Maybe they forgot that the Internet has no borders?
No, they remembered:
http://www.publications.parlia...
'The only way as we see it to resolve questions of jurisdiction and access to communications data would be by international treaty.'
Coming soon to a legislature near you!
There's a bigger problem with the summary than that - timothy has misread the BBC article, which refers to 'half of all samples from the gut'. These aren't human cell samples, they're faecal samples. The phage presumably infects gut bacteria, not human cells. From the proteins that the phage encodes, the researchers predict the genus of bacteria the host belongs to (Bacteroides).
Because CRISPR itself is so precise, we can envision a number of safeguards. Alterations can be reversed by releasing a new drive with an updated version of the change.
...and when wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death.
The secretive British spy agency GCHQ has developed covert tools to seed the internet with false information, including the ability to manipulate the results of online polls
Right now on Slashdot, you can see the results of this blatant manipulation in the service of their sinister paymasters in the energy-saving lightbulb industry...
It's not a joke article or astroturfing. He's just using humorous examples of improbable technical solutions to the problem, when of course the real answer is to get more adults involved in helping the kids to learn chess (which is his real point). He's written elsewhere about a K12 chess tournament sponsored by his company:
ITworld's Phil Johnson has rounded up a list of what just might be the world's top 14 programmers alive today.
In the unpublished final volume of The Art of Computer Programming, Knuth describes an algorithm that can provide a complete emulation of any of the other 13.
You can send MIDI through USB if you have the drivers and your keyboard supports it, but pro keyboards will also have dedicated MIDI ports. The idea is to transmit which keys are played (with timing and velocities, etc.) to a virtual instrument on the connected computer. When set up this way, your keyboard's built-in sounds aren't used. This arrangement gives you access to a huge range of sophisticated virtual instruments, light years away from the unconvincing beeps you probably heard in the 90s. There are single instrument libraries (e.g. from a specific grand piano) with well over 100Gb of samples.
You linked to the list of bugs *fixed* in 3.6
In the first link, the relevant text is the first bit ("Firefox 3.6 is no longer supported and is affected by vulnerabilities fixed in newer versions of the program"). In the second link, many vulnerabilities fixed in subsequent versions are listed. I suspect neither of us knows exactly how many of these already existed in 3.6, which is sort of the point - it's no longer audited or supported. Why risk using a vulnerable browser when it's perfectly possible to make Firefox 30 behave like Firefox 1, using Classic Theme Restorer and a bit of tinkering with 'Customise' and about:config? It took me about a minute to get 30 working the way I wanted (by moving the navigation buttons), since most of the customisation I'd done for earlier versions carried through. Only the previous upgrade to 29 took longer than this (basically the time it took to discover, install and configure CTR). Most of the earlier updates have required no changes to retain my preferred UI. It's irritating that the Mozilla devs insist on foisting a Chrome-style UI on us, but it's so easy to fix this (when necessary) it's only a minor annoyance.
Or just install the 3.6. Works too.
But seriously, yes, it was 'legitimately beaten', just like it's been 'legitimately beaten' in times past, going back to ELIZA in the 60s.
How does that make you feel?
Should DNA sequencers contain hashes of the DNA of virulent organisms so they can call the NSA/CIA/SAS/UN/boy scouts when they are being used for possible bioweapon related work? (Hopefully they don't rain hellfires on the CDC.)
Some people have indeed suggested that both DNA synthesizers (which write the sequence) and DNA sequencers (which read it) should have such safeguards:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...
At least some companies that synthesize custom DNA commercially already have pathogen sequence screening in place, but this doesn't seem to be universal or necessarily effective. A few years ago The Guardian had a (small, defective) fragment of the smallpox virus genome synthesized without setting off any alarms, and wrote a rather hyped-up article about it:
http://www.nature.com/news/200...
Practically, this sort of thing is always going to be hard to police, much like the situation with 3D weapon printing - e.g., a terrorist could always use older technology that lacks the safeguards. On the other hand, assembling a dangerous microorganism from the genome up is hardly the most cost-effective way of causing mayhem - you'd need a proper, well-equipped lab and a terrorist cell of trained scientists to carry out your evil schemes.
'GNOME' is really too vague. The results would probably have been more informative if the options had been:
GNOME 3
GNOME 2/MATE
since MATE pretty much is GNOME 2.
Spreadsheets tend to mess with strings that look somewhat like a date, it will automatically convert it to a date when it sees things like that. You need to be really careful about spreadsheets automatically reformatting your data, make sure you properly indicate whether a field is Text or not.
e.g. the infamous 'Excel genes', when a gene name like SEPT1 is silently converted to numerical date format:
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1...
http://nsaunders.wordpress.com...
Excel makes it far too easy for this to happen (just opening and saving a
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1...
Excel in bioimformatics? - just say no, kids.
Why can't the headline start with "ENGINEERED Measles Virus [...]". Be accurate.
The engineering was incidental to the success of the treatment in these particular cases. The 'oncolytic' virus, already adapted to preferentially infect tumour cells just by growing it in tumour cell cultures, has indeed been engineered to express a protein that mediates iodine uptake into infected cells, but in the current study this was only used for tracing the infection with radioactive iodine. The tumour cells were killed by normal viral mechanisms. However, using a higher dose of radioactive iodine, they will in future also be able to target the infected cells with therapeutic levels of the radioisotope in much the same way that thyroid cancers are treated (thyroid cells naturally express the same protein).
Real Programmers don't eat quiche. They eat Twinkies and Szechwan food.
