No no, I understand. But they do not buy ANYTHING else. They don't run low on anything in the store other than milk and bread. It's a strange Rhode Island phenomenon. Even the news casters have joked about it ("might be mildly bad weather... better go out now to beat the milk and bread rush"). I blame the elderly. We have too many.
They do this for EVERY storm. Tropical storm, hurricane, half inch of snow. And it's not like people need ten times the normal quantity of milk. Honestly, the shelves will be literally bare.
Boston is full of college kids, who are probably not New Englanders. And all of the natives around them have now evolved the most aggressively defensive driving style ever imagined to protect themselves. Not a good sample pool.
Look at Maine.
Or someplace that gets a lot of lake effect snow.
Here in Rhode Island, people are terrified of snow. If they predict snow, all of a sudden there is no milk or bread in any store in the state. This always baffled me. Bread, ok. But WHY would you buy milk when there could be severe weather. If you're trapped in your house, your power will likely go out, and now you have a new gallon of spoiled milk. Genius.
On the plus side, I repeatedly impress my neighbors by getting my car out of the snowbanks they make on top of it by shoveling their car out and dumping the snow on mine. I think they're bitter that I don't have to shovel if I don't want to.
I would guess that it's more coincidence than symbiosis. Most of the things that an influenza virus would find helpful would also be helpful to, say, Streptococcus pneumoniae. Since most infectious organisms are vulnerable to similar immune system defenses, shutting them down just sort of accidentally helps out everyone.
But you could make the argument that these organisms evolved similarities to take advantage of just such strategies. Chicken or egg and all that.
Constant vomiting is not likely to be caused by an influenza virus. People call a lot of different things a "stomach flu" but that's really a misnomer. It has nothing to do with influenza. And one of the reasons that people don't frequently look into it any more than "stomach flu" is that it doesn't make a huge amount of difference what caused it, both the symptoms and treatment are the same: get lots of fluid and eventually it will go away. Or you'll die, which is a very unpleasant but thankfully small subset of going away.
To a geologist, this makes you sound about as stupid as the people who believe that California is going to fall off into the ocean the next time we have a large earthquake.
It's true, but in terms of medical services, it had a few more consequences. If you're rich and you buy a car, I can still get a car. We are not about to run out of cars.
The same is not true of, for example, MRIs or surgery. We ARE frequently at the limit for how many surgeries can be performed. So if you are rich and you want an MRI someone else might not get one, or might have to wait longer.
In a service industry like medicine, where our resources are stretched fairly thin as it is, the concept of getting more because you're willing and able to pay for it can actually translate to someone else getting less.
Although it is true that the hepatic portal system will eliminate some of the crap you absorb, it certainly doesn't do so without using blood. Which was all I was saying.
I didn't mean to imply that the yeast battery would make you drunk, just that alcohol doesn't magically get whisked away by the liver without entering the bloodstream at all.
I wasn't aware that the hepatic portal system is particularly effective for alcohol though, which is why your B.A.C. is usually affected as much by your first shot as your second and so on. I didn't see much on it either way after a cursory glance around Google.
That will teach me to give simple explanations on/. No need to get all up in arms about it. And although I do understand that there are no women on the internet, I'm not a guy.
How would it get to your liver without getting into your blood first? Alcohol is absorbed into the blood stream even through the lining of your mouth and stomach, long before most nutrients can be actively absorbed by your intestines. The liver is connected to the GI tract for secretory purposes. All filtration and metabolism functions happen on the other side, through the blood.
I could see choosing even a very unpleasant spinal tap over having AD, but that's not really the choice being offered here. It's having a potentially unpleasant procedure to find out that yes, you do in fact have this disease, about which we can do almost nothing.
The meds we have now are really piss poor. Do crosswords and hard math problems a lot. It's cheaper and WAY less painful. Plus it might actually help.
Why oh why did I slack off and only get my main to level 72? I have deprived myself of this fantastic Level 80 achievement. I should obviously go home right now and start grinding.
It's probably true overall. But in my experience there are so many more non-geeks than geeks, that you don't notice that most of them don't make the first move, because enough of them do to keep you busy. But the geeks are fewer and farther between, so you have time to notice their lack of being forward.
The real breakthrough here has to do with the fact that they can, like you mentioned, activate only one signaling pathway at a time. An electrode can only excite the whole cell, and not even one one kind of cell.
Attaching the light sensitive bit onto different pathways, they even mention that some of the pathways they tried didn't produce the "addiction" behavior. It can provide a whole lot more information on exactly which signals are the ones that make you addicted, versus other pathways that activate the same chain of events down the line, but don't lead to the true "addiction" signals long term.
Personally I think the easiest solution is to get nerd girls to be pretty and have good social skills.
As a giant dork myself, I am inherently addicted to nerdy, geeky, dork men. I don't need genetic engineering to help me along that path. I just need a good kick in the pants to ask out one of the hot geeky scientists I work with, since most of them are too shy to do it themselves.
Drop in the bucket. The NIH funds about half of all the medical research in this country. No one else comes close to that percentage.
And I have to ask once again, your personal feelings on who should pay for research aside, why does the technique used to further the research make a difference in who should pay for it? Is it really that you believe that the government is wasting tons of money on embryonic stem cells and is going to hand it over to a company that might make money by producing a treatment that the people who developed it couldn't afford to do? That seems pretty thin.
To pay for the research perhaps require those companies to pay royalties in addition to an initial fee. Using Taxol as an example, each pharmaceutical would have paid say 1 or 5 million dollars then 1% on sells.
Now see, that sounds like a perfectly valid solution to me. But it still involves the government funding in the first place. However you did claim that:
While I support embryonic stem cell research, I don't support taxpayer money supporting it. Reduce taxes and let those who want ESC research donate money.
This is really the part I take issue with. I would like to see how much funding all Taxol projects received since the 60's adjusted to current inflation and adjusted for commercial instead of government costs. And just because not all of your research turns out to be valuable doesn't mean that the reason you got funded wasn't because some corporate executive thought it was a good bet that some of it would. There is very rarely any corporate funding for something that CAN'T BE PATENTED. Corporations are not interested in spending huge sums of money on something that can't be lucrative only to them. And the amount of funding that comes from private foundations (where people donate money for a specific field of research as you suggest) as barely a drop in the bucket.
The fact that BMS tried to stop generic Taxol is why they didn't hold up their end of the bargain. It isn't the government's fault that BMS tried to do something shady. LOTS of drugs are researched through basic science funded by government funding and developed for production by a pharmaceutical company. If you don't like the fact that pharmaceutical companies charge too much, I wholeheartedly agree. But not funding the basic science because of one example where the deal didn't work out well is a very bad solution.
Also, from the wiki article you keep referencing, the research on Taxol was published out in the open for anyone to see since the 60's. The quote you reference about stocks and proprietary access to data is in reference to a semi-synthetic method of production which the research could not get working well enough to produce the drug at any cost. BMS did. And in exchange, they were allowed to market the drug exclusively for five years. Then they tried to stop the production of generics (a battle which they lost). The drug was expensive, but was at least commercially available, which as I mentioned before, seems to me a better option than trying to find a Pacific Yew tree and extract it yourself. And if you disagree, then don't take it.
I still ask why this one example, even if it were the norm, would be evidence suggesting that government funding of basic research is bad or even negative. And I further ask how you conclude that embryonic stem cells are worse than any other type of research in terms of the government "giving away data to pharmaceutical companies".
Since you insist on this one example I read up on it.
If you look closely at the history and development of this drug, you'll find that BMS was given exclusive rights for marketing only. Neither the government nor BMS owned ANY data, since Taxol cannot be patented at all. The NCI did this to accomplish exactly what you said: reduce the production costs. That is important. This is why you buy aspirin from Bayer instead of making it yourself. If you don't like the drugs being cheaper because the wrong people make money, then go find some Pacific Yew bark and extract it yourself. You're well within your rights to do so. The government hardly handed over intellectual rights to produce a drug, as you claim.
And this was an out of the ordinary case. Most of the controversy surrounds the fact that BMS may not have lived up to their end of the bargain (and not because they made money and the government didn't) and because they were awarded a trademark that some people feel was inappropriate.
It really has no bearing on whether or not federally funded data is available to the taxpayers (it is), and has even less bearing on what techniques the government should or should not fund. Even if the government was regularly in the habit of giving away patents to big bad pharmaceutical companies that should rightfully belong to the taxpayers (which I can't see that it is), what would make embryonic stem cells more likely to fall into that trap than any other type?
Good suggestion, but no. I ought to have said "crappy computer wheely cart" instead of "desk". If I did that, then the keyboard would also be facing the wall. In fact, the rough spot is from where I've chipped the powder coating off the edge of the "desk" over the years.
I actually have a really nice teak desk in storage. It's going to stay there until I'm living somewhere other than a 3rd floor walk up without room for a real desk. I'll just hold out until then.
The good news is that the fingerless gloves that keep my sweaty hands off the game controllers help with my wrist callus too: extra cushioning.
There's a difference between working for the government and the government basically giving away taxpayer paid for research.
This is the disconnect. The government did nothing of the sort. The government does not own something you patent even if they were paying you to work on that project. The RESEARCHERS sold something that THEY owned. The government funded the research that developed it, but has no rights to the intellectual property the work produces. That's the way the deal works. You feel justified in complaining about it because someone else made money off of it later, but that was the bargain that was entered into: the government doesn't stand to make money off of your work, even if they fund it. You can fight to change that, but I for one would not be pleased that my brilliant scheme for how to get a mouse gene to cure cancer would be owned by the government simply because I came up with the idea while working on a government grant to look at mouse genetics.
And many employers, if they offer health insurance benefits, require you to have them. They will not allow me to opt not to purchase health insurance unless I can prove to them that I have equivalent coverage somewhere else. So effectively, I'm being forced to contribute to corporate funded research as well. And I similarly have no share in those profits.
Like I said, I see your point. The government could have done something more productive with that money, like fund more research. But the consequences of giving over all of your intellectual property rights is fairly staggering.
I'm such a sucker. I read all the way through it, waiting for come folding punchline. Then I reread it, thinking I had simply missed it the first time through.
My mind could not accept the possibility that that was not farce.
Most of the defining characteristics of any disease state have to do with what causes it, not the symptoms that are present. The difference between having a cold and having the flu is what virus infected you, even though they can produce almost identical symptoms at times.
That being said, yeah, its pretty gay to make it specifically PLAYSTATION caused.
Yeah. I have a killer callus on the right edge of my right wrist, from where there is a rough spot on the edge of my desk that rubs my mouse hand. Crappy.
Although the picture does indeed look like blisters, the condition that they diagnosed this kid with is more of an open sore. The previous type is usually documented on feet, and couldn't be caused by the same thing (sweaty feet + jogging). So they gave the hand one caused by console gaming a new name. It's sort of like you might have gotten a blister if you hadn't been so sweaty, but instead it turned into a crazy inflamed open sore.
Slashdot Mirror
No no, I understand. But they do not buy ANYTHING else. They don't run low on anything in the store other than milk and bread. It's a strange Rhode Island phenomenon. Even the news casters have joked about it ("might be mildly bad weather... better go out now to beat the milk and bread rush"). I blame the elderly. We have too many.
They do this for EVERY storm. Tropical storm, hurricane, half inch of snow. And it's not like people need ten times the normal quantity of milk. Honestly, the shelves will be literally bare.
I always thought that toilet paper was still a better purchase if you might be stuck at home. I would rather be out of dairy.
Boston is full of college kids, who are probably not New Englanders. And all of the natives around them have now evolved the most aggressively defensive driving style ever imagined to protect themselves. Not a good sample pool.
Look at Maine.
Or someplace that gets a lot of lake effect snow.
Here in Rhode Island, people are terrified of snow. If they predict snow, all of a sudden there is no milk or bread in any store in the state. This always baffled me. Bread, ok. But WHY would you buy milk when there could be severe weather. If you're trapped in your house, your power will likely go out, and now you have a new gallon of spoiled milk. Genius.
On the plus side, I repeatedly impress my neighbors by getting my car out of the snowbanks they make on top of it by shoveling their car out and dumping the snow on mine. I think they're bitter that I don't have to shovel if I don't want to.
I would guess that it's more coincidence than symbiosis. Most of the things that an influenza virus would find helpful would also be helpful to, say, Streptococcus pneumoniae. Since most infectious organisms are vulnerable to similar immune system defenses, shutting them down just sort of accidentally helps out everyone.
But you could make the argument that these organisms evolved similarities to take advantage of just such strategies. Chicken or egg and all that.
Constant vomiting is not likely to be caused by an influenza virus. People call a lot of different things a "stomach flu" but that's really a misnomer. It has nothing to do with influenza. And one of the reasons that people don't frequently look into it any more than "stomach flu" is that it doesn't make a huge amount of difference what caused it, both the symptoms and treatment are the same: get lots of fluid and eventually it will go away. Or you'll die, which is a very unpleasant but thankfully small subset of going away.
To a geologist, this makes you sound about as stupid as the people who believe that California is going to fall off into the ocean the next time we have a large earthquake.
Hey. We can hope, can't we?
It's true, but in terms of medical services, it had a few more consequences. If you're rich and you buy a car, I can still get a car. We are not about to run out of cars.
The same is not true of, for example, MRIs or surgery. We ARE frequently at the limit for how many surgeries can be performed. So if you are rich and you want an MRI someone else might not get one, or might have to wait longer.
In a service industry like medicine, where our resources are stretched fairly thin as it is, the concept of getting more because you're willing and able to pay for it can actually translate to someone else getting less.
Although it is true that the hepatic portal system will eliminate some of the crap you absorb, it certainly doesn't do so without using blood. Which was all I was saying.
I didn't mean to imply that the yeast battery would make you drunk, just that alcohol doesn't magically get whisked away by the liver without entering the bloodstream at all.
I wasn't aware that the hepatic portal system is particularly effective for alcohol though, which is why your B.A.C. is usually affected as much by your first shot as your second and so on. I didn't see much on it either way after a cursory glance around Google.
That will teach me to give simple explanations on /. No need to get all up in arms about it. And although I do understand that there are no women on the internet, I'm not a guy.
Shenanigans.
How would it get to your liver without getting into your blood first? Alcohol is absorbed into the blood stream even through the lining of your mouth and stomach, long before most nutrients can be actively absorbed by your intestines. The liver is connected to the GI tract for secretory purposes. All filtration and metabolism functions happen on the other side, through the blood.
I could see choosing even a very unpleasant spinal tap over having AD, but that's not really the choice being offered here. It's having a potentially unpleasant procedure to find out that yes, you do in fact have this disease, about which we can do almost nothing.
The meds we have now are really piss poor. Do crosswords and hard math problems a lot. It's cheaper and WAY less painful. Plus it might actually help.
Why oh why did I slack off and only get my main to level 72? I have deprived myself of this fantastic Level 80 achievement. I should obviously go home right now and start grinding.
It's probably true overall. But in my experience there are so many more non-geeks than geeks, that you don't notice that most of them don't make the first move, because enough of them do to keep you busy. But the geeks are fewer and farther between, so you have time to notice their lack of being forward.
The real breakthrough here has to do with the fact that they can, like you mentioned, activate only one signaling pathway at a time. An electrode can only excite the whole cell, and not even one one kind of cell.
Attaching the light sensitive bit onto different pathways, they even mention that some of the pathways they tried didn't produce the "addiction" behavior. It can provide a whole lot more information on exactly which signals are the ones that make you addicted, versus other pathways that activate the same chain of events down the line, but don't lead to the true "addiction" signals long term.
It's actually pretty damn cool.
Personally I think the easiest solution is to get nerd girls to be pretty and have good social skills.
As a giant dork myself, I am inherently addicted to nerdy, geeky, dork men. I don't need genetic engineering to help me along that path. I just need a good kick in the pants to ask out one of the hot geeky scientists I work with, since most of them are too shy to do it themselves.
Drop in the bucket. The NIH funds about half of all the medical research in this country. No one else comes close to that percentage.
And I have to ask once again, your personal feelings on who should pay for research aside, why does the technique used to further the research make a difference in who should pay for it? Is it really that you believe that the government is wasting tons of money on embryonic stem cells and is going to hand it over to a company that might make money by producing a treatment that the people who developed it couldn't afford to do? That seems pretty thin.
To pay for the research perhaps require those companies to pay royalties in addition to an initial fee. Using Taxol as an example, each pharmaceutical would have paid say 1 or 5 million dollars then 1% on sells.
Now see, that sounds like a perfectly valid solution to me. But it still involves the government funding in the first place. However you did claim that:
While I support embryonic stem cell research, I don't support taxpayer money supporting it. Reduce taxes and let those who want ESC research donate money.
This is really the part I take issue with. I would like to see how much funding all Taxol projects received since the 60's adjusted to current inflation and adjusted for commercial instead of government costs. And just because not all of your research turns out to be valuable doesn't mean that the reason you got funded wasn't because some corporate executive thought it was a good bet that some of it would. There is very rarely any corporate funding for something that CAN'T BE PATENTED. Corporations are not interested in spending huge sums of money on something that can't be lucrative only to them. And the amount of funding that comes from private foundations (where people donate money for a specific field of research as you suggest) as barely a drop in the bucket.
The fact that BMS tried to stop generic Taxol is why they didn't hold up their end of the bargain. It isn't the government's fault that BMS tried to do something shady. LOTS of drugs are researched through basic science funded by government funding and developed for production by a pharmaceutical company. If you don't like the fact that pharmaceutical companies charge too much, I wholeheartedly agree. But not funding the basic science because of one example where the deal didn't work out well is a very bad solution.
Also, from the wiki article you keep referencing, the research on Taxol was published out in the open for anyone to see since the 60's. The quote you reference about stocks and proprietary access to data is in reference to a semi-synthetic method of production which the research could not get working well enough to produce the drug at any cost. BMS did. And in exchange, they were allowed to market the drug exclusively for five years. Then they tried to stop the production of generics (a battle which they lost). The drug was expensive, but was at least commercially available, which as I mentioned before, seems to me a better option than trying to find a Pacific Yew tree and extract it yourself. And if you disagree, then don't take it.
I still ask why this one example, even if it were the norm, would be evidence suggesting that government funding of basic research is bad or even negative. And I further ask how you conclude that embryonic stem cells are worse than any other type of research in terms of the government "giving away data to pharmaceutical companies".
Since you insist on this one example I read up on it.
If you look closely at the history and development of this drug, you'll find that BMS was given exclusive rights for marketing only. Neither the government nor BMS owned ANY data, since Taxol cannot be patented at all. The NCI did this to accomplish exactly what you said: reduce the production costs. That is important. This is why you buy aspirin from Bayer instead of making it yourself. If you don't like the drugs being cheaper because the wrong people make money, then go find some Pacific Yew bark and extract it yourself. You're well within your rights to do so. The government hardly handed over intellectual rights to produce a drug, as you claim.
And this was an out of the ordinary case. Most of the controversy surrounds the fact that BMS may not have lived up to their end of the bargain (and not because they made money and the government didn't) and because they were awarded a trademark that some people feel was inappropriate.
It really has no bearing on whether or not federally funded data is available to the taxpayers (it is), and has even less bearing on what techniques the government should or should not fund. Even if the government was regularly in the habit of giving away patents to big bad pharmaceutical companies that should rightfully belong to the taxpayers (which I can't see that it is), what would make embryonic stem cells more likely to fall into that trap than any other type?
Good suggestion, but no. I ought to have said "crappy computer wheely cart" instead of "desk". If I did that, then the keyboard would also be facing the wall. In fact, the rough spot is from where I've chipped the powder coating off the edge of the "desk" over the years.
I actually have a really nice teak desk in storage. It's going to stay there until I'm living somewhere other than a 3rd floor walk up without room for a real desk. I'll just hold out until then.
The good news is that the fingerless gloves that keep my sweaty hands off the game controllers help with my wrist callus too: extra cushioning.
There's a difference between working for the government and the government basically giving away taxpayer paid for research.
This is the disconnect. The government did nothing of the sort. The government does not own something you patent even if they were paying you to work on that project. The RESEARCHERS sold something that THEY owned. The government funded the research that developed it, but has no rights to the intellectual property the work produces. That's the way the deal works. You feel justified in complaining about it because someone else made money off of it later, but that was the bargain that was entered into: the government doesn't stand to make money off of your work, even if they fund it. You can fight to change that, but I for one would not be pleased that my brilliant scheme for how to get a mouse gene to cure cancer would be owned by the government simply because I came up with the idea while working on a government grant to look at mouse genetics.
And many employers, if they offer health insurance benefits, require you to have them. They will not allow me to opt not to purchase health insurance unless I can prove to them that I have equivalent coverage somewhere else. So effectively, I'm being forced to contribute to corporate funded research as well. And I similarly have no share in those profits.
Like I said, I see your point. The government could have done something more productive with that money, like fund more research. But the consequences of giving over all of your intellectual property rights is fairly staggering.
I'm such a sucker. I read all the way through it, waiting for come folding punchline. Then I reread it, thinking I had simply missed it the first time through.
My mind could not accept the possibility that that was not farce.
Most of the defining characteristics of any disease state have to do with what causes it, not the symptoms that are present. The difference between having a cold and having the flu is what virus infected you, even though they can produce almost identical symptoms at times.
That being said, yeah, its pretty gay to make it specifically PLAYSTATION caused.
Yeah. I have a killer callus on the right edge of my right wrist, from where there is a rough spot on the edge of my desk that rubs my mouse hand. Crappy.
Although the picture does indeed look like blisters, the condition that they diagnosed this kid with is more of an open sore. The previous type is usually documented on feet, and couldn't be caused by the same thing (sweaty feet + jogging). So they gave the hand one caused by console gaming a new name. It's sort of like you might have gotten a blister if you hadn't been so sweaty, but instead it turned into a crazy inflamed open sore.