They aren't prying into documents, they are copying media files. Its quite a big difference. It's not more of an invasion of privacy than the guy at the auto shop looking under the hood to see what you are running. That's the most ridiculous thing I've heard in a while. They were paid to install iTunes. How does digging through various personal folders for image files and then copying pictures of bikini-clad women to a USB drive have anything fucking remotely related to do with "installing itunes"? Maybe you have some version of the iTunes installer that I'm missing out on.
O.K., bright boy. Build something better than S3. Open Source it, if you like. But first prove to me that your solution scales to an enterprise the size of Amazon.com. That it will be cheaper and more reliable. Then we can talk. How does the ability to perform some service well make it patentable? I could see if they came up with some novel way of making it scalable, but just being good at something doesn't make it patentable. I'd guess that someone had already combined a web interface with something like an NFS/AFS share long before S3.
I disagree. Half the people who didn't like it complain that there was too much time spent on plot development and the other half complain there wasn't enough. It had a half-way decent plot that was carried by some really kick ass action sequences and some truly humorous moments (like the "20 minutes devoted to finding the glasses in the house", the bulk of which was actually the autobots amusingly trying to hide in the backyard). Seriously, it's the Transformers, what did you expect Dostoevsky?
George Bush (Sept 30 2003):
"And if there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is. And if the person has violated law, the person will be taken care of."
Yes, they sure will...
This is utter nonsense, which I do not consider necessary to consider for answer
LOL, so you apparently know of some strain of bacteria that is capable of violating the laws of thermodynamics? If you have X amount of input energy in the form of nutrients and Y is the amount of energy consumed by the cell for life, then X-Y will equal the amount left over for other things like reproduction or in this case biosynthesis of a compound. In an organism that has extraneous cellular processes such as the ability to metabolize a wide array of input macromolecules, that Y will be larger than in an organism that has a stripped down genome, as it has to produce the enzymes to metabolize those compounds and replicate those added genes during cell division. The very reason that they even chose mycoplasma genetalium is that it is a obligate parasite and has become specialized to living in a restricted environment thereby allowing it to undergo a massive genome reduction.
Bacteria well know for the effective usage of really junk energetic resources
Which is exactly why they have genes that are unnecessary for the purposes that Venter's group is targeting it for. In fact part of the patent application describes the medium that they plan on using:
The inventors have identified 101 protein-coding genes that are non-essential for sustaining the growth of an organism, such as a bacterium, in a rich bacterial culture medium, such as SP4. Such a culture medium contains all of the salts, growth factors, nutrients etc. required for bacterial growth under laboratory conditions. A minimal set of genes required for sustaining the viability of a free-living organism under laboratory conditions is extrapolated from the identification of these non-essential genes. By a "minimal gene set" is meant the minimal set of genes whose expression allows the viability (e.g., survival, growth, replication, proliferation, etc.) of a free-living organism in a particular rich bacterial medium as discussed above. it makes more sense to me to add necessary genes to some tough badass bacteria that can it dirt and make a living on it.
I disagree. The more self-sufficient your bacterium is, the higher the likelihood of it surviving outside of the lab. Plus by that very definition it will produce less output of the target compound than a bacteria which is engineered to be a specialist.
proving that this gene is involved in that pathway does not prove that it is not involved in other pathways.
The number of pathways known (or unknown) that a given gene is involved in is irrelevant from their point of view. If they can knock out a particular gene and have the organism still grow at the same level and produce compound X, then that gene is unnecessary for their purposes.
And, again, why is it necessary to strip it down to "minimal" amount of genes?
Primarily because production of "unnecessary" genes is wasting energy. Things like RNA transcription, protein translation, and protein degradation all have real (albeit small) energy costs. When you ramp production up to a level where you are producing hydrocarbon fuels to power an economy, then those trivial energy costs become significant. You can right that off as minor, but it clearly is important otherwise there wouldn't be several groups actively trying to accomplish the same goal, though some are using other model organisms like yeast.
95% of the genome is not necessary to produce the target but are necessary to sustain the bacterial colony.
Not really. If you are designing an organism for a specific purpose then you only need a minimal set for critical life processes and for producing the target compound. Most bacteria have a wide variety of metabolic genes for utilizing various macromolecule nutrients for energy, which are largely unnecessary if you are going to be feeding it a specific nutrient broth, so you can chuck out a bunch of genes that are involved in metabolism of other compounds than what you are feeding it. You can also throw out things like genes for motility, congugation, recombination, as well. The patent was for an organism with 381 genes, so in the case of mycoplasma genetalium it obviously wasn't a huge amount as it has ~470 genes naturally. Still that's roughly 20% of the genome.
About practical implications: is not it much more practical to transform existing bacteria to produce whatever is necessary by adding required features into the genome?
Depends on what you mean by practical. If you mean easier for us to do, then yes. However, the point is to create a synthetic organism that is engineered to make a single product. So it makes more sense to strip out all of the extraneous genes/processes that are not necessary for production of that compound. As an example, in a standard bacteria with an inserted gene, you'd have 95% of energy being used for cellular processes (making structural genes, cell movement, cell signaling, etc) and 5% going to making the target compound*. Now if you strip out all of the unnecessary processes you could get down to 50% cellular processes and 50% compound production. So you can see how that would be extremely useful for commercial applications.
*Note: These are arbitrary numbers, but you get the idea
Here instead of removing one gene from the entire set (to an admittedly MUCH more complex organism), Venter will be able to control ALL the genes in his bacteria. This will greatly reduce/eliminate unwanted interactions (because the "unneeded" genes have been eliminated) allowing R&D to go much more quickly.
Exactly. You could do the same thing that Venter is doing using a virus to infect bacteria, but the real goal is to be able to strip out all the excess cellular processes that would otherwise be consuming energy. That way the bulk of your input energy (in the form of nutrients) is going almost exclusively to whatever the bacteria is engineered to do (such as make hydrocarbon fuels) rather than "wasteful" cellular processes. People are freaking out over this idea and in reality it isn't really that different from much of what is going on today in labs across the country. In fact by its very nature of having a stripped down genome, you are inherently creating a "weaker" life form that can't live on it's own in the wild.
I agree with you, but do you realistically think that it's going to go over well with Sally homemaker when little Tommy comes home from school with his homework about worshiping the Devil?
How would you feel about someone coming to your school and teaching your kids about Wicca, Scientology, Raelism? How about Satanism? If you're going to open that door and force all kids to be exposed to that, then who gets to choose which religions are appropriate? Maybe the parents who are raising their kids as Satanists don't want their kids to be exposed to that Jesus stuff. I agree with your sentiments, but I think it's more difficult to actually implement, you can't just teach the "acceptable" religions.
The major leap people seem to be making here is that these transcripts actually do something. Just because something is transcribed into RNA does not make it functional. The transcriptional machinery is surprisingly sloppy and often produces a distribution of transcripts rather than 1 particular type of a precise length. Often many of the aberrant transcripts are later recognized through a process known as non-sense mediated decay, whose role is to identify and break down abnormal RNA transcripts. So if you take a snapshot of all the transcripts in a cell at any given moment, then it's likely that you'll see a variety of these weird transcripts. The real question is do that actually do something? If you're going to look at very rare transcripts at the extreme tail of the distribution (in terms of how common they are in the entire pool of transcripts made from a single gene), then you're going to need to show some kind of function. Otherwise you could just be studying artifacts that get rapidly degraded or are just too rare to have any effect. I saw someone present something similar at a conference last fall and the guy got ripped a new a**hole.
Cancer is a huge burden on the public in terms of costs paid by medicare (read the public). In fact, direct payments made by medicare for cancer treatment is over 60 billion dollars a year. Research has led to increased ability to detect and cure cancer, which is why cancer rates have dropped recently. So it's in the best interest of the public to fund research because they not only directly benefit from new cures, but they also save money by reducing the amount of money paid by medicare for treatment.
Yes there are potential impacts of sex on the public, which is why sex *is* regulated. Don't believe me, go have anal sex with a 10 year old in Alabama or ask yourself why blood tests for STDs are required in a number of states before marriage or why there is gov't funding of sex education.
Which is actually fairly impressive, but then again you'd really only need one remote vulnerability if you are trying to compromise completely unpatched systems.
Honestly, if you are looking at value, build a desktop
Actually, building a desktop yourself really doesn't save you money anymore. That was true about 5 years ago, but now you can find really inexpensive desktop systems online (and even from major vendors) so when you add in the cost of shipping for individual parts, it works out to about the same.
Letting the market decide the course of medical progress is an idiotic concept. Corporate industry's primary obligation is to their shareholders, not the health and well-being of the public. Therefore they tend to focus on things that require limited investment and little risk that are likely to make huge returns. That automatically rules out research into rare diseases and ideas that have big risk (like stem cell research). If it wasn't for gov't funding of academic research, the state of biotech and medicine wouldn't be anywhere even close to where it is today.
Just because a disease is non-communicable doesn't make it a "private health issue" and thus unworthy of public funding. By it's very nature disease itself is a public health issue (i.e it affects the public). Cancer is one of the leading causes of death in the US population and I'm sure that those people who are diagnosed with it are glad their tax dollars are going towards researching a cure. Also note that stem cell research isn't about cloning people, one of the primary goals of stem cell research is the idea of growing entire organs/limbs from your own cells so that they are genetically matched. Breakthroughs in this field would be a huge boon to public health.
A person's skin DNA is the same as the rest of their DNA
Technically it's not. Once a stem cell starts to differentiate, you see different patterns of epigenetic changes that alter which genes are actively expressed and which are silent. It's part of the reason why you don't have eyeball proteins expressed by your feet. In general, we've found that once you start initiating a cascade where a stem cell starts differentiating into something else, it's difficult to go backwards and "undo" the changes.
It says in the advisory that javascript is used to inject the exploit. Disabling javascript, whether manually or through NoScript is obviously going to cause the demo to fail. That doesn't mean that your version of Firefox is not vulnerable though, it just means javascript is required to exploit the vulnerability.
There are a shitload of sites that host malicious code to intentionally infect vulnerable browsers. Even regular sites are occasionally hacked to host malicious code. The most recent big name one I can think of is the Miami Dolphins football team website during the last superbowl. A few years back a number of sites that produce banner advertisements were hacked, which resulted in widespread malicious banners getting hosted on tons of otherwise secure sites. I don't know of any database of malicious websites, but http://isc.sans.org/ usually has a good daily handlers report that lists widespread nastiness and other new developments.
There actually was an acknowledgment in the paper:
"We have also been stimulated by a knowledge of the general nature of the unpublished results and ideas of Dr. M.H.F. Wilkins, Dr. R.E. Franklin, and their co-workers at King's College London"
From their paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Academy:
The information reported in this section was very kindly reported to us prior to its publication by Drs Wilkins and Frankilin. We are most heavily indebted in this respect to the King's College Group, and we wish to point out that without this data the formulation of our structure would have been most unlikely, if not impossible"
She probably deserved a full authorship, but as a graduate student that is a crapshoot depending on your advisor and who is writing the paper. Plus that's not bad considering she basically told them to fsck off.
Actually most of the scientific studies on the subject tend to find that there is a fairly large heritable component to homosexuality. In particular, there have been a number of twin studies that looked at rates of homosexuality in maternal vs fraternal twins that find identical twins (who share 100%) are more likely to both be homosexual than a fraternal twin pair (who only share 50%).
Slashdot Mirror
I disagree. Half the people who didn't like it complain that there was too much time spent on plot development and the other half complain there wasn't enough. It had a half-way decent plot that was carried by some really kick ass action sequences and some truly humorous moments (like the "20 minutes devoted to finding the glasses in the house", the bulk of which was actually the autobots amusingly trying to hide in the backyard). Seriously, it's the Transformers, what did you expect Dostoevsky?
Yes, they sure will...
This is utter nonsense, which I do not consider necessary to consider for answer
LOL, so you apparently know of some strain of bacteria that is capable of violating the laws of thermodynamics? If you have X amount of input energy in the form of nutrients and Y is the amount of energy consumed by the cell for life, then X-Y will equal the amount left over for other things like reproduction or in this case biosynthesis of a compound. In an organism that has extraneous cellular processes such as the ability to metabolize a wide array of input macromolecules, that Y will be larger than in an organism that has a stripped down genome, as it has to produce the enzymes to metabolize those compounds and replicate those added genes during cell division. The very reason that they even chose mycoplasma genetalium is that it is a obligate parasite and has become specialized to living in a restricted environment thereby allowing it to undergo a massive genome reduction.
Which is exactly why they have genes that are unnecessary for the purposes that Venter's group is targeting it for. In fact part of the patent application describes the medium that they plan on using:
The inventors have identified 101 protein-coding genes that are non-essential for sustaining the growth of an organism, such as a bacterium, in a rich bacterial culture medium, such as SP4. Such a culture medium contains all of the salts, growth factors, nutrients etc. required for bacterial growth under laboratory conditions. A minimal set of genes required for sustaining the viability of a free-living organism under laboratory conditions is extrapolated from the identification of these non-essential genes. By a "minimal gene set" is meant the minimal set of genes whose expression allows the viability (e.g., survival, growth, replication, proliferation, etc.) of a free-living organism in a particular rich bacterial medium as discussed above.
it makes more sense to me to add necessary genes to some tough badass bacteria that can it dirt and make a living on it.
I disagree. The more self-sufficient your bacterium is, the higher the likelihood of it surviving outside of the lab. Plus by that very definition it will produce less output of the target compound than a bacteria which is engineered to be a specialist.
proving that this gene is involved in that pathway does not prove that it is not involved in other pathways.
The number of pathways known (or unknown) that a given gene is involved in is irrelevant from their point of view. If they can knock out a particular gene and have the organism still grow at the same level and produce compound X, then that gene is unnecessary for their purposes.
And, again, why is it necessary to strip it down to "minimal" amount of genes?
Primarily because production of "unnecessary" genes is wasting energy. Things like RNA transcription, protein translation, and protein degradation all have real (albeit small) energy costs. When you ramp production up to a level where you are producing hydrocarbon fuels to power an economy, then those trivial energy costs become significant. You can right that off as minor, but it clearly is important otherwise there wouldn't be several groups actively trying to accomplish the same goal, though some are using other model organisms like yeast.
95% of the genome is not necessary to produce the target but are necessary to sustain the bacterial colony.
Not really. If you are designing an organism for a specific purpose then you only need a minimal set for critical life processes and for producing the target compound. Most bacteria have a wide variety of metabolic genes for utilizing various macromolecule nutrients for energy, which are largely unnecessary if you are going to be feeding it a specific nutrient broth, so you can chuck out a bunch of genes that are involved in metabolism of other compounds than what you are feeding it. You can also throw out things like genes for motility, congugation, recombination, as well. The patent was for an organism with 381 genes, so in the case of mycoplasma genetalium it obviously wasn't a huge amount as it has ~470 genes naturally. Still that's roughly 20% of the genome.
About practical implications: is not it much more practical to transform existing bacteria to produce whatever is necessary by adding required features into the genome?
Depends on what you mean by practical. If you mean easier for us to do, then yes. However, the point is to create a synthetic organism that is engineered to make a single product. So it makes more sense to strip out all of the extraneous genes/processes that are not necessary for production of that compound. As an example, in a standard bacteria with an inserted gene, you'd have 95% of energy being used for cellular processes (making structural genes, cell movement, cell signaling, etc) and 5% going to making the target compound*. Now if you strip out all of the unnecessary processes you could get down to 50% cellular processes and 50% compound production. So you can see how that would be extremely useful for commercial applications.
*Note: These are arbitrary numbers, but you get the idea
Here instead of removing one gene from the entire set (to an admittedly MUCH more complex organism), Venter will be able to control ALL the genes in his bacteria. This will greatly reduce/eliminate unwanted interactions (because the "unneeded" genes have been eliminated) allowing R&D to go much more quickly.
Exactly. You could do the same thing that Venter is doing using a virus to infect bacteria, but the real goal is to be able to strip out all the excess cellular processes that would otherwise be consuming energy. That way the bulk of your input energy (in the form of nutrients) is going almost exclusively to whatever the bacteria is engineered to do (such as make hydrocarbon fuels) rather than "wasteful" cellular processes. People are freaking out over this idea and in reality it isn't really that different from much of what is going on today in labs across the country. In fact by its very nature of having a stripped down genome, you are inherently creating a "weaker" life form that can't live on it's own in the wild.
I agree with you, but do you realistically think that it's going to go over well with Sally homemaker when little Tommy comes home from school with his homework about worshiping the Devil?
How would you feel about someone coming to your school and teaching your kids about Wicca, Scientology, Raelism? How about Satanism? If you're going to open that door and force all kids to be exposed to that, then who gets to choose which religions are appropriate? Maybe the parents who are raising their kids as Satanists don't want their kids to be exposed to that Jesus stuff. I agree with your sentiments, but I think it's more difficult to actually implement, you can't just teach the "acceptable" religions.
The major leap people seem to be making here is that these transcripts actually do something. Just because something is transcribed into RNA does not make it functional. The transcriptional machinery is surprisingly sloppy and often produces a distribution of transcripts rather than 1 particular type of a precise length. Often many of the aberrant transcripts are later recognized through a process known as non-sense mediated decay, whose role is to identify and break down abnormal RNA transcripts. So if you take a snapshot of all the transcripts in a cell at any given moment, then it's likely that you'll see a variety of these weird transcripts. The real question is do that actually do something? If you're going to look at very rare transcripts at the extreme tail of the distribution (in terms of how common they are in the entire pool of transcripts made from a single gene), then you're going to need to show some kind of function. Otherwise you could just be studying artifacts that get rapidly degraded or are just too rare to have any effect. I saw someone present something similar at a conference last fall and the guy got ripped a new a**hole.
Cancer is a huge burden on the public in terms of costs paid by medicare (read the public). In fact, direct payments made by medicare for cancer treatment is over 60 billion dollars a year. Research has led to increased ability to detect and cure cancer, which is why cancer rates have dropped recently. So it's in the best interest of the public to fund research because they not only directly benefit from new cures, but they also save money by reducing the amount of money paid by medicare for treatment.
Yes there are potential impacts of sex on the public, which is why sex *is* regulated. Don't believe me, go have anal sex with a 10 year old in Alabama or ask yourself why blood tests for STDs are required in a number of states before marriage or why there is gov't funding of sex education.
Has IIS had any remotely exploitable holes since version 5?
At least one in version 6:
http://secunia.com/advisories/21006/
Which is actually fairly impressive, but then again you'd really only need one remote vulnerability if you are trying to compromise completely unpatched systems.
Honestly, if you are looking at value, build a desktop
Actually, building a desktop yourself really doesn't save you money anymore. That was true about 5 years ago, but now you can find really inexpensive desktop systems online (and even from major vendors) so when you add in the cost of shipping for individual parts, it works out to about the same.
That made less sense than your first post. You should have just cut your losses.
Letting the market decide the course of medical progress is an idiotic concept. Corporate industry's primary obligation is to their shareholders, not the health and well-being of the public. Therefore they tend to focus on things that require limited investment and little risk that are likely to make huge returns. That automatically rules out research into rare diseases and ideas that have big risk (like stem cell research). If it wasn't for gov't funding of academic research, the state of biotech and medicine wouldn't be anywhere even close to where it is today.
Just because a disease is non-communicable doesn't make it a "private health issue" and thus unworthy of public funding. By it's very nature disease itself is a public health issue (i.e it affects the public). Cancer is one of the leading causes of death in the US population and I'm sure that those people who are diagnosed with it are glad their tax dollars are going towards researching a cure. Also note that stem cell research isn't about cloning people, one of the primary goals of stem cell research is the idea of growing entire organs/limbs from your own cells so that they are genetically matched. Breakthroughs in this field would be a huge boon to public health.
A person's skin DNA is the same as the rest of their DNA
Technically it's not. Once a stem cell starts to differentiate, you see different patterns of epigenetic changes that alter which genes are actively expressed and which are silent. It's part of the reason why you don't have eyeball proteins expressed by your feet. In general, we've found that once you start initiating a cascade where a stem cell starts differentiating into something else, it's difficult to go backwards and "undo" the changes.
It says in the advisory that javascript is used to inject the exploit. Disabling javascript, whether manually or through NoScript is obviously going to cause the demo to fail. That doesn't mean that your version of Firefox is not vulnerable though, it just means javascript is required to exploit the vulnerability.
There are a shitload of sites that host malicious code to intentionally infect vulnerable browsers. Even regular sites are occasionally hacked to host malicious code. The most recent big name one I can think of is the Miami Dolphins football team website during the last superbowl. A few years back a number of sites that produce banner advertisements were hacked, which resulted in widespread malicious banners getting hosted on tons of otherwise secure sites. I don't know of any database of malicious websites, but http://isc.sans.org/ usually has a good daily handlers report that lists widespread nastiness and other new developments.
i nssiteshacked_1.html
Link to info on the Dolphins hack:
http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/02/02/HNdolph
http://www.nature.com/physics/looking-back/crick/
From their paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Academy: http://www.journals.royalsoc.ac.uk/content/h2p612
She probably deserved a full authorship, but as a graduate student that is a crapshoot depending on your advisor and who is writing the paper. Plus that's not bad considering she basically told them to fsck off.
since this isn't about SCIENCE yet - nothing has been proven
d &Cmd=ShowDetailView&TermToSearch=1553528 d &Cmd=ShowDetailView&TermToSearch=11058483
Sure about that? SCIENCE would seem to disagree:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?Db=PubMe
http://www.narth.com/docs/nothardwired.html
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?Db=PubMe
Actually most of the scientific studies on the subject tend to find that there is a fairly large heritable component to homosexuality. In particular, there have been a number of twin studies that looked at rates of homosexuality in maternal vs fraternal twins that find identical twins (who share 100%) are more likely to both be homosexual than a fraternal twin pair (who only share 50%).