useless advice, of course, since they're not selling them, but that plus a usb-connectable dvd drive would be what you're looking for, if you can deal with a small, funky keyboard. Maybe you can get one off ebay? Install Xubuntu on a 16GB SD card, and you'd have the light, cheap, indestructible computer of your dreams. Sunlight readable screen, too. I use mine on the beach on Southern California, and blowing sand doesn't get into it either.
Other than that, you are very out of luck. I *carefully* transported a Toshiba and, later, a Sony Vaio to and from work on a bicycle. It was in a padded case, the roads were all smooth blacktop, and the rest of the time it was having a quiet life on a desk or at home. The Sony needed the hard disk replaced in about four months. The Toshiba developed screen problems because of a loose connection after about three months. These were newish laptops. The problems were due to shaking, not old age.
If you can't get an olpc, maybe get two Eee's and make arrangements to have the second one sent to you when the first one craps out.
Seriously, sperm contributes some information on the developmental process, besides the plain old DNA. The technical term for the developmental "recipe book" is imprinting. The egg has most of it, but sperm has what's increaasingly looking like a critical part that is not duplicated by the egg.
What it means is that trying to clone a human with the female or the male part of the "recipe" missing is very likely to end in nonfunctional messes. Unlike the equivalent case in a sheep or a mouse though, there are some major issues with just offing the "mistake" and starting over.
48% with some funny business, as reported in the NSF study, sounds about right to me.
I'm a biologist, went through the whole Pile Higher and Deeper thing, taught for decades, did research, yadda, yadda, yadda. A lot of that 48% is really minor stuff that wouldn't alter the results. The vast majority of scientists are astonishingly honest, given that the whole thing is run on the honor system.
But based on my personal experience, I'd guess that around 10%-15% is really major: ripping off grad students, postdocs, untenured faculty; real falsification of data; and that kind of thing. Power is the first principal component in who gets away with cheating and who doesn't.
It's not peer review that needs fixing so much as the power relationships in the system. Enough with the absolute serfdom of the lower echelons. Nobody, including migrant fruit pickers, should be treated like migrant fruit pickers. Have peer review be *double* blind, not single blind. (Right now, the submitter doesn't know who is doing the reviews, but the reviewers know who the author is. People at, say, Yale, get astonishingly good reviews astonishingly often.) And so on.
For some reason, the people who hold all the power in the current system are dead against any reforms that will actually make a difference.
I got one of these Dec 21st, and the whole rest of my life has disappeared while I play with it. Very addictive little machine.
I have Xubuntu on it in a dual boot system, with ubuntu on an SD card. Followed moocapiean's directions. Works great. No glitches.
So, as for it being hackable, I'd say that it's easy to *change*, in ways it wasn't originally intended to run. You don't have to break anything to do that, so maybe it's not strictly speaking hackable. But then, nothing open source is hackable.
without a second thought. On a Borg product, you'd have to turn me into one of the Collective first... and even then you might have to kill me before you could get my finger to push the send button.
It's called trust. It's free too. Free as in priceless.
Man. Ain't that the truth. I saw, I think, one comment mentioning Obama, none about Clinton, Edwards, Romney, Huckabee. I'm scanning this thread, looking for some actual information. Except for the person upthread who told us to RTFM by going to the candidates voting records (true, but not helpful), I haven't seen anything yet. Inquiring minds want to know. Will now continue scanning down...
EXACTLY! BBC is taxpayer-supported and should be taxpayer-accessible! If they exclude people because they're not important enough, can those taxpayers also decide not to pay the BBC part of their taxes?
Government entities don't and shouldn't run by the same rules as a business.
Have to agree with this particular AnonCoward. It makes no sense to this biologist either.
Viral, bacterial, or any other genetic material is too similar to the host's when you're talking about mechanical disruption. There's no way to destroy one and not the other.
What's unique about viruses in this context is their coat (capsid) which has a very precise structure. It's different enough from anything else and I could imagine it shattering and nothing else being damaged. If this was somehow (as people have pointed out, that would require magic!) being done in a live person, the immune system would attack the broken particles. Hopefully, it would get them all. If not... see next....
If it was happening in blood filtration, I'd think you'd have to figure out some way of removing the bits and pieces. Virus particles do self-assemble. And evolution being what it is, this would be a good way of selecting for viruses that are particularly good at self-assembling.
Haven't used anything but OO in years, but always have to save in doc because everything I do has to go electronically to someone sooner or later. And so many people panic when faced with anything except.doc that it's just easier to save everything that way. I'd drop the stupid format in a minute, if I could. Messes up my headers & pagination.
As for the gent who won't support anything but.doc: if his company had competition that was less arrogant, they'd get my business, even if I do save in.doc.
Honestly. Verizon even said that they never checked the legality. I'm sure they'd have the same attitude if I spied on my sister because "my brother-in-law made me do it."
Only I thought we were going to have to wait till they did it with telescopes in orbit. So when are they publishing the pictures after all the data is combined? Huh? When?
That's funny, which is how I assume he meant it. As a serious statement, it would be totally laughable except that a few people who know even less are going to say, "Ooh, Freeman Dyson. Must be good."
Like the commenter above said, biologists are just mixing and matching from organisms and hoping for the best. A simple regulatory cascade involves around sixty (60) proteins, and biologists have only the vaguest ideas about how to manipulate the process. And that's a big step up from even three years ago. Really. They have barely a clue. As a biologist who's taught college for decades, really, it's true.
Life was never "open source" in Dyson's sense. Horizontal gene transfer is always a rare event, even more so in multicellular eukaryotic organisms like, say, vertebrates or trees. Natural selection has always and will always operate because in order to survive, creatures have to be able to produce lots of offspring. However, there's not enough resources for all of them, and the ones less able to use the resources die. This would be true of any life, anywhere. It's not limited to Earth. Kind of like the speed of light is the same everywhere, and gravity operates everywhere.
Sure, people will get better and better at genetic engineering and biotech. And a good thing, too. Paralysis will become a thing of the past, as will blindness and failing organs. That's great. But it's not going to change life itself.
Journals charging for scientific content is piracy, in the real sense of the word. Consider:
--almost all scientific work that appears in journals like Nature or Science has been done on government grants. You already paid once.
--page charges are included in most grant funding. The author pays the journal so much per page of his/her article to cover the journal's costs. The journal not only doesn't pay the author(s), it RECEIVES payment from the author. You, once again, have paid for that.
--The journal then charges you for the content. That's the third time you're paying for it.
The amount they charge is non-trivial. $30 / per electronic copy in Nature's case, for instance. The cost to them is whatever that space on their server costs. A tenth of a cent, perhaps? (The other aspects of their costs they've already been paid for a couple of times.)
It's about bloody time they published ALL their articles under CC. The commenter who said scientific work is about open and free access has it absolutely right. Anything less than that is indeed not science.
Ah yes, the dictatorship of a few scientists who "believe" in gravity, a spherical Earth, and the insane notion that the Earth circles the sun when you can SEE that it doesn't. How we all suffer.
Memo to V. Klaus: you're not entitled to your own facts. And when reality has a politically inconvenient bias, that's just tough, you know?
Man, what a step down from Vaclav Havel. Possibly if the goofball took up smoking it would realign his little grey cells.
The studies are not flawed, have been repeated with the same results so many times I've lost track, and refer to an actual cognitive impairment that has nothing to do with hands-free sets, eating french fries, or listening to the radio. We're social animals and our brains are wired to give social interaction priority.
The two couldn't be in conflict in the good old Paleolithic because if you were doing something where your life was at stake and that required total concentration everybody with you was in the same situation. You wouldn't be avoiding leopards while one guy yakked on about the good time he'd had last night. That's also why talking to a passenger in the car is different. If there's a red light coming up and you're not stopping for it, the passenger will either stop talking or say something about it (according to taste).
What the neurological scans show under simulated driving conditions with actual cell phone usage is that the areas of the brain being used are different when listening to the radio or talking to passengers. Decision-making and processing areas are devoted to the cell phone conversation first, the driving second. The closest analogy is being drunk, even though that feels very different. The effect of not having your brain in gear for the task at hand is similar though.
1) What he said: minimal forms have been known for a while.
2) Artificial genomes have been made before, both bacterial artificial chromosomes (BACs) and yeast artificial chromosomes (YACs). This is by people who've actually made these things, not just thought it would be a neat idea.
3) Patenting vague obvious ideas (and this idea is obvious if you have any background in the field) is exactly what Verizon is trying to do by claiming to have patented the concept of voip on a phone. It's also what the Supremes just kicked back in some other case.
4) I'm not sure why the Venter is calling it "synthetic" life when all he's done is crib liberally from an existing organism.
5) This type of crap seems to be a pattern of practice with him. When he so-called sequenced the human genome, he just sequenced all the bits. That's not actually that hard. He used the Human Genome Project's chromosome maps to make any sense of it. That's what takes 90% of the work, computers, and brain power. What Venter did was like picking up the pieces of a shredded phone book, and telling people they could now find any number they wanted.
... too that. Make up your goddamn minds. For science, as it happens, I've been impressed as hell with Wikipedia. Whether it's my own field (evolutionary biology), a related field (eg gene regulation), or something I'm clueless about (eg quantum chromodynamics), the explanations are clear and factually accurate. No, it doesn't replace scientific journals. And, no, it doesn't replace the Golden Guide to Cats.
Slashdot Mirror
Only for men. You'll notice the gender of the bright wits doing the "research."
Why wasn't this published in the Journal of Irreproducible Results? Why?
then it's not about you. This sounds like it's all about guys getting more replies so they can try for the next step.
So what's in it for her?
useless advice, of course, since they're not selling them, but that plus a usb-connectable dvd drive would be what you're looking for, if you can deal with a small, funky keyboard. Maybe you can get one off ebay? Install Xubuntu on a 16GB SD card, and you'd have the light, cheap, indestructible computer of your dreams. Sunlight readable screen, too. I use mine on the beach on Southern California, and blowing sand doesn't get into it either.
Other than that, you are very out of luck. I *carefully* transported a Toshiba and, later, a Sony Vaio to and from work on a bicycle. It was in a padded case, the roads were all smooth blacktop, and the rest of the time it was having a quiet life on a desk or at home. The Sony needed the hard disk replaced in about four months. The Toshiba developed screen problems because of a loose connection after about three months. These were newish laptops. The problems were due to shaking, not old age.
If you can't get an olpc, maybe get two Eee's and make arrangements to have the second one sent to you when the first one craps out.
Seriously, sperm contributes some information on the developmental process, besides the plain old DNA. The technical term for the developmental "recipe book" is imprinting. The egg has most of it, but sperm has what's increaasingly looking like a critical part that is not duplicated by the egg.
What it means is that trying to clone a human with the female or the male part of the "recipe" missing is very likely to end in nonfunctional messes. Unlike the equivalent case in a sheep or a mouse though, there are some major issues with just offing the "mistake" and starting over.
48% with some funny business, as reported in the NSF study, sounds about right to me.
I'm a biologist, went through the whole Pile Higher and Deeper thing, taught for decades, did research, yadda, yadda, yadda. A lot of that 48% is really minor stuff that wouldn't alter the results. The vast majority of scientists are astonishingly honest, given that the whole thing is run on the honor system.
But based on my personal experience, I'd guess that around 10%-15% is really major: ripping off grad students, postdocs, untenured faculty; real falsification of data; and that kind of thing. Power is the first principal component in who gets away with cheating and who doesn't.
It's not peer review that needs fixing so much as the power relationships in the system. Enough with the absolute serfdom of the lower echelons. Nobody, including migrant fruit pickers, should be treated like migrant fruit pickers. Have peer review be *double* blind, not single blind. (Right now, the submitter doesn't know who is doing the reviews, but the reviewers know who the author is. People at, say, Yale, get astonishingly good reviews astonishingly often.) And so on.
For some reason, the people who hold all the power in the current system are dead against any reforms that will actually make a difference.
That's all. You know what to do.
I got one of these Dec 21st, and the whole rest of my life has disappeared while I play with it. Very addictive little machine.
I have Xubuntu on it in a dual boot system, with ubuntu on an SD card. Followed moocapiean's directions. Works great. No glitches.
So, as for it being hackable, I'd say that it's easy to *change*, in ways it wasn't originally intended to run. You don't have to break anything to do that, so maybe it's not strictly speaking hackable. But then, nothing open source is hackable.
Depends on your definition hackable.
without a second thought. On a Borg product, you'd have to turn me into one of the Collective first ... and even then you might have to kill me before you could get my finger to push the send button.
It's called trust. It's free too. Free as in priceless.
Man. Ain't that the truth. I saw, I think, one comment mentioning Obama, none about Clinton, Edwards, Romney, Huckabee. I'm scanning this thread, looking for some actual information. Except for the person upthread who told us to RTFM by going to the candidates voting records (true, but not helpful), I haven't seen anything yet. Inquiring minds want to know. Will now continue scanning down...
EXACTLY! BBC is taxpayer-supported and should be taxpayer-accessible! If they exclude people because they're not important enough, can those taxpayers also decide not to pay the BBC part of their taxes?
Government entities don't and shouldn't run by the same rules as a business.
Have to agree with this particular AnonCoward. It makes no sense to this biologist either.
... see next ....
Viral, bacterial, or any other genetic material is too similar to the host's when you're talking about mechanical disruption. There's no way to destroy one and not the other.
What's unique about viruses in this context is their coat (capsid) which has a very precise structure. It's different enough from anything else and I could imagine it shattering and nothing else being damaged. If this was somehow (as people have pointed out, that would require magic!) being done in a live person, the immune system would attack the broken particles. Hopefully, it would get them all. If not
If it was happening in blood filtration, I'd think you'd have to figure out some way of removing the bits and pieces. Virus particles do self-assemble. And evolution being what it is, this would be a good way of selecting for viruses that are particularly good at self-assembling.
That would be a Bad Thing.
Haven't used anything but OO in years, but always have to save in doc because everything I do has to go electronically to someone sooner or later. And so many people panic when faced with anything except .doc that it's just easier to save everything that way. I'd drop the stupid format in a minute, if I could. Messes up my headers & pagination.
.doc: if his company had competition that was less arrogant, they'd get my business, even if I do save in .doc.
As for the gent who won't support anything but
Honestly. Verizon even said that they never checked the legality. I'm sure they'd have the same attitude if I spied on my sister because "my brother-in-law made me do it."
Idiots.
Venal idiots.
Venal, cowardly, criminal idiots.
Only I thought we were going to have to wait till they did it with telescopes in orbit. So when are they publishing the pictures after all the data is combined? Huh? When?
paypalsucks.
Seconded! Or, considering that this is /., probably millionthed.
they're not stupid
That's funny, which is how I assume he meant it. As a serious statement, it would be totally laughable except that a few people who know even less are going to say, "Ooh, Freeman Dyson. Must be good."
Like the commenter above said, biologists are just mixing and matching from organisms and hoping for the best. A simple regulatory cascade involves around sixty (60) proteins, and biologists have only the vaguest ideas about how to manipulate the process. And that's a big step up from even three years ago. Really. They have barely a clue. As a biologist who's taught college for decades, really, it's true.
Life was never "open source" in Dyson's sense. Horizontal gene transfer is always a rare event, even more so in multicellular eukaryotic organisms like, say, vertebrates or trees. Natural selection has always and will always operate because in order to survive, creatures have to be able to produce lots of offspring. However, there's not enough resources for all of them, and the ones less able to use the resources die. This would be true of any life, anywhere. It's not limited to Earth. Kind of like the speed of light is the same everywhere, and gravity operates everywhere.
Sure, people will get better and better at genetic engineering and biotech. And a good thing, too. Paralysis will become a thing of the past, as will blindness and failing organs. That's great. But it's not going to change life itself.
Journals charging for scientific content is piracy, in the real sense of the word. Consider:
--almost all scientific work that appears in journals like Nature or Science has been done on government grants. You already paid once.
--page charges are included in most grant funding. The author pays the journal so much per page of his/her article to cover the journal's costs. The journal not only doesn't pay the author(s), it RECEIVES payment from the author. You, once again, have paid for that.
--The journal then charges you for the content. That's the third time you're paying for it.
The amount they charge is non-trivial. $30 / per electronic copy in Nature's case, for instance. The cost to them is whatever that space on their server costs. A tenth of a cent, perhaps? (The other aspects of their costs they've already been paid for a couple of times.)
It's about bloody time they published ALL their articles under CC. The commenter who said scientific work is about open and free access has it absolutely right. Anything less than that is indeed not science.
Ah yes, the dictatorship of a few scientists who "believe" in gravity, a spherical Earth, and the insane notion that the Earth circles the sun when you can SEE that it doesn't. How we all suffer.
Memo to V. Klaus: you're not entitled to your own facts. And when reality has a politically inconvenient bias, that's just tough, you know?
Man, what a step down from Vaclav Havel. Possibly if the goofball took up smoking it would realign his little grey cells.
The studies are not flawed, have been repeated with the same results so many times I've lost track, and refer to an actual cognitive impairment that has nothing to do with hands-free sets, eating french fries, or listening to the radio. We're social animals and our brains are wired to give social interaction priority.
The two couldn't be in conflict in the good old Paleolithic because if you were doing something where your life was at stake and that required total concentration everybody with you was in the same situation. You wouldn't be avoiding leopards while one guy yakked on about the good time he'd had last night. That's also why talking to a passenger in the car is different. If there's a red light coming up and you're not stopping for it, the passenger will either stop talking or say something about it (according to taste).
What the neurological scans show under simulated driving conditions with actual cell phone usage is that the areas of the brain being used are different when listening to the radio or talking to passengers. Decision-making and processing areas are devoted to the cell phone conversation first, the driving second. The closest analogy is being drunk, even though that feels very different. The effect of not having your brain in gear for the task at hand is similar though.
So now the "free" market gets us a WORSE deal? Wow. Who'da thunk it?
1) What he said: minimal forms have been known for a while.
2) Artificial genomes have been made before, both bacterial artificial chromosomes (BACs) and yeast artificial chromosomes (YACs). This is by people who've actually made these things, not just thought it would be a neat idea.
3) Patenting vague obvious ideas (and this idea is obvious if you have any background in the field) is exactly what Verizon is trying to do by claiming to have patented the concept of voip on a phone. It's also what the Supremes just kicked back in some other case.
4) I'm not sure why the Venter is calling it "synthetic" life when all he's done is crib liberally from an existing organism.
5) This type of crap seems to be a pattern of practice with him. When he so-called sequenced the human genome, he just sequenced all the bits. That's not actually that hard. He used the Human Genome Project's chromosome maps to make any sense of it. That's what takes 90% of the work, computers, and brain power. What Venter did was like picking up the pieces of a shredded phone book, and telling people they could now find any number they wanted.
The man seems to be a bit of a toxic doofus.
... too that. Make up your goddamn minds. For science, as it happens, I've been impressed as hell with Wikipedia. Whether it's my own field (evolutionary biology), a related field (eg gene regulation), or something I'm clueless about (eg quantum chromodynamics), the explanations are clear and factually accurate. No, it doesn't replace scientific journals. And, no, it doesn't replace the Golden Guide to Cats.
To the editor of Wired: Get a life.