The only thing special about my refutation of Anfinsen in 1989, it turns out, is that it was a non-biological refutation, pssibly the first. A little statistics drawn from the meager dna and protein sequences available in 1989 (they fit on a few floppies) was enough to prove that codon choice, when there is more than one codon for an amino acid, influences the secondary structure of the protein at that loocation.

As to stop codons, if you had three halt instructions in an unknown assembly language, the decision that they are all the same and interchangeable might be assumed risky by programers, and there is biological evidence that this decision is wrong. (just google).

This would be important if the unknown assembly language was for some important program which we knew very little about and was of great consequent to our existence..

But since it's jst the genetis code, hell, lets just hack it and see what happens!

I get tired of having to repeat this warning every time this idea is rediscovered, but those are NOT wasted codons, and this scheme could hardly fail to cause catastrophic consequences if it gets into the wild. Over the years people have been discovering there is less and less 'junk' DNA, and everything in the code has a meaning. The stop codons are in all probability different. and someone is going to say 'oops' in a few years, when we wipe out all or part of life on earth.

It may be true that Google autocorrects snowden' to 'snowman' as someone pointed out today.

Whether or not, check out the old movie 'The Falcon and The Snowman' about some goofy teems selling US secrets to the Soviets.

We all agree the KGB is a lot more honest and open that the NSA, or Google, Apple, or Microsoft for that matter. Yep,give the scumbag a medal!!!!!

Right on. The whole thing was a plot to keep Obama off the TV talking about the crooks who stole all the money five years ago and have just gotten stronger.
Obama was on TV but only a few minutes and not on the evening news (unless I missed it) And the two pictures of the suspect were of two completely different people. And the second shooter was relegated to the grassy knoll.

All this to control a news cycle. Scared yet?

from fracking, warming permafrost, and warming oceans. i wonder if they considered it. it could cause runaway warming.

I have some Neanderthal DNA and I want reparations from the Homo Sapiens who stole my birthright. A billion would be fine, even though it represents just a pittance compared to the contributions of my people, which was stolen from us.

This article and http://threatpost.com/crypto-gains-ramp-up-calls-to-get-ahead-of-inevitable-rsa-algorithm-downfall/101560 both imply that we need to jump to ECC and get off of RSA. Since there are direct quotes from Mr. Stamos in one of these articles, it sounds like he is the source of the confusion. Actually the recent advances weaken ECC more than RSA, and RSA is only weakened if the discrete log advances are followed by similar advances in factoring. There is no known theoretical reason for this to be guaranteed to happen, but folklore shows that it has indeed happened in the past: discrete log breakthroughs are intertwined with factoring breakthroughs, but there are only vague handwaving explanations about why this should be true.

So the problem is that RSA may well break soon, but ECC is already to some extent broken by Joux et al. Any advice to throw out RSA in favor of ECC seems wrong to me. What you really need is a totally new potentially hard problem to base new crypto algorithms on, and you maybe only have months to come up with the idea, and then only a few years to get the idea into practice, or else it's a return to snailmail if we haven't completely dismantled it before then.

See http://www.treefrogenterprises.com/research/funwithecc.html for more.

SDN makes hacking and covering tracks so, so, so, much more potent, quicker, and easier. Now you don't just have the NSA to be afraid of. As with the entire history of the Internet, they will not worry about security until their baby has grown into a giant, and then they will attempt to tack some kind of loincloth on it and declare it secure.

OK, let's say these senators are correct and the document has fallacies.

And they say they cannot say what the fallacies are because it would release classified information?

WELL NOW THE NSA CANNOT CORRECT THE DOCUMENT OR SOMEONE WHO KNOWS 'diff' CAN FIGURE OUT THE CLASSIFIED INFORMATION.

The senators should not have made this public. It is almost as if they did release classified information. Are they that stupid? Or are they that smart?

thinking outside the 3d printer box, ever since viewing the endless suburbs in the texas towns I have envisioned something substantially bigger than the vehicle that transports the space shuttle to the launch pad, advancing through the countryside, ingesting woods, grasslands, soil, and rock, and out the other end comes a suburban street with driveways and houses in move-in-ready state. Materiel for plumbing and electricity might have to be transported into the monster.

For Moore, OK, the thing could recycle the rubble back into homes, adding storm shelters of course.

I've been watching for the unmanned aerial technology to develop sufficiently so they could eliminate TV helicopters from the Tour de France and other televised bicycle races, before the inevitable flaming crash, and also so that the energy use is more in line with what the riders are outputting. With a UAV they could also eliminate those pesky motorcycles (not all of them, just the TV ones the riders draft off of) and get some great new angles.

Now, if we eliminate the team cars and replace them with slightly larger unmanned helicopters capable of carrying a mechanic or spare parts....

Or, can a robot riderless domestique be far behind?