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This may be nitpicking but i noticed the license says "world-wide".. well umm what about usage on space probes etc?
I believe that as long as that space probe is owned and operated by some entity on Earth, that entity is the licensee and the license will be interpreted in the jurisdiction of said entity. It doesn't matter whether the code sits in a computer on the ground, on a ship at sea, in an airplane, in Earth orbit, in interplanetary space, or in interstellar space (though you may want to study any export regulations applied by your government before you put that probe within reach of an alien civilization).
You may have a point when our Martian colony decides to cut ties with Earth and declare independency; will they still be part of the "world" then?
Extending the license to deal also with alien licensees will be a task for the license steward when creating a new version of the CDDL. At the same time, we may also consider non-human intelligence here on Earth, before those monkeys trade their typewriters for P2P technology and begin distributing binaries without regard for any open source license at all.
That's an interesting find, but it doesn't invalidate the argument that most egg cells have already been created when the female mammal is born, and thus the average cell division rate would still be close to 20 divisions per generation (don't take that exact number for granted; I just seem to remember it off the top of my head). Even if a 45-year old woman produces an egg cell that is twice as many cell divisions removed from her own conception (say, 40) than the egg cells produced during her teenage years, she is far behind a rat which is reproductive already before one year of age.
Interestingly, this constant "20" appears to put an upper limit to the theoretical number of offspring a single mammal could produce, namely around a million if no cells are wasted on non-reproductive organs...:-)
A mutation which starts in the brain but doesn't make its way to the reproductive organs prior to procreation doesn't get passed on to any future generation.
Of course, but this doesn't affect the mutation rate, and thus won't explain the differing mutation rates between rats and humans. A mutation in a rat's brain cell is no more likely to make it to the reproductive organs than a mutation in a human brain cell, in spite of the rat being a lot smaller (it supposedly has fewer of all kinds of cells, not smaller cells).
Instead, the number of mutations passed on to future generations relates to the number of times the DNA helix is split and copied between two successive conceptions, ignoring what happens in non-reproductive organs of the body. As others have explained, that number appears to be constant with mammals, resulting in faster mutation rates for species with shorter generation spans, although this theory is probably not cast in stone yet.
The percentage that doesn't matter is the similarity between human and chimp DNA, not the accuracy with which the artificial sequence was reconstructed after simulated mutations. While it's true that there is little if any correlation between DNA sequence similarity and similarity of the resultant physiologies, the simulation was only concerned with the DNA sequences themselves, not their manifestations as living creatures.
For all we know, the initial DNA sequence used for the simulation may have been entirely random, not related to the DNA of any organism alive today or in the past. The purpose of the experiment was to determine whether the reverse-engineering algorithm would be able to "undo" the simulated mutations, which it managed to do with 98% accuracy. This is a strictly quantitative measure, unrelated to the biochemical results of placing those DNA sequences in live cells.
One thing I doubt the simulated evolution can have taken into account is natural selection due to lethal mutations. Well, the simulation may have considered some percentage of mutations lethal and dropped them, but it may hardly have been able to predict which parts of the artificial DNA sequence would kill the embryo if they were mutated. Thus the resulting sequences were obviously even more artificial than the sequence they started with, but I doubt this mattered to the reverse-engineering algorithm. The scientists are merely comparing blueprints with each other, not the houses built from said blueprints. If you are interested in blueprint evolution, it doesn't matter what the houses look like or how similar they are to each other (assuming those blueprints are based on other blueprints only, not on actual houses previously built).
This shows that the entertainment industry will stop at nothing trying to increase their profit. When then can't get legislators to extend copyright to 900 years past the death of the author, they want scientists the extend the life of authors by 900 years instead. Assuming most authors will have forgotten that they even wrote something more than 500 years ago, their publishers can expect to collect the royalties for themselves.
I thought he meant to disconnect America from the Internet in order to protect America from the rest of the world (possibly allowing only "secure" American establishments to have any kind of Internet presence, say on offshore websites), not disconnect the rest of the world. In some way, that idea makes sense, only problem is that it won't ever be tried.
When you have insecure nuclear facilities as well as curious kids on the same internet, clearly either of those have got to go. Which option involves cutting the lowest number of wires?
Can I obtain a copy of (or a reference to) that target list Lycos is using, so that I can examine it myself and decide what I should do about those targets? It's not that I think Lycos is wrong about them, but I want to get my brain involved in the process rather than merely lend Lycos my hardware and name.
If Lycos wants me to kill someone, they should provide me with the guy's name and photo and let me do the job, not blindfold me and ask me to pull the trigger while they take care of aiming my gun for me. The same if the guy should be allowed to escape after a slight beating. If they want my assistance with any of this, I want to take part in the thinking, not just follow their instructions.
Has Lycos released the source code for this screensaver? If not, why?
I believe the answer is in line with your explanation, but I still can't really visualize the process well enough to understand it. If the female rat is one year old and the human woman is 30, how come their respective egg cells are both 20 "cell generations" younger than those of their mothers?
While the entire rat population will experience a higher number of cell divisions (and thus a proportionally higher number of mutations) per unit time due to its size, those mutations will normally end up in different lineages rather than accumulate in the same lineage, and thus not contribute to a higher number of mutations in the same individual...
Ah! I think I get it now. Sykes was discussing mtDNA evolution, where lineages split, but never merge (as mitochondrial DNA is inherited along the maternal line only). This is of course different from nucleic DNA, which is combined from the DNA of two parents, thereby allowing mutations from both to merge in the same individual. The mutation rate is the same, but mtDNA mutations are more easily lost due to some mothers having sons only, no daughters. While any single nucleic mutation from either parent runs a 50% risk of being eliminated in a child, this is made up for by one couple having more than two children, whether male or female. This effect is way more noticeable with rats and their explosive reproduction.
It's late here, but I hope I didn't mess that reasoning up completely and there is still a grain of truth to it...:-)
I agree that the way this is expressed in the article leads to your interpretation:
To assess their method, they created a hypothetical portion of ancestral mammalian DNA and let a computer model simulate the process of evolution, to generate sequences for its descendants.
Then they made their algorithm work backward from these descendants, to see if it could recreate the original ancestor.
However, I seriously doubt they actually reversed the simulation algoritm. Reading the entire article, it sounds more as if the algorithms for reverse engineering DNA have been under development for a long time, and that they wrote a separate simulation program to produce test data for evaluation of the newest version of the algorithm.
A geneticist isn't necessarily a good computer scientist, and mistakes do happen in science, but somehow I doubt a mistake like that would slip by reviewers unnoticed. Maybe the algorithms are described in more detail in the associated papers (linked from the article).
I don't see your point. If the screensaver targets spammer IPs, and my network connections are to those IPs this can only mean one of two things:
1. The screensaver does what it is supposed to do
2. It's all a great spammer conspiracy and Lycos is sending all the info it can gather from my PC to the spammers
In this context, yes I trust Lycos.
You assume that the screensaver is either perfect or a conspiracy, then pick the most likely of those two extremes. In reality, any computer software is likely to have both positive and negative sides, and it's up to you (the user) to decide whether it serves your needs. If you are satisfied with the screensaver blasting every target to smithereens, then of course it doesn't matter whether the throttling mechanism works at all, and I will not bother you with further advice. I'm more likely to blacklist your IP address as a precaution, just in case my web server ends up among your targets.
I'm dropping some of the arguments from this discussion simply because they lead us nowhere. No offense meant.
If everybody does what I'm doing then the operating costs of spammers will skyrocket.
That presumes you know what you are doing, but you appearantly concluded that the screensaver works ok simply because it 1) generates network traffic, and 2) is not a spammer conspiracy. That happens to be true for Internet Explorer as well, but I doubt you use MSIE with just as much enthusiasm, so I guess your performance evaluation criteria are more refined than you explain above...
And, yes, you can argue that in such a scenario Lycos will have great power but also a HUGE responsibility. Whether they use their power fairly is something to be seen.
They can only achieve that power if given to them by their users. That's my primary reason for staying away from them; not that what they are doing is wrong, but that they are seeking more power than I consider appropriate for a single corporation. Even if they don't abuse that power themselves, simply having it puts everybody else at an unfair disadvantage. They would become like a second government, benign or not.
But it's as much a good start as any. Perhaps Lycos' efforts will shake the active Internet community into developing more "active" spam fighting applications the exact same way that Napster triggered the P2P revolution.
Either that, or it will trigger a new wave of censorship against supporters of "vigilante" software solutions. We can see that happening right now, with some backbone providers blocking access to the screensaver download site. The problem is not that you can't find the screensaver (you obviously can anyway); the problem is that such censorship becomes more likely to be tolerated by Internet users in general. As much as I dislike your software, I want to defend your freedom to distribute it.
It's about time each of us individually and collectively do something about spam.
Me: "You are all individuals!" Users of the Lycos screensaver, in unison:"YES. WE ARE ALL INDIVIDUALS."
(I hope you have seen the movie)
Sure, we are in agreement here. It's just that I don't see this screensaver idea as much of an improvement over the past when it comes to the aspect of individuality. I suppose there are no knobs for you to tune your screensaver, but you either run it, or you don't run it, right? It's an all-or-nothing choice.
Perhaps I'm spoiled, but I'm used to the notion of every user defining his or her own terms when it comes to what activities to engage in, what blacklists to use, and so on. I have recently switched to a new e-mail provider (because my old one went down the drain in terms of customer support and technical competence), and I hope to have him implement per-dom
They released the screensaver with a fixed list of sites?
No matter whether they did that or something else, releasing the screensaver without telling exactly how it obtains its list of targets is the big mistake here. I have heard various theories, one saying that they use a SpamCop blacklist, another that the list is compiled by Lycos staff, and now I'm not inclined to believe either until I see the source code myself.
Trying to guess how someone else's undocumented software works is a waste of time, unless it's attacking you and you want to neutralize it. If you want it to work, you'd better design it from scratch yourself.
I would compare it to analyzing languages spoken today to determine how the language they descend from (such as proto-indoeuropean) may once have sounded. While many indoeuropean languages are mutually unintelligible today, they share certain fundamental elements that are best explained by them having been present from the start. It's not an exact science, of course.
And by the way, as the article said, we're quite a bit behind the rodents in losing bases...
The article explained the difference in mutation rates by referring to the shorter reproduction rates of rodents. However, as I understand the process of transferring DNA from one generation to the next, mutations may occur whenever a cell splits in two, not only when the animal reproduces. I seem to recall from Sykes' book The Seven Daughters of Eve that the average number of successive cell divisions in the reproductive organs from one human generation to the next is around 20 (or perhaps less). Do the corresponding cells in rodents really divide more often than in humans, just because they reproduce faster?
Since the accuracy with which the artificial genome was recreated in the simulation isn't compared with that of other methods for doing the same thing, the 98% figure doesn't tell us much. For all I know, that could be the accuracy you would get using any method (but I suppose the scientists actually have more simulation data than was presented in the article).
Likewise, comparing that number to the degree of genome similarity between humans and chimps isn't very meaningful either. Since the article doesn't mention chimpanzees but rather rats and pigs, I suppose the research is focused on longer periods of evolution than the few million years that have passed since the split between humans and chimps.
By the way, is the 98% difference in relation to all human DNA, or merely to the part of the genome that is identical among all humans? I don't know how much of a difference that makes, but I believe there is a difference.
I don't know how well understood the lineage from dinosaurs to modern birds are, but I suspect you would need the genomes from a few species that are not descended from dinosaurs (say, mammals) as well, for interpolation rather than extrapolation of the dinosaur genome.
Even if we could recreate dinosaur DNA in this way, I doubt we have the technology to turn that DNA into a live animal, or even do a computer simulation of that process. Is anybody working on an open-source biochemical simulator?
So now we have Google restricting what we can do with old Usenet posts... didn't they buy up all the archives for this stuff a while back? This would appear to give them some amount of power, but also (they should realize) responsibility as stewards of the past. This is not something that they are simply indexing on someone else's website, it's data that they actually own. But in this case it's not really their data at all - it's the community's.
I obtained access to Usenet around 1984, and participated in various groups until the early 1990's, when it simply became too much. For a long time I didn't care a lot about Usenet, but I was excited when Google presented their 20-year archive and I could read my own postings of the past (one of them had even made it to Google's 20-year Usenet timeline, May 1986).
While Google may legally own the digital collection as such, the copyright to individual postings remain with their authors (unless otherwise noted). Therefore, Google isn't free to do as they please with the collection, and they know it. Individual authors who object to Google archiving their postings can request them to be removed, if they can demonstrate that they are the real authors (or acting on their behalf).
I don't mind seeing my postings reproduced in verbatim, even as all the e-mail addresses I have ever had on Usenet have been rendered useless by spammers (I have disabled the addresses one by one, the last one as late as this past summer). Google's attempt at masking those addresses now strikes me as utterly futile. Do they believe that the spammers will trash their old address collections and replace them with a set of fresh, useless addresses instead? One thing I do mind is people "editing" what I have written before reproducing it, without telling the difference between the original and their edition.
If Google won't remove the address masking "feature" (or at least make it optional), maybe I should request removal of all my postings from the Google archive, after I have obtained copies for submitting to some other archive, to have them reproduced without pointless mutilation. I intentionally refrained from masking my own address when I wrote those articles, and I don't want Google to do it for me 10-20 years later. My e-mail address is part of my identity, similar to a residential address; removing or masking it is almost like removing my name from my copyright notice if I ever wrote one.
Are there others who feel like I do, and would like to participate in a joint action, to let Google know what we think of their "improvements"?
It's fairly easy to check the requests the screensaver generates. Grant you, I am in the minority, but I really wonder what the purpose of the above-said is...
Yes, you can watch the screensaver in action when you run it yourself, but that doesn't tell you how it works, does it? Watching network packets fly is not very useful in terms of understanding why they do it, learning what factors influence the behaviour of that software, and predicting what the long-term effect of millions of users around the Internet running the same screensaver will be. You need at least the source code to do that, and I doubt that is sufficient.
It's relatively easy to evaluate a word processor: If it accepts your keyboard input and turns it into nice-looking printouts, then it's probably ok to run. There is little point in analyzing the file formats used or the traffic generated by the word processor on your office LAN unless you encounter a serious problem with it, as doing so will tell you nothing about its printouts. Normally, it's the end result that counts.
With the Lycos screensaver, you can't even see (and much less evaluate) the end results, but rather the network traffic only, and what does it tell you? Essentially nothing. You can analyze a bulk mailer package in the same way, and the network analyzer won't tell you that the package is used for spamming, because all the packets look fine.
As for the purpose of my previous post, I asked you on what basis you trust Lycos to the point of letting them generate network traffic with your name on it. I'm not saying it's necessarily wrong, but I wonder how you manage to tell Lycos apart from some spammer who wants to send out unsolicited advertising with your name on it. Is it because Lycos is a familiar name to you, or is it because Lycos says "This is not spam"?
If I have the time and knowledge to look for the screensaver and download it, don't you believe that I will eventually hear and read about the dozens of more informed users who will (eventually) discover that this piece of software actually does more/other than what it's supposed to do?
More informed users have discovered time and again that Microsoft Windows actually does more or other than what it's supposed to do. The response from the user community? It's not a major shift to a different operating system vendor; it's more like "I'll install that security patch when it doesn't interfere with the software my business depends on!"
And, given that the Lycos screensaver aims at the long-term goal of making spam improfitable, the long-term side effects of its global deployment are the only side effects that really count. The goal of Microsoft Windows is to keep your computer running until the next reboot; if it has any long-term goal it is to make money for Microsoft.
If your reservations are of a purely legal nature then I would really enjoy seeing my home country extradite me to China because I have "gently harassed the landlord of a known burglar".
No, my reservations aren't legal, but primarily ethical. Responsibility and accountability are ethical as well as legal concepts. I'm not satisfied with doing what appears to work well for me at this very moment; I want to do what will work for everybody for eternity (ideally, at least). Specifically, the issue is not "will my action alone matter to anybody else", but rather "what if everybody do as I do, will the result be good".
No matter whether someone tries to extradite you from your country; you be the judge deciding whether you will find refuge within your own conscience.
I would certainly prefer using your open-source software!
Without analyzing it? Why? Because open source software is inherently incapable of producing undesirable results?
Since when did self-defense became either unethical or illegal?
Self-defense is neither unethical or illegal merely for being self-defense. In some cases, an act that is otherwise unethical or illegal may be considered both ethical and legal if performed in self-defense, but that's the exception to the general rule. Every act does not become legal merely for being self-defense.
These "entities" attack my mailboxes and my mailservers on a day-to-day basis.
They sure do, and my mailboxes suffer as well.
Now that there's a simple way to fight back, I have suddenly mutated from victim to villain?
There have always been ways to fight back. I don't think you have mutated into anything, but if you have, it's not because Lycos has invented the concept of retaliation.
If someone breaks into your home won't you use any means necesary to delay or stop this intrusion?
That's self-defense, analogous to rejecting inbound junk mail by means of blacklists, tarpitting, what have you. Your screensaver from Lycos doesn't prevent any junk mail from polluting your mail server, but instead takes part in collective retaliation against spammers in general. Retaliation is not self-defense, except on the macroscopic level. To use your analogy, Lycos is organizing a mob of angry villagers to gently harrass the landlords of known burglars.
If I sound the alarm and start shouting and hitting him, am I "disrupting the peace" and "attempting to cause bodily harm"???
You are trying to justify the act of retaliation by describing it as self-defense, which it is not. I'm not saying that retaliation is wrong (I engage in it myself at times), only that your justification for it doesn't hold.
The problem with the Lycos approach, as I see it, is that it's unclear who is responsible for the retaliation here. Are you acting as an informed individual, taking appropriate measures against someone you feel threatened by, or are you merely supporting Lycos financially by lending them your hardware to use as they see fit? Note that Lycos telling you they will only use your support for things you like doesn't mean a lot; they could be lying or they may simply be incompetent. Do you have any way of verifying that their screensaver does exactly what you expect from it, and do you assume full responsibility for its actions?
I asked the programmer behind the screensaver about this, and his argument was that the vast majority of Internet users don't have a clue as to how to fight back in a proper way, which is why they have written software for it. The purpose of the software is thus not to automate a task the user would otherwise be doing manually, but to automate a task the average user doesn't even understand. Those users cannot be regarded as "informed" about what activities they lend their resources to, just as they generally don't have a clue what the operating system they run is up to.
If you happen to know exactly what you are doing, you belong to a minority, and your action alone won't make much of a difference anyway. Put yourself in the position of the average user, and ask yourself the question: Am I willing to trust Lycos to do the right thing, without myself understanding the consequences of my support for this? If you don't trust them, you shouldn't be running their software. If you do trust them, I wonder what basis you have for that trust. It's not that what they are doing may be illegal, it's that you seem willing to take legal advice from them and let them dictate your actions.
I'd be happy to design my own retaliatory software and use it with the same blacklists and other information available to Lycos, simply to know what my computer is doing and assume responsibil
A screenshot (or why not a plain copy) of the HTML source code, including any Javascript code present, would have been more enlightening. Can you read Javascript? If not, how can you trust your computer to know what it's talking about?
When you encounter weird things happening with your web browser and you want to analyze it, the first thing to do is to disable various features such as Javascript, ActiveX, even inline images if you are really paranoid, then view the HTML source to see what is really happening here. Personally, I have disabled Javascript by default, enabling it (with prompting) only for sites in my "secure" zone. It means I sometimes have to press a "Yes" button to confirm that I want some code to be executed, but I least I have a fairly good idea of what my browser is doing. If the web page uses frames, I sometimes cut and paste the URLs of individual subframes to avoid loading several frames simultaneously.
A hoax is just one way of implementing a DDoS attack. You spread a rumour, and get thousands of people to distribute that rumour, eventually causing end users to hit back against the victim of the hoax (in this case Lycos). Seems they succeeded, and Slashdot readers took part in it.
Wheteher it actually was a hoax, or Lycos is merely claiming it to avoid giving a more complicated answer, we may never know.
This looks like news forgery to me. Is there any indication of a security breach at Lycos? All we seem to have is "an anonymous reader" telling Slashdot that the screensaver was compromised, and at least one blog repeating what has been said on Slashdot. Maybe this is just another PR stunt by Lycos, or a spammer trolling Slashdot?
With Lycos relying on Javascript to get their message out, I sure won't waste my time trying to decipher it. If they can tell me where the spammer websites are, I'll be happy to evaluate their opinion and take appropriate action against those sites myself, after careful consideration. Lend Lycos my hardware and IP address, so that they can mastermind a DDoS attack disguised as me? Certainly not.
Relocate the server to some small island in international waters or some country that doesn't give a Flying...ya know... about U.S. laws
(I'm intentionally cutting that quote short)
While your suggestion may indeed be meaningful with respect to "some small island in international waters", relocating your server to a country that doesn't pay attention to United States laws (there are several of those) isn't going to help you a bit. This legal case isn't about challenging overbroad U.S. legislation (for whatever definition of "overbroad"), this is about challenging the constitutionality of recent changes to U.S. copyright law, changes that came about as a result of the United States acceeding to an international treaty, namely the Berne Convention.
Your operation handing out copies of old works still under copyright protection will be regulated by essentially the same copyright regime in any Berne Convention country where you choose to relocate. That's a little over 100 countries, probably most of the countries where you would want to relocate. If you want to put up a fight, make sure that you are fighting the right enemy (the Berne Convention, not the United States).
As for myself, I don't consider copyright by default to be much of a problem, but that's because Sweden acceeded to the Berne Convention even before I was born, and copyright by default is the general rule in Europe. It's the United States that is the latecomer in this respect.
Even if the challenge is successful on constitutional grounds, I doubt the United States could amend its copyright legislation to your liking and still be in compliance with the Berne Convention. As Kahle suggests, you would have to discriminate against your own citizens, requiring United States authors to register their works for copyright protection, while granting it automatically to foreign authors (or authors from other Berne Convention countries, to be precise). Would you accept that?
Even with automatic copyright protection, I think it should be up to the copyright holder to sue for infringement. Unfortunately, the Swedish supreme court found in one case that infringement had occurred even without a lawsuit from the proper copyright holder.
The Earth's rotation causes a 20-kilometre bulge at the equator, making Chimborazo volcano in Ecuador the highest mountain above sea level.
Above sea level? Since the Earth's oceans form part of that 20-kilometer bulge, "sea level" isn't a constant distance from the center of the Earth either, and Mount Everest is still the highest mountain above sea level (while there is no actual sea right below either Mount Everest or Chimborazo, the shape of its hypothetical and non-spherical extension around the globe, called the geoid, can be determined mathematically).
What they mean is that Chimborazo is the place on the surface that is most distant from the Earth's center.
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I believe that as long as that space probe is owned and operated by some entity on Earth, that entity is the licensee and the license will be interpreted in the jurisdiction of said entity. It doesn't matter whether the code sits in a computer on the ground, on a ship at sea, in an airplane, in Earth orbit, in interplanetary space, or in interstellar space (though you may want to study any export regulations applied by your government before you put that probe within reach of an alien civilization).
You may have a point when our Martian colony decides to cut ties with Earth and declare independency; will they still be part of the "world" then?
Extending the license to deal also with alien licensees will be a task for the license steward when creating a new version of the CDDL. At the same time, we may also consider non-human intelligence here on Earth, before those monkeys trade their typewriters for P2P technology and begin distributing binaries without regard for any open source license at all.
That's an interesting find, but it doesn't invalidate the argument that most egg cells have already been created when the female mammal is born, and thus the average cell division rate would still be close to 20 divisions per generation (don't take that exact number for granted; I just seem to remember it off the top of my head). Even if a 45-year old woman produces an egg cell that is twice as many cell divisions removed from her own conception (say, 40) than the egg cells produced during her teenage years, she is far behind a rat which is reproductive already before one year of age.
Interestingly, this constant "20" appears to put an upper limit to the theoretical number of offspring a single mammal could produce, namely around a million if no cells are wasted on non-reproductive organs... :-)
Of course, but this doesn't affect the mutation rate, and thus won't explain the differing mutation rates between rats and humans. A mutation in a rat's brain cell is no more likely to make it to the reproductive organs than a mutation in a human brain cell, in spite of the rat being a lot smaller (it supposedly has fewer of all kinds of cells, not smaller cells).
Instead, the number of mutations passed on to future generations relates to the number of times the DNA helix is split and copied between two successive conceptions, ignoring what happens in non-reproductive organs of the body. As others have explained, that number appears to be constant with mammals, resulting in faster mutation rates for species with shorter generation spans, although this theory is probably not cast in stone yet.
The percentage that doesn't matter is the similarity between human and chimp DNA, not the accuracy with which the artificial sequence was reconstructed after simulated mutations. While it's true that there is little if any correlation between DNA sequence similarity and similarity of the resultant physiologies, the simulation was only concerned with the DNA sequences themselves, not their manifestations as living creatures.
For all we know, the initial DNA sequence used for the simulation may have been entirely random, not related to the DNA of any organism alive today or in the past. The purpose of the experiment was to determine whether the reverse-engineering algorithm would be able to "undo" the simulated mutations, which it managed to do with 98% accuracy. This is a strictly quantitative measure, unrelated to the biochemical results of placing those DNA sequences in live cells.
One thing I doubt the simulated evolution can have taken into account is natural selection due to lethal mutations. Well, the simulation may have considered some percentage of mutations lethal and dropped them, but it may hardly have been able to predict which parts of the artificial DNA sequence would kill the embryo if they were mutated. Thus the resulting sequences were obviously even more artificial than the sequence they started with, but I doubt this mattered to the reverse-engineering algorithm. The scientists are merely comparing blueprints with each other, not the houses built from said blueprints. If you are interested in blueprint evolution, it doesn't matter what the houses look like or how similar they are to each other (assuming those blueprints are based on other blueprints only, not on actual houses previously built).
Thanks, I wasn't aware of that fact (possibly forgotten, more likely never learned).
This shows that the entertainment industry will stop at nothing trying to increase their profit. When then can't get legislators to extend copyright to 900 years past the death of the author, they want scientists the extend the life of authors by 900 years instead. Assuming most authors will have forgotten that they even wrote something more than 500 years ago, their publishers can expect to collect the royalties for themselves.
For a limited time, indeed.
I thought he meant to disconnect America from the Internet in order to protect America from the rest of the world (possibly allowing only "secure" American establishments to have any kind of Internet presence, say on offshore websites), not disconnect the rest of the world. In some way, that idea makes sense, only problem is that it won't ever be tried.
When you have insecure nuclear facilities as well as curious kids on the same internet, clearly either of those have got to go. Which option involves cutting the lowest number of wires?
Can I obtain a copy of (or a reference to) that target list Lycos is using, so that I can examine it myself and decide what I should do about those targets? It's not that I think Lycos is wrong about them, but I want to get my brain involved in the process rather than merely lend Lycos my hardware and name.
If Lycos wants me to kill someone, they should provide me with the guy's name and photo and let me do the job, not blindfold me and ask me to pull the trigger while they take care of aiming my gun for me. The same if the guy should be allowed to escape after a slight beating. If they want my assistance with any of this, I want to take part in the thinking, not just follow their instructions.
Has Lycos released the source code for this screensaver? If not, why?
I believe the answer is in line with your explanation, but I still can't really visualize the process well enough to understand it. If the female rat is one year old and the human woman is 30, how come their respective egg cells are both 20 "cell generations" younger than those of their mothers?
While the entire rat population will experience a higher number of cell divisions (and thus a proportionally higher number of mutations) per unit time due to its size, those mutations will normally end up in different lineages rather than accumulate in the same lineage, and thus not contribute to a higher number of mutations in the same individual...
Ah! I think I get it now. Sykes was discussing mtDNA evolution, where lineages split, but never merge (as mitochondrial DNA is inherited along the maternal line only). This is of course different from nucleic DNA, which is combined from the DNA of two parents, thereby allowing mutations from both to merge in the same individual. The mutation rate is the same, but mtDNA mutations are more easily lost due to some mothers having sons only, no daughters. While any single nucleic mutation from either parent runs a 50% risk of being eliminated in a child, this is made up for by one couple having more than two children, whether male or female. This effect is way more noticeable with rats and their explosive reproduction.
It's late here, but I hope I didn't mess that reasoning up completely and there is still a grain of truth to it... :-)
I agree that the way this is expressed in the article leads to your interpretation:
However, I seriously doubt they actually reversed the simulation algoritm. Reading the entire article, it sounds more as if the algorithms for reverse engineering DNA have been under development for a long time, and that they wrote a separate simulation program to produce test data for evaluation of the newest version of the algorithm.
A geneticist isn't necessarily a good computer scientist, and mistakes do happen in science, but somehow I doubt a mistake like that would slip by reviewers unnoticed. Maybe the algorithms are described in more detail in the associated papers (linked from the article).
You assume that the screensaver is either perfect or a conspiracy, then pick the most likely of those two extremes. In reality, any computer software is likely to have both positive and negative sides, and it's up to you (the user) to decide whether it serves your needs. If you are satisfied with the screensaver blasting every target to smithereens, then of course it doesn't matter whether the throttling mechanism works at all, and I will not bother you with further advice. I'm more likely to blacklist your IP address as a precaution, just in case my web server ends up among your targets.
I'm dropping some of the arguments from this discussion simply because they lead us nowhere. No offense meant.
That presumes you know what you are doing, but you appearantly concluded that the screensaver works ok simply because it 1) generates network traffic, and 2) is not a spammer conspiracy. That happens to be true for Internet Explorer as well, but I doubt you use MSIE with just as much enthusiasm, so I guess your performance evaluation criteria are more refined than you explain above...
They can only achieve that power if given to them by their users. That's my primary reason for staying away from them; not that what they are doing is wrong, but that they are seeking more power than I consider appropriate for a single corporation. Even if they don't abuse that power themselves, simply having it puts everybody else at an unfair disadvantage. They would become like a second government, benign or not.
Either that, or it will trigger a new wave of censorship against supporters of "vigilante" software solutions. We can see that happening right now, with some backbone providers blocking access to the screensaver download site. The problem is not that you can't find the screensaver (you obviously can anyway); the problem is that such censorship becomes more likely to be tolerated by Internet users in general. As much as I dislike your software, I want to defend your freedom to distribute it.
Me: "You are all individuals!"
Users of the Lycos screensaver, in unison: "YES. WE ARE ALL INDIVIDUALS."
(I hope you have seen the movie)
Sure, we are in agreement here. It's just that I don't see this screensaver idea as much of an improvement over the past when it comes to the aspect of individuality. I suppose there are no knobs for you to tune your screensaver, but you either run it, or you don't run it, right? It's an all-or-nothing choice.
Perhaps I'm spoiled, but I'm used to the notion of every user defining his or her own terms when it comes to what activities to engage in, what blacklists to use, and so on. I have recently switched to a new e-mail provider (because my old one went down the drain in terms of customer support and technical competence), and I hope to have him implement per-dom
No matter whether they did that or something else, releasing the screensaver without telling exactly how it obtains its list of targets is the big mistake here. I have heard various theories, one saying that they use a SpamCop blacklist, another that the list is compiled by Lycos staff, and now I'm not inclined to believe either until I see the source code myself.
Trying to guess how someone else's undocumented software works is a waste of time, unless it's attacking you and you want to neutralize it. If you want it to work, you'd better design it from scratch yourself.
I would compare it to analyzing languages spoken today to determine how the language they descend from (such as proto-indoeuropean) may once have sounded. While many indoeuropean languages are mutually unintelligible today, they share certain fundamental elements that are best explained by them having been present from the start. It's not an exact science, of course.
The article explained the difference in mutation rates by referring to the shorter reproduction rates of rodents. However, as I understand the process of transferring DNA from one generation to the next, mutations may occur whenever a cell splits in two, not only when the animal reproduces. I seem to recall from Sykes' book The Seven Daughters of Eve that the average number of successive cell divisions in the reproductive organs from one human generation to the next is around 20 (or perhaps less). Do the corresponding cells in rodents really divide more often than in humans, just because they reproduce faster?
Since the accuracy with which the artificial genome was recreated in the simulation isn't compared with that of other methods for doing the same thing, the 98% figure doesn't tell us much. For all I know, that could be the accuracy you would get using any method (but I suppose the scientists actually have more simulation data than was presented in the article).
Likewise, comparing that number to the degree of genome similarity between humans and chimps isn't very meaningful either. Since the article doesn't mention chimpanzees but rather rats and pigs, I suppose the research is focused on longer periods of evolution than the few million years that have passed since the split between humans and chimps.
By the way, is the 98% difference in relation to all human DNA, or merely to the part of the genome that is identical among all humans? I don't know how much of a difference that makes, but I believe there is a difference.
I don't know how well understood the lineage from dinosaurs to modern birds are, but I suspect you would need the genomes from a few species that are not descended from dinosaurs (say, mammals) as well, for interpolation rather than extrapolation of the dinosaur genome.
Even if we could recreate dinosaur DNA in this way, I doubt we have the technology to turn that DNA into a live animal, or even do a computer simulation of that process. Is anybody working on an open-source biochemical simulator?
I obtained access to Usenet around 1984, and participated in various groups until the early 1990's, when it simply became too much. For a long time I didn't care a lot about Usenet, but I was excited when Google presented their 20-year archive and I could read my own postings of the past (one of them had even made it to Google's 20-year Usenet timeline, May 1986).
While Google may legally own the digital collection as such, the copyright to individual postings remain with their authors (unless otherwise noted). Therefore, Google isn't free to do as they please with the collection, and they know it. Individual authors who object to Google archiving their postings can request them to be removed, if they can demonstrate that they are the real authors (or acting on their behalf).
I don't mind seeing my postings reproduced in verbatim, even as all the e-mail addresses I have ever had on Usenet have been rendered useless by spammers (I have disabled the addresses one by one, the last one as late as this past summer). Google's attempt at masking those addresses now strikes me as utterly futile. Do they believe that the spammers will trash their old address collections and replace them with a set of fresh, useless addresses instead? One thing I do mind is people "editing" what I have written before reproducing it, without telling the difference between the original and their edition.
If Google won't remove the address masking "feature" (or at least make it optional), maybe I should request removal of all my postings from the Google archive, after I have obtained copies for submitting to some other archive, to have them reproduced without pointless mutilation. I intentionally refrained from masking my own address when I wrote those articles, and I don't want Google to do it for me 10-20 years later. My e-mail address is part of my identity, similar to a residential address; removing or masking it is almost like removing my name from my copyright notice if I ever wrote one.
Are there others who feel like I do, and would like to participate in a joint action, to let Google know what we think of their "improvements"?
Yes, you can watch the screensaver in action when you run it yourself, but that doesn't tell you how it works, does it? Watching network packets fly is not very useful in terms of understanding why they do it, learning what factors influence the behaviour of that software, and predicting what the long-term effect of millions of users around the Internet running the same screensaver will be. You need at least the source code to do that, and I doubt that is sufficient.
It's relatively easy to evaluate a word processor: If it accepts your keyboard input and turns it into nice-looking printouts, then it's probably ok to run. There is little point in analyzing the file formats used or the traffic generated by the word processor on your office LAN unless you encounter a serious problem with it, as doing so will tell you nothing about its printouts. Normally, it's the end result that counts.
With the Lycos screensaver, you can't even see (and much less evaluate) the end results, but rather the network traffic only, and what does it tell you? Essentially nothing. You can analyze a bulk mailer package in the same way, and the network analyzer won't tell you that the package is used for spamming, because all the packets look fine.
As for the purpose of my previous post, I asked you on what basis you trust Lycos to the point of letting them generate network traffic with your name on it. I'm not saying it's necessarily wrong, but I wonder how you manage to tell Lycos apart from some spammer who wants to send out unsolicited advertising with your name on it. Is it because Lycos is a familiar name to you, or is it because Lycos says "This is not spam"?
More informed users have discovered time and again that Microsoft Windows actually does more or other than what it's supposed to do. The response from the user community? It's not a major shift to a different operating system vendor; it's more like "I'll install that security patch when it doesn't interfere with the software my business depends on!"
And, given that the Lycos screensaver aims at the long-term goal of making spam improfitable, the long-term side effects of its global deployment are the only side effects that really count. The goal of Microsoft Windows is to keep your computer running until the next reboot; if it has any long-term goal it is to make money for Microsoft.
No, my reservations aren't legal, but primarily ethical. Responsibility and accountability are ethical as well as legal concepts. I'm not satisfied with doing what appears to work well for me at this very moment; I want to do what will work for everybody for eternity (ideally, at least). Specifically, the issue is not "will my action alone matter to anybody else", but rather "what if everybody do as I do, will the result be good".
No matter whether someone tries to extradite you from your country; you be the judge deciding whether you will find refuge within your own conscience.
Without analyzing it? Why? Because open source software is inherently incapable of producing undesirable results?
Self-defense is neither unethical or illegal merely for being self-defense. In some cases, an act that is otherwise unethical or illegal may be considered both ethical and legal if performed in self-defense, but that's the exception to the general rule. Every act does not become legal merely for being self-defense.
They sure do, and my mailboxes suffer as well.
There have always been ways to fight back. I don't think you have mutated into anything, but if you have, it's not because Lycos has invented the concept of retaliation.
That's self-defense, analogous to rejecting inbound junk mail by means of blacklists, tarpitting, what have you. Your screensaver from Lycos doesn't prevent any junk mail from polluting your mail server, but instead takes part in collective retaliation against spammers in general. Retaliation is not self-defense, except on the macroscopic level. To use your analogy, Lycos is organizing a mob of angry villagers to gently harrass the landlords of known burglars.
You are trying to justify the act of retaliation by describing it as self-defense, which it is not. I'm not saying that retaliation is wrong (I engage in it myself at times), only that your justification for it doesn't hold.
The problem with the Lycos approach, as I see it, is that it's unclear who is responsible for the retaliation here. Are you acting as an informed individual, taking appropriate measures against someone you feel threatened by, or are you merely supporting Lycos financially by lending them your hardware to use as they see fit? Note that Lycos telling you they will only use your support for things you like doesn't mean a lot; they could be lying or they may simply be incompetent. Do you have any way of verifying that their screensaver does exactly what you expect from it, and do you assume full responsibility for its actions?
I asked the programmer behind the screensaver about this, and his argument was that the vast majority of Internet users don't have a clue as to how to fight back in a proper way, which is why they have written software for it. The purpose of the software is thus not to automate a task the user would otherwise be doing manually, but to automate a task the average user doesn't even understand. Those users cannot be regarded as "informed" about what activities they lend their resources to, just as they generally don't have a clue what the operating system they run is up to.
If you happen to know exactly what you are doing, you belong to a minority, and your action alone won't make much of a difference anyway. Put yourself in the position of the average user, and ask yourself the question: Am I willing to trust Lycos to do the right thing, without myself understanding the consequences of my support for this? If you don't trust them, you shouldn't be running their software. If you do trust them, I wonder what basis you have for that trust. It's not that what they are doing may be illegal, it's that you seem willing to take legal advice from them and let them dictate your actions.
I'd be happy to design my own retaliatory software and use it with the same blacklists and other information available to Lycos, simply to know what my computer is doing and assume responsibil
A screenshot (or why not a plain copy) of the HTML source code, including any Javascript code present, would have been more enlightening. Can you read Javascript? If not, how can you trust your computer to know what it's talking about?
When you encounter weird things happening with your web browser and you want to analyze it, the first thing to do is to disable various features such as Javascript, ActiveX, even inline images if you are really paranoid, then view the HTML source to see what is really happening here. Personally, I have disabled Javascript by default, enabling it (with prompting) only for sites in my "secure" zone. It means I sometimes have to press a "Yes" button to confirm that I want some code to be executed, but I least I have a fairly good idea of what my browser is doing. If the web page uses frames, I sometimes cut and paste the URLs of individual subframes to avoid loading several frames simultaneously.
A hoax is just one way of implementing a DDoS attack. You spread a rumour, and get thousands of people to distribute that rumour, eventually causing end users to hit back against the victim of the hoax (in this case Lycos). Seems they succeeded, and Slashdot readers took part in it.
Wheteher it actually was a hoax, or Lycos is merely claiming it to avoid giving a more complicated answer, we may never know.
This looks like news forgery to me. Is there any indication of a security breach at Lycos? All we seem to have is "an anonymous reader" telling Slashdot that the screensaver was compromised, and at least one blog repeating what has been said on Slashdot. Maybe this is just another PR stunt by Lycos, or a spammer trolling Slashdot?
With Lycos relying on Javascript to get their message out, I sure won't waste my time trying to decipher it. If they can tell me where the spammer websites are, I'll be happy to evaluate their opinion and take appropriate action against those sites myself, after careful consideration. Lend Lycos my hardware and IP address, so that they can mastermind a DDoS attack disguised as me? Certainly not.
(I'm intentionally cutting that quote short)
While your suggestion may indeed be meaningful with respect to "some small island in international waters", relocating your server to a country that doesn't pay attention to United States laws (there are several of those) isn't going to help you a bit. This legal case isn't about challenging overbroad U.S. legislation (for whatever definition of "overbroad"), this is about challenging the constitutionality of recent changes to U.S. copyright law, changes that came about as a result of the United States acceeding to an international treaty, namely the Berne Convention.
Your operation handing out copies of old works still under copyright protection will be regulated by essentially the same copyright regime in any Berne Convention country where you choose to relocate. That's a little over 100 countries, probably most of the countries where you would want to relocate. If you want to put up a fight, make sure that you are fighting the right enemy (the Berne Convention, not the United States).
As for myself, I don't consider copyright by default to be much of a problem, but that's because Sweden acceeded to the Berne Convention even before I was born, and copyright by default is the general rule in Europe. It's the United States that is the latecomer in this respect.
Even if the challenge is successful on constitutional grounds, I doubt the United States could amend its copyright legislation to your liking and still be in compliance with the Berne Convention. As Kahle suggests, you would have to discriminate against your own citizens, requiring United States authors to register their works for copyright protection, while granting it automatically to foreign authors (or authors from other Berne Convention countries, to be precise). Would you accept that?
Even with automatic copyright protection, I think it should be up to the copyright holder to sue for infringement. Unfortunately, the Swedish supreme court found in one case that infringement had occurred even without a lawsuit from the proper copyright holder.
From the article:
Above sea level? Since the Earth's oceans form part of that 20-kilometer bulge, "sea level" isn't a constant distance from the center of the Earth either, and Mount Everest is still the highest mountain above sea level (while there is no actual sea right below either Mount Everest or Chimborazo, the shape of its hypothetical and non-spherical extension around the globe, called the geoid, can be determined mathematically).
What they mean is that Chimborazo is the place on the surface that is most distant from the Earth's center.