The problem is one of trust. These days, I don't trust my government (UK) enough to let them make decisions about what I don't get to see. If they wanted to keep this trust, all they had to do was not oppose the release of their expenses quite so vigorously.

I don't think the Slashdot crowd should need convincing that Wikileaks is a force for good. However, passive support won't be enough for such a contentious organisation, so do what I did and show them some love.

(Hmm, I just noticed that PayPal donation is currently down, which is rather awkward...)

You're right that this guy has flown the geek flag pretty high here; however, at least it's to some useful purpose. There are all kinds of facts about a country that are quite hard to discover just wandering about in it, and Wikipedia would be the ideal candidate to answer them.

Last time I went on holiday (to Australia) I came back with a dozen questions I wanted answering, just because I didn't have internet access while I was out there; Wikipedia access would answer many of these questions. Examples:

• I heard that Beds Are Burning was about the Australian aborigines - I never knew this before and wanted to look up more details on it.
• As a result of that, I wanted to know far more information about how well aborigines were integrated in Australia at the moment. Answer: badly, but again hard to find out just by wandering around in Australia and difficult to raise with a random Aussie.
• Australia is experiencing a lot of drought at the moment, but while we in Sydney, it rained quite a few times. I wanted to know more about the drought and what parts of the country it was affecting.
• ...

I could answer these questions by going into an internet cafe, but this isn't always possible. A portable Wikipedia sounds like a great idea.

Dude, there are no water fountains at UK airports. Yes, I know that sucks. Why do you think I'm bitching about it?

They still have something similar at the new BA Heathrow terminal. If you're a business or 1st class passenger you get your own special lane in the security checks where (presumably - I'm just an economy pleb) the line moves faster (fewer unwashed masses) and maybe the staff are less rude to you. I guess it's just another part of the "aspirational" nature of flying, where you wish you could afford to fly business because it might be a slightly less depressing and dehumanising experience.

The cynic in me says that this is a natural and welcome part of security theatre. Like forcing everybody to rebuy their bottled water every time they fly, this practice seems to have a lot more to do with making companies associated with flight security a pile of money than it does making anybody safe.

"Step into your fullness - the world needs you to be all you can be. Wake up. You are being called to reconnect with your true self. More then ever before, it is a critical time to follow the feelings already awakening within and realize your greatest potential."

Yikes.

To anybody who doesn't get this, it's a reference to The Tick, a brilliant super-hero/spoof TV animation. In one of the episodes, a super-villain called Chairface Chippendale tries to write his name on the moon. For some reason. I seem to remember that later in the series, you can still see the partially written word "Chairface" in the moon.

My favourite Tick episode is where he gets flu and, for some reason, has to fight a version of himself made out of snot. He wins by snorting it into himself and sneezing it into a dimensional portal. Nice.

I really can't tell if this article is serious or not.

Is Fortran really that much quicker than Python+Numpy? I'm genuinely interested. I do large data set numerical stuff with Python and I find the performance is pretty good. As an example, I can z-score an array of 40 million data points in less than 2 seconds.

There is also decent support for linking in more high performance stuff, using Cython or Swig. I'm also not convinced that the execution speed benefits of a dated language like Fortran stacks up against the convenience of programming in Python. I would not want to manage the kind of complexity and variety I need to deal with in a language without modern OO support.

I'd rather it took a few weeks to write and a few days to run than a few months to write and a few hours to run. I guess this depends how many runs you expect to do.

In this case, the problem is that Doctors are not trained in statistics. The example you quote, and many more, are reference in this excellent book about the irrational decisions people make, partly because they don't understand statistics.

Don't even get me started on the complexity of the bioinformatics that will be involved in resolving this data. All you'll need is for somebody to misplace a switch in the pipeline of tools you need to analyse data from these insanely complex high-throughput sequencing devices and you could get completely unreliable results.

Of course, that won't happen because IT professionals never make mistakes.

The difference between a pathological and a normal allele could be just one SNP - any number of cockups in experiment or analysis could misidentify this kind of difference.

I know, this kind of misdiagnosis can happen anywhere, but these companies are selling some kind of miracle new method when we're only just getting started on understanding how high-throughput sequencing works. Bad idea.

Have your own DNA sequence would be cool and everything, but it's not everything. Epigenetic changes have a massive impact on gene expression, they're not included in the sequence and they're heritable. Of course, there are lots of things you can look at in the sequence, but you could miss a lot by getting too hung up on just the sequence.

I don't know. Molecular biology is mind bogglingly complex but it doesn't seem to instill humility in those guys.

I'm always amazed that theoretical physicists can manipulate such immensely complex abstract objects in their heads and still be able to breathe and maintain bladder control. It really makes software engineering look like a piece of piss. Much respect.

I would also say that having worked with academic medics, chemists, mathematicians, computer scientists and biologists, physicists are almost always the coolest, most down to earth and least douchey scientists out there.

We're accustomed on Slashdot to saying that the general public is not aware of the issues surrounding DRM and file sharing. However, this debate seems to suggest otherwise. I know the HYS debates are often full of ranting morons but it is still an audience of non-experts. Looking at the most recommended comments there seem to be quite a few people who know what's going on.