You can tell a lot about who made this thing by looking at who it's targeting: Iran, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Eygpt, Saudi Arabia... it's practically a Who's Who of Israel's enemies and potential enemies. If you look at the map in the article, you can see all the infected countries in red, and smack dab in the middle of all of them is Israel. Israel also has some of the most advanced cyberwarfare capabilities in the world, so when you see an extremely sophisticated piece of malware, they should be at the top of your list of suspects. In short, the only way you could possibly make this malware look more Israeli is to circumcise it and put a yarmulke on top.

The graphs in the article are just jaw-dropping. This one shows how the cost per genome should drop if sequencing followed Moore's Law, versus how the cost per genome actually scales ahref=http://www.genome.gov/images/content/cost_per_genome.jpgrel=url2html-18366http://www.genome.gov/images/content/cost_per_genome.jpg>.

With the introduction of next-generation sequencing, the costs have actually dropped much faster than you'd predict if it followed Moore's Law. If it's possible to keep that pace up, then we can expect a $1000 genome in 2014-2015, and a $100 dollar genome two or three years later. My guess is that within 10-20 years we could see the widespread use of genetic screening of embryos for genetic diseases. Right now, this all seems very sci-fi. Like something out of Brave New World, Gattaca, or the Eugenics Wars in Star Trek. But unlike a lot of sci-fi, this stuff isn't fictional because it's technologically difficult/impossible, like a faster than light drive, or a flying car. It's sci-fi because it's too expensive to do right now, but that's going to change rapidly within our lifetimes. The development of tests for Down's Syndrome has already led to a dramatic reduction in the number of children born with the condition, it only follows that the development of new tests will have similar effects with other disorders.

This raises a lot of very thorny questions. Say a fetus tests positive for a mutation that is strongly associated with early-onset Alzheimer's disease. What's the moral choice? Is it moral to abort the fetus and spare them and their loved ones the suffering of Alzheimer's? Or would having that life be better than never being born at all? Or would you be willing to take the bet that in the next 30 to 60 years, they develop the therapies to cure or prevent the disease?

It gets more complicated. What if the fetus tested positive for a gene associated with schizophrenia? It might seem cruel to bring someone into the world knowing that's what they had to face. But this is where the story of genetic determinism put forward by modern medicine breaks down. Schizophrenia has a genetic component, true. What's remarkable is that among identical twins (100% shared DNA) the disease is found in both twins less than 50% of the time. Clearly, there's a very strong environmental component (another striking thing that backs this up is that schizophrenia rates are significantly higher in developed countries than in developing countries). Getting these genes makes you vulnerable, true, but there's a better-than-even chance you won't develop the disease at all. Is a less than 50% chance of developing schizophrenia enough to abort a fetus over?

The issues raised by gene sequencing have been pretty hypothetical up until now. It was too expensive and difficult to look at what genetic cards you'd been dealt. But that's going to change.

"The television station also reported the company isn't incorporated in Rhode Island, but rather Delaware as a limited liability company, which would deem 38 Studios ineligible for tax credits in the state."

This is fraud if anyone but a famous, rich athlete does it.

Google cars were all on public roadways. If it's not encrypted, you don't own it once you broadcast it. The only legally interesting part of this is to figure out how screwed up the legal system is in this area: if you're standing on public property but look in through the window of a private house and see a naked woman, you're a peeping tom. If you look in and see a naked man, he's an exhibitionist.

I have a Pulsar Y911 watch. This is my favorite watch ever despite its simplicity. It has four killer features: (1) it is 100% titanium, so it's very light. (2) It's cheap (got mine for $57 new or something). (3) it has a "white-on" display, which is a cool LCD technology that appears over the analog watch face in *white*, but only when you push a button. The watch doesn't have a backlight (the only real downside IMO), but white-on is just cool. (4) with two pushes of the top-right button, it enters "1-AL" ("Single-time alarm") mode. Every subsequent push of the same button sets a one-off alarm one minute further in the future from the current time. This makes it really easy to set a reminder alarm for something, at any small number of minutes into the future, without even looking, by pushing the button (2 + the number of minutes) times. I use this feature *all* the time, and in fact it is the best feature I have ever found in a watch. I have looked all over for other watches that have this feature, and failed to find one. Does anybody know of other watches with 1-AL mode?

Yeah, the "Ex-PATRIOT Act" sounds like just a bunch of bullshit political theater. In the case of Saverin, the U.S. will lose an estimated $67 million dollars in tax revenue. Now consider that this $67 million wouldn't even pay for a single F-35 fighter ($195 million), or 6 hours of fighting in Afghanistan ($300 million per day). It's a drop in the bucket compared to the overall defense budget ($700 billion) or entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid ($1.5 trillion).

Schumer is just posturing, this bill won't do a damn thing to address the real issues- a poor economy, excessive government spending, and low tax rates- it just seems to be an attempt to distract from the deep problems we face by stirring up popular resentment against one filthy-rich individual.

Here's the situation. Most economists agree that it's not going to be possible to get the deficit under control by either just increasing taxes, or just cutting spending- we're going to have to do both. The question is whether it's going to be possible to raise enough money by just going after the 1%. The 1% do make a ton of money, but there's just not that many of them- only 1% of the population, after all- so even if you taxed them all at 100% it wouldn't balance the budget. That means tax increases on the middle class, who are responsible for the bulk of U.S. federal tax dollars.

But where will they find swords small enough to fit into their tiny little mouse paws?

Actually, Firefox usage is more than 92% Windows, and less than 6% Mac.

The thing that sets the Mozilla Web Apps ecosystem apart from others is that you can run your own marketplace. There can be dozens of competing marketplaces, each with different incentives, economics, target audiences, etc. Mozilla is building a Marketplace but the specs and the formats for receipts and the like are all open source and freely re-implementable.

Set up your own Markeplace and prove the centralized stores wrong.