Don't even get me started on the complexity of the bioinformatics that will be involved in resolving this data. All you'll need is for somebody to misplace a switch in the pipeline of tools you need to analyse data from these insanely complex high-throughput sequencing devices and you could get completely unreliable results.
Of course, that won't happen because IT professionals never make mistakes.
The difference between a pathological and a normal allele could be just one SNP - any number of cockups in experiment or analysis could misidentify this kind of difference.
I know, this kind of misdiagnosis can happen anywhere, but these companies are selling some kind of miracle new method when we're only just getting started on understanding how high-throughput sequencing works. Bad idea.
Have your own DNA sequence would be cool and everything, but it's not everything. Epigenetic changes have a massive impact on gene expression, they're not included in the sequence and they're heritable. Of course, there are lots of things you can look at in the sequence, but you could miss a lot by getting too hung up on just the sequence.
I'm always amazed that theoretical physicists can manipulate such immensely complex abstract objects in their heads and still be able to breathe and maintain bladder control. It really makes software engineering look like a piece of piss. Much respect.
I would also say that having worked with academic medics, chemists, mathematicians, computer scientists and biologists, physicists are almost always the coolest, most down to earth and least douchey scientists out there.
We're accustomed on Slashdot to saying that the general public is not aware of the issues surrounding DRM and file sharing. However, this debate seems to suggest otherwise. I know the HYS debates are often full of ranting morons but it is still an audience of non-experts. Looking at the most recommended comments there seem to be quite a few people who know what's going on.
I wasn't always a fan of Babylon 5, but you have to admire the coherency of the plot. Straczynski designed the plot for the first 4 seasons before he even started making the first. He even made forward references to future seasons in the first.
Place this in stark contrast to Lost, where it's clear that there is no long term game plan and they're just trying to keep people guessing for as long as possible. What's the point in guessing if there isn't, and never has been, an answer?
But in this case, aren't human beings violating the patent every time they reproduce, since this involves a new creation of a BRCA2 and BRCA3 gene? In fact, I guess every occurrence of mitosis is also a violation of the patent.
Can anybody explain what patenting the genes actually means? The articles aren't too clear. They're still in the public databases: BRCA1 and BRCA2. This includes the sequence, SNPs, transcript information and all the other goodies. In fact, the Ensembl home page still lists BRCA2 as an example for its search box...
I can understand they might patent technology they have developed that is associated with those genes, which seems fair. But if all this information is still available, they haven't really patented the gene itself.
A lot of technologies are being developed to reduce the CO2 emissions at source, which is useful. However, are there any industrial process that will reduce the already-emitted CO2 in the atmosphere?
That depends what you mean by "reporters". What about Guido Fawkes? HuffPo? Crooks and Liars? None of these are newspapers and yet they all contain hard hitting journalism and telling the truth to power. They link to newspapers, yes, but this is only a small portion of their source content.
The thing that bothers me with newspaper and TV news is that many stories need information from a specialist and they insist on putting a non-specialist, a journalist, between you and the person who knows what they're talking about.
In scientific stories, you always get a 3 minute story with an idiot dressed in a lab-coat dumbing down the message of a professor or medic, followed by a measly 10 second snippet with the actual expert. Of course experts won't always speak in the most media friendly way possible - so coach them! Edit the interview until it makes sense! But don't feed them through a non-comprehending cipher.
It really is reaching the stage where the best way to get the information is to find a decent blog from somebody who actually works in that field.
I'm guessing the bandwidth of wired connections will always be one step ahead of wireless. Since I regularly have to transfer multi-gigabyte files from network storage, I'll be sticking with whatever makes this process as fast as possible, thanks, even if that does disagree with the prognosis of these moronic "future trend" people.
It's a bit like delays on trains. If your train is just about due to arrive and they schedule a 15 minute delay, there is a reasonable chance that it will actually be delayed by 15 minutes. If your train is not due to leave for an hour and they put up a 15 minute delay, it will clearly be delayed by a lot more than 15 minutes. The delay will gradually increase during the next hour according to some complex non-linear formula I've never been quite able to derive.
Sometimes, the delay time is listed as "unknown". This is the Duke Nukem Forever of train delays. At this point, it's usually quicker just to walk, even if your journey is several hundred miles.
FTFA: "You won't be able to notice the vast improvement in Ubuntu's desktop experience over the past six months by browsing screenshot galleries of 9.04 or looking at new feature lists."
Aside from stupid newspaper articles, I also hate the practical jokes of April fools.
Maybe I have no sense of humour, but playing pranks or practical jokes on somebody strikes me as far more sadistic than funny. Oh look! I've completely humiliated my friend by making them look like a complete moron! How hilarious!
I suppose so. Still, like many people I send a lot of Emails. I have to weigh the time it takes me to be quite this careful against the damage that the one-bad-one-in-a-hundred does to me.
I use Thunderbird, which has an "are you sure you want to send?" confirmation by default. Since I use the ctrl-return hot key to send, I usually just blast through this message so at one stage, I switched it off.
However, I found that in the half second between pressing ctrl-return and return to confirm, my brain was actually doing some checking to make sure I should send that message.
I sent a reply to a whole message board asking for more information about a job - not a disaster, but not what I had intended. I realised almost as soon as I had hit the button, but I'd switched off the confirmation by this point. I rapidly switched it back on. Since then, I've noticed quite a few occasions on which I've hit ctrl-return and then realised I should tweak my message in some way before I send it.
In conclusion: 5 seconds may not seem like a lot, but it could make all the difference.
I thought I saw somewhere a proposal to put data centres in the basement of residential properties. You could use the convection currents and air vents to heat people's homes.
In programming, if you misspell a variable, the program usually doesn't work.
Usually? Does this mean you've found a programming language where the compiler says 'oh, he's put "conut", but he probably meant "count"' and corrects it for you?
Sometimes, you need a professional touch on these things. That costs money, just as many of the professional touches in Linux have cost money.
A few years ago, I played and really enjoyed the Freespace 2. I enjoyed it so much, I thought I would try some of the free contributed content from enthusiastic fans. I played the campaign that was generally rated as the best and it was good fun, but there was a huge gulf in quality from the professionally produced content. The amateur stuff was laden with fan-boy excitement - the mission descriptions were far too long and the in game dialog chattered on and on. This was particularly tedious when you had to replay missions and listen to it over and over again. Also, the voice acting was incredibly hammy and it was so obvious that it had been recorded in geeks bedrooms.
These guys were doing their best, but they are not writers or actors. Maybe other projects are better at recruiting these kinds of people to work for free, but I suspect the overenthusiastic geek effect is probably quite difficult to mitigate.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't even get me started on the complexity of the bioinformatics that will be involved in resolving this data. All you'll need is for somebody to misplace a switch in the pipeline of tools you need to analyse data from these insanely complex high-throughput sequencing devices and you could get completely unreliable results.
Of course, that won't happen because IT professionals never make mistakes.
The difference between a pathological and a normal allele could be just one SNP - any number of cockups in experiment or analysis could misidentify this kind of difference.
I know, this kind of misdiagnosis can happen anywhere, but these companies are selling some kind of miracle new method when we're only just getting started on understanding how high-throughput sequencing works. Bad idea.
Have your own DNA sequence would be cool and everything, but it's not everything. Epigenetic changes have a massive impact on gene expression, they're not included in the sequence and they're heritable. Of course, there are lots of things you can look at in the sequence, but you could miss a lot by getting too hung up on just the sequence.
I don't know. Molecular biology is mind bogglingly complex but it doesn't seem to instill humility in those guys.
I'm always amazed that theoretical physicists can manipulate such immensely complex abstract objects in their heads and still be able to breathe and maintain bladder control. It really makes software engineering look like a piece of piss. Much respect.
I would also say that having worked with academic medics, chemists, mathematicians, computer scientists and biologists, physicists are almost always the coolest, most down to earth and least douchey scientists out there.
We're accustomed on Slashdot to saying that the general public is not aware of the issues surrounding DRM and file sharing. However, this debate seems to suggest otherwise. I know the HYS debates are often full of ranting morons but it is still an audience of non-experts. Looking at the most recommended comments there seem to be quite a few people who know what's going on.
This is the kind of forum posting I like to see from a University professor.
*fist bump*
Quite.
I wasn't always a fan of Babylon 5, but you have to admire the coherency of the plot. Straczynski designed the plot for the first 4 seasons before he even started making the first. He even made forward references to future seasons in the first.
Place this in stark contrast to Lost, where it's clear that there is no long term game plan and they're just trying to keep people guessing for as long as possible. What's the point in guessing if there isn't, and never has been, an answer?
(I've posted this before, but still)
Yes, it is a pain.
But in this case, aren't human beings violating the patent every time they reproduce, since this involves a new creation of a BRCA2 and BRCA3 gene? In fact, I guess every occurrence of mitosis is also a violation of the patent.
Can anybody explain what patenting the genes actually means? The articles aren't too clear. They're still in the public databases: BRCA1 and BRCA2. This includes the sequence, SNPs, transcript information and all the other goodies. In fact, the Ensembl home page still lists BRCA2 as an example for its search box...
I can understand they might patent technology they have developed that is associated with those genes, which seems fair. But if all this information is still available, they haven't really patented the gene itself.
A lot of technologies are being developed to reduce the CO2 emissions at source, which is useful. However, are there any industrial process that will reduce the already-emitted CO2 in the atmosphere?
Before somebody says "a tree", we might need an alternative.
That depends what you mean by "reporters". What about Guido Fawkes? HuffPo? Crooks and Liars? None of these are newspapers and yet they all contain hard hitting journalism and telling the truth to power. They link to newspapers, yes, but this is only a small portion of their source content.
This government is actually moronic enough to make me wish the Tories were in power.
Ben Goldacre had it right.
The thing that bothers me with newspaper and TV news is that many stories need information from a specialist and they insist on putting a non-specialist, a journalist, between you and the person who knows what they're talking about.
In scientific stories, you always get a 3 minute story with an idiot dressed in a lab-coat dumbing down the message of a professor or medic, followed by a measly 10 second snippet with the actual expert. Of course experts won't always speak in the most media friendly way possible - so coach them! Edit the interview until it makes sense! But don't feed them through a non-comprehending cipher.
It really is reaching the stage where the best way to get the information is to find a decent blog from somebody who actually works in that field.
I'm guessing the bandwidth of wired connections will always be one step ahead of wireless. Since I regularly have to transfer multi-gigabyte files from network storage, I'll be sticking with whatever makes this process as fast as possible, thanks, even if that does disagree with the prognosis of these moronic "future trend" people.
It's a bit like delays on trains. If your train is just about due to arrive and they schedule a 15 minute delay, there is a reasonable chance that it will actually be delayed by 15 minutes. If your train is not due to leave for an hour and they put up a 15 minute delay, it will clearly be delayed by a lot more than 15 minutes. The delay will gradually increase during the next hour according to some complex non-linear formula I've never been quite able to derive.
Sometimes, the delay time is listed as "unknown". This is the Duke Nukem Forever of train delays. At this point, it's usually quicker just to walk, even if your journey is several hundred miles.
(for context, I live in the UK)
If you make them yourself, how will you know how to apply the directional markings?
FTFA: "You won't be able to notice the vast improvement in Ubuntu's desktop experience over the past six months by browsing screenshot galleries of 9.04 or looking at new feature lists."
Any solution that relies on people not being lazy morons is never going to work.
Aside from stupid newspaper articles, I also hate the practical jokes of April fools.
Maybe I have no sense of humour, but playing pranks or practical jokes on somebody strikes me as far more sadistic than funny. Oh look! I've completely humiliated my friend by making them look like a complete moron! How hilarious!
No lawns available today.
I suppose so. Still, like many people I send a lot of Emails. I have to weigh the time it takes me to be quite this careful against the damage that the one-bad-one-in-a-hundred does to me.
I use Thunderbird, which has an "are you sure you want to send?" confirmation by default. Since I use the ctrl-return hot key to send, I usually just blast through this message so at one stage, I switched it off.
However, I found that in the half second between pressing ctrl-return and return to confirm, my brain was actually doing some checking to make sure I should send that message.
I sent a reply to a whole message board asking for more information about a job - not a disaster, but not what I had intended. I realised almost as soon as I had hit the button, but I'd switched off the confirmation by this point. I rapidly switched it back on. Since then, I've noticed quite a few occasions on which I've hit ctrl-return and then realised I should tweak my message in some way before I send it.
In conclusion: 5 seconds may not seem like a lot, but it could make all the difference.
I thought I saw somewhere a proposal to put data centres in the basement of residential properties. You could use the convection currents and air vents to heat people's homes.
In programming, if you misspell a variable, the program usually doesn't work.
Usually? Does this mean you've found a programming language where the compiler says 'oh, he's put "conut", but he probably meant "count"' and corrects it for you?
Actually, that sounds like a bit of a nightmare. Autocorrect usually causes as many problems as it solves.
Sometimes, you need a professional touch on these things. That costs money, just as many of the professional touches in Linux have cost money.
A few years ago, I played and really enjoyed the Freespace 2. I enjoyed it so much, I thought I would try some of the free contributed content from enthusiastic fans. I played the campaign that was generally rated as the best and it was good fun, but there was a huge gulf in quality from the professionally produced content. The amateur stuff was laden with fan-boy excitement - the mission descriptions were far too long and the in game dialog chattered on and on. This was particularly tedious when you had to replay missions and listen to it over and over again. Also, the voice acting was incredibly hammy and it was so obvious that it had been recorded in geeks bedrooms.
These guys were doing their best, but they are not writers or actors. Maybe other projects are better at recruiting these kinds of people to work for free, but I suspect the overenthusiastic geek effect is probably quite difficult to mitigate.