The problem is somebody has to pay for the publishing. It's not free. It costs money to hire editors, typesetters, to print paper copies, to run servers, to solicit peer reviewers and make editorial decisions, to maintain archives, to maintain searchable databases, to electronically archive older papers, to do artwork (yes, I know, but it's still part of it), to solicit news/reviews/perspective articles. So where is that money going to come from? Right now a chunck comes from the researchers themselves. The rest comes from the subscription fees. You can argue that more tax money should go to support publication, so that there will be more open access. But either way, money is going to come from public pockets. The cost of publishing has to be borne somewhere. Do you want more of the NIH/NSF/DOE/DARPA/etc budget to pay for publishing instead of research? Or do you want to raise taxes to support a publishing fund of some type? What's the solution? Because I see a lot of griping, but no real solutions.

And why then can't you just go to your local university library to get access? I mean really, it's not that hard. I'm not a big fan of the publishing industry, but I've never had trouble getting access to an article I needed. If the library doesn't have a subscription, interlibrary loan works pretty well.

Still, I doubt it would really cost $1m. We've become surprisingly good, and clever, at discovering mutations in recent years. With the human genome we already have a pretty good scaffold. You would need high genome coverage. That is cheap these days. The expensive part is the analysis, but there is a lot of stuff out there to make this much easier than it used to be. I would be surprised if the cost is even $100k. If they are saying $1m, they are full of it.

It really depends on the nature of the mutation. If you're trying to identify a random mutation in single differentiated cells, like you describe, then it is hopeless. But in all likelihood it would be a more general mutation shared by all or a large number of cell types that happened pre-differentiation (ie: in the germ cell).

The summary and medicaldaily article are fairly horrid, so here is the abstract of the research article. The full article is also available for those who have access.

Misstatements of the posted summary/article,
1) Discovery is of a new antibiotic (an antimicrobial peptide), not antibody.
2) Statement in the article: "They cause much less drug resistance of microbes than conventional antibiotics.", referring to antimicrobial peptides is a ridiculous statement not substantiated by anything.
3) The "kinetics" of the antimicrobial activity, as published, is not particularly useful for determining efficacy in the clinic. Since the drug they compared against, clindamycin, is completely different in every way from their peptide, it doesn't really say anything at all. They probably screened a number of antibiotics for this "test" and cherry-picked this result to highlight their find.
4) Use of the term "conventional antibiotic" is misleading. This is a new member of a class of antibiotics (antimicrobial peptides) that are relative newcomers to the field, but is otherwise just another antibiotic. It is not a new mechanism of action, biosynthetic origin, class of molecule, or anything like that. In other words, it is about as conventional as they come, but perhaps useful because we do and will continue to need new antibiotics.

For anybody who is interested, here is an open access article on the subject of newly discovered mammalian antimicrobial peptides as potential new antibiotics.

Interesting statement. It clearly indicates you know nothing about immigration to the US. While it is (relatively) easy to get a student visa to go to school in the US, it is far more difficult to get a resident-work visa. To get a resident-work visa, you first need to find an employer who is willling to sponsor you, fill out the paperwork, and pay the fee. Then you need a labor certification from the Department of Labor, more money and time. Then you can file the actual visa application (money) and wait for an eligible date (time). How long this takes depends on your visa category and the country you are applying from. If you are in the E3 category (Skilled Workers, Professionals, and Unskilled Workers (Other Workers)) and applying from an oversubscribed country (ex: Mexico), this can take a long time. Only 140,000 employment-based visas are granted for 2012. With a 7% cap on each country and an ~29% issuance to the E3 category, a restaurant worker from Mexico would be competing for one of ~2800 visas granted this year. They likely won't get it and will have to wait until the following year or longer.

That is the minimum required for immigration to work unless you are in the priority category or have some other kind of exemption. You could stop there. However, your visa will expire eventually and usually cannot be renewed. So if you want to stay in the US, you have to start applying for permanent residence, which is another big hassel that takes a lot of time and money. Without at least a Master's degree (PhD is better), you can be waiting for a lottery number for a very long time, and paying a lot of money in lawyer's and application fees.

So, no, it is not easy to immigrate to the US. It is arguably easy to figure out what forms to fill out and submit them, but it is not easy to get the actual visa that you need to get, which then allows you to get the permanent residence, which then allows you to apply for citizenship.

What the hell? GNOME definitely has some problems, but setting up printers is certainly not one of them, and that's been true for at least 6 or 7 years. Go to System Settings|Printers, click Add, type the ip address or hostname of the printer, maybe answer a question about some optional features that may be present (Duplexer, etc), done. If you are on a small enough network to be able to use mDNS/zeroconf and the printer is advertising itself, you don't need to type in the ip address or hostname, just select it from the list of network printers.

Meanwhile, even on OS X it isn't any easier. And when setting up non-postscript/pcl printers like the HP Color Laserjet 3600, it can be quite a pain, with each version of OS X having a slightly different workaround to make it work.

And Windows...the upside is the driver is certainly available, just download it and click through the installer. The downside, you have to download and install the driver. For the above mentioned HP on Windows 7, that's a 148 MB download, and it installs a bunch of crapware along with it.

Wow, TFS/TFS is terrible, and not at all an accurate description of TOR (the original research). For those too lazy to click the parent's link, here is the abstract of the article,

Now, I realize this might be a bit technical for the non-biologists. But suffice it to say, the article is about microRNA-mediated gene regulation (the first sentence). A microRNA is not the same thing as a gene. It is a regulatory RNA that influences transcription and post-transcriptional modification of SETS of genes. So in other words, a mutation event that resulted in the creation of a new microRNA resulted in changes in the regulation of genes linked to brain function, as well as some compensatory mutations that likely affected the extent of regulation of those and other genes by the microRNA.

I can only surmise from your comment that you must be using a distro like Suse or Fedora, which is the source of your problems. Suse I've used on and off over the years, and never have been happy with them. Just questionable decisions with regard to configuration, setup utilities, and buggy interfaces. Fedora is definitely not a desktop distro. Every time I give it a try, I run into some kind of ridiculous problem (crashy, graphics artifacts, broken packages) within the first couple of weeks. So if you really want a desktop distro, what you need is Ubuntu. It's the only distro, out of hundreds, that is really focused on desktop usability, and that is why people like me stick with it despite things like unity-lens-shopping. There just isn't a good alternative, or at least I haven't found one. With Ubuntu, most of your list goes away:
1) No RTFM on the ubuntuforums. I have never seen it.
2) No dependency hell. Ever. And the PPA respoitories are nice when you are looking for custom packages.
3) No binary blob or proprietary codec war. In older versions of Ubuntu these were opt-in, but now they are installed by default. So everything works pretty well out of the box.
4) For SAMBA, what is it you are trying to do? File sharing is pretty easy to setup in Ubuntu. If you are looking to join a domain, then SADMS is what you are looking for.

As for your other list:
1) What kind of RAW support do you need. Darktable supports pretty much everything.
2) Adobe yes, well, you can say the same thing about MS Office or any other proprietary software. Adobe isn't going to sink the development cost into supporting linux when the market just isn't there. So you'll just have to dual-boot for this if you really need it. Ditto for games.
3) Your embroidery software has a reasonably good chance of working with Wine. I've managed to get a number of simple Windows applications to work this way.
4) iPhone agreed. This is due to Apple suckiness mostly, though. The protocol has to be reverse-engineered to get it to work on linux. It's being worked on, but progress is slow.
5) Bravo SE, seems like they have some kind of linux support, but again, without the market they don't have the pressure to make it work. The upside is they do seem to have an SDK, so an interested linux developer could take it up as a project.
6) Which printer? A number of Brother printers are supported.
7) Silverlight? Don't expect MS to cooperate on this. They could and it would work with minimal effort, but they won't.

You need to install Kerberos. That is what Active Directory is, see: LDAP, Kerberos, DNS, and file/print sharing, all rolled up into a nice package. It appears the Ubuntu package doesn't include it as a dependency, which it should, so I would blame the package manager.

I agree, the docs need to be better, but Samba4 hasn't officially been released yet.

So then you do know what program is editing your resolv.conf.

Preventing the DHCP client from doing what it is intended to do is breaking DHCP. You can achieve the result you want by just editing /etc/network/interfaces. It's in the man page.

Another way of doing it is editing the the connection in NetworkManager, and instead of selecting DHCP under ipv4 settings, select DHCP (addresses only).

Editing a different config file from the one you are used to is not "jumping through hoops."

That, on the other hand, is. Why not just take the most painless route to get what you want? Seriously, it's not that big of deal. There have been tons of similar changes to the Debian userland over the years (pam.d, update-rc.d, modprobe.d, ...). All of them entail moving config files and using scripts or includes to keep master copies up to date. Yes, it might be frustrating to find something you already know has been changed, but it usually takes only about 5 minutes to get up to speed with the new setup.

There is a pretty good rationale for resolvconf on the developer website, if you actually really care about the why.

As someone who uses NetworkManager all the time on simple to complex configurations, I can tell you that it works just fine. In fact, for the fairly complicated kind (static routes, custom dhclient hooks, vpns, etc), NetworkManager makes it a lot easier than it ever used to be. It seems to me, linux users should be more capable of learning and adapting to new things than a typical computer user, but from the comments in this thread that is obviously not the case. Everybody just learned how to manually use the ifup script back in 1995, and anything different is just too complicated. Oh noes they moved the config file? Too bad there isn't anything like a man page that might tell you where it is....

Far from it. NetworkManager is an actual robust network management tool, unlike the init.d/ hacks that existed before.

Really? The first line of the file says "# Dynamic resolv.conf(5) file for glibc resolver(3) generated by resolvconf(8)". And if you just read the man page, you are told which files to edit to make changes to the resolver config.

The reason turning off write doesn't work is because resolvconf runs as root, of course. And it's not a good idea anyway unless you like breaking DHCP.

Perhaps you just need to learn how to work with said utility. I can complain that they screwed up apt because I can't edit /etc/apt/sources.list directly anymore. Or I can just realize that they moved custom configurations to /etc/apt/sources.list.d, which actually solves two problems. It allows you to more easily revert changes, and it prevents the package manager from clobbering the config file every time it updates the package. For system connections, NetworkManager does very little differently than the old /etc/init.d/networking script. It's just the config file that has moved to a different place.

And what's wrong with just editing the files in /etc/resolvconf/resolv.conf.d/? That one's in the man page. You can also edit /etc/network/interfaces like you always have. You just can't edit /etc/resolv.conf directly.