I haven't gotten any of the new generation consoles (except a wii). I was thinking of a PS3 over a 360 because friends with 360s said they were a headache to own. Lots of failures, very noisy and occasionally even scratching disks.
Why would a PS3 be less useful than a 360 if all the games are the same and the hardware is better?
No way in hell anyone who hasn't had massive experience with PCR is going to get results from a DIY PCR. Extracting DNA from a sample is dead easy with the latest generation of kits, and DNA Is fairly stable stuff, but PCR protocols, although simple, are incredibly touchy and take a lot of time to get consistent results from.
The rough equivalent of having a page that says to Joe Public that he can either pay some professional to build a custom database for his companies needs, or he can download OpenOffice and do it himself. It's only cheaper if you don't put a value on time, quality or results.
For a start this is not EU-wide. Basically there is an EU directive that states EU members are allowed to block contracts from companies breaking the rules listed in Article 93,
1. Candidates or tenderers shall be excluded from participation in a procurement procedure if:
(a) they are bankrupt or being wound up, are having their affairs administered by the courts, have entered into an arrangement with creditors, have suspended business activities, are the subject of proceedings concerning those matters, or are in any analogous situation arising from a similar procedure provided for in national legislation or regulations; (b) they have been convicted of an offence concerning their professional conduct by a judgment which has the force of res judicata;
(c) they have been guilty of grave professional misconduct proven by any means which the contracting authority can justify;
(d) they have not fulfilled obligations relating to the payment of social security contributions or the payment of taxes in accordance with the legal provisions of the country in which they are established or with those of the country of the contracting authority or those of the country where the contract is to be performed;
(e) they have been the subject of a judgment which has the force of res judicata for fraud, corruption, involvement in a criminal organisation or any other illegal activity detrimental to the Communities' financial interests;
(f) following another procurement procedure or grant award procedure financed by the Community budget, they have been declared to be in serious breach of contract for failure to comply with their contractual obligations.
2. Candidates or tenderers must certify that they are not in one of the situations listed in paragraph 1. But that is not a mandatory for all EU states, it is only mandatory for EU institutions and some member states. But even that is a pretty massive lump of the EU market and would sting like hell (the ban would be for 5 years). Not only that but imagine the resources turned onto moving from MS to Open source solutions. It could end MS as a major player in the EU institutions and that would knock on into the private sector.
Not to mention the added bonus of all that cash heading into European projects like KDE and linux instead of overseas.
Not sure what the American Gov would think of it though...
I've got no electronic/IT background at all (I'm a lab tech), but even I could mess around with an arduino and get it to work. My GF is using one in an art project to have bag that analyses RFID tags from supermarket food and change the appearance of the bag depending on how ecologically you shopped.
I'm thinking of trying to use an arduino and my home music/movie server PC to make a cheap version of Philips 'Wake up light'. I was thinking of using it to control a stepper motor hooked up to a dimmer switch, but maybe someone here (with real electronics knowledge) can hint at a better way to do this?
Anyone reading up on the progress in genomics over the last decade has seen the huge leaps in speed and accuracy and the insane cuts in cost to work with nucleic acids.
From a lab level where what used to be a weeks work with lots of chemicals and processing is now usually a 20 minute protocol with a kit from Quagen. what used to be massive amounts of work with hundreds of gels and digestions and labeling steps to analyse nucleic acid sequences is now a few days with an affymetrix kit, giving far more accurate and useable results. Across every step this progress has been rapid.
And in the future, near-term like within a decade, all these methods will become outdated and replaced with near-realtime analysis and diagnosis. The best point in all of this is that no matter how advanced medical tech has become, the limiting factor has been that it's necessary to actually BRING your disease ridden body to the hospital or doctor. The rise of companies like www.decodeme.com is what i expect DNA assesment to be like in the future. You send off some samples you scrape off your cheek yourself, and within a few days you get a full diagnosis on any known predisposition to disease or genetic problems.
Which is why a lot more attention should be put into the debate on morality and genetic profiling. It's going to be here before you can blink, it might be nice to know what you think about using embryo selection to wipe out CF before it becomes a possibility.
I used to work for a major pharma company that had a big plant in Ireland. They had a massive totally automated warehouse, with one spider in it that could pick up any pallet and deliver it to almost anywhere in the plant in minutes. Inside the warehouse was strictly off limits, no space at all for human traffic. It had a few teething problems, but it did what 20ish people used to do in a fraction of the time.
This was 4 years ago, so not sure how cutting edge the technology is...
The shooter left a few documents (including a 'manifesto', a video of him shooting his 0.22 pistol in the woods and picture of himself) open to the public; Freaky stuff....
I think this is a lot better than it appears to be in terms of keeping innocent people out of jail.
You see although the odds of getting the same result for these STR checks between two random people is supposedly 1 in billions, in reality some papers put the odds of getting a false positive at 1 in 100. And the reasons are mostly due to lab errors. You have bad protocol. Sample degradation from being mishandled at the crime scene, or not being transported correctly, or being stored badly, sample mixup, mislabelled samples, or samples being loaded into the wrong tubes as it's being processed, contamination. That's just a splash of one sample onto a glove, and then touched into another sample going to PCR, or contaminated pipette tips, or badly cleaned glassware, or any of a million fuckups that can happen in a busy lab.
Those kind of mistakes (if you work in a lab), you will see are so common as to make ridiculous the claims that a single test can show XYZ to the odds of millions to one. There is hardly ever redundancy, the labs are usually national forensic labs, or state forensic labs in the US that process all the samples in the same lab, on the same benches, in the same LFCs, in the same PCR machines.
And just to put everything into one post, the labs are also often not doing blind tests. They know that in this case it's this guys blood and he is suspected of doing this and so on. That should never be the case, there's a reason the statue of justice has a blindfold on.
Caveat, i don't work in a forensic lab. I do however have the training to do so, could get a job there if I wanted, and do work with very similar procedures and the material/equipment as they use. And as I hope the post points out, it's not the specific procedures that the errors are introduced in, it's the standard lab work. People not changing gloves often enough, not cleaning thoroughly, running many samples at the same time to save time, not RNAase-zapping, etc etc etc.
Being able to run the sample AT the scene means that there is much less chance of mixing up samples, the samples are much fresher, the odds of someone tampering with the samples is almost nil, the DNA produced by PCR can be stored rapidly and safely in water until it can be checked again at proper lab to ensure it's accurate. The samples can also be examined and stored by the (assumedly) qualified person running this machine.
all in all, it's progress, sure it can be used in a bad way, almost anything can, but I humbly submit the knee-jerk issues raised about liberty and so forth are very much apropos of nothing in this case.
Rubbish, you obviously haven't worked in a nice lab. You think they are using full sized SDS gels for this? Agilent systems have capillary gel chips that run samples far more accurately and in a fraction of the time of SDS-Page.
And you think they're using a SPEC to check nucleic acid levels? Christ! just because you're using equipment form the 90s doesn't mean everyone else is!
A southern blot (process involving the removal of DNA from a gel) is usually allowed to run overnight.
!!!!
OK, i give up, you've been locked in a room since the 1960's right?
I had a Samsung 250 GB HM250JI 2.5" SATA on order, in Europe it's less than 150 Euro and that is a bargain for a 250 Gig laptop drive. The problem was that a little googling showed massive performance problems with some drives. Some had miserable speed benchmarks, others (in OS X) failed to mount or mounted sporadically. Others performed just fine.
Turned out Samsung had a couple of different firmware versions on shipping drives, and it is possible to burn new firmware to a CD and boot from it under OS X to flash the drive with updated firmware. But after reading about these and other problems with Samsung drives I cancelled the order and bought a WD instead. Pity Seagate don't have any affordable similar drives, I've only ever used seagate before and I think they're pretty fantastic.
While most people think that the aerospace industry is high-tech, the truth is that it's rather backward. Strictly speaking, it's an industry that's been largely paralyzed by liability attorneys. Why would I have to adjust the fuel mixture MANUALLY on an airplane to get peak performance, when my cheap-o Saturn SL2 does the job nicely, even adapting itself to my specific driving habits?
This is interesting. I work in the Pharma industry, and for years it's been very obvious to anyone working in Pharma that they are light years behind the food industry. Basically, in pharma, the risk of fucking up and making a product that is dangerous and will kill your customers has to be totally ruled out. And the way that has been done for 50 years is through STRICT STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURES. You form a company, you design a drug. You design the process to make that drug. Then you get it approved by the FDA and friends. And then you do not EVER change a single thing about that process. You end up with decade old methods of making drugs, inefficiently and costly methods, that cannot be changed.
A company i worked for had a process to make a very high price/volume product from a fermentation process. Once it had been approved, it was put in production. After 10 years of production there were numerous improvements to the organism that would allow for an almost 10X increase in productivity (and profit). But they could not be implemented without re-approving everything which would cost more than the increase productivity would make the company. So it was left as it was.
Today, the FDA is moving towards how the food industry have done things for decades. PAT, Process Analytical Technology. Basically you design the process, and you monitor* it at every stage and know what is happening intimately. Once it's approved you can change the process easily as long as you know what you are doing. The product at the end is more consistent and safer than with the old SOP methods. Hopefully this is the equivalent of the Air industry playing catchup to less strictly regulated industries as well.
Cutting our planes' emissions will do nothing but place further financial strains on us, leading to a relative inability to compete with other countries less concerned about the illusory monster of global warming.
this is a ridiculous argument that keeps being brought up as a reason to defer or cancel any planned control of pollution.
It's flawed in two ways. One, it presumes that any prevention of pollution benefits us only globally, if at all. That if we reduce our pollution by damaging our economy we do it to ward of the *possible* spectre of global warming, and that other nations that might ignore our work (thereby gaining an economic advantage) will damage the environment just as much as we would have done. This is ignoring the fact that pollution may end up being global, but it starts local. Countries with the strictest controls on pollution have the cleanest air, the cleanest water, the lowest incidences of environmental disasters. The benefits aren't that you *might* reduce global warming (if it exists or not), but that you *will* increase the quality of your citizens lives.
Flaw number two, is that we will be damaged economically by reducing CO2 through legislation. For a start, the US has seen a decrease in CO2 per GDP dollar over the last few decades. Americans are making more money, and doing it cleaner. And it can't be blamed solely on the loss of manufacturing jobs from the US either, as Germany is the worlds largest exporter, and has a much lower pollution level per dollar of goods exported than the US or China.
in the EU, where environmental legislation is toughest, CO2 per GDP is the lowest in the world. The top rankings show that the countries with least CO2 per GDP are also those with highest productivity in the world. Norway and Luxembourg both have higher GDP per hour worked than the US and still manage to have much lower CO2 per GDP unit.
The fact is, that it is ABSOLUTELY possible to have stricter pollution controls in place, and yet to be competitive with countries that do not comply to the same high standards.
This is more government micromanagement that will do nothing but further bring us down.
As a fellow living in one of the most micromanaged, government intrusive counties in the world, and also one of the richest, cleanest and with the highest standard of living in the world, I would like to say that it is clear to me the US could do with some more open government intervention and less supposedly invisible hand market control. If anything has bought the US down in the last decade, it's been corruption and abuse from large corporations not kept in check by government.
On the OS X side of things, when OS X was updated with core image a lot of people were talking about how someone would be able to swoop in and offer a front-end to all the built in image filters that were part of core image. (you can see a list of all the filters that are part of it here. You could open up Core Image Fun House (on the OS X install disc) and play around will all the filters, and easily imagine a company making an interface for that power, offering 60% of the power of photoshop for a fraction of the cost.
Cut a long story short, someone seems to be almost ready to finally do this, Pixelmator. Cheap, neat and looks like it's easy to use. Not a real photoshop competitor, but then again most people pirate photoshop for light photo retouching and occasional messing around. This looks like it could handle what a lot of casual photoshop users want without the insane price tag.
And the info is gone or changed. What the hell is wrong with people that they need to hype this kind of stuff up all the time? There are so many posts under this topic that are totally misinformed, but it only took me 5 minutes to get an account, download a song and try to edit it in Textedit in order to see how little there is to this bullshit.
Try Philips instead of Sony, the difference is obvious when you look at their players. Philips have no labels, or movie making divisions, so they have nothing to lose with hardware that is lax about playing as many file types as possible. They already have DVD players with USB ports for Harddrives that play Divx, and media players that record video feed to MPEG-2, play back DivX, and don't have any DRM to speak of.
Also very easy to crack players, as far as region free goes.
Offtopic, but I've struggled with PDFs and a good way to organise/index them. I have thousands (Biotech, doing a postgrad), and I really have tried everything. A lot of PDF library apps, and when 10.4 came out I was dead happy to try spotlight, but it didn't work so well.
Anyway, long story short, the amazing Mekentosj pair came up with this PDF library app called papers. They make a ton of other free apps that have won awards, papers is the first one that costs cash. But if you want to organise a lot of PDFs, it really is incredible, especially if you use pubmed, which it integrates with. It's in beta, but you can test drive it, and see if it suits.
hope it helps!
(PS, not affiliated with mekentosj, just a huge fan of their apps).
OK, that was your mobile phone rant. What about this one?
I want a mobile phone with a camera, you know, to take pictures of my friends and put them in my address book. MP3 player is good too, and a loudspeaker for hands free and also so my awesome ringtone can be heard by everyone in the bus/train/plane that i'm on.
I want it to look nice, silvery or something, actually, I REALLY want covers I can pry off so I can buy covers with my favourite band on them and put them on instead. And I want the keys to light up in different colours. I want it to have something so I can check my email, and bluetooth so I can play games with my friends.
And I don't mind if it breaks in a year or two, because by then I'll want something else.
OK, now imagine that post times a million, compared to your single request for something tough and simple. Now imagine that is what the feedback Nokia et al gets is. Now imagine they have a choice, spend millions doing R&D for your phone, and sell a few thousand of them, or spend millions doing R&D for the phone with removable 'XPRESS-ON COVERS', and sell a few MILLION of them.
This is what annoys me about the "all i want is a phone that RINGS PEOPLE" crowd on slashdot. You are not stupid, accept the fact that you are in the minority, that to give you a phone with less features the phone company would have to spend A LOT MORE. It is cheaper for them to sell you the same stuff everyone else wants rather than make a new cheap line that would satisfy you.
this is all not to mention that there are plenty of no-frill phones out there if you look hard enough. Try the Nokia E series for a start. Business phones, no bullshit, metal design, very tough and simple. Or the nokia 6250, tough rugged waterproof and so on. Big buttons, no camera, blah blah blah. there are plenty of options.
I also mostly use the keyboard, and one thing that a lot of people forget with OS X is to turn on the full keyboard control. Without it OS X is well behind Windows in terms of keyboard shortcuts, with full keyboard access enabled it is well ahead.
System Preferences > Keyboard & Mouse > 'Full Keyboard Access', change it to 'All Controls'.
With that enabled, OS X is much more controllable by keyboard and much more consistent than Windows. In ANY standard dialogue box ESC is always cancel, Spacebar is option and Return is default (for example, Cancel, Don't Save and Save in a save dialogue). In the same preference pane you can add custom shortcuts for any menu item you want or look up the nice hidden ones (i.e. hovering your cursor over a word in any app and hitting ctrl-apple-D pops up a dictionary definition of the word. Selecting text and hitting apple-shift-L does a google search of that text).
Add in Quicksilver and you'll hardly ever need the mouse.
I made a similar move. I had a home PC as a media server and wifi provider, always on. I bought a new macbook pro recently, so I made my old powerbook a new media server and decided to sell the PC. The day i turned that PC off I noticed the entire apartment was a lot cooler, it used to get uncomfortably warm in the evenings. A month later I found my electricity bill had gone from around 80 euros a month to 35.
Hopefully with the industry seeming to pay more attention to energy matters (e.g. with the release of the Core duos and the emphasis on performace per watt) this kind of change might start to occur on a much larger scale as people start to ditch power hungry P4s for more efficient chips.
I used to think having a mobile phone that played MP3s would be a dumb move. The iPod has a neat interface, easy to update from itunes, a mobile that plys MP3s would be a pain in the ass to use (my old phone did have the capability, but it was rubbish at it, in order to play a song or album you had to spend 5 minutes burrowing around in a dozen menus trying to find the buggy copy of realplayer to play stuff).
Cut a long story short, I bought a Nokia N80 (bought it because it was a wifi capable smart phone with a great screen, not because of the MP3 playing aspect) and my girlfriend bought a nokia 5300 (because she liked the look of it and it was free).
Neither of us use our ipods anymore. The N80 plays MP3s fine, when you start playing them the player pops up on the active standby so you are always one click away from having control over the player, and the 5300 has dedicated buttons on the case to play music. It's as handy to use as your average MP3 player. There are plenty of hacks to get them recognised by iTunes and auto-synced, and it's one less device in the pocket.
just look at the photos of the 5300, they show off the little rubberised buttons for playing music. The price-tag on it was so low that buying it from a carrier means it's free. It made me totally rethink my position on the uselessness of convergent devices.
I stopped buying CDs year ago, because all I was doing was buying them and ripping them. I started to buy the albums I wanted on vinyl and just downloaded the MP3s of the music separately. Vinyl was prettier, held it's value longer, and was more fun to play on those special occasions when MP3s aren't enough:)
But the most recent CD I bought was by Richie Hawtin, the pre-eminent electronic artist behind plastikman. The CD came with a DVD (or vice versa), with a live show by him. The CD had a full album by him, but the DVD also had that album ripped as a high bitrate MP3 for your ipod, it had a longer version that wouldn't fit on CD, and also a lot of extras, to play with.
Basically it copied the way DVDs of movies have gone lately, lots of extras, low prices, and therefore high sales.
Wasteful television standby settings and the energy efficiency of computers and water heaters are to be targeted in a new legislative drive aimed at slicing 100bn a year from the European Union's energy bill, in a move that could impose Europe's green agenda on the world. Stringent new European Commission energy efficiency targets for items such as electrical appliances and cars could set new global standards, since all imports into the European market would have to comply.
Some previous EU deadlines have resulted in some pretty dismal performances (the Lisbon agreement springs to mind), but the EU's very high standards for energy efficiency and recycling have been adhered to across the continent with admirable results. Not to mention the fact that EU enforced limits on car pollution (as one example) have led to high efficiency cars in Europe and across the globe, as manufacturers are forced to comply with EU levels to gain access to the EU market. The proposed regulations - including extensions of existing rules - would impose European energy efficiency standards on any company worldwide seeking access to the EU's 480m consumers, including US manufacturers. European standards and norms in the car sector and mobile telephony have already become accepted in many countries worldwide, to the annoyance of Washington, which believes the EU sets too many rules.
If there is one criticism that is levelled at the EU a lot, is that it sets too many rules. But the high standards they have raised in efficiency for cars and electronics (think about those EU energy labels on all fridges, freezers and so on, they've come a long way from D's and E's a decade ago, how much energy did that initiative save?), so it's A-OK by me.
It's not just medical research that's being handicapped by the politicisation of the stem cell issue in the US. Stem cell research has the potential to generate billions in revenue in the future. For example, in my University and some others in Sweden and Germany (Including the pre-eminent Karolinska institute), the EU has started and is funding a project to use embryonic stem cells to analyse drug toxicity and metabolism. The eventual goal is to replace animal testing with cell culture testing.
Results would be much more accurate, at the moment hundreds of animals are used to generate enough statistically safe data about drugs being tested, with embryonic stem cells many more tests could be run at a fraction of the cost, with much higher accuracy (as the cells would respond as a human cell would, and not as an animal cell would.) Drugs could be ready for the market place in a much shorter time, and pharmacy companies would save billions while also saving many hundreds of thousands of animals lives AND getting more accurate results to give consumers more safety.
The US Government is shooting itself in the foot here. There are so many fantastic areas where stem cells can deliver so much, and it's a race that they have not yet started in, while the rest of the world is already competing.
when i read the Christian science monitor people glance at the title and knee jerk immediately, 'what the hell are you reading that for?'
Just in case you have not had an encounter with the CSM before, it's not some religious orientated 'intelligent theory' spouting mouth piece of the far right. It's one of the most respected newspapers around, has a league of its own reporters rather than relying on wire services like most other papers, has won many awards for fantastic journalism, often reports on cutting edge science that would make the conservative far right weep, and also often reports on stories that the rest of the press skip over for not being sexy enough.
AND, they're low on cash and have been in the red for some time, how about splashing out on a subscription?
Obviously you haven't been doing much traveling. Check out Cuba, Nicaragua, Israel, Croatia (until recently), etc. No matter where I've been the U.S. has always welcomed me back with open arms compared to some of the places I've traveled.
Just think about what you've written. You're saying the US is not so bad, not compared to Cuba, Nicaragua, Croatia, Israel. If you're trying to say that the US is not such a fortress state and in doing so favourably compare it to countries like Cuba or Nicaragua, or countries undergoing as much *real* terrorism as Israel, or countries with such recent mass-conflicts such as Croatia, then you're not doing a very favourable comparison.
Slashdot Mirror
Clarification for me please?
I haven't gotten any of the new generation consoles (except a wii). I was thinking of a PS3 over a 360 because friends with 360s said they were a headache to own. Lots of failures, very noisy and occasionally even scratching disks.
Why would a PS3 be less useful than a 360 if all the games are the same and the hardware is better?
No way in hell anyone who hasn't had massive experience with PCR is going to get results from a DIY PCR. Extracting DNA from a sample is dead easy with the latest generation of kits, and DNA Is fairly stable stuff, but PCR protocols, although simple, are incredibly touchy and take a lot of time to get consistent results from.
The rough equivalent of having a page that says to Joe Public that he can either pay some professional to build a custom database for his companies needs, or he can download OpenOffice and do it himself. It's only cheaper if you don't put a value on time, quality or results.
1. Candidates or tenderers shall be excluded from participation in a procurement procedure if:
(a) they are bankrupt or being wound up, are having their affairs administered by the courts, have entered into an arrangement with creditors, have suspended business activities, are the subject of proceedings concerning those matters, or are in any analogous situation arising from a similar procedure provided for in national legislation or regulations;
(b) they have been convicted of an offence concerning their professional conduct by a judgment which has the force of res judicata;
(c) they have been guilty of grave professional misconduct proven by any means which the contracting authority can justify;
(d) they have not fulfilled obligations relating to the payment of social security contributions or the payment of taxes in accordance with the legal provisions of the country in which they are established or with those of the country of the contracting authority or those of the country where the contract is to be performed;
(e) they have been the subject of a judgment which has the force of res judicata for fraud, corruption, involvement in a criminal organisation or any other illegal activity detrimental to the Communities' financial interests;
(f) following another procurement procedure or grant award procedure financed by the Community budget, they have been declared to be in serious breach of contract for failure to comply with their contractual obligations.
2. Candidates or tenderers must certify that they are not in one of the situations listed in paragraph 1. But that is not a mandatory for all EU states, it is only mandatory for EU institutions and some member states. But even that is a pretty massive lump of the EU market and would sting like hell (the ban would be for 5 years). Not only that but imagine the resources turned onto moving from MS to Open source solutions. It could end MS as a major player in the EU institutions and that would knock on into the private sector.
Not to mention the added bonus of all that cash heading into European projects like KDE and linux instead of overseas.
Not sure what the American Gov would think of it though...
I've got no electronic/IT background at all (I'm a lab tech), but even I could mess around with an arduino and get it to work. My GF is using one in an art project to have bag that analyses RFID tags from supermarket food and change the appearance of the bag depending on how ecologically you shopped.
I'm thinking of trying to use an arduino and my home music/movie server PC to make a cheap version of Philips 'Wake up light'. I was thinking of using it to control a stepper motor hooked up to a dimmer switch, but maybe someone here (with real electronics knowledge) can hint at a better way to do this?
Anyone reading up on the progress in genomics over the last decade has seen the huge leaps in speed and accuracy and the insane cuts in cost to work with nucleic acids.
From a lab level where what used to be a weeks work with lots of chemicals and processing is now usually a 20 minute protocol with a kit from Quagen. what used to be massive amounts of work with hundreds of gels and digestions and labeling steps to analyse nucleic acid sequences is now a few days with an affymetrix kit, giving far more accurate and useable results. Across every step this progress has been rapid.
And in the future, near-term like within a decade, all these methods will become outdated and replaced with near-realtime analysis and diagnosis. The best point in all of this is that no matter how advanced medical tech has become, the limiting factor has been that it's necessary to actually BRING your disease ridden body to the hospital or doctor. The rise of companies like www.decodeme.com is what i expect DNA assesment to be like in the future. You send off some samples you scrape off your cheek yourself, and within a few days you get a full diagnosis on any known predisposition to disease or genetic problems.
Which is why a lot more attention should be put into the debate on morality and genetic profiling. It's going to be here before you can blink, it might be nice to know what you think about using embryo selection to wipe out CF before it becomes a possibility.
I used to work for a major pharma company that had a big plant in Ireland. They had a massive totally automated warehouse, with one spider in it that could pick up any pallet and deliver it to almost anywhere in the plant in minutes. Inside the warehouse was strictly off limits, no space at all for human traffic. It had a few teething problems, but it did what 20ish people used to do in a fraction of the time.
This was 4 years ago, so not sure how cutting edge the technology is...
The shooter left a few documents (including a 'manifesto', a video of him shooting his 0.22 pistol in the woods and picture of himself) open to the public;
Freaky stuff....
I think this is a lot better than it appears to be in terms of keeping innocent people out of jail.
You see although the odds of getting the same result for these STR checks between two random people is supposedly 1 in billions, in reality some papers put the odds of getting a false positive at 1 in 100. And the reasons are mostly due to lab errors. You have bad protocol. Sample degradation from being mishandled at the crime scene, or not being transported correctly, or being stored badly, sample mixup, mislabelled samples, or samples being loaded into the wrong tubes as it's being processed, contamination. That's just a splash of one sample onto a glove, and then touched into another sample going to PCR, or contaminated pipette tips, or badly cleaned glassware, or any of a million fuckups that can happen in a busy lab.
Those kind of mistakes (if you work in a lab), you will see are so common as to make ridiculous the claims that a single test can show XYZ to the odds of millions to one. There is hardly ever redundancy, the labs are usually national forensic labs, or state forensic labs in the US that process all the samples in the same lab, on the same benches, in the same LFCs, in the same PCR machines.
And just to put everything into one post, the labs are also often not doing blind tests. They know that in this case it's this guys blood and he is suspected of doing this and so on. That should never be the case, there's a reason the statue of justice has a blindfold on.
Caveat, i don't work in a forensic lab. I do however have the training to do so, could get a job there if I wanted, and do work with very similar procedures and the material/equipment as they use. And as I hope the post points out, it's not the specific procedures that the errors are introduced in, it's the standard lab work. People not changing gloves often enough, not cleaning thoroughly, running many samples at the same time to save time, not RNAase-zapping, etc etc etc.
Being able to run the sample AT the scene means that there is much less chance of mixing up samples, the samples are much fresher, the odds of someone tampering with the samples is almost nil, the DNA produced by PCR can be stored rapidly and safely in water until it can be checked again at proper lab to ensure it's accurate. The samples can also be examined and stored by the (assumedly) qualified person running this machine.
all in all, it's progress, sure it can be used in a bad way, almost anything can, but I humbly submit the knee-jerk issues raised about liberty and so forth are very much apropos of nothing in this case.
Rubbish, you obviously haven't worked in a nice lab. You think they are using full sized SDS gels for this? Agilent systems have capillary gel chips that run samples far more accurately and in a fraction of the time of SDS-Page.
And you think they're using a SPEC to check nucleic acid levels? Christ! just because you're using equipment form the 90s doesn't mean everyone else is!
A southern blot (process involving the removal of DNA from a gel) is usually allowed to run overnight.
!!!!
OK, i give up, you've been locked in a room since the 1960's right?
I had a Samsung 250 GB HM250JI 2.5" SATA on order, in Europe it's less than 150 Euro and that is a bargain for a 250 Gig laptop drive. The problem was that a little googling showed massive performance problems with some drives. Some had miserable speed benchmarks, others (in OS X) failed to mount or mounted sporadically. Others performed just fine.
Turned out Samsung had a couple of different firmware versions on shipping drives, and it is possible to burn new firmware to a CD and boot from it under OS X to flash the drive with updated firmware. But after reading about these and other problems with Samsung drives I cancelled the order and bought a WD instead. Pity Seagate don't have any affordable similar drives, I've only ever used seagate before and I think they're pretty fantastic.
While most people think that the aerospace industry is high-tech, the truth is that it's rather backward.
Strictly speaking, it's an industry that's been largely paralyzed by liability attorneys.
Why would I have to adjust the fuel mixture MANUALLY on an airplane to get peak performance, when my cheap-o Saturn SL2 does the job nicely, even adapting itself to my specific driving habits?
This is interesting. I work in the Pharma industry, and for years it's been very obvious to anyone working in Pharma that they are light years behind the food industry. Basically, in pharma, the risk of fucking up and making a product that is dangerous and will kill your customers has to be totally ruled out. And the way that has been done for 50 years is through STRICT STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURES. You form a company, you design a drug. You design the process to make that drug. Then you get it approved by the FDA and friends. And then you do not EVER change a single thing about that process. You end up with decade old methods of making drugs, inefficiently and costly methods, that cannot be changed.
A company i worked for had a process to make a very high price/volume product from a fermentation process. Once it had been approved, it was put in production. After 10 years of production there were numerous improvements to the organism that would allow for an almost 10X increase in productivity (and profit). But they could not be implemented without re-approving everything which would cost more than the increase productivity would make the company. So it was left as it was.
Today, the FDA is moving towards how the food industry have done things for decades. PAT, Process Analytical Technology. Basically you design the process, and you monitor* it at every stage and know what is happening intimately. Once it's approved you can change the process easily as long as you know what you are doing. The product at the end is more consistent and safer than with the old SOP methods. Hopefully this is the equivalent of the Air industry playing catchup to less strictly regulated industries as well.
*NIR. PAT == NIR
Cutting our planes' emissions will do nothing but place further financial strains on us, leading to a relative inability to compete with other countries less concerned about the illusory monster of global warming.
this is a ridiculous argument that keeps being brought up as a reason to defer or cancel any planned control of pollution.
It's flawed in two ways. One, it presumes that any prevention of pollution benefits us only globally, if at all. That if we reduce our pollution by damaging our economy we do it to ward of the *possible* spectre of global warming, and that other nations that might ignore our work (thereby gaining an economic advantage) will damage the environment just as much as we would have done. This is ignoring the fact that pollution may end up being global, but it starts local. Countries with the strictest controls on pollution have the cleanest air, the cleanest water, the lowest incidences of environmental disasters. The benefits aren't that you *might* reduce global warming (if it exists or not), but that you *will* increase the quality of your citizens lives.
Flaw number two, is that we will be damaged economically by reducing CO2 through legislation. For a start, the US has seen a decrease in CO2 per GDP dollar over the last few decades. Americans are making more money, and doing it cleaner. And it can't be blamed solely on the loss of manufacturing jobs from the US either, as Germany is the worlds largest exporter, and has a much lower pollution level per dollar of goods exported than the US or China.
in the EU, where environmental legislation is toughest, CO2 per GDP is the lowest in the world. The top rankings show that the countries with least CO2 per GDP are also those with highest productivity in the world. Norway and Luxembourg both have higher GDP per hour worked than the US and still manage to have much lower CO2 per GDP unit.
The fact is, that it is ABSOLUTELY possible to have stricter pollution controls in place, and yet to be competitive with countries that do not comply to the same high standards.
This is more government micromanagement that will do nothing but further bring us down.
As a fellow living in one of the most micromanaged, government intrusive counties in the world, and also one of the richest, cleanest and with the highest standard of living in the world, I would like to say that it is clear to me the US could do with some more open government intervention and less supposedly invisible hand market control. If anything has bought the US down in the last decade, it's been corruption and abuse from large corporations not kept in check by government.
On the OS X side of things, when OS X was updated with core image a lot of people were talking about how someone would be able to swoop in and offer a front-end to all the built in image filters that were part of core image. (you can see a list of all the filters that are part of it here. You could open up Core Image Fun House (on the OS X install disc) and play around will all the filters, and easily imagine a company making an interface for that power, offering 60% of the power of photoshop for a fraction of the cost.
Cut a long story short, someone seems to be almost ready to finally do this, Pixelmator. Cheap, neat and looks like it's easy to use. Not a real photoshop competitor, but then again most people pirate photoshop for light photo retouching and occasional messing around. This looks like it could handle what a lot of casual photoshop users want without the insane price tag.
And the info is gone or changed. What the hell is wrong with people that they need to hype this kind of stuff up all the time? There are so many posts under this topic that are totally misinformed, but it only took me 5 minutes to get an account, download a song and try to edit it in Textedit in order to see how little there is to this bullshit.
http://pax-europa.com/temp/kraftwerk.png
Nothing to see here, move along...
Try Philips instead of Sony, the difference is obvious when you look at their players. Philips have no labels, or movie making divisions, so they have nothing to lose with hardware that is lax about playing as many file types as possible. They already have DVD players with USB ports for Harddrives that play Divx, and media players that record video feed to MPEG-2, play back DivX, and don't have any DRM to speak of.
Also very easy to crack players, as far as region free goes.
Offtopic, but I've struggled with PDFs and a good way to organise/index them. I have thousands (Biotech, doing a postgrad), and I really have tried everything. A lot of PDF library apps, and when 10.4 came out I was dead happy to try spotlight, but it didn't work so well.
Anyway, long story short, the amazing Mekentosj pair came up with this PDF library app called papers. They make a ton of other free apps that have won awards, papers is the first one that costs cash. But if you want to organise a lot of PDFs, it really is incredible, especially if you use pubmed, which it integrates with. It's in beta, but you can test drive it, and see if it suits.
hope it helps!
(PS, not affiliated with mekentosj, just a huge fan of their apps).
OK, now imagine that post times a million, compared to your single request for something tough and simple. Now imagine that is what the feedback Nokia et al gets is. Now imagine they have a choice, spend millions doing R&D for your phone, and sell a few thousand of them, or spend millions doing R&D for the phone with removable 'XPRESS-ON COVERS', and sell a few MILLION of them.
This is what annoys me about the "all i want is a phone that RINGS PEOPLE" crowd on slashdot. You are not stupid, accept the fact that you are in the minority, that to give you a phone with less features the phone company would have to spend A LOT MORE. It is cheaper for them to sell you the same stuff everyone else wants rather than make a new cheap line that would satisfy you.
this is all not to mention that there are plenty of no-frill phones out there if you look hard enough. Try the Nokia E series for a start. Business phones, no bullshit, metal design, very tough and simple. Or the nokia 6250, tough rugged waterproof and so on. Big buttons, no camera, blah blah blah. there are plenty of options.
I also mostly use the keyboard, and one thing that a lot of people forget with OS X is to turn on the full keyboard control. Without it OS X is well behind Windows in terms of keyboard shortcuts, with full keyboard access enabled it is well ahead.
System Preferences > Keyboard & Mouse > 'Full Keyboard Access', change it to 'All Controls'.
With that enabled, OS X is much more controllable by keyboard and much more consistent than Windows. In ANY standard dialogue box ESC is always cancel, Spacebar is option and Return is default (for example, Cancel, Don't Save and Save in a save dialogue). In the same preference pane you can add custom shortcuts for any menu item you want or look up the nice hidden ones (i.e. hovering your cursor over a word in any app and hitting ctrl-apple-D pops up a dictionary definition of the word. Selecting text and hitting apple-shift-L does a google search of that text).
Add in Quicksilver and you'll hardly ever need the mouse.
I made a similar move. I had a home PC as a media server and wifi provider, always on. I bought a new macbook pro recently, so I made my old powerbook a new media server and decided to sell the PC. The day i turned that PC off I noticed the entire apartment was a lot cooler, it used to get uncomfortably warm in the evenings. A month later I found my electricity bill had gone from around 80 euros a month to 35.
Hopefully with the industry seeming to pay more attention to energy matters (e.g. with the release of the Core duos and the emphasis on performace per watt) this kind of change might start to occur on a much larger scale as people start to ditch power hungry P4s for more efficient chips.
I used to think having a mobile phone that played MP3s would be a dumb move. The iPod has a neat interface, easy to update from itunes, a mobile that plys MP3s would be a pain in the ass to use (my old phone did have the capability, but it was rubbish at it, in order to play a song or album you had to spend 5 minutes burrowing around in a dozen menus trying to find the buggy copy of realplayer to play stuff).
Cut a long story short, I bought a Nokia N80 (bought it because it was a wifi capable smart phone with a great screen, not because of the MP3 playing aspect) and my girlfriend bought a nokia 5300 (because she liked the look of it and it was free).
Neither of us use our ipods anymore. The N80 plays MP3s fine, when you start playing them the player pops up on the active standby so you are always one click away from having control over the player, and the 5300 has dedicated buttons on the case to play music. It's as handy to use as your average MP3 player. There are plenty of hacks to get them recognised by iTunes and auto-synced, and it's one less device in the pocket.
just look at the photos of the 5300, they show off the little rubberised buttons for playing music. The price-tag on it was so low that buying it from a carrier means it's free. It made me totally rethink my position on the uselessness of convergent devices.
I stopped buying CDs year ago, because all I was doing was buying them and ripping them. I started to buy the albums I wanted on vinyl and just downloaded the MP3s of the music separately. Vinyl was prettier, held it's value longer, and was more fun to play on those special occasions when MP3s aren't enough :)
But the most recent CD I bought was by Richie Hawtin, the pre-eminent electronic artist behind plastikman. The CD came with a DVD (or vice versa), with a live show by him. The CD had a full album by him, but the DVD also had that album ripped as a high bitrate MP3 for your ipod, it had a longer version that wouldn't fit on CD, and also a lot of extras, to play with.
Basically it copied the way DVDs of movies have gone lately, lots of extras, low prices, and therefore high sales.
Is here at the Financial Times.
Wasteful television standby settings and the energy efficiency of computers and water heaters are to be targeted in a new legislative drive aimed at slicing 100bn a year from the European Union's energy bill, in a move that could impose Europe's green agenda on the world. Stringent new European Commission energy efficiency targets for items such as electrical appliances and cars could set new global standards, since all imports into the European market would have to comply.
Some previous EU deadlines have resulted in some pretty dismal performances (the Lisbon agreement springs to mind), but the EU's very high standards for energy efficiency and recycling have been adhered to across the continent with admirable results. Not to mention the fact that EU enforced limits on car pollution (as one example) have led to high efficiency cars in Europe and across the globe, as manufacturers are forced to comply with EU levels to gain access to the EU market.
The proposed regulations - including extensions of existing rules - would impose European energy efficiency standards on any company worldwide seeking access to the EU's 480m consumers, including US manufacturers. European standards and norms in the car sector and mobile telephony have already become accepted in many countries worldwide, to the annoyance of Washington, which believes the EU sets too many rules.
If there is one criticism that is levelled at the EU a lot, is that it sets too many rules. But the high standards they have raised in efficiency for cars and electronics (think about those EU energy labels on all fridges, freezers and so on, they've come a long way from D's and E's a decade ago, how much energy did that initiative save?), so it's A-OK by me.
It's not just medical research that's being handicapped by the politicisation of the stem cell issue in the US. Stem cell research has the potential to generate billions in revenue in the future. For example, in my University and some others in Sweden and Germany (Including the pre-eminent Karolinska institute), the EU has started and is funding a project to use embryonic stem cells to analyse drug toxicity and metabolism. The eventual goal is to replace animal testing with cell culture testing.
Results would be much more accurate, at the moment hundreds of animals are used to generate enough statistically safe data about drugs being tested, with embryonic stem cells many more tests could be run at a fraction of the cost, with much higher accuracy (as the cells would respond as a human cell would, and not as an animal cell would.) Drugs could be ready for the market place in a much shorter time, and pharmacy companies would save billions while also saving many hundreds of thousands of animals lives AND getting more accurate results to give consumers more safety.
The US Government is shooting itself in the foot here. There are so many fantastic areas where stem cells can deliver so much, and it's a race that they have not yet started in, while the rest of the world is already competing.
when i read the Christian science monitor people glance at the title and knee jerk immediately, 'what the hell are you reading that for?'
Just in case you have not had an encounter with the CSM before, it's not some religious orientated 'intelligent theory' spouting mouth piece of the far right. It's one of the most respected newspapers around, has a league of its own reporters rather than relying on wire services like most other papers, has won many awards for fantastic journalism, often reports on cutting edge science that would make the conservative far right weep, and also often reports on stories that the rest of the press skip over for not being sexy enough.
AND, they're low on cash and have been in the red for some time, how about splashing out on a subscription?
Obviously you haven't been doing much traveling. Check out Cuba, Nicaragua, Israel, Croatia (until recently), etc. No matter where I've been the U.S. has always welcomed me back with open arms compared to some of the places I've traveled.
Just think about what you've written. You're saying the US is not so bad, not compared to Cuba, Nicaragua, Croatia, Israel. If you're trying to say that the US is not such a fortress state and in doing so favourably compare it to countries like Cuba or Nicaragua, or countries undergoing as much *real* terrorism as Israel, or countries with such recent mass-conflicts such as Croatia, then you're not doing a very favourable comparison.