Lots of problems with that. Vacuum welding of lots of things, the fact that the hydrazine that the shuttle uses as primary attitude control is not the sort of thing you want parked out next to the ISS. The fact that it would take another ten years and a billion dollars for NASA to come up with the engineering contingency plans for the thing. And others.
I do like the idea of leaving at least one in orbit. Makes no sense at all, but would be mega cool.
Oh, and just so I don't wander off into total snark ville - The FDA is really just looking for comments on things that either are used directly by a medical provider to view images or is attached to a medical device (like a glucometer). Makes perfect sense although why the FDA is so wound up about PACS (Picture Archival and Communication System - just a glorified version of a image viewer and database) is beyond me, but that's the FDA for you.
As for all of the other 'Alternative / natural / homeopathic apps - so long as they state they are not designed to diagnose or cure disease then they're fine.
No, you have got it all scrambled. Neoplastons cause subluxations. Antioneoplastons are the good guys in this let's-bash-the-FDA-and-cronies psychotic (but unmedicated) mind view.
If the 'antineplastons' are so wonderful, how come this MD PhD scientist type hasn't offered to rid some other country of the scourge of cancer? Europeans, Africans, Asians - they all get cancer and have money.
Why not have a voluntary blood test for everyone in the country, once a year. Use the blood to screen for every known disease. If done on a massive scale it could save hundreds of billions of dollars a year just by catching various terminal illnesses in their early stages.
This would probably work better in a country with socialised medicine, rather than one where people are afraid of their health insurers finding out about pre-existing conditions.
From a lecture by Dr. Ned Calonge, the chairman of the United States Preventive Services Task Force, “There are five things that can happen as a result of screening tests, and four of them are bad.” The problem with screening tests is that they lead to other tests / outcomes that might not help - in fact they might hurt. It can lead to falsely positive or falsely negative tests. The cure might be worse than the disease.
Not sequencing of course, but checks a whole lot of SNPs. I've been quite happy with the information you can get, and you can download all the data yourself.
Problem is, once you get the sequence, it's hard to know what to do with it.
Why are you happy with the information if you don't know what to do with it?
Your article talks about methylated bases - the basic DNA base pairs that have been modified AFTER replication. And you are correct, non of the sequencing methods (AFAIK) can determine the extent of methylation or demethylation of a given base. This is likely to be rather important although the mechanism and the level of importance has yet to be determined.
What will having your genome sequenced actually do for you, today, right now? Why should I pay $1k or even $50k for something like this?
Virtually nothing. There have been several companies that have tried to cash in on the 'personal genomics' craze (23andMe comes to mind) that actually didn't do a whole sequence, just SNP (single nucleotide polymorphisms) that purported to help you determine your risk of various diseases. Except that they found precious few diseases that had clear links to SNPs. Whole genome sequencing will be even harder to figure out.
So other than bragging rights, it does you little good. For research purposes, getting fast, accurate (and see the AC's post above concerning the Sanger Method and accuracy) and cheap sequences will be very useful. For personal use, not so much.
hell you could start up some hobby work very quickly and (relatively) cheaply since it's such a straight forward process.
They're hoping to get the cost down for a total organism sequence to around $1000. That's one hell of an expensive hobby even before you start asking yourself what you plan to do with that rather impressive amount of information. I suppose you could use it to blackmail your family and friends by turning up all sorts of paternity issues - whatever floats your boat.
Researchers, OTOH, should be very happy about the trend.
But it would be nice to, at least in theory, RTFA. Is it just me or do I have to wait until Sunday at 7:00 PM (timezone unknown) to download the MP3 and LTFA.
Or should I just whine about how bad patent trolls are without benefit of absorbing any new material? It's not like we haven't been down this road before.
"enterprises can also distribute custom iPad apps over-the-air for their users to install."
i'm sure an enterprise will love that lack of control - technically illiterate users installing apps.
If your user can't install an iPad app, then you should probably not let them near anything more complex than a toaster.
Still, it has always stricken me as peculiar that in the wintertime people spend energy to heat the kitchen up to 20-25 C, and inside it there is a little fridge working as hard as it can to bring the temperature back to exactly the same value as outside.
Not to mention that this refrigerator is typically located just next to the electric cooker...
Convenience and cheap energy. For residential buildings, the money saved generally doesn't amount to enough to support the infrastructure required to transfer and control heat. However, in larger buildings, this sort of thing is rather normal. In theory, you could make smaller units for the house that would take hot air from the refrigerator and dump it into the living room in the winter or preheat the water for the hot water heater, but the ducting involved would either be rather ugly or have to be built in to the house. Wait until heating / cooling gets really expensive, then the savings might justify the hassle.
The other big problem is that we're not talking about a lot of heat. Put your hands on the back of a modern refrigerator - it's warm, not hot. To move energy with low heat values gets harder (read bigger ducts / fans) and less worthwhile. Put your hands on the exhaust of a city sized natural gas fired thermal power plant and you've got some significant BTUs pumping out - it then becomes worth your while to do something with it.
You guys have to move to Alaska. It's a nice, comfortable 55 degrees F. And my rendering cluster (a pair of old dual xeons) is making the basement nice and comfy. The Lab is currently sleeping under the rack that the computers are on because the heat is deflected downward.
How does this hurt the brain? Isn't it just the eyestrain that gives the headache? I thought the brain itself had no pain receptors.
Mostly it hurts your eye, neck and facial muscles ( a 'tension' headache). Besides, at least for males, the brain clearly has pain receptors. Go kick some guy in the nuts and see what happens.
The battery on my MBP is built-in. I'd expect most other brands to allow you to replace the battery without resorting to screwdrivers.
Screwdrivers are scary to you or something? I pulled the back off of my new MBP - took all of 5 minutes. Now, if you're one of those relatively few people that swaps out batteries to keep working, then a new MacBook isn't your best choice. You only have a couple of hundred others. For the rest of us, replacing a used up battery every three years (and cleaning out the fans) isn't such a hardship.
1) Why would a device whose purpose is to provide electrical supply have to have firmware, or even some other-than-electrical relationship with the system.
2) Why would someone permit any communication from the 'firmw'a....
Let's see - so the user could have some idea what the battery charge was? So the user could have some idea what the 'health' of the battery is?
And notice that Charlie Miller (the hacker) could NOT figure out how to control the computer from the battery. It's possible that with more work he could, but that remains to be seen. Security is ALWAYS a tradeoff between useability. If you're so paranoid, unhook the battery, and run it off the wall wart.
And loosen the straps on the hat. The tinfoil is eating into your brain.
If it's in the "cloud", in time, it will go away. Most "streaming" services seem to have a life of about five years. Size doesn't matter; WalMart Music and Microsoft PlaysForSure both went away. Zune may be going away, too.
And if it's in the "cloud", cable companies can slowly cut off your air supply with bandwidth caps, forcing you to watch their "premium" services.
I was working at a big-name electronics store. I had a 100MB removable cartridge drive and that is about the same time that Superdrives -- 100MB drives that were backwards-compatible with 3.5" floppies -- became widely available.
Yeah, I remember those. Expensive. Unreliable. Expensive. You couldn't transfer information without someone having the same peripheral - and they never had much of a market penetration. Just wasn't a replacement for a floppy. Even if said floppy wasn't terribly reliable itself, they were cheap and ubiquitous.
I seriously doubt that unless you work in a brain trauma ward.
Like any freeway in the US? Seriously, the reason that we're progressing so rapidly with autonomous driving vehicle is that the current bar (human drivers) is so low that a Z80 with 64K RAM and two floppies could outsmart the average American driver on most days.
Also, if Apple were to have pressed the discs and boxed and shipped them, Lion's release date would have been later than today.
And life would have continued. Not to rant at you personally but it's amusing how much angst is being displayed here. I'm going to go camping for a few days and will log in when I get back to see how all of you beta testers fared.
Anybody that rushes to overwrite a perfectly good OS with a new beta release on the first day deserves either a medal or a couple extra doses of your favorite antipsychotic. You'll need it...
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Lots of problems with that. Vacuum welding of lots of things, the fact that the hydrazine that the shuttle uses as primary attitude control is not the sort of thing you want parked out next to the ISS. The fact that it would take another ten years and a billion dollars for NASA to come up with the engineering contingency plans for the thing. And others.
I do like the idea of leaving at least one in orbit. Makes no sense at all, but would be mega cool.
Oh, and just so I don't wander off into total snark ville - The FDA is really just looking for comments on things that either are used directly by a medical provider to view images or is attached to a medical device (like a glucometer). Makes perfect sense although why the FDA is so wound up about PACS (Picture Archival and Communication System - just a glorified version of a image viewer and database) is beyond me, but that's the FDA for you.
As for all of the other 'Alternative / natural / homeopathic apps - so long as they state they are not designed to diagnose or cure disease then they're fine.
No, you have got it all scrambled. Neoplastons cause subluxations. Antioneoplastons are the good guys in this let's-bash-the-FDA-and-cronies psychotic (but unmedicated) mind view.
If the 'antineplastons' are so wonderful, how come this MD PhD scientist type hasn't offered to rid some other country of the scourge of cancer? Europeans, Africans, Asians - they all get cancer and have money.
On the plus side, you can hide your own Easter eggs.
Hell, you can BE your own Easter egg.
Why not have a voluntary blood test for everyone in the country, once a year. Use the blood to screen for every known disease. If done on a massive scale it could save hundreds of billions of dollars a year just by catching various terminal illnesses in their early stages.
This would probably work better in a country with socialised medicine, rather than one where people are afraid of their health insurers finding out about pre-existing conditions.
From a lecture by Dr. Ned Calonge, the chairman of the United States Preventive Services Task Force, “There are five things that can happen as a result of screening tests, and four of them are bad.” The problem with screening tests is that they lead to other tests / outcomes that might not help - in fact they might hurt. It can lead to falsely positive or falsely negative tests. The cure might be worse than the disease.
Careful what you ask for, you just might get it.
Not sequencing of course, but checks a whole lot of SNPs. I've been quite happy with the information you can get, and you can download all the data yourself.
Problem is, once you get the sequence, it's hard to know what to do with it.
Why are you happy with the information if you don't know what to do with it?
Your article talks about methylated bases - the basic DNA base pairs that have been modified AFTER replication. And you are correct, non of the sequencing methods (AFAIK) can determine the extent of methylation or demethylation of a given base. This is likely to be rather important although the mechanism and the level of importance has yet to be determined.
What will having your genome sequenced actually do for you, today, right now? Why should I pay $1k or even $50k for something like this?
Virtually nothing. There have been several companies that have tried to cash in on the 'personal genomics' craze (23andMe comes to mind) that actually didn't do a whole sequence, just SNP (single nucleotide polymorphisms) that purported to help you determine your risk of various diseases. Except that they found precious few diseases that had clear links to SNPs. Whole genome sequencing will be even harder to figure out.
So other than bragging rights, it does you little good. For research purposes, getting fast, accurate (and see the AC's post above concerning the Sanger Method and accuracy) and cheap sequences will be very useful. For personal use, not so much.
hell you could start up some hobby work very quickly and (relatively) cheaply since it's such a straight forward process.
They're hoping to get the cost down for a total organism sequence to around $1000. That's one hell of an expensive hobby even before you start asking yourself what you plan to do with that rather impressive amount of information. I suppose you could use it to blackmail your family and friends by turning up all sorts of paternity issues - whatever floats your boat.
Researchers, OTOH, should be very happy about the trend.
Well, I finally found something resembling TFA
But it would be nice to, at least in theory, RTFA. Is it just me or do I have to wait until Sunday at 7:00 PM (timezone unknown) to download the MP3 and LTFA.
Or should I just whine about how bad patent trolls are without benefit of absorbing any new material? It's not like we haven't been down this road before.
Corrosion is a solved problem. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galvanic_anode
My boat (with several zinc anodes) would like to have a word with you. Be sure to bring some WD-40.
"enterprises can also distribute custom iPad apps over-the-air for their users to install." i'm sure an enterprise will love that lack of control - technically illiterate users installing apps.
If your user can't install an iPad app, then you should probably not let them near anything more complex than a toaster.
Still, it has always stricken me as peculiar that in the wintertime people spend energy to heat the kitchen up to 20-25 C, and inside it there is a little fridge working as hard as it can to bring the temperature back to exactly the same value as outside. Not to mention that this refrigerator is typically located just next to the electric cooker...
Convenience and cheap energy. For residential buildings, the money saved generally doesn't amount to enough to support the infrastructure required to transfer and control heat. However, in larger buildings, this sort of thing is rather normal. In theory, you could make smaller units for the house that would take hot air from the refrigerator and dump it into the living room in the winter or preheat the water for the hot water heater, but the ducting involved would either be rather ugly or have to be built in to the house. Wait until heating / cooling gets really expensive, then the savings might justify the hassle.
The other big problem is that we're not talking about a lot of heat. Put your hands on the back of a modern refrigerator - it's warm, not hot. To move energy with low heat values gets harder (read bigger ducts / fans) and less worthwhile. Put your hands on the exhaust of a city sized natural gas fired thermal power plant and you've got some significant BTUs pumping out - it then becomes worth your while to do something with it.
You guys have to move to Alaska. It's a nice, comfortable 55 degrees F. And my rendering cluster (a pair of old dual xeons) is making the basement nice and comfy. The Lab is currently sleeping under the rack that the computers are on because the heat is deflected downward.
How does this hurt the brain? Isn't it just the eyestrain that gives the headache? I thought the brain itself had no pain receptors.
Mostly it hurts your eye, neck and facial muscles ( a 'tension' headache). Besides, at least for males, the brain clearly has pain receptors. Go kick some guy in the nuts and see what happens.
The battery on my MBP is built-in. I'd expect most other brands to allow you to replace the battery without resorting to screwdrivers.
Screwdrivers are scary to you or something? I pulled the back off of my new MBP - took all of 5 minutes. Now, if you're one of those relatively few people that swaps out batteries to keep working, then a new MacBook isn't your best choice. You only have a couple of hundred others. For the rest of us, replacing a used up battery every three years (and cleaning out the fans) isn't such a hardship.
1) Why would a device whose purpose is to provide electrical supply have to have firmware, or even some other-than-electrical relationship with the system.
2) Why would someone permit any communication from the 'firmw'a....
Let's see - so the user could have some idea what the battery charge was? So the user could have some idea what the 'health' of the battery is?
And notice that Charlie Miller (the hacker) could NOT figure out how to control the computer from the battery. It's possible that with more work he could, but that remains to be seen. Security is ALWAYS a tradeoff between useability. If you're so paranoid, unhook the battery, and run it off the wall wart.
And loosen the straps on the hat. The tinfoil is eating into your brain.
Crap. Caffeine insufficiency. Old Stuff
Yeah, yeah. Old stuff. Now, for the Chiba clinics and we're all set.
If it's in the "cloud", in time, it will go away. Most "streaming" services seem to have a life of about five years. Size doesn't matter; WalMart Music and Microsoft PlaysForSure both went away. Zune may be going away, too.
And if it's in the "cloud", cable companies can slowly cut off your air supply with bandwidth caps, forcing you to watch their "premium" services.
Clouds are, by their very nature, ephemeral.
I was working at a big-name electronics store. I had a 100MB removable cartridge drive and that is about the same time that Superdrives -- 100MB drives that were backwards-compatible with 3.5" floppies -- became widely available.
Yeah, I remember those. Expensive. Unreliable. Expensive. You couldn't transfer information without someone having the same peripheral - and they never had much of a market penetration. Just wasn't a replacement for a floppy. Even if said floppy wasn't terribly reliable itself, they were cheap and ubiquitous.
I seriously doubt that unless you work in a brain trauma ward.
Like any freeway in the US? Seriously, the reason that we're progressing so rapidly with autonomous driving vehicle is that the current bar (human drivers) is so low that a Z80 with 64K RAM and two floppies could outsmart the average American driver on most days.
Also, if Apple were to have pressed the discs and boxed and shipped them, Lion's release date would have been later than today.
And life would have continued. Not to rant at you personally but it's amusing how much angst is being displayed here. I'm going to go camping for a few days and will log in when I get back to see how all of you beta testers fared.
Anybody that rushes to overwrite a perfectly good OS with a new beta release on the first day deserves either a medal or a couple extra doses of your favorite antipsychotic. You'll need it...