I agree with you. New threats have emerged in recent years, like the use of virtualization in 'undetectable' Blue-pill Rootkits and attacks against drivers. The days of standard buffer overflows are waning as operating systems incorporate stack-protection measure like w^x and canaries. As a result hackers have to evolve and find new paradigms for exploiting systems...it's Darwinian evolution at its finest.
They're using the Illumina 550K HapMap chip along with an additional 30,000 targeted SNPs. So the vast majority of the SNPs (the Illumina chip) are selected more for even coverage and for frequency (HapMap only uses SNPs with minor allele frequencies greater than %5). So these are not likely to tell you anything informative at this point. The additional 30,000 targeted SNPs are ones that have a known causative role in various diseases or phenotypes such as lactose-intolerance and ear-wax type (seriously).
IMO, I would hold out. The genotyping chips are growing in a Moore's law-ish fashion and Illumina is already selling a 1M chip. It won't be that long until they have genotyping chips which cover virtually all SNPs. Having your whole genome sequenced is a bit overkill because the vast majority of it isn't variable from person-to-person. You really only need to know what's different.
Yes I realize there is a OSX version of MS Office. There has also been consistent threats by MS to not release versions for OSX and there have also been plenty of complaints that the OSX version is buggy and doesn't run as well. Plus how many people avoids becoming switchers because you can't run games? When did they release a Mac version of Halo? What about Halflife?
"I think it may be a sign
of future addition of a Win32 subsystem to OS X."
And that's coming from the WINE guys. To be honest, I'm not a Windows guy so I don't know that much about the ins and outs of the licensing, but I don't think it's that absurd if the WINE people are legitimately suspicious that they're adding some form of WIN32 capability. Maybe you can enlighten me on why that would be impossible for Apple to do, but WINE can get away with it?
Interesting. One of the major downsides to using OSX is that there isn't as much software available for it. If OSX were able to run windows executables natively (think Microsoft Office and games) that would be a major coup for Apple. Plus you wouldn't need to sit around hoping that WINE decides to support that application.
Awesome! I was wondering how Adobe was going to make Acrobat Reader even more of a bloated monstrosity than it already is. What a better way to expand its memory footprint than to integrate some kind of ad management function. I hope they use Flash ads for this. I can smell the sweet aroma of burning RAM already!
How come they don't address the issue that those who were going to commit violence anyway are going to gravitate towards violent games and media?
In the original research they took prior acts of aggression into account. So they should theoretically be able to see if the already aggressive kids migrated towards violent games rather than some kind of true causality. I can't remember if they actually measured this somehow or if it was self-reported. If it's the latter, then their methods may be suspect. Frankly I don't buy it either, I anything, I find violent games like shooters to be a good outlet for stress.
I think much of that is based on carbon dating of prehistoric settlements found in various parts of North America. Some of the carbon dates appear to predate the estimated earliest migrations across the Bering strait land bridge. AFAIK, there is significant controversy as to whether the dates are correct.
If an earlier group of people were wiped out, the only genetic
signatures you'd find for them would be in fossils, right?
If they exterminated the entire population, then yes. However, you often see examples where only the males were killed and the women were "appropriated". In that case you'd expect to see sudden introduction of new variants into those populations.
There is no point in creating more stem cell lines
There are a ton of reasons to create new lines. First the technology used to create all of those lines relied on mouse "feeder cells" which the stem cells grew on. This resulted in widespread contamination of these cells with mouse antigens which not only makes them poor models of how natural stem cells function but also means you can't ever transplant them to humans. Second, growing cells in culture almost always eventually causes them to undergo genetic changes and chromosomal abnormalities that make them akin to cancer (by growing in culture you are by definition selecting for cells that grow the fastest and have the least ability to respond to overgrowing conditions). So you can't just grow them forever, though by nature they are less affected by this than other cell types (ie primary cell lines). The fact that there are now many more ES cell lines created by foreign research is clear that there is obviously a point to creating new lines.
If it did set us back 5 years, then why wasn't this discovery made by Kyoto University and the University of France?
This is not embryonic stem cell research. Blocking ES cell research would have zero effect on their ability to do this research. The reason the US is behind in embryonic stem cell research is because the people who have been working on it are leaving the US and foreigners who would normally come to the US are going elsewhere. Granted, places like Harvard and the state of CA have created gov't funding-free dedicated facilities to work on ES research but AFAIK, the CA money has been held up by court battles. So the only place you could even do embryonic research is at Harvard. To get US embryonic stem cell research back up to the point that other countries like Korea are at would take at least several years.
That's what I was wondering. If you knew that salts weren't being used on the hashes, then a bruteforce tool like John would have found an alphabet-only password trivially. If he would have googled "password cracking", he would have been done a hell of a lot faster than try to code his own tool for doing a dictionary attack.
Bush was the first president in history to authorize funding of stem cell research.
This is really a questionable statement. People had been getting grant money to do embryonic stem research well before Bush became president. He became the first to create a specific category of NIH funding towards stem cell research, but that was with the major caveat that you could only use existing stem cell lines which in effect froze embryonic stem cell research in the US and set it back 5 years. It's akin to setting aside NSF funds for space exploration research but then saying you can only use Legos to do it.
You're also heavily manipulating them and we have no idea right now what that means. In fact we barely understand the processes by which embryonic stem cells differentiate in the first place and we have almost no idea how this process they developed works exactly. So taking a skin cell and manipulating it into becoming a totipotent stem cell and and then manipulating further to become the type of tissue we want to grow is a significant deviation from the natural course of tissue development and it remains to be seen if this will function the same way. It is very cool stuff and it loads of potential, but this is still hugely preliminary and remains unclear whether infecting cells with a virus driving the expression of multiple regulatory genes is safe.
Awesome, so now we can go back to incinerating *all* of them without anyone from the the religious right giving a crap. Thank heavens they aren't being used for anything useful...sigh.
He's also the same 'S' in the FMS attack that first cracked the WEP encryption protocol. Like Schneier, I'd trust his opinion until it's proven otherwise.
I believe most of the BRCA tests are done by full sequencing because there are lots of different BRCA1 mutations, so you can't just pick a handful of previously known variants like the deCode project. The BRCA genes themselves are also a real pain because they are relatively large and they are composed of lots of small exons (segments), which makes it even more technically cumbersome.
Yeah, this is actually a significant issue in the genetics field. Depending on the population, you can have upwards of 10% non-paternity, which can really screw things up when you are trying to trace the inheritance of disease-causing mutations as they are passed through a family. With all the HIPAA regulations you could obviously never disclose any of that, but we had a medical student once take it on themselves to call a family and basically say "hey we did these genetic tests and they aren't coming out correctly, are you sure that so-and-so is the father?". I'm sure it was a quiet dinner that night.
"A" nuke plant? You're the one whose dreams glow in the dark.
It takes the same amount of time to build 1,2,10 or 100. You realize there are more than one set of civil engineers who can build reactors at the same time right?
Solar is already close enough to be an alternative
No it's not. There are still efficiency problems. There are still problems with cost. There are still significant issues with being able to scale it to the point where is could replace fossil fuels or nuclear power.
You could get a nuke plant built and operational in 10 years. If you think you're going to be able to drop the same amount into solar panel research and not only get it efficient and cost effective enough to be a reasonable alternative energy source *and* get it deployed in the same amount of time you are dreaming.
No, but it doesn't just happen overnight regardless of how much money you throw at the problem. Fully funding research definitely accelerates the rate of progress, but there are still significant technical hurdles that may or may not be solvable any time soon (like fusion or solar panel efficiency). It'd be great if they were the answer, but you can't *depend* on those things for the short term. If we continue to be dependent on oil and natural gas we are going to be in for a world of hurt in the near future. Things like nuclear and corn-based ethanol are good ways to wean ourselves off fossil fuels until a better solution can be found.
I agree it's a good idea to fund alternative energy research, but sitting around in the mean time waiting for researchers to innovate our way out of a looming energy crisis without anything to get us through the next 30 years is a dangerous plan. I'd rather that stop-gap be something other than coal.
Oh I agree, it's completely ridiculous and would obviously never happen. In fact, I believe he even offered to be George Bush's personal Islamic "mentor". Close your eyes and imagine that one for a second or two...
With coal plants they just burning it and letting the waste go out the stack. So you're likely breathing stuff like mercury, lead and radioisotopes all the time. I'd rather we figure out a place to put it than just burn it and pretend we aren't putting tons of hazardous compounds in the air for our families to breathe.
Security is an interesting niche in that most small to medium size businesses are large enough that they need the skills of someone knowledgeable in computer/network security but yet it's not such a necessity that they require dedicated staff to handle it. Hence you hire a outside consultant to handling things like auditing, designing build docs, incident handling. A few years ago being a security consultant meant anything from a professional with an advanced degree and certs to some ex-script kiddie. In the last few years there has been a shift and a degree is starting to become a necessity and prior security-related work has become a prerequisite for certain certifications. A number of universities are now even offering security-related graduate degrees as well. FWIW, I'm sure most bill a hell of lot more per hour than your friend.
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I agree with you. New threats have emerged in recent years, like the use of virtualization in 'undetectable' Blue-pill Rootkits and attacks against drivers. The days of standard buffer overflows are waning as operating systems incorporate stack-protection measure like w^x and canaries. As a result hackers have to evolve and find new paradigms for exploiting systems...it's Darwinian evolution at its finest.
They're using the Illumina 550K HapMap chip along with an additional 30,000 targeted SNPs. So the vast majority of the SNPs (the Illumina chip) are selected more for even coverage and for frequency (HapMap only uses SNPs with minor allele frequencies greater than %5). So these are not likely to tell you anything informative at this point. The additional 30,000 targeted SNPs are ones that have a known causative role in various diseases or phenotypes such as lactose-intolerance and ear-wax type (seriously).
IMO, I would hold out. The genotyping chips are growing in a Moore's law-ish fashion and Illumina is already selling a 1M chip. It won't be that long until they have genotyping chips which cover virtually all SNPs. Having your whole genome sequenced is a bit overkill because the vast majority of it isn't variable from person-to-person. You really only need to know what's different.
Yes I realize there is a OSX version of MS Office. There has also been consistent threats by MS to not release versions for OSX and there have also been plenty of complaints that the OSX version is buggy and doesn't run as well. Plus how many people avoids becoming switchers because you can't run games? When did they release a Mac version of Halo? What about Halflife?
Interesting. One of the major downsides to using OSX is that there isn't as much software available for it. If OSX were able to run windows executables natively (think Microsoft Office and games) that would be a major coup for Apple. Plus you wouldn't need to sit around hoping that WINE decides to support that application.
Awesome! I was wondering how Adobe was going to make Acrobat Reader even more of a bloated monstrosity than it already is. What a better way to expand its memory footprint than to integrate some kind of ad management function. I hope they use Flash ads for this. I can smell the sweet aroma of burning RAM already!
Funny, they're busy blaming the democrats for the war this week.
If they exterminated the entire population, then yes. However, you often see examples where only the males were killed and the women were "appropriated". In that case you'd expect to see sudden introduction of new variants into those populations.
Speak for yourself. My ancestors are all pure-blooded Pangaeans.
There is no point in creating more stem cell lines
There are a ton of reasons to create new lines. First the technology used to create all of those lines relied on mouse "feeder cells" which the stem cells grew on. This resulted in widespread contamination of these cells with mouse antigens which not only makes them poor models of how natural stem cells function but also means you can't ever transplant them to humans. Second, growing cells in culture almost always eventually causes them to undergo genetic changes and chromosomal abnormalities that make them akin to cancer (by growing in culture you are by definition selecting for cells that grow the fastest and have the least ability to respond to overgrowing conditions). So you can't just grow them forever, though by nature they are less affected by this than other cell types (ie primary cell lines). The fact that there are now many more ES cell lines created by foreign research is clear that there is obviously a point to creating new lines.
If it did set us back 5 years, then why wasn't this discovery made by Kyoto University and the University of France?
This is not embryonic stem cell research. Blocking ES cell research would have zero effect on their ability to do this research. The reason the US is behind in embryonic stem cell research is because the people who have been working on it are leaving the US and foreigners who would normally come to the US are going elsewhere. Granted, places like Harvard and the state of CA have created gov't funding-free dedicated facilities to work on ES research but AFAIK, the CA money has been held up by court battles. So the only place you could even do embryonic research is at Harvard. To get US embryonic stem cell research back up to the point that other countries like Korea are at would take at least several years.
That's what I was wondering. If you knew that salts weren't being used on the hashes, then a bruteforce tool like John would have found an alphabet-only password trivially. If he would have googled "password cracking", he would have been done a hell of a lot faster than try to code his own tool for doing a dictionary attack.
Bush was the first president in history to authorize funding of stem cell research.
This is really a questionable statement. People had been getting grant money to do embryonic stem research well before Bush became president. He became the first to create a specific category of NIH funding towards stem cell research, but that was with the major caveat that you could only use existing stem cell lines which in effect froze embryonic stem cell research in the US and set it back 5 years. It's akin to setting aside NSF funds for space exploration research but then saying you can only use Legos to do it.
You're also heavily manipulating them and we have no idea right now what that means. In fact we barely understand the processes by which embryonic stem cells differentiate in the first place and we have almost no idea how this process they developed works exactly. So taking a skin cell and manipulating it into becoming a totipotent stem cell and and then manipulating further to become the type of tissue we want to grow is a significant deviation from the natural course of tissue development and it remains to be seen if this will function the same way. It is very cool stuff and it loads of potential, but this is still hugely preliminary and remains unclear whether infecting cells with a virus driving the expression of multiple regulatory genes is safe.
Awesome, so now we can go back to incinerating *all* of them without anyone from the the religious right giving a crap. Thank heavens they aren't being used for anything useful...sigh.
I believe most of the BRCA tests are done by full sequencing because there are lots of different BRCA1 mutations, so you can't just pick a handful of previously known variants like the deCode project. The BRCA genes themselves are also a real pain because they are relatively large and they are composed of lots of small exons (segments), which makes it even more technically cumbersome.
Yeah, this is actually a significant issue in the genetics field. Depending on the population, you can have upwards of 10% non-paternity, which can really screw things up when you are trying to trace the inheritance of disease-causing mutations as they are passed through a family. With all the HIPAA regulations you could obviously never disclose any of that, but we had a medical student once take it on themselves to call a family and basically say "hey we did these genetic tests and they aren't coming out correctly, are you sure that so-and-so is the father?". I'm sure it was a quiet dinner that night.
No it's not. There are still efficiency problems. There are still problems with cost. There are still significant issues with being able to scale it to the point where is could replace fossil fuels or nuclear power.
You could get a nuke plant built and operational in 10 years. If you think you're going to be able to drop the same amount into solar panel research and not only get it efficient and cost effective enough to be a reasonable alternative energy source *and* get it deployed in the same amount of time you are dreaming.
I agree it's a good idea to fund alternative energy research, but sitting around in the mean time waiting for researchers to innovate our way out of a looming energy crisis without anything to get us through the next 30 years is a dangerous plan. I'd rather that stop-gap be something other than coal.
Oh I agree, it's completely ridiculous and would obviously never happen. In fact, I believe he even offered to be George Bush's personal Islamic "mentor". Close your eyes and imagine that one for a second or two...
With coal plants they just burning it and letting the waste go out the stack. So you're likely breathing stuff like mercury, lead and radioisotopes all the time. I'd rather we figure out a place to put it than just burn it and pretend we aren't putting tons of hazardous compounds in the air for our families to breathe.
Security is an interesting niche in that most small to medium size businesses are large enough that they need the skills of someone knowledgeable in computer/network security but yet it's not such a necessity that they require dedicated staff to handle it. Hence you hire a outside consultant to handling things like auditing, designing build docs, incident handling. A few years ago being a security consultant meant anything from a professional with an advanced degree and certs to some ex-script kiddie. In the last few years there has been a shift and a degree is starting to become a necessity and prior security-related work has become a prerequisite for certain certifications. A number of universities are now even offering security-related graduate degrees as well. FWIW, I'm sure most bill a hell of lot more per hour than your friend.