I am currently forced into the position of doing my own genetics study on my own family. I would give good money to have me and three family members' genomes sequenced quickly and accurately. I am tracking the much hyped progress of nano-pore technology, which may eventually make such sequencing possible, but for now, it's a freaking miracle that I can get an exome sequenced for $650 (at Axeq). If you had much of a clue, you'd realize that this article is simply about extracting a DNA sample from blood or saliva, and not about actual gene sequencing. I will get our family's 4 samples of blood processed into extracted DNA for about $400 total. Now, this article is exciting tech. It means maybe no needles will be required in the future. However, it doesn't do one freaking thing to make the hard part - actual genome sequencing - any simpler, faster, or cheaper.

Ooops.... that's a mistake. It's Paul Ryan I was talking about, the Ayn Rand fan, while parent posts talk about Ron Paul. Ron Paul remains my favorite member of the House, in that he votes against almost all bills with funding. When you have the checkbook, and you're spending other people's money, there is a tendency to get a bit carried away, and Ron Paul acts as a tiny counter weight to that. I suspect Ayn Rand would have little negative to say about Ron Paul.

He was simply using the phrase commonly used in Atlas Shrugged. It's a little funny. easyTree has probably read the book.

However, Ron Paul and friends would have Ayn Rand rolling over in her grave. While she would support eliminating all social programs, like Social Security, Medicare, and public education, much like Paul Ryan, Ayn Rand would be appalled at Paul Ryan's chumminess with big corporate lobbies, like AT&T, who line Paul Ryan's election coffers and in return get Internet regulations favoring AT&T at your and my expense. She would hate Paul's never ending support for corporate welfare. I suspect she might even think that while all taxes are evil, if they have to be paid, the rich should pay their fair share.

My own personal battle against DRM is driven by my anger over not being able to read ebooks visually. Instead, I translate ebooks to audio files using text-to-speech tools. The entire audio path I use, even the TTS engine, is FOSS software, and some of it (the speed-up code) I had to invent and write myself. You wont hear people like me complaining, "Why don't you guys work harder to make our lives better." I'll change the world to conform to my own needs, thank you very much, at least until DRM arrived. DRM destroys my ability to help myself, and I can't even begin to tell you how much that pisses me off.

I agree. This isn't like that stupid face on Mars, where public opinion eventually forced NASA to re-photograph the area where the "face" was seen. The theory and current experimental evidence simply doesn't hold any highly convincing evidence that anti-matter falls down. What's really interesting is that every time we think we've got a solid argument, a reasonable counter-argument is found. For example, particles and anti-particles traveling near the speed of light now have good experimental evidence that they bend their trajectories around stars in the same way, but that just means the both particles and anti-particles go straight when traveling near the speed of light, and that space bends. This is an area where no one knows for sure. Experimental measurement is needed.

I find the analogy between matter/anti-matter and electron/hole pairs in semiconductors to be pretty fascinating. It's only pseudo-science, but I did some checking of Maxwell's equations and equations from Special Relativity, using this analogy, to see if anti-matter falling up makes any sense. If you assume mass can be negative, like the mass of a hole in a silicon lattice, then there are only a couple of places where I had to use the absolute value of mass to make it all consistent (one was E=MC^2). However, there are alternative ways to represent anti-matter falling up which may more consistent, where antimatter has positive mass. "Does antimatter have negative mass?" is not the same question as "Does antimatter fall up?" Here's what I put on the talk page on Wikipedia about this topic:

General relativity predicts anti-matter falls down, and it probably does. However, I find the close analogy between electron/hole pairs and electron/positron pairs fascinating. Holes fall up, because the electrons above fall down. When electron/hole pairs meet, they annihilate each other, often giving off a photon, just like electron/positrons. Electron/holes are created in pairs, never just on their own, just like matter/anti-matter.

It's a weak analogy, but if gravity is caused by warping of space, can we compare that to how electrons and holes warp a crystal lattice? Electrons cause a crystal lattice to expand to make room for them, and this expansion causes other electrons to be weakly attracted to them. At very low temperatures this results in Cooper pairs, which likely explains super-conductivity. Holes in a silicon lattice similarly attract each other, because they cause the local lattice to contract. There are papers on the web that mention the possibility of Cooper pairs made of holes. Electrons are repelled by the lattice contraction caused by holes, just as holes are repelled by the lattice expansion caused by electrons. Could matter/anti-matter be similar?

Nice. I think we all need to learn to act as Thomas Jefferson advised, "When you do a thing, imagine the whole world is watching and act accordingly." Police can have their police cams, and we can have our cell-phone cams. The more we have to do things in the light of video recordings, the more we'll all try and be a bit more civilized. I don't think all cops hate video... probably just the bad ones, which I think are a small minority. I suspect they love having their own video. However, you never know which kind of cop you'll be recording...

The local cop around here is our sheriff, who is pretty cool. Once I went to a friends house after his alarm went off, and the sheriff was there first. I accidentally scared the heck out of him when I walked up the driveway. I don't think around here he's ever had to draw his gun on anyone. He helps keep kids from stealing from houses in our neighborhood, and that's a good thing.

Google has been hostile to attempts to use GPG. GPG support can easily be added in their API, and plugins for the popular browsers developed. In recent JavaScript updates, there's a file API, where a private key could be decrypted with a user password, encrypting the data in the browser independently of which browser is in use. If we're more security minded, we could have additional methods in place. With an iframe and postMessage, I could encrypt data through an encryption service, which could be on a server I control. Or... the browser companies, including Google, could simply provide for GPG encryption, the way ssh does.

The other guys on this thread are right. Google wants to read your email to make more money in advertising. Any encryption defeats that. However, you are quite wrong.

I "read" ebooks now at 600 to 800 words per minute by listening to text-to-speech wav files sped up by 3-4X. If you're stuck reading at average or below speed, I can forgive you for being somewhat ignorant of history. I was until I started speed listening. By "we", I assume you mean the USA. Britain bombed the heck out of Germany, far more than we did, and the Russians may have even outdone England. While the bombing was terrible, it was primarily communist Russia that defeated Germany. They both inflicted and took more casualties than the rest of us fighting Germany combined by something like a factor of 3X. That in part is why Russia was in military possession of so many countries at the end of the war, and why they felt they couldn't just go home after fighting so hard for every mile. The even greater casualties on the Russian side relative to Germany helps explain the rape an pillage by the communists as they rampaged through Europe, though Stalin encouraged it, and sh-t flows downhill. Are you confusing Nazi Germany with Japan? It's probably fair to say we bombed Japan into the stone age, partly with nuclear bombs, though our napalming of Japanese cities made of wood probably did far more damage. Now, this was all under a Democratic dominated government in the USA. Are they the single-issue party you are referring to?

Did you notice how Google seems incapable of providing any sort of encryption feature? I can't even digitally sign gmail. Secure communication with their servers has been there from the beginning, yet somehow Google doesn't have the technical prowess to incorporate a bit of GPG? If you think Google just finds it too hard to offer public key encryption with their email, I've got a bridge in Alaska you might want to invest in. Someone from the government has spooked them into keeping everything in plain text.

Their airport security works, and the environment is hostile, so I can't blame them much for their airport interview techniques. In 1996, I was consulting for an electronics company in Haifa, where I wrote a technology mapper for digital logic. At the exit interview, the security guy wanted to understand exactly what it was I was doing in Israel, and he almost made me miss my plane. He just couldn't figure out what the heck I was paid to do no matter how I explained it. No biggie. I have a Palestinian friend who tells me about having to go through cavity searches to get on a plane. Their methods violate privacy big time, but it works.

If we want to pick on Israel, I think pointing out that 45 years of brutal occupation of the West Bank isn't cool. I can let the airport thing slide.

First of all, there's some fundamental math that gets in the way of accurate scheduling. If you estimate your project at 1 month, within a factor of 2, than that's from 2 weeks to 2 months. There's no limit to how long a project schedule can slip, but you can only speed up a "two week" schedule by at most two weeks. If you have several projects scheduled at their best guess that must be done in sequence, and half of them come in at half the estimated time, and half come in at double, then you've just missed your deadline big time.

Given all that, my boss knows me too well... Normally my boss doubles my estimates, but this time my boss in January challenged me to rebuild all the tools I'd developed in the last year "in the cloud", but in only 2 and 1/2 months. The bastard (we're all bastards) knew he was challenging my manhood, and that I couldn't help myself, and that my coworker was the same. We busted our asses and delivered the code. I had to learn C#, JavaScript, jquery, Bootstrap, "model first", "code first" (oh my God! Microsoft SQL SUCKS!!!), Knockout, and oh my brain hurts! But we got it done... f-ing bastard boss... knows us too well...

About 1/3rd of our income was from stock, taxed at 15%. That's the real key to low taxes, though I have a pretty large interest deduction from the house. My wife and I maxed out our 401Ks, and since my wife had a regular job and decent consulting on the side, she also maxed out her IRA, and was able to save $3,500 in state taxes due to a GOP $50K small business income deduction passed last year. I'm tempted to have some extra work on the side just so I can fund an IRA and take advantage of the tax credit. I have a friend who owns a business who legally paid only 6% federal this year, and expects to pay none next year. Through initial losses he'll take on a building project, he'll be able to convert his pre-tax 401K (or maybe it was an IRA) to a post-tax IRA without paying tax, perfectly legally. These are the kinds of things available to the wealthy, but not the middle class.

Doing alternative energy right is hard, and people are stupid, which explains the results. Here in the USA, stupid Republicans bash every dumb Democratic attempt to go green with solar and wind subsidies. Unfortunately, the stupid Democrats totally f-ed up alternative energy funding in the stimulus bills. They paid us to install solar panels, whether it made financial sense or not. As a result, outdated solar panel manufacturing plants that need $3/watt to build a panel expanded their capacity, while companies like Nano Solar produced panels at under $1/watt, but had no incentive to drop prices to under $4/watt, and instead sat back and gave their employees record bonuses, and put $1.5B of our tax money in the bank. Now that the stimulus money for solar around the world has dried up, there's been a total blood bath in the solar industry. Panel prices dropped from $4-$6/watt in 2009 to around $1/watt today. Solar companies are going out of business left and right. The amazing news is that now that we've stopped wasting money producing solar panels the wrong way, solar is now more economical than ever before. Here in NC, farmers are planting solar panels in their fields like mad, which is still pretty stupid, and caused by silly tax incentives.

The story in nuclear is just as f-ed up. Republicans give insane amounts of money to the nuclear industry, but all we got were old-school plants that melt down when power to the pumps shut off. We've figured out how to build better plants (like the A1000), but our regulation is so f-ed up that we can't. Our waste storage plan is straight from a Dilbert cartoon.

I've got mod points to mod you up, but I'd rather reply... My wife and I both made record salaries last year, and we sold a lot of stock that we'd earned in the past. We finally made it into the category of people Obama wanted to tax more heavily. Our total tax rate was lower than I've ever had before: 14% federal, and 4% state. We usually pay 25% federal, and 6% state. I didn't even pay Social Security taxes after the first $110K. At the same time, the US government borrowed about $11K per family of four like mine. If your family of four bought fewer than $11K in US bonds last year, then you are below average, and the future interest on the debt will make it harder for you to succeed.

If you want to get ahead, it's pretty hard to do while working for someone else. Starting your own business can make you money and create jobs America needs. If you quit your job, here's what the system has in store for you:

1) Forget health insurance. Until Obamacare kicks into high gear, you literally risk your life to start a business.
2) You think that 7% Social Security is high? Just wait until you have to pay 14% "self employment" tax.
3) If you hire several workers, and then your business fails like what happened to my wife's company in 2009, all your workers get unemployment benefits. Guess what you get? Nothing. If you can't find a job, and have spent all your money on your failed business, you get to go hungry.

The system is set up to make it easy to stay rich and get richer if you are rich. The biggest threat to your wealth may be some hard working kid who wants to build a new company that will kill yours. Never fear, the government is here! That kid will get put down hard.

Now, having said all that, I was one of those punk kids who started a company and made a bit of money. You don't need to start the next Facebook or Google, you just need enough to get into the upper middle class. It's definitely worth doing, but it sure isn't easy. You'll fight the "system" the entire way, and neither Democrats nor Republicans have any realistic plan or even incentive to make your life any easier. You'll have to succeed in spite of the system. If you do, maybe you too can enjoy low taxes.