Wolfram announced his latest idea - that there needed to be some kind of pliable material available next to toilets with which to clean one's bum. This material, he said, is going to be really soft, probably a couple of layers thick, and needed to be on some kind of continuous dispenser mechanism which he is developing.

And naturally, he'll call it Wolfram paper. :-)

I figure there needs to be something similar to the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program: here, something that makes society safer overall (vaccines) is promoted by reducing the risk of an individual harm (a rare side effect). This says: "Pay in and help make society safer, and if it individually harms you, we've got your back."

So, why not something for driverless cars? You opt into a driverless car with the societal benefit of reduced accidents, and if your driverless car harms you individually (physically or legally), the national defense fund takes over.

Furthermore, the passenger might be helping with the navigation, answering those critical emails, etc ... to help the driver keep focused on the road.

this and this are pretty similar. I see this most frequently in multi-person text messages from iPhone, and indeed, in the default txt message client, these often appear as attachments / multimedia instead of text.

Good point. Since I've seen this issue sporadically with multiple iPhones sending messages to Android, I had figured it was more on the iPhone end with a standards-breaking or standards-bending SMS behavior.

BitZtream (692029) wrote: That doesn't happen on iPhones, perhaps its your end thats the problem.

theurge14 (820596) wrote: Sounds like it might be a problem on your phone. I haven't seen this problem at all on iPhones.

[snark]Of course the standards-breaking message sender renders its standards-breaking messages correctly.[/snark]

More seriously, we have:

• iPhone -> iPhone : no problem
• non-iPhone -> iPhone : no problem
• non-iPhone -> Android : no problem
• iPhone -> Android : textual messages appearing like multimedia attachments

This suggests that iPhone is using iChat or similar to "txt" with other phones and encoding outgoing info in some sort of multimedia or attachment tags within the SMS format.

I can't stress enough how much it drives me up the wall to get text messages on my Android phone from iPhones. Far too often, they show as "multimedia" messages requiring a data connection just to download 5-7 words of text.

Or when an iPhone user sends a txt message to several people, and each "reply to all" response appears as a separate, disjoint SMS thread without the full conversation or context.

The "universal translator" idea had crossed my mind, too. ;-)

Personally, as a guy with hearing loss that's really cutting into those handy consonant sounds above 2000 Hz, I'm thrilled at the idea of real-time "closed captioning" placed under each speaker. Right now, noisy restaurants and lectures can be a bit of a nightmare, even with top-of-the-line hearing aids.

Great answer to this type of comment. :-)

Many thanks from another member of the cancer community. So glad this has shown such tremendous results for you. Hope we can some day understand this better and help more people! All the best wishes for continued health! -- Paul

I am not a biologist so forgive me my ignorance but when people say that DNA is the blueprint for an organism I never understand how a bunch of proteins can determine an organism's shape and behavior. Aren't there more factors that determine those things, like the surroundings in which the DNA is used, like chemicals that the growing organism is surrounded with, temperature, etc?

You're absolutely right. Microenvironment -- the cell's chemical, mechanical, and physical environment, determines which genes are switched on, whether those proteins get made, and how and whether they interact with other proteins to alter cell behavior.

This has been a challenge (and perhaps even a failure) of many current genome projects, which are often reductionist to the point of ignoring much of these features, whereas "context" may well be more important than the genome.

There was a big splashy paper in the New England Journal of Medicine last year, where multiple regions of a single tumor were sequenced. It was found that while there were significant differences in the genome across a single tumor, the cell phenotypes (their behavior) was much more convergent. That is, even with significantly different genes, these cells found a way to function similarly when presented a similar environmental context.

It's affecting a lot more than commerce.

My cancer research website is down, too. (Only works on computers that had cached the DNS entries.) So much for inviting seminar speakers today.

I'm an academic. I set my site up years ago (before all the SOPA business) and don't have time to muck with moving my site around, hosting DNS here and content there, and the like. I barely have time to maintain content in the middle of a busy research career. I suppose I'm now supposed to be an expert on mathematical modeling + cancer + hosting my own DNS?

It's always worth keeping in mind that these things affect far more than business sites.

My commute itself is 20-30 minutes.

But as a one-car family, it's 20-30 minutes to get my wife to the bus stop, another 20-30 minutes to get my daughter to day care, and then my own commute.

I'm not honestly sure if this comes out net positive for the environment vs. two cars: two cars would probably cut 10-20 minutes of driving twice daily, but of course adds extra environmental impact of maintaining a second car. It certainly is a net positive on the budget for now, though.