EDIT: Changed title to include "Show HN." Was just fooling around with the Google Charts API and wanted to share. These pie charts represent the top tags in each class of tag that news stories can be tagged with on techwatching. The charts visually show which tags dominate in their class - i.e.: as of the writing of this comment, POTUS is dominating the "People" class.
Yeah, somehow no one on HN upvoted the stories, previously posted, about it. And, for once, I am glad I didn't do my usual search before posting. Otherwise this is a tool that wouldn't have had much exposure among the HN crowd. But this is a different topic altogether. ;)
I wonder to what degree technology has played a role. The article references gang taunting etc. via the internet instead of on the street - would be interesting to know to what degree social networks, video games, etc. have had an impact on gang activities, and also the degree to which drug sales have moved off the street - i.e.: you don't need people hanging on the corner to sell drugs anymore.
large parts of the poorer urban communities didn't jump on the smartphone bandwagon until 2010. "Ballers" had Blackberries but most people were still using flip or feature phones. I remember arguing with a lot of people that the iPhone/Android was the future.
Around 2010 all of that changed. Everyone in my neighborhood in Harlem started to have smartphones. And with the rise of smartphones in poor urban neighborhoods came the rise of these same people using social media in record numbers.
The pervasiveness of social media since 2008 has been a qualitative, rather than just quantitative, change. Different things are possible when such a high percentage of people have access to the same network. Also, 6 years is not a very long time frame over which to scoff at a lack of progress, even if it were true...
I apologize for reading the word "scoff" into your comment about technology, but I think my point that the pervasiveness of social media represents another qualitative (or perhaps "fundamental", to use your terminology) change during that period stands.
I have to disagree with you on this point. I doubt Silk Road or people buying drugs online with bitcoins have affected the market for street drugs at all. Two completely different socio-economic markets.
Most who buy drugs in the inner city do not have access to bitcoin and/or Silk Road, and even if they did they would scoff at the inflated prices compared to the price on the streets.
From what I've read gangs where I live (Chicago), they don't get as involved in drug sales as one might think. It's less about drug territories and more about representing the block one grew up on. This American Life did a pretty good story about it in two episodes about a high school a couple of years ago.
It's even worse than that. Cable companies have to pay a portion of that add-on fee to the channels for their content. In this case of (not) throttling bandwidth, the ISPs are keeping all of the fees since you're not paying for the content, just access to it.
This is the 'spot' where you put the ink in your 3D atom printer.
Life had used its entire 'ANSI-code' for its own purposes, (naturally (literally)). But if we want to insert our own stuff, we need a place to put it. So these guys refactored the entire code of e. Coli to avoid one of the lesser used characters, which can then be used as an escape character for any new code you want to use. Basically, refactoring an old ASCII program (e. Coli (20 amino acids)) to allow compatibility with UTF-8 (modern chemistry (~unlimited amino acids)) by shifting all uses of one of the letters to a compatible, but not identical case. And now you can use that letter for anything you like (when designing proteins).
You get to use new amino acids in building your proteins. The current amino acids have been evolutionarily defined by being metabolically creatable, useful, etc. and are restricted in number. Some get modified after the fact, but in general, there are only a limited number of amino acids used to build proteins. (Protein = biological machine)
If you have an 'escape character' in your DNA, you can insert any amino acid you want into that protein by registering it in that empty spot. This can include introducing amino acids you created chemically in a lab. So now your new organism can start to use amino acids in its proteins that are impossible to build in nature. Creativity gets opened wide. Right-handed amino acids are the obvious choice to start with - biologically 'inert' (immune system doesn't recognize them), but functionally identical. Theoretically you could start to use non-organic atoms. New biologically orthogonal reactive groups. Or entirely new structural features.
You can now incorporate non-natural chemical moieties with atomic resolution.
In addition to the applications mentioned by toufka, one would be data storage.
There has been some work[1] done on using DNA as a medium of high-density self-replicating storage for digital data, and it would be exciting to have another couple bases to work with.
What would be exciting is if the bases had properties that made them amenable to easy read operations using non biological means. Currently it takes 1 - 3 days fort a DNA sequencer to read what is effectively a few gigabytes of data in a human DNA sequence. That is painfully slow for any practical use. However if we had DNA bases that had atomic properties that could interact with some sort of electronic device, we might be able to engineer a sequencer that is quite easy and cheap. In fact, we might even be able to design an enzyme that translates regular DNA into a synthetic form for easy sequencing (similar to how RNA polymerase turns DNA to RNA)
