* Posts by E

573 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Jun 2007

Page:

Missing DNA fails to kill mice

E

Wooly headed.

"The biggest question the research raises is that of how these sections of DNA came to be perfectly preserved, if they are not vital to the viability of the animal? The researchers are not entirely sure."

Not being vital to viability ***is not*** the criteria for natural selection. Being beneficial (conversely, detrimental) to reproduction ***is*** the criteria for natural selection. These are two different things.

Evolution says that heritable mutations that make successful reproduction more likely will tend to be preserved. It is easy to see that heritable mutations that are detrimental to successful reproduction will tend to be eliminated.

Irrelevant DNA has no reproductive effect and therefore may or may not be eliminated over time. *Whether* some irrelevant DNA persists is not governed by natural selection, is not an evolutionary process - it is just dumb chance without selection.

The DNA described has no effect... there's no reason for it to be preserved *or* for it to be bred out.

The opening quote merely demonstrates wooly-headed thinking: the common mistake that evolution has intent or style or a goal. Evolution has none of these.

E

@Exactly the point...

Historically, the theory about ultraconserved strings of DNA is about three years old, and in no way proven outside of the minds of some dogmatic people who want it to be true.

"ultraconserved" probably made a fine zinger to promote some geneticists' grant application or sell her/his book. Still, it is just an unproven theory.

The people that did this experiment kind of put the cart before the horse in their comments wrt their statement about the result, as do most of the people commenting here.

What you have here is some indication of the correctness of the theory. Nothing more or less than that.

Apple slashes iPhone prices

E

so?

This is not a story. This is normal business practice. If the author has an issue with Jobs or Apple, then the author should just publish a story with headline "I have an issue with jobs".

When AMD brought out the Athlon MP I was psyched. I ran out and spent about $3K to put together a dual 1.2GHz (1.2GHz, not 1200+) dual CPU rig. Likely it was one of the first in Canada. It rocked, I was happy. I certainly did not whine when 6 or 8 weeks later the price had dropped considerably. I knew what I wanted and I paid for it. AMD had no contract with me to protect my l33t status, I did not expect that of AMD.

Grow up, you whiners.

XenSource dishes embedded hypervisor to OEMs

E

Whither the GPL?

Like the subject sez.

Raygun 747 test will be delayed, hints Boeing

E

@C&Cs tend to be tougher than...

"Have you seen any enemies physically deny us the ability to fly planes with bombs over their targets recently?"

Well no, but then again, you've been fighting either a 3rd world country (Afghanistan) with no indigenous industrial/technological capacity to speak of, or 2nd world countries (Iraq) which industrial/technological capacity was systematically reduced during the course of a 12 year air war - 1991 to 1993. In 1991 and 1993 neither country had any military capacity to speak of. Yeah, they didn't oppose. So what?

If the USA fought a country with simliar industrial/technical capacity it would be a somewhat different story.

You're really just wanking.

Pentagon: Chinese military hacked us

E

@A better way...

No, just disconnect the Pentagon. It amazes me that a target like the pentagon is connected al the time to the Internet. Why not hang a sign out announcing "Here we are, come f**k with our network!"

Email's important, but have they never heard of UUCP? Even Exchange can use UUCP, no? If they don't use Exchange they should: whenever the Sec of Defense or Prez needs to 'lose' an email message, they can blame it's loss quite plausibly on Exchange.

But, more likely, the Pentagon and Executive share a squirrel(ly)mail server with the CIA!

China looking to develop scramjet missile tech

E

re: shubin

"...US foreign policy has created a political environment that has resulted in the first Chinese-Russian mutual defense treaty ever (giving the Chinese first access to Russian weapons, research and technology)..."

Hmmm, I seem to recall such a treaty in the 50's (maybe 40's) between Stalin's USSR and Mao's China. It was based largely on Communist fellow feeling, but it didn't last very long.

That aside, I think you are mostly on the money with the comment about transfer of technology.

However to say that the USA created a Chinese tail is giving too little credit to the Chinese. The Chinese clawed their way back over the past five decades from some 150 years of foreign harrassment, colonialism, exploitation and occupation - they did much of that in the 50's, 60's & 70's in the face of hostility from the USA *and* USSR. Much historical evidence indicates that before about 1750 and damage from large scale contact with the west and then Japan, China produced the bulk of finished non-military goods on the planet. And, WTH, China has existed approximately 10 times longer than the United States anyway!

E

WRT Aussies

A few of their women are OK, but on the whole I agree. Perhaps disposable scram jets could be developed that disintegrate after landing in Australia.

Cops cuff man for burning Burning Man man

E

What is a Morissette a measure of?

Like the subject says!

Pesky hack divulges Intel's 'Project Copy Hypertransport'

E

Arrrggghhh, ya Intel/AMD fanboies!

Who really gives a d*mn about Itanium anyway? I certainly don't care if CSI hurts Itanium and I know my neighbours are not too worried either. Really, Intel just keeps Itanium around because it's a good internal pork barrel for research money... probably a nice tax loss too.

Or.... maybe CSI is a straw man designed to distract people when AMD drops Barcelona next months and activates it's secret plan to transform Intel into a BOLUS OF BLOOD AND SILICON GREASE and throw that bolus onto the ash heap of history! Aaahhaaahhhaahh!

Seriously, though, nifty as all this computational power is, does anyone besides eng/sci researchers and FPS game developers have a real use for it?

There is some stuff floating about the web that strongly suggests CSI will work best in 2 to 8 CPU configurations, so really it just means Intel may compete better against AMD in the 4+ CPU server market. I definitely wouldn't mind seeing the price of quad CPU servers drop like dual CPU server prices have in the past 5 years. I work with physicists, they are always calculating horribly abstruse sums and redlining the CPUs in their dualie boxes. I'd love to offer them four or eight quad core CPU boxes at a good price.

US Customs gets kill-droids for Caribbean

E

No, no, it's all about extraordinary rendition

Two tonnes capacity would let them move logs, excuse me, lots, of political prisoners, ahem, 'illegal combatants' to and from Guantanomo and bases on the mainland, excuse me homeland (or is that fatherland) with pretty much zero likelyhood of media detection.

US robot carrier-jet contract announced

E

Latency, and politics

I was anticipating something more autonomous than "fly by radio" remote control. I had in mind something that incorporated the sort of terrain recognition ability of a quality cruise missile into a reusable weapons platform.

For attacking buildings & infrastructure & fairly easily identified things like armour and automobiles, this would seem to be the way to go.

My main objection, not well stated above, is that such weapons remove pretty much any reason for domestic political opposition to a war - officially declared or unofficially declared. The only time (so it seems to me) most countries start to seriously object to fighting a war is when the cost in lives or gold rises too high.

Robotic weapons remove the variable of dead military personnel, and I do not believe the US economy would much notice production of these things (what do current stealth bombers cost anyway?)

Therefore these weapons become very very easy to use. As such they constitute as much a political change vis a vis war as they do a military one.

The point that countries do not surrender to air forces has some truth, but it is only relevant if the goal of a war is to force a surrender. Students of history know well that war and military force has often been used to force economic concessions (examples: China vs gunboat diplomacy from Europe initially and then later also the USA & Japan, from about 1800 to 1945; Japan vs the USA and US gun boat diplomacy opening Japan to foreign mostly US trade; the development of the British Empire in India; ...go read all about it). You don't need to win to dominate, control and extract profits from a target.

This kind of weaponry is perfect for gunboat (if you will) diplomacy: no political cost at home, quite possible to use without even informing the domestic polity, terrifying and largely unanswerable militarily force to the target country. I gotta ask, what else would you want to use this tech for?

And, it's not that I think the USA gov't is especially vulnerable to the temptation these would represent: Canada, if we had 'em, would behave badly too, as would most countries. But, well, it seems the US is the country most interested in acquiring the tech, so it got the heat.

The Reg is nominally a tech rag, so I will shut up now.

E

Grrreeeaaattt....

If this program succeeds then future George Bushes will be able to invade other countries without even bothering to tell the electorate.

No yanks dies in battle, the military action can be declared military secret and the yank populace would mostly just say "well, it doesn't affect me...". The US will have achieved the ability to wage war without domestic cost.

You know what? Give the US this kind of weaponry and no other sane country will have a reason to not built nukes, and that quick. Few countries can build robotic stealth bombers but most can build nukes. Nothing retaliates for a clutch of 5000 lb bombs falling on your capitol like a nuke, and for most countries thqat will be the only option.

Mark my words. This kind of weaponry is madness.

IBM: Dinosaurs were green

E

re: Few large boxes, many small boxes...

Good points, but I contest the "because YOU wanted it, but the LARGE BOXES" part.

Twenty+ years ago if one wanted to use computers in a small or medium size business the mainframes (and minicomputers) were too expensive. God help you if you wanted a real operating system on your home computer.

In 1990 I learned a lot about UNIX (Sun OS) at Uni, saw it was much better than DOS/Win3.x. I called up Sun and asked what a workstation would cost me. The answer was from $12000Cdn up, depending on the features I wanted!

I plumped for Slackware on a 486 instead. It wasn't the most full featured OS, but it did the job. The machine - a Dell - cost me about $2000.00Cdn.

There was a solid monetary reason why mainframes and workstations got overtaken by PCs.

E

...Redundancy

I have now some large SGI boxes eating up floor space in a small server room. They are up to 10 years old and they won't die. I want them to die. Die! Die! Die SGI boxes! Then I can replace them with inefficient heat generating 1U x86_64 machines and help destroy the planet. Destroy! Destroy! Destroy!

In a past job the IT system ran on an IBM main frame that was perhaps 30 years old. The disk platters were 2 feet in diameter and the disk cases were cast steel tubes with glass sides! For some incomprehensible reason when that mainframe *was* replaced, IBM insisted on the return of the disks. I wanted one to use as the pedestal for a small coffee table.

Seem to me stability is less of an issue with mainframes and minicomputers that PC systems.

Gaming 4G warfare for the USAF, with rayguns

E

Doom II

This is nothing new.

IIRC, the US military used multi-player Doom II as a training tool some 10 or 15 years ago. The story was that two teams of soldiers played against each other, and when a player was killed he could not respawn. It was reported as being effective for teaching battlefield tactics.

Google: Kill all the patent trolls

E

Or...

...stop issuing patents for most things that are now granted.

The video game arrow and the people jumping are fine examples: a lot of patents are granted for things which are either not inventions (jumping people) or are prior art (arrows).

More seriously, take something like, say, the giant magneto-resistive effect used in hard disk drives. This was patented but it was not an invention. Rather, it was a... discovery!

You can treat a discovery as a trade secret. It should not qualify for a patent because, qua prior existence, it is not the product of a human mind. It (say, GMR again) was there before someone discovered it. As such is can be discovered independently many times - and this is what patents do not account for.

Someone said that the use of patents are harming innovation. This may be the case, but consider also that basic scientific knowledge is being patented: DNA sequences, some large prime numbers (well, it was attempted), quantum machanical effects, the list goes on. This stifles scientific research, and we are if nothing else a civilization based on the fruits of scientific research.

Imagine Isaac Newton trying to patent gravity or the inverse square relationship found in gravity & EM fields. Or whoever discovered the inverse power law (it's non-square) that describe the weak nuclear force. A ridiculous idea. Patenting basic research today results is as ridiculous. One might argue that there is money spent on that research: Newton spent money too, and trade secrets allow exploitation without stifling other smart people or groups.

The current regime poses a possible threat to the basis of our system, mainly because we allow patenting of things that simply should not qualify for patent.

My $0.02.

Thirsty Koreans fight duff whisky with mobiles

E

Hmmm

"With the RFID chip you could look up info on several different brands."

Um, IMSHO, if you need the web to help you choose whether to try some booze in a bar - even really really good booze - then you should be much *much* more proud of your powers of anal retention than the discernment of your palate.

Iran's 'Rescue Nuke Scientist' game battles US game studio

E

AVAILABILITY?

Nice story. Nicer still if some info about the distributor was provided.

Does anybody know where the game can be purchased or downloaded?

Red Hat tight lipped on Microsoft talks

E

Whither mp3 and video?

Well, Fedora does not ship with the ability to play MP3 files or most video. So I'd say the patent trolls beat MS to the punch in terms of castrating open source. Same with Suse.

Nvidia to beat AMD to release on-the-fly GPU switching tech?

E

Because...

If for no other reason that that Nvidia can now sell you two chips instead of one.

Fossil, Sony restyle Bluetooth watch line for the mainstream

E

Flash storage?

I want 1, 2 or 4 gigs of flash storage in the watch, accessible via bluetooth from my notebook PC. Use it in place of a USB flash drive.

Music player or cell phone interface is silly and redundant.

E

Also...

... I want the watch to contain a gigawatt class infrared laser so I can smoke the terrorists and suspicious-looking people.

Page: