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.

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.

https://www.mozilla.org/securi...

https://www.mozilla.org/securi...

How does that make you feel?

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.

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 .csv file with Excel will silently corrupt it instead of invoking the data import wizard that would give you a chance to set data types per column - a great design decision!), and it's hard to spot corrupted cells if you have a list of hundreds or thousands of genes. Some of these have made their way into major online genetic databases:

http://www.biomedcentral.com/1...

Excel in bioimformatics? - just say no, kids.

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).

(a) They selected patients for treatment who already had low levels of measles antibodies. (b) This is only one of a range of oncolytic viruses (including herpes visues) being investigated. (c) The virus could be further engineered so that antibodies to vaccine or wild type strains do not bind it. (d) Other strategies could be used to hide the virus from the immune system, including the use of 'carrier cells'.

Who is going to maintain this after you leave? Are you making a firm commitment to provide maintenance in the long term? If so, your off-site VPS solution with a web front end may be appropriate. If not, and there is no local IT expertise at the charity, something self-contained that needs only a single consumer software package to work (Access, Libreoffice Base, even an Excel or Calc workbook) has a better chance of remaining useful when you're gone. Since this is personal data, have you considered how the local law may affect how the data must be stored, secured and accessed? e.g:

https://uprdoc.ohchr.org/uprwe...
 

Mod this up!:

https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad...

"A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: 1. Could I put it more shortly? 2. Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly? But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you -- even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent -- and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at this point that the special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear."

His parody of a 'translation' of Ecclesiastes 9:11 into pretentious and imprecise modern jargon is priceless:

"Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles and perversions, let me give another example of the kind of writing that they lead to. This time it must of its nature be an imaginary one. I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:

        I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Here it is in modern English:

        Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account."

Take out 'non-rechargeable' and this is pretty much Apple's business model.

In TFA, they claim 4.5 billion unique users, and that this number has only gone up by 5% since 2011.

The WSJ is marginally more informative on the contents:

"The content consists mainly of newer bestsellers and public-domain classics, as well as titles from the Navy reading list and other texts for professional development. Since publishing partners include Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, Hachette and Random House, the lineup is impressive, ranging from contemporary fiction such as A Game of Thrones and The Girl with a Dragon Tattoo, bestselling non-fiction such as The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, and bonafide nerd favorites including The Lord of the Rings series, Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game, and Stephen King's The Stand."

Anyone have a list, or is it classified? Is 'Mutiny on the Bounty' allowed?