More to the point, even if they can the question is how much DNA they can salvage from different individual members of the species.
The problem with ressurecting a species with cloning and DNA techniques like this is not simply a case of bringing one animal back, but that you need to bring multiple animals back all from different recovered DNA sources.
The reason for this is because creating clones from a single individual will leave you with a population without any real genetic variability and so you will end up with a population that cannot really evolve to cope with disease and so forth (including those that have arisen since it's extinction). Bringing an individual clone of a species back is one thing, but bringing back a viable population is even more difficult.
This is why we would struggle even more to bring back longer extinct species like the dodo or the mammoth because we're finding it a hell of a challenge to recover the DNA of just one individual, let alone a batch of individuals with DNA that is distinct enough to create a viable population that's not basically just inbred.
Of course, that's not to put down the achievement, it's a great first step and hopefully will lead to us producing the technology to bring back entire viable breeding populations that can cope with disease and so forth. It may be that we can even introduce artificial changes to the DNA to artificially create this variability but even that would be difficult to get right to the point we're able to mimic naturally evolved variability between individuals of a species.
For what it's worth, we've actually had similar problems in the past, where we've had entire types of banana go extinct because they were all clones of each other and hence couldn't resist disease so it's not even a theoretical problem, it can and does happen- you need variability within a species to keep it viable in the long run.
More likely Google discovered this one as a result of a security audit in the light of the Chinese attacks against them.
Interestingly though, the parent may have a point, it could be that this one of the exploits the Chinese used internally at Google precisely because they have known about it so long.
It's also relevant that yes, whilst China is big, it'd be stupid to ignore India.
Sure it'd be nice to have both, but if Google spends the additional effort it spent on China in somewhere like India instead I'd wager they could increase profits in India enough to mitigate any loss from pulling out of China.
The population of India is 1.14 billion, the population of China is 1.32 billion. Sure it's a 180 million person difference which is a lot, but when you scale down to those that have internet access rather than total population and so forth the amount decreases quite a bit. This is an even more pertinent point when you take into account the greater risk of operating in China in terms of having your IP stolen, your servers hacked and so on all state sponsored.
I'd imagine Google have just done the math and realised that China wont net them that much money compared to simply just refocussing that effort elsewhere. Sure there's 1.3 billion people in China, but there's also still 5.3 billion people elsewhere.
Yeah, except no ones forcing you to play WoW, good luck opting out of warrantless wiretaps and so forth.
It's really not comparable, this is a feature in game, a game you can opt out of playing if you don't like the features. It's arguable if it's even your privacy being invaded, certainly some MMOs claim owernship of any characters and such you create, so legally it might not even be your data they're displaying. If you don't like the terms, simply don't pay them- it's the same with people who use Facebook, no one's forcing them to sign up.
Really, let's face it, most people who have a problem with this are people who play when they should be working or at school or something and are concerned their employer/parent will now be able to see this and hold it up as evidence against them in disciplinary action.
As you say, there's really little value there for a stalker. A stalker is more likely to be watching your house with binoculars to see when you leave the house and what you do at what times, rather than giving a shit about what time you got the epic weapon of lolz or whatever.
Yes, but unfortunately, for people to change their stance away from that you're frustrated about would also require those same people to accept that their own country isn't infallible. To accept that would be in complete conflict with the patriotic mindset which they are indoctrinated into in the first place.
Unfortunately, the fact that you're correct will still be lost on such people, because they are unwilling to accept something that challenges something fundamental to how they view the world.
It's no different to religious zealots and so forth that will deny the truth even when the evidence countering their view is right in front of their face.
So the bad news is, you may be sick of reading such crap, but sadly you'll continue to have to.
"Netscape gave up because their business model was completely undercut by the fact that Microsoft made IE mandatory on every computer sold."
No, that's simply the excuse Netscape gave for giving up. The real reason they gave up is because not many people used their browser because it was quite simply inferior. In fact, it was really quite shit.
"Opera survived as a niche, and Mozilla was born from Netscape's ashes, both of which are signs that Microsoft didn't succeed."
They're signs that it really didn't matter what perceived advantage Microsoft had, what mattered at the end of the day was that to begin to dethrone IE, you need something worthwhile to dethrone it with. You can't enter the market with a shit browser and expect people to switch to it when even IE is better. Mozilla realised this, they simply produced a better browser and have been chewing away at IE's marketshare ever since as a result.
Really, no one gave a shit about what Windows has installed already, if you give someone something better, for free, they'll gladly take it, but being better is absolutely key. I had plenty of opportunity to use Netscape back in the day as my main browser, I had it free on magazine CDs, my ISP would send me it on CD, I downloaded 4 when it came out, but I always ended up back with IE, not because it was already installed, as that was no big deal, I'd already installed Netscape too, I always switched back because as crap as IE was, it was still better than Netscape.
IE has the same advantage it's always had even now until the EU ballot screen comes into force, and yet Firefox has been happily chewing away at it's marketshare despite the supposed idea that IE being installed by default would prevent anyone switching. The only reason Firefox hasn't taken over faster and more marketshare is because it's historically not given much support to corporate users- for too long the tools to deploy and configure via Active Directory and so forth were 3rd party and lacklustre.
That smell I can smell is the smell of a million health and safety bureaucrats world wide shitting their pants at the idea of your comment becoming reality.
Yes, and I like the solution too- rather than contact Microsoft to find out what the fuck is going on, post it to Slashdot and get Slashdotted as well.
That's what they're suggesting, in reality, as someone who lives in England, I think what is happening is that due to the housing boom over the last 10 years or so, housing developers decided it'd be a good idea to build as many houses as possible to rake in the profits.
The problem is, England is small, and there isn't a lot of spare cheap land for building.
Enter flood plains, for some reason these builders have been allowed to build on low lying areas, flood plains and so forth, areas that are useless for most building and farming and hence cheap.
So I'd wager that a good portion of the people under threat from flooding in the UK now are those who were naive enough to not think of the problems that could arise in the area they chose to buy their house. Since the floods a couple of years ago, the British government has actually stopped some of this sillyness of building on flood plains, but there's still thousands of houses built on areas vulnerable to flooding.
Hence, it's not really that sea levels are rising enough to endanger cities right now, but that builders are stupid enough to build and people are stupid enough to buy houses in areas that always were at risk to flooding.
The ideal solution would've been to reclaim unused industrial and inner city areas, but cleaning them up costs more than building on empty flood plains.
Normal programmers using existing compilers like GCC usually...
Even if you're building for a brand new architecture, it's still quicker to write a compiler for the new architecture on an existing machine using an existing architecture with existing tools and languages than it is to build one from scratch in ASM.
The situations in which you'd need to build from ASM and couldn't do this are pretty much non-existent. If the architecture in question is still binary based it's almost certainly just easier to do things this way.
There's a reason there was single quotes around the word brain in the summary you know?
The problem isn't marketing droids or anything like that, the problem is you don't understand how to interpret written English properly.
It is written in this way, because by using the word brain, most people understand that it's the section of the device responsible for thinking- in technical terms, responsible for processing. If you removed the single quotes and replaced the word brain with "hopfield artificial neural network" or whatever then I assure you even more people would be confused by what the fuck the summary was on about. It's just easier and makes more sense when writing for a general audience to use something that everyone understands and can relate to.
No one's pretending the thing has a real brain in it.
That's cos Bill didn't have the physical strength to lift and throw a chair being the penultimate geek.
One must wonder though if even before Ballmer took over he had a penchant for throwing chairs, even at chief Bill. Certainly Bill had mad chair evasion skills:
I wonder if this is why Microsoft has a history of buggy software? Because rather than managing properly Bill and Ballmer spent half their time in the office playing dodgeball with chairs or something?
Reading through the discussion I looked down to remind myself where on my keyboard it was, only to find that my Logitech keyboard I've been using at work for the last 2 years doesn't even have a Syr rq key.
My work laptop does though as an alternative on the delete key.
Still, I didn't even realised it'd gone from my main keyboard!!
No, I agree with you, I don't think they have an interest in that.
To clarify, my point was that many Western fears about China are completely unfounded, because even if China did have the interest in going for a military option (which again, like you, I don't believe they do) then they do not have the capability to win any kind of victory. In all offensive scenarios, conventional or nuclear, right now, they do not have the capacity to be anything but the losing side, the scales are tipped too far against them militarily.
I'm not even convinced they'd cope that well in a defensive capacity against a full scale attack from the West, because as I say an attack on them would leave them in a position where they could no longer use hundreds of thousands of troops to supress dissidents in places like Tibet, and to defend their disputed regions against Russia and India. Whilst I wouldn't expect the US would want to land on their shores, a flurry of attacks from cruise missiles, stealth aircraft airstrikes and so forth would be enough to cripple their infrastructure severely.
But again, this is precisely why I agree with your point that China has no interest in going down this route, even if I disagree slightly on the reasons for not wanting to. I believe they know full well that too large a percent of their military is required to maintain internal stability for them to have any true interest in dealing with external threats.
Laser weaponry is also a possibility, but that seems to be struggling to be turned into truly deployable weaponry right now due to the logistics of powering them. The rail gun option seems viable in the very near future.
I don't think you realise how few nukes China has and also overestimate the size of a nuclear explosion as many people often do.
The only two countries in the world that can unilaterally push the no one wins scenario are Russia and the USA. Other nuclear capable nations simply do not have enough weapons of high enough yield setup to be deployed via the harder to take down ICBMs to fulfil that scenario. They could do a lot of damage for sure, they could whipe out the entire Eastern seaboard of the US, the vast majority of Europe and so forth, but here's the key, if they did either of those you'd still have either Europe left, or the entire rest of the US and it's allies, or a combination of that would strike back. The US would still have facility to whipe out the whole of China via ICBMs in response. My point is, that in a worst case scenario China could not end the world or anything so daft, they could not even end the West, and their price for only heavily damaging it would be their own entire obliteration. China has at most 180 nuclear weapons, of these many are only deployable from shorter range launchers or aircraft, which would be easy for the US to defend against. Of the handful that are ICBMs, many aren't particularly high yield. This is why as I state, China's nuclear capacity is limited far below anything approaching complete worldwide obliteration. In contrast, again, only the US and Russia have enough ICBMs to whipe the world out a few times over.
"Anyway, I can't actually remember China say they're going to "unilaterally take on the world". For now they seem content just to take on the world's manufacturing."
No neither can I, but then, though that's probably because I was quite clearly talking about a hypothetical worst case scenario if things ever really did get that crazy, which I don't believe they honestly ever will.
Slashdot Mirror
More to the point, even if they can the question is how much DNA they can salvage from different individual members of the species.
The problem with ressurecting a species with cloning and DNA techniques like this is not simply a case of bringing one animal back, but that you need to bring multiple animals back all from different recovered DNA sources.
The reason for this is because creating clones from a single individual will leave you with a population without any real genetic variability and so you will end up with a population that cannot really evolve to cope with disease and so forth (including those that have arisen since it's extinction). Bringing an individual clone of a species back is one thing, but bringing back a viable population is even more difficult.
This is why we would struggle even more to bring back longer extinct species like the dodo or the mammoth because we're finding it a hell of a challenge to recover the DNA of just one individual, let alone a batch of individuals with DNA that is distinct enough to create a viable population that's not basically just inbred.
Of course, that's not to put down the achievement, it's a great first step and hopefully will lead to us producing the technology to bring back entire viable breeding populations that can cope with disease and so forth. It may be that we can even introduce artificial changes to the DNA to artificially create this variability but even that would be difficult to get right to the point we're able to mimic naturally evolved variability between individuals of a species.
For what it's worth, we've actually had similar problems in the past, where we've had entire types of banana go extinct because they were all clones of each other and hence couldn't resist disease so it's not even a theoretical problem, it can and does happen- you need variability within a species to keep it viable in the long run.
More likely Google discovered this one as a result of a security audit in the light of the Chinese attacks against them.
Interestingly though, the parent may have a point, it could be that this one of the exploits the Chinese used internally at Google precisely because they have known about it so long.
But still, who knows.
That's quite impressive, it means that theoretically I should die before I finish typing out this respon
Your argument depends on the premise that the majority of the people in the country support the government and the laws set by it.
That premise is quite possibly false.
It's also relevant that yes, whilst China is big, it'd be stupid to ignore India.
Sure it'd be nice to have both, but if Google spends the additional effort it spent on China in somewhere like India instead I'd wager they could increase profits in India enough to mitigate any loss from pulling out of China.
The population of India is 1.14 billion, the population of China is 1.32 billion. Sure it's a 180 million person difference which is a lot, but when you scale down to those that have internet access rather than total population and so forth the amount decreases quite a bit. This is an even more pertinent point when you take into account the greater risk of operating in China in terms of having your IP stolen, your servers hacked and so on all state sponsored.
I'd imagine Google have just done the math and realised that China wont net them that much money compared to simply just refocussing that effort elsewhere. Sure there's 1.3 billion people in China, but there's also still 5.3 billion people elsewhere.
Yeah, except no ones forcing you to play WoW, good luck opting out of warrantless wiretaps and so forth.
It's really not comparable, this is a feature in game, a game you can opt out of playing if you don't like the features. It's arguable if it's even your privacy being invaded, certainly some MMOs claim owernship of any characters and such you create, so legally it might not even be your data they're displaying. If you don't like the terms, simply don't pay them- it's the same with people who use Facebook, no one's forcing them to sign up.
Really, let's face it, most people who have a problem with this are people who play when they should be working or at school or something and are concerned their employer/parent will now be able to see this and hold it up as evidence against them in disciplinary action.
As you say, there's really little value there for a stalker. A stalker is more likely to be watching your house with binoculars to see when you leave the house and what you do at what times, rather than giving a shit about what time you got the epic weapon of lolz or whatever.
Yes, but unfortunately, for people to change their stance away from that you're frustrated about would also require those same people to accept that their own country isn't infallible. To accept that would be in complete conflict with the patriotic mindset which they are indoctrinated into in the first place.
Unfortunately, the fact that you're correct will still be lost on such people, because they are unwilling to accept something that challenges something fundamental to how they view the world.
It's no different to religious zealots and so forth that will deny the truth even when the evidence countering their view is right in front of their face.
So the bad news is, you may be sick of reading such crap, but sadly you'll continue to have to.
"Netscape gave up because their business model was completely undercut by the fact that Microsoft made IE mandatory on every computer sold."
No, that's simply the excuse Netscape gave for giving up. The real reason they gave up is because not many people used their browser because it was quite simply inferior. In fact, it was really quite shit.
"Opera survived as a niche, and Mozilla was born from Netscape's ashes, both of which are signs that Microsoft didn't succeed."
They're signs that it really didn't matter what perceived advantage Microsoft had, what mattered at the end of the day was that to begin to dethrone IE, you need something worthwhile to dethrone it with. You can't enter the market with a shit browser and expect people to switch to it when even IE is better. Mozilla realised this, they simply produced a better browser and have been chewing away at IE's marketshare ever since as a result.
Really, no one gave a shit about what Windows has installed already, if you give someone something better, for free, they'll gladly take it, but being better is absolutely key. I had plenty of opportunity to use Netscape back in the day as my main browser, I had it free on magazine CDs, my ISP would send me it on CD, I downloaded 4 when it came out, but I always ended up back with IE, not because it was already installed, as that was no big deal, I'd already installed Netscape too, I always switched back because as crap as IE was, it was still better than Netscape.
IE has the same advantage it's always had even now until the EU ballot screen comes into force, and yet Firefox has been happily chewing away at it's marketshare despite the supposed idea that IE being installed by default would prevent anyone switching. The only reason Firefox hasn't taken over faster and more marketshare is because it's historically not given much support to corporate users- for too long the tools to deploy and configure via Active Directory and so forth were 3rd party and lacklustre.
Don't Apple users already often use Microsoft office? Didn't many of them even use IE for years?
Is using Bing as the search engine really such a big jump?
That smell I can smell is the smell of a million health and safety bureaucrats world wide shitting their pants at the idea of your comment becoming reality.
I salute you sir.
Yes, and I like the solution too- rather than contact Microsoft to find out what the fuck is going on, post it to Slashdot and get Slashdotted as well.
Pure genius.
To be honest, I think it's misleading.
That's what they're suggesting, in reality, as someone who lives in England, I think what is happening is that due to the housing boom over the last 10 years or so, housing developers decided it'd be a good idea to build as many houses as possible to rake in the profits.
The problem is, England is small, and there isn't a lot of spare cheap land for building.
Enter flood plains, for some reason these builders have been allowed to build on low lying areas, flood plains and so forth, areas that are useless for most building and farming and hence cheap.
So I'd wager that a good portion of the people under threat from flooding in the UK now are those who were naive enough to not think of the problems that could arise in the area they chose to buy their house. Since the floods a couple of years ago, the British government has actually stopped some of this sillyness of building on flood plains, but there's still thousands of houses built on areas vulnerable to flooding.
Hence, it's not really that sea levels are rising enough to endanger cities right now, but that builders are stupid enough to build and people are stupid enough to buy houses in areas that always were at risk to flooding.
The ideal solution would've been to reclaim unused industrial and inner city areas, but cleaning them up costs more than building on empty flood plains.
It's certainly not labelled as such like other keyboards I have though.
Normal programmers using existing compilers like GCC usually...
Even if you're building for a brand new architecture, it's still quicker to write a compiler for the new architecture on an existing machine using an existing architecture with existing tools and languages than it is to build one from scratch in ASM.
The situations in which you'd need to build from ASM and couldn't do this are pretty much non-existent. If the architecture in question is still binary based it's almost certainly just easier to do things this way.
There's a reason there was single quotes around the word brain in the summary you know?
The problem isn't marketing droids or anything like that, the problem is you don't understand how to interpret written English properly.
It is written in this way, because by using the word brain, most people understand that it's the section of the device responsible for thinking- in technical terms, responsible for processing. If you removed the single quotes and replaced the word brain with "hopfield artificial neural network" or whatever then I assure you even more people would be confused by what the fuck the summary was on about. It's just easier and makes more sense when writing for a general audience to use something that everyone understands and can relate to.
No one's pretending the thing has a real brain in it.
It should be obvious to any other geek who the ultimate geek is. Woz of course.
I dunno, give them some credit, Hillary Clinton might talk at them again. I'm sure they'll care deeply about that.
That's cos Bill didn't have the physical strength to lift and throw a chair being the penultimate geek.
One must wonder though if even before Ballmer took over he had a penchant for throwing chairs, even at chief Bill. Certainly Bill had mad chair evasion skills:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxaCOHT0pmI
I wonder if this is why Microsoft has a history of buggy software? Because rather than managing properly Bill and Ballmer spent half their time in the office playing dodgeball with chairs or something?
Reading through the discussion I looked down to remind myself where on my keyboard it was, only to find that my Logitech keyboard I've been using at work for the last 2 years doesn't even have a Syr rq key.
My work laptop does though as an alternative on the delete key.
Still, I didn't even realised it'd gone from my main keyboard!!
Maybe it's because GCHQ/NSA's monitoring operation have to decrypt the mail first after intercepting it before mining it if it's encrypted :p
I think you're in the wrong room. The one you want is just down the hall, this is the "Gran Turismo 5 Delayed" lecture.
I know it's not looking good for GT5, but I don't think mummification needs to be on the cards for it just yet!
No, I agree with you, I don't think they have an interest in that.
To clarify, my point was that many Western fears about China are completely unfounded, because even if China did have the interest in going for a military option (which again, like you, I don't believe they do) then they do not have the capability to win any kind of victory. In all offensive scenarios, conventional or nuclear, right now, they do not have the capacity to be anything but the losing side, the scales are tipped too far against them militarily.
I'm not even convinced they'd cope that well in a defensive capacity against a full scale attack from the West, because as I say an attack on them would leave them in a position where they could no longer use hundreds of thousands of troops to supress dissidents in places like Tibet, and to defend their disputed regions against Russia and India. Whilst I wouldn't expect the US would want to land on their shores, a flurry of attacks from cruise missiles, stealth aircraft airstrikes and so forth would be enough to cripple their infrastructure severely.
But again, this is precisely why I agree with your point that China has no interest in going down this route, even if I disagree slightly on the reasons for not wanting to. I believe they know full well that too large a percent of their military is required to maintain internal stability for them to have any true interest in dealing with external threats.
I suspect that this type of technology will mitigate almost all anti-ship weaponry including the ballistic missile threat before too long:
http://gizmodo.com/351467/navy-rail-gun-test-destroys-everything-it-touches-at-5640-mph
Laser weaponry is also a possibility, but that seems to be struggling to be turned into truly deployable weaponry right now due to the logistics of powering them. The rail gun option seems viable in the very near future.
I don't think you realise how few nukes China has and also overestimate the size of a nuclear explosion as many people often do.
The only two countries in the world that can unilaterally push the no one wins scenario are Russia and the USA. Other nuclear capable nations simply do not have enough weapons of high enough yield setup to be deployed via the harder to take down ICBMs to fulfil that scenario. They could do a lot of damage for sure, they could whipe out the entire Eastern seaboard of the US, the vast majority of Europe and so forth, but here's the key, if they did either of those you'd still have either Europe left, or the entire rest of the US and it's allies, or a combination of that would strike back. The US would still have facility to whipe out the whole of China via ICBMs in response. My point is, that in a worst case scenario China could not end the world or anything so daft, they could not even end the West, and their price for only heavily damaging it would be their own entire obliteration. China has at most 180 nuclear weapons, of these many are only deployable from shorter range launchers or aircraft, which would be easy for the US to defend against. Of the handful that are ICBMs, many aren't particularly high yield. This is why as I state, China's nuclear capacity is limited far below anything approaching complete worldwide obliteration. In contrast, again, only the US and Russia have enough ICBMs to whipe the world out a few times over.
"Anyway, I can't actually remember China say they're going to "unilaterally take on the world". For now they seem content just to take on the world's manufacturing."
No neither can I, but then, though that's probably because I was quite clearly talking about a hypothetical worst case scenario if things ever really did get that crazy, which I don't believe they honestly ever will.