Comment Re:The 3 Laws of Robotics (Score 2) 258
Which of the Ten Commandments are confusing to you?
Is this a serious question? There isn't even agreement on what the 10 commandments *are*: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
Comment Re:As a colleague of mine once said: (Score 1) 266
How about the airport? It's remarkably easy and convenient to print at a kiosk there!
Chinese Writers Sue Apple Over IP Violations 143
hackingbear writes "A group of 22 Chinese authors have filed a claim against Apple, alleging its App Store sells unlicensed copies of their books. The Writers Rights Alliance, founded by Han Han, a young popular Chinese author and the worlds' most popular blogger, who is known for his cynical criticism of the government, petitioned Apple last year to stop electronic distribution of the writers' books and had earlier persuaded Baidu, China's largest search engine, to stop publishing their material on its Baidu Library product."
Comment Re:Trade off (Score 1) 106
Environmentally-induced mutation definitely does play a large role in tumor formation--that's why smoker's get lung cancer, sunburns can lead to skin cancer, etc! There's also viruses that can play a role.
However, we also don't really know how many mutations are necessary for cancer to arise, and one of the first things to happen may be either immortalization through mechanisms including telomerase activity (or the tumor could arise in stem cells where this activity is already present) or (more often) a mutation that in turns leads to an increased mutation rate! Regardless, it's probably not that many mutations, and don't underestimate just how large a number of cells there are in the body (on the order of 10^13 - 10^14)!
However, we also don't really know how many mutations are necessary for cancer to arise, and one of the first things to happen may be either immortalization through mechanisms including telomerase activity (or the tumor could arise in stem cells where this activity is already present) or (more often) a mutation that in turns leads to an increased mutation rate! Regardless, it's probably not that many mutations, and don't underestimate just how large a number of cells there are in the body (on the order of 10^13 - 10^14)!
Comment Re:Trade off (Score 3, Informative) 106
In humans, telomeres limit cells to ~50 divisions, which is probably related to how DNA replication is only 99.9998% accurate. After that many divisions, the genome is 0.001% different from when it started, which is one error per 10,000 base pairs, or an error in 1/3 of all genes. This is in addition to the slow rate of spontaneous mutations you accumulate over your lifetime.
Where did you get your numbers? Human DNA replication (in normal cells with no damage) is 99.99999999% accurate (i.e. about 1 mutation per 10^-10 base pairs). Please do not mod parent informative for this misinformative post!
Comment Re:Topical sites cause traditional search to shrin (Score 1) 184
Sure...but on the other hand, as soon as you start typing "Gy" into imdb, Gyllenhaal comes up complete with a photo and a big-name movie (for both Jake and Maggie). And if you type in secretary, it brings up an option to go straight to the movie page--without even having to type Gyllenhaal too. So I'd say that's quite a win for imdb. You don't need to know who is in the movie, you don't need to be able to spell "Gyllenhaal"....
Comment Re:names egregious, but not relevant (Score 3, Informative) 268
To clarify, you want each of your markers to carry maximum information. SNPs are the easiest/cheapest markers to genotype, and represent positions in the genome where some chromosomes in the population have one nucleotide (e.g. G, one of the alleles) and others have a different nucleotide (e.g. T, the other allele). (I say chromosomes instead of people, since people are diploid and will have 2 copies of each chromosome. Diploid genotypes are then GG, GT, or TT for a G/T SNP). To maximize information, you want to choose a SNP where the probability of these genotypes is relatively even--maximized if the proportion of G's and T's in the population are equal, leading to 25% GG, 50% GT, and 25% TT.
While the parent is correct that 24 SNPs is sufficient in a given population, in practice it's probably hard to choose 24 SNPs that cover ALL populations in the world well (since a SNP with a high minor allele frequency in, say, Europeans, may not have a high minor allele frequency in Asians, or Indians, or Australians...
While the parent is correct that 24 SNPs is sufficient in a given population, in practice it's probably hard to choose 24 SNPs that cover ALL populations in the world well (since a SNP with a high minor allele frequency in, say, Europeans, may not have a high minor allele frequency in Asians, or Indians, or Australians...
The Perfect Way To Slice a Pizza 282
iamapizza writes "New Scientist reports on the quest of two math boffins for the perfect way to slice a pizza. It's an interesting and in-depth article; 'The problem that bothered them was this. Suppose the harried waiter cuts the pizza off-center, but with all the edge-to-edge cuts crossing at a single point, and with the same angle between adjacent cuts. The off-center cuts mean the slices will not all be the same size, so if two people take turns to take neighboring slices, will they get equal shares by the time they have gone right round the pizza — and if not, who will get more?' This is useful, of course, if you're familiar with the concept of 'sharing' a pizza."
Sequencing a Human Genome In a Week 101
blackbearnh writes "The Human Genome Project took 13 years to sequence a single human's genetic information in full. At Washington University's Genome Center, they can now do one in a week. But when you're generating that much data, just keeping track of it can become a major challenge. David Dooling is in charge of managing the massive output of the Center's herd of gene sequencing machines, and making it available to researchers inside the Center and around the world. He'll be talking about his work at OSCON, and gave O'Reilly Radar a sense of where the state of the art in genome sequencing is heading. 'Now we can run these instruments. We can generate a lot of data. We can align it to the human reference. We can detect the variance. We can determine which variance exists in one genome versus another genome. Those variances that are cancerous, specific to the cancer genome, we can annotate those and say these are in genes. ... Now the difficulty is following up on all of those and figuring out what they mean for the cancer. ... We know that they exist in the cancer genome, but which ones are drivers and which ones are passengers? ... [F]inding which ones are actually causative is becoming more and more the challenge now.'"
How Do I Put Unused Servers To Work? 302
olyar writes "I worked for an internet start-up last year and during the 'we have plenty of money' phase, a lot of server hardware was purchased. Eight months later, there is very little money, but we're still plugging along — using only a fraction of the hardware. We just cleared out a co-lo and I now have a stack of 17, 1U servers in my garage. Each of those has 2 servers, each of which is a 2-processor, dual-core box with 8 GB of RAM. Add that up and I have 136 processors and 272 GB of RAM with nothing to do. The IT guy in me thinks that's a waste of FLOPS. The wanna-be businessman in me thinks its probably a waste of money as well. So I've been brainstorming ways to put all of that power to good use. Any ideas?"
158 Pages of Microsoft's Dirty Laundry 296
KrispyRasher writes "Even internally, Microsoft couldn't agree on what the base requirements to run Vista were, but that didn't stop it from inaccurately promoting the OS as running on some hardware. 158 pages of Microsoft internal emails reveal scandalous truths about the squabbles that took place in the lead up to Vista's launch."
BBC iPlayer Bandwidth Explosion Bodes Ill For ISPs 249
penfold69 writes "Dave Tomlinson is one of the network gurus at PlusNET PLC, a Tier-2 ISP in the UK. He recently put up a blog post about the ramifications of the BBC iPlayer for the ISP industry in the UK. The post makes some very interesting reading regarding the bandwidth usage triggered by the iPlayer, and raises timely questions about the Net Neutrality debate. The Register also picked up on this story with a good review of who is going to have to pay for all this legal video streaming."
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