are today has much more to do with hygene. Just look at third world countries, their hygene level and child mortality.
Yeah. And that's why they have much slower population growth than Western countries. Oh wait...
Man, I think you are severely confused about evolution as well. Evolution is based on differential gene propagation. It has nothing to do with our well-being. Poorer countries have much faster population growth than richer countries. Therefore, in terms of evolution, right now, third world countries are the winners. We are the losers. In the current environment, poverty is a selective advantage.
Anyway, this is completely irrelevant. Poverty and modern hygiene are not genetic traits ! For a long period of time Asian nations had a much higher level of hygiene than the West. Besides, third world countries have a low level of hygiene, yet even that is significantly better than what people had in prehistoric times; in other words, over evolutionary timescales, modern Western hygiene is quite simply insignificant.
it isn't military power which is gonna bring peace to the world: it's people all over the world having a comfortable standard of living which is gonna do that.
It will certainly help. On the other hand, Bin Laden came from one of the richest families in Saudi Arabia, and almost all of the 9/11 terrorists were upper-class, western-educated professionals. Radovan Karadzic, mastermind of the Bosnian Serbs during the war in Yougaslavia, is a poet. Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouges were western-educated intellectuals.
Modern Europe is a demonstration that development and integration can prevent "traditional" wars; but against fanaticism, keeping a big stick under your bed is still your best protection.
Thomas-
It depends on what "accessible" means. I think these guys misunderstood the motivation behind Google's effort. Google is here to organise information - not to provide it: Google Print is only there to allow you to find books that match your searches, not to read them.
Try just about any book search on Google, even about old ones. Try Austen's Sense and Sensibility. Try Hobbes' Leviathan. Whatever. Google Print will point you to a modern, copyrighted edition of the book. You will only be able to browse a few pages.
Contrast with the Gallica project at the Bibliotheque Nationale de France: thousands of digitised books, freely accessible from beginning to end, most in scanned image format, but many in full ASCII text. And Gallica is much older than Google Print (in Internet time it's about one or two generations older), though not as old as the Gutenberg project.
Judging from his language, the French dude seems to think that Google Print is a scaled-up, English-language Gallica. It isn't. But if European libraries get their act together and start a project to make literally millions of books freely accessible for all in all European languages, hey, I'm all for it !
Thomas-
No, of course not. Mainstream news outlets reserve those kinds of comments for companies that will never advertise with them.
And for the BBC, that's a lot of companies....
Thomas-
And Iran would be pacifist if we never got involved in their history. They had a moderate government with some elements of capitalism. But then the USA decided to help Hussien, we sold him all the arms he needed to attack Iran for over a decade. And we let the Shah get expelled, for a very rigid Kohmeni.
I think you are a bit confused about the particulars, though your general point is correct.
Act I: Iran has a popular, secular, western-educated leader, Mohammed Mossadegh. Unfortunately this leader happens to brush American and British governments the wrong way, to the point of actually nationalising local oil companies (shock ! horror !)
Obviously our luminaries of freedom and democracy can not tolerate such an attack on western businessmen's rights. So they organise a coup to get rid of Mossadegh and put the Shah into power, leading to a few years of a rather brutal dictatorship. That's Act II.
Act III: At some point the Iranians got really pissed about it and started a revolution. This revolution was driven by two main forces: socialist intellectuals and islamic fundamentalists. As soon as the Shah was overthrown, the islamists simply eliminated the socialists and used their fanaticised support base to crush upon any kind of dissent.
Just a bit later, Saddam launched a war against Iran for seemingly no reason - but with thorough US and western backing, at least in the beginning (hey, he's against the Mollahs, so he's a good guy, right ?). One million dead. Only when reports of atrocities emerged (gasing of Kurdish populations) did the west begin to reconsider their support for Saddam.
Iranians hate the US, period. But this deep resentment against America was not instillated by their government - only exploited as a way to strengthen their power (since the Iranian government is the most outspoken opponent of the US on the world stage, anyone who dissents with the Iranian government can conveniently be called an agent of the US). Iranians have good reasons to dislike the US. By removing a moderate, popular government from office out of short-term considerations, they opened the way for a much more brutal, oppressive and dangerous regime in the end.
You'd think they'd learn.
Thomas
I am appalled by atheists exploiting success of science (which neither presumes nor denies existence of God, so far, at least)
Science does not and cannot disprove God (i.e. the idea of a supernatural Creator): such a concept is beyond science altogether. It is not possible to prove or disprove the fact that the world was initially created by a sentient being.
However science, or even plain common sense, puts a lot of strain on religions, that is, particular teachings based on sacred revelations.
Religion consists in switching off your brain and believing the unbelievable. Not only that, but believing in one particular set of unbelievable things, to the exclusion of any other. Hint: What is the difference between a religion and a cult, except for size and political impact ?
I would even go as far as to say that such coattailing is more cowardly act than oppressing minority beliefs under the authority of a powerful Church
Show me a preacher burnt at the stake (as in real fire and real charred flesh, not metaphorically) by a council of scientists and I'll agree with you.
Thomas-
Crackpot alert !
It's highly likely that Jesus had a wife. There's strong evidence to show that Jesus had Rabbii training, and strong evidence that his wife was Mary Magdelene, aka Mary of Bethany (yes, the one and same person). During that era, it was extremely unusual for a jewish male to not be married, and a Rabbii had to be married. It was basically a 'law'.
Voodoo theology. See the wikipedia article for a level-headed description of the matter.
The Roman Catholic church has long sought to hide the line of Jesus, spread by Mary Magdelene when she moved to the area of Marseilles.
Actually, in the area of Arles, in a locality which is now known as the Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer (I should know, I'm from there). Together with Martha, Mary of Bethany, Salome, and Lazarus, among others. Then Lazarus went on to become bishop of Marseilles, Martha went to kill a monster that wreaked havoc in Tarascon, and Magdalene ended her life in the Sainte-Baume moutains.
This happens to be one of the many popular legends that flourished in medieval folk christianism. One of the early bishops of Marseilles was actually called Lazarus, but there is no relation with the resurrected one. Similar stuff occured all over Europe, e.g. Saint-Denis, patron saint of France, has been wrongly identified with Denys the Areopagite. In my own city, Arles, the legendary first bishop Trophimus has been identified with the homonymous disciple of Paul mentioned in the New Testament.
While many such confusions may have arisen out of sincere self-delusion, one should keep in mind that holy relics (which attracted pilgrims in droves) were extremely important at the time, both in terms of prestige and of plain commercial interest. Exposing the relic of a Father of the Church was much more profitable, in any sense, than some obscure 3rd century bishop.
The deal with Clovis was renegged less than 100 years after his death, removing the line of the Menengoverians by the assassination of Dagobert II.
You are an ignorant ass. The Merovingians faded into irrelevance out of sheer incompetence. They were replaced by the descendents of Charles Martel (then a kind of "prime minister", in charge of the actual work of running the empire), not by cunning or assassination, but simply because the guy saved the country and the rest of Europe from Arab domination - which brings us to your next point...
Add to the fact that the Roman Catholic church is highly intolerant of other religions - the murder and war against the Saracens in the 11th century
Look, man, I have no particular sympathy for Catholicism, but you should remember that the relationship between Christian Europe and the Moslem world has been one of constant invasions and counter-invasions - and the Saracens called the first shots in the 7th-8th centuries, until they got their arses kicked big time by Charles Martel, and were driven out by his successors, the Carolingians - eponymous to Martel's grandson, a certain Charlemagne.
When you add up aggressions and atrocities from both sides, all you can say is that there's no winner - only a few million losers.
Thomas-