Your intuition is right on. It must be about a 22-23 nucleotide oligomer. 4^22 = 18 trillion or so. Like someone else said, DNA doesn't glow green, so they either used tagged nucleotides or just spiked their DNA-containing ink with a green fluorescent dye. The dye, I suspect, is just so they know where they put the DNA without having to actually discolor the ball.
You'd be amazed if you knew what their profit margin must be. Oligos like that cost about 10 bucks for enough to probably detectably tag all 120 footballs, and you can synthesize any sequence you want. A couple of bucks for that fluoresence dye, some ink, and I bet it costs them about a quarter a ball altogether. You could even do this sort of thing yourself for not much more. Most DNA synthesis companies will happily do business with private citizens. The only substantial cost would be verifiying an object that someone brings in, but even that just requires a half-decent molecular biology tech and some not-too-expensive equipment. You don't need to actually sequence the thing to verify that it matches a reference sample - you can just cheaply and quickly test binding affinity. I'll bet they charge for verification, anyway. So this whole scheme is probably the next-best thing to printing money.
What? If you published a book today, it would go out of copyright 70 years after you die. It's very clear. It's a limited term, not perpetual. What's the problem?
Constiutionally, it must be a "limited" term. But in the past few decades Congress has repeatedly and retroactively extended the term, such that the practical effect has been to make copyright perpetual for any works published since the incorporation of Disney:
1790: The original copyright act called for a 14 year term, renewable once if the author was still alive. 1909: Term doubled to 28 years; can be renewed once if author still alive. 1976: Term extended to the life of the author plus 50 years; 75 years for anonymous/corporate works. 1998: Term extended to the life of the author plus 70 years; 95 years for anonymous/corporate works.
Note that Disney was founded in 1923. Under orignal law, 1923 + 56 = 1979. Under the 1976 law, 1923 + 75 = 1998. Under the 1998 law, 1923 + 95 = 2018. Think it's a coincidence? The extensions are retroactive, but explictly apply only to works created in 1923 or later. Yes, 1923 is the actual cut-off in US law. I think you can put the debate over a new term extension bill on your 2018 calendar.
[aside]Even as it stands now, seventy years after I die? How can anyone consider that a reasonable term? My kids, grandkids, and maybe even their kids will all be dead seventy years after I'm gone. Why should my great-great-grandkids get to leech off of my copyrighted works? How is this providing any incentive to me beyond the orignal, 1790-mandated 28-years-so-long-as-I'm-alive?[/aside]
What is the source of the human genes in your experiment ?
Do you have to kill a human embryo to get human genes ? I don't think so. Can't you just take a few cells from an adult human ?
This is different from stem cells and cloning. Unlike those two hot-button issues, whose impact is still largely theoretical, human-animal disease models have been in widespread use for decades, and are fundamental to how we understand human diseases.
Specifically, no, you don't use DNA from embryos. When studying human genes, the physical DNA itself can come from any human cells. You can even synthesize it chemically for very short genes. Most research using human tissue is performed on immortal lines of one specific type of cell - often derived from cancers, sometimes custom-made for the purpose - that are grown in petri dishes in incubators. The limitations inherent to this approach (how do you study Alzheimer's disease in a petri dish?) are exactly why animal models, which let us study the whole organism, are so incredibly valuable.
The attempted humor in the replies pains me, because this is actually a *very* serious issue that could cripple human disease research in this country if gone about ham-handedly.
For all you non-bio-geeks out there, we use animal models to study disease because there are many experiments you can do on a mouse or a fly that are either impractical or wholly unethical to do on humans. The trouble is that mice and men are different, so it's rare to find an animal model that perfectly replicates the human disease. But we often get close. One way we get close is by inserting human disease genes into mice. Or rats. Or frogs. Or worms. Or flies. So we can study in great detail exactly what those malfunctioning genes do. These animal models are technically chimeras - animals carrying human genes. But without them applied medical research, the stuff that finds cures for disease, would grind to a halt.
Then there's the issue of biotechnology, actually creating and producing those cures. Another poster said that recombinant insulin is made by inserting the human insulin gene into other organisms - usually, I think, bacteria. Every recombinant drug is made the same way. So are the many antibody-derived drugs now reaching market (Herceptin, etc.). There's fundamentally no way around this. It's utterly uneconomical to mass-produce these drugs in vitro, using all-purified enzymes, and we don't even always understand how to do that. These drugs are already absurdly expensive, and much research has been devoted to developing new methods to produce them more cheaply (in cows' milk, for example).
So this is all no joke. Given the record of the people in charge in all branches of government, I don't think we can assume that they thoroughly understand the issues and will craft appropriately rational legislation. If dealt with flippantly, through the usual partisan talking points, this *will* become a medical and scientific train wreck.
Must be a pretty recent band-aid, too, since I deloused an XP computer exactly one year ago that had a blank admin account password, and which had been pwned by a worm that spread precisely by trying to log into everything it could see using administrator/[blank].
Perl was the first language I learned as a mol biol grad student, when I started doing gene expression microarrays. These things generate so much data that unless you know how to code something, you're limited to the most superficial analyses. I started with sql queries, then shell scripts, and finally Perl. I just about fell in love with Perl. Today, probably 90% of the code I write is <100 lines and geared to a specific task. Perl makes it so easy to Get That Shit Done. There's little overhead, basic file I/O is a breeze, text manipulation is awesome, and pseudo-relational hash matching is fast and easy.
On the other hand, my one program that evolved into a major project I also coded in Perl, and wrote before I had a handle on good Perl practices. It still worked - and I think it only would have been possible for a neophyte like me to develop it at all, let alone so fast, in Perl. But looking at it now, it's a mashed-up hack job that should probably get re-written from the ground up. I see Perl as a great enabler, and most of the time enabling people To Do Shit is much more important than writing perfect code. But I can also see that when the need to Do It unexpectedly gives way to the need to maintain and extend it, it's easy to have retrospectivly dug yourself a hole. Still, for non-critical applications like my biology apps, I think it's better to Get Shit Done first, and worry about the other stuff in the unlikely event your code gets there.
We became the world's only superpower by (1) building a giant friggin' arsenal, (2) training a ridiculously immense armed forces, and (3) developing a staggeringly robust economy to sustain both.
Remember that (3) came long before (1) and (2). We were the leading economic power in 1885, the superpower by WWI. Yet it was only in 1943 that the political and miltary spheres caught up. During that entire transition period the military was slaved to the economics, not the other way around. Arguably it still is, or else we'd be spending far more than 4% GDP on defense.
From the title of TFA, "Case researchers discover methods to find 'needles in haystack' in data". Pet peeve of mine, new techniques are not "discovered", they are "developed" (or something similar). Henry Ford did not discover the Model T by peering though a microscope, and CowboyNeal did not discover SlashCode by analyzing reams of code observations. It may be semantic nit-picking, but I think saying that the researchers just discovered this (surely insanely complex) bit of mathematical analysis takes away from their creativity - it all came from their heads, not from under a rock.
I think the main difference between Suspend and Sleep is the power usage. Macs use only a few % of power per day in sleep, so it's perfectly realistic to *never* turn off your laptop, even if you go for a week without using it. Whereas my friends' Dells use so much power in Suspend mode that if they leave it for more than a day they risk draining the battery. I also haven't seen wake-on-open (vs. wake-on-keypress), but that must due to cheap manufacturers' implementations. I can't imagine there's a difference between the two at a BIOS level.
I don't know if the difference in power usage represents something fundamental, or just different designers being more or less careful with power management. I don't really doubt that Apple will be just as careful with their Intel designs as they have been with their PowePC ones.
If the price of a good doubles every eight years, you can bet that society is going to cut back on consumption of that good.
Which assumes that demand for that commodity is sufficiently elastic across its entire market. We proved in the late 70s that gasoline demand in the US was reasonably elastic then - but is it still so elastic now, after we've had another generation to build out suburbs and exurbs requiring ever-longer commutes? To refuse to invest in new transit systems? And to lower our fleet milage with 20 years worth of SUVs and light trucks? I think it's an open question just how elastic demand will be over a 4-8 year period. Over a longer period, you can still only build out transit and build in sprawl so fast.
Take the test yourself. How much would the price of gas have to increase for you to dramatically alter your use of it? To sell your car for a more efficient one, to move closer to work, to take mass transit every day, etc? For me, with an already short (5 mile) commute, about $10/gallon is probably the tipping point. For you? For the rest of America? I think it will prove to be surprisingly high. After all, the price of gas has already doubled, in just two years - with little real impact yet.
And that completely ignores the elephant in the room. Global oil demand is increasingly being driven by developing economies, especially China. And since their government's legitimacy is now based on the dubiously acheivable promise of bringing a Western-style standard of living - complete with autos - to over a billion people, it is unlikely that their surging demand will prove any more elastic than our already-high demand.
I voted for Bob Dole once. That was the smartest thing I ever did since he lost.
Off-topic, but I love your sig. Bob Dole happened to be the first Presidential candidate I cast a vote for - and the first in a so-far unbroken string of votes I cast for losers. Too funny.
I think another reason is that computational labs have their own hardware (or shared core facilties) while non-computational labs with the occasional need for number-crunching find it easier to do it on their own general-purpose hardware (slowly) or borrow time on a friend/collaborator's hardware. If you're running so few jobs to make it not worth your while to buy dedicated hardware, it seems unlikely that you'll care if a job takes a few days on your lab workstation, vs. a few minutes/hours on Sun's Grid. Plus the fact that labs which can't or won't buy dedicated hardware are likely to be small and narrowly-focused, and lack the expertise to quickly adapt their code to run on the Grid.
I suppose the only exception would be HPC labs - with the need for massive computing resources and the expertise to adapt to them - without any access to academic HPC facilities. But I can't imagine there are many of those out there. I mean, what would they have been doing up until now?
YOU have a choice whether or not to buy the album. If enough people thought the price point was unfair, they wouldn't buy, and the price would go down. Enough people think the price point is fair to keep it there.
So the fact that this never happens means...what? If sales go down, they blame piracy, not the product. If sales are disppointing, they never, never lower prices. In fact, they have a long history of brawling with retailers who tried to sell at discounts (The Wiz, anyone?). There is no stratification of price to match supply and demand - high-demand and low-demand recordings are sold at essentially identical prices. If anything, low-demand usually cost more.
The music industry does not obey the usual rules of economics. This might be for structural reasons, since they have an effective monolpoly over any given artist (no competing suppliers) and much of the demand is organized by artist. Or it might be that the music industry is a corrupt oligopoly that buys legislation and bullies opponent (including artists themselves) to ensure perpetual profits. Or some mix of the two. But it's patently absurd to condescendingly say that Econ 101 still applies to them.
In essence, if you want to dispense with the monopoly-drug business model, you'll have to replace the entire second half of the development track for drugs. You'll have hundreds or thousands of raw, freely usable ideas for diagnosing and curing disease. It will be up to you to figure out how to use them. And good luck with that - it's usually a pretty hard technical problem, taking several man-decades of experimentation.
You're right, that sounds like an utterly intractable problem. If only there were some other way, some way of organizing people...lots of people. Using their money, together, to hire impartial experts to work for them. And then making the results available to all. I don't just mean a few dozen people, or a few thousand, I mean MILLIONS AND MILLIONS. Heck, why not just bring *everybody* in? We can all band together and do incredible things that would be out of reach of any of us individually. We can even select our own leaders to decide how our money gets spent, and have public debates about whether they're doing a good job. Everything will be transparent and accountable, and all working to the benefit of all of us! I shall start this great organization. I shall create it, for all of us. And I shall call it...
Wrong. The previous poster specifically stated he could record two HD channels simultaneously. The HD version of TiVo, last time I checked, was $800. And can it even record two channels at once? Of course the basic version is much cheaper, but it's not HD. The previous poster could have saved a lot of money on his box by not going HD: much cheaper capture cards, much smaller hard drives, etc. This is not an apples-to-apples comparison.
Sure. Nor can the $50 TiVo burn DVDs, nor can it easily transfer DRM-free files to your computer, nor can it store more than 11 hours of best-quality non-HD video, nor can it play games and run Office in its spare cycles...
But it does the fundamental job at low cost with no hassle. In fact, you can't build a MythTV box with even the most basic functionality for the same price. And TiVo is still indescribably easier to set up and use. So it depends on what you need, but clearly the market for TiVo is much, much, much larger than the market for kick-ass $2000 MythTV systems.
I'll take that over Tivo any day of the week for $2000, Alex! And now I don't have to worry about some product manufacturer farking around with my rights after I've bought a lifetime subscription to their service.
That's great. I'm a big Gentoo fan, too, and I thought long and hard about modding my PC to be a MythTV box.
Before I bought my TiVo. Because I realized that the immediate hardware cost would be more than the lifetime cost of TiVo. The basic boxes are $50 now, and the rest of your $2000 investment would buy 6 lifetime subscriptions. Or, if you're a pay-as-you-go kind of guy, 12.5 years of monthly bills. Not even counting the value of my time saved during the product lifespan (TiVo really is idiot-proof, but in an efficient, Apple-like way).
So more power to you for building a kick-ass MythTV box that can do anything but cook and clean - when I can eventually afford to, I'll probably do the same - but TiVo is going to remain insansely popular for doing what it does easily, well, and cheaply.
he troops (Guard and otherwise) in Iraq are not generally the type of troops needed to help here. Logistics, construction, food & water supply, medical, maybe some security.
Erm, those are exactly the specialties that are heavily concentrated in the Guard, and which are heavily deloyed in Iraq right now.
Military police? Civil affairs? Engineers? Transportation? The whole point of the post-Vietnam Guard reorganization was to take these critical units out of active forces, so a major war would require substantial Guard activation. It worked. And so many of these critical, front-line units are deployed overseas right now, including many from the region like the 1088th ENG Bn and 199th Support Bn of Louisiana, and the 150th ENG Bn and 106th Support Bn of Mississippi. Where do you think most of the LA and MS Guard's best equipment is? In Iraq with the fighting units, or back home working to save New Orleans?
In the 1830s-1840s over 90 % of federal tax money was collected from the south, while most of the federal spending was in the north.
Got links? I find this rather difficult to believe, since so little of the South's wealth was in mobile, taxable assets. That was exactly why the South had such a hard time raising hard money by taxation duing the war, and finally settled on taxes-in-kind in the form of food and slave labor requisitions. Unless you're referring to customs duties, which I again have a hard time believing were concentrated in the South. The volume of trade to/from the North was much, much larger. And most of those Southern customs duties were paid by the Northern merchants that carried the goods, anyway. Southerners may have screamed about the Tariff, but the reality was that they were "among the most lightly taxed peoples on Earth."
I'm also not sure about most of federal spending being in the North. The North had far more infrastructure, to be sure, but it was paid for parimarily by private money, and secondarily by state funds. The age of federally funded improvements really only came in 1864, when the Republican Congress enacted the Homestead Act, transcontinental railroad subsidies, land grant schools, etc. And then, as now, most military spending was concentrated in the South and West.
So in the absence of sources, I don't believe a word of your snark.
A great anecdote of the SPL: I recently wanted to browse a mechanic's labor guide to see if my auto mechanic was being straight with me. These are insanely expensive, and your average person would never get enough use out of one to justify the cost. Yet everyone occasionally could use access to it. Perfect library material, right? Well, SPL doesn't have a single one. Not one: any year, any publisher. Bellevue, on the other hand, has a not-quite-so-impressive main library, but a full complement of labor guides. Similarly, SPL has an incredible on-line request system, but so few copies of popular books that thousand-person queues and six-month waits are not uncommon. For a town with such a tech reputation, the holdings on computing and programming are sparse and outdated. Yeah, tech and pop books can have a short shelf-life, but it shouldn't be hard to recoup some costs with an on-line sales system that targets older stuff to people who might want to buy it.
Libraries are about books, first and always. But I do also like the idea of having reading rooms with comfy chairs and coffee service, too.;)
Thirty years and countless books on the subject and not til today do I learn the US entered Vietnam for France. It's been a while though and apparently I'm not up on the latest 'Freedom Fries' school of historical thought.
I assume that's sarcasm, but it's misplaced. The US did get involved in Vietnam on behalf of France, twice. The first time was back in 1948. Ho Chi Minh - who had led the anti-Japanese resistance, after all - wanted independence for Vietnam, and offered the US naval bases and a trade agreement if we would support him. The US military advisors in the area enthusiastically endorsed the idea, and Truman was apparently leaning towards agreeing.
But 1948 was the year of the Berlin blockade, and it was becoming clear that new arrangements were necessary in Europe to deter a Soviet attack. The most critical was the re-arming of (West) Germany. But France would have none of that idea, so soon after the war. Unless we agreed to give them a free hand, and military aid, in restoring colonial rule in Indochina. At that point, half of the Western divisions in Germany were French, France was officially an occupying power in Germany, and withdrawal of France from the nascent Western alliance would have been disastrous. Truman saw it as a choice between Europe and Indochina, and chose Europe without hesitation. This was before the defeat of the Chinese Nationalists raised fears of Asian communism, so who cared about a far-off tropical nation? The rest, including our assumption of the conflict after 1954, is history.
All of that is straight from the archives of US diplomatic cables from the period. Fascinating, fascinating stuff. Not sure if they're available on the web, but they are sprinked around the larger US universities.
If this discovery is confirmed then it means that Bush's compromise worked out wonderfully, whether you like him or not. He allowed the basic research to continue, and scientists found a solution.
I can ignore your insulting but expected demonization of the "left", but this bit is just absurd. It's "comfirmed" that Bush is a genius? No, it's evidence that scientists are willing to make heroic efforts on behalf of all of us desipte the inane restrictions Bush put in place. There's no rational argument that the science will go more rapidly without federal support than with. There's no argument that the billions of dollars that have been appropriated from state taxes and private donations could have been spent more productively if the federal money was there instead. There's no question that the recent breakthroughs in Korea would have happened here first if our government acted as enlightened as Korea's (?!). There's no question that scientists have already left the US out of fear of further restrictions being enacted in the future.
It is patently absurd to assign any credit to Bush for the hard, innovative work of dedicated scientists. He put a huge roadblock in their path, and they're figuring out how to laboriously claw their way around it. I see this as yet another sign of how fast this field could have moved if we gave it a decent level of support.
Actually, there's been considerably great results in stem cell research already. 65 viable treatments have been found. The only thing is, that is from ADULT stem cell research
Every single one is a variant of the bone marrow transplant, which has been in clinical use for 30 years although we still don't quite understand how it works. The fact that BMT sometimes works in very limited circumstances with severe side effects is no reason to not pursue different and better therapies for other circumstances. Further, when used non-autologously, it suffers from the same fundamental defect as all non-autologous transplants.
The nice thing about adult stem cell research is that there are no sticky ethical/moral problems.
There's no sticky moral issue about a child being on expensive and debilitating anti-rejection drugs for the rest of their life? No ethical dilemma about degenerative diseases that have no hope of cure? No moral dilemma when the demand for organ transplants exceeds the supply by an order of magnitude? You take a very narrow view of what constitutes a moral problem.
The bad thing is, despite the fact that there's great results, everyone and their mother is focused on embryonic research.
Far, far more money is being spent on "adult stem cell" research, because BMT is an established procedure with a huge amount of clinical developmental research around it. But just as much effort is going into other adult stem cells as into embryonic research. Partisans on one side always try to frame this as "either-or". It's not. Let us do the research, and let the science determine what works and what doesn't, and what's best for a given job.
What a perfect example of the kind of disinformation the GP was posting about. The aritcle you cited is about adult stem cells on which there are absolutely no research restrictions. Further, every viable treatment to date using stem cells has been using adult stem cells as well.
What a perfect example of not understanding the science at all. Neural stem cells cannot currently be extracted from adult brains without killing the donor. It may be possible to do so one day; it may not. You can't exactly dissect out a chunk of brain, like you can muscle or bone marrow, without ill effects. Models for generating neurons from any other adult tissue simply don't exist. Further, any therapy involving stem cells - including bone marrow transplants - involves a huge risk of tissue rejection and/or graft-vs-host disease. The only way around rejection is genetically tailored donor material - which can only be produced by nuclear transfer to generate customized embryonic stem cells. This article provides hope that can be done without first creating embryos. But the problem is fundamental, despite ill-informed talking-points that pretend it doesn't exist.
Slashdot Mirror
Your intuition is right on. It must be about a 22-23 nucleotide oligomer. 4^22 = 18 trillion or so. Like someone else said, DNA doesn't glow green, so they either used tagged nucleotides or just spiked their DNA-containing ink with a green fluorescent dye. The dye, I suspect, is just so they know where they put the DNA without having to actually discolor the ball.
You'd be amazed if you knew what their profit margin must be. Oligos like that cost about 10 bucks for enough to probably detectably tag all 120 footballs, and you can synthesize any sequence you want. A couple of bucks for that fluoresence dye, some ink, and I bet it costs them about a quarter a ball altogether. You could even do this sort of thing yourself for not much more. Most DNA synthesis companies will happily do business with private citizens. The only substantial cost would be verifiying an object that someone brings in, but even that just requires a half-decent molecular biology tech and some not-too-expensive equipment. You don't need to actually sequence the thing to verify that it matches a reference sample - you can just cheaply and quickly test binding affinity. I'll bet they charge for verification, anyway. So this whole scheme is probably the next-best thing to printing money.
(IAAMB - molecular biologist)
1790: The original copyright act called for a 14 year term, renewable once if the author was still alive.
1909: Term doubled to 28 years; can be renewed once if author still alive.
1976: Term extended to the life of the author plus 50 years; 75 years for anonymous/corporate works.
1998: Term extended to the life of the author plus 70 years; 95 years for anonymous/corporate works.
Note that Disney was founded in 1923. Under orignal law, 1923 + 56 = 1979. Under the 1976 law, 1923 + 75 = 1998. Under the 1998 law, 1923 + 95 = 2018. Think it's a coincidence? The extensions are retroactive, but explictly apply only to works created in 1923 or later. Yes, 1923 is the actual cut-off in US law. I think you can put the debate over a new term extension bill on your 2018 calendar.
[aside]Even as it stands now, seventy years after I die? How can anyone consider that a reasonable term? My kids, grandkids, and maybe even their kids will all be dead seventy years after I'm gone. Why should my great-great-grandkids get to leech off of my copyrighted works? How is this providing any incentive to me beyond the orignal, 1790-mandated 28-years-so-long-as-I'm-alive?[/aside]
Specifically, no, you don't use DNA from embryos. When studying human genes, the physical DNA itself can come from any human cells. You can even synthesize it chemically for very short genes. Most research using human tissue is performed on immortal lines of one specific type of cell - often derived from cancers, sometimes custom-made for the purpose - that are grown in petri dishes in incubators. The limitations inherent to this approach (how do you study Alzheimer's disease in a petri dish?) are exactly why animal models, which let us study the whole organism, are so incredibly valuable.
The attempted humor in the replies pains me, because this is actually a *very* serious issue that could cripple human disease research in this country if gone about ham-handedly.
For all you non-bio-geeks out there, we use animal models to study disease because there are many experiments you can do on a mouse or a fly that are either impractical or wholly unethical to do on humans. The trouble is that mice and men are different, so it's rare to find an animal model that perfectly replicates the human disease. But we often get close. One way we get close is by inserting human disease genes into mice. Or rats. Or frogs. Or worms. Or flies. So we can study in great detail exactly what those malfunctioning genes do. These animal models are technically chimeras - animals carrying human genes. But without them applied medical research, the stuff that finds cures for disease, would grind to a halt.
Then there's the issue of biotechnology, actually creating and producing those cures. Another poster said that recombinant insulin is made by inserting the human insulin gene into other organisms - usually, I think, bacteria. Every recombinant drug is made the same way. So are the many antibody-derived drugs now reaching market (Herceptin, etc.). There's fundamentally no way around this. It's utterly uneconomical to mass-produce these drugs in vitro, using all-purified enzymes, and we don't even always understand how to do that. These drugs are already absurdly expensive, and much research has been devoted to developing new methods to produce them more cheaply (in cows' milk, for example).
So this is all no joke. Given the record of the people in charge in all branches of government, I don't think we can assume that they thoroughly understand the issues and will craft appropriately rational legislation. If dealt with flippantly, through the usual partisan talking points, this *will* become a medical and scientific train wreck.
I agree 100%.
Perl was the first language I learned as a mol biol grad student, when I started doing gene expression microarrays. These things generate so much data that unless you know how to code something, you're limited to the most superficial analyses. I started with sql queries, then shell scripts, and finally Perl. I just about fell in love with Perl. Today, probably 90% of the code I write is <100 lines and geared to a specific task. Perl makes it so easy to Get That Shit Done. There's little overhead, basic file I/O is a breeze, text manipulation is awesome, and pseudo-relational hash matching is fast and easy.
On the other hand, my one program that evolved into a major project I also coded in Perl, and wrote before I had a handle on good Perl practices. It still worked - and I think it only would have been possible for a neophyte like me to develop it at all, let alone so fast, in Perl. But looking at it now, it's a mashed-up hack job that should probably get re-written from the ground up. I see Perl as a great enabler, and most of the time enabling people To Do Shit is much more important than writing perfect code. But I can also see that when the need to Do It unexpectedly gives way to the need to maintain and extend it, it's easy to have retrospectivly dug yourself a hole. Still, for non-critical applications like my biology apps, I think it's better to Get Shit Done first, and worry about the other stuff in the unlikely event your code gets there.
The guy can't even spell "teh intarweb" correctly.
From the title of TFA, "Case researchers discover methods to find 'needles in haystack' in data". Pet peeve of mine, new techniques are not "discovered", they are "developed" (or something similar). Henry Ford did not discover the Model T by peering though a microscope, and CowboyNeal did not discover SlashCode by analyzing reams of code observations. It may be semantic nit-picking, but I think saying that the researchers just discovered this (surely insanely complex) bit of mathematical analysis takes away from their creativity - it all came from their heads, not from under a rock.
I think the main difference between Suspend and Sleep is the power usage. Macs use only a few % of power per day in sleep, so it's perfectly realistic to *never* turn off your laptop, even if you go for a week without using it. Whereas my friends' Dells use so much power in Suspend mode that if they leave it for more than a day they risk draining the battery. I also haven't seen wake-on-open (vs. wake-on-keypress), but that must due to cheap manufacturers' implementations. I can't imagine there's a difference between the two at a BIOS level.
I don't know if the difference in power usage represents something fundamental, or just different designers being more or less careful with power management. I don't really doubt that Apple will be just as careful with their Intel designs as they have been with their PowePC ones.
Take the test yourself. How much would the price of gas have to increase for you to dramatically alter your use of it? To sell your car for a more efficient one, to move closer to work, to take mass transit every day, etc? For me, with an already short (5 mile) commute, about $10/gallon is probably the tipping point. For you? For the rest of America? I think it will prove to be surprisingly high. After all, the price of gas has already doubled, in just two years - with little real impact yet.
And that completely ignores the elephant in the room. Global oil demand is increasingly being driven by developing economies, especially China. And since their government's legitimacy is now based on the dubiously acheivable promise of bringing a Western-style standard of living - complete with autos - to over a billion people, it is unlikely that their surging demand will prove any more elastic than our already-high demand.
I think another reason is that computational labs have their own hardware (or shared core facilties) while non-computational labs with the occasional need for number-crunching find it easier to do it on their own general-purpose hardware (slowly) or borrow time on a friend/collaborator's hardware. If you're running so few jobs to make it not worth your while to buy dedicated hardware, it seems unlikely that you'll care if a job takes a few days on your lab workstation, vs. a few minutes/hours on Sun's Grid. Plus the fact that labs which can't or won't buy dedicated hardware are likely to be small and narrowly-focused, and lack the expertise to quickly adapt their code to run on the Grid.
I suppose the only exception would be HPC labs - with the need for massive computing resources and the expertise to adapt to them - without any access to academic HPC facilities. But I can't imagine there are many of those out there. I mean, what would they have been doing up until now?
The music industry does not obey the usual rules of economics. This might be for structural reasons, since they have an effective monolpoly over any given artist (no competing suppliers) and much of the demand is organized by artist. Or it might be that the music industry is a corrupt oligopoly that buys legislation and bullies opponent (including artists themselves) to ensure perpetual profits. Or some mix of the two. But it's patently absurd to condescendingly say that Econ 101 still applies to them.
government.
But it does the fundamental job at low cost with no hassle. In fact, you can't build a MythTV box with even the most basic functionality for the same price. And TiVo is still indescribably easier to set up and use. So it depends on what you need, but clearly the market for TiVo is much, much, much larger than the market for kick-ass $2000 MythTV systems.
Before I bought my TiVo. Because I realized that the immediate hardware cost would be more than the lifetime cost of TiVo. The basic boxes are $50 now, and the rest of your $2000 investment would buy 6 lifetime subscriptions. Or, if you're a pay-as-you-go kind of guy, 12.5 years of monthly bills. Not even counting the value of my time saved during the product lifespan (TiVo really is idiot-proof, but in an efficient, Apple-like way).
So more power to you for building a kick-ass MythTV box that can do anything but cook and clean - when I can eventually afford to, I'll probably do the same - but TiVo is going to remain insansely popular for doing what it does easily, well, and cheaply.
Military police? Civil affairs? Engineers? Transportation? The whole point of the post-Vietnam Guard reorganization was to take these critical units out of active forces, so a major war would require substantial Guard activation. It worked. And so many of these critical, front-line units are deployed overseas right now, including many from the region like the 1088th ENG Bn and 199th Support Bn of Louisiana, and the 150th ENG Bn and 106th Support Bn of Mississippi. Where do you think most of the LA and MS Guard's best equipment is? In Iraq with the fighting units, or back home working to save New Orleans?
I'm also not sure about most of federal spending being in the North. The North had far more infrastructure, to be sure, but it was paid for parimarily by private money, and secondarily by state funds. The age of federally funded improvements really only came in 1864, when the Republican Congress enacted the Homestead Act, transcontinental railroad subsidies, land grant schools, etc. And then, as now, most military spending was concentrated in the South and West.
So in the absence of sources, I don't believe a word of your snark.
Seriously. Books, books, books (and coffee).
;)
A great anecdote of the SPL: I recently wanted to browse a mechanic's labor guide to see if my auto mechanic was being straight with me. These are insanely expensive, and your average person would never get enough use out of one to justify the cost. Yet everyone occasionally could use access to it. Perfect library material, right? Well, SPL doesn't have a single one. Not one: any year, any publisher. Bellevue, on the other hand, has a not-quite-so-impressive main library, but a full complement of labor guides. Similarly, SPL has an incredible on-line request system, but so few copies of popular books that thousand-person queues and six-month waits are not uncommon. For a town with such a tech reputation, the holdings on computing and programming are sparse and outdated. Yeah, tech and pop books can have a short shelf-life, but it shouldn't be hard to recoup some costs with an on-line sales system that targets older stuff to people who might want to buy it.
Libraries are about books, first and always. But I do also like the idea of having reading rooms with comfy chairs and coffee service, too.
But 1948 was the year of the Berlin blockade, and it was becoming clear that new arrangements were necessary in Europe to deter a Soviet attack. The most critical was the re-arming of (West) Germany. But France would have none of that idea, so soon after the war. Unless we agreed to give them a free hand, and military aid, in restoring colonial rule in Indochina. At that point, half of the Western divisions in Germany were French, France was officially an occupying power in Germany, and withdrawal of France from the nascent Western alliance would have been disastrous. Truman saw it as a choice between Europe and Indochina, and chose Europe without hesitation. This was before the defeat of the Chinese Nationalists raised fears of Asian communism, so who cared about a far-off tropical nation? The rest, including our assumption of the conflict after 1954, is history.
All of that is straight from the archives of US diplomatic cables from the period. Fascinating, fascinating stuff. Not sure if they're available on the web, but they are sprinked around the larger US universities.
It is patently absurd to assign any credit to Bush for the hard, innovative work of dedicated scientists. He put a huge roadblock in their path, and they're figuring out how to laboriously claw their way around it. I see this as yet another sign of how fast this field could have moved if we gave it a decent level of support.