This is something I've been wondering about for a while with devices that receive software updates. People base their purchasing decisions on the list of features announced for the devices, the payoff of what features you get against the price. Then, as part of an upgrade, the manufacturer deliberately cripples part of the device and removes some functionality. This removal of support for third-party storage is a good example, or Amazon pushing an "update" to remove the text-to-speech feature for many (all?) books.

There are all sorts of arguments made about software because we're typically sold licences, not an actual copy of the software. But in cases like this, we've actually bought a physical object. It's now ours, not the manufacturer's. So do they really still have the legal right to reach out an remove features? They advertised a function, which it now doesn't have. It feels like a sort of retroactive false advertising. A lot of Xbox owners will now need to spend extra money simply to restore the original functions; if they'd known this was necessary before purchase they might only have been willing to buy the XBox at a correspondingly lower price, if at all. So as MS have changed their end of this bargain, surely their customers should have the right to change theirs? A partial refund (to represent a lower original price) or the option of a full refund both seem fair to me,

I know people can, in principle, unplug their XBox to avoid accepting this update but then, again, they're losing the functionality that was originally advertised and that they originally paid for. Does this seem fair to anyone? Does it seem legal?

Of courres not.

sudo apt-get cure-for-cancer

Here in the UK, we have our very own Creationist Zoo that markets itslf to local schools as fulfilling curriculum requirements but pushes a strong and consistent creationist adgenda.

Meanwhile, a recent survey says that half of Britons either don't believe in evolution or say they're too confused to have an opinion.

This does sound like a cool project and I'll keep an eye on it, but I worry about the consequences of lauding Darwin and his work too much. Creationists, IDers and other crackpots often attack evolution by attacking errors or omissions that Darwin made, ignoring almost two centuries of refinements and advancements since his work. They also love to strawman scientists and other people who accept the evidence for evolution by referring to them as "Darwinists", implying that it's a simple case of "faith in God" vs. "faith in Darwin", rather than a matter of evidence.

Darwin certainly deserves to be remembered and respected for the amazing groundwork and insights he gave us. But I think there's a danger of looking too fixated on one personality and his centuries-old pronouncements at the expense of modern and more solid results. It sucks that we have to consider stuff like this, but like it or not there is an ideological battle going on. Because IDers and creationists are basing their arguments on emotion and strawmen, we have to consider what attacks we're exposing ourselves to, even (or especially) if they're unfair and totally illogical.

It does look like the ship will be packed with modern research equipment; hopefully the media they put out will heavily emphasise the modern data supporting evolution and acknowledging where Darwin's work has been improved upon, emphasising the success of the scientific method over the hero-worship.

When it's good PR and doesn't cost the politicians any time, effort or deviation from their current plans.

I live in the UK and I'm astonished that you even have to do this. I bought my first mobile phone in 2002; from that one onward, I've never owned a phone for which I couldn't tell it to play an arbitrary music file (mp3, midi and other supported formats) for ringtones or message tones. Note that these have never even been top of the line phones. Today, I doubt that I could go into a phone shop and buy one without this ability even if I wanted to. My current LG Viewty (well over a year old) has fairly basic video capability so it also lets me set a divx video as a ringtone if I want.

I understand that US networks have higher overheads due to your country's lower population density, but I'm amazed that they get away with crippling such basic features of the phones' designs. I half expect to hear next that you can't use arbitrary pictures for wallpapers or contact pics...

There seems to be evidence in both directions. For example, on study showed that it's not as bad as alcohol, but far worse than sober drivers:

Source

A computer that learns from its opponent to get better every time it plays the game...

Is it any good at Gloabal Thermounuclear War?

It's a common reagent in molecular biology labs, so it's probably just that they had some handy and could buy more, ready-purified, very cheaply.

The reason it's so common in labs is that it's extracted from salmon sperm, which is produced in colossal quantity at salmon farms, and the excess sold to scientists. Extracting DNA from sperm is much easier than, say, grinding up a whole fly. Once you've decided that you're after sperm, fish pump their sperm out into the water anyway so you don't need to "milk" it in the way that you'd need to if you wanted e.g. bull sperm.

Dunbal is right - the adaptive immune system is basically the same in all vertebrates. So dogs will have a small number of directly inherited pathogen recognition receptors (e.g. TLRs) and a much larger (by several orders of magnitude) library of randomly generated ones in the form of antibodies or B- or T-cell receptors. Having a big population with the same MHC types could create a small shared vulnerability to the spread of disease, but I wouldn't worry too much about it. Thanks to the adaptive immune system, a monoculture of cloned vertebrates isn't comparable to a monoculture of e.g. plants.

I can vouch for Spotify's windows client working perfectly under WINE for me and a few friends. We're all on various versions of (k)ubuntu with whatever version of WINE is currently latest in the stable repos. The Mac client is great too.

Very good points. I think I've been using a very sloppy definition of gene, just a vague idea that it's only DNA>RNA>protein>action or DNA>RNA>action. I've never really got deeply into thinking about regulatory elements, etc. It's compounded by the fact that, while I'm interested in cancer, most of my actual work is with a DNA-based virus that only produces a very few non-translated RNAs that we're aware of. I have a tough time convincing some people that even those are biologically relevant.

I sometimes think that RNAs and various epigenetic factors (I'm including DNA secondary and tertiary structures here) fall into the same trap as a lot of post-translational protein modifications: They're hard to study so not much is written or understood about them, so most non-specialists basically ignore them and decide they can't be too important. It's changing now as techniques evolve to do the experiments, but I'm still shocked how often I see someone basically say "well we don't understand this so we'll assume it's not affecting our system".