By increasing manufacturing efficiency, lowering prices for everyone (including products that aren't produced with automation by increasing the available labor pool for other industries). If you care about giving people jobs more than you care about making products efficiently, why not just have everyone build a giant brick pyramid in the middle of Nebraska. Oh, and make sure they do it by hand, wouldn't want any pesky earth moving equipment costing people their jobs.
Keep in mind, his total earnings for the year were $14 million. At a company where, according to the summary, $300 is an average month's salary. Not to take away from what he did, giving up $3,000,000 is still an amazing thing to do, but it's gotta be easier when you bring in $14 million a year than it is otherwise.
A) Infecting reproductive cells isn't quite the same as infecting muscle cells. B) I doubt they are infecting a statistically significant number of cells in the person's body, so in the unlikely event that the virus can also infect reproductive cells it's still statistically unlikely to happen. C) They are repairing a faulty human gene using the correct version of that human gene, as opposed to taking a gene from one species and inserting it into another D) Only the people who elect to take part in the treatment are affected, as opposed to gene tailored crops which will find their way into your food supply no matter how hard you try
Hell, I'm not even against modded food crops (I am against the way companies like Monsanto have prosecuted people who, by some arguments, were the ones being wronged) and even I call your argument BS.
Yep, lets ignore the millions of dollars spent on prevention and just focus on the fact that nothing bad happened. That's like if they upgraded the levies 2 months before Katrina and then flooding didn't happen and everyone said "what a waste of money those levies were!".
Oh for crying out loud. Stuxnet managed to damage equipment and all but shut down a nuclear weapons research program, and that was attacking secured PCs that were on a closed network. Do you have any idea how poor security is at your communities local infrastructure? If a single virus, by all accounts written by no more than a half dozen people over the course of a year, can do significant damage to a secured computer network, why is it ridiculous to imagine that a foreign nation could shut down water treatment plants at dozens of places in the US? Please explain, what exactly is the difference between programming a centrifuge to spin at a rate outside it's safety margin and programming a rail switching station to reroute trains randomly?
I used to think the Golden Girls troll was just annoying, but the fact that every single time he does it someone is compelled to correct the lyrics is actually starting to make me laugh. Seriously guys, we know it's not cosmonaut. We know because there have been literally dozens of Slashdot commentators who jump in and correct him, sometimes, as in this case, multiple people in a single thread. The troll isn't in posting the Golden Girls song, the troll is in getting a word wrong and making people react, stop feeding him!
The problem is that the general steps are easily duplicated, once someone has determined that a disease or risk is correlated with a gene it's pretty easy for to make a test that takes advantage of that information. So you either need to patent gene sequencing in the general case, which is a genie that is already well out of the bottle thankfully, or you need to be able to patent using that gene to predict an outcome. It is the test that is being patented, or at least the correlation. The problem is twofold: one, the patent hampers other research groups looking into the gene and two, the patents just plain last too long. I don't see any problem with giving them an exclusive license to sell a test for a correlation they discovered so long as they are not allowed to prevent third party research and their monopoly lasts a reasonable amount of time (5 years after the test is FDA approved or 10 years after the patent is filed seems more reasonable than the current numbers to me).
If the cops can tail you without a license, then why shouldn't they be able to track you with GPS. And if they can track you with GPS, why shouldn't they be able to track everyone? Sometimes the scale of something matters. Being able to recognize me when you see me on the street or on a facebook post is a little different from being able to find every single publicly available picture that I've ever been in.
I'm not sure there can be one. The concern that is being raise is the shear number of cameras in public spaces, combined with accurate location and direction info, combined with facial recognition. I could imagine a world where, if enough people had their device set to 'upload and share everything I see' you could track someone from the moment they left their house in the morning until they moment they arrived home at night. All using publicly available images taken from public property but the general public.
As others have pointed out, bigger brains might allow a species to spread over a wider, more diverse area, increasing survival chances. Keep in mind, the asteroid might have killed the dinosaurs, but it took hundreds of thousands of years for them to all die out, which is obviously plenty of time for intelligent problem solving to be a useful survival skill. Global scale events aren't generally things that happen quickly, a geological eye blink yes but that's still an awfully long time.
Facebook's mobile app is mediocre at best. If you believe even half the hype, that will be enough to seriously hurt them in the long run, especially considering they've admitted it themselves that they don't know how to do mobile well.
Android is the only market that matters as far as their leverage goes. Everyone on android has gmail, and everyone on gmail has Google+. My family suddenly realized that everyone had a video chat app installed on their phones, imagine their shock! But how to organize it so the whole family can be on together? Oh wait, Google+ supports events now. And sharing pictures and video is about 2 taps on the screen? Oh, but my friends don't want to see yet another picture of my daughter doing something adorable, luckily it's about 2 more screen presses to only share it with my family then. The Google+ app has a remarkable amount of functionality, Google has been putting a lot of effort into getting it right because they know that mobile is where Facebook stumbles.
Color is admittedly a problem, but I would have thought that the brain would learn to adjust things for the positioning. At least, your brain did it once (unless every single eyeball has it's neurons laid out in exactly the same positions, which seems unlikely) and there are lots of things that your brain can take care of before it hits your stream of consciousness. I would think it's possible that ignoring the problem and letting the brain do it's thing might produce good results.
I don't understand this. If I go to Hertz, rent a car, and plow through a playground, I'm liable. Hertz tell you so, repeatedly, when you get the car and they try to sell you insurance. Why should it be any different for an individual? I can see if there's a maintenance or other issue with the car. But if the driver it is on them and their insurance (either through the rental company or their own private insurance) to cover the damages.
95% at a pressure of.6 kilo-pascals. The ratio is fine, drop some plants down and let them do their thing, eventually you'll have O2 to breath, just not nearly enough. If there were more CO2 on mars, much, much more, you could break it down into a breathable amount of Oxygen. Though it gets kind of tricky if that's all you add, because CO2 is poisonous in high concentrations even if there's O2 to breath so you'd probably want to keep the pressure low, and the O2 content high. Or ship in a few billion tons of nitrogen (which you're probably going to need to set up any kind of sustainable farming anyway).
They aren't in this to make money! Not really anyway. All they're doing is recouping some of their research and development costs, costs that are being racked up as they work towards a manned orbital vehicle. Think about it. 250kg isn't much, but it's enough to bring 2 people plus a weeks worth of supplies to LEO. Boost that to 500 kg with the next iteration, get it man certified, and all you really need is a destination to start selling orbital vacations to the super rich. They are years ahead of their competition when it comes to man certified sub-orbital flights and everyone knows that the real money is going to be in making orbit, this is just the next step to that destination.
Yes, that's a point that my argument makes by coincidence. All this micro- vs macro- evolution is worthless speculation anyway because nature doesn't work that way. Nature isn't divided neatly from one species to another and none of our working definitions of a species work in every situation. The very idea of a 'species' goes against observational and theoretical reasoning when it comes to evolution because it implies that there's a cutoff point where one generation is species A and the next is species B, and that isn't the way things work in the real world.
So, is it fair to say the evolved version of e. coli is a new species? Well, it breaks the human made definition of the species e. coli so by human definitions it probably should be; else you can just keep moving the goalposts over and over again and end with something you call e. coli that has little relation to your original definition.
As long as there is something valuable on Mars that can be exported to Earth[...]
So... any ideas? Keeping in mind that anything you come up with has to be economically viable despite the staggering cost of the return trip. And don't tell me those costs will fall, obviously they will, the part you might forget is that other manufacturing and resource costs will fall also. Also keep in mind that if you're already talking about mars it probably isn't much harder (and possibly could be much easier) to colonize an asteroid or a moon. Personally, I honestly can't think of a single thing that could conceivably be found on Mars that could warrant the expense.
Well, a defining characteristic of the e. coli species is the lack of an ability to transport citrate across the cell membrane. Enough so that this is often used to differentiate e. coli from salmonella in cultures. So, evolving the ability to transport (and therefore metabolize) citrate in the lab would seem to be a pretty good example of e. coli becoming something other than e. coli (lacking one of the defining characteristics of the species).
Very rough and simple version: When particles interact with the Higgs field they get mass, the Higgs field is related to but distinct from the Higgs Boson. I'm not entirely sure on the details how the two (the field and the particle) are connected though.
You watch MXC to see people fail (and they always do). You watch Ninja Warrior to see people succeed (and they hardly ever do). They're both obstacle courses, but otherwise the tone, purpose, editing, style, humor are are completely different.
Not to be pedantic, but you do realize that marijuana is in fact a psychoactive drug right? The fact that it mellows out his brain chemistry would be a pretty good indication for instance.
You're not any more dead than if your airliner falls out of the sky at 500 mph.
Safety is not the real problem. If you really put some research and development into it, you could probably get maglev down to $500,000 per km and probably a similar amount (if not more) for the vacuum tube (compare to $100 million per km right now). Then there's the cost of the trains, running the lines, maintaining vacuum ect. And for any run to make sense it's going to need to be thousands of km long, and every stop you make is going to defeat the purpose so direct lines between major cities are a must. A run from NY to LA would run you several billion dollars just to get started and several hundred million every year after that for maintenance and repair. So, the real question is: is there enough traffic between NY and LA (for example) to recuperate the cost of construction and operations. I highly, highly doubt the answer is yes.
Slashdot Mirror
By increasing manufacturing efficiency, lowering prices for everyone (including products that aren't produced with automation by increasing the available labor pool for other industries). If you care about giving people jobs more than you care about making products efficiently, why not just have everyone build a giant brick pyramid in the middle of Nebraska. Oh, and make sure they do it by hand, wouldn't want any pesky earth moving equipment costing people their jobs.
Keep in mind, his total earnings for the year were $14 million. At a company where, according to the summary, $300 is an average month's salary. Not to take away from what he did, giving up $3,000,000 is still an amazing thing to do, but it's gotta be easier when you bring in $14 million a year than it is otherwise.
So many things...
A) Infecting reproductive cells isn't quite the same as infecting muscle cells.
B) I doubt they are infecting a statistically significant number of cells in the person's body, so in the unlikely event that the virus can also infect reproductive cells it's still statistically unlikely to happen.
C) They are repairing a faulty human gene using the correct version of that human gene, as opposed to taking a gene from one species and inserting it into another
D) Only the people who elect to take part in the treatment are affected, as opposed to gene tailored crops which will find their way into your food supply no matter how hard you try
Hell, I'm not even against modded food crops (I am against the way companies like Monsanto have prosecuted people who, by some arguments, were the ones being wronged) and even I call your argument BS.
So you're saying the guy in Gattaca could have had his faulty heart gene repaired and lived his dream legally?
Yep, lets ignore the millions of dollars spent on prevention and just focus on the fact that nothing bad happened. That's like if they upgraded the levies 2 months before Katrina and then flooding didn't happen and everyone said "what a waste of money those levies were!".
Oh for crying out loud. Stuxnet managed to damage equipment and all but shut down a nuclear weapons research program, and that was attacking secured PCs that were on a closed network. Do you have any idea how poor security is at your communities local infrastructure? If a single virus, by all accounts written by no more than a half dozen people over the course of a year, can do significant damage to a secured computer network, why is it ridiculous to imagine that a foreign nation could shut down water treatment plants at dozens of places in the US? Please explain, what exactly is the difference between programming a centrifuge to spin at a rate outside it's safety margin and programming a rail switching station to reroute trains randomly?
I used to think the Golden Girls troll was just annoying, but the fact that every single time he does it someone is compelled to correct the lyrics is actually starting to make me laugh. Seriously guys, we know it's not cosmonaut. We know because there have been literally dozens of Slashdot commentators who jump in and correct him, sometimes, as in this case, multiple people in a single thread. The troll isn't in posting the Golden Girls song, the troll is in getting a word wrong and making people react, stop feeding him!
The problem is that the general steps are easily duplicated, once someone has determined that a disease or risk is correlated with a gene it's pretty easy for to make a test that takes advantage of that information. So you either need to patent gene sequencing in the general case, which is a genie that is already well out of the bottle thankfully, or you need to be able to patent using that gene to predict an outcome. It is the test that is being patented, or at least the correlation. The problem is twofold: one, the patent hampers other research groups looking into the gene and two, the patents just plain last too long. I don't see any problem with giving them an exclusive license to sell a test for a correlation they discovered so long as they are not allowed to prevent third party research and their monopoly lasts a reasonable amount of time (5 years after the test is FDA approved or 10 years after the patent is filed seems more reasonable than the current numbers to me).
If the cops can tail you without a license, then why shouldn't they be able to track you with GPS. And if they can track you with GPS, why shouldn't they be able to track everyone? Sometimes the scale of something matters. Being able to recognize me when you see me on the street or on a facebook post is a little different from being able to find every single publicly available picture that I've ever been in.
I'm not sure there can be one. The concern that is being raise is the shear number of cameras in public spaces, combined with accurate location and direction info, combined with facial recognition. I could imagine a world where, if enough people had their device set to 'upload and share everything I see' you could track someone from the moment they left their house in the morning until they moment they arrived home at night. All using publicly available images taken from public property but the general public.
As others have pointed out, bigger brains might allow a species to spread over a wider, more diverse area, increasing survival chances. Keep in mind, the asteroid might have killed the dinosaurs, but it took hundreds of thousands of years for them to all die out, which is obviously plenty of time for intelligent problem solving to be a useful survival skill. Global scale events aren't generally things that happen quickly, a geological eye blink yes but that's still an awfully long time.
Facebook's mobile app is mediocre at best. If you believe even half the hype, that will be enough to seriously hurt them in the long run, especially considering they've admitted it themselves that they don't know how to do mobile well.
Android is the only market that matters as far as their leverage goes. Everyone on android has gmail, and everyone on gmail has Google+. My family suddenly realized that everyone had a video chat app installed on their phones, imagine their shock! But how to organize it so the whole family can be on together? Oh wait, Google+ supports events now. And sharing pictures and video is about 2 taps on the screen? Oh, but my friends don't want to see yet another picture of my daughter doing something adorable, luckily it's about 2 more screen presses to only share it with my family then. The Google+ app has a remarkable amount of functionality, Google has been putting a lot of effort into getting it right because they know that mobile is where Facebook stumbles.
Color is admittedly a problem, but I would have thought that the brain would learn to adjust things for the positioning. At least, your brain did it once (unless every single eyeball has it's neurons laid out in exactly the same positions, which seems unlikely) and there are lots of things that your brain can take care of before it hits your stream of consciousness. I would think it's possible that ignoring the problem and letting the brain do it's thing might produce good results.
Surely nobody thinks MS would be stupid enough to not test the one piece of functionality that could cost them 10% of their turnover!
I don't understand this. If I go to Hertz, rent a car, and plow through a playground, I'm liable. Hertz tell you so, repeatedly, when you get the car and they try to sell you insurance. Why should it be any different for an individual? I can see if there's a maintenance or other issue with the car. But if the driver it is on them and their insurance (either through the rental company or their own private insurance) to cover the damages.
95% at a pressure of .6 kilo-pascals. The ratio is fine, drop some plants down and let them do their thing, eventually you'll have O2 to breath, just not nearly enough. If there were more CO2 on mars, much, much more, you could break it down into a breathable amount of Oxygen. Though it gets kind of tricky if that's all you add, because CO2 is poisonous in high concentrations even if there's O2 to breath so you'd probably want to keep the pressure low, and the O2 content high. Or ship in a few billion tons of nitrogen (which you're probably going to need to set up any kind of sustainable farming anyway).
I thought this was pretty obvious:
They aren't in this to make money! Not really anyway. All they're doing is recouping some of their research and development costs, costs that are being racked up as they work towards a manned orbital vehicle. Think about it. 250kg isn't much, but it's enough to bring 2 people plus a weeks worth of supplies to LEO. Boost that to 500 kg with the next iteration, get it man certified, and all you really need is a destination to start selling orbital vacations to the super rich. They are years ahead of their competition when it comes to man certified sub-orbital flights and everyone knows that the real money is going to be in making orbit, this is just the next step to that destination.
Yes, that's a point that my argument makes by coincidence. All this micro- vs macro- evolution is worthless speculation anyway because nature doesn't work that way. Nature isn't divided neatly from one species to another and none of our working definitions of a species work in every situation. The very idea of a 'species' goes against observational and theoretical reasoning when it comes to evolution because it implies that there's a cutoff point where one generation is species A and the next is species B, and that isn't the way things work in the real world.
So, is it fair to say the evolved version of e. coli is a new species? Well, it breaks the human made definition of the species e. coli so by human definitions it probably should be; else you can just keep moving the goalposts over and over again and end with something you call e. coli that has little relation to your original definition.
As long as there is something valuable on Mars that can be exported to Earth[...]
So... any ideas? Keeping in mind that anything you come up with has to be economically viable despite the staggering cost of the return trip. And don't tell me those costs will fall, obviously they will, the part you might forget is that other manufacturing and resource costs will fall also. Also keep in mind that if you're already talking about mars it probably isn't much harder (and possibly could be much easier) to colonize an asteroid or a moon. Personally, I honestly can't think of a single thing that could conceivably be found on Mars that could warrant the expense.
Well, a defining characteristic of the e. coli species is the lack of an ability to transport citrate across the cell membrane. Enough so that this is often used to differentiate e. coli from salmonella in cultures. So, evolving the ability to transport (and therefore metabolize) citrate in the lab would seem to be a pretty good example of e. coli becoming something other than e. coli (lacking one of the defining characteristics of the species).
Very rough and simple version: When particles interact with the Higgs field they get mass, the Higgs field is related to but distinct from the Higgs Boson. I'm not entirely sure on the details how the two (the field and the particle) are connected though.
You watch MXC to see people fail (and they always do). You watch Ninja Warrior to see people succeed (and they hardly ever do). They're both obstacle courses, but otherwise the tone, purpose, editing, style, humor are are completely different.
it doesn't require him to take psychoactive drugs
Not to be pedantic, but you do realize that marijuana is in fact a psychoactive drug right? The fact that it mellows out his brain chemistry would be a pretty good indication for instance.
You're not any more dead than if your airliner falls out of the sky at 500 mph.
Safety is not the real problem. If you really put some research and development into it, you could probably get maglev down to $500,000 per km and probably a similar amount (if not more) for the vacuum tube (compare to $100 million per km right now). Then there's the cost of the trains, running the lines, maintaining vacuum ect. And for any run to make sense it's going to need to be thousands of km long, and every stop you make is going to defeat the purpose so direct lines between major cities are a must. A run from NY to LA would run you several billion dollars just to get started and several hundred million every year after that for maintenance and repair. So, the real question is: is there enough traffic between NY and LA (for example) to recuperate the cost of construction and operations. I highly, highly doubt the answer is yes.