I have one of ATI's older graphics cards (the first or second generation of their "All in Wonder" line) - but the latest version of their software.
And it is buggy, still. Their drivers are much better now, but in the begining they were dreadful.
I'm still quite pleased with my setup - in a one room apartment the TV/computer combination saves a lot of space, and I can surf the net during commercials. In spite of the problems, I recommend buying one to anyone who asks. However, every three days or so ATIMMC (the process that actually plays the TV) forces me to do a hard reset.
A lot of the problem is with win32, of course, which enters a non-responsive state when I try to kill the ATIMMC process (I don't do any actual work in a windows environment so my technical knowledge is somewhat limited - but if it walks like a kernel panic, and if it quacks like a kernel panic...). If I were still running win16 I would hardly notice something that took three whole days to crash my computer.
Also - the early versions of their product hardly ever worked in beige boxen. It was wildly incomptabible with a large spectrum of commodity hardware (I've been told their newer cards have this problem to a lesser extent.) I mention this because I went through a lot of grief over it - but now adays building your own machine isn't worth the $50 you save anyway.
So - while I'm really pleased with their product in spite of the flaws - I wouldn't recommend being a beta tester for the HDTV card, especially given the slow rollout of HDTV. Give ATI a year or two to iron out the flaws, and let HDTV acquire a little penetration, before bothering to buy. That's what I plan to do.
not slashdotted; PETE has ddos attacked the site
on
iPod Mini Autopsy
·
· Score: 3, Funny
PETE (People for the Ethical Treatment of Electronics) maintains that the goals of science can be equally well served without doing harm to our bleeping, whirring, cousins. As a show of protest, they have initiated a series of ddos attacks against sites linked to by popular "electronic butchery forum" slashdot.
PETE spokesman Nigel Rehnquist defending the ddos attack, saying "the ethically important question is not - can electronics understand what is being done to them? The ethically important question is - can electronics feel pain? I've trained my tamagotchi to wail in agony when I press this button, which makes YOU a sadist!"
PETE has achieved notoriety in recent years for it's colorful lobbying and advertising efforts. One series of advertisements, which NBC declined to air, showed graphic depictions of graphing calculator-shaped puppets transmiting IR signals to one another and moaning in the throes of ecstacy. PETE called the advertisement a public service announcement to remind Americans how important and easy it was (only a bit of tape is required) to "fix" their graphic calculators. Prominent executives at another network approached about the ads, speaking on condition they not be identified, called the series of advertisements "disturbing, incomprehensible and weird." "One of them kept rocking his cellphone and singing to it," added one executive, "they scare me."
Obviously, Beer (which the membership of al Qaeda are commanded by God not to drink) is in league with al Qaeda, just like the former secularist government of Iraq (which the membership of al Qaeda was commanded by God to overthrow.) Whatever the article-author may think - it is clear that cool, refreshing beer, or even hobo urine like Budweiser, is more of a threat to our freedoms than the brave members of our law enforcement community.
Therefore, DARPA has asked Anheuser-Busch to help them keep track of the treasonous fluid. Don't get me started on those frenchies and their wine.
My problem with performance enhancing drugs is that they hurt the athletes - people should not ruin their lives in order to compete; they should not be under *pressure* to destroy themselves in order to compete.
To the extent that gene therapy might-merely-give everyone the benefit of the "best" possible human genes, I don't have a problem with it. Likewise, any hypothetical performance enhancing drug that was not harmful - I wouldn't have a problem with that. None of these things eliminate the elements of Skill, Discipline and Dedication.
The problem, of course, is that in "optimizing" a person for athletic performance you may pay an opportunity cost - in the form of sociability, intellectual development or lifespan.
Performance enhancement should be regulated to make sure that the athletes are not harmed - which is a crime AGAINST the athlete and not BY the athlete. Who cares about CHEATING when someone could fucking die?
In the case of this treatment - it strikes me that this is something that most people would benefit from, actually. If it is safe (which is a VERY big if) then in a modern human (with no calorie shortage, indeed an excess) this treatment could be expected to have a favorable impact on lifespan, and on health and vitality particularly in late old age (where loss of muscle mass -> related conditions are a major health issue). The chief effect of forcing someone to evolve more muscle tissue is to reduce the amount of adipose tissue (fat.) Of course it is much more complicated than that and I don't doubt that there are side effects for a treatment of this kind which would need to be considered, but - are we going to deny athletes a treatment that the general population takes in order to IMPROVE their health? Clearly not.
I was wondering how much I could've gotten with my Biochemistry degree straight out of college (well, I had a second major in CS, so it probably wouldn't be a good indicator.) Anecdotally, I'd expect something around $30K (which is only slightly more than I get paid to go to graduate school). Does anyone have any hard data?
That said - if you care about earning a decent living you need an advanced degree of some kind. ESPECIALLY in the sciences.
Does diversity end if the code goes unused?
on
The Software Monoculture
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I'm a biologist, biatch!
A biological population can experience genetic bottlenecks. For example, everyone in Iceland is practically genetically identical, since they are descended from a group of about a few dozen (already closely related) Vikings.
The potatoes in Ireland where a similar example. Not only was everyone growing potatoes - all of these potatoes were descended from a small number of potatoes brought over from the New World. The original population of New World potatoes were genetically diverse - but the potatoes brought to Ireland were all especially susceptible to the fungus that brought on the Irish Potato Famine, so it was catastrophic.
You can also get a genetic bottleneck in an entire species. The few surviving Andean condors probably only represent a fraction of the genetic diversity the Condor had at the height of its population. The diversity is gone forever.
The same is not true for rarely used, or even completely unused, software. If some disaster befalls us that makes other operating systems useless, we can resurrect OS/2 Warp even if not a single installation remains anywhere in the world.
On the other hand, without a population of OS/2 Warp installations, OS/2 Warp cannot evolve. It exists in a form of stasis that, over time, may render OS/2 inviable, in much the same way that environmental changes might drive the andean condor all the way to extinction (while it might have survived with the genetic diversity that the species has already lost.)/RANT
I stay home on Thursday night, in spite of the legion of sophisticated bisexual women clawing at the door to my Manhattan apartment, putting aside a rich evening of culinary, cultural and sexual exploration of the kind that all geeks regularly enjoy, in order to selflessly devote myself to keeping slashdot running smoothly.
I e-mail the on-duty editor with a problem - as I am instructed to do.
I do so with at least ten minutes to spare before the story actually goes live.
What does the editor do? Absolutely nothing!
What is the point of even *having* an on-duty editor if they can't filter out duplicate stories! Jeez!
To improve their flexibility, and thus their utility in an ever-unpredictable combat situation, these robots will be able to assume a variety of conformations; to transform, if you will, in order to disguise themselves from hostile guerilla forces.
Indeed, think of the benefits to the army Corp of engineers if they can respond to an unexpected hostile presence by combining their earth moving equipment into a giant combat robot! Given the assymetric threats our military is expected to face in the coming century, do policy makers really have any choice?
Ordinarily, I'd contemptuously dismiss any toothless rugby hooligan who claimed to have duplicated some of your deadly and sophisticated military hardware in the back of his yurt.
However, he's built a lot of those cool jet engines, which means his claim to have built a cruise missile is definitely credible. The New Zealand...ian government clearly thinks his claims are credible (unless they really are just prosecuting him for tax evasion, which is always a possibility people.) They might be going persecuting him for talking to the Iranians rather than because they think his missile works, and they'd still refuse to comment for Security reasons.
If you read his web page he says he's finished the missile except for some trivial details (not his exact phrasing.) My experience working with engineers (I am a Scientist, not any sort of MBA, before any of you start) leads me to believe that these "trivial details" may be less of a paint job and more of a profound deficiency that would prevent the thing from actually working. Of course, I'm just speculating here.
If they really are trying to squelch his right to free speech with the tax charge - he should give all his missile design documents to some outfit that will distribute them far and wide, raisethefist.com or something. That'll show the guv'mint what for.
THAT is what gasses looks like
on
Superball!
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
My PI (Principal Investigator = the professor who supervises my thesis research) is teaching physical chemistry right now. I'm going to pass this on to him so he can show his students that movie - that way, when he describes all the molecules in a gas bouncing around everywhere, he can show them what that would look like.
When they "infected" the cells with synthetic phage DNA, only working phage DNA replicated. This is how you identify the "good" copies of the DNA. So, in the bacteria you already have a system that replicates only the good copies of the DNA.
This phage DNA, when it is replicated, actually benefits from (many) of the processes that check quality of DNA duplication in the bacterium.
So, tada.
Now, the problem is that one molecule of phage DNA isn't enough - the odds of any particular molecule successfully infecting a bacterium are small (they go up "in the wild" because the phage has something called a protein coat, that helps it to infect cells, in the lab with purely synthetic DNA you must use cruder methods.) Upshot: you need not one but a LOT of "good copies". More than previous groups were able to manufacture.
For this reason, until this work, no-one had ever gotten a synthetic molecule of this size to infect cells and produce viable virus offspring.
Note: I do not favor censorship of scientific research in any sense, case or circumstance. The actions of.... it was the NSF, wasn't it?... anyway, the movement towards "self-censorship" in potentially dangerous biology research is counterproductive as well as spineless. A previous poster made an excellent analogy to closed source computer security - hiding your head in the sand will not protect you.
I'm doing computational biology right now, but I was a practicing biochemist in the past (I am the author of the root of this thread.)
If I wanted ebola, I could not get it. Well, *I* probably could if I had a legitimate reason to want some, but most people can't.
The possibility that, in 20 years time, you could mail order a kit that would enable you to make ebola (you'd need to do some cute cell biology to make the stuff actually infect your cell culture, it is true) "from scratch" is a legitimate cause for concern. Is this critically more dangerous than what you could do with late 1980s techniques? Maybe not. But, perhaps the societal or organizational structures (or dumb luck) which have prevented existing techniques from being widely used to make bioweapons might not apply to this new technology. Who can say? I'm concerned about the prospect, certainly. Does this mean I'm opposed to the research or favor censorship? NO NO NO NO. No some more. But, it is a possibility of which we should be aware.
The human genome (which is DNA), contained in each of your cells, contains the instructions needed to make a cell (much like a computer program.)
However, in order to use these instructions to make a cell, you need a cell of the same kind to read them.
Analogy: You have a computer program that tells you how to manufacture computers but this doesn't do any good unless you already have a computer OF THE SAME KIND on which to execute it.
So, even if I assemble an entire human genome, I can't use it to make a person unless I already have a human cell. Kapish?
A VIRUS, which is what was made here, is NOT A CELL. It is a parasitic piece of DNA that hijacks an existing cell and contains the instructions to make viruses. The DNA that the virus contains is, in the best case, sufficient to hijack the cell all by itself, and convert the cell into a factory for making viruses. Viruses CANNOT make more viruses by themselves. The similarity to a computer virus, I assume, is obvious.
So, if you can make VIRAL DNA, this will be sufficient to make the virus, if you have cells that the virus can infect.
Even making the genome of a virus is very difficult. The "commercially available" DNA mentioned in the article is made chemically. DNA is made up of a chain of monomers; each monomer has a 5' end and a 3' end that can attach together to form a chain. In order to add monomer n+1 to a growing chain, this is what you do (description meant to be accessible to people who don't know a lot of chemistry):...(Monomer n-1) 3' - 5' (Monomer n) 3'(BLOCKED)
-> **add reagent to unblock**
-> wash...(Monomer n) 3'
-> add 5' (Monomer n) 3' {BLOCKED}
-> add reagent to attach 5' and 3' together...(Monomer n) 3' - 5' (Monomer n+1) 3' {BLOCKED} and repeat for Monomer n+2. Recursion is good.
Now, this is done in parallel in thousands of molecules of DNA (the 5' end of each molecule is fixed to a plate.)
Every time you add the reagent to remove the BLOCKS, it has a percentage chance, which can be very small, of failing.
So, for example, if, on one paritcular molecule, it fails at position 10, then instead of: ACGTACGTACGT you will get, ACGTACGTAGT.
DNA that makes proteins has something called a "reading frame", consisting of codons which are three monomers long. If you shift the reading frame over by 1 monomer, it completely changes the meaning of the message.
So, a single nucleotide deletion, which I describe above, is disastrous - the synthetic DNA becomes useless.
Even if the chance of failing to remove a block is small - typically about 0.1% - if your DNA molecule is thousands of bases long, the chance of successfully adding every base to any individual molecule is slight.
Of course, you can make two different 100-base long molecules by the above technique and then ligate them together (recursion by splitting the task in half) which is, I believe, what's been done here. This has technical difficulties of it's own, of course, but with refinements it woud allow you to make useful DNA of length n*2^m instead of DNA of length n.
This is a frightening prospect because it would allow you to make ebola "from scratch", or just from the the string of letters that represent the genome (which is so short I could write it out by hand on a stack of cocktail napkins.) We're not to that point yet but it is a scary possibility.
I can't believe no one mentioned this already (I searched the comments page.)
In a graft, which is what has been done here, you stick the stem of one plant (tomato in this case) onto the root of another (tobacco in this case). If the two plants are closely related (as are tomatoes and tobacco,) the hybrid plant will grow and survive; often, chemicals (nicotine in this case) will move in the sap from the roots to the leaves (and presumably fruit.)
This is NOT a genetic change. If you took these "tomacco" seeds and planted them, they'd grow into regular tomatoes. Making the genetic changes required for tomatoes to actually make their own nicotine (which would breed true,) is an entirely different and more complicated prospect.
Are government agencies really allowed to do this? I suppose the DOJ is allowed to "educate" people about the law, and propogate the legal positions of the justice department - but any five year old can see that this monolog is advocating legislative policy (the extension of the PATRIOT act, among other things), using federal money.
They'll screen these people they've threatened (giving "generous" out of court settlements to the bad PR cases,) and then sue whoever they think they can get away with - or, their target demographic.
I'm no hypocrite, so I support unrestricted file sharing. However, even with my eyepatch on, I can see that the RIAA members are fighting for their economic survival. P2P may not have had a significant impact on CD sales *YET*, but it absolutely *WILL*. On top of that it will fragment the market and seriously weaken their distribution monopoly, etc. etc.
These are all good things for our culture but bad for the livelihoods of the people in the biz.
Like the chinese care about what NDAs are signed in their government laboratories!
It is true, if some of the code written in those laboratories comes BACK to the US, MS might be able to throw some harassment lawsuits at people who try to use it, but how far will they get?
Besides, MS needs attack dogs (like SCO,) to make legal threats for them, doing it directly is too much trouble.
I don't know how B&N e-books work, but doesn't this mean that you'll never be able to "install" the e-book on another computer, since you can't unlock it shaking hands with their server? I may be getting confused; B&N may not work this way.
If I Recall Correctly, all twelve of B&N's e-book customers should demand their money back.
MPAA Inquisitor: Recant! Publisher: Never! Inquisitor: You'll be sorry. Publisher: Do your worst! Inquisitor: Very well! You leave me no choice! As punishment for distributing this code, you'll be forced to watch these ten DivX movies made from rips that used code you posted! Publisher: I heard Dirty Pretty Things was pretty good. Inquisitor: Nice try. You'll be watching this past Summer's big budget movies! Should I start you off with "The Hulk" or "Gigli"? Publisher: No! I recant! I recant! You can spy on me! You can nuke my hard drive from space! Anything! Please! Aieeeeee!
Obviously, you couldn't patent the invention of banging two rocks together, since our ancestors did it.
Sponges are the most primitive Metazoans (multicelled organisms.) All animal life is descended from one sort or another of Sponge.
Our closest single-celled relatives are little buggers called Choanoflagellates, by the way.
Did the particular sponges from which we are descended make this stuff, I wonder? Probably not, since they presumably lived in relatively shallow salt water before evolving into worms.
My suspicion, which is pure speculation, is that these sponges make the glass fibers enzymatically, at some stage or another. Of course any enzymatic process would be difficult (to say the least,) to duplicate.
More tangential! If the glass itself is somehow secreted, made by enzymes, it ought to be POLARISING glass - because all the copies of a given enzyme must have the same handedness. That strikes me as totally awesome, for some reason.
Slashdot Mirror
I have one of ATI's older graphics cards (the first or second generation of their "All in Wonder" line) - but the latest version of their software.
And it is buggy, still. Their drivers are much better now, but in the begining they were dreadful.
I'm still quite pleased with my setup - in a one room apartment the TV/computer combination saves a lot of space, and I can surf the net during commercials. In spite of the problems, I recommend buying one to anyone who asks. However, every three days or so ATIMMC (the process that actually plays the TV) forces me to do a hard reset.
A lot of the problem is with win32, of course, which enters a non-responsive state when I try to kill the ATIMMC process (I don't do any actual work in a windows environment so my technical knowledge is somewhat limited - but if it walks like a kernel panic, and if it quacks like a kernel panic...). If I were still running win16 I would hardly notice something that took three whole days to crash my computer.
Also - the early versions of their product hardly ever worked in beige boxen. It was wildly incomptabible with a large spectrum of commodity hardware (I've been told their newer cards have this problem to a lesser extent.) I mention this because I went through a lot of grief over it - but now adays building your own machine isn't worth the $50 you save anyway.
So - while I'm really pleased with their product in spite of the flaws - I wouldn't recommend being a beta tester for the HDTV card, especially given the slow rollout of HDTV. Give ATI a year or two to iron out the flaws, and let HDTV acquire a little penetration, before bothering to buy. That's what I plan to do.
PETE (People for the Ethical Treatment of Electronics) maintains that the goals of science can be equally well served without doing harm to our bleeping, whirring, cousins. As a show of protest, they have initiated a series of ddos attacks against sites linked to by popular "electronic butchery forum" slashdot.
PETE spokesman Nigel Rehnquist defending the ddos attack, saying "the ethically important question is not - can electronics understand what is being done to them? The ethically important question is - can electronics feel pain? I've trained my tamagotchi to wail in agony when I press this button, which makes YOU a sadist!"
PETE has achieved notoriety in recent years for it's colorful lobbying and advertising efforts. One series of advertisements, which NBC declined to air, showed graphic depictions of graphing calculator-shaped puppets transmiting IR signals to one another and moaning in the throes of ecstacy. PETE called the advertisement a public service announcement to remind Americans how important and easy it was (only a bit of tape is required) to "fix" their graphic calculators. Prominent executives at another network approached about the ads, speaking on condition they not be identified, called the series of advertisements "disturbing, incomprehensible and weird." "One of them kept rocking his cellphone and singing to it," added one executive, "they scare me."
In ancient Sumer. That's right - in IRAQ.
Obviously, Beer (which the membership of al Qaeda are commanded by God not to drink) is in league with al Qaeda, just like the former secularist government of Iraq (which the membership of al Qaeda was commanded by God to overthrow.) Whatever the article-author may think - it is clear that cool, refreshing beer, or even hobo urine like Budweiser, is more of a threat to our freedoms than the brave members of our law enforcement community.
Therefore, DARPA has asked Anheuser-Busch to help them keep track of the treasonous fluid. Don't get me started on those frenchies and their wine.
I'm a computational biologist.
My problem with performance enhancing drugs is that they hurt the athletes - people should not ruin their lives in order to compete; they should not be under *pressure* to destroy themselves in order to compete.
To the extent that gene therapy might-merely-give everyone the benefit of the "best" possible human genes, I don't have a problem with it. Likewise, any hypothetical performance enhancing drug that was not harmful - I wouldn't have a problem with that. None of these things eliminate the elements of Skill, Discipline and Dedication.
The problem, of course, is that in "optimizing" a person for athletic performance you may pay an opportunity cost - in the form of sociability, intellectual development or lifespan.
Performance enhancement should be regulated to make sure that the athletes are not harmed - which is a crime AGAINST the athlete and not BY the athlete. Who cares about CHEATING when someone could fucking die?
In the case of this treatment - it strikes me that this is something that most people would benefit from, actually. If it is safe (which is a VERY big if) then in a modern human (with no calorie shortage, indeed an excess) this treatment could be expected to have a favorable impact on lifespan, and on health and vitality particularly in late old age (where loss of muscle mass -> related conditions are a major health issue). The chief effect of forcing someone to evolve more muscle tissue is to reduce the amount of adipose tissue (fat.) Of course it is much more complicated than that and I don't doubt that there are side effects for a treatment of this kind which would need to be considered, but - are we going to deny athletes a treatment that the general population takes in order to IMPROVE their health? Clearly not.
I was wondering how much I could've gotten with my Biochemistry degree straight out of college (well, I had a second major in CS, so it probably wouldn't be a good indicator.) Anecdotally, I'd expect something around $30K (which is only slightly more than I get paid to go to graduate school). Does anyone have any hard data?
That said - if you care about earning a decent living you need an advanced degree of some kind. ESPECIALLY in the sciences.
I'm a biologist, biatch!
/RANT
A biological population can experience genetic bottlenecks. For example, everyone in Iceland is practically genetically identical, since they are descended from a group of about a few dozen (already closely related) Vikings.
The potatoes in Ireland where a similar example. Not only was everyone growing potatoes - all of these potatoes were descended from a small number of potatoes brought over from the New World. The original population of New World potatoes were genetically diverse - but the potatoes brought to Ireland were all especially susceptible to the fungus that brought on the Irish Potato Famine, so it was catastrophic.
You can also get a genetic bottleneck in an entire species. The few surviving Andean condors probably only represent a fraction of the genetic diversity the Condor had at the height of its population. The diversity is gone forever.
The same is not true for rarely used, or even completely unused, software. If some disaster befalls us that makes other operating systems useless, we can resurrect OS/2 Warp even if not a single installation remains anywhere in the world.
On the other hand, without a population of OS/2 Warp installations, OS/2 Warp cannot evolve. It exists in a form of stasis that, over time, may render OS/2 inviable, in much the same way that environmental changes might drive the andean condor all the way to extinction (while it might have survived with the genetic diversity that the species has already lost.)
I stay home on Thursday night, in spite of the legion of sophisticated bisexual women clawing at the door to my Manhattan apartment, putting aside a rich evening of culinary, cultural and sexual exploration of the kind that all geeks regularly enjoy, in order to selflessly devote myself to keeping slashdot running smoothly.
I e-mail the on-duty editor with a problem - as I am instructed to do.
I do so with at least ten minutes to spare before the story actually goes live.
What does the editor do? Absolutely nothing!
What is the point of even *having* an on-duty editor if they can't filter out duplicate stories! Jeez!
Unlike you sheep, I watch a lot of television, print is dead, I never leave my apartment and I have no friends.
In your *face*, you frauds!
To improve their flexibility, and thus their utility in an ever-unpredictable combat situation, these robots will be able to assume a variety of conformations; to transform, if you will, in order to disguise themselves from hostile guerilla forces.
Indeed, think of the benefits to the army Corp of engineers if they can respond to an unexpected hostile presence by combining their earth moving equipment into a giant combat robot! Given the assymetric threats our military is expected to face in the coming century, do policy makers really have any choice?
They - the people spamming google with this stuff - would just switch to underscores.
Glbsnoop: On this one simulated planet, these "humans" have created a simulator to see how likely earthlike planets are to form! Isn't that rich?
Qlbthrx: Very amusing, Glb. Now turn off the computer and take out the trash.
Glbsnoop: Fine. CLICK
Ordinarily, I'd contemptuously dismiss any toothless rugby hooligan who claimed to have duplicated some of your deadly and sophisticated military hardware in the back of his yurt.
However, he's built a lot of those cool jet engines, which means his claim to have built a cruise missile is definitely credible. The New Zealand...ian government clearly thinks his claims are credible (unless they really are just prosecuting him for tax evasion, which is always a possibility people.) They might be going persecuting him for talking to the Iranians rather than because they think his missile works, and they'd still refuse to comment for Security reasons.
If you read his web page he says he's finished the missile except for some trivial details (not his exact phrasing.) My experience working with engineers (I am a Scientist, not any sort of MBA, before any of you start) leads me to believe that these "trivial details" may be less of a paint job and more of a profound deficiency that would prevent the thing from actually working. Of course, I'm just speculating here.
If they really are trying to squelch his right to free speech with the tax charge - he should give all his missile design documents to some outfit that will distribute them far and wide, raisethefist.com or something. That'll show the guv'mint what for.
My PI (Principal Investigator = the professor who supervises my thesis research) is teaching physical chemistry right now. I'm going to pass this on to him so he can show his students that movie - that way, when he describes all the molecules in a gas bouncing around everywhere, he can show them what that would look like.
and do TRY not to melt into a puddle. It would terrible PR.
That is effectively what they did, and more.
When they "infected" the cells with synthetic phage DNA, only working phage DNA replicated. This is how you identify the "good" copies of the DNA. So, in the bacteria you already have a system that replicates only the good copies of the DNA.
This phage DNA, when it is replicated, actually benefits from (many) of the processes that check quality of DNA duplication in the bacterium.
So, tada.
Now, the problem is that one molecule of phage DNA isn't enough - the odds of any particular molecule successfully infecting a bacterium are small (they go up "in the wild" because the phage has something called a protein coat, that helps it to infect cells, in the lab with purely synthetic DNA you must use cruder methods.) Upshot: you need not one but a LOT of "good copies". More than previous groups were able to manufacture.
For this reason, until this work, no-one had ever gotten a synthetic molecule of this size to infect cells and produce viable virus offspring.
Note: I do not favor censorship of scientific research in any sense, case or circumstance. The actions of.... it was the NSF, wasn't it?... anyway, the movement towards "self-censorship" in potentially dangerous biology research is counterproductive as well as spineless. A previous poster made an excellent analogy to closed source computer security - hiding your head in the sand will not protect you.
I'm doing computational biology right now, but I was a practicing biochemist in the past (I am the author of the root of this thread.)
If I wanted ebola, I could not get it. Well, *I* probably could if I had a legitimate reason to want some, but most people can't.
The possibility that, in 20 years time, you could mail order a kit that would enable you to make ebola (you'd need to do some cute cell biology to make the stuff actually infect your cell culture, it is true) "from scratch" is a legitimate cause for concern. Is this critically more dangerous than what you could do with late 1980s techniques? Maybe not. But, perhaps the societal or organizational structures (or dumb luck) which have prevented existing techniques from being widely used to make bioweapons might not apply to this new technology. Who can say? I'm concerned about the prospect, certainly. Does this mean I'm opposed to the research or favor censorship? NO NO NO NO. No some more. But, it is a possibility of which we should be aware.
The human genome (which is DNA), contained in each of your cells, contains the instructions needed to make a cell (much like a computer program.)
...(Monomer n-1) 3' - 5' (Monomer n) 3'(BLOCKED) ...(Monomer n) 3' ...(Monomer n) 3' - 5' (Monomer n+1) 3' {BLOCKED}
However, in order to use these instructions to make a cell, you need a cell of the same kind to read them.
Analogy: You have a computer program that tells you how to manufacture computers but this doesn't do any good unless you already have a computer OF THE SAME KIND on which to execute it.
So, even if I assemble an entire human genome, I can't use it to make a person unless I already have a human cell. Kapish?
A VIRUS, which is what was made here, is NOT A CELL. It is a parasitic piece of DNA that hijacks an existing cell and contains the instructions to make viruses. The DNA that the virus contains is, in the best case, sufficient to hijack the cell all by itself, and convert the cell into a factory for making viruses. Viruses CANNOT make more viruses by themselves. The similarity to a computer virus, I assume, is obvious.
So, if you can make VIRAL DNA, this will be sufficient to make the virus, if you have cells that the virus can infect.
Even making the genome of a virus is very difficult. The "commercially available" DNA mentioned in the article is made chemically. DNA is made up of a chain of monomers; each monomer has a 5' end and a 3' end that can attach together to form a chain. In order to add monomer n+1 to a growing chain, this is what you do (description meant to be accessible to people who don't know a lot of chemistry):
-> **add reagent to unblock**
-> wash
-> add 5' (Monomer n) 3' {BLOCKED}
-> add reagent to attach 5' and 3' together
and repeat for Monomer n+2. Recursion is good.
Now, this is done in parallel in thousands of molecules of DNA (the 5' end of each molecule is fixed to a plate.)
Every time you add the reagent to remove the BLOCKS, it has a percentage chance, which can be very small, of failing.
So, for example, if, on one paritcular molecule, it fails at position 10, then instead of:
ACGTACGTACGT
you will get,
ACGTACGTAGT.
DNA that makes proteins has something called a "reading frame", consisting of codons which are three monomers long. If you shift the reading frame over by 1 monomer, it completely changes the meaning of the message.
So, a single nucleotide deletion, which I describe above, is disastrous - the synthetic DNA becomes useless.
Even if the chance of failing to remove a block is small - typically about 0.1% - if your DNA molecule is thousands of bases long, the chance of successfully adding every base to any individual molecule is slight.
Of course, you can make two different 100-base long molecules by the above technique and then ligate them together (recursion by splitting the task in half) which is, I believe, what's been done here. This has technical difficulties of it's own, of course, but with refinements it woud allow you to make useful DNA of length n*2^m instead of DNA of length n.
This is a frightening prospect because it would allow you to make ebola "from scratch", or just from the the string of letters that represent the genome (which is so short I could write it out by hand on a stack of cocktail napkins.) We're not to that point yet but it is a scary possibility.
I can't believe no one mentioned this already (I searched the comments page.)
In a graft, which is what has been done here, you stick the stem of one plant (tomato in this case) onto the root of another (tobacco in this case). If the two plants are closely related (as are tomatoes and tobacco,) the hybrid plant will grow and survive; often, chemicals (nicotine in this case) will move in the sap from the roots to the leaves (and presumably fruit.)
This is NOT a genetic change. If you took these "tomacco" seeds and planted them, they'd grow into regular tomatoes. Making the genetic changes required for tomatoes to actually make their own nicotine (which would breed true,) is an entirely different and more complicated prospect.
Are government agencies really allowed to do this? I suppose the DOJ is allowed to "educate" people about the law, and propogate the legal positions of the justice department - but any five year old can see that this monolog is advocating legislative policy (the extension of the PATRIOT act, among other things), using federal money.
For suing children, feeble little grandpas, etc.
They'll screen these people they've threatened (giving "generous" out of court settlements to the bad PR cases,) and then sue whoever they think they can get away with - or, their target demographic.
I'm no hypocrite, so I support unrestricted file sharing. However, even with my eyepatch on, I can see that the RIAA members are fighting for their economic survival. P2P may not have had a significant impact on CD sales *YET*, but it absolutely *WILL*. On top of that it will fragment the market and seriously weaken their distribution monopoly, etc. etc.
These are all good things for our culture but bad for the livelihoods of the people in the biz.
Like the chinese care about what NDAs are signed in their government laboratories!
It is true, if some of the code written in those laboratories comes BACK to the US, MS might be able to throw some harassment lawsuits at people who try to use it, but how far will they get?
Besides, MS needs attack dogs (like SCO,) to make legal threats for them, doing it directly is too much trouble.
I'm on my toilet right now! Ha!
I don't know how B&N e-books work, but doesn't this mean that you'll never be able to "install" the e-book on another computer, since you can't unlock it shaking hands with their server? I may be getting confused; B&N may not work this way.
If I Recall Correctly, all twelve of B&N's e-book customers should demand their money back.
MPAA Inquisitor: Recant!
Publisher: Never!
Inquisitor: You'll be sorry.
Publisher: Do your worst!
Inquisitor: Very well! You leave me no choice! As punishment for distributing this code, you'll be forced to watch these ten DivX movies made from rips that used code you posted!
Publisher: I heard Dirty Pretty Things was pretty good.
Inquisitor: Nice try. You'll be watching this past Summer's big budget movies! Should I start you off with "The Hulk" or "Gigli"?
Publisher: No! I recant! I recant! You can spy on me! You can nuke my hard drive from space! Anything! Please! Aieeeeee!
Tangent, Go!
Obviously, you couldn't patent the invention of banging two rocks together, since our ancestors did it.
Sponges are the most primitive Metazoans (multicelled organisms.) All animal life is descended from one sort or another of Sponge.
Our closest single-celled relatives are little buggers called Choanoflagellates, by the way.
Did the particular sponges from which we are descended make this stuff, I wonder? Probably not, since they presumably lived in relatively shallow salt water before evolving into worms.
My suspicion, which is pure speculation, is that these sponges make the glass fibers enzymatically, at some stage or another. Of course any enzymatic process would be difficult (to say the least,) to duplicate.
More tangential! If the glass itself is somehow secreted, made by enzymes, it ought to be POLARISING glass - because all the copies of a given enzyme must have the same handedness. That strikes me as totally awesome, for some reason.
When struck by lightning, killer robots reprogram themselves and turn into peacenick hippies. This has been known for some time.
The problem with this phenomena is that it leads to Steve Guttenberg being cast in other movies; something we as a nation cannot afford!
So, please, stop these killer robots before Hollywood's movies become that much worse.