i'd say that it depends on the amount of DNA material that makes up the particular gene that produces the phenotipic effect of HIV imunity. Could be just a couple thousand if the the amount to be isolated is big enough, or LOTS if its just a couple of dna pairings. think of it in terms of sets: you need to find a common subset of dna in the very large set of possible dna combinations. the bigger the set you want to find, the smaller the group you'll need to identify it, at least theoretically.
but mind you, IANAMolecularBiologist, just a statistician:)
my reasons for ubuntu (not trying to sell it to anyone...) deb based, debian derivative huge community with tons of use-cases that help troubleshoot almost anything huge software repo nice release cycle and upgrade system different desktops available without too much hassle
and i had a terrible experience in my n00by years with rpm systems, both in fedora and suse flavours (although that was mainly an ati card being a bitch).
my only gripe is that although they offer a kde version, development is pretty much gtk-centric, and i hate gtk and gnome with its habit of treating the luser as a complete moron. i hear that opensuse is kde based, but i already put my chips on canonicals side, so i'm pretty happy with *buntu.
oxygen icons are beatiful. Heck, kde4 is frickin' awesomw, actually; and i bet you cant make gnome look even good with little effort.
and the difference between mac osx and windows vs linux, is that this automation you speak about is optional in linux of any flavour. that's a HUGE adventage if you find a problem, or if you ever want to use you machine to do something different to what the manufacturer intended.
1.- The American civil war was the deadliest, meanest and most violent military confrontation up until world war one. It saw the development of weaponry and military strategy up to an unprecedented point in world history, goodies like the submarine or the Gatling machine gun were invented during this time. By Americans. To shoot other Americans. Once they hated each other so much as to declare war on them, the little fact that they looked like your mother, or even were your uncles and aunts cared little, they happily proceeded to savagely try and kill each and every one of them.
2.- Ever read about a military dictatorship? typically, they are implemented by military personnel of the same nationality than the people against who it's implemented. And never, not even the most unprofessional and hippie army in the world, has drop their weapons and changed sides out of solidarity with the oppressed.
That's why a civil war is also called a fratricide war: 'tis brother against brother, father against son. And their family ties have never been strong enough to avoid conflict. Anywhere.
To think that "you just have to make them kill you to make them turn from the evil side" is, quite honestly, not the smartest thing I've read around here, to say it mildly.
well, no. the whole point of my post was that a taxonomy that does not contribute with an explanatory insight is little more than a list. the periodic tables has, well, periods. Numbers and characteristics of the elements contained that determine their possition in the table. It's much more valuable than a simple list of elements. Other scientific taxonomies share this same aspect, like the Scientific Classification, where the mere name of an entity determines its similarities with other entities in its same specie/family/genus, etc.
If it does not give new explanatory insights, then, if anything, it's a descriptive typology, and in this case 68 elements is too many elements to provide a really important breakthrough in our understanding of the processes involved, since lacking an explanatory insight we have little options to predict and forbade some relations and determine their importance, and are left only with its combinatorial possibilities (or whatever, again, i am not a molecular biologist). Descriptive typologies are very useful, however, if the number of elements is small, and they provide a new classification that gives some insight into the natural similarities and differences between different entities, or if they are able to sustain new phenomena by incorporation of the new entities into some of the categories contained in the typology.
Determining (provisionally) a list of 68 molecules involved in some process is of little worth, if this determination does not shed some light into why these particular 68, if it is theoretically possible tht a 69th molecule exists, and other critical questions.
It's interesting, though. Curious, probably. not much more.
until we find a bacteria that has a 69th molecule in its chemical composition, and then its all over again.
Actually, by having a delimited taxonomy we might overlook some critical aspect related to this hypothetical 69th molecule, etc etc.
This is a classic problem in epistemology. Taxonomies are of no worth if they do not produce a cognitive change unavailable without the formulation of the taxonomy. Limiting the number of elements in a set is not in itself a great leap forward for science, unless you can explain and draw conclussions and new insights out of this limit, like, i don't know, "this 68 mols are the only possible theoretical configurations of x, y and z because of a, b and c", instead of "this 68 molecules are persistent in all observations, until now".
The first proposition is a theoretically relevant observation, that just happens to determine a taxonomy. The second one is just a taxonomy that might or might not be useful. In itself, it is only useful until it is proven wrong, and taxonomy and categories that define limited sets of entities are the easiest hypothesis to falsify.
In other words: absurd reductionism, not worthy of more reaction than a mildly amused "meh, too bad they were not 42".
(incidentally, 68 elements for a taxonomy is pretty shitty taxonomy. The set of possible 5 -pulled out of my ass, IANAMB- mol sequences with that number of elements is 2,0667E+94, a number that is larger than the number of atoms in the whole universe)
Amen. we've been doing this persistency thingy since at least 2003 in nwn, and there's a lot of knowledge acquired by several teams of developers and server admins (one of which i was proudly part of until last year:P)
yes, it was blatantly off-topic. i was replying to GP, who quoted his post on old tech. just that. so look no more, the quote was from the quoted post, not his original comment. sorry?
yeah, you could say it was in the wrong place, but my reply is a comment on the post quoted by GP, so i think you're being a little too overzealous. not that i care, anyway...
Stoves without pilot lights No, I'm not speaking here of the new stoves that use an electric spark. I'm talking about technology that I'm not old enough to know first hand, but have only read of.
Early stoves had to be lit with a match, and there were no safety devices to shut an unlit gas source off. The knob on the oven was known as "the knob that will make the house explode," because if you turned on the knob and didn't light it, sooner or later when the house was full of fumes, boom.
I doubt many people miss exploding houses!
The stove in my house, and in 90% of houses in my country, do NOT have a pilot light nor an electric spark to be ignited. We use matches.
There is a security feature, though: all burners have a thermostat to close the gas if the burner is not hot (as in on). To turn the stove on, you have to press on the knob to override this thermostat, and without releasing it, turn it to open the gas, apply the match and light it. After the burner is hot enough (in ovens it takes a few seconds, in surface burners it's near instantaneous), you release the knob and have a lighted burner. if you release too early, the gas gets cut and it's the whole shebang all over again. Nearly all gas appliances down here work in this fashion.
Our stoves have contained this security feature since at least the 70's, i sincerely doubt your stoves did not, so it seems to me that you made a mistake.
Pilot flames, on the other hand, are very much more dangerous.
Of all indigenous peoples of the americas, only those in the mesoamerica area had fully developed writing systems, Incas had only a rudimentary system of number representation with knots in string, and in northamerica, only the Ojibwe had some form of writing.
According to your criteria, all other individually considered indigenous peoples of the americas would not qualify as human.
Since the concept of "species" has no (valid) formal definition, we can't use any criteria to say that since an individual is a member of a specie considered to be human, she is human; we must use a criteria that enables us to say that the particular individual is human. If this criteria is writing, non-writing cultures and little children would fall out, contraintuitevily.
A compiler that produces and passes a program to a robot is essentially communicating an ordered list of steps without providing for a demonstration. if we use that criteria to define language and by this, as a proxy to define humans, should my NQC compiler be considered human? why not?
And what about bees? They transmit directions and recruit help without demonstrations, and i KNOW that a freaking bee is not a human being. see here.
Well, in principle, i agree with you: i said i was a hard-line meat-eating humanist. I do believe that "humans" have a special status in nature, and are in this ontological sense more "important" than any other entity hitherto discovered.
The problem is much more subtle and not-trivial, because we do not have a formal definition of human, but only an approximated notion based on an intuitive aggregation of characteristics that enable us to recognize others as obviously human, but are useless to make a clear distinction in the fringes of the category.
A person with a severe mental disability, with no proven capacity for abstract thought, severe memory loss and a lack of education on the fall of Rome or other historical events... is she human? And if you or me (already established members of the human class) suddenly lose some or all of this capacities, do we stop being humans? And if not, under which circumstances would we stop being humans? And on and on. Since you are a software engineer (i am not), you must be aware of the problems that the lack of formal definition entails for a class of entities to be useful.
Now, the above is mainly an ontological question, but it has very concrete legal consequences when you use "human" as the main criteria to distribute right and duty in a society, formally. And from this formal definition we must derive 1.- who has access to the rights and duties that we concede to "humans", 2.- and under which circumstances an entity could lose his humanity, and his rights. This applies for example, in discussions on abortion, euthanasia, the political treatment of immigrants, etc etc etc.
Now, i am not saying that there isn't a possible criteria. We always know who is or isn't human. I'm only saying that until now, all the formal criteria proposed have been proven false by new discoveries in nature or advances in machine intelligence, and the only criteria we have left are intuitive. This is problematic.
To put it in yet another sense: Is it possible to build a machine that could tell humans and non-humans apart? how? if so, then any entity that passes that test should be considered a member of the class entitled to all rights and duties of humans. In this context, there is no way to prove that some entity will not pass the test at any given point in the future. In light of this, we humans will yet again change the test, because we know that the new entity isn't human, and that the problem is on our formal criteria and its contradiction with our preconceived notions. You surely understand that this is form of reasoning is aberrant to any self respecting rationalist... hence, problematic.
The above notwithstanding: Language could be used as a criteria. it certainly has been proposed several times (Habermas and Luhmann, Searle, etc), and it seems a good one. The only problem is that we do not have a satisfactory definition for that one, too. What exactly is a language? and all answers to that one tend to end up where we started: language is any medium useful to communicate human stuff.
Exactly. But this has (several) problems: If we can't tell for sure what is human and what isn't, how can we determine who has rights, and in what extent?
Note that most modern legal systems are based on a bill of rights of some sort, and a political community formed by citizens, defined somewhere in the vicinity of "all persons".
So yeah, we do not know for sure what makes us what we are, but the corollary to this is that we can't tell for sure if any given organism is or isn't human. This is not trivial!
Full disclosure: i am a certified social scientist, but i dont promote any hand-wavy theory or taxonomy, thank you very much.
Although i am a hard-line meat eating humanist, i do think he has a point, and you have not been able to contradict him.
Apart from an species bias based on genetic composition, there's no clear cut criteria to define human (tool making and self awareness discarded). Now you propose, among others, i presume, city building, literature writing and movie directing as criteria. I have not done anything of the above, and apart from genetic similarity, i have no relation to anyone who has. Am I Human?
To put it differently: Who built cities? was it the worker? his part in city building is no more complex than the role performed by the crow using a tool. Maybe the architect? then his humanity is tied to a capacity for abstract design, but then again, there are many homo sapiens of whom we do not know if they posses such capacity. Are they to be considered human too? and if we have no proof of their capacity, on what basis should they be considered human?
In the end, the whole capacity-based point of view is flawed. It's impossible to determine now if any capacity chosen as criteria will not be replicated by some non-human agent in the future, be it because we discovered it or because we create it, so we end up with only two possible criteria: Genetics and Empathy. And both are arbitrary: In the strict sense, the concept of "species" is irrelevant form a genetic point of view, as argued by Dawkins in the Selfish Gene and the Extended Phenotype. And empathy is just a generalization and aggregation of a capacity based criteria, not to say it's subjective and not possible to state formally (e.g. some forms of disability produce repulsion, etc).
i wouldn't wait before Aurora takes off before talking to them, as it will be far easier convincing them of a name change now, than after someone outside geekland knows about it.
there's a whole world of difference between a.- the operating system you use in your private box, b.- the standards you use to code on your web page and c.- the practices and formats that you think are the most sensitive and convenient for standardization.
In other words: my choice of os, or scripting language, or home computer will not affect in ANYTHING the truth or false standing of the rather obvious and self-evident proposition that "closed formats and standards are bad".
If you really want to impersonate miguelito, then at least do him a favor and come up with some decent arguments.
Slashdot Mirror
i'd say that it depends on the amount of DNA material that makes up the particular gene that produces the phenotipic effect of HIV imunity. Could be just a couple thousand if the the amount to be isolated is big enough, or LOTS if its just a couple of dna pairings. think of it in terms of sets: you need to find a common subset of dna in the very large set of possible dna combinations. the bigger the set you want to find, the smaller the group you'll need to identify it, at least theoretically.
but mind you, IANAMolecularBiologist, just a statistician :)
really true. i haven't played with a newer mac in a long time, but from what i recall, OSX was SLOOOOOOOOW
if they have sped it up a bit, good for them.
my reasons for ubuntu (not trying to sell it to anyone...)
deb based, debian derivative
huge community with tons of use-cases that help troubleshoot almost anything
huge software repo
nice release cycle and upgrade system
different desktops available without too much hassle
and i had a terrible experience in my n00by years with rpm systems, both in fedora and suse flavours (although that was mainly an ati card being a bitch).
my only gripe is that although they offer a kde version, development is pretty much gtk-centric, and i hate gtk and gnome with its habit of treating the luser as a complete moron. i hear that opensuse is kde based, but i already put my chips on canonicals side, so i'm pretty happy with *buntu.
oxygen icons are beatiful. Heck, kde4 is frickin' awesomw, actually; and i bet you cant make gnome look even good with little effort.
and the difference between mac osx and windows vs linux, is that this automation you speak about is optional in linux of any flavour. that's a HUGE adventage if you find a problem, or if you ever want to use you machine to do something different to what the manufacturer intended.
nonsense, and i got two examples:
1.- The American civil war was the deadliest, meanest and most violent military confrontation up until world war one. It saw the development of weaponry and military strategy up to an unprecedented point in world history, goodies like the submarine or the Gatling machine gun were invented during this time. By Americans. To shoot other Americans. Once they hated each other so much as to declare war on them, the little fact that they looked like your mother, or even were your uncles and aunts cared little, they happily proceeded to savagely try and kill each and every one of them.
2.- Ever read about a military dictatorship? typically, they are implemented by military personnel of the same nationality than the people against who it's implemented. And never, not even the most unprofessional and hippie army in the world, has drop their weapons and changed sides out of solidarity with the oppressed.
That's why a civil war is also called a fratricide war: 'tis brother against brother, father against son. And their family ties have never been strong enough to avoid conflict. Anywhere.
To think that "you just have to make them kill you to make them turn from the evil side" is, quite honestly, not the smartest thing I've read around here, to say it mildly.
Erm... is that not how the periodic table works?
well, no. the whole point of my post was that a taxonomy that does not contribute with an explanatory insight is little more than a list. the periodic tables has, well, periods. Numbers and characteristics of the elements contained that determine their possition in the table. It's much more valuable than a simple list of elements. Other scientific taxonomies share this same aspect, like the Scientific Classification, where the mere name of an entity determines its similarities with other entities in its same specie/family/genus, etc.
If it does not give new explanatory insights, then, if anything, it's a descriptive typology, and in this case 68 elements is too many elements to provide a really important breakthrough in our understanding of the processes involved, since lacking an explanatory insight we have little options to predict and forbade some relations and determine their importance, and are left only with its combinatorial possibilities (or whatever, again, i am not a molecular biologist). Descriptive typologies are very useful, however, if the number of elements is small, and they provide a new classification that gives some insight into the natural similarities and differences between different entities, or if they are able to sustain new phenomena by incorporation of the new entities into some of the categories contained in the typology.
Determining (provisionally) a list of 68 molecules involved in some process is of little worth, if this determination does not shed some light into why these particular 68, if it is theoretically possible tht a 69th molecule exists, and other critical questions.
It's interesting, though. Curious, probably. not much more.
until we find a bacteria that has a 69th molecule in its chemical composition, and then its all over again.
Actually, by having a delimited taxonomy we might overlook some critical aspect related to this hypothetical 69th molecule, etc etc.
This is a classic problem in epistemology. Taxonomies are of no worth if they do not produce a cognitive change unavailable without the formulation of the taxonomy. Limiting the number of elements in a set is not in itself a great leap forward for science, unless you can explain and draw conclussions and new insights out of this limit, like, i don't know, "this 68 mols are the only possible theoretical configurations of x, y and z because of a, b and c", instead of "this 68 molecules are persistent in all observations, until now".
The first proposition is a theoretically relevant observation, that just happens to determine a taxonomy. The second one is just a taxonomy that might or might not be useful. In itself, it is only useful until it is proven wrong, and taxonomy and categories that define limited sets of entities are the easiest hypothesis to falsify.
In other words: absurd reductionism, not worthy of more reaction than a mildly amused "meh, too bad they were not 42".
(incidentally, 68 elements for a taxonomy is pretty shitty taxonomy. The set of possible 5 -pulled out of my ass, IANAMB- mol sequences with that number of elements is 2,0667E+94, a number that is larger than the number of atoms in the whole universe)
http://www.google.com/chrome/
does this option take it off rss too?
how is apple not a monopoly again?
Amen. we've been doing this persistency thingy since at least 2003 in nwn, and there's a lot of knowledge acquired by several teams of developers and server admins (one of which i was proudly part of until last year :P)
Forget not the humble 8-track tape!
The eight track is a format best forgotten, as I said in Good Riddance to Bad Tech a few years ago.
yes, it was blatantly off-topic. i was replying to GP, who quoted his post on old tech. just that. so look no more, the quote was from the quoted post, not his original comment. sorry?
yeah, you could say it was in the wrong place, but my reply is a comment on the post quoted by GP, so i think you're being a little too overzealous. not that i care, anyway...
or betamax!
Stoves without pilot lights
No, I'm not speaking here of the new stoves that use an electric spark. I'm talking about technology that I'm not old enough to know first hand, but have only read of.
Early stoves had to be lit with a match, and there were no safety devices to shut an unlit gas source off. The knob on the oven was known as "the knob that will make the house explode," because if you turned on the knob and didn't light it, sooner or later when the house was full of fumes, boom.
I doubt many people miss exploding houses!
The stove in my house, and in 90% of houses in my country, do NOT have a pilot light nor an electric spark to be ignited. We use matches.
There is a security feature, though: all burners have a thermostat to close the gas if the burner is not hot (as in on). To turn the stove on, you have to press on the knob to override this thermostat, and without releasing it, turn it to open the gas, apply the match and light it. After the burner is hot enough (in ovens it takes a few seconds, in surface burners it's near instantaneous), you release the knob and have a lighted burner. if you release too early, the gas gets cut and it's the whole shebang all over again. Nearly all gas appliances down here work in this fashion.
Our stoves have contained this security feature since at least the 70's, i sincerely doubt your stoves did not, so it seems to me that you made a mistake.
Pilot flames, on the other hand, are very much more dangerous.
Of all indigenous peoples of the americas, only those in the mesoamerica area had fully developed writing systems, Incas had only a rudimentary system of number representation with knots in string, and in northamerica, only the Ojibwe had some form of writing.
According to your criteria, all other individually considered indigenous peoples of the americas would not qualify as human.
Since the concept of "species" has no (valid) formal definition, we can't use any criteria to say that since an individual is a member of a specie considered to be human, she is human; we must use a criteria that enables us to say that the particular individual is human. If this criteria is writing, non-writing cultures and little children would fall out, contraintuitevily.
As i said... 'tis not an easy problem ;)
but machines can do that and do it all the time!
A compiler that produces and passes a program to a robot is essentially communicating an ordered list of steps without providing for a demonstration. if we use that criteria to define language and by this, as a proxy to define humans, should my NQC compiler be considered human? why not?
And what about bees? They transmit directions and recruit help without demonstrations, and i KNOW that a freaking bee is not a human being. see here.
Well, in principle, i agree with you: i said i was a hard-line meat-eating humanist. I do believe that "humans" have a special status in nature, and are in this ontological sense more "important" than any other entity hitherto discovered.
The problem is much more subtle and not-trivial, because we do not have a formal definition of human, but only an approximated notion based on an intuitive aggregation of characteristics that enable us to recognize others as obviously human, but are useless to make a clear distinction in the fringes of the category.
A person with a severe mental disability, with no proven capacity for abstract thought, severe memory loss and a lack of education on the fall of Rome or other historical events... is she human? And if you or me (already established members of the human class) suddenly lose some or all of this capacities, do we stop being humans? And if not, under which circumstances would we stop being humans? And on and on. Since you are a software engineer (i am not), you must be aware of the problems that the lack of formal definition entails for a class of entities to be useful.
Now, the above is mainly an ontological question, but it has very concrete legal consequences when you use "human" as the main criteria to distribute right and duty in a society, formally. And from this formal definition we must derive 1.- who has access to the rights and duties that we concede to "humans", 2.- and under which circumstances an entity could lose his humanity, and his rights. This applies for example, in discussions on abortion, euthanasia, the political treatment of immigrants, etc etc etc.
Now, i am not saying that there isn't a possible criteria. We always know who is or isn't human. I'm only saying that until now, all the formal criteria proposed have been proven false by new discoveries in nature or advances in machine intelligence, and the only criteria we have left are intuitive. This is problematic.
To put it in yet another sense: Is it possible to build a machine that could tell humans and non-humans apart? how? if so, then any entity that passes that test should be considered a member of the class entitled to all rights and duties of humans. In this context, there is no way to prove that some entity will not pass the test at any given point in the future. In light of this, we humans will yet again change the test, because we know that the new entity isn't human, and that the problem is on our formal criteria and its contradiction with our preconceived notions. You surely understand that this is form of reasoning is aberrant to any self respecting rationalist... hence, problematic.
The above notwithstanding: Language could be used as a criteria. it certainly has been proposed several times (Habermas and Luhmann, Searle, etc), and it seems a good one. The only problem is that we do not have a satisfactory definition for that one, too. What exactly is a language? and all answers to that one tend to end up where we started: language is any medium useful to communicate human stuff.
Exactly. But this has (several) problems: If we can't tell for sure what is human and what isn't, how can we determine who has rights, and in what extent?
Note that most modern legal systems are based on a bill of rights of some sort, and a political community formed by citizens, defined somewhere in the vicinity of "all persons".
So yeah, we do not know for sure what makes us what we are, but the corollary to this is that we can't tell for sure if any given organism is or isn't human. This is not trivial!
Full disclosure: i am a certified social scientist, but i dont promote any hand-wavy theory or taxonomy, thank you very much.
Although i am a hard-line meat eating humanist, i do think he has a point, and you have not been able to contradict him.
Apart from an species bias based on genetic composition, there's no clear cut criteria to define human (tool making and self awareness discarded). Now you propose, among others, i presume, city building, literature writing and movie directing as criteria. I have not done anything of the above, and apart from genetic similarity, i have no relation to anyone who has. Am I Human?
To put it differently: Who built cities? was it the worker? his part in city building is no more complex than the role performed by the crow using a tool. Maybe the architect? then his humanity is tied to a capacity for abstract design, but then again, there are many homo sapiens of whom we do not know if they posses such capacity. Are they to be considered human too? and if we have no proof of their capacity, on what basis should they be considered human?
In the end, the whole capacity-based point of view is flawed. It's impossible to determine now if any capacity chosen as criteria will not be replicated by some non-human agent in the future, be it because we discovered it or because we create it, so we end up with only two possible criteria: Genetics and Empathy. And both are arbitrary: In the strict sense, the concept of "species" is irrelevant form a genetic point of view, as argued by Dawkins in the Selfish Gene and the Extended Phenotype. And empathy is just a generalization and aggregation of a capacity based criteria, not to say it's subjective and not possible to state formally (e.g. some forms of disability produce repulsion, etc).
All in all, i think this is no trivial matter...
oblig xkcd
And would they even be useful if they didn't come with Natalie Portman (covered in grits, naturally)?
i don't think so, after all, you need a grit covered natalie portman to waive each oen of all those swatters...
mmm, 'cause they are still trying to sell it as-a-product?
i wouldn't wait before Aurora takes off before talking to them, as it will be far easier convincing them of a name change now, than after someone outside geekland knows about it.
there's a whole world of difference between a.- the operating system you use in your private box, b.- the standards you use to code on your web page and c.- the practices and formats that you think are the most sensitive and convenient for standardization.
In other words: my choice of os, or scripting language, or home computer will not affect in ANYTHING the truth or false standing of the rather obvious and self-evident proposition that "closed formats and standards are bad".
If you really want to impersonate miguelito, then at least do him a favor and come up with some decent arguments.