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Comment Re:ROTFL! (Score 2) 148

At least now perhaps we can put to rest some of these awful trends in web design.

These guys have designed a really absurd parody site that mocks many of these design elements (I especially love the ridiculous horizontal scroll bar):

http://www.dhigroupinc.com/

It's a bit too silly to be believable (e.g., what are they actually supposed to be selling?!) but it'll still probably fool a fair number of people.

Comment Re:RTFA (Score 2) 182

Wrong. They only tested 54 of the embryo's afterward. 28/54 is a 51.8% success rate.

Only if you ignore the 15/86 = 17.4% of the original series that didn't survive the process.

The off-target mutations in the remaining 26 embryos was not only expected, it was predicted about 16 years ago, when we first started experimenting with retroviral splicing vectors.

Microinjection with CRISPR/Cas9 constructs is a completely different technology to using retroviral vectors. The result is 'unexpected' because the off-target event frequency was apparently much lower when CRISPR was previously used to edit genes in mouse embryos or differentiated human cells. It's currently unclear if this result is due to some property of human embryos in general, or just of the non-viable 'tripronuclear' embryos used in this study.

Comment Re:Lies, not statistics (Score 1) 293

We get the same nonsense in the UK, where they've set a '50% digital' listening threshold for analogue switch-off. Right now DAB accounts for under a quarter of radio listening, but they can boost that to over 1/3 by throwing in the other digital platforms. I don't really see the point of buying a DAB set for my home use - there are half a dozen devices around the house that already do a better job of it via IP or Freeview DTV (which carries the national radio channels).

I do have a pocket DAB radio, which drains batteries at an alarming rate and, while small by DAB standards, is much bulkier than the FM equivalent. It generally stays at home while I actually use the FM tuner in my (much smaller) mp3 player, or an IP radio app on my phone.

The powers that be have also decided that the UK will stick with the antiquated original DAB system rather than DAB+, so we have a lot of poor quality low bitrate broadcasts (often worse than FM). In 2015, it's a bit like decreeing that LPs will be phased out in favour of MiniDisc. Of course quality and 'choice' isn't the Government's real concern - they just want to shut off FM so they can sell off the radio spectrum to the highest bidder from the mobile phone/data industry.

Comment Re:What? Why discriminate? (Score 1) 700

Hardly a fair comparison. Scholarly editions of major religious texts are not secret, and their prices reflect their academic market (Reader's pass for the British Library or Library of Congress - free of charge). The Vatican doesn't ask for $380,000 just to read the standard version of the Book of Revelation. Even Lucasfilm only wants $90 for the Star Wars saga on Blu-ray, including the apocryphal prequels (though to be fair, the original master tapes of the Holiday Special are as closely guarded as OT IX and X).

Comment Re:What? Why discriminate? (Score 5, Insightful) 700

The question, I believe, is whether the CoS really is a belief organization, or a financial scam.

Cost of reading the most sacred beliefs of all major religions: free online, or $10 for the paperback. Jedi may also need to invest in the DVDs.

Cost of reading the most sacred beliefs of CoS: $380,000 (2006 pricing: http://www.xenu.net/archive/pr... ). Discounts available by signing a billion year contract and working full time in return for food.

Comment Space Cadets (Score 4, Insightful) 169

Reports emerged that the contract with the TV production company Endemol - which Mars One claimed could bring in up to $6 billion in revenue - was no longer in place and that the companies had gone their separate ways.

Interesting that they originally partnered with Endemol, who previously produced this:

'Space Cadets': http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

"The series described itself as the most elaborate hoax perpetrated in television history...A group of twelve contestants (who answered an advert looking for "thrill seekers") were selected to become the first British televised space tourists, including going to Russia to train as cosmonauts at the "Space Tourist Agency of Russia" (STAR) military base, with the series culminating in a group of four embarking on a five-day space mission in low Earth orbit...However, the show was in fact an elaborate practical joke...Unknown to the "space cadets", they were not in Russia at all...and the "space trip" was entirely fake, complete with a wooden "shuttle" and actor "pilots".

In the last episode, I recall the presenter joking that the next series would be called 'Mission to Mars'...

Comment Re:terminal? (Score 1) 698

Though I imagine that the original poster has exhausted all his standard treatment options, it might also be worth mentioning the sort of 'precision medicine' that major cancer centres like Sloan-Kettering are now starting to do. The idea is to take a sample of the tumour and sequence all the genes in which mutations might make the cancer responsive to some specific treatment (perhaps a drug that would not normally be considered for that type of tumour). This can now be done very rapidly. If one of the genes comes up as positive for an 'actionable' mutation, then in some circumstances the patient may be offered a treatment that is intended to exploit the damaged gene to target the tumour (e.g., as part of a new type of clinical trial that runs across cancers of different types where individual cases happen to have mutations in the same gene). Further details, including contact information, are here:

http://www.mskcc.org/blog/new-...

My best wishes to the poster and his family at this very difficult time.

Comment Re:Now needs a better phone app (Score 3, Informative) 77

Google's mapping products have been getting steadily worse for the last couple of years. On a phone, Maps 6 was the last great version, with My Maps and Latitude nicely integrated, half-decent offline caching, and sane road colouring (especially for, e.g., UK users). Now we have a dumbed-down app that's superficially prettier with the currently fashionable low-contrast look that's harder to read, poorer road colouring in various countries, Latitude swallowed by Google+, and My Maps pointlessly spun off into a separate app. The desktop version also has a trendier but largely poorer interface, and although the 'Classic' version remains for the moment, 'migrated' My Maps tracks and locations no longer work properly. Purely for offline use, the Nokia Here maps app is so much better it's embarrassing - on a phone, you can cache an entire country or US state in a form that's fully searchable and routable with turn by turn navigation, and doesn't expire.

Comment Re:Java-Free Like NeoOffice? (Score 4, Informative) 148

If you remove the plugin manually it will be reinstalled with every update, and if the plugin is on your system browsers will find it an use it.

Windows versions of Java now come with a control panel applet that lets you turn off the browser plugin, and I think this setting persists when Java is updated.

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