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why not use a decent shell like rc ?

for (w in `{cat /usr/share/dict/words})
curl 'http://www.buddylinks.net/support.php?sn=' ^$w > /dev/null

The big problem with prions (the things that cause mad cow disease (or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, BSE), as well as scrapie in sheep and some other diseases) is that there is no microorganism to blame, like a virus or bacteria.

Instead, prions are just mis-folded proteins. Take your normal protein, fold it wrong, and suddenly it acts funny because it can't do its normal job correctly. It also induces other proteins to fold incorrectly (that whole replication thing). Because this misfolding has to start somewhere, there are (very, very rare) cases of spontaneous Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (the human equivalent of mad cow disease).

Now, because the protein itself is technically correct, the body doesn't see anything wrong with it, so it doesn't kill it (like it would if it saw a mutated cell). This also means that cooking prions won't change anything.

Because a prion is a single incorrect protein, the transmission rate is really pretty low, especially between species. That is, eating a single wrong protein probably won't infect you. However, your hamburgers are probably a bit larger than single proteins.

There is no evidence of prions in muscle meat. The largest concentration of prions is in the brain/nervous system. Stay away from brains and ground meat (since you don't know exactly where the ground stuff comes from) and you're probably fine, even if the animal was infected.

Try this page for some info, slightly technical, from the UK.

Try this page from NOVA

Good, simple info from NIH

Additions:

Compiler: Tendra
Shells: rc, ksh
Unix tools: *BSD

It's a little more complicated than you were taught in high school. There are viruses with genes made from DNA, viruses with genes made from RNA that go through a DNA stage in their 'life' cycle, and viruses with genes made from RNA that never go through a DNA stage:

http://www.web-books.com/MoBio/Free/Ch1Et.htm
http://www.virology.net/Big_Virology/BVFamilyGroup .html

These viruses hijack cellular components to make the proteins they require to copy themselves and protect their genetic material. 'Sub-viral' agents also exist that do not encode any proteins:

http://www-micro.msb.le.ac.uk/3035/Viroids.html

It's not really sensible to write shell scripts using one shell and use another, so steer clear of csh.

It's my understanding that this same family of viruses is responsible for measles and mumps in humans and distemper in dogs. For a little information about this virus, check here. All of those have vaccines for them. So would it be possible to prepare a vaccine for this virus, too?

awk essential for pipe work.

you'll see it here used like
wget -O - http://domain/info.html | awk -f proc.awk | mysql -u news newsdb

rc shell and it's unix implmentation

I would love to see this used on process mechanically reclaimed meat. I understand that it breaks things up to the molecular level. This means it would break apart those nasty prions that survive autoclaving. Note that prions are organic molecular compounds, meaning that they consist of more than one molecule.

I can no longer donate blood due to the FDA's concern about nvCJ. All for being in the U.S. Army in Europe during the 80's when they imported their beef from the UK.

I recommend this link for a good discussion of prionic proteins and how they relate to CWD and similar illnesses.

Extensive use of the $path variable is discouraged in Plan 9. Instead, use the default (. /bin) and bind what you need into /bin.

Most of our enemies would see it most efficient to use prions.

These are what scientists think are responsible for mad cow disease, as well as the Kuru disease from Africa. Supposedly, if used as a biological weapon (which is years away, if even possible), they could be targetted toward specific ethnic groups and people with certain attributes. (Yes, each word in the above is a link to a resource.)

the moment i read "a superset of all those other shells", i shuddered. "all those other shells" are bourne shell-like, and they are all broken. none of them fix the main problem with the bourne shell: the horrible quoting semantics. this is the main cause of bugs and security flaws in shell scripts around the world. the classic "change IFS and watch everything break" problem.

starter question for 3 points: what does $@ do in the bourne shell? why is it there?

for a small and simple shell that actually fixes some of the fundamental problems with the original bourne shell design, check out rc. it was designed for plan 9, but the above version runs under most versions on UNIX. despite being smaller and simpler, it's more powerful. it provides branching pipelines for example:

% cmp <{echo hello world} <{echo hello Xorld}
/fd/6 /fd/5 differ: char 7

along similar lines, i wrote a shell for inferno which is even smaller (39K), simpler and more powerful. but what's the point, if monstrosities like zsh and bash continue to exist? :-(

Interestingly, on another thread today I found a site for the Vector Markup Language which looks promising.

The same conversation also lead to the university of Leicester's Virtual Field Course

If 5.0 can be built by mere mortals I'll make an RPM out of it, no problem. There's a nice tutorial for GRASS at

Leicester University's GRASS Seeds Tutorial

and the place where I got the binaries was the

Grass 4.2.1 Main Page

at the University of Hanover. Why? Because my boss said to... ;-)

Incidentally, getting the TclTkGrass menu interface (and building it from within Grass) is a Good Thing to do if you're a clod like me.