Unfortunately, that's not what the decision means: cDNA isn't "synthetic DNA", it's derived from mRNA and is a widely used tool in genetic research.

Most "commercially useful products" actually involve RNA, not DNA.

have about 100k lines of VBA code in Access that would be downright painful to rewrite in .NET, and completely unwritable on any *Nix platform.

Bet you could do it in, like, 17 lines of Perl.

Who's rising up? People just got sick of the hype quicker than usual, because there was more of it.

Hype. Image. Bullshit.

Sure, sure... most real currencies don't go through that every two weeks, though.

Or to peaceably assemble them, I guess.

TV computer systems and "viruses" have very little in common with real-world computer systems and viruses.

A young, single male is an automatic 'brogrammer' now?

Leaping to faulty conclusions from spotty data is basically my day job, but it seems these people take it to a new level.

30% of breaches will be from SQL injections, because that's the percent they found to be vulnerable?

A certain type of attack will increase because they googled some shit?

What the actual fuck is this?

How nice of the BitCoin people to provide examples of that, again and again.

Yeah, I still don't really see how "can be used in a car" is preferable to "can be used indoors".

I still don't get the mirror display thing - are they cheaper or something? I don't believe that anyone would actually decide that "yes! the one where what you see is a) your face and, distant-second, b) whatever you're trying to work on, is the way to go!"

Am I missing something? The only matte displays I can find anymore are Lenovo T-series and a few specific Dells. It's just weird.

You're an even shittier person than you though: you didn't think at all about the families and friends of the millions of other people currently dying of cancer and other illnesses.

Heh, that's interesting - one of my favorite things about The Culture is that Banks isn't given to aggrandizing "the human spirit" or any other such malarkey.

Without daily worries, the vast majority of Culture citizens dedicate their lives to finding new and interesting ways to get high and stimulate their genitals. It's a very, very few that have exotic adventures, which is actually pretty hard to get into, since you either have to be invited to SC or convince a Mind to take you along.

I just finished Excession a few weeks ago and, for example, the picture it paints of Phage Rock "high society" sounds very far from the ultimate expression of human potential.

You're not getting it. It's likely that the 5 copies were characteristic of the cancer cells when she died - as the parent said, cancer cells are all sorts of fucked up.

That's entirely besides the point, though. These cell lines are not used as a model of cancer they're used as a model of human cells. Those working with them understand the limitations of the model (most of the time, at least); it's well known that cell lines are not the same thing as cells in a live organism, no one was assuming otherwise.

There is no new information here. This is a little like looking at humans and mice, noticing that they are different, and announcing that this "Invalidates all research done on mice!"

Please don't assume that all researchers are idiots all of the time.