jrl

I love that game, I used to play it many years ago.

"Basic things like TCP connections between VMs would mysteriously hang"

This is like a car that can't even get you two blocks from home. Amazing.

Even the 70% backing number is too high. According to the findings of the NYAG:

"Because of Tether’s inability to conduct significant banking activity during this time, it could not itself hold dollars sufficient to back the hundreds of millions of new tethers that had entered the market. Until September 15, 2017, the only U.S. dollars held by Tether ostensibly backing the approximately 442 million tethers in circulation was the approximately $61 million on deposit at the Bank of Montreal."

https://ag.ny.gov/sites/default/files/2021.02.17_-_settlemen...

This is one of the reasons why I love a simple website without too many whistles and bells.

"Can you use such a construction to create carbon nanotubes or equivalent and then lay them out in a three dimensional lattice structure with nanometer precision and six-sigma workpiece reliability?"

I can use biochemistry to build second-generation machines which might be capable of doing that. We might not have a diamondoid nanomachine but we can eventually synthesize it, since biology gives us atomically precise positioning of atoms. This looks like a feasible way to develop Drexlerian nanotech.

An analogy with computer programming could be that biology is like assembly language. Using that you can make a higher-level language such as C, and from there you can develop much more powerful abstractions and technologies (Python, Perl, Lisp, Ruby, etc.)

The domains of biochemistry and molecular manufacturing are not completely different because the former could be the foundation of the latter. Also, the science behind biology can inform nanotech. Transforming mechanical energy into chemical processes and viceversa are common processes in cells (e.g., motor proteins.), this is very similar to the type of processes molecular nanotech aspires to make.

Another thing is that cells are capable of correcting errors in DNA synthesis to a substantial degree, 1 mistake for every 1 to 10 billion nucleotides. Reliability isn't an insurmountable problem in biology.

"This is not atomically precise, mechanosynthetic manufacturing."

But we can agree that biology can do atomically precise synthesis. And enzymatic catalysis can sometimes be described in terms of mechanical bending of molecules, such as the ATP synthase.

If biochemistry were so irrelevant to molecular manufacturing, Drexler wouldn't have written so many pages talking about it or suggesting it as way to develop nanotech.

Enzymes can add hydroxyl groups to molecules in specific locations. A hydroxyl group contains only two atoms. Enzymes can also remove a couple of hydrogen atoms and their electrons in particular places of a molecule. By combining these and similar reactions, cells can do extremely specific remodeling of compounds. For example, a single bond in a fatty acid chain can be turned into a double bond by the dehydrogenation reaction mentioned before, and then hydration and subsequent oxidation yields a keto group. The overall change represent the addition of ONE oxygen to the molecule in the same position.

This means that beta oxidation (the metabolic pathway where those reactions take place) of fatty acids involve manipulation of molecules at the atomic level. Drexler describes a path from biochemistry to molecular manufacturing in Engines of Creation. In fact, part of his argument is that biochemistry is similar to a great extent to the molecular machines he envisions.

Octave is a nice language for doing matrix operations, I'm glad someone made a port for Android.

It´s also blocked in my country! Not a titanic task to circumvent the blockade though.

If governments can censor for a "good" purpose, they can also censor for a "bad" one. For example, the laws and technology that allow you to interrupt access to a piracy website could be used to censor any controversial content (note that many positive advances in society, such as women's voting rights, were controversial when first discussed).

So, strong enforcement of intellectual property laws means problems to... free speech and society's progress, if that involves filtering or censoring content on the internet.

I have asked myself the same question, why doesn't Mozilla file an antitrust complain or something like that against Apple? They're not only bundling their own browser, but also actively preventing competitors from using the platform.

Yes, it's worse than Microsoft's dominance of PCs in the 1990s. Back then, at least you could install whatever software you wanted in your machine. Now it's completely locked down in the iPhone and Windows Phone. What happened to the hacker culture that defended users' and programmers' rights? We should be making more noise about this problem.

FirefoxOS might make the mobile web better. It will give web developers more access to the device's hardware, unlike a website running stock Android browser. Everybody has been saying it for years, native apps can do more than web apps in iOS and Android. I wish that FirefoxOS changed that, similarly to how Chrome pushed HTML5 on the desktop.

Very interesting. I wonder what other researchers think about this.

That sounds like a very cool science fiction idea :-)

It looks like cells under the microscope. Very interesting stuff.

This is great, I love it. I can read PDF files without leaving the browser, in any browser. I find it slightly distracting to switch to a third-party application.

"...Apple has crafted a marketplace that offends nobody."

Apple could keep this curated marketplace and at the same time allow sideloading of applications, like many Android phones do. By taking that simple step, concerns about censorship would be ameliorated.

Another reason why allowing side-loading is essential. Giving too much power to a company over your digital life is a mistake. All those problems could be avoided by directly contacting the developer of the app and asking for a file to upgrade. In this context, Android is superior to iOS.

"It is also important to dispute the dissent's analogy to snapping a leaf from a tree. With respect, no one could contemplate that snapping a leaf from a tree would be worthy of a patent, whereas isolating genes to provide useful diagnostic tools and medicines is surely what the patent laws are intended to encourage and protect. Snapping a leaf from a tree is a physical separation, easily done by anyone. Creating a new chemical entity is the work of human transformation, requiring skill, knowledge, and effort."

They're not creating a new chemical entity. The gene was created by evolution (natural selection, genetic drift, mutation) millions of years ago. The DNA sequence existed and performed its function long before any human began studying it. Furthermore, such information could already be found isolated in the form of mRNA, which contains the same information as the DNA gene (with the thymines replaced by uracils). Ultimately, what really matters for the function of the cell and even the diagnostic method is the information coded in the DNA, RNA, or protein. You are simply using a different alphabet to represent the same thing. And because the information was designed by nature, it shouldn't be patentable.

Nearly all experiments require you to modify what you're observing in order to measure it. That's why I feel the argument asserting that because you "modify" something makes it susceptible to patent protection is weak. If I combine water with some powder and sell it, I can patent the final product or maybe even the process to make it, but not the water. Water was present before I had the idea. BRCA1 was there before we had the idea of linking it to cancer, it's a substance just like water.

The troubling thing in this case is there's not even a modification involved. Cutting a DNA segment from the chromosome doesn't alter its sequence. In fact, separating DNA pieces happens routinely during recombination.

The problem is that they're not only protecting the diagnostic tool like the majority ruling says, they're claiming ownership of a chemical substance present in all humans that was invented by nature. I would support patenting the DNA sequencing method they used, but never the gene itself.