By far the most expensive part of the process was donated by Illumina, a company which makes gene sequencing equipment and accepted his family as a test group. That probably would have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. (The summary's misleading; he only prepared the samples in his basement. The sequencing equipment was bleeding-edge.)

As Xeno man said, the real treasure this fellow had was his knowledge of molecular biology and biochemistry, although as a player in the biotech industry his connections weren't insignificant.

The machine learning researcher in me feels this comment is overly presumptuous and possibly discriminatory.

No, no, not BCD, ASCII decimal. BCD's been ubiquitous in instruction sets since the early sixties, I'm pretty sure. The imagined horror is doing all that math with 0x30 ORed onto everything.

...I was joking, but it's called AAA. bws111 is a bit wrong (I think?); unpacked BCD still uses 0x00 to represent 0, not 0x30. You have to do an extra operation to go between ASCII and unpacked BCD.

Ten bucks says there's an x86 instruction for it.

Given ICANN's track record, I'm pretty sure they're just looking for more public resources to carve up and monetize.

Here's your answer:

Basically, they'd be extracting a licensing fee from the current people you go to for WHOIS lookups. Arguably this could be called "killing" WHOIS since it means taking away its... free spirit.

(FWIW, the high-profile accusations of Stasi-like behaviour implied that the rest of the world was being treated like East Germany much moreso than the US itself. Keep in mind that while the NSA may be retaining metadata, they have carte blanche to the same information in every other country. So much for the Pledge of Allegiance.)

That being said, as a Canadian who's visited the US several times, they just don't care. They're too busy to scour everyone's mobile devices. As long as you don't look like you might be Muslim or a specific individual on their hit list, you won't even be subjected to anything more than backscatter and removing your shoes.

Nothing left; I'm satisfied. Except perhaps that I think you need to use more critical reasoning when browsing Wikipedia. Different areas have different ambient levels of quality; they're not all rubbish. Reasonably unobscure articles in the life sciences tend to be very if not completely reliable, simply because there's nothing to manipulate and they're above the reading comprehension of most vandals.

Aha! Yeah, never do that. In perl, this behaviour of the short-circuiting || (or) operator was noticed, so they extended the return value to provide a freaky combo if statement inspired by the ternary operator. It's simultaneously brilliant and revolting, like most things in perl.

Not if you're really, really, really ridiculously tall.

Evolution sure does. It's set up that way for a reason: shorter life expectancies during times of abundance yield a more rapid mutation rate. This is the sublime hand of God's design in action. (What a great guy, eh?) It's immensely futile to be upset about our hard-wired suicidal tendencies, since they're supposed to clear space for our children—but feel free to rewrite them, if you really think it's best for the world.

Only until puberty—Luke's thesis abstract states that after that, melatonin levels return to normal, although the onset puberty is certainly accelerated.

I sure have—but don't forget that there are other implicated causes, like BGH in milk and xenoestrogens (such as from plastics.) If Fluoride really can be implicated in an epidemic of precocious puberty, then there must be some other variables; it's too widespread to fit the data.

So... forgive me, but why didn't you? The link was right there on the Wikipedia article you cited.

Surely you should be asking the AC?