'General: USB socket is same width as RJ45 so you can slide a USB plug into the network port and it feels 'right', but gets you nowhere until you look and check!'
The design of the standard USB 'A' connector has got a lot to answer for, even when you use the correct socket! Just by making the design more obviously asymmetric, they could have avoided millions of attempted mis-insertions, especially when the socket is hard to see properly. A few years back, some of Dell's standard office mini-towers had, for no good reason, front USB sockets angled downwards at about 45 degrees and concealed under a flap hinged at the top, which only opened halfway. This seemed deliberately designed to make inserting a USB plug as difficult as possible, as the flap effectively blocked your view of the two pointlessly angled, annoyingly closely spaced sockets.
However, one of my personal 'favourites' goes back to the 8-bit era - the infamous Sinclair ZX81 RAM pack wobble. For about 30 GBP you could buy an external RAM expansion box with the huge capacity of 16kb that slotted into an edge connector at the back in a rather precarious way. Nudge the computer, sneeze, or look at it in the wrong way, and bang goes the current contents of RAM (well, '3D Monster Maze', anyway).
'If such a "hybrid" virus were to be so different from either of its parent strains that a vaccine would be ineffective could you easily tell how dangerous to humans it might be?'
No, not easily. Both virulence and infectivity are hard to predict (though we have some knowledge of what sequence elements have been associated with particularly nasty flu viruses in the past, e.g. from looking at samples of the 1918 pandemic strain). We wouldn't know a dangerous new strain had emerged until, as in the case of the current strain, clinical cases started to appear.
'Killing its host is completely against the interests of any virus.'
Well, a mild infection that spreads widely is obviously a more effective strategy than a severe infection that can be contained. But the flu virus has managed to have it both ways in the past. Even the 1918 virus (also H1N1) only killed a small minority of those it infected, but its increased virulence over seasonal flu and its ability to spread worldwide resulted in an estimated 50 million deaths. And in a sense, we're still seeing the effects - H1N1 may well have made the jump into domestic pigs around the time of the 1918 human pandemic (Influenza A was first recognised as a swine illness at that time, and H1N1 strains were isolated from US pig populations in the 1930s). Now one of its distant descendants is back in the human population.
Yes, absolutely sure. Try a search at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ for "Influenza A", and you'll see papers this term going back to the 1940s. H1N1 designates a subset of Influenza A viruses that include (e.g.) the 1918 'Spanish Flu' and the current pandemic 'swine flu' strain. The H5N1 'bird flu' is also Influenza A. For a good overview, see:
'My question is if they are removing the blue E icon or actually removing the rendering engine? My guess is the former. The way things stand, I imagine many apps would be impossible to run without the rendering engine.'
'Most importantly, the E versions of Windows 7 will continue to provide all of the underlying platform functionality of the operating system--applications designed for Windows will run just as well on an E version as on other versions of Windows 7.'
'Infuenza A H1N1' is really no more specific than just 'H1N1', since all H1N1 flu viruses are Influenza A. There doesn't seem to be a generally agreed name that's both snappy and specific, so you'll see things like 'Novel H1N1 Influenza' and '2009 A/H1N1'. Virologists use more detailed identifiers for individual isolates, like 'A/New York/3002/2009(H1N1)'.
I don't think the biggest issue is any potential bug in the software. Rather, it's the interpretation of the data even when it's been analysed correctly. At this stage, most of large-scale genomic profiling being offered to consumers is based on SNP chips rather than next-generation sequencing. These typically give a readout of 'only' several hundred thousand variable bases scattered across the genome. The difficulty lies in attributing meaning to any particular variant. Simply matching against a database derived from previous 'genome-wide association studies' into various diseases is very likely to give misleading results (very often the variants themselves aren't functionally significant, and just act as pointers to something that might be - this is well understood by the scientists doing the experiments, but probably not by consumers!). Full genome sequencing will have its own problems, of course, though again I think the interpretation (and factors like coverage depth) will be more of an issue than the basic data crunching pipeline (which will probably be industry standard software run at a major facility).
As it happens, I was at a scientific meeting earlier today, where one geneticist put up a slide showing an image from a personal genomics company advert of happy smiling people who had presumably received favourable data. His comment was that the only person who should really be smiling about this would be the CEO of the company, for making rather a lot of money from offering tests of questionable value...
Re:Did they invent C too?
on
Unix Turns 40
·
· Score: 5, Funny
'I really, really want to say that Ken and Dennis invented C to make unix but I'm not completely sure. I could look it up, but I'm interested to hear what people have to say here'
'Dennis and I [Thompson] were responsible for the operating environment. We looked at Multics and designed the new system to be as complex and cryptic as possible to maximize casual users' frustration levels, calling it Unix as a parody of Multics, as well as other more risque allusions. Then Dennis and Brian worked on a truly warped version of Pascal, called 'A'. When we found others were actually trying to create real programs with A, we quickly added additional cryptic features and evolved into B, BCPL and finally C.'
Yeah, but the trouble with the whole locked door and unbreakable glass window thing is that some idiot always leaves his coat behind in the test chamber, and goes back to fetch it just when the non-cancellable timelock you thoughtfully installed as a safety feature engages, with hilarious consequences when the beams power up. But the worst thing is you then have to put up with a giant blue glowing naked guy who spends most of his time pontificating about the illusory nature of free will as observed from his own godlike perspective, or something, which is never fun at parties.
'Back when Edison was offering music on wax cylinders you could buy, I avoided going with George Westinghouse scheme to stream music. I wanted to own it! but now I can't find a player for them.'
Should have gone with Victor Talking Machine media - you can still find drives for those. The EULA is a bit restrictive, though:
You are free to re-distribute the code to anyone and everyone, but this doesn't oblige the distributors you got it from (who might be the original authors, and who might have charged you for the software) to do so themselves. Their only responsibility is to you. Here's a relevant FAQ entry directly from the FSF:
'If I distribute GPL'd software for a fee, am I required to also make it available to the public without a charge?
No. However, if someone pays your fee and gets a copy, the GPL gives them the freedom to release it to the public, with or without a fee. For example, someone could pay your fee, and then put her copy on a web site for the general public.'
'Wouldn't it still be as much a science as say... human psychology?'
Pretty much:
'...and this area is maddeningly slippery. No concept is precisely defined. Results are qualified with "usually" or "in general". Today's research may, or may not, help tomorrow's work. New approaches often overturn earlier methods, with the new approaches burning brightly for a while and then falling out of fashion as their limitations emerge.'
Fry: Look! It's the moon landing site! We found it! Leela: Fry, get in here. Fry: It's that flag from MTV, and Neil Armstrong's footprint! [Puts his foot over Armstrong's footprint, leaving a Nike footprint in its place] Fry: Hey, my foot's bigger. Leela, isn't this the greatest thing you've ever seen? Leela: Fry, look around! It's just a crummy plastic flag and a dead man's tracks in the dust. Now get in here before you freeze.
'Not everyone has a video card that supports hardware acceleration. In the realm of software decoders, I don't know of any better.'
Indeed. CoreAVC is the only thing I've found that's able to decode 720p H.264 in real time on my netbook, where hardware acceleration isn't an option. Of course, this might not be a terribly sensible thing to do in the first place, but it's rather neat that an underpowered box like this can actually serve as a half-decent media platform when provided with some efficiently coded software. And it takes up virtually no space next to my TV...
Here in the UK, there are 3G PAYG tariffs from 2 GBP (~ $3.30 USD) per day (with no minimum charge per month). No idea if there's a pocket router available on any of these plans, but a cheap HSDPA USB stick modem is now cheaper to use (and obviously much more flexible) than many pay per day wifi hotspots.
'Maybe today's "exciting new technologies" will create programs capable of telling when a lazy ass reporter is lifting entire paragraphs straight from Robert Heinlein's Expanded Universe.'
Well, it makes a change from lazy ass reporters lifting entire articles straight from Wikipedia. Of course, anyone wanting to write a piece about 'Why Our "Amazing" Science Fiction Future Fizzled' would probably be better off stealing their material from William Gibson's 'The Gernsback Continuum':
'The books on Thirties design were in the trunk; one of them contained sketches of an idealized city that drew on Metropolis and Things to Come, but squared everything, soaring up through an architect's perfect clouds to zeppelin docks and mad neon spires. That city was a scale model of the one that rose behind me. Spire stood on spire in gleaming ziggurat steps that climbed to a central golden temple tower ringed with the crazy radiator flanges of the Mongo gas stations. You could hide the Empire State Building in the smallest of those towers. Roads of crystal soared between the spires, crossed and recrossed by smooth silver shapes like beads of running mercury. The air was thick with ships: giant wing-liners, little darting silver things (sometimes one of the quicksilver shapes from the sky bridges rose gracefully into the air and flew up to join the dance), mile-long blimps, hovering dragonfly things that were gyrocopters...the Future had come to America first, but had finally passed it by. But not here, in the heart of the Dream. Here, we'd gone on and on, in a dream logic that knew nothing of pollution, the finite bounds of fossil fuel, or foreign wars it was possible to lose.'
'Do we really need those all-inclusive portals anymore?'
Need them?! Surely the real danger is that they will become far too powerful! As a writer for one well-known technology blog put it a little while ago:
'The juxtaposition of the two announcements was almost Biblical in its symbolism and significance...AOL and Time-Warner wouldn't just be creating another media company, but an information nation. This company would be much larger in cultural influence and economic power than most countries on the earth.'
'Not as dangerous as you'd think...Viruses pick up DNA strands from the host as they are made by the hosts cells, this is primarily what causes rapid mutation and why H1N1 contains human, swine, and avian DNA-this strain has been transmitted between these three animals'
The Flu virus is a rather unusual case - its genome (in fact RNA rather than DNA) is made up of 8 segments that can easily be swapped around ('reassorted') when two different strains infect the same animal (8 segments with 2 versions of each = 2^8 = 256 possible new viruses). This isn't true for the adenovirus used in the article, which has an unsegmented DNA genome, but there's still some concern that a therapeutic strain might 'recombine' with a wild-type strain:
This is one reason why you have to be careful when adding (e.g.) new genes to viruses of this type (as in gene therapy). It's rather less of a concern when doing the sort of experiment described in the original article, where the replication of the virus is partially blocked rather than enhanced, and where no new genes are added.
'Viruses have a highly successful history as prophylactic vaccines and are also being developed for their intrinsic anticancer activities. In both settings the ability to undergo restricted replication is highly desirable. Attenuated (but not killed) viral strains often represent the most effective viral vaccines, affording the possibility of persistent low level infection without significant pathology.'
In other words, you want the virus to replicate in a controlled way, so that (e.g.) it hits more cancer cells than a non-replicating vector. Traditionally, 'attenuated' viruses have been used for vaccines and for anti-tumour experiments, but this tends to make them less effective than they might otherwise be. The trick they've used in this paper is selective attenuation - they've inserted an 'off switch' that responds to a microRNA that's expressed in liver (where the virus might do harm), but not elsewhere (where the virus is needed). Also, the adenovirus used in these studies isn't some exotic replicating construct with a deadly payload, but a rather common virus that generally causes mild disease even in its unattenuated form. It may not even be necessary to deliver a foreign gene to the tumour - replication-selective but otherwise normal adenoviruses can have intrinsic anti-tumour ('oncolytic') activity if they are engineered to prefer replicating in tumour cells. One common strategy is to delete a viral gene normally used to evade the cell's p53 response. The virus can then only replicate in cells with an already damaged p53 pathway (like many tumour cells!):
The Therac-25 incident also includes a great example of a ridiculous workaround for a serious (fatal!) software bug, the race condition triggered by this fast typing, or using an unexpected sequence of keys. The manufacturer's initial suggested fix was:
"Effective immediately, and until further notice, the key used for moving the cursor back through the prescription sequence (i.e., cursor "UP" inscribed with an upward pointing arrow) must not be used for editing or any other purpose.
To avoid accidental use of this key, the key cap must be removed and the switch contacts fixed in the open position with electrical tape or other insulating material. For assistance with the latter you should contact your local AECL service representative."
Quite rightly, the FDA concluded this was completely inadequate:
It could be worse. The writers might suggest world peace could be achieved by some extensive remodelling of New York City real estate triggered by the appearance of a giant squid.
'It may well be anonymous today, but that can not be guaranteed into the future.'
It's not that anonymous even today:
'While volunteers won't have their names published with their genomic information, Church said the subjects are completely aware that anyone familiar with them can deduct from the photos and background information who they are.'
Some early volunteers in the pilot program have gone even further than this, and explicitly linked their names to the public data.
'Because ultimately books are supposed to be "spread around", and not hidden away. Should I put you on my list of "Big Jerks of Sci-Fi" next to Ellison now?'
No, you really shouldn't.
Partly because Le Guin is quite rightly regarded as one of the greatest of all SF authors (just the other day, aged 79, she won yet another Nebula), and deserves a bit of respect.
Partly because her annoyance at noticing violation of her copyright is perfectly understandable, and would be shared by the vast majority of authors (Cory Doctorow is writing in a subgenre and is active in a subculture where free distribution provides useful publicity - full marks to him, but not everyone can make this model work for them right now).
Partly because Le Guin is not as 'unenlightened' about copyright and sharing ideas as you might imagine, e.g. here:
she describes the Sonny Bono act as "the recent excessive extension of copyright term by the U.S.A, which has imperilled the international copyright system", and here:
(on JK Rowling) "It's great that so many people have enjoyed her fantasies and thereby rediscovered the genre. I could wish she'd been a little more generous about admitting influences, but so what. A lot of borrowing always goes on in an active, vital art form, not plagiarism, just learning from each other. No harm in saying so."
But mainly because Ellison is really in a class of his own...
'How about writing software that can still run on 10+ year old hardware, wouldn't that be better for the environment than needing a world-wide oil-driven infrastructure to make the new CPUs and chips and plastic cases?'
Software bloat it annoying, of course, but a lot of feature-rich 'netbook applications' already exist, if you don't insist on this year's release. I'm probably not the only one to have replaced an ageing P4 notebook with an Atom-based netbook, which in most respects is an upgrade over the original hardware (cpu about as fast, much larger HD, can accept 2Gb RAM - only the smaller screen is a downgrade). When in Windows, I'm running Photoshop 7 and Office 2000, as well as the current Firefox (just as I did on the old machine) and for most purposes performance isn't an issue (I don't miss many features of the CS3 or Office 2007 I might use on a desktop). But it is true that for some applications well outside the intended use of this hardware, a really well written piece of software can make a big difference. Decoding 720p video in real time is impossible with most software, but Media Player Classic in combination with the super efficient CoreAVC codec manages perfectly well.
Older hardware like my P4 laptop would obviously perform similarly, but the new gear beats it soundly in rather important areas like built-in connectivity and battery life. But rather more tellingly, the old laptop is now defunct - this technology isn't designed to last indefinitely, and soon becomes uneconomical to repair (perhaps because we aren't paying the real cost of disposal of the old stuff?).
Slashdot Mirror
'General: USB socket is same width as RJ45 so you can slide a USB plug into the network port and it feels 'right', but gets you nowhere until you look and check!'
The design of the standard USB 'A' connector has got a lot to answer for, even when you use the correct socket! Just by making the design more obviously asymmetric, they could have avoided millions of attempted mis-insertions, especially when the socket is hard to see properly. A few years back, some of Dell's standard office mini-towers had, for no good reason, front USB sockets angled downwards at about 45 degrees and concealed under a flap hinged at the top, which only opened halfway. This seemed deliberately designed to make inserting a USB plug as difficult as possible, as the flap effectively blocked your view of the two pointlessly angled, annoyingly closely spaced sockets.
However, one of my personal 'favourites' goes back to the 8-bit era - the infamous Sinclair ZX81 RAM pack wobble. For about 30 GBP you could buy an external RAM expansion box with the huge capacity of 16kb that slotted into an edge connector at the back in a rather precarious way. Nudge the computer, sneeze, or look at it in the wrong way, and bang goes the current contents of RAM (well, '3D Monster Maze', anyway).
'If such a "hybrid" virus were to be so different from either of its parent strains that a vaccine would be ineffective could you easily tell how dangerous to humans it might be?'
No, not easily. Both virulence and infectivity are hard to predict (though we have some knowledge of what sequence elements have been associated with particularly nasty flu viruses in the past, e.g. from looking at samples of the 1918 pandemic strain). We wouldn't know a dangerous new strain had emerged until, as in the case of the current strain, clinical cases started to appear.
'Killing its host is completely against the interests of any virus.'
Well, a mild infection that spreads widely is obviously a more effective strategy than a severe infection that can be contained. But the flu virus has managed to have it both ways in the past. Even the 1918 virus (also H1N1) only killed a small minority of those it infected, but its increased virulence over seasonal flu and its ability to spread worldwide resulted in an estimated 50 million deaths. And in a sense, we're still seeing the effects - H1N1 may well have made the jump into domestic pigs around the time of the 1918 human pandemic (Influenza A was first recognised as a swine illness at that time, and H1N1 strains were isolated from US pig populations in the 1930s). Now one of its distant descendants is back in the human population.
Yes, absolutely sure. Try a search at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ for "Influenza A", and you'll see papers this term going back to the 1940s. H1N1 designates a subset of Influenza A viruses that include (e.g.) the 1918 'Spanish Flu' and the current pandemic 'swine flu' strain. The H5N1 'bird flu' is also Influenza A. For a good overview, see:
http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/cidrap/content/influenza/swineflu/biofacts/swinefluoverview.html
At a quick glance, this wikipedia page looks OK:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthomyxoviridae
'My question is if they are removing the blue E icon or actually removing the rendering engine? My guess is the former. The way things stand, I imagine many apps would be impossible to run without the rendering engine.'
The article is now linking to an MS blog:
http://microsoftontheissues.com/cs/blogs/mscorp/archive/2009/06/11/working-to-fulfill-our-legal-obligations-in-europe-for-windows-7.aspx
which states:
'Most importantly, the E versions of Windows 7 will continue to provide all of the underlying platform functionality of the operating system--applications designed for Windows will run just as well on an E version as on other versions of Windows 7.'
'Infuenza A H1N1' is really no more specific than just 'H1N1', since all H1N1 flu viruses are Influenza A. There doesn't seem to be a generally agreed name that's both snappy and specific, so you'll see things like 'Novel H1N1 Influenza' and '2009 A/H1N1'. Virologists use more detailed identifiers for individual isolates, like 'A/New York/3002/2009(H1N1)'.
I don't think the biggest issue is any potential bug in the software. Rather, it's the interpretation of the data even when it's been analysed correctly. At this stage, most of large-scale genomic profiling being offered to consumers is based on SNP chips rather than next-generation sequencing. These typically give a readout of 'only' several hundred thousand variable bases scattered across the genome. The difficulty lies in attributing meaning to any particular variant. Simply matching against a database derived from previous 'genome-wide association studies' into various diseases is very likely to give misleading results (very often the variants themselves aren't functionally significant, and just act as pointers to something that might be - this is well understood by the scientists doing the experiments, but probably not by consumers!). Full genome sequencing will have its own problems, of course, though again I think the interpretation (and factors like coverage depth) will be more of an issue than the basic data crunching pipeline (which will probably be industry standard software run at a major facility).
As it happens, I was at a scientific meeting earlier today, where one geneticist put up a slide showing an image from a personal genomics company advert of happy smiling people who had presumably received favourable data. His comment was that the only person who should really be smiling about this would be the CEO of the company, for making rather a lot of money from offering tests of questionable value...
'I really, really want to say that Ken and Dennis invented C to make unix but I'm not completely sure. I could look it up, but I'm interested to hear what people have to say here'
For the definitive account, see:
http://www.galactic-guide.com/articles/2U20.html
'Dennis and I [Thompson] were responsible for the operating environment. We looked at Multics and designed the new system to be as complex and cryptic as possible to maximize casual users' frustration levels, calling it Unix as a parody of Multics, as well as other more risque allusions. Then Dennis and Brian worked on a truly warped version of Pascal, called 'A'. When we found others were actually trying to create real programs with A, we quickly added additional cryptic features and evolved into B, BCPL and finally C.'
Yeah, but the trouble with the whole locked door and unbreakable glass window thing is that some idiot always leaves his coat behind in the test chamber, and goes back to fetch it just when the non-cancellable timelock you thoughtfully installed as a safety feature engages, with hilarious consequences when the beams power up. But the worst thing is you then have to put up with a giant blue glowing naked guy who spends most of his time pontificating about the illusory nature of free will as observed from his own godlike perspective, or something, which is never fun at parties.
'Back when Edison was offering music on wax cylinders you could buy, I avoided going with George Westinghouse scheme to stream music. I wanted to own it! but now I can't find a player for them.'
Should have gone with Victor Talking Machine media - you can still find drives for those. The EULA is a bit restrictive, though:
http://www.natch.net/stuff/78_license/
You are free to re-distribute the code to anyone and everyone, but this doesn't oblige the distributors you got it from (who might be the original authors, and who might have charged you for the software) to do so themselves. Their only responsibility is to you. Here's a relevant FAQ entry directly from the FSF:
http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl-faq.html#DoesTheGPLRequireAvailabilityToPublic
'If I distribute GPL'd software for a fee, am I required to also make it available to the public without a charge?
No. However, if someone pays your fee and gets a copy, the GPL gives them the freedom to release it to the public, with or without a fee. For example, someone could pay your fee, and then put her copy on a web site for the general public.'
'Wouldn't it still be as much a science as say... human psychology?'
Pretty much:
'...and this area is maddeningly slippery. No concept is precisely defined. Results are qualified with "usually" or "in general". Today's research may, or may not, help tomorrow's work. New approaches often overturn earlier methods, with the new approaches burning brightly for a while and then falling out of fashion as their limitations emerge.'
Fry: Look! It's the moon landing site! We found it!
Leela: Fry, get in here.
Fry: It's that flag from MTV, and Neil Armstrong's footprint!
[Puts his foot over Armstrong's footprint, leaving a Nike footprint in its place]
Fry: Hey, my foot's bigger. Leela, isn't this the greatest thing you've ever seen?
Leela: Fry, look around! It's just a crummy plastic flag and a dead man's tracks in the dust. Now get in here before you freeze.
'Not everyone has a video card that supports hardware acceleration. In the realm of software decoders, I don't know of any better.'
Indeed. CoreAVC is the only thing I've found that's able to decode 720p H.264 in real time on my netbook, where hardware acceleration isn't an option. Of course, this might not be a terribly sensible thing to do in the first place, but it's rather neat that an underpowered box like this can actually serve as a half-decent media platform when provided with some efficiently coded software. And it takes up virtually no space next to my TV...
Here in the UK, there are 3G PAYG tariffs from 2 GBP (~ $3.30 USD) per day (with no minimum charge per month). No idea if there's a pocket router available on any of these plans, but a cheap HSDPA USB stick modem is now cheaper to use (and obviously much more flexible) than many pay per day wifi hotspots.
'Maybe today's "exciting new technologies" will create programs capable of telling when a lazy ass reporter is lifting entire paragraphs straight from Robert Heinlein's Expanded Universe.'
Well, it makes a change from lazy ass reporters lifting entire articles straight from Wikipedia. Of course, anyone wanting to write a piece about 'Why Our "Amazing" Science Fiction Future Fizzled' would probably be better off stealing their material from William Gibson's 'The Gernsback Continuum':
http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/it/1988/1/1988_1_34.shtml
'The books on Thirties design were in the trunk; one of them contained sketches of an idealized city that drew on Metropolis and Things to Come, but squared everything, soaring up through an architect's perfect clouds to zeppelin docks and mad neon spires. That city was a scale model of the one that rose behind me. Spire stood on spire in gleaming ziggurat steps that climbed to a central golden temple tower ringed with the crazy radiator flanges of the Mongo gas stations. You could hide the Empire State Building in the smallest of those towers. Roads of crystal soared between the spires, crossed and recrossed by smooth silver shapes like beads of running mercury. The air was thick with ships: giant wing-liners, little darting silver things (sometimes one of the quicksilver shapes from the sky bridges rose gracefully into the air and flew up to join the dance), mile-long blimps, hovering dragonfly things that were gyrocopters...the Future had come to America first, but had finally passed it by. But not here, in the heart of the Dream. Here, we'd gone on and on, in a dream logic that knew nothing of pollution, the finite bounds of fossil fuel, or foreign wars it was possible to lose.'
'Do we really need those all-inclusive portals anymore?'
Need them?! Surely the real danger is that they will become far too powerful! As a writer for one well-known technology blog put it a little while ago:
'The juxtaposition of the two announcements was almost Biblical in its symbolism and significance...AOL and Time-Warner wouldn't just be creating another media company, but an information nation. This company would be much larger in cultural influence and economic power than most countries on the earth.'
http://features.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/01/10/1418231
Oh, wait...
It's a bit of a shame they didn't use the alternative ending in the movie, which at least hints at this idea:
http://www.firstshowing.net/2008/03/05/must-watch-i-am-legends-original-ending-this-is-amazing/
'Not as dangerous as you'd think...Viruses pick up DNA strands from the host as they are made by the hosts cells, this is primarily what causes rapid mutation and why H1N1 contains human, swine, and avian DNA-this strain has been transmitted between these three animals'
The Flu virus is a rather unusual case - its genome (in fact RNA rather than DNA) is made up of 8 segments that can easily be swapped around ('reassorted') when two different strains infect the same animal (8 segments with 2 versions of each = 2^8 = 256 possible new viruses). This isn't true for the adenovirus used in the article, which has an unsegmented DNA genome, but there's still some concern that a therapeutic strain might 'recombine' with a wild-type strain:
http://vir.sgmjournals.org/cgi/content/full/89/2/380
This is one reason why you have to be careful when adding (e.g.) new genes to viruses of this type (as in gene therapy). It's rather less of a concern when doing the sort of experiment described in the original article, where the replication of the virus is partially blocked rather than enhanced, and where no new genes are added.
'In any virus intended for therapeutic use in humans, allowing the virus to retain its reproductive mechanisms is just a bad idea.'
Not necessarily. Obviously there are risks (and this is just a proof of concept experiment), but as the original paper explains:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.ppat.1000440
'Viruses have a highly successful history as prophylactic vaccines and are also being developed for their intrinsic anticancer activities. In both settings the ability to undergo restricted replication is highly desirable. Attenuated (but not killed) viral strains often represent the most effective viral vaccines, affording the possibility of persistent low level infection without significant pathology.'
In other words, you want the virus to replicate in a controlled way, so that (e.g.) it hits more cancer cells than a non-replicating vector. Traditionally, 'attenuated' viruses have been used for vaccines and for anti-tumour experiments, but this tends to make them less effective than they might otherwise be. The trick they've used in this paper is selective attenuation - they've inserted an 'off switch' that responds to a microRNA that's expressed in liver (where the virus might do harm), but not elsewhere (where the virus is needed). Also, the adenovirus used in these studies isn't some exotic replicating construct with a deadly payload, but a rather common virus that generally causes mild disease even in its unattenuated form. It may not even be necessary to deliver a foreign gene to the tumour - replication-selective but otherwise normal adenoviruses can have intrinsic anti-tumour ('oncolytic') activity if they are engineered to prefer replicating in tumour cells. One common strategy is to delete a viral gene normally used to evade the cell's p53 response. The virus can then only replicate in cells with an already damaged p53 pathway (like many tumour cells!):
http://www.jci.org/articles/view/9762
The Therac-25 incident also includes a great example of a ridiculous workaround for a serious (fatal!) software bug, the race condition triggered by this fast typing, or using an unexpected sequence of keys. The manufacturer's initial suggested fix was:
"Effective immediately, and until further notice, the key used for moving the cursor back through the prescription sequence (i.e., cursor "UP" inscribed with an upward pointing arrow) must not be used for editing or any other purpose.
To avoid accidental use of this key, the key cap must be removed and the switch contacts fixed in the open position with electrical tape or other insulating material. For assistance with the latter you should contact your local AECL service representative."
Quite rightly, the FDA concluded this was completely inadequate:
http://courses.cs.vt.edu/~cs3604/lib/Therac_25/Therac_3.html
Start here for the whole sorry story:
http://courses.cs.vt.edu/~cs3604/lib/Therac_25/Therac_1.html
It could be worse. The writers might suggest world peace could be achieved by some extensive remodelling of New York City real estate triggered by the appearance of a giant squid.
'It may well be anonymous today, but that can not be guaranteed into the future.'
It's not that anonymous even today:
'While volunteers won't have their names published with their genomic information, Church said the subjects are completely aware that anyone familiar with them can deduct from the photos and background information who they are.'
Some early volunteers in the pilot program have gone even further than this, and explicitly linked their names to the public data.
No need for all that mucking about with physics - they just need to hire this student:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/5261752/Artist-creates-invisible-car.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/lancashire/8030766.stm
'Because ultimately books are supposed to be "spread around", and not hidden away.
Should I put you on my list of "Big Jerks of Sci-Fi" next to Ellison now?'
No, you really shouldn't.
Partly because Le Guin is quite rightly regarded as one of the greatest of all SF authors (just the other day, aged 79, she won yet another Nebula), and deserves a bit of respect.
Partly because her annoyance at noticing violation of her copyright is perfectly understandable, and would be shared by the vast majority of authors (Cory Doctorow is writing in a subgenre and is active in a subculture where free distribution provides useful publicity - full marks to him, but not everyone can make this model work for them right now).
Partly because Le Guin is not as 'unenlightened' about copyright and sharing ideas as you might imagine, e.g. here:
http://www.ursulakleguin.com/Copyright.html
she describes the Sonny Bono act as "the recent excessive extension of copyright term by the U.S.A, which has imperilled the international copyright system", and here:
http://nerdworld.blogs.time.com/2009/05/11/an-interview-with-ursula-k-le-guin/
(on JK Rowling) "It's great that so many people have enjoyed her fantasies and thereby rediscovered the genre. I could wish she'd been a little more generous about admitting influences, but so what. A lot of borrowing always goes on in an active, vital art form, not plagiarism, just learning from each other. No harm in saying so."
But mainly because Ellison is really in a class of his own...
'How about writing software that can still run on 10+ year old hardware, wouldn't that be better for the environment than needing a world-wide oil-driven infrastructure to make the new CPUs and chips and plastic cases?'
Software bloat it annoying, of course, but a lot of feature-rich 'netbook applications' already exist, if you don't insist on this year's release. I'm probably not the only one to have replaced an ageing P4 notebook with an Atom-based netbook, which in most respects is an upgrade over the original hardware (cpu about as fast, much larger HD, can accept 2Gb RAM - only the smaller screen is a downgrade). When in Windows, I'm running Photoshop 7 and Office 2000, as well as the current Firefox (just as I did on the old machine) and for most purposes performance isn't an issue (I don't miss many features of the CS3 or Office 2007 I might use on a desktop). But it is true that for some applications well outside the intended use of this hardware, a really well written piece of software can make a big difference. Decoding 720p video in real time is impossible with most software, but Media Player Classic in combination with the super efficient CoreAVC codec manages perfectly well.
Older hardware like my P4 laptop would obviously perform similarly, but the new gear beats it soundly in rather important areas like built-in connectivity and battery life. But rather more tellingly, the old laptop is now defunct - this technology isn't designed to last indefinitely, and soon becomes uneconomical to repair (perhaps because we aren't paying the real cost of disposal of the old stuff?).