This might be a problem with Google Maps 7. I haven't noticed it with Maps 6, which seems to do full caching, and is a superior app all round. If you're on Android, there are various methods of 'upgrading' to the previous version here:
You're still stuck with the annoying marketing-driven 30 day limit, though with a proper manager for the cached maps in 6.x it's easy enough to download exactly the same area again. There are a number of other apps that handle offline maps on Android, of course, but I've yet to find anything that's otherwise as useful as Google Maps 6. A shame Nokia seems to be making Here a Samsung exclusive - Google could use some serious mapping competition across Android.
There are, of course, hundreds of thousands of apps you might consider installing, but I think most people will agree that only two are absolutely essential for everyone:
(sample review: GREAT APP ESPECIALLY IF YOUR STONED OR DRUNK OR ANYTHING ELSE,TRIPS U OUT,I USE IT WHEN I'M ON ANOTHER LEVEL,WHEN I'M ON THE MOON STONED *****)
this will allow you to make anyone else do your bidding, making a large majority of other apps completely redundant.
(sample review: 'Excellent! The only I ching app that uses sticks and not coins. Much more reliable. The editable entries are also a bonus. Great work, thanks!' )
This will help you make all the major decisions in your life, including what apps to install. It is also useful for understanding the plot of The Man in the High Castle. I meditated on your situation, and using the yarrow stalk method received the wisdom of Hexagram XLII ('The second SIX, divided, shows parties adding to the stores of its subject ten pairs of tortoise shells whose oracles cannot be opposed. Let him persevere in being firm and correct, and there will be good fortune.'). I hope this is helpful.
Never mind trivial things like systemd - the real watershed moment for Old Unix vs New Linux was back in 2011, when a humourless package maintainer excluded 'ddate' from the default build of util-linux:
They haven't finished banning things yet. The common Class C halogen bulbs that fit in standard GLS light fittings are going to be killed off in 2016 in the UK: http://www.nationallampsandcom... Don't know if anyone has bothered marketing a 'rough service' bulb of this type. The lighting quality is very nice, and the GLS halogens are/were a good drop-in replacement
In the UK it's perfectly legal to sell 'rough service' incandescent light bulbs (supposedly tougher glass, reinforced filaments) to anyone, which is a loophole a couple of companies are now exploiting.
Slashdot editors - please fix the submitter's grotesque misreading of the linked article in the summary! Creating fictional outbreaks of lab viruses leading to thousands of deaths should be left to bad movies, not 'news' sites. Which isn't to say, of course, that there aren't genuine risks to consider. High level containment of various viruses in China and elsewhere has been breached on a number of occasions in the last few decades, sometimes with fatal consequences, e.g.:
"... there have already been three escapes from BSL-4 containment since 1990: a Marburg virus laboratory-acquired infection at the Vector facility in the Soviet Union in 1990, a foot and mouth disease virus escape from the Pirbright facility in England, and a SARS virus laboratory-acquired infection from a BSL-4-rated biosafety cabinet in a Taiwan laboratory."
"SARS has not re-emerged naturally, but there have been six escapes from virology labs: one each in Singapore and Taiwan, and four separate escapes at the same laboratory in Beijing."
Luckily, none of these incidents involved 'gain of function' strains, but the potential for a catastrophic incident is certainly there.
You can process genome sequencing data to get the same sort of information you'd get from a karyotype (translocations, missing or extra copies of chromosomes or particular cytobands, etc.), but at much higher resolution. Unlike a traditional karyotype it generally won't be derived from a single cell, though (which has advantages and disadvantages).
It wouldn't help the individual patients, as the risk factors are pretty difficult to avoid in today's world.
It can help at the time of treatment. We are already sequencing not just the germline DNA of the patient, but also the damaged genome of the tumour tissue. If a specific gene is found to be mutated that can be targeted by an existing drug, then the treatment can be tailored to the individual case.
There's a bigger problem with the summary than that - timothy has misread the BBC article, which refers to 'half of all samples from the gut'. These aren't human cell samples, they're faecal samples. The phage presumably infects gut bacteria, not human cells. From the proteins that the phage encodes, the researchers predict the genus of bacteria the host belongs to (Bacteroides).
Because CRISPR itself is so precise, we can envision a number of safeguards. Alterations can be reversed by releasing a new drive with an updated version of the change.
...and when wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death.
The secretive British spy agency GCHQ has developed covert tools to seed the internet with false information, including the ability to manipulate the results of online polls
Right now on Slashdot, you can see the results of this blatant manipulation in the service of their sinister paymasters in the energy-saving lightbulb industry...
It's not a joke article or astroturfing. He's just using humorous examples of improbable technical solutions to the problem, when of course the real answer is to get more adults involved in helping the kids to learn chess (which is his real point). He's written elsewhere about a K12 chess tournament sponsored by his company:
ITworld's Phil Johnson has rounded up a list of what just might be the world's top 14 programmers alive today.
In the unpublished final volume of The Art of Computer Programming, Knuth describes an algorithm that can provide a complete emulation of any of the other 13.
You can send MIDI through USB if you have the drivers and your keyboard supports it, but pro keyboards will also have dedicated MIDI ports. The idea is to transmit which keys are played (with timing and velocities, etc.) to a virtual instrument on the connected computer. When set up this way, your keyboard's built-in sounds aren't used. This arrangement gives you access to a huge range of sophisticated virtual instruments, light years away from the unconvincing beeps you probably heard in the 90s. There are single instrument libraries (e.g. from a specific grand piano) with well over 100Gb of samples.
In the first link, the relevant text is the first bit ("Firefox 3.6 is no longer supported and is affected by vulnerabilities fixed in newer versions of the program"). In the second link, many vulnerabilities fixed in subsequent versions are listed. I suspect neither of us knows exactly how many of these already existed in 3.6, which is sort of the point - it's no longer audited or supported. Why risk using a vulnerable browser when it's perfectly possible to make Firefox 30 behave like Firefox 1, using Classic Theme Restorer and a bit of tinkering with 'Customise' and about:config? It took me about a minute to get 30 working the way I wanted (by moving the navigation buttons), since most of the customisation I'd done for earlier versions carried through. Only the previous upgrade to 29 took longer than this (basically the time it took to discover, install and configure CTR). Most of the earlier updates have required no changes to retain my preferred UI. It's irritating that the Mozilla devs insist on foisting a Chrome-style UI on us, but it's so easy to fix this (when necessary) it's only a minor annoyance.
Should DNA sequencers contain hashes of the DNA of virulent organisms so they can call the NSA/CIA/SAS/UN/boy scouts when they are being used for possible bioweapon related work? (Hopefully they don't rain hellfires on the CDC.)
Some people have indeed suggested that both DNA synthesizers (which write the sequence) and DNA sequencers (which read it) should have such safeguards:
At least some companies that synthesize custom DNA commercially already have pathogen sequence screening in place, but this doesn't seem to be universal or necessarily effective. A few years ago The Guardian had a (small, defective) fragment of the smallpox virus genome synthesized without setting off any alarms, and wrote a rather hyped-up article about it:
Practically, this sort of thing is always going to be hard to police, much like the situation with 3D weapon printing - e.g., a terrorist could always use older technology that lacks the safeguards. On the other hand, assembling a dangerous microorganism from the genome up is hardly the most cost-effective way of causing mayhem - you'd need a proper, well-equipped lab and a terrorist cell of trained scientists to carry out your evil schemes.
Spreadsheets tend to mess with strings that look somewhat like a date, it will automatically convert it to a date when it sees things like that. You need to be really careful about spreadsheets automatically reformatting your data, make sure you properly indicate whether a field is Text or not.
e.g. the infamous 'Excel genes', when a gene name like SEPT1 is silently converted to numerical date format:
Excel makes it far too easy for this to happen (just opening and saving a.csv file with Excel will silently corrupt it instead of invoking the data import wizard that would give you a chance to set data types per column - a great design decision!), and it's hard to spot corrupted cells if you have a list of hundreds or thousands of genes. Some of these have made their way into major online genetic databases:
'In another moment I had scrambled up the earthen rampart and stood upon its crest, and the interior of the redoubt was below me. A mighty space it was, with gigantic machines here and there within it, huge mounds of material and strange shelter places. And scattered about it, some in their overturned war-machines, some in the now rigid handling-machines, and a dozen of them stark and silent and laid in a row, were the Martians--dead!--slain by the putrefactive and disease bacteria against which their systems were unprepared; slain as the red weed was being slain; slain, after all man's devices had failed, by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth.
For so it had come about, as indeed I and many men might have foreseen had not terror and disaster blinded our minds. These germs of disease have taken toll of humanity since the beginning of things--taken toll of our prehuman ancestors since life began here. But by virtue of this natural selection of our kind we have developed resisting power; to no germs do we succumb without a struggle, and to many--those that cause putrefaction in dead matter, for instance--our living frames are altogether immune. But there are no bacteria in Mars, and directly these invaders arrived, directly they drank and fed, our microscopic allies began to work their overthrow. Already when I watched them they were irrevocably doomed, dying and rotting even as they went to and fro. It was inevitable. By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth, and it is his against all comers; it would still be his were the Martians ten times as mighty as they are. For neither do men live nor die in vain.'
Well, at least this has saved us from the Heat Ray, the Black Smoke and the Red Weed. The Martians should have invaded back in 1897 when they had a chance.
Why can't the headline start with "ENGINEERED Measles Virus [...]". Be accurate.
The engineering was incidental to the success of the treatment in these particular cases. The 'oncolytic' virus, already adapted to preferentially infect tumour cells just by growing it in tumour cell cultures, has indeed been engineered to express a protein that mediates iodine uptake into infected cells, but in the current study this was only used for tracing the infection with radioactive iodine. The tumour cells were killed by normal viral mechanisms. However, using a higher dose of radioactive iodine, they will in future also be able to target the infected cells with therapeutic levels of the radioisotope in much the same way that thyroid cancers are treated (thyroid cells naturally express the same protein).
Why the fuck would you engineer a virus from a virus that everyone has been immunized for? Which genius thought that was a good idea? Why not use a virus that the immune system has difficulty fighting off and won't be purged? Herpes perhaps?
(a) They selected patients for treatment who already had low levels of measles antibodies. (b) This is only one of a range of oncolytic viruses (including herpes visues) being investigated. (c) The virus could be further engineered so that antibodies to vaccine or wild type strains do not bind it. (d) Other strategies could be used to hide the virus from the immune system, including the use of 'carrier cells'.
Slashdot Mirror
This might be a problem with Google Maps 7. I haven't noticed it with Maps 6, which seems to do full caching, and is a superior app all round. If you're on Android, there are various methods of 'upgrading' to the previous version here:
https://productforums.google.c...
You're still stuck with the annoying marketing-driven 30 day limit, though with a proper manager for the cached maps in 6.x it's easy enough to download exactly the same area again. There are a number of other apps that handle offline maps on Android, of course, but I've yet to find anything that's otherwise as useful as Google Maps 6. A shame Nokia seems to be making Here a Samsung exclusive - Google could use some serious mapping competition across Android.
There are, of course, hundreds of thousands of apps you might consider installing, but I think most people will agree that only two are absolutely essential for everyone:
Hypnotic Spiral: https://play.google.com/store/...
(sample review: GREAT APP ESPECIALLY IF YOUR STONED OR DRUNK OR ANYTHING ELSE,TRIPS U OUT,I USE IT WHEN I'M ON ANOTHER LEVEL,WHEN I'M ON THE MOON STONED *****)
this will allow you to make anyone else do your bidding, making a large majority of other apps completely redundant.
I Ching - Divine Your Future: https://play.google.com/store/...
(sample review: 'Excellent! The only I ching app that uses sticks and not coins. Much more reliable. The editable entries are also a bonus. Great work, thanks!' )
This will help you make all the major decisions in your life, including what apps to install. It is also useful for understanding the plot of The Man in the High Castle. I meditated on your situation, and using the yarrow stalk method received the wisdom of Hexagram XLII ('The second SIX, divided, shows parties adding to the stores of its subject ten pairs of tortoise shells whose oracles cannot be opposed. Let him persevere in being firm and correct, and there will be good fortune.'). I hope this is helpful.
Yes, I use digital too like everyone else, but somehow I keep going back to the Leica.
Never mind trivial things like systemd - the real watershed moment for Old Unix vs New Linux was back in 2011, when a humourless package maintainer excluded 'ddate' from the default build of util-linux:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
https://git.kernel.org/cgit/ut...
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/sh...
They haven't finished banning things yet. The common Class C halogen bulbs that fit in standard GLS light fittings are going to be killed off in 2016 in the UK: http://www.nationallampsandcom...
Don't know if anyone has bothered marketing a 'rough service' bulb of this type. The lighting quality is very nice, and the GLS halogens are/were a good drop-in replacement
In the UK it's perfectly legal to sell 'rough service' incandescent light bulbs (supposedly tougher glass, reinforced filaments) to anyone, which is a loophole a couple of companies are now exploiting.
'400 rads, ladies and gentlemen. A lethal dose to anyone within ten yards. Get it while it's hot!'
Slashdot editors - please fix the submitter's grotesque misreading of the linked article in the summary! Creating fictional outbreaks of lab viruses leading to thousands of deaths should be left to bad movies, not 'news' sites. Which isn't to say, of course, that there aren't genuine risks to consider. High level containment of various viruses in China and elsewhere has been breached on a number of occasions in the last few decades, sometimes with fatal consequences, e.g.:
http://thebulletin.org/unaccep...
"... there have already been three escapes from BSL-4 containment since 1990: a Marburg virus laboratory-acquired infection at the Vector facility in the Soviet Union in 1990, a foot and mouth disease virus escape from the Pirbright facility in England, and a SARS virus laboratory-acquired infection from a BSL-4-rated biosafety cabinet in a Taiwan laboratory."
http://thebulletin.org/threate...
"SARS has not re-emerged naturally, but there have been six escapes from virology labs: one each in Singapore and Taiwan, and four separate escapes at the same laboratory in Beijing."
Luckily, none of these incidents involved 'gain of function' strains, but the potential for a catastrophic incident is certainly there.
You can process genome sequencing data to get the same sort of information you'd get from a karyotype (translocations, missing or extra copies of chromosomes or particular cytobands, etc.), but at much higher resolution. Unlike a traditional karyotype it generally won't be derived from a single cell, though (which has advantages and disadvantages).
It wouldn't help the individual patients, as the risk factors are pretty difficult to avoid in today's world.
It can help at the time of treatment. We are already sequencing not just the germline DNA of the patient, but also the damaged genome of the tumour tissue. If a specific gene is found to be mutated that can be targeted by an existing drug, then the treatment can be tailored to the individual case.
Maybe they forgot that the Internet has no borders?
No, they remembered:
http://www.publications.parlia...
'The only way as we see it to resolve questions of jurisdiction and access to communications data would be by international treaty.'
Coming soon to a legislature near you!
There's a bigger problem with the summary than that - timothy has misread the BBC article, which refers to 'half of all samples from the gut'. These aren't human cell samples, they're faecal samples. The phage presumably infects gut bacteria, not human cells. From the proteins that the phage encodes, the researchers predict the genus of bacteria the host belongs to (Bacteroides).
Because CRISPR itself is so precise, we can envision a number of safeguards. Alterations can be reversed by releasing a new drive with an updated version of the change.
...and when wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death.
The secretive British spy agency GCHQ has developed covert tools to seed the internet with false information, including the ability to manipulate the results of online polls
Right now on Slashdot, you can see the results of this blatant manipulation in the service of their sinister paymasters in the energy-saving lightbulb industry...
It's not a joke article or astroturfing. He's just using humorous examples of improbable technical solutions to the problem, when of course the real answer is to get more adults involved in helping the kids to learn chess (which is his real point). He's written elsewhere about a K12 chess tournament sponsored by his company:
http://blogs.sas.com/content/s...
ITworld's Phil Johnson has rounded up a list of what just might be the world's top 14 programmers alive today.
In the unpublished final volume of The Art of Computer Programming, Knuth describes an algorithm that can provide a complete emulation of any of the other 13.
You can send MIDI through USB if you have the drivers and your keyboard supports it, but pro keyboards will also have dedicated MIDI ports. The idea is to transmit which keys are played (with timing and velocities, etc.) to a virtual instrument on the connected computer. When set up this way, your keyboard's built-in sounds aren't used. This arrangement gives you access to a huge range of sophisticated virtual instruments, light years away from the unconvincing beeps you probably heard in the 90s. There are single instrument libraries (e.g. from a specific grand piano) with well over 100Gb of samples.
You linked to the list of bugs *fixed* in 3.6
In the first link, the relevant text is the first bit ("Firefox 3.6 is no longer supported and is affected by vulnerabilities fixed in newer versions of the program"). In the second link, many vulnerabilities fixed in subsequent versions are listed. I suspect neither of us knows exactly how many of these already existed in 3.6, which is sort of the point - it's no longer audited or supported. Why risk using a vulnerable browser when it's perfectly possible to make Firefox 30 behave like Firefox 1, using Classic Theme Restorer and a bit of tinkering with 'Customise' and about:config? It took me about a minute to get 30 working the way I wanted (by moving the navigation buttons), since most of the customisation I'd done for earlier versions carried through. Only the previous upgrade to 29 took longer than this (basically the time it took to discover, install and configure CTR). Most of the earlier updates have required no changes to retain my preferred UI. It's irritating that the Mozilla devs insist on foisting a Chrome-style UI on us, but it's so easy to fix this (when necessary) it's only a minor annoyance.
Or just install the 3.6. Works too.
https://www.mozilla.org/securi...
https://www.mozilla.org/securi...
But seriously, yes, it was 'legitimately beaten', just like it's been 'legitimately beaten' in times past, going back to ELIZA in the 60s.
How does that make you feel?
Should DNA sequencers contain hashes of the DNA of virulent organisms so they can call the NSA/CIA/SAS/UN/boy scouts when they are being used for possible bioweapon related work? (Hopefully they don't rain hellfires on the CDC.)
Some people have indeed suggested that both DNA synthesizers (which write the sequence) and DNA sequencers (which read it) should have such safeguards:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...
At least some companies that synthesize custom DNA commercially already have pathogen sequence screening in place, but this doesn't seem to be universal or necessarily effective. A few years ago The Guardian had a (small, defective) fragment of the smallpox virus genome synthesized without setting off any alarms, and wrote a rather hyped-up article about it:
http://www.nature.com/news/200...
Practically, this sort of thing is always going to be hard to police, much like the situation with 3D weapon printing - e.g., a terrorist could always use older technology that lacks the safeguards. On the other hand, assembling a dangerous microorganism from the genome up is hardly the most cost-effective way of causing mayhem - you'd need a proper, well-equipped lab and a terrorist cell of trained scientists to carry out your evil schemes.
Spreadsheets tend to mess with strings that look somewhat like a date, it will automatically convert it to a date when it sees things like that. You need to be really careful about spreadsheets automatically reformatting your data, make sure you properly indicate whether a field is Text or not.
e.g. the infamous 'Excel genes', when a gene name like SEPT1 is silently converted to numerical date format:
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1...
http://nsaunders.wordpress.com...
Excel makes it far too easy for this to happen (just opening and saving a .csv file with Excel will silently corrupt it instead of invoking the data import wizard that would give you a chance to set data types per column - a great design decision!), and it's hard to spot corrupted cells if you have a list of hundreds or thousands of genes. Some of these have made their way into major online genetic databases:
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1...
Excel in bioimformatics? - just say no, kids.
'In another moment I had scrambled up the earthen rampart and stood upon its crest, and the interior of the redoubt was below me. A mighty space it was, with gigantic machines here and there within it, huge mounds of material and strange shelter places. And scattered about it, some in their overturned war-machines, some in the now rigid handling-machines, and a dozen of them stark and silent and laid in a row, were the Martians--dead!--slain by the putrefactive and disease bacteria against which their systems were unprepared; slain as the red weed was being slain; slain, after all man's devices had failed, by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth.
For so it had come about, as indeed I and many men might have foreseen had not terror and disaster blinded our minds. These germs of disease have taken toll of humanity since the beginning of things--taken toll of our prehuman ancestors since life began here. But by virtue of this natural selection of our kind we have developed resisting power; to no germs do we succumb without a struggle, and to many--those that cause putrefaction in dead matter, for instance--our living frames are altogether immune. But there are no bacteria in Mars, and directly these invaders arrived, directly they drank and fed, our microscopic allies began to work their overthrow. Already when I watched them they were irrevocably doomed, dying and rotting even as they went to and fro. It was inevitable. By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth, and it is his against all comers; it would still be his were the Martians ten times as mighty as they are. For neither do men live nor die in vain.'
Well, at least this has saved us from the Heat Ray, the Black Smoke and the Red Weed. The Martians should have invaded back in 1897 when they had a chance.
Why can't the headline start with "ENGINEERED Measles Virus [...]". Be accurate.
The engineering was incidental to the success of the treatment in these particular cases. The 'oncolytic' virus, already adapted to preferentially infect tumour cells just by growing it in tumour cell cultures, has indeed been engineered to express a protein that mediates iodine uptake into infected cells, but in the current study this was only used for tracing the infection with radioactive iodine. The tumour cells were killed by normal viral mechanisms. However, using a higher dose of radioactive iodine, they will in future also be able to target the infected cells with therapeutic levels of the radioisotope in much the same way that thyroid cancers are treated (thyroid cells naturally express the same protein).
Why the fuck would you engineer a virus from a virus that everyone has been immunized for? Which genius thought that was a good idea? Why not use a virus that the immune system has difficulty fighting off and won't be purged? Herpes perhaps?
(a) They selected patients for treatment who already had low levels of measles antibodies. (b) This is only one of a range of oncolytic viruses (including herpes visues) being investigated. (c) The virus could be further engineered so that antibodies to vaccine or wild type strains do not bind it. (d) Other strategies could be used to hide the virus from the immune system, including the use of 'carrier cells'.