The real strength of OSS is the rate of evolution, not in the ground-up creation.
This is a wonderful observation, thank you. And the corellary to it is that evolution takes a long time, but you get a very viable, strong, and vibrant product from it. That's what we're seeing now on the desktop.
Seeing that interview with Rasterman recently made me realize just how far Evolution has fallen aside as a project. Windowmaker too, is less and less used, although it is still wonderful. Remember when fvwm was the standard?
Now it's all KDE and Gnome, KDE and Gnome. That's evolution. The more fit come in and take over. Within Gnome, remember gnome-mc? That fell to Nautilus. How about evolution falling to sawfish, now falling to metacity? Things are happening. It might not be overnight but it is noticable. I challenge anyone who thinks Gnome 1.0's release can match its state now.
And how about the browsers? Netscape fell to Konqueror and Opera and now Mozilla has come up from behind to compete again. Suddenly, Konqueror has to add those tabs to stay competitive. We all win, because we have the stronger products as a result.
Linux on the desktop is going to take a long time. But it'll get there. Open software degrades fairly gracefully, and the necessarily modular nature of the thing makes it easy to replace something like sawfish with metacity. People just need to be patient. With everyone screaming "Now! Now! Now!" it's easy to forget that things will get there eventually. Remember the early releases of Mozilla? How about that abysmal Gnome 1.0? Have patience, contribute a little bit (even bug reports or documentation helps) and one day the best desktop in the world will be running on *NIX.
Cool, so this is what Creature Labs is up to. I've been meaning to check up on the company ever since I read Steve Grand's book, and now I know what he's up to. For those who don't know, Grand is an AI researcher who wrote large chunks of the game Creatures, which is an AI game where you raise these animals, Tomogatchi-style, and they interact with their world.
He left to work at Creature Labs, and I guess R2 is one of their big things. With his experience, I'd imagine that R2 has very well done AI, and might even show some hint of a personality beyond simple beer-fetcher, which befits the "real" R2 that we all know and love.
If there's grant money involved, a study was obviously needed . Whether it was needed by the general public or just this researcher is another question.
I hate this troll. How many times a day do we see people posting about the so-called hypocrisy of slashdot? It's such a disgusting oversimplification that I can't tell if the people posting are really just trolling, or if they're simply short-sighted idiots who just want to hate slashdot.
Slashdot is a big and complicated community with a lot of different posters from various backgrounds, countries, and outlooks on life. Because it is not a monoculture, you get many different posts with many different opinions. Some people will ferverently boycott the RIAA and the MPAA while others don't care in the slightest and will continue to spend their entertainment dollars as usual. Many fall somewhere in the middle, concerned about what is happening but not so concerned as they are about other things.
The entertainment industry too, is a large and complex entity. Many people feel that, while they don't agree with the entertainment industry's actions in the political arena, they enjoy what the entertainment industry produces enough to overcome this distaste. It's a question of priorities, and because this is a large and relatively diverse forum, you get a variety of feelings and actions on the subject. Others simply don't care at all about the politics, so long as they are able to buy products that satisfy them.
Even the editors are not of one mind. Most of the stories against the RIAA and MPAA are posted by Michael, while most of the anime ones are posted by CmdrTaco. There is no reason why, on a site such as this, that hardly pretends to editorial professionalism (no matter how much many posters would want it) there should be one single overriding features of all stories. No, wait, I take it back. There is one overriding feature of all the stories, and it's "News for Nerds". Now, the term nerd is a fairly loose one, and as such it encompasses many people with diverse opinions. As such, we get stories posted on different subjects with differing slants. Now, any thinking person would never take this as gospel, but would instead use the differing opinions to weigh out their own viewpoint. Do I want to boycott the MPAA, or do I think their product is so good that it outweighs the politics? By asking this sort of question, we are able to make better decisions about the world that we live in. I, for one, appreciate it, and am glad that both sides are presented.
FYI, the English translation was done by Neil Gaiman of Sandman fame. When I heard he was doing it, I was surprised, since it seemed like it was very much out of his expertise.
FWIW, I didn't think the translation was so bad. Granted, I saw the dubbed version (it was the only way I could see it on the big screen) but I didn't think it was so poorly done. Nothing glared out at me, but then, I'm no expert.
there really aren't any, at least no big films that are serious and aren't Anime... well I'll be buggered!
You ignored a few that are on the list there. There's Wizards, which was bizarre and psychadelic (a lot of R. Crumb-like influence in it) and animated, but not anime. It wasn't totally serious, but it had a serious message, and had a lot of mature content in addition.
Speaking of Crumb, there's the Fritz the Cat movies (I didn't know there was more than one) on there too. I haven't seen them, but I know Crumb's work, and there's always that counterculture air. Again, not serious like Ghost in the Shell or Akira, but with some serious things going on. Also animated, but not anime.
There's also the Hobbit cartoon and the unfinished Lord of the Rings animated movie. Similar category.
Someone, please point me to the definative quality Anime so I can be proved wrong!
You forgot Akira, which is my personal gold standard for best anime feature film. Others will probably point to Mononoke or Ghost in the Shell, but Akira remains my personal favorite.
The thing about anime though, is that the highest quality work is not in feature films, but in the series made for TV. Neon Genesis Evangelion, Trigun, and Cowboy Bebop all have US versions available, and all are outstanding. I've heard excellent things about Serial Experiments: Lain as well. The feature films based off of Cowboy Bebop and Evangelion are also must-sees for fans of the series, but they aren't particularly good if you haven't watched the TV versions.
The new series Vandread is excellent as well, in a quirky and funny sort of way. Not as mature as the others, but still good. Ranma 1/2 also has its fans, although I haven't seen it myself.
Some people are pretty obsessed with Dragonball Z as well, although I personally couldn't get in to it, as it never seems to end. The other series clock in at one season apice, which means you can actually watch them to completion over a relatively short period of time. Not so with DBZ.
Basically, most of the best anime will come out in the TV series. Take it upon yourself to start renting the Evangelion DVD's, or download the episodes online to try before you buy. Eva is incredibly deep and moving and very complex, and is generally considered to be the best "difficult" anime series around, so it may be best to start you there. I've neglected to list many above, mainly due to ignorance, but those should get you started. There's a lot out there. Good luck!
I've always thought that Macross Plus would make a kick-ass live action movie, or even re-released for American audiences in the movies, would make for something that they could follow.
They already did. It's called Top Gun.
Seriously, it's obvious when you watch it, and they even advertise it on the front of the DVD as the anime version of Top Gun.
I don't know what you're going on about. I run Mozilla in KDE, and I've had antialiasing for months now, well before 1.0 hit. Debian includes it as a standard install option, and it can easily be turned on and off, and it will run with any X environment, including Gnome and Windowmaker.
Basically, if you don't have antialiasing, it's either your own fault or that of your distro.
Or perhaps it'll be another closed, DRM containing codec that can plug in to the open framework? We'll at least be able to watch things then if we want to make that choice, which is more than we can really say now.
The site talks about open-sourcing the Helix server, as well as the encoder. While the server isn't too much of a surprise, given the success of the Quicktime one, what is the encoder going to be?
You said that it won't be the Real format, which is fine, but what formats will it encode for? Windows Media? MPEG? Or is it more just a pluggable framework for codecs?
I think one of the interesting things about the rise of Microsoft and the IBM clone PC in general is that it proved that an open, extensible system is going to win out. It doesn't matter how good your closed system is, it just won't win out (witness: Mac vs DOS).
And here we are, it's 2002, and Microsoft, the company that most benefited from having the PC architecture open, is now seeking to close it. For "security". As more restrictions are added, fewer interesting things will happen on the system, and people will start to look elsewhere to get what they want and need.
It's sad that Microsoft has forgotten what got them where they are in the first place. Look for Apple to do even better once Palladium hits.
If you read the interview, it becomes apparent that Ian is a fan of dselect, so much so that he'd much rather use it than apt, or even some of the newer, nicer tools like aptitude.
I've read at least a few times that apt was never meant to be directly used by people, and that a frontend was always intended. The problem is that so many people hated dselect, that they just went and used apt instead. Ian doesn't like this, and thinks people should use tools like dselect and aptitude as their actual interface, and I'd agree with him. I personally despise using apt-get unless I have to, because having a GUI or ncurses frontend makes life a lot easier.
Thank you very much! I was actually just asking my boss this afternoon for more info on the subject, and she couldn't find the papers she had stashed somewhere on it. These will be very helpful, thank you very much. I think you just killed at least a little bit of my free time this weekend, damn you!:-) Thanks again.
Nope, but I took a class on bioterrorism and talked about it pretty extensively with a paranoid friend of mine in the same major. We all sat around and discussed, among other fun topics, ebola for weeks. Great class:-)
You're very right, biology can be more abstracted, up to a point. If someone decided to place a bunch of virulent genes on a single plasmid, or just took one from one of the bacteria that already have them, and simply put a multiple cloning site (a piece of DNA that can be cut in multiple different ways easily) in to it and sold it, there's a real big problem for everyone. Then the person using it isn't much better than a script kiddie, but yes it could certainly be abstracted in that way so that the person wouldn't have to know jack.
But no matter what they'd have to have some basics down, like how to run a gel or transfect bacteria. Not hard stuff, but they'd have to know how to do it. The more and more stuff people build up, like the antibiotic resistance example, the more abstract it can be, just like today you don't have to write to the hardware, you can use something like Perl. They'd still have to learn the equivalent of Perl to do it, which is no small task in itself, but even today there's no need to go around isolating your own restriction enzymes and such.
It is very much an engineering question, just like in software. The more complex your library is, the less you have to worry about. There's a lot of premade stuff out there that can be pieced together already. We're not really at scripting language level, but we're well beyond assembly. Things can be absracted, but only to a point. Like if you want to write your own OS, you can't really do it in Perl (or perhaps bash is a better example there, perl is an organism unto itself;-), and no matter what you're going to have to get down to some assembly at some time or another. Same thing with this. You can do some very basic things now, like make bacteria turn blue, which many high school biology classes do each year (the technology is over 25 years old!) but to do something as complex as synthesizing polio from scratch requires really knowing nuts and bolts. It's all a question of how much you want to do. Something simple? Doesn't take much knowledge. Something really tough? You'd better really know what you're doing.
The way these scientists did this was actually fairly "high level". They ordered premade genes (read: libraries or objects) from the mail and pieced them together correctly. Obviously there's a lot more to it than that, but that's the gist of it. The problem is that it still takes a lot of skill and knowhow, as well as time and energy to do this.
No matter what, you're still going to be cutting up DNA and splicing it together using enzymes.
No matter what, you've got to make sure you have enough DNA, which means either amplification by PCR or growing it up in cells and isolating it.
No matter what, you need to confirm what you've got, which takes more enzymes, gel equipment, and a good working knowledge of the sequence.
No matter what, you'd have to package it in to a virus, something that's not easy even with today's kits.
All of this can be done using "high level" stuff, kits for PCR, cloning, amplification, and isolation exist. You still need to understand what's happening, unless someone sends you a ready-to-make polio kit, you still have to know how to use the stuff. Having all of these tools lying around won't make the virus the same way having a copy of the gcc won't make you a programmer. You have to know how to use the tools.
This is very true (you're thinking of influenza by the way) but the thing about the chicken strain is that it was able to reproduce in areas other than the upper respiratory tract, where the human influenza virus is stuck in. Mixing the human genes with the chicken ones allowed the new strain to reproduce in any human cell, which would have killed scores of people.
This is a very real danger, but how does this change anything related to the technology? With the old technology, you could have easily done this by hand, rather than synthesizing from scratch, you could shuffle a bunch of coinfected influenza viruses around until you got what you wanted, essentially speeding up the natural process. You could also modify the existing virus to do this.
Just like nature did in creating the Influenza strain you're talking about.
Re:Statistics, Nature, and Suicide Genes
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The problem is that you're thinking of it like a normal, natural virus. It's not. It's really just a hunk of DNA surrounded by a protein capsule. That's what a virus is too, but the difference is that a virus can use you as a host to replicate. This DNA in a capsule can't. It simply isn't able to. It could potentially gain that ability and become Just Another Virus, but then it's just that: another virus, not really any different than the ones that are out there already. No more lethal, no more dangerous, just with a different heritage.
The scenario that you're envisioning is no different than another piece of DNA gaining the ability to reproduce. Remember, this stuff gets integrated in to your genome when it's used, so it's really about as likely to gain reproductive ability as any other random part of your genome. And in case you've never dealt with the human genome, I'll tell you this: you've got a lot of it, but I don't see you worrying that a mutant p53 gene in someone's cancer will gain reproductive ability and go around infecting people and giving them tumors all over their bodies before spreading to the next victim. This is just as likely, and even more scary.
There's A Reason Why Genes Are Conserved
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Why do you say that?
My understanding of the poliovirus is that it's protein capsule is very highly conserved. The gene for its pieces is actually one polyprotein which is cleaved after the pieces interact. The pieces of the each subunit have to fit together perfectly, and altering the genetic structure of the gene can destroy those interactions, making it impossible for the virus to assemble correctly.
So the antibodies will probably be just fine. Besides, the Salk vaccine is heat-killed virus anyways, so you could probably apply the same treatment to your mutated virus, and have an effective vaccine. Or, since you know the makeup of your synthesized original, you could mess around with its genetic structure and create a live attenuated vaccine (another type which exists for polio, and can be more effective).
Statistics, Nature, and Suicide Genes
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Are you telling me there is abosoutly no way that a cancer cell will mutate, accept the introdouced virus and create a new hybrid cell/virus that carries the deadly portion and the reproduction capability?
Nothing is guaranteed in life, especially the science of life. And yes, it is a possibility, but it's far far far less likely than creating a hybrid from a normal, wild type virus. The wild type virus already has the machinery to replicate, and thus is more likely to take the necessary cellular machinery with it.
And you know what? This has already happened. That's how viruses can replicate inside us now. They have some of the same genes, stolen from host cells long long ago.
So, you have to ask yourself this: How is what I'm doing any different than what nature itself is doing? It's not really, and in fact, it's far more controllable and less likely to happen than in nature itself. In nature, the virus has less hurdles to go through to create this sort of doomsday scenario you're thinking of. With us, it's got to go through a lot more trouble. It's not impossible, but it's really really unlikely.
You also have to realize what I mean by "suicide gene". It's not something that will randomly kill whatever cell it's expressed in. We, and many many others, are using a standard gene taken from herpes called Thymidine Kinase (Tk). Humans have a version of this gene too, but it's far more picky than the herpes one. Basically, if you use the herpes gene, you can treat with a prodrug like gancyclovir, which normal human Tk will ignore, but herpes Tk will incorporate in to DNA. This will cause the DNA to be unable to replicate, and the cell will die. Note that this can't happen without administering the drug. The provides yet another major hurdle for the virus to overcome in order to attain its "deadly capability".
Stop being so scared of what humans are creating. Nature is doing a far better job of finding ways to kill you and the rest of humanity than I or any other molecular biologist could ever hope to devise.
Do you have a reference for this? I've never heard of using these sorts of things on people and killing them.
There was one case out (in Pennsylvania, I think) where the doctor administered way way way too much virus, and the kid was already immunocompromised, and he basically died of toxic shock. Since then, I don't think anyone's done any real viral gene therapy on humans.
But if you have references for this (particularly abstracts from medical journals linked from PubMed) I'd really like to see them.
Oh, and as for killing animals with engineered viruses, I have personally seen plenty of animals that were not affected by engineered viruses that are administered. We generally have a pretty good idea as to what we've made before we go putting it in a living creature.
Re:ebola ain't no joking matter
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Ebola is scary scary stuff.
But it's also limited. Why is it that we haven't had a major outbreak all over the world, killing billions? Ebola is an RNA virus, which makes it very unstable (RNA is far less stable than DNA, and more prone to mutations). Because of this, Ebola was able to evolve in the first place in to something so deadly, due to its high mutation rate.
But Ebola never lasts too long, it comes in outbreaks, then it goes. That's because of two reasons. One is that the same instability which made it deadly also causes it to become ineffective at a quick pace. Mutations can work against these organisms too. The other reason is that it kills too quickly. It can't spread because people die before it gets a chance to move effectively. It's just too damn lethal.
Ebola is terrifying, but it's not all powerful. Any kind of pathogen has to balance infectivity with lethality, and Ebola is too far on the lethal side to be massively infective right now, thankfully.
Slashdot Mirror
Seeing that interview with Rasterman recently made me realize just how far Evolution has fallen aside as a project. Windowmaker too, is less and less used, although it is still wonderful. Remember when fvwm was the standard?
Now it's all KDE and Gnome, KDE and Gnome. That's evolution. The more fit come in and take over. Within Gnome, remember gnome-mc? That fell to Nautilus. How about evolution falling to sawfish, now falling to metacity? Things are happening. It might not be overnight but it is noticable. I challenge anyone who thinks Gnome 1.0's release can match its state now.
And how about the browsers? Netscape fell to Konqueror and Opera and now Mozilla has come up from behind to compete again. Suddenly, Konqueror has to add those tabs to stay competitive. We all win, because we have the stronger products as a result.
Linux on the desktop is going to take a long time. But it'll get there. Open software degrades fairly gracefully, and the necessarily modular nature of the thing makes it easy to replace something like sawfish with metacity. People just need to be patient. With everyone screaming "Now! Now! Now!" it's easy to forget that things will get there eventually. Remember the early releases of Mozilla? How about that abysmal Gnome 1.0? Have patience, contribute a little bit (even bug reports or documentation helps) and one day the best desktop in the world will be running on *NIX.
Cool, so this is what Creature Labs is up to. I've been meaning to check up on the company ever since I read Steve Grand's book, and now I know what he's up to. For those who don't know, Grand is an AI researcher who wrote large chunks of the game Creatures, which is an AI game where you raise these animals, Tomogatchi-style, and they interact with their world.
He left to work at Creature Labs, and I guess R2 is one of their big things. With his experience, I'd imagine that R2 has very well done AI, and might even show some hint of a personality beyond simple beer-fetcher, which befits the "real" R2 that we all know and love.
If there's grant money involved, a study was obviously needed . Whether it was needed by the general public or just this researcher is another question.
Nifty. Thanks for the clarification. My faith in Neil is restored! :-)
I hate this troll. How many times a day do we see people posting about the so-called hypocrisy of slashdot? It's such a disgusting oversimplification that I can't tell if the people posting are really just trolling, or if they're simply short-sighted idiots who just want to hate slashdot.
Slashdot is a big and complicated community with a lot of different posters from various backgrounds, countries, and outlooks on life. Because it is not a monoculture, you get many different posts with many different opinions. Some people will ferverently boycott the RIAA and the MPAA while others don't care in the slightest and will continue to spend their entertainment dollars as usual. Many fall somewhere in the middle, concerned about what is happening but not so concerned as they are about other things.
The entertainment industry too, is a large and complex entity. Many people feel that, while they don't agree with the entertainment industry's actions in the political arena, they enjoy what the entertainment industry produces enough to overcome this distaste. It's a question of priorities, and because this is a large and relatively diverse forum, you get a variety of feelings and actions on the subject. Others simply don't care at all about the politics, so long as they are able to buy products that satisfy them.
Even the editors are not of one mind. Most of the stories against the RIAA and MPAA are posted by Michael, while most of the anime ones are posted by CmdrTaco. There is no reason why, on a site such as this, that hardly pretends to editorial professionalism (no matter how much many posters would want it) there should be one single overriding features of all stories. No, wait, I take it back. There is one overriding feature of all the stories, and it's "News for Nerds". Now, the term nerd is a fairly loose one, and as such it encompasses many people with diverse opinions. As such, we get stories posted on different subjects with differing slants. Now, any thinking person would never take this as gospel, but would instead use the differing opinions to weigh out their own viewpoint. Do I want to boycott the MPAA, or do I think their product is so good that it outweighs the politics? By asking this sort of question, we are able to make better decisions about the world that we live in. I, for one, appreciate it, and am glad that both sides are presented.
FYI, the English translation was done by Neil Gaiman of Sandman fame. When I heard he was doing it, I was surprised, since it seemed like it was very much out of his expertise.
FWIW, I didn't think the translation was so bad. Granted, I saw the dubbed version (it was the only way I could see it on the big screen) but I didn't think it was so poorly done. Nothing glared out at me, but then, I'm no expert.
Speaking of Crumb, there's the Fritz the Cat movies (I didn't know there was more than one) on there too. I haven't seen them, but I know Crumb's work, and there's always that counterculture air. Again, not serious like Ghost in the Shell or Akira, but with some serious things going on. Also animated, but not anime.
There's also the Hobbit cartoon and the unfinished Lord of the Rings animated movie. Similar category.
You forgot Akira, which is my personal gold standard for best anime feature film. Others will probably point to Mononoke or Ghost in the Shell, but Akira remains my personal favorite.
The thing about anime though, is that the highest quality work is not in feature films, but in the series made for TV. Neon Genesis Evangelion, Trigun, and Cowboy Bebop all have US versions available, and all are outstanding. I've heard excellent things about Serial Experiments: Lain as well. The feature films based off of Cowboy Bebop and Evangelion are also must-sees for fans of the series, but they aren't particularly good if you haven't watched the TV versions.
The new series Vandread is excellent as well, in a quirky and funny sort of way. Not as mature as the others, but still good. Ranma 1/2 also has its fans, although I haven't seen it myself.
Some people are pretty obsessed with Dragonball Z as well, although I personally couldn't get in to it, as it never seems to end. The other series clock in at one season apice, which means you can actually watch them to completion over a relatively short period of time. Not so with DBZ.
Basically, most of the best anime will come out in the TV series. Take it upon yourself to start renting the Evangelion DVD's, or download the episodes online to try before you buy. Eva is incredibly deep and moving and very complex, and is generally considered to be the best "difficult" anime series around, so it may be best to start you there. I've neglected to list many above, mainly due to ignorance, but those should get you started. There's a lot out there. Good luck!
Seriously, it's obvious when you watch it, and they even advertise it on the front of the DVD as the anime version of Top Gun.
I'm getting that "they're going to rape and pillage it like Starship Troopers" feeling. What a waste.
I don't know what you're going on about. I run Mozilla in KDE, and I've had antialiasing for months now, well before 1.0 hit. Debian includes it as a standard install option, and it can easily be turned on and off, and it will run with any X environment, including Gnome and Windowmaker.
Basically, if you don't have antialiasing, it's either your own fault or that of your distro.
You just gave me my new Windows-side background. Thank you!
Or perhaps it'll be another closed, DRM containing codec that can plug in to the open framework? We'll at least be able to watch things then if we want to make that choice, which is more than we can really say now.
The site talks about open-sourcing the Helix server, as well as the encoder. While the server isn't too much of a surprise, given the success of the Quicktime one, what is the encoder going to be?
You said that it won't be the Real format, which is fine, but what formats will it encode for? Windows Media? MPEG? Or is it more just a pluggable framework for codecs?
I think one of the interesting things about the rise of Microsoft and the IBM clone PC in general is that it proved that an open, extensible system is going to win out. It doesn't matter how good your closed system is, it just won't win out (witness: Mac vs DOS).
And here we are, it's 2002, and Microsoft, the company that most benefited from having the PC architecture open, is now seeking to close it. For "security". As more restrictions are added, fewer interesting things will happen on the system, and people will start to look elsewhere to get what they want and need.
It's sad that Microsoft has forgotten what got them where they are in the first place. Look for Apple to do even better once Palladium hits.
If you read the interview, it becomes apparent that Ian is a fan of dselect, so much so that he'd much rather use it than apt, or even some of the newer, nicer tools like aptitude.
I've read at least a few times that apt was never meant to be directly used by people, and that a frontend was always intended. The problem is that so many people hated dselect, that they just went and used apt instead. Ian doesn't like this, and thinks people should use tools like dselect and aptitude as their actual interface, and I'd agree with him. I personally despise using apt-get unless I have to, because having a GUI or ncurses frontend makes life a lot easier.
Thank you very much! I was actually just asking my boss this afternoon for more info on the subject, and she couldn't find the papers she had stashed somewhere on it. These will be very helpful, thank you very much. I think you just killed at least a little bit of my free time this weekend, damn you! :-) Thanks again.
Nope, but I took a class on bioterrorism and talked about it pretty extensively with a paranoid friend of mine in the same major. We all sat around and discussed, among other fun topics, ebola for weeks. Great class :-)
You're very right, biology can be more abstracted, up to a point. If someone decided to place a bunch of virulent genes on a single plasmid, or just took one from one of the bacteria that already have them, and simply put a multiple cloning site (a piece of DNA that can be cut in multiple different ways easily) in to it and sold it, there's a real big problem for everyone. Then the person using it isn't much better than a script kiddie, but yes it could certainly be abstracted in that way so that the person wouldn't have to know jack.
;-), and no matter what you're going to have to get down to some assembly at some time or another. Same thing with this. You can do some very basic things now, like make bacteria turn blue, which many high school biology classes do each year (the technology is over 25 years old!) but to do something as complex as synthesizing polio from scratch requires really knowing nuts and bolts. It's all a question of how much you want to do. Something simple? Doesn't take much knowledge. Something really tough? You'd better really know what you're doing.
But no matter what they'd have to have some basics down, like how to run a gel or transfect bacteria. Not hard stuff, but they'd have to know how to do it. The more and more stuff people build up, like the antibiotic resistance example, the more abstract it can be, just like today you don't have to write to the hardware, you can use something like Perl. They'd still have to learn the equivalent of Perl to do it, which is no small task in itself, but even today there's no need to go around isolating your own restriction enzymes and such.
It is very much an engineering question, just like in software. The more complex your library is, the less you have to worry about. There's a lot of premade stuff out there that can be pieced together already. We're not really at scripting language level, but we're well beyond assembly. Things can be absracted, but only to a point. Like if you want to write your own OS, you can't really do it in Perl (or perhaps bash is a better example there, perl is an organism unto itself
The way these scientists did this was actually fairly "high level". They ordered premade genes (read: libraries or objects) from the mail and pieced them together correctly. Obviously there's a lot more to it than that, but that's the gist of it. The problem is that it still takes a lot of skill and knowhow, as well as time and energy to do this.
No matter what, you're still going to be cutting up DNA and splicing it together using enzymes.
No matter what, you've got to make sure you have enough DNA, which means either amplification by PCR or growing it up in cells and isolating it.
No matter what, you need to confirm what you've got, which takes more enzymes, gel equipment, and a good working knowledge of the sequence.
No matter what, you'd have to package it in to a virus, something that's not easy even with today's kits.
All of this can be done using "high level" stuff, kits for PCR, cloning, amplification, and isolation exist. You still need to understand what's happening, unless someone sends you a ready-to-make polio kit, you still have to know how to use the stuff. Having all of these tools lying around won't make the virus the same way having a copy of the gcc won't make you a programmer. You have to know how to use the tools.
This is very true (you're thinking of influenza by the way) but the thing about the chicken strain is that it was able to reproduce in areas other than the upper respiratory tract, where the human influenza virus is stuck in. Mixing the human genes with the chicken ones allowed the new strain to reproduce in any human cell, which would have killed scores of people.
This is a very real danger, but how does this change anything related to the technology? With the old technology, you could have easily done this by hand, rather than synthesizing from scratch, you could shuffle a bunch of coinfected influenza viruses around until you got what you wanted, essentially speeding up the natural process. You could also modify the existing virus to do this.
Just like nature did in creating the Influenza strain you're talking about.
The problem is that you're thinking of it like a normal, natural virus. It's not. It's really just a hunk of DNA surrounded by a protein capsule. That's what a virus is too, but the difference is that a virus can use you as a host to replicate. This DNA in a capsule can't. It simply isn't able to. It could potentially gain that ability and become Just Another Virus, but then it's just that: another virus, not really any different than the ones that are out there already. No more lethal, no more dangerous, just with a different heritage.
The scenario that you're envisioning is no different than another piece of DNA gaining the ability to reproduce. Remember, this stuff gets integrated in to your genome when it's used, so it's really about as likely to gain reproductive ability as any other random part of your genome. And in case you've never dealt with the human genome, I'll tell you this: you've got a lot of it, but I don't see you worrying that a mutant p53 gene in someone's cancer will gain reproductive ability and go around infecting people and giving them tumors all over their bodies before spreading to the next victim. This is just as likely, and even more scary.
Why do you say that?
My understanding of the poliovirus is that it's protein capsule is very highly conserved. The gene for its pieces is actually one polyprotein which is cleaved after the pieces interact. The pieces of the each subunit have to fit together perfectly, and altering the genetic structure of the gene can destroy those interactions, making it impossible for the virus to assemble correctly.
So the antibodies will probably be just fine. Besides, the Salk vaccine is heat-killed virus anyways, so you could probably apply the same treatment to your mutated virus, and have an effective vaccine. Or, since you know the makeup of your synthesized original, you could mess around with its genetic structure and create a live attenuated vaccine (another type which exists for polio, and can be more effective).
And you know what? This has already happened. That's how viruses can replicate inside us now. They have some of the same genes, stolen from host cells long long ago.
So, you have to ask yourself this: How is what I'm doing any different than what nature itself is doing? It's not really, and in fact, it's far more controllable and less likely to happen than in nature itself. In nature, the virus has less hurdles to go through to create this sort of doomsday scenario you're thinking of. With us, it's got to go through a lot more trouble. It's not impossible, but it's really really unlikely.
You also have to realize what I mean by "suicide gene". It's not something that will randomly kill whatever cell it's expressed in. We, and many many others, are using a standard gene taken from herpes called Thymidine Kinase (Tk). Humans have a version of this gene too, but it's far more picky than the herpes one. Basically, if you use the herpes gene, you can treat with a prodrug like gancyclovir, which normal human Tk will ignore, but herpes Tk will incorporate in to DNA. This will cause the DNA to be unable to replicate, and the cell will die. Note that this can't happen without administering the drug. The provides yet another major hurdle for the virus to overcome in order to attain its "deadly capability".
Stop being so scared of what humans are creating. Nature is doing a far better job of finding ways to kill you and the rest of humanity than I or any other molecular biologist could ever hope to devise.
Do you have a reference for this? I've never heard of using these sorts of things on people and killing them.
There was one case out (in Pennsylvania, I think) where the doctor administered way way way too much virus, and the kid was already immunocompromised, and he basically died of toxic shock. Since then, I don't think anyone's done any real viral gene therapy on humans.
But if you have references for this (particularly abstracts from medical journals linked from PubMed) I'd really like to see them.
Oh, and as for killing animals with engineered viruses, I have personally seen plenty of animals that were not affected by engineered viruses that are administered. We generally have a pretty good idea as to what we've made before we go putting it in a living creature.
Ebola is scary scary stuff.
But it's also limited. Why is it that we haven't had a major outbreak all over the world, killing billions? Ebola is an RNA virus, which makes it very unstable (RNA is far less stable than DNA, and more prone to mutations). Because of this, Ebola was able to evolve in the first place in to something so deadly, due to its high mutation rate.
But Ebola never lasts too long, it comes in outbreaks, then it goes. That's because of two reasons. One is that the same instability which made it deadly also causes it to become ineffective at a quick pace. Mutations can work against these organisms too. The other reason is that it kills too quickly. It can't spread because people die before it gets a chance to move effectively. It's just too damn lethal.
Ebola is terrifying, but it's not all powerful. Any kind of pathogen has to balance infectivity with lethality, and Ebola is too far on the lethal side to be massively infective right now, thankfully.