Intel has precisely two architectures right now. The P4 core, and the old P6 core. Everything they're shipping is a variant of one or the other of these. Whether they call it Celeron or Pentium 4 or Pentium Mobile, it's one or the other of these two designs.
This is a little silly - the M shares significantly less DNA with the P6 than the G4/e600 does with the 603. You might as well say that Mot/Free hasn't had a new idea since 1995. Which isn't true, of course. Intel's just had a lot more money to throw at refreshing old designs and creating new ones, and it shows. You're also ignoring Intel's non-desktop architectures, any of which might well have spawned a new desktop chip if circumstances warranted, just like the narrowly-designed, low-power M is evolving into every PC-related niche now.
The M is 70% faster per clock than the P4. That still means it's slower per clock than the e600. And the e600 will run existing Mac OS code native, not under emulation.
In reality, it's probably comparable to the e600 per clock. The G4 isn't really twice as fast as the P4, even considering all tasks. And the M is already shipping at 50% higher clock than the e600 is due to debut at, sometime next year. It just seems clear that history was going to repeat itself over and over, following the blunt economic facts.
...they're still barely ahead. And they've screwed up badly before... they haven't managed a clear victory... ever.
I think you're being a little over-critical, but the fact you can be shows how irrelevant it is. Intel is big enough to be able to screw up now and again, and yet still deliver winners. Moreover, since anything that can even remotely be considered to be Apple's competition uses x86, even if Intel and AMD both stumble on the desktop, it doesn't hurt Apple at all. Meanwhile, Mot/Free can't afford to screw up at all, and when they do, Apple takes it on the chin.
If you're worried about someone other than Intel/AMD coming along and delivering the Next Big Thing(tm), well, the universe of Mac code is going to be a heck of a lot more portable after next year, won't it?
As of Monday, yes, that's absolutely true.
It was already true before Monday. That was the problem.
All I'm saying is that there's no other reason to do this NOW, rather than in 2001, or 2003, or 2007, other than Apple's got enough market share and cash to risk it now, and they've got enough developers on the NeXTstep-derived API that they can risk losing a few of the ones still coding to MacOS-derived Carbon for whom conversion is too much of a hurdle.
So, in other words, there's no reason to do this now, other than all the reasons that make it not only practical, but the perfect time. Exactly.:)
I'm convinced the loss of Carbon-chained developers will be miniscule. Cocoa is just so much easier to develop new apps in that most of the major Carbon users left are the big development houses, who have the resources to do the switch anyway. There will be some creative destruction on the margins - who knows if GraphicConverter will make the switch, for example - but even an app like that would be so much easier to develop and maintain in Cocoa that if that particular developer doesn't rise to the challenge, someone else will.
That's kind of a characteristic of long-pipeline cores in general.
A PowerMac G5 has as many integer units as a Cell + a Xenon. And would probably outperform either on general-purpose tasks. These PPE's look like very specialized beasts that will excel at what they are designed to excel at...which is feeding data to vector units. Moreover, 3.2 is not much greater than 2.7, and console chips aren't intended to scale. Is Apple supposed to ship a 3.2GHz PC for the next five years? How much effort has Sony put into upgrading the Emotion Engine?
This leads to the fundamental point, which is economics.
Um, the G4 core has always been close to twice as fast clock-for-clock than the Pentium 4.
Sure. But do you remember how it took a year to scale from 450 to 500 MHz? And how it's been tooth-and-nail for every extra cycle since? The G4 was always the "better" CPU, but the P4 consistently ran at more than twice the frequency. Even today, the race stands at 3.8 vs. 1.67. Freescale has barely managed incremental upgrades to the G4, while Intel has been plowing along with a variety of architectures, one of which was bound to not suck. The M is 70% faster per clock than the P4, already runs at much faster clockspeed than the G4, and is scheduled to be dual-core in the same timeframe as Freescale's e600.
Mot/Freescale has, since 2000, shown the classic symptoms of a company trying to compete in a capital- and R&D-intensive industry without sufficient resources. In reality, they haven't been trying to compete - they focus very effectively in the embedded market, which has had just enough overlap with Apple's designs to enable dual-use products. But the embedded market still has different economics and incentives than the PC market, and Apple's suffered enormously for that. IBM's motivations for diving in with the 970 remain obscure, but may have been marketing as much as anything else. Having secured their spot as manufacturer for every next-gen console CPU, they have little incentive to both keep up with Intel (who's going to buy these chips, and who else are they trying to impress?) and invest the cash to differentiate the 970 (for use in what else, consoles? IBM laptops?). There's just nothing in it for them. And the next-gen console chips are great, but they're subject to console-chip rules. Apple would be insane to bet their business on them.
For better or worse, Intel is the only major supplier of PC CPUs in the world - aside from AMD, which shares a common platform, anyway. It was only inertia that made the switch seem unthinkable - it was really inevitable.
Anyone who was honestly waiting for a Powerbook G5 isn't qualified to comment on processor technology.
Folks were waiting for the laptops to get ANYTHING that would put them at parity with the new desktops, and, incidentally, with the Pentium M. A multi-core G4 or a low-watt 970, whatever Apple might call a "G5". The currently shipping M's arguably perform comparably to a high-end nuclear-hot Pentium 4, and make current G4's look as long in the tooth as they are.
The Pentium-M equivalent of the PPC line is the Freescale MPC8641. It's running a bit later, but a dual-core G4 with two 667 MHz memory busses is a lot more exciting to me than a Pentium III core with a single 533 MHz FSB, even if the Pentium is running 25% faster.
One has been shipping for two years. The other won't even sample until the end of this year. At lower clockspeeds than the current G4 (and even lower than the currently-shipping M's). And we all know how well Mot^H^H^HFreescale has been at sticking to production schedules. You're comparing vapor vs. reality, and ignoring the simple fact that neither Freescale nor IBM is in the market of consumer PC processors. The PPC Pollyanna's have been saying since 2000 "just wait for the Next Big Thing(tm)!", but it was time to cut bait. Or, more accurately, for Apple to admit that it can't create a market for specialized CPUs all by itself.
IBM is showing you a 3-core 3.2 GHz "G5" and a "G5" with 8 integrated DSPs, either of which could have been used in a Powermac if Apple was actually interested in them.
...both of which run non-vector functions somewhere between "mediocre" and "bad". Neither of which will make a good general-purpose chip (jury is still out if, graphics aside, they'll even make good console chips). Both of whose future development are subject to the demands of a console market (same performance, lower cost), not a desktop market (improving performance, same cost). For both of which Apple's market would amount to not even a pimple on an elephant's hide.
Freescale is showing you a G4 that'll run as fast as a 3 GHz Pentium 4 and cooler than a Pentium M and its bridge chips... because it's an integrated CPU with multiple independent memory and I/O ports.
Right. Real Soon Now(tm). Really. They've only been holding back since, oh, 2000 or so to enhance the dramatic effect.
Exactly. What's more, those pro-PPC voices have been getting noticeably quieter over the past four years, ever since the 500 MHz fiasco. The G5 was a glimmer of hope, but how long have we been waiting for a PowerBook G5? It seems to me that, aside from a handful of Chicken Littles like this guy, the community is embracing the switch because they're fed up with the inability of PPC to deliver on its promises. Every year it's been the same sad story (again, G5 release partly excepted). The glory days of a 350 MHz 604e and a mobile 400 MHz G4 are long past. Most of the community (including me) just can't wait for a Pentium M iBook.
We also realize that right now, this year, is probably the best possible time for Apple to pull the trigger. Mac hardware sales are down below 50% of revenues (!) thanks to the iPod. Even if Mac sales crater by half, Apple's revenues will still be higher than two years ago. There's almost a year's worth of revenue in the bank, anyway. With 10.4, the Cocoa house is finally in order, giving devs both the motivation and the breathing room to focus fully on the switch (both to Cocoa and Intel) for the next couple of years. The stars are all aligned.
Summary: White bicycles were scattered around Amsterdam in the 60s for people to use. They got stolen and vandalized, so the experiment didn't work.
Interesting, because Copenhagen has an ongoing "free-bicycle" program, and it seems to work fine. It requires only a $3 deposit, which presumably doesn't cover the cost of the bike.
You're really misintrepreting your above links, most of which are from decidely non-scientific sources, anyway. The first link lists dozens of diseases that are treatable with "adult stem cells". What you probably don't understand is that every one of those diseases is a disorder of the blood, and the treatment is bone marrow transplant. Which, yes, is essenially the transfer of "adult stem cells". But those stem cells are only capable of producing blood cells, and moreover we still don't know what they actually are! We deduce that hematopeotic stem cells get transfered during a bone marrow transplant, but no one has yet been able to identify an actual stem cell.
Bone marrow transplant is a wonderful triumph of clinical research, and an example of how we can use a technology to save and improve lives even if we don't actually understand it. But it is probably not extendible to any other tissue or organ, and it's actually more difficult to get a handle on the basic biology at work than it is to understand ES cell development. Moreover, even this poster-child of "adult stem cell" therapy could benefit hugely from therapeutic cloning and ES cell research, since only the use of therapeutic cloning could give these patients a life without either obliteration of their own bone marrow or daily anti-rejection drugs and without the danger of graft-vs-host disease. Future generations will look back at most of our medical practices as barbaric, but surely near the top of the list will be our use of non-genetically matched tissue transplants, with such a high risk of devastating complications, and requiring the obliteration by irradiation or suppression by toxic drugs of the patient's own immune system.
I know The Register is The Register, but "mega-patch"? "A service pack in all but name"? Gimme a break. It is the biggest single Security Update Apple's released so far, but barely. 2005-003 had 12 patches, 2004-09-07 had 15 patches, and 2004-12-02 had 17 patches. This one has 19? BFD.
Was it really necessary to echo The Register's ridiculous hyperbole in the article title?
Every once in a while you read a story that seems to have been written by a science writer with at least a quarter of a clue, and then you find that one fateful line that reaffirms the proper order of things: that science writers are complete idiots who have no business writing about science:
First, human stem cells were injected into bacteria, then mice and now sheep.
We inject human stem cells into single-celled prokaryotes that are probably less than one-thousandth the volume of a stem cell? I'd like to see that trick. The writer presumably confused human stem cells with human DNA, and probably wouldn't know the difference if it were pointed out to him/her, anyway.
Some governments subsidise local production plants, but this is exactly the same as Boeing getting a $20billion tax break from Washington State to move its 777 production plant to that state.
In your rush to relativism ("you guys are just as bad as us!") you managed to mangle your math by an order of magnitude. Boeing was offered $2-3 billion in tax breaks by the state of Washington, over a 20-year period. Which, of course, are only cashed in if they make enough money to pay the taxes - risk-free to the state, one might say. So no, that's not "exactly the same", in quantity or quality, as the massive launch subsidies which are risk-free to Airbus.
I think there's a general consensus that American higher education (undergraduate, postgraduate, and professional) is still the class of the world. Both its quality and its accessibility to outsiders play a role. When American, European, Asian, and African students all start flooding into the burgeoning universities of India, China, France, or wherever else, that consensus will change. But the global brain drain is still real, and unidirectional.
One question that I haven't got an answer to though. Will there be anyway to backport the functionality, any ADC Premeirs out there know if Core Data's.framework will be embedable and able to be targeted to pre 10.4 versions of OS X?
I have no idea, but Cocoa Bindings in 10.3 were the predecessor of Core Data - oh man, did they make my life easier - and apps built using them were only usable on 10.3. I wasn't aware of any way to embed the framework in the.app. So I suspect Core Data will be the same way. Like you said, "ok" - it provides motivation for others to upgrade, and it makes life SO much easier for developers.
To this amateur developer, it seems like Apple has made more real progress on that side of things than on the user side. First Cocoa & Interface Builder, then Bindings, now Core Data. It's already at the point where anyone with a modicum of programming experience can throw together a pretty impressive Cocoa app, and it seems like soon anyone at all will be able to build an app to do what they need (through either Cocoa or Automator). Truly empowering. I'm not aware of any such programming-for-the-masses progress being made elsewhere. And they give it all away for free with the OS!
Whoever created the Wikipedia article is a moron. If they were going to expand out the IUPUC form for some protein (a molecule which has its own nomenclature btw) then they should have chosen Dystrophin.
The Dystrophin exon (coding sequence) is over 2.4 MILLION bases or 800,000 amino acids long.
Using the moron's system of naming proteins, Dystrophin's name would be ~3.5 MILLION characters long.
Wow and this made it past the Slashdot editors. Good job guys! Maybe it's because the editors have no clue about most science. Maybe they need to hire someone who does.
I agree with you that the editors, submitters, and authors are all morons, but if you're going to call someone a moron you ought to make sure an observer can distinguish you from them. The dystrophin gene (in humans) produces a 2.4 MB primary transcript. This includes both exons and introns. Like all mammalian genes, it's 99+% intron. The actual coding sequence, consisting of all exons (virtually no human genes have only a single exon) is only 14,000 or so nucleotides. The protein encoded by that mature, spliced message is less than 4000 amino acids long. Dystrophin is notable only for the physical size of the gene, not for the size of the mature message or encoded protein. The idea of an 800,000 residue protein is just ludicrous. That would have the mass of several dozen complete ribosomes.
But it's still even more idiotic to try to name a protein by mashing together the names of all its residues. If they were just going for laughs, they could have made an even longer and more incomprehensible name by using the proper chemical names for all the amino acids instead of the biologists' short-hand.
A bunch of Yalies pulled a similar prank at this year's The Game, but there was no lock-picking or theft involved - just pure social engineering. They reconnoitered the Cantabs' stadium and designed their own card stunt. The day of the game, they dressed up as the "Harvard Pep Squad", and passed out their cards, without, apparently, raising an eyebrow. And not once, not twice, but three times (or more!), they got 1800 Havard students and alums to declare as one: "WE SUCK".
This is wrong. A publically owned (which google now is) corporation's top priority is to do what the majority of the shareholders want.
No, it is right. A publically-owned company legally exists to create value for shareholders. The executives and directors can be sued for doing anything else. That is the law. Read "The Corporation" for a nice analysis of how this simple, unavoidable fact makes the modern Corporation inherently sociopathic in action.
This isn't going to be used all willy-nilly in clinical trials. For genetic diseases caused by known single-gene defects, this is simply a safer form of gene therapy. Gene therapy trials have been underway for years now, and the major drawback has been the danger of random integration - that is, inserting your corrected gene at a random point in the genome, quite possibly in the middle of a cancer-causing gene. This technique virtually eliminates that risk. However, it's useful only for so-called "ex vivo" gene therapy, where you can remove the cells from the body, them put them back in - mostly disorders of blood. So hurrah for them, and good news for the fairly limited set of patients this might help. Otherwise, for single-gene disorders, there's no paradigm shift here - we've been trying to do gene therapy for a while, and we know exactly *what* to do, just not *how* best to do it.
For more complex problems, ones that cannot be traced to known mutation in a single gene, this will not be used in the clinics any time soon. It's value is for the researchers. Biologists who work on model organisms like yeast and mice have, for years now, been able to do precision "knock-ins/knock-outs" - that is, very precisely deleteing a particular gene, or replacing it with a peculiarly defective version that will help you figure out the function of the gene. This is an incredibly powerful technique for working out the biology of a complex system, and it's one that has been essentially inaccessible to human biologists.
These guys have promised that they can target any arbitrary gene with their cutsomized proteins. If so, and if they can do it for a reasonable price, it will be a major boon for human biologists, giving them access to the same powerful genetic techniques that yeast and mouse biologists have found so useful. But all this work will happen in cultured cell lines, not in people. No one's going to start randomly "hacking" the germ-line quite yet.
If you have permission to run a virus on their computers, and lets assume that their two computers are walled off from the rest of the world so the infection strays no further, why would you have legal bills?
If you RTFA, it says that the two computer are at separate locations, linked only via the internet-at-large. No IP's are given. The expectation is that the only way to win the prize is to release a virus that is sufficiently virulent to infect virtually every non-firewalled Mac on the internet, so that it eventually gets to both of these random, anonymous Macs. They request "benign" viruses only, but at that level of virulence there's probably no such thing (even if it doesn't harm the computers themselves, it'll hammer a network). I wouldn't be at all surprised if the FBI subponeaed the contact info of the "winner".
Defenders of the USA Patriot Act love to defend it by asking its critics how the Patriot Act has personally affected them. Well, I love to turn this argument against them by asking how terrorism has personally affected them, because for the vast majority of the public, terrorism has not affected their lives in any way. The government's response to terrorism, OTOH, has made life much more difficult though for law-abiding citizens.
While I agree with your fundamental point - that the potential risk of foreign terrorism is outweighed by the real loss of liberty - you have to be honest, that 9/11 really did affect a huge number of people. Beyond the relatives and coworkers of the victims, the lives of just about everyone in New York were directly affected. It probably seemed remote if you weren't there, but it was very real.
However, and ironicallly, I think if you polled those people, you'd find relatively low support for USA PATRIOT. In fact, I think if you polled all the citzens of those cities most likely to be affected by a future attack, you'd find much lower support than in the Heartland-WalMart demographic that is extremely unlikely to ever be targeted by foreign terrorism.
But is it known if it is the virus that caused this, or the gene the virus was inserting?
Both. Let's back up a bit. Oncogenes are normal genes that have normal functions in your body, usually to promote growth. If they become corrupted, for example by mutation, they might become hyperactive, or incapable of being turned off. "Promote growth" then becomes "promote cancer". The virus inserted itself right next to one of these oncogenes. By doing so, it disrupted the normal regulation fo that oncogene, causing it to be expressed at a much higher rate. The now hyperactive oncogene began turning that cell into a cancer cell. The cell (actually it's decendants) had to accumulate a bunch of other mutations before it became a full-blown cancer, but the activation of the oncogene by the virus was the initial trigger.
Nonsense. How can you say that the virus caused the cancer? Nobody knows what caused the death and cancer related to this.
The virus did cause the cancer. In at least one patient, they mapped the site of viral intergration and found that it activated a known oncogene. Unfortunately, this is a currently unavoidable risk* of gene therapy. You have to stick the new genes into the chromosomes for it to work, but if it goes in the wrong place, it could cause a cancer. However, it may well be a reasonable risk given the pre-therapy quality of life of these folks, and the fact that there are effective therapies for leukemias. That one patient whose intergation site was mapped was treated for the cancer, and, AFAIK, is still alive today.
* There are ways to target the site of integration (that's how you create "knock-out" mice), but they only work if you can remove the cells from the body first, culture them for some time, and put them back. We can't do that for blood stem cells quite yet, and it's obviously impossible to do that for things like brains, lungs, and bones.
So, does the saved kid pass on the original deficiency in the gene pool?
He passes on the gene, but not the disease. This form of SCID is a recessive disorder - you need two bad copies of the gene to get this disease. The alleles that cause disease are quite rare, and this kid won the reverse-lottery by having two parents who happened to both be carriers *and* both gave him their bad copy. He will certainly pass the disease allele onto his children, but his children would only have the disease if their mother was a carrier *and* gave them her bad copy. The odds of that are vanishingly low, and can be reduced to zero by genetically screening the mother (and if she is a carrier, doing IVF and screening the embryos).
So there is little or no risk to his kids, and the "harm" done to the gene pool is minimal because the bad alleles are so rare anyway.
From what I understand, this DNA is not spliced into the existing DNA strand, but rather is just "loose" in the cell.
Actually, this and all viral vectors used in gene therapy will integrate their payload DNA into a host chromosome, usually at a random point. This is necessary for the therapy to work: naked, non-chromosomal DNA will be quickly degraded by the cell, and will not be passed on when the cell divides. But it's also the major drawback of gene therapy - if the site at which the virus randomly integrates happens to be an oncogene or a tumor suppressor, you run the risk of causing cancer.
Now if one was to introduce the carrier virus directly into the body, it could inject DNA into all sorts of cells in the body, possibly including the reproductive cells. In addition to being far more controversial, it is also less focused and controllable, and (unless there is a way to make replicating viruses that do not destroy the host cell) would require alot of viri, so in general it is not done.
Many forms of gene therapy currently in trials involve injecting live virus directly into the patient. For cystic fibrosis patients, for example, it's not practical to extract their lungs in order to perform gene therapy outside the body.:) But the virus that is injected is modified to be a one-shot virus. It can infect a host cell, once, to deliver its payload. But that host cell is incapable of creating live virus that can infect other cells. So there is no danger of the virus replicating out of control, or spreading around the population. And yes, this does require a *lot* of virions.:)
I'd say no. You could make the argument that the Valerie Plame story involves public intrest, because it revolves around alleged nepotism and poor quality research done at the CIA.
But two other reporters with only tangential links to the story, the New York Times' Judith Miller and Time magazine's Matthew Cooper, are being held in contempt of court, and are facing 18 months in prison for not naming their sources in connection with the case. Clearly the judge in their cases feels the Valerie Plame story involves critical public interest, so the only question is why these two and not the guy who actually published it?
Slashdot Mirror
If you're worried about someone other than Intel/AMD coming along and delivering the Next Big Thing(tm), well, the universe of Mac code is going to be a heck of a lot more portable after next year, won't it?It was already true before Monday. That was the problem.So, in other words, there's no reason to do this now, other than all the reasons that make it not only practical, but the perfect time. Exactly.
I'm convinced the loss of Carbon-chained developers will be miniscule. Cocoa is just so much easier to develop new apps in that most of the major Carbon users left are the big development houses, who have the resources to do the switch anyway. There will be some creative destruction on the margins - who knows if GraphicConverter will make the switch, for example - but even an app like that would be so much easier to develop and maintain in Cocoa that if that particular developer doesn't rise to the challenge, someone else will.
This leads to the fundamental point, which is economics. Sure. But do you remember how it took a year to scale from 450 to 500 MHz? And how it's been tooth-and-nail for every extra cycle since? The G4 was always the "better" CPU, but the P4 consistently ran at more than twice the frequency. Even today, the race stands at 3.8 vs. 1.67. Freescale has barely managed incremental upgrades to the G4, while Intel has been plowing along with a variety of architectures, one of which was bound to not suck. The M is 70% faster per clock than the P4, already runs at much faster clockspeed than the G4, and is scheduled to be dual-core in the same timeframe as Freescale's e600.
Mot/Freescale has, since 2000, shown the classic symptoms of a company trying to compete in a capital- and R&D-intensive industry without sufficient resources. In reality, they haven't been trying to compete - they focus very effectively in the embedded market, which has had just enough overlap with Apple's designs to enable dual-use products. But the embedded market still has different economics and incentives than the PC market, and Apple's suffered enormously for that. IBM's motivations for diving in with the 970 remain obscure, but may have been marketing as much as anything else. Having secured their spot as manufacturer for every next-gen console CPU, they have little incentive to both keep up with Intel (who's going to buy these chips, and who else are they trying to impress?) and invest the cash to differentiate the 970 (for use in what else, consoles? IBM laptops?). There's just nothing in it for them. And the next-gen console chips are great, but they're subject to console-chip rules. Apple would be insane to bet their business on them.
For better or worse, Intel is the only major supplier of PC CPUs in the world - aside from AMD, which shares a common platform, anyway. It was only inertia that made the switch seem unthinkable - it was really inevitable.
Exactly. What's more, those pro-PPC voices have been getting noticeably quieter over the past four years, ever since the 500 MHz fiasco. The G5 was a glimmer of hope, but how long have we been waiting for a PowerBook G5? It seems to me that, aside from a handful of Chicken Littles like this guy, the community is embracing the switch because they're fed up with the inability of PPC to deliver on its promises. Every year it's been the same sad story (again, G5 release partly excepted). The glory days of a 350 MHz 604e and a mobile 400 MHz G4 are long past. Most of the community (including me) just can't wait for a Pentium M iBook.
We also realize that right now, this year, is probably the best possible time for Apple to pull the trigger. Mac hardware sales are down below 50% of revenues (!) thanks to the iPod. Even if Mac sales crater by half, Apple's revenues will still be higher than two years ago. There's almost a year's worth of revenue in the bank, anyway. With 10.4, the Cocoa house is finally in order, giving devs both the motivation and the breathing room to focus fully on the switch (both to Cocoa and Intel) for the next couple of years. The stars are all aligned.
You're really misintrepreting your above links, most of which are from decidely non-scientific sources, anyway. The first link lists dozens of diseases that are treatable with "adult stem cells". What you probably don't understand is that every one of those diseases is a disorder of the blood, and the treatment is bone marrow transplant. Which, yes, is essenially the transfer of "adult stem cells". But those stem cells are only capable of producing blood cells, and moreover we still don't know what they actually are! We deduce that hematopeotic stem cells get transfered during a bone marrow transplant, but no one has yet been able to identify an actual stem cell.
Bone marrow transplant is a wonderful triumph of clinical research, and an example of how we can use a technology to save and improve lives even if we don't actually understand it. But it is probably not extendible to any other tissue or organ, and it's actually more difficult to get a handle on the basic biology at work than it is to understand ES cell development. Moreover, even this poster-child of "adult stem cell" therapy could benefit hugely from therapeutic cloning and ES cell research, since only the use of therapeutic cloning could give these patients a life without either obliteration of their own bone marrow or daily anti-rejection drugs and without the danger of graft-vs-host disease. Future generations will look back at most of our medical practices as barbaric, but surely near the top of the list will be our use of non-genetically matched tissue transplants, with such a high risk of devastating complications, and requiring the obliteration by irradiation or suppression by toxic drugs of the patient's own immune system.
What's better? PHP or Python?
Perl.
I know The Register is The Register, but "mega-patch"? "A service pack in all but name"? Gimme a break. It is the biggest single Security Update Apple's released so far, but barely. 2005-003 had 12 patches, 2004-09-07 had 15 patches, and 2004-12-02 had 17 patches. This one has 19? BFD.
Was it really necessary to echo The Register's ridiculous hyperbole in the article title?
I despair of scientific literacy in this country.
Cool web site. I'll see your statistic and raise you a more relevant one: rate of enrollment in tertiary education.
I think there's a general consensus that American higher education (undergraduate, postgraduate, and professional) is still the class of the world. Both its quality and its accessibility to outsiders play a role. When American, European, Asian, and African students all start flooding into the burgeoning universities of India, China, France, or wherever else, that consensus will change. But the global brain drain is still real, and unidirectional.
To this amateur developer, it seems like Apple has made more real progress on that side of things than on the user side. First Cocoa & Interface Builder, then Bindings, now Core Data. It's already at the point where anyone with a modicum of programming experience can throw together a pretty impressive Cocoa app, and it seems like soon anyone at all will be able to build an app to do what they need (through either Cocoa or Automator). Truly empowering. I'm not aware of any such programming-for-the-masses progress being made elsewhere. And they give it all away for free with the OS!
But it's still even more idiotic to try to name a protein by mashing together the names of all its residues. If they were just going for laughs, they could have made an even longer and more incomprehensible name by using the proper chemical names for all the amino acids instead of the biologists' short-hand.
A bunch of Yalies pulled a similar prank at this year's The Game, but there was no lock-picking or theft involved - just pure social engineering. They reconnoitered the Cantabs' stadium and designed their own card stunt. The day of the game, they dressed up as the "Harvard Pep Squad", and passed out their cards, without, apparently, raising an eyebrow. And not once, not twice, but three times (or more!), they got 1800 Havard students and alums to declare as one: "WE SUCK".
In their own words, or as told by the Yale Daily 'News'.
This isn't going to be used all willy-nilly in clinical trials. For genetic diseases caused by known single-gene defects, this is simply a safer form of gene therapy. Gene therapy trials have been underway for years now, and the major drawback has been the danger of random integration - that is, inserting your corrected gene at a random point in the genome, quite possibly in the middle of a cancer-causing gene. This technique virtually eliminates that risk. However, it's useful only for so-called "ex vivo" gene therapy, where you can remove the cells from the body, them put them back in - mostly disorders of blood. So hurrah for them, and good news for the fairly limited set of patients this might help. Otherwise, for single-gene disorders, there's no paradigm shift here - we've been trying to do gene therapy for a while, and we know exactly *what* to do, just not *how* best to do it.
For more complex problems, ones that cannot be traced to known mutation in a single gene, this will not be used in the clinics any time soon. It's value is for the researchers. Biologists who work on model organisms like yeast and mice have, for years now, been able to do precision "knock-ins/knock-outs" - that is, very precisely deleteing a particular gene, or replacing it with a peculiarly defective version that will help you figure out the function of the gene. This is an incredibly powerful technique for working out the biology of a complex system, and it's one that has been essentially inaccessible to human biologists.
These guys have promised that they can target any arbitrary gene with their cutsomized proteins. If so, and if they can do it for a reasonable price, it will be a major boon for human biologists, giving them access to the same powerful genetic techniques that yeast and mouse biologists have found so useful. But all this work will happen in cultured cell lines, not in people. No one's going to start randomly "hacking" the germ-line quite yet.
However, and ironicallly, I think if you polled those people, you'd find relatively low support for USA PATRIOT. In fact, I think if you polled all the citzens of those cities most likely to be affected by a future attack, you'd find much lower support than in the Heartland-WalMart demographic that is extremely unlikely to ever be targeted by foreign terrorism.
* There are ways to target the site of integration (that's how you create "knock-out" mice), but they only work if you can remove the cells from the body first, culture them for some time, and put them back. We can't do that for blood stem cells quite yet, and it's obviously impossible to do that for things like brains, lungs, and bones.
So there is little or no risk to his kids, and the "harm" done to the gene pool is minimal because the bad alleles are so rare anyway.