Positive people are dangerous. Because they assume everything is going to be fine, they fail to plan for things to go wrong, and then after you're stuck cleaning up the mess they caused, they sweep it all under the rug and act like everything went smoothly - so not only do you get no recognition for your heroic efforts to fix everything, but they're fully confident in their ability to handle the next situation just as well as the last.

But nobody wants to listen to the pessimists, because they're so negative.

Thanks for upgrading Adobe Flash Player to fix this week's gaping security hole! You'd like to also install this FREE version of McAfee VirusScan too, right?

I think they can figure out how to upsell.

This should be REALLY USEFUL - for gene therapy and stem cell therapy.

One of the big problems with such therapies is how to deliver the modified genes or regulators to the target cells, without converting them to something that would be rejected or otherwise have unintended markers or modifications.

One approach is to deliver genes or regulatory chemicals via a modified virius or using viral capsid proteins to construct an "injector". (A family of methods for turning harvested somatic cells into toti/pluri/multi/unipotent stem cells consists of inserting four regulatory proteins - by inserting about four GENES THAT CODE FOR THEM via a modified virus.)

Now here we have a a method, already used by the body, to transport RNA signalling snippets and other factors from one cell into another, by a sending cell creating virus-like carrier particles that destination cells readily accept and absorb.

THAT looks like an IDEAL basis for building a carrier for regulatory factors to switch cell modes on and off, or to tote new genetic material into a target cell for incorporation, to correct genetic errors or supply lost genes:

  1) Make fake exosomes carrying the message you want to deliver.
  2) Inject them into the tissue you want to affect.
  3) Rewrite the state or code of the target cells.
  4) Cure disease (or otherwise augment the patient's health).
  5) PROFIT!

Viruses by definition contain genetic code from outside the host organism.

On the other hand, just as some organelles (i.e. mitochondria, chloroplasts) are apparently the remnant of a microbial infection or ancient symbiosis that became integrated, there are several cellular mechanisms that are apparently remnants of an ancient retrovirus infection, where the bulk of the viral genome was lost but one of its mechanisms was retained and adapted to perform some useful new function.

I'd be willing to bet this is another example of such an

No, you'd have to be inbred with the cancer 'donor' to not reject their cancer as readily as you'd reject an organ transplant from them.

Not necessarily.

These things aren't carrying the full-blown genome. They're carrying little bits of it - like regulatory switches (or something that functions like that). They ought to be able, occasionally, to covert another person's cells JUST FINE without also marking them as any more foreign than an equivalent cancer naturally arising in that person.

The article makes a big deal of Mac OS X's UNIX certification. Although it didn't hurt, the certification really had nothing to do with the rise in popularity of the Mac. Using open source code certainly allowed Apple to take advantage of (and then build upon) the cool stuff we've enjoyed on Linux for years, but what broke Microsoft's stranglehold on the consumer mindset was really the iPod, and later the iPhone. That's what made people think that buying a Mac might be a viable alternative to Windows. Of course once they made the switch, users were able to see that the technology really works, but without the iPod, most people would never have considered the Mac as an option.

There were other factors at work too:

• Poor support for Vista when it launched made people desperate for an alternative
• The rising popularity of Firefox made web developers stop building sites that only worked in IE on Windows

This seems like circular logic. First one has to define what a "Neanderthal" is before answering that question.

Yep. A lot of taxonomy is like that.

In the process of classifying things they're trying to find or define sharp boundaries on a subject matter that is actually a continuum.

I recall, in my first encounters with the subject, trying to get a coherent definition of the distinctions between species, genus, family etc.. The instructor was utterly uanble to provide one. (Of course this WAS at the junior-high level.)

DNA technology is also substantially revamping the whole field. Previously they had to infer what genes various organisms had by observing their expressions in morphology - which makes it hard to track genes that are there but "turned off". Now that they can actually sequence the DNA (or the expressed protiens when the sample is too old for DNA and RNA to survive) a lot of the classifications are getting rearranged.

Was Neanderthal a species, or something more akin to a colorform? What constitutes extinction when a branch that once interbred with another dies out, but leaves behind a substantial amount of its DNA? Did the two branches actually "speciate", i.e. separate to the point where the COULDN'T interbreed, or at least couldn't produce viable crossbreed offspring that could produce offspring of their own in turn? Or was it just that they mostly DIDN'T interbreed? Were they like the races of the current human species (clusters of different traits but one big gene pool), like horses and donkeys (where crossbreeds are easy but mostly infertile), or like fully-speciated organisms that might try but just can't produce offspring? Did they go extinct, or did most of their traits just gradually (or suddenly, as in a near-extinction event where all the copies of a gene were in the places where everybody died off) get lost from the geneome of the one big human family?

Seems to me it's mostly a matter of definition and partly a subject for more research.

Don't ask me for an authoritative definition. I'm just another observer, not a taxonimist. B-)

So by what metric are Neanderthals extinct, if there are Neanderthals who have living descendants with a measurable amount of their genetic makeup?

There is no living population, large enough to produce additional generations of viable offspring, with a full, or substantial, Neanderthal genome.

No. In the U.S. cartoon images ARE protected by the First Amendment. This was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2002. (Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, 535 U.S. 234 (2002)). Sometimes our Supreme court DOES get it right!

Thanks for the cite!

I'm really happy to be proven wrong on this one.

Yeah, this is stupid. You can't sentence people for drawing and using a paper and pen, whatever the content of their drawing, ...

Sure "you" can. This was in the UK. They don't have First Amendment protections, so the law is what's passed and enforced.

Last I heard, some jurisdictions in the US have some similar anti-pornography laws, banning drawn images. In the US the anti-pornography laws are justified against the clear prohibition on such laws in the First Amendment by claiming the purveyors of pornography are part of a conspiracy with the pornographer who abused an underage child by photographing her.

Obviously this justification is bogus when the image is drawn. So while the prohibition is on the books, I understand the authorities are reluctant to actually enforce it against anyone who has enough money to appeal it. So they tend to use such laws only when they can't find (or plant) any actual child pictures on a target(s) they've raided, but still really want to jail them and seize their assets, or as a "pour on the counts" measure when knocking the law down wouldn't do much for the accused.

(I think the underage are underripe and have no personal interest in such fare. So I don't follow the issue closely, except when someone threatens to post such stuff on a system I administer. Maybe somebody else, with more reliable and/or up-to-date knowledge, can comment?)

Even if the Nevada health department DID have an objection, what's wrong with having some ice bags in an insulated box at the counter and calling THAT a "cooler" or "icebox"? It wouldn't need to be powered, because it would be kept cold by the steady flow of fresh bags from the supply truck.

You'd have to run it as a FIFO, to avoid having bags sitting there for hours. (Bag porters put 'em in one end, clerks pull them out at the other - or put a moving partition in and run it as a circular buffer, so you don't have to slide them down. No additional communication between counter workers and bag-porters is necessary, because the available open space signals when more bags need to be toted. Only downside I see is that if/when the counter is about to close, you need to signal the porters to stop, to avoid having unsold bags in the cooler that need to be ported back to the truck to keep them from melting during the break.)

Such a local buffer would do all you want, without leaving the ice bags sitting on a counter in the desert. Also: The ice would be seen by the customers to be fresh, rather than partially melted while waiting to be picked up.

So nothing has made it through the Chunnel yet?

It was a military surplus rifle that had been "sporterized" (mainly by cutting the stock down to a more civilian profile).

The Enfield has an interesting history: Back in the period leading up to WWII the British mmilitary had a good idea the war was coming. The army was armed mainly wiith the Lee-Enfield bolt action rifles and they knew they needed a good slect fire automatic/semiautomatic rifle to replace them, least they be outgunned. But they debated over WHICH design to pick for so long that, when the Blitzkreig brought the Germans into a faceoff with the British, the autos weren't yet deployed.

It turns out that the Lee-Enfield action has a number of features that make it VERY much faster to operate than other bolt-action military weapons of the time. The bolt has a very small throw angle. It has rear, not front, locking lugs (out where there's lots of clearance and little stress and opportunity for dirt to gum them up). The action is almost glassy-smooth. The bolt ball is located where it can be opened by the thumb, while slapping it closed with the palm, doesn't require accurate positioning of the hand, and guides the hand back to the correct position to fire, letting the user's attention remain on the target scene and sight picture. It cocks on closing (rather than on opening as Mausers do), dedicating essentially all the energy on opening to case extraction, rather than splitting it with spring-cocking and keeping the opening and closing work closer to equal.

The result is that, with a modicum of practice, a rifleman with a Lee-Enfield can achieve higher firing rates than the operator of a machine gun. (Machine gun rates are deliberately limited to make them easier to control and aim, avoid wasting ammunition, and reduce overheating, burnout, and jamming.) It can't keep it up as LONG, because the Lee Enfield has a small, fixed, magazine. But it can fire a couple fast, controlled, bursts - just what is needed in many situations - using a powerful rifle cartridge.

By comparison the Germans were armed with things like the recently developed "assault rifle" - a short-barreled select-fire rifle (for easy handling in cramped hallways or popping up out of a tank hatch), firing a low-powered cartridge. (Militaries had figured out that a gun should be designed to WOUND, not kill: Kill a soldier and you take one out of action - wound him and you use up him, his buddy, a medic, and a lot of infrastructure and supplies taking care of him and shipping him back home.)

The Blitzkreig stormed across much of Europe and encountered only limited resistance, typically armed with the likes of the slower bolt-action Mausers. Then they came up against the British. They knew the Brits were armed with bolt-actions and believed their own propaganda about their lack of resolve. So they expected to sweep them up as they had their previous encounters. They came charging out, and were blasted back, repeatedly, by withering fire. There are records of communications from the front where the officers were claiming all the Brits were armed with machine guns. (I hear one of these records is a recording - with the officer in question being killed in mid-message by a round from one of those Lee-Enfields.)

We have the same thing here in the US, but good luck getting a new SSN if it gets compromised.

What bugs me is I've been refusing to give out my SS# to any operation that didn't have a federal mandate to get it for decades - since at LEAST the '80s.

Then I aged into eligibility for medicare - and other health insurers insist that, since I'm eligible, they'll only pay the difference between my coverage with them and what Medicare pays (which is most of the bill), even if I don't collect from Medicare. Not collecting from Medicare would be a financial disaster.

But Medicare's I.D. is the social security number with a single letter appended to it. Every clerk at every doctor's office, clinic, hospital, pharmacy, etc. that I interact with gets my SS#. Ever such operation's database has my SS#. I went to Costco for a flu shot, so now Costco has my SS#. Every store's database is a chance for a cracker to collect it. Every clerk is a chance for some crook to tempt them and buy it.

There was recently an article wringing its hands over the discovery that people over 65 have a higher incidence of identity theft. Well DUH!

The solution would be fore Medicare to assign a separate medicare number for making claims and otherwise interacting with them - something randomly picked (not algorithmically generated from the SS#, which would return to the current case as soon as the algorithm leaked), and only paired with the SS# (if at all) in a database in the relevant government department.

As I understand it (in hindsight):

- Saddam was supposed to stop his production of new WMDs and estroy the old stuff.
  - He apparently complied, at least with stopping new production. (His guys - maybe at his orders, maybe on their own - apparently hid some of the key components of the nuclear program so it could potentially be restarted at some later date without starting from zero.)
  - But a lot of the old stuff was still around.
  - Meanwhile, he had enemies all around, and one of the deterrents was that they thought he had all this nasty weaponry.
  - So to keep them at bay, he made it look to his neighbors like he really was posturing about stopping and destroying, while still having much and making more. ("I got rid of all that stuff." Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.) As a "good client dictator" he counted on the US diplomatic and intelligence communities to know that he really did it, was tellnig the truth to us, and putting on a show for his neighbors.
  - Unfortunately for him, the show he put on for his neighbors convinced the US that he still had and was still making. Oops!
  - Meanwhile, his neighbors planted stories, disguised as intelligence reports, about his continuation. (One such that hit the press was the forged documents for the "yellowcake" uranium ore purchase. The guy who fabricated it bragged about it after the war.)
  - So the US decided he'd gone (too) rogue and had to be taken out.
  - The US went in looking for the NEW stuff and the CURRENT production and research. Oops! Didn't find it. Found a bunch of old stuff, but that didn't support the argument for going to war. Either it didn't exist (and the US had done a BIG boo-boo) or it was just well enough hidden that it hadn't been found yet.
  - So it was politically expedient for the administration to not mention the old stuff while they kept looking for the new stuff they still believed was there.
  - It was also politically expedient for the opposition to crow about not finding the stuff that was the reason for the war. The old stuff weakened the message, so they didn't mention it.
  - Most of the mainstream press was solidly in the opposition's pocket. So they didn't mention the old stuff, either. This made any reports of it from the remainder of the press look like a pro-administration fabrication.

Thus, if you weren't watching many sources and making really good estimates of what was correct, important, fluff, and/or fabrications, you either didn't hear about the old weaponry or thought such stories were disinformation, and came away with the idea that there wasn't any WMD material to be had in Iraq