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DIY Biologists To Open Source Research

Posted by Soulskill on from the meatware-hacking dept.

destinyland writes "Falling costs and garage tinkering are creating a grass roots movement of amateur biologists whose research is more transparent than that of academia. They are building lab equipment using common household items and even synthesizing new organisms, and their transparency also allows the social pressure which creates more ethical research. DIY Bio.org fosters lab co-ops for large equipment and provokes important discussions. (Would it be ethical to release a homegrown symbiote that cures scurvy in hundreds of thousands of people?) This movement could someday lead to bottom-up remedies for disease, fuel-generating microbes, or even a social-networked disease-tracking epidemiology. 'In much the same way that homebrew computer science built the world we live in today, garage biology can affect the future we make for ourselves,' argues h+ magazine, which featured the article in their summer issue."

4 of 147 comments (clear)

  1. DIY first post by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    belongs to anonymous coward.

  2. *BSD is Dying by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic
    It is now official. Netcraft confirms: *BSD is dying

    One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.

    You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.

    FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.

    Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.

    OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.

    Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.

    All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could reanimate the corpse at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.

    Fact: *BSD is dying

  3. Tony Hawk skateboards through White House by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Well, Iran is headed for Civil War and N. Korea is going to fire a missile towards Hawaii on July 4. Russia has Europe by the balls in terms of oil and natural gas access, and our own Big Media is spitting out pro-Obama propaganda that makes Pravda blush. It's good the see that the "adults" in the White House are taking things seriously.

  4. I'm not a big fan of niggers... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Don't get me wrong, I love black people and think that they have contributed much to Western culture. It's niggers that I have a problem with. See below for an explanation of the distinction:

    Black Man:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wynton_Marsalis

    Niggers:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKr0DeUuy-o
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pyW6w5B7Aw
    http://shamesanatomy.com/yahoo_site_admin/assets/images/representing_black_males_as_thugs.278172509_std.JPG