OK - so first of all 23andme et al do not search for "abnormal genes" - they look for common polymorphisms present in human DNA sequences. These are not abnormal, simply different. Secondly, rs numbers found in association with disease are practically valueless without the underlying functional data, plus replication of the association in different populations.
To be fair, both of those companies do include a panel of custom genetic variants that have actually been found to be associated with various disorders and labs have replicated them and in some cases they've been shown to have function consequences. So it's not like they're just simply running an Illumina 500k SNP-chip with a bunch of random genetic markers on there. Plus even if they did do that, you could still potentially use that data to determine if you're carrying risk alleles when new ones are discovered later on. So while it's not a truly full genome sequence, they are still giving you some legitimately useful healthcare information. IMO, as long as they're upfront about informing people of what they're getting, I'm hesitant to brand them as snake-oil salesmen.
Actually I believe he was referring to theobromine which is the primary alkaloid in chocolate and gives it its distinctive bitter taste. You'll often see its structure on T-shirts that are captioned as "Chocolate". It has a similar chemical structure to that of caffeine. Caffeine is only found in relatively small amounts in chocolate (about 1/10 that of theobromine in most of the literature).
You're exactly right. In fact if anything, science has started moving *away* from the kind of purely computational and statistical correlations that you get through data mining. Granted they are extremely important for generating hypotheses, but journals are much less likely to accept a paper without some kind of experimental validation.
The large scale genetic association studies are a great example. There was a day that you could publish a paper solely describing a correlation between a variant in gene X and its association with disease Y. However, because of the way we do statistics in science, sooner or later you'll find a statistically significant correlation simply due to chance alone. In fact the epidemiologist John ioannidis wrote an article about this (that I believe appeared on Slashdot as well). Now you're often required to show some kind of experimental validation that there is a biological basis that verifies the statistical correlation. The scientific method is not going away anytime soon.
But Carl Sagan documentaires were *a must* when I was a kid.
Agreed. Watching his specials and NOVA were a large part of what inspired me to become a scientist. I predict that the current generation is going to grow up watching things like Mythbusters and Brainiac and lead to an massive increase in the number of people entering fields science that involve "blowing shit up".
When a doctor breaks their oath they can no longer practice medicine, what happens if a scientists breaks this oath. They can't study stuff? Well currently you're likely to get banned from getting federal grant money and blacklisted with journals, so for all practical purposes you are totally screwed unless you have a few hundred grand lying around to fund your own work.
So exactly which originalist interpretation are you thinking of? When, in the history of our country, have we granted Constitutional rights to the enemy in wartime? I don't believe we put German POWs on trial, or gave them habeas corpus. And doing so did not violate the Constitution then, and it does not violate the Constitution now.
The constitution applies to both citizens and non-citizens in US territory and as such they are both entitled to habeas corpus. The difference between these people in Guantanamo and German POWs in WWII is that these people have been specifically defined as *not* being POWs, but rather illegal enemy combatants. So either they're POWs and get Geneva convention protection or they are criminals being held in US territory in which case they get habeas corpus. The Deciderer just can't pick and chose which parts he wants to apply.
Especially when at least 2 of the 4 dissenters (Scalia and Thomas) are supposed to be Originalists that adhere to a strict interpretation of the Constitution. Apparently that goes out the window when it comes to servicing King George.
If they were not in a cold war with us, they would allow their yuan to float against all others The reason they want to peg the yuan to the dollar is financial. If the value of the dollar suddenly dropped to 1/2 the value of the yuan, then Chinese-made goods suddenly become twice as expensive to their largest market.
In addition, they would be building DEFENSES weapons, not offensive. You realize that they have a minuscule navy that makes it impossible for them to project military power outside of their region, right? It's going to be a long ass swim from China before you need to worry about Chinese military aggression in this part of the world.
There are plenty of reasons to be concerned about China, but neither of those are one of them.
A giant fanboy orgy is going to take place inside the cube. Steve Jobs will allow them all the blow him 10 seconds each.
Well that's obviously wrong. The line would be a hell of a lot longer than 60 deep for that.
Lazlo: "Looks at the facts: very high power, portable, limited firing time, unlimited range. All you'd need is a big spinning mirror and you could vaporize a human target from space."
(Mitch glances at Chris.)
Chris: "This is not good."
I think that prosecuting this case in this way is shady at best, and liable to be used as a precedent for something that people here will be up in arms about.
Welcome to the US legal system. If someone wants to nail you, there's always something they can pin on you. That's why there are vague crimes like disorderly conduct, wire fraud, and conspiracy. Remember Al Capone didn't get sent to jail for being a mobster or murder.
Actually you're not allowed to send porn to Iraq. When you send a package to a soldier stationed there, customs has a list of items that aren't allowed to be shipped into the country and will be removed from the package. Besides porn, you can't send a number of other items that are forbidden, such as pork products and alcohol. Seems a bit strange that you can buy it there though.
To be fair, most of the difference can be attributed to lifestyle factors such as poor diet and smoking/drinking. Even infant mortality is misleading as the US uses a different criteria for counting infant deaths. In many countries, an infant could be alive for several days and still be categorized as "stillborn". Many rates of disease are higher in the US because they have more effective screening programs (prostate cancer is a good example)
Won't disagree with you about that, but I doubt we'd fake this incident in order to start bombing Iraqi Ministry offices inside the Green Zone over it.
I think the tinfoil hat is cutting off circulation to your brain. If it's a South Korean ship (article doesn't specify) and an Iraqi ship, then they're both U.S. allies.
Both are relatively safe, physiologically speaking. He wasn't equating the two, he was making the distinction of heroin being safe while alcohol/tobacco are unsafe. I'd disagree and say that they are both relatively safe in low doses while toxic at higher doses.
But it also toxic to cells. Where heroin is not. So it balances out, I think. Which is fine if you are a cell, but as far as I'm aware you are not. You're most likely an organism with opioid receptors that feed into a central nervous system which shuts off when given enough morphine. Alcohol has a similar depressive effect, but while the LD50 for heroin is pretty high as far as drugs go, it's still nowhere near that of alcohol. A gram of heroin is a massive dose that would kill most people, I had twice that dose of alcohol today and then drove home.
So? Highly addictive drugs are a danger to the public. If you can afford to supply your own habit, then more power to you. The problem is that drugs like heroin and crack aren't used solely by those who can afford them. So you don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out what happens when they run out of money. Sure the price would come down if it wasn't illegal, but until the price is zero there will always be people who can't afford it and are willing to go to any length in order to obtain it.
I like how you say that heroin in moderate amounts isn't damaging to the body, but then try to draw a comparison with alcohol, which is only dangerous when used in excess. Moderate alcohol use is even been found to be beneficial. I've been on morphine and I can absolutely say that shit is extremely addictive.
Security is low on the list of features people notice, so sacrificing anything higher on that list for the sake of security will be perceived as a negative feature.
I disagree. Look at the market share that Firefox has picked up, almost exclusively because people were desperate for a browser that would protect them from sites that infected their systems with spyware and malware. If anything using Firefox is more of a pain in the ass because many website developers only beta-test their code in IE.
No, I don't think this is some kind of knee-jerk, anti-apple, rhetoric. The real problem here is that once companies start including all kinds of crap in under the guise of an "update" is that people are just going to avoid installing updates entirely. Updates need to be quick and relatively painless otherwise people just aren't going to bother. Once you start dissuading people from doing it, you're going to be increasing the number of unpatched computers out there, which is bad for everyone.
To be honest, I barely caught the word "Safari" in the update and came close clicked ok. I can guarantee you that I'll be taking a closer look at the text of future updates.
If Microsoft really cared for their customers, vendors would not need custom installers. To really give users choice and convenience, Microsoft would set up a software repository and serve up things like Safari with a good package manager. How does the Firefox update on OS X? Because last time I checked, Firefox only updates with its 3rd party updater rather than through Apple's.
Slashdot Mirror
OK - so first of all 23andme et al do not search for "abnormal genes" - they look for common polymorphisms present in human DNA sequences. These are not abnormal, simply different. Secondly, rs numbers found in association with disease are practically valueless without the underlying functional data, plus replication of the association in different populations.
To be fair, both of those companies do include a panel of custom genetic variants that have actually been found to be associated with various disorders and labs have replicated them and in some cases they've been shown to have function consequences. So it's not like they're just simply running an Illumina 500k SNP-chip with a bunch of random genetic markers on there. Plus even if they did do that, you could still potentially use that data to determine if you're carrying risk alleles when new ones are discovered later on. So while it's not a truly full genome sequence, they are still giving you some legitimately useful healthcare information. IMO, as long as they're upfront about informing people of what they're getting, I'm hesitant to brand them as snake-oil salesmen.
Good example are the t-shirts from thinkgeek
You'll notice the caffeine shirts are different.
Actually I believe he was referring to theobromine which is the primary alkaloid in chocolate and gives it its distinctive bitter taste. You'll often see its structure on T-shirts that are captioned as "Chocolate". It has a similar chemical structure to that of caffeine. Caffeine is only found in relatively small amounts in chocolate (about 1/10 that of theobromine in most of the literature).
You're exactly right. In fact if anything, science has started moving *away* from the kind of purely computational and statistical correlations that you get through data mining. Granted they are extremely important for generating hypotheses, but journals are much less likely to accept a paper without some kind of experimental validation.
The large scale genetic association studies are a great example. There was a day that you could publish a paper solely describing a correlation between a variant in gene X and its association with disease Y. However, because of the way we do statistics in science, sooner or later you'll find a statistically significant correlation simply due to chance alone. In fact the epidemiologist John ioannidis wrote an article about this (that I believe appeared on Slashdot as well). Now you're often required to show some kind of experimental validation that there is a biological basis that verifies the statistical correlation. The scientific method is not going away anytime soon.
Agreed. Watching his specials and NOVA were a large part of what inspired me to become a scientist. I predict that the current generation is going to grow up watching things like Mythbusters and Brainiac and lead to an massive increase in the number of people entering fields science that involve "blowing shit up".
Well currently you're likely to get banned from getting federal grant money and blacklisted with journals, so for all practical purposes you are totally screwed unless you have a few hundred grand lying around to fund your own work.
The constitution applies to both citizens and non-citizens in US territory and as such they are both entitled to habeas corpus. The difference between these people in Guantanamo and German POWs in WWII is that these people have been specifically defined as *not* being POWs, but rather illegal enemy combatants. So either they're POWs and get Geneva convention protection or they are criminals being held in US territory in which case they get habeas corpus. The Deciderer just can't pick and chose which parts he wants to apply.
Especially when at least 2 of the 4 dissenters (Scalia and Thomas) are supposed to be Originalists that adhere to a strict interpretation of the Constitution. Apparently that goes out the window when it comes to servicing King George.
In addition, they would be building DEFENSES weapons, not offensive. You realize that they have a minuscule navy that makes it impossible for them to project military power outside of their region, right? It's going to be a long ass swim from China before you need to worry about Chinese military aggression in this part of the world.
There are plenty of reasons to be concerned about China, but neither of those are one of them.
Try finding a Chinese made commercial airliner. Manufacturing output refers to the value of all goods manufactured in that country in US dollars.
hping2 -p 80 -a whitehouse.gov mediadefender.org
Your honor, we have indisputable evidence in our server logs that the defendant, one George W Bush, was maliciously SYN flooding our website...
Well that's obviously wrong. The line would be a hell of a lot longer than 60 deep for that.
Lazlo: "Looks at the facts: very high power, portable, limited firing time, unlimited range. All you'd need is a big spinning mirror and you could vaporize a human target from space."
(Mitch glances at Chris.)
Chris: "This is not good."
Welcome to the US legal system. If someone wants to nail you, there's always something they can pin on you. That's why there are vague crimes like disorderly conduct, wire fraud, and conspiracy. Remember Al Capone didn't get sent to jail for being a mobster or murder.
Though for some people it could be irritating to have your picture taken while you're trying to work.
Actually you're not allowed to send porn to Iraq. When you send a package to a soldier stationed there, customs has a list of items that aren't allowed to be shipped into the country and will be removed from the package. Besides porn, you can't send a number of other items that are forbidden, such as pork products and alcohol. Seems a bit strange that you can buy it there though.
To be fair, most of the difference can be attributed to lifestyle factors such as poor diet and smoking/drinking. Even infant mortality is misleading as the US uses a different criteria for counting infant deaths. In many countries, an infant could be alive for several days and still be categorized as "stillborn". Many rates of disease are higher in the US because they have more effective screening programs (prostate cancer is a good example)
Won't disagree with you about that, but I doubt we'd fake this incident in order to start bombing Iraqi Ministry offices inside the Green Zone over it.
I think the tinfoil hat is cutting off circulation to your brain. If it's a South Korean ship (article doesn't specify) and an Iraqi ship, then they're both U.S. allies.
But it also toxic to cells. Where heroin is not. So it balances out, I think. Which is fine if you are a cell, but as far as I'm aware you are not. You're most likely an organism with opioid receptors that feed into a central nervous system which shuts off when given enough morphine. Alcohol has a similar depressive effect, but while the LD50 for heroin is pretty high as far as drugs go, it's still nowhere near that of alcohol. A gram of heroin is a massive dose that would kill most people, I had twice that dose of alcohol today and then drove home.
So? Highly addictive drugs are a danger to the public. If you can afford to supply your own habit, then more power to you. The problem is that drugs like heroin and crack aren't used solely by those who can afford them. So you don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out what happens when they run out of money. Sure the price would come down if it wasn't illegal, but until the price is zero there will always be people who can't afford it and are willing to go to any length in order to obtain it.
I like how you say that heroin in moderate amounts isn't damaging to the body, but then try to draw a comparison with alcohol, which is only dangerous when used in excess. Moderate alcohol use is even been found to be beneficial. I've been on morphine and I can absolutely say that shit is extremely addictive.
I disagree. Look at the market share that Firefox has picked up, almost exclusively because people were desperate for a browser that would protect them from sites that infected their systems with spyware and malware. If anything using Firefox is more of a pain in the ass because many website developers only beta-test their code in IE.
No, I don't think this is some kind of knee-jerk, anti-apple, rhetoric. The real problem here is that once companies start including all kinds of crap in under the guise of an "update" is that people are just going to avoid installing updates entirely. Updates need to be quick and relatively painless otherwise people just aren't going to bother. Once you start dissuading people from doing it, you're going to be increasing the number of unpatched computers out there, which is bad for everyone.
To be honest, I barely caught the word "Safari" in the update and came close clicked ok. I can guarantee you that I'll be taking a closer look at the text of future updates.
How does the Firefox update on OS X? Because last time I checked, Firefox only updates with its 3rd party updater rather than through Apple's.
So you'd be cool if MS Office for OSX installed IE on your system as a hidden part of an update?