I've kinda wanted this for awhile, but only if you can authorise keys on other people's phones. Imagine you're at some huge music festival - how useful would it be if you could turn the service on and select your buddy from the list, then just walk round with an arrow pointing to which way they are and a distance meter.
Many of you won't appreciate the idea, but then you've probably never been to Glastonbury..
What I would like to see is the ability to TURN THIS OFF,
You can, its called turning your mobile off, or just leave it at home.
[/karma bonus]
[rant]
I'm sorry, but this kind of answer just annoys the hell out of me. I mean, it's a good point you make, that would fix it. So I guess if you don't like people pointing out that you're a bloody-minded flame baiter who clearly has no appreciation for the problem at hand and thinks that the point behind a mobile should be subservient to the technology some arsehole put in there which you didn't want to begin with, I guess you should be ok with the idea that people will diss you on this site. After all, if you didn't want them to, you could just stop coming, right?
The only real difference is that this "organization" is not threatening the law suit on shaky if not absurd grounds. Rather is it like an insurance company of sorts.
Yeah, and exactly like SCO, it's also known as a "protection racket."
Um yeah, RNA does carry AIDS, but all DNA viruses (retrovirii) do this. This is a totally different animal. At best, I would imagine it might help us find a way to stop HIV spreading so quickly. The molecules they're talking about are tiny things which deal with cell regulation. There are a great deal of different types of RNA.
Well, you have something more like a regular-expression matching engine, which traverses (literally, it rides along the dna like a roller-coaster) the sequence, looking for certain sequences, which start and end genes. These are the main agents which transcribe the DNA into RNA, which make proteins. tRNA also has a regex-style recognition sequence which it uses to transcribe rna into dna. To be honest, I'm struggling to recall what you're thinking of precisely, but the mechanisms the cells use to transcribe dna are full of sequence checking.
sorry, this smacks of pseudo-science and paranoia. Merely because something exists does not imply it has a function or a purpose. It's been said a million times by biologists but is so rarely understood by the common populace: evolution is not the process whereby nature whittles down one stick until it makes the perfect tool. It is a bunch of forks and branches and we are being acted on by forces from the microscopic (bacteria, virii) to the highly macroscopic (sabre-toothed cats, wolves). how on earth is it you think that a piece of string 9billion units long will get away without a few knots and a few useless loops? Natural Selection is not the process of building a better mousetrap. It is a desperate fight to survive and make it out of the genetic swamp with enough mates to ensure your children do the same. Evolution, unlike what Richard Dawkins proposes, is not at the level of the gene. It's not entirely at the level of the individual, either. It's all over the place. Stop looking for God and go read a stage 1 biology text book. One interesting point is that alot of 'Junk DNA' may be useful just because it's there, not because it really does anything. What do you think happens if you try to splice your dna with your wife's and they're different lengths? Think that's gonna work real well? Probably not. We've all gotta stay in the race together, so even if it does nothing, it will apply a selective force.
The guy I most often hear is "the best physicist round" these days is Ed Witten, who doesn't seem to be too great on that front. The best guy since Einstein was supposedly Richard Feynman, who was supposedly terrific at explaining things to the layman. So much so, his papers were often criticised because of their use of common English. Quite a few physicists were apparently annoyed when Hawking got called 'Einstein's successor' or somesuch, since there were alot of people of his quality, and some beyond. Pity how the Universe itself is apparently just another political game..
Sorry to say this, but normally the best sailors still win the America's Cup. This is why once it finally made it to New Zealand, all the New Zealand sailors got bought by foreign conglomerates. New Zealand's not a rich country, but not only does it boast many of the world's best sailors, it also has one Bruce Farr, one kickass sailboat technologist. So we got a double edge. Not now though, cause Russell Coutts and others all belong to Japanese and other outside interests.
Just look at the Volvo Ocean Race (formerly the Whitbread Round-the-World Yacht Race) and you'll find New Zealanders on every single boat. Not bad considering there's only 3 million of us.
Some days I'm so patriotic it scares me. Go on,f find an Australian to mod me down:)
Well, the life expectancy in Bolton (a town in England) during the Industrial Revolution for a male was 17. And that's much more recent than a few thousand years ago... a little irrelevant, but do you believe technology helped them? Or that the 'research' showing that smoking tobacco killed harmful throat bacteria benefited twentieth century consumers in a way that was more beneficial than the pre-American colonisation?
Typically they inject you with fragments of a dead virus, known to be incapable of reproducing itself. It's no live virus.
Adenoviruses are a class of viruses we hope ain't that bad. They're normally blamed for the common cold, for instance. I guess one of the reasons they have 'localised effects' as somone noted above is that your body is so used to destroying them, it does so quite quickly. A nice side effect.
One problem: it was an adenovirus that killed a human participating in a GE experiment (don't take this as a rule and don't flame me). in other interesting news, a couple of adenovirii have been blamed for rampant obesity in chickens and humans.
Ebola's a really scary one, too. not because it's a particularly smart virus, quite the opposite. In evolutionary terms, something which destroys its environment so quickly is totally sucky. HIV is obviously much smarter, with a huge gestation period and good infectivity. Ebola has the potential to spread very quickly and visibly. Thus, a city gets quarantined, but not before everybody is infected. HIV ain't so good, cause it might take ten years to blow up in your face. Ebola is ore easily controllable once contained. It's like a clean nuke. Handle it right and it's a serious piece of evil fucking hardware.
The point is surely that terrorists have cash. That's not the problem, it was always the know-how. I'm all for freeing knowledge, and using the Internet to brighten the corners of ignorance without forcing people to pay large amounts of money to go to Universities, but I like ice creams and walks on the beach. I don't like bleeding to death through my eyeballs so much.
I have a degree in genetics, and personally wouldn't withhold knowledge from anybody. This is the kind of shit people like Monsanto and Celera would jump on in order to privatise data that should be publicly available, so we should proceed with care. but don't underestimate what's capable with biological weaponry, ever, ever, ever.
*Washes hands after typing the words 'monsanto' and 'celera' twice in the same coment.*
The Internet Backbone is kind of an old idea. I mean the main centres are still there, but many modern ISPs are meshing their networks quite densely. The telco-based old guys are still sitting there refusing to peer with anyone, but those that are meshing up are making for a much more stable Internet, the way it was originally intended. Just try knocking the thing over when half the large ISPs are linked to each other at diverse points. If chunks of the Internet disappear, a few phone calls are made and peering agreements briefly become transit agreements. No more problem.
That being said, I'm in Australia, and our speeds are alot slower than most in our backbone networks. But I know for a fact that Verio US has 192 fairly well deployed. Down here we're nowhere near that. I know a few years ago, Optus was running STM16s (OC48) so they might be close now. Mind you I don't think they've sold so much bandwidth that they'd have gone that far yet.
Yeah c'mon, this site is read by shitloads of people all over the world. This was fucking dumb and the story should have been withdrawn, not changed. I'm not one to rag on/. normally, but Rob should have made a call here and not just 'lived with the mistake'. That story will be there for a day on most people's screens, and if they haven't seen it, they'll still be damn pissed off.
This is also called a scale-free network, and the research on it, by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi (currently at Notre Dame U) is in this week's New Scientist. (Apologies, it's not on their site yet - www.newscientist.com) He's applied it to many systems other than the web as well, from viral transmission on the net and human populations to the vulnerability of "hubs" in genetics (a few, like p53) would take out damn near everything due to their pervasiveness and even quantum mechanics.
Re:How does this fit in with String theory?
on
Quark Stars
·
· Score: 2
Forgive me if I'm wrong, but I believe a neutron star isn't one large anything, it's a collection of neutrons, much like any normal matter is a collection of whole atoms. I believe the quark star they're talking about is supposedly another bundle of sub-atomic particles. A singularity supposedly has no size, therefore everything must be superimposed: ie, it's one thing. A Bose-thingimagic is a bunch of things which act like one at a very low temperature, I believe. This isn't either of those two, but an object with size and probably more than one component.
It states in the article that certain people believe the cells are produced by the process, not that they already exist and are simply refined.
Is it just me, or was there news in the past year or so from people that had found that making cells dormant on minimal media (the same way they prepare cells for cloning) actually made them multipotent anyway? Does anyone else remember this?
When they say there's no sign of aging, they more than likely mean that the progeny of one cell doesn't have shorter DNA fragments than the parent cell.
As you go through life, you're bombarded by radiation (like UV) which actually destroys DNA in different places. In effect, what you get is shortened lengths of DNA, due to their being cut.
This is exactly what they were worried about with Dolly. If Dolly was cloned from a cell which already had shortened DNA, would all her cells start that way, and the progeny get shorter quicker? In other words, would she be born with the effective age of her mother clone?
I believe this is the main mechanism behind the Hayflick Number, which is a measure of how many times a cell can reliably divide before it will stop dividing. I think it's 21. So they were worried that Dolly would have less divisions left, and would die young.
It's been a while since I was in the lab, so someone please feel free to correct me if I've steered too far of course here.
I'm sorry, I must say that for once scientists have charged ahead and decided that stem cell research is for the benefit of all humanity, and should be applauded! After the fucked up things scientists have given us (the nuke, et al) it's good that something which acts at the fundamental, medical level - not just a new toy - is being taken seriously enough that those with the knowledge are willing to risk going to jail to bring it to us.
"Ethical" ramifications are never hashed out. People just argue ad infinitum. How long, exactly, would you say they should wait? Until either everyone on earth shares the same religion or there is no religion anywhere? Until everyone is in exactly the same sociopolitical caste and there's no racism, so everyone agrees? Dream on. Stem cell research will do more to improve the lives of humans than anything prior. Just give it time to become available to everyone. Not developing it won't make anyone's life better. So why wait?
I personally think that the idea of "perpetuating the office monopoly" is valid, but that it might have the opposite effect in the longterm as well.
Think about it: Getting people onto the Linux desktop is the first, and biggest, part of the battle. Once you've done that, and people aren't so scared of it, maybe they'll start looking at OpenOffice now that they're happy with what Linux can do for them. I think getting used to the environment, exploring it a little will play out automatically for many adoptees.
The biggest victory here, of course, is Evolution's final release. It looks so much like Outlook that anyone deciding to migrate this one simple application would inevitably be drawn into the web of other open source products, realising (again) there's nothing to be afraid of.
In short, I don't think Office is what you should be afraid of. Unless they rename their operating system Microsoft Office, we should be ok:-)
Slashdot Mirror
I've kinda wanted this for awhile, but only if you can authorise keys on other people's phones. Imagine you're at some huge music festival - how useful would it be if you could turn the service on and select your buddy from the list, then just walk round with an arrow pointing to which way they are and a distance meter.
Many of you won't appreciate the idea, but then you've probably never been to Glastonbury..
I'm sorry, but this kind of answer just annoys the hell out of me. I mean, it's a good point you make, that would fix it. So I guess if you don't like people pointing out that you're a bloody-minded flame baiter who clearly has no appreciation for the problem at hand and thinks that the point behind a mobile should be subservient to the technology some arsehole put in there which you didn't want to begin with, I guess you should be ok with the idea that people will diss you on this site. After all, if you didn't want them to, you could just stop coming, right?
[/rant] [karma bonus]Yeah, and exactly like SCO, it's also known as a "protection racket."
Um yeah, RNA does carry AIDS, but all DNA viruses (retrovirii) do this. This is a totally different animal. At best, I would imagine it might help us find a way to stop HIV spreading so quickly. The molecules they're talking about are tiny things which deal with cell regulation. There are a great deal of different types of RNA.
Well, you have something more like a regular-expression matching engine, which traverses (literally, it rides along the dna like a roller-coaster) the sequence, looking for certain sequences, which start and end genes. These are the main agents which transcribe the DNA into RNA, which make proteins.
tRNA also has a regex-style recognition sequence which it uses to transcribe rna into dna.
To be honest, I'm struggling to recall what you're thinking of precisely, but the mechanisms the cells use to transcribe dna are full of sequence checking.
sorry, this smacks of pseudo-science and paranoia. Merely because something exists does not imply it has a function or a purpose.
It's been said a million times by biologists but is so rarely understood by the common populace: evolution is not the process whereby nature whittles down one stick until it makes the perfect tool. It is a bunch of forks and branches and we are being acted on by forces from the microscopic (bacteria, virii) to the highly macroscopic (sabre-toothed cats, wolves). how on earth is it you think that a piece of string 9billion units long will get away without a few knots and a few useless loops?
Natural Selection is not the process of building a better mousetrap. It is a desperate fight to survive and make it out of the genetic swamp with enough mates to ensure your children do the same. Evolution, unlike what Richard Dawkins proposes, is not at the level of the gene. It's not entirely at the level of the individual, either. It's all over the place.
Stop looking for God and go read a stage 1 biology text book.
One interesting point is that alot of 'Junk DNA' may be useful just because it's there, not because it really does anything. What do you think happens if you try to splice your dna with your wife's and they're different lengths? Think that's gonna work real well? Probably not. We've all gotta stay in the race together, so even if it does nothing, it will apply a selective force.
The guy I most often hear is "the best physicist round" these days is Ed Witten, who doesn't seem to be too great on that front.
The best guy since Einstein was supposedly Richard Feynman, who was supposedly terrific at explaining things to the layman. So much so, his papers were often criticised because of their use of common English. Quite a few physicists were apparently annoyed when Hawking got called 'Einstein's successor' or somesuch, since there were alot of people of his quality, and some beyond.
Pity how the Universe itself is apparently just another political game..
Nope. But thanks for asking :)
Follow the URL..
Sorry to say this, but normally the best sailors still win the America's Cup. This is why once it finally made it to New Zealand, all the New Zealand sailors got bought by foreign conglomerates. New Zealand's not a rich country, but not only does it boast many of the world's best sailors, it also has one Bruce Farr, one kickass sailboat technologist. So we got a double edge. Not now though, cause Russell Coutts and others all belong to Japanese and other outside interests.
Just look at the Volvo Ocean Race (formerly the Whitbread Round-the-World Yacht Race) and you'll find New Zealanders on every single boat. Not bad considering there's only 3 million of us.
Some days I'm so patriotic it scares me. Go on,f find an Australian to mod me down
Well, the life expectancy in Bolton (a town in England) during the Industrial Revolution for a male was 17. And that's much more recent than a few thousand years ago... a little irrelevant, but do you believe technology helped them? Or that the 'research' showing that smoking tobacco killed harmful throat bacteria benefited twentieth century consumers in a way that was more beneficial than the pre-American colonisation?
Technology, he be fickle.
Typically they inject you with fragments of a dead virus, known to be incapable of reproducing itself. It's no live virus.
Adenoviruses are a class of viruses we hope ain't that bad. They're normally blamed for the common cold, for instance. I guess one of the reasons they have 'localised effects' as somone noted above is that your body is so used to destroying them, it does so quite quickly. A nice side effect.
One problem: it was an adenovirus that killed a human participating in a GE experiment (don't take this as a rule and don't flame me). in other interesting news, a couple of adenovirii have been blamed for rampant obesity in chickens and humans.
"Senescence: Can't spell it, don't need it. A dummy's guide to handling nuclear waste."
My God, if anybody gets that, I'll be amazed. Too much coffee today.
This is true. Not many people realise just how many cats Schrodinger killed before he published.
Ebola's a really scary one, too. not because it's a particularly smart virus, quite the opposite. In evolutionary terms, something which destroys its environment so quickly is totally sucky. HIV is obviously much smarter, with a huge gestation period and good infectivity. Ebola has the potential to spread very quickly and visibly. Thus, a city gets quarantined, but not before everybody is infected. HIV ain't so good, cause it might take ten years to blow up in your face. Ebola is ore easily controllable once contained. It's like a clean nuke. Handle it right and it's a serious piece of evil fucking hardware.
I'm afrad of the big bad wolf
He's right, inject enough anything into a mouse, and it'll still explode.
**rushes to patent office to register new biological weapon*
The point is surely that terrorists have cash. That's not the problem, it was always the know-how. I'm all for freeing knowledge, and using the Internet to brighten the corners of ignorance without forcing people to pay large amounts of money to go to Universities, but I like ice creams and walks on the beach. I don't like bleeding to death through my eyeballs so much.
I have a degree in genetics, and personally wouldn't withhold knowledge from anybody. This is the kind of shit people like Monsanto and Celera would jump on in order to privatise data that should be publicly available, so we should proceed with care. but don't underestimate what's capable with biological weaponry, ever, ever, ever.
*Washes hands after typing the words 'monsanto' and 'celera' twice in the same coment.*
The Internet Backbone is kind of an old idea. I mean the main centres are still there, but many modern ISPs are meshing their networks quite densely. The telco-based old guys are still sitting there refusing to peer with anyone, but those that are meshing up are making for a much more stable Internet, the way it was originally intended. Just try knocking the thing over when half the large ISPs are linked to each other at diverse points. If chunks of the Internet disappear, a few phone calls are made and peering agreements briefly become transit agreements. No more problem.
That being said, I'm in Australia, and our speeds are alot slower than most in our backbone networks. But I know for a fact that Verio US has 192 fairly well deployed. Down here we're nowhere near that. I know a few years ago, Optus was running STM16s (OC48) so they might be close now. Mind you I don't think they've sold so much bandwidth that they'd have gone that far yet.
Yeah c'mon, this site is read by shitloads of people all over the world. This was fucking dumb and the story should have been withdrawn, not changed. I'm not one to rag on /. normally, but Rob should have made a call here and not just 'lived with the mistake'. That story will be there for a day on most people's screens, and if they haven't seen it, they'll still be damn pissed off.
This is also called a scale-free network, and the research on it, by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi (currently at Notre Dame U) is in this week's New Scientist. (Apologies, it's not on their site yet - www.newscientist.com) He's applied it to many systems other than the web as well, from viral transmission on the net and human populations to the vulnerability of "hubs" in genetics (a few, like p53) would take out damn near everything due to their pervasiveness and even quantum mechanics.
Forgive me if I'm wrong, but I believe a neutron star isn't one large anything, it's a collection of neutrons, much like any normal matter is a collection of whole atoms. I believe the quark star they're talking about is supposedly another bundle of sub-atomic particles. A singularity supposedly has no size, therefore everything must be superimposed: ie, it's one thing. A Bose-thingimagic is a bunch of things which act like one at a very low temperature, I believe. This isn't either of those two, but an object with size and probably more than one component.
Yeah, blastocysts have differentiated tissue types. Zygotes are one cell, I believe.
It states in the article that certain people believe the cells are produced by the process, not that they already exist and are simply refined.
Is it just me, or was there news in the past year or so from people that had found that making cells dormant on minimal media (the same way they prepare cells for cloning) actually made them multipotent anyway? Does anyone else remember this?
When they say there's no sign of aging, they more than likely mean that the progeny of one cell doesn't have shorter DNA fragments than the parent cell.
As you go through life, you're bombarded by radiation (like UV) which actually destroys DNA in different places. In effect, what you get is shortened lengths of DNA, due to their being cut.
This is exactly what they were worried about with Dolly. If Dolly was cloned from a cell which already had shortened DNA, would all her cells start that way, and the progeny get shorter quicker? In other words, would she be born with the effective age of her mother clone?
I believe this is the main mechanism behind the Hayflick Number, which is a measure of how many times a cell can reliably divide before it will stop dividing. I think it's 21. So they were worried that Dolly would have less divisions left, and would die young.
It's been a while since I was in the lab, so someone please feel free to correct me if I've steered too far of course here.
I'm sorry, I must say that for once scientists have charged ahead and decided that stem cell research is for the benefit of all humanity, and should be applauded! After the fucked up things scientists have given us (the nuke, et al) it's good that something which acts at the fundamental, medical level - not just a new toy - is being taken seriously enough that those with the knowledge are willing to risk going to jail to bring it to us.
"Ethical" ramifications are never hashed out. People just argue ad infinitum. How long, exactly, would you say they should wait? Until either everyone on earth shares the same religion or there is no religion anywhere? Until everyone is in exactly the same sociopolitical caste and there's no racism, so everyone agrees? Dream on. Stem cell research will do more to improve the lives of humans than anything prior. Just give it time to become available to everyone. Not developing it won't make anyone's life better. So why wait?
I personally think that the idea of "perpetuating the office monopoly" is valid, but that it might have the opposite effect in the longterm as well.
Think about it: Getting people onto the Linux desktop is the first, and biggest, part of the battle. Once you've done that, and people aren't so scared of it, maybe they'll start looking at OpenOffice now that they're happy with what Linux can do for them. I think getting used to the environment, exploring it a little will play out automatically for many adoptees.
The biggest victory here, of course, is Evolution's final release. It looks so much like Outlook that anyone deciding to migrate this one simple application would inevitably be drawn into the web of other open source products, realising (again) there's nothing to be afraid of.
In short, I don't think Office is what you should be afraid of. Unless they rename their operating system Microsoft Office, we should be ok:-)