Posts by Tony Haines
22 posts • joined Tuesday 12th June 2007 17:00 GMT
the bin
It does seem a funny name for the front page.
Re: Nukular material
Reminds me of Mr Burns' Grandfather:
"Come on, come on! Crack those atoms! You, turn out your pockets. (worker does so) Atoms! (counts them) One, two three, four… six of them! Take him away!"
Re: And this is why...
" For example: you may let the BBC use your picture but refuse it to the Daily Mail. The next day you change your mind about The Daily Mail. You cannot do this with a restrictive CC license. The whole point is to make a sacrifice "for the good of the commons", aka, The Greater Good."
Um, what Creative Commons licence is it that precludes you (as the copyright holder) giving out other licences?
Looking at the Creative Commons website, at page creativecommons.org/licenses/ :
"CC BY-NC-ND
This license is the most restrictive of our six main licenses, only allowing others to download your works and share them with others as long as they credit you, but they can’t change them in any way or use them commercially."
And in the licence deed for that :
"Waiver — Any of the above conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder."
Or did you mean some other 'CC'?
Or did you mean that you can't change your mind after licensing something with a *less* restrictive CC licence? (And also mean "you may let the BBC use your picture *and also* the Daily Mail.")
"The model lamented the lack of big stick under local law for snapping people's privates."
Am I alone in thinking that's a little bit harsh?
Precidence not necessary
The thing is, this is regarding a trade-mark, not a patent. The rules are different.
Trademarks apparently don't require precidence - how else would someone be able to trademark "Keep calm and carry on"?
However, I am not a lawyer; I don't know whether what Games Workshop have allow them to block books with those words in the title.
Posted in Squillions of bytes in one cup of DNA
Re: Has nobody thoughtof the children?
"Frivolity aside, couldn't they have used some other protein sequence to achieve the same effect?"
Theoretically perhaps, but practically using proteins has some issues.
1) Protein sequencing isn't anywhere near the same league as DNA sequencing. We can just about determine the sequence of a few residues from one end of a protein. If it's pure.
2) Proteins often don't store well. DNA in dry form stores really well.
3) In-vitro protein synthesis is not easy. The usual way to get a protein sample is to produce a gene encoding it then put it in an organism which will make it for you. Then extract and purify it.
So apart from writing, reading and the wait in between it's a potentially effective approach.
To answer what I think was your real concern, creating what is to a cell essentially random DNA really isn't a big risk. Apart from that, the paper isn't about storing information in living cells, all the above comments notwithstanding.
Re: WTF?
I don't understand why he didn't use time along the x axis and coloured lines for the different catagories.
Clever
If they get enough traffic through the 'contact us' captcha, they won't need to hire anyone to provide the service.
worker bees not identical sisters
"The whole hive of honeybees are genetically identical sisters..."
I believe this is not actually true.
Worker bees (and the queen) are diploids, meaning that they have two sets of chromosomes. But - the way the workers are generated involves a haploid (single set of chromosomes) egg being fertilised by a haploid sperm.
Chromosomes are allocated at random to eggs, and generally there's at least one cross-over involved between each pair.
Therefore the worker-bees are presumably not genetically identical.
(The same assortment process also occurs in spermatozoa in many species, but not honey bees; drone (male) bees are haploid so all sperm must carry the same set.)
HTH.
Re: I for one would welcome....
I'm thinking that the easiest way of reducing the bug-introduction rate would be to put more statements on each line.
Somehow you miss titles when they're gone.
Olympic gold medals are made of steel now?
Oh oo oooh!
I so want this certificate!
It'd look great on my CV.
I'm sure I could ace the test first time - I've been practicing my observing through bus windows skills.
Posted in Red Hat Enterprise clone poised to 'die'
Hmmm.
It's more likely that he's been disappeared by the FBI, at the bequest of the mayor of Tuttle City.
phff.
Phoible. (foi-bell) n. A weakness for spelling words in a whimsical manner.
Re: Moore's law?
Nexox Enigma,
didn't you hear that China's first CPU had six million crystal tubes?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/09/30/six_million_crystal_tubes/
Posted in Lords debate airline liquids ban
Title
I went to Taiwan earlier in the year, and experienced the ridiculousness of the regulations.
At the time (and as far as I know, these rules haven't changed) you were allowed to take liquids (and gels etc) in bottles with individual capacity no more than 100ml in a transparent zip-lock bag, with a max capacity of 1 litre. Part-full containers in excess of 100ml are not permitted, which ignores the fact all passengers now have a transparent zip-lock bag with a capacity of 1 l.
Strictly speaking the rules don't say anything about solids, so technically you should be able to freeze anything you want to take on. But I wouldn't trust them to follow the letter of the law in that case.
What isn't really considered in all the above about the liquids rules is the many other stupidities of the system. For example, at Birmingham airport we were told you are not allowed knives or imitation weapons, carefully searched and went past a big glass display-case of the penknives and toy guns they've taken off people. Well, OK. I think it has been pointed out before that the snaking back and forth line of people waiting to get through this heightened security makes a new target.
Then we got to the secure area, where you can buy a meal which is served with a metal knife and fork. You then have a good hour or two to sharpen them before you get on the plane (without any further security checks).
Quantum computing?
It'll all end in tears, mark my words...
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v448/n7152/pdf/448510a.pdf
comment title required indeed.
I'm with Marvin. Just paint your rusty old laptop with hammerite.
Hey...
The mountains in those two pictures in the article are different. I think they went to the wrong place the second time. Mystery solved.
Use a proper unit.
Football, soccer, whatever - as people have pointed out, the pitch isn't precisely defined, so it isn't a good unit of measurement.
Therefore, I've converted it into something more useful.
The lake was 1.95 to 2.34 micro-areas-the-size-of-Wales.
Hope this helps.
so.
RE:probably not legal in many countries
They're modifying the yeast. Genetically modified, but it is still yeast. Since they're not even putting a working gene in, it won't change the yeasts properties (unless they insert their watermark sequence into something important).
Whether they'll allow genetically modified whatever is another matter.
RE: Unique DNA
The sequence of DNA in an organism may be unique or not. Since yeast is asexual (mostly), the descendants of a cell are identical, barring the odd mutation. If I took some of your yeast culture it would have the same sequence (if anyone went to the considerable expense of sequencing both strains). But so would your grandmothers culture, and anyone else's she'd given it to.
So someone might claim to have the same strain independently. If you can modify the DNA sequence of your special strain in a proveable way, then you can clearly prove that they got it from you.
Whether this matters legally may or may not make a difference.
