I'm watching the discovery channel right now - am I completly wrong and don't understand plain English, or did they lost this spacecraft as well? Nooooo!
Bingo:-) This was a very nice idiom which sound much better in polish then its english translation - it means, "do not teach the father how the babies are made".
Well, I was showing off with the greek, I don't speak Greek, knowing only some phrases from ancient Greek and some obscenities from modern Greek... and my Latin is more then miserable, although I can always throw at you some quotes:-)
Regards,
Showingofnuary
P.S. Huc est mens deducta tua, mea Lesbia, culpa atque ita se officio perdidit ipsa suo...
Where I was born, in Eastern Europe, this (methinks) eight centuries old story is well known. There are countless references to that in literature, starting from Apollinaire (yeah, he was polish) and ending with Lewis Wallace.
There have been many sf stories referring to le juif errant, Hasver (or Ahasver or Ahasverus: the name is, AFAIR, much younger then the story itself, and I think there were other names and other legends about). There were also many sf stories - e.g. Arkadij and Boris Strugacki or Stanisl/aw Lem.
Charta non erubescit, my dear friend, nonplusque Slashdot. But I'm not. Gnothi seauton, dear Toad, because I do know who the Wandering Jew is and that is precisly why I admired this' books coherence and the authors literacy. Oida ouden eidos - however my pitiful english spelling, grammar and so on could have given you a hint that I come from the older continent, and therefore need not to be told about what belongs to basic literary education, if you forbid my harsh and inflammatory remark. It's good that you came up with the name, though, it is always worth - indocti discant, ament meminissae pariti - but I felt that you take me for impos animi.
Tibi et igni,
Januarius Tertius
P.S. Nie ucz pan ojca dzieci robic
P.S.2 I'm sorry, but I don't know Hebrew. Does that mean I'm a whippersneaker, quodque significat?
The quote of the lady from the Hamburg office is not in relation to Windows 2000.
It is in relation to Executive software.
You don't seriously believe that anyone in the goverment would stop Microsoft from shipping Windows 2000 to Germany, are you?
No, although the Germans keep amazing me. But it gives Microsoft a bad breath. And for us - a brand new little name to call the Windows users: "booooo, ya scientologists!".
The quote of the lady from the Hamburg office is not in relation to Windows 2000.
It is in relation to Executive software.
You don't seriously believe that anyone in the goverment would stop Microsoft from shipping Windows 2000 to Germany, are you?
No, although the Germans keep amazing me. But it gives them a bad breath. And for us - a brand new little name to call the Windows users: "booooo, ya scientologists!".
Did you notice that the only "non sf" element in the book is The Jew? The one waiting, the one who is several thousands years old?
For me, discovering The Jew (and The Poet), the mystic elements of the story was a wonderful experience. The book got a new dimension: it really showed the authors talent. This repeating leitmotive... the words - "As long as there is a single Jew, there will be someone to mend their tents" - beautiful. This book acomplished a kind of fullness, completeness which is in my eyes reserved for rare pearls of world literature. It's structure resembles a well written piece of classical music, a... well, it must be said: a canticle.
You are wrong: they also quote an official from the Innenministerium, the ministry for internal affairs, section devoted to Scientology. And the "bann" in this context meanst that it would not be used by public offices - and this does not have to do anything with the church.
Regards,
January
P.S. No, I'm not using babelfish. I just speak German and live in Germany.
On Internet, we have already low-quality advertisments, low-quality art, low-quality radio and low-quality video. Now the great time comes for low-quality TV! Wow.
Excuse me my sarcasm. It's just that inspite that the bandwith is growing, the connections are getting slower - at least where I work. Getting short, simple pages from US lasts longer and longer. It's the same phenomenon that makes each new version of Windows slower in spite of more powerfull computers. Quality does not improve: only the number of gadgets. I'd rather see quick loading of a page without even pictures than a java-live-video-audio-whatever-overloaded page which takes two hours to load.
When I think about it... it's like with buying a new back-pack. You had one which had 60 liters, and it was too small. Then you buy one with 100 liters, and it's still too small - but much heavier then the first one. The same goes for cars. And apartments. And benches in a lab. And money. Woah, I think it's a hardwired feature! I wouldn't be amazed if they found it on the 22 chromosome...
Sickle cell anaemia seems to be sustained by natural selection, because people with this disease are immune to malaria.
Although the malfunctioning genes were quickly eliminated during human evolution (now it changed, because people with even grave diseases can still live or even reproduce), there are some DNA sequences which are more prone to errors during replication than others, due to the DNA chemistry and nature of eukaryotic replication mechanisms. Of course, theoretically such "weak spots" could be eliminated by natural selection - but in most cases probably the enhancements in the repair mechanisms would cost more then a sporadic mutation. Don't forget that natural selection does not act on organisms, but on genes.
Of course there are some cases when it is known exactly how a genetic disorder causes a certain type of illness - you all know of the Down syndrome, thalassomy, sickle cell anaemia - but there is *a lot* more.
DAMNED!!! Why can't I send a cancel message?:-) I pressed the "Submit" button again! Grrr....
Back to the topic. There are cases, when finding one single disorder which causes one specific disease is easy. There are cases, when you can pin down a certain region - by tracing the genetic tree of the family, whose members have the disease. There are cases, where you are able to tell that - well, there *is* a genetic component of a certain disease. In some cases, you can tell two forms of the disease: a genetically inherited and a genetically independent form (e.g. the early-onset Alzheimers and the age-dependent Alzheimers disease).
There is yet one thing you have to keep in mind: there is no "gene causing disease X". It's rather: "a gene, whose malfunction or absence causes disease X". For example, a single nucleotide substitution can result in a non-active enzyme, or an enzyme with much slower activity. The whole metabolic pathway, to which this enzyme belongs, is hampered. In some cases a heterozygous organism will have another copy of the gene, which will do the job, or do the job at least in a part - and the disease shows fully in homozygous organisms.
Of course there are some cases when it is known exactly how a genetic disorder causes a certain type of illness - you all know of the Down syndrome, thalassomy, sickle cell anaemia - but there is *a lot* more.
Just one more afterthought. There is a basic difference in sequence strategy between the HGP and TIGR.
HGP does it by "clone by clone" strategy. That means, the chromosome is cut in smaller pieces, then again in even smaller pieces, the pieces get cloned (cloning in molecular biology means not the Dolly sheep: it means, a certain sequence is inserted into a epigenetic element called plasmid, which itself can propagate and thrive in bacteria), and then sequenced. This is cumbersome and requires a lot of manual work, but it provides unmatched quality of the sequencing.
TIGR adopted another strategy, the so-called shotgun method. In this strategy, you get a sequence, but you have not the slightest idea where from the genome does it come from. Only you when you have a lot of this sequences you can start assembling - using a lot of CPU, trying to match them one to another, like a puzzle, but trickier: a sequence often contains errors, especially at the end (you can only read a couple of hundreds bases, then the signals are to weak and not clear enough). This strategy requires considerably less highly trained man-power: just a lot of technicians and $$ for expensive sequencing machines (which were provided to TIGR by Perkin-Elmer). However, this method has a serious drawback: there are many sequences in the human genome, which are partly, or totally repeated. This repeat elements can be a royal pain in the sequencing project (been there, done that).
It is really a good thing that there are two sequencing project with two different strategies: the comparison between the two sequences could provide an enormous insight into a) quality of the sequencing b) human variablity. Venter from TIGR is definitely an enfant terrible, but I don't think he is one of those corporate Bad Guys (TM), rather one who was fed up with the slow pace of conventional scientific projects. On the other hand, HGP, representing "the slow pace", shows us also why a slow pace is needed sometimes.
In a recent/. discussion we argued about the Human Genome Project v. TIGR. As you see, the HUGEP is doing quite well. The raw data from the sequencing project should be available next year.
Will this finish a task? No, it is just a beginning - having the sequence, the real work starts: searching ORFs (Open Reading Frames - sequences which could possibly be genes), running database searches, and slowly passing to the most exciting fields of modern molecular biology - from genomics to transcriptomics and proteomics. Transcriptomics is looking for genes, which actually got expressed, and proteomics - similarly, looking for expressed proteins. Making transcription / translation (translation is the process in which proteins get synthetized) profiles can lead us to 1) function of proteins (e.g. protein X. is expressed under this and this conditions, so it must take part in this and this metabolic response) 2) regulation - DNA is a single strand, but various enzymes are present in various copy numbers under various conditions.
Those are enormous projects. A lot of work has to be done before the raw sequence will actually be of any use; nethertheless, it is a milestone of molecular biology and will be a fine achievement for the end of our century.
Another project will be to determine the variability of human genome: screening for different gene allels, mutations etc. This will be one of the most important goals in human genomics in the next few years.
Whats on the catch... erm, chromosome 22? 22 is 33,400,000 bases long (Mycoplasma pneumoniae, one of the smallest bacteriums, has about 816,394 bases). It contains several already known genes responsible for various genetic disorders, and possibly a gene responsible for certain types of schizophrenia.
By the way, a much better source of information is the Nature science update page - the original scientific publication has been published today in Nature.
What happened to all of our dreams about space exploration? And this in the face of all those marvellous scientific discoveries in the recent years? When I was a kid, space colonies seemed to be a matter of next few years: now I will be happy to live long enough to see man landing on the moon once again (once again landing, not to see it once again:-) ).
Basic ecology says that sooner or later there will be much to many Earth inhabitants; rather sooner, though. And when an ecological niche is filled up, the natural selection strenghtens: for us, that means wars, famine, diseases, basically - call me Kasandra - the end of the european civilization. We could expand our niche if we start it doing early enough... but I'm pessimistic whether this is possible: unless someone will actually make money with sending people to a Mars collony there will never be money for it.
A mission to Mars is nevertheless possible; and I will sign this petition - maybe it works, who knows? I still dream about pigs... ops. humans in space.
Regards,
January
Thanks, those are holy words
on
Interface Zen
·
· Score: 1
You speak out of my heart! I'm not a hacker, and I'll never be, but I type quite fast and I do type a lot. And every time I get a new keyboard I turn into an old grump: whoa, the keyboards these days are worse and worse, in my days we had real keyboards... I got constantly annoyed by some poor inventions claiming to be 'a revolution' - I suppose that means 'bloody', 'pointless', 'cruel', 'eating own children' and so on. Look at this damned new Macintosh keyboard (no, I'm not a Macintosh users, but there are mostly Macs in our lab - I use them as a terminal): not only they changed this little spot which tells your fingers whether they are in the right place (it was on "d" and "k", now it's "g" and "h"), but they also removed the keypad (did you ever have to type in a hundred or so numbers by hand?), removed the delete key and run over the keyboard with a sledgehammer - at least that is my impression (and don't forget the colors like from a Velasquez's nightmare).
I got a new NT box serving only as a control unit to some sophisticated biological device. Not only is the keyboard cruelly castrated by Dell (halved "Enter" key, so I constantly push "backspace"), but the UI is more then s*wed, its badly sc*wed. You have to use mouse, even though most of your actions is typing data into a spreadsheet - sorry, to go from one cell to another you have move you mouse, push one of that buttons, then a pop-up menu comes, then you have to click with the mouse pointer in the only input field (otherwise press tab three times), and type in the data. I mean, OK, I am stupid, I am a biologist, but what do they take me for? A four year old AOL user?
There was an article on the "Nature Science Update" page about computers designed as to sense human emotions (or, actually, certain behavioural patterns which are related to stress / anger / or, maybe, even positive feelings:-) ).
It seems that the development of such tools is more evolved than you'd expect. One of the research centers mentioned in the article is the MIT's Media Laboratory. You can find more information on the ML projects here. The lab is working also on some other futuristic projects: wearable computers, software algorythms for recognizing photographs and other.
Look, imagine someone patented the modifications of the xxx gene as a target for gene therapy of early-onset Alzheimer. Of course I cannot try to develop a gene therapy using this sequence; but I can clearly use the sequence for scientific purposes, i.e. researching Alzheimers disease.
Maybe what you mean is patenting genes which have been artificially modified, e.g. sequences of transgenic enzymes used for research purposes (all those "TM" polymerases and such). In that case the sequence is patented, because it was developed by the company selling it. Since you have usually no access to such sequences, it should not be a problem.
Another idea - if a company sequences a gene, they can keep the sequence and you may not use it if you somehow get you hands at it (I think). But noone can forbid you to sequence the gene for yourself - in fact, that is the case of many bacterial genomes (E. coli has been sequenced several times by different teams, but only one or two sequences were published).
I am no lawyer, so I just present you my general idea of how the things work. I'm not at all sure whether I am right or not.
Hello, my name is January and the group in which I am doing my Ph.D. thesis sequenced in 1996 a bacterial genome (Mycoplasma pneumoniae). Since we are into genomics, transcriptomics and all other -mics I know at least a little about the way it works - although on a much smaller scale.
First issue: could distributed computing help? My answer is a brief "no". First, the bottleneck is on the experimental side - getting the sequences, and not putting them all together. Second, although you need quite a lot of computing power to do so, much of the job must be revised and checked by humans, i.e. there is a lot of skilled manual work to do - you have to have "an eye" for the sequences. But the first point is more important.
Now, TIGR, the commercial alternative to the Humane Genome Project has sequenced more organisms then any other scientific group in the world. Craigg J. Venter seems to be very efficient and hard working guy. Even if you don't like the idea of making money with patents in this area the scientific community owes him a lot - he was the one to sequence the first organism, to sequence Helicobacter pylori and many, many others. On the other side... you know, when M. pneumoniae sequence was about to be published, it was supposed to be the first Mycoplasma sequence. But Venter was faster with Mycoplasma genitalium - and he kept it quiet, so noone involved in sequencing those organisms actually knew there is a race. Now Venter claimed to be able to complete the human genome with much less effort and much less $$, and considerably faster then the HuGeP. I'm not sure whether he is able to do so or not, because it depends chiefly on the "hardware" side - the new Perkin Elmer automatized sequencers they are supposed to use.
Anyway, the question is, whether it is good or bad if Venter sequences the human genome. In my opinion - it's OK. The Hugep is somewhot different in its purely scientific interest, and I'm convinced that they will produce data of much higher quality. On the other hand, human genome has a considerable variation, so two genomes are better then one. I would not be very concerned about the patent issue, because it will come anyway (because of **!'*%$! american and international patent law) - even if TIGR would not sequence the genome, someone takes the output of the HUGEP project and will patent the same sequences Venter would. Venter just wants to gain a little time for evaluating the sequence before releasing it to the public.
And of course, not the _sequences_ are patented - what is patented, is the usage of modification of a certain sequence for medical purposes, or a certain enzyme as an aim in medical treatment.
Although I am just a lamer, a biologist, a computer-zero, I got used to a command line interface and I can't live without it. Although I do know that many of KDE programs have command line options, it is sometimes hard to find them out, due to lack of a man-style, traditional documentation.
I'm therefore a little concerned about how KDE handles the de-facto standards for Linux programs - it seems to me, like, saying: "GUI is the most important thing, and we want it to be "a better Windows".'' Well, I don't. I don't want my rc files look like some Win 3.11 ini files:-) so to say. Don't you feel sometimes that you head for the "more-features-more-gadgets" road? I mean, it's nice to have this or that, but I don't want to abandon what I learned, and I don't want Linux abandon Un*x philosophy, which is, in my eyes, slightly different. A tiny example: why doesn't the commandline from kwm have a history / tab completion / anything that could make it seem a little different than dos?
Note, that I'm using KDE every day and I like it very much. I just - I am just concerned, that's all:-)
You are joking, aren't you? I lived in a country where the goverment controlled communication, information, all the commerce, all the warfare - and it was never able to actually control thoughts. Otherwise, I wouldn't be writing now what I do. Microsoft is very far from that point - believe me, although I think that you have a different perspective.
(uhm... seems I have too much time today... anyway...)
I don't believe in monopolies. Sooner or later it is doomed to crash: I have been living for 17 years in a perfect monopol - everything was run by one and single company, called The Party. Monopols are ineffective, and not stable, although they can persist for a certain period. Even if Microsoft was ten times bigger than it is now, I doubt it could ever monopolize the Internet - for a long time. Imagine the Internet, monopolized by MS, and Linux - coming up, say, five years later. Microsoft, having a perfect monopol, is expensive, really expensive, but its products have an even lower quality than today. In especially, security is a problem. Maybe in America MS stays a monopol for a long time: but in poorer countries, which cannot afford new hardware and $1000 for every update, simple, low-end solutions start to play an important role. The force of natural selection is very harsh, but possible gains are huge: therefore, evolution is quick.
No. I really don't think it could happen. And if it did, it wouldn't last very long.
First - I don't think this is a copyright violation - the book has 235 pages, and only 10% of them are reproduced, which is roughly what you may reproduce from a book or article without permission (as far as I know, of course).
Second, BEWARE. This page is lame - all gifs on a single page, and they are HUGE. For my own purposes I downloaded them with wget, converted to ps and finally produced one single PDF file. You can download it here. This is my student account, and in Germany, so if someone can put it for all the slashdotters in USA on an american server and notify me I would be grateful.
Slashdot Mirror
It ruins my day.
Regards,
January
Well, I was showing off with the greek, I don't speak Greek, knowing only some phrases from ancient Greek and some obscenities from modern Greek... and my Latin is more then miserable, although I can always throw at you some quotes :-)
Regards,
Showingofnuary
P.S. Huc est mens deducta tua, mea Lesbia, culpa atque ita se officio perdidit ipsa suo...
There have been many sf stories referring to le juif errant, Hasver (or Ahasver or Ahasverus: the name is, AFAIR, much younger then the story itself, and I think there were other names and other legends about). There were also many sf stories - e.g. Arkadij and Boris Strugacki or Stanisl/aw Lem.
Regards
January
Tibi et igni,
Januarius Tertius
P.S. Nie ucz pan ojca dzieci robic
P.S.2 I'm sorry, but I don't know Hebrew. Does that mean I'm a whippersneaker, quodque significat?
It is in relation to Executive software.
You don't seriously believe that anyone in the goverment would stop Microsoft from shipping Windows 2000 to Germany, are you?
No, although the Germans keep amazing me. But it gives Microsoft a bad breath. And for us - a brand new little name to call the Windows users: "booooo, ya scientologists!".
Regards,
January
It is in relation to Executive software.
You don't seriously believe that anyone in the goverment would stop Microsoft from shipping Windows 2000 to Germany, are you?
No, although the Germans keep amazing me. But it gives them a bad breath. And for us - a brand new little name to call the Windows users: "booooo, ya scientologists!".
Regards,
January
For me, discovering The Jew (and The Poet), the mystic elements of the story was a wonderful experience. The book got a new dimension: it really showed the authors talent. This repeating leitmotive... the words - "As long as there is a single Jew, there will be someone to mend their tents" - beautiful. This book acomplished a kind of fullness, completeness which is in my eyes reserved for rare pearls of world literature. It's structure resembles a well written piece of classical music, a... well, it must be said: a canticle.
Regards,
January
Regards,
January
P.S. No, I'm not using babelfish. I just speak German and live in Germany.
Excuse me my sarcasm. It's just that inspite that the bandwith is growing, the connections are getting slower - at least where I work. Getting short, simple pages from US lasts longer and longer. It's the same phenomenon that makes each new version of Windows slower in spite of more powerfull computers. Quality does not improve: only the number of gadgets. I'd rather see quick loading of a page without even pictures than a java-live-video-audio-whatever-overloaded page which takes two hours to load.
When I think about it... it's like with buying a new back-pack. You had one which had 60 liters, and it was too small. Then you buy one with 100 liters, and it's still too small - but much heavier then the first one. The same goes for cars. And apartments. And benches in a lab. And money. Woah, I think it's a hardwired feature! I wouldn't be amazed if they found it on the 22 chromosome...
Regards,
January
P.S. It's not a flame. It's a joke.
Regards,
January
Although the malfunctioning genes were quickly eliminated during human evolution (now it changed, because people with even grave diseases can still live or even reproduce), there are some DNA sequences which are more prone to errors during replication than others, due to the DNA chemistry and nature of eukaryotic replication mechanisms. Of course, theoretically such "weak spots" could be eliminated by natural selection - but in most cases probably the enhancements in the repair mechanisms would cost more then a sporadic mutation. Don't forget that natural selection does not act on organisms, but on genes.
Regards,
January
DAMNED!!! Why can't I send a cancel message? :-) I pressed the "Submit" button again! Grrr....
Back to the topic. There are cases, when finding one single disorder which causes one specific disease is easy. There are cases, when you can pin down a certain region - by tracing the genetic tree of the family, whose members have the disease. There are cases, where you are able to tell that - well, there *is* a genetic component of a certain disease. In some cases, you can tell two forms of the disease: a genetically inherited and a genetically independent form (e.g. the early-onset Alzheimers and the age-dependent Alzheimers disease).
There is yet one thing you have to keep in mind: there is no "gene causing disease X". It's rather: "a gene, whose malfunction or absence causes disease X". For example, a single nucleotide substitution can result in a non-active enzyme, or an enzyme with much slower activity. The whole metabolic pathway, to which this enzyme belongs, is hampered. In some cases a heterozygous organism will have another copy of the gene, which will do the job, or do the job at least in a part - and the disease shows fully in homozygous organisms.
Regards,
January
Of course there are some cases when it is known exactly how a genetic disorder causes a certain type of illness - you all know of the Down syndrome, thalassomy, sickle cell anaemia - but there is *a lot* more.
HGP does it by "clone by clone" strategy. That means, the chromosome is cut in smaller pieces, then again in even smaller pieces, the pieces get cloned (cloning in molecular biology means not the Dolly sheep: it means, a certain sequence is inserted into a epigenetic element called plasmid, which itself can propagate and thrive in bacteria), and then sequenced. This is cumbersome and requires a lot of manual work, but it provides unmatched quality of the sequencing.
TIGR adopted another strategy, the so-called shotgun method. In this strategy, you get a sequence, but you have not the slightest idea where from the genome does it come from. Only you when you have a lot of this sequences you can start assembling - using a lot of CPU, trying to match them one to another, like a puzzle, but trickier: a sequence often contains errors, especially at the end (you can only read a couple of hundreds bases, then the signals are to weak and not clear enough). This strategy requires considerably less highly trained man-power: just a lot of technicians and $$ for expensive sequencing machines (which were provided to TIGR by Perkin-Elmer). However, this method has a serious drawback: there are many sequences in the human genome, which are partly, or totally repeated. This repeat elements can be a royal pain in the sequencing project (been there, done that).
It is really a good thing that there are two sequencing project with two different strategies: the comparison between the two sequences could provide an enormous insight into a) quality of the sequencing b) human variablity. Venter from TIGR is definitely an enfant terrible, but I don't think he is one of those corporate Bad Guys (TM), rather one who was fed up with the slow pace of conventional scientific projects. On the other hand, HGP, representing "the slow pace", shows us also why a slow pace is needed sometimes.
Regards,
January
Will this finish a task? No, it is just a beginning - having the sequence, the real work starts: searching ORFs (Open Reading Frames - sequences which could possibly be genes), running database searches, and slowly passing to the most exciting fields of modern molecular biology - from genomics to transcriptomics and proteomics. Transcriptomics is looking for genes, which actually got expressed, and proteomics - similarly, looking for expressed proteins. Making transcription / translation (translation is the process in which proteins get synthetized) profiles can lead us to 1) function of proteins (e.g. protein X. is expressed under this and this conditions, so it must take part in this and this metabolic response) 2) regulation - DNA is a single strand, but various enzymes are present in various copy numbers under various conditions.
Those are enormous projects. A lot of work has to be done before the raw sequence will actually be of any use; nethertheless, it is a milestone of molecular biology and will be a fine achievement for the end of our century.
Another project will be to determine the variability of human genome: screening for different gene allels, mutations etc. This will be one of the most important goals in human genomics in the next few years.
Whats on the catch... erm, chromosome 22? 22 is 33,400,000 bases long (Mycoplasma pneumoniae, one of the smallest bacteriums, has about 816,394 bases). It contains several already known genes responsible for various genetic disorders, and possibly a gene responsible for certain types of schizophrenia.
By the way, a much better source of information is the Nature science update page - the original scientific publication has been published today in Nature.
Regards,
January
Basic ecology says that sooner or later there will be much to many Earth inhabitants; rather sooner, though. And when an ecological niche is filled up, the natural selection strenghtens: for us, that means wars, famine, diseases, basically - call me Kasandra - the end of the european civilization. We could expand our niche if we start it doing early enough... but I'm pessimistic whether this is possible: unless someone will actually make money with sending people to a Mars collony there will never be money for it.
A mission to Mars is nevertheless possible; and I will sign this petition - maybe it works, who knows? I still dream about pigs... ops. humans in space.
Regards,
January
I got a new NT box serving only as a control unit to some sophisticated biological device. Not only is the keyboard cruelly castrated by Dell (halved "Enter" key, so I constantly push "backspace"), but the UI is more then s*wed, its badly sc*wed. You have to use mouse, even though most of your actions is typing data into a spreadsheet - sorry, to go from one cell to another you have move you mouse, push one of that buttons, then a pop-up menu comes, then you have to click with the mouse pointer in the only input field (otherwise press tab three times), and type in the data. I mean, OK, I am stupid, I am a biologist, but what do they take me for? A four year old AOL user?
Regards,
January
It seems that the development of such tools is more evolved than you'd expect. One of the research centers mentioned in the article is the MIT's Media Laboratory. You can find more information on the ML projects here. The lab is working also on some other futuristic projects: wearable computers, software algorythms for recognizing photographs and other.
Regards,
January
Look, imagine someone patented the modifications of the xxx gene as a target for gene therapy of early-onset Alzheimer. Of course I cannot try to develop a gene therapy using this sequence; but I can clearly use the sequence for scientific purposes, i.e. researching Alzheimers disease.
Maybe what you mean is patenting genes which have been artificially modified, e.g. sequences of transgenic enzymes used for research purposes (all those "TM" polymerases and such). In that case the sequence is patented, because it was developed by the company selling it. Since you have usually no access to such sequences, it should not be a problem.
Another idea - if a company sequences a gene, they can keep the sequence and you may not use it if you somehow get you hands at it (I think). But noone can forbid you to sequence the gene for yourself - in fact, that is the case of many bacterial genomes (E. coli has been sequenced several times by different teams, but only one or two sequences were published).
I am no lawyer, so I just present you my general idea of how the things work. I'm not at all sure whether I am right or not.
Regards,
January
First issue: could distributed computing help? My answer is a brief "no". First, the bottleneck is on the experimental side - getting the sequences, and not putting them all together. Second, although you need quite a lot of computing power to do so, much of the job must be revised and checked by humans, i.e. there is a lot of skilled manual work to do - you have to have "an eye" for the sequences. But the first point is more important.
Now, TIGR, the commercial alternative to the Humane Genome Project has sequenced more organisms then any other scientific group in the world. Craigg J. Venter seems to be very efficient and hard working guy. Even if you don't like the idea of making money with patents in this area the scientific community owes him a lot - he was the one to sequence the first organism, to sequence Helicobacter pylori and many, many others. On the other side... you know, when M. pneumoniae sequence was about to be published, it was supposed to be the first Mycoplasma sequence. But Venter was faster with Mycoplasma genitalium - and he kept it quiet, so noone involved in sequencing those organisms actually knew there is a race. Now Venter claimed to be able to complete the human genome with much less effort and much less $$, and considerably faster then the HuGeP. I'm not sure whether he is able to do so or not, because it depends chiefly on the "hardware" side - the new Perkin Elmer automatized sequencers they are supposed to use.
Anyway, the question is, whether it is good or bad if Venter sequences the human genome. In my opinion - it's OK. The Hugep is somewhot different in its purely scientific interest, and I'm convinced that they will produce data of much higher quality. On the other hand, human genome has a considerable variation, so two genomes are better then one. I would not be very concerned about the patent issue, because it will come anyway (because of **!'*%$! american and international patent law) - even if TIGR would not sequence the genome, someone takes the output of the HUGEP project and will patent the same sequences Venter would. Venter just wants to gain a little time for evaluating the sequence before releasing it to the public.
And of course, not the _sequences_ are patented - what is patented, is the usage of modification of a certain sequence for medical purposes, or a certain enzyme as an aim in medical treatment.
Regards,
January
1. Linux, as far as I know, did not start as a "the FSF's GNU project".
2. Linux, AFAIK is not a "reverse engineered Unix clone".
Besides, I think the article is a little too hurra-optimistic.
Regards,
January
I'm therefore a little concerned about how KDE handles the de-facto standards for Linux programs - it seems to me, like, saying: "GUI is the most important thing, and we want it to be "a better Windows".'' Well, I don't. I don't want my rc files look like some Win 3.11 ini files :-) so to say. Don't you feel sometimes that you head for the "more-features-more-gadgets" road? I mean, it's nice to have this or that, but I don't want to abandon what I learned, and I don't want Linux abandon Un*x philosophy, which is, in my eyes, slightly different. A tiny example: why doesn't the commandline from kwm have a history / tab completion / anything that could make it seem a little different than dos?
Note, that I'm using KDE every day and I like it very much. I just - I am just concerned, that's all :-)
Regards,
January
Regards,
January
I don't believe in monopolies. Sooner or later it is doomed to crash: I have been living for 17 years in a perfect monopol - everything was run by one and single company, called The Party. Monopols are ineffective, and not stable, although they can persist for a certain period. Even if Microsoft was ten times bigger than it is now, I doubt it could ever monopolize the Internet - for a long time. Imagine the Internet, monopolized by MS, and Linux - coming up, say, five years later. Microsoft, having a perfect monopol, is expensive, really expensive, but its products have an even lower quality than today. In especially, security is a problem. Maybe in America MS stays a monopol for a long time: but in poorer countries, which cannot afford new hardware and $1000 for every update, simple, low-end solutions start to play an important role. The force of natural selection is very harsh, but possible gains are huge: therefore, evolution is quick.
No. I really don't think it could happen. And if it did, it wouldn't last very long.
I think I am in an optimistic mood today...
Regards,
January
Second, BEWARE. This page is lame - all gifs on a single page, and they are HUGE. For my own purposes I downloaded them with wget, converted to ps and finally produced one single PDF file. You can download it here. This is my student account, and in Germany, so if someone can put it for all the slashdotters in USA on an american server and notify me I would be grateful.
Regards,
January