I think you're misunderestimating the author's vocabulary...

Maybe pay a consultant for a day's worth of advice instead of trying to do it on the cheap by "asking Slashdot" -- in the long run, it might save you some of that rare philanthropy cash which seems in danger of being spent in a panick purchase.

So the arXiv article (http://arxiv.org/abs/1106.4192v1) cited in TFA is a little more accurate than the already-much-panned summary. But the authors of the arXiv article still use the term 'virtual infection' which is very misleading at best.

Basically there are a few (actually only two described in the paper) entries in one particular human genome database maintained at EMBL that appear to be mycoplasma-derived. Two out of 45,000 features on the Affymetrix Human U133 +2 oligonucleotide array, used to quantify mRNA levels in a given sample, appear to correspond to the mycoplasma sequences. So, at best, two of the genes you look at (out of 45,000) might be mycoplasma genes in that particular type of experiment.

It's not a big deal, so that's why the work isn't published in a peer-reviewed journal.

My eyes and brain must be getting old.. I read the title as "Turing machine Completes Hole Under Niagara Falls"...

It just needs to be made entirely out of materials that are available to it. I don't think metal would be easy to come by for a machine like this. Or plastic, for that matter. The mining/manufacturing process is too difficult.

People get freaked out by the idea of replicators, but what the hell are WE? Or any life form, for that matter? The simplest ones can survive on light or heat or chemical energy alone, and as long as there is energy and a few new necessary building blocks about (C, O, N etc in various forms) a lot of types of bacteria will happily replicate indefinitely!!

All this grey goo and nanotech rubbish is pure paranoia! It has already happened! It's life, dammit!

I for one.. ah, fuck it.

Could somebody please enlighten me by answering this question: If the 3D universe can be encoded on a 2D surface, would not that surface have to be curved i.e. be three dimensional itself?

Not that I have read TFA, but this is probably another plant with multiple copies of each chomosome. In which case it's not really a newsflash; this is the case for many plants. Sugar cane and many other monocots have extremely multiploid genomes.

... too, many, commas, in, this, summary.

Thankyou. I have often wondered the same thing. How exactly can we assume that all non-dark matter is detectable using today's instruments? Isn't it possible that there is one hell of a crapload of normal matter out there that we just can't see? That it isn't some mysterious force that we have to give a spooky name to?

Hope some cosmologists out there can shed some light on this, preferably in layperson's terms.

As are Half Life 2 and Portal, both of which are now playable on OSX.

Just a suggestion and I haven't had time to check if someone else has also suggested this, but you might find that contacting an academic who works in a similar area and asking them to add their name to the author list as a corresponding author might give you a better chance of publishing the material in a decent journal. It's pretty normal to have at least two authors these days, even if the second author did next-to-nothing for the article. It helps in the case where a student does the work then moves elsewhere and is not contactable - the supervisor's contact details are not as likely to change (plus they usually contributed to the research by funding or providing equipment etc), so they get put on at the end of the author list as a point of contact.

In your case, there are a shitload of companies likely to profit if your algorithm is as good as you reckon it is, so I would support previous suggestions that you protect it in some way before releasing it to the public.

It's just not a well-designed feature. If you don't delete them manually, eventually all your apps are going to appear there, and what the hell is the use of that? There needs to be a way of quitting apps without adding them to the bar.

Excellent! Now you just need a bad car analogy...

Nice try, grasshopper, but the correct response to all those with no sense of humour is.. "whoosh"!