I bet that there are NO cures for cancer, NO blind man seeing, and NO crippled people walking due to stem cell research, in our lifetimes.
Medically, there could be cures in less than a decade. But whether we get them depends on how much influence religious radicals continue to wield in our government.
After all, if stem cells are so great, and the cures so close, then why cannot the private sector have funded this research?
They have, to some degree. But they are dependent on government funding, support, and approval, and they are not going to invest in something if there's a risk they can't actually treat people with it.
Furthermore, since stem cell treatments are expected to be cures, they are actually less financially interesting than, say, drug treatments.
wouldn't it be better to not wander into a moral gray area?
This is tissue obtained during a legal procedure, and it's going to be destroyed if it's not used. What exactly do you think is "morally gray" about using it to help people?
Given the deep moral objection a significant part of the community has
I have deep moral objections to Christianity, but that doesn't mean I want to make Christianity illegal. If we're going to live together peacefully, we must get over trying to legislate our moral objections over what other people are doing, and limit ourselves to legislating what we need in order to co-exist.
that adult and other non-destructive forms of stem cell research have been fruitful.
Nobody has any idea how well adult stem cells work relative to embryonic stem cells.
I don't understand the point of lifting the ban other than for purely political purposes
Obama is removing an unjustified interference by Republicans in scientific research that was enacted for "purely political purposes". In different words, Obama is restoring some sanity.
People are more scared of a center-left documentary maker with an eye than the 400 ways they are filmed every day at the school
And that's fairly rational, too: the privacy implications and usage of security cameras are much more predictable than those of a filmmaker running around with a bionic eye.
Few new technologies make economic sense. They need early adopters to allow production to ramp up and get the price down.
And the fact that it doesn't make economic sense is clear from the premium you pay for those cars. Nevertheless, people are willing to pay the premium anyway.
I am not surprised at this turn of events because Dawkins' comments in the God delusion are widely considered to be hateful in nature.
Really? Where's your source?
And what is hateful about telling Christians that they are immoral, irrational, and plain wrong? I mean that's exactly what Christians tell everybody else all the time.
Consider that, in the United states, some 93-96 percent of people believe in God
According to the Pew study, it's more like 85%, but that's assuming that everybody who identifies as a Christian actually is. In my experience, most Christians don't know much about Christian theology, and hence they don't believe in God (i.e., the Christian god), but some other supernatural being.
his office sent 5 letters to Craigslist asking them to better police the "erotic services" section or shut it down.
Strangely enough, the job of "policing" the erotic services section is the job of the police. And if there is actual prostitution being advertised, they could spring into action.
I don't think anything will come of this. If he has proof that there is prostitution, then the immediate question is: why haven't you done anything about the cases you could identify? And all the other ads are just ads where he suspects prostitution but can't prove it; he does not have a right to restrain that speech, even if he doesn't like it.
There's a little bit of prostitution in human society, but more might actually be better. Bonobo society, a society built around sex and prostitution, is a lot more peaceful than human society. We're more like chimps, we resolve conflicts through fighting.
Dates usually require at least dinner and a movie, often several times. That can run into the hundreds of dollars per lay. Marriage-oriented sites require even more money per lay. Craigslist ads seem to generally dispense with such monetary transfers and cut right to the chase. So, obviously, Craigslist has less prostitution than other personal sites. He should go after relationship oriented sites.
Governments all over the world are asserting copyrights on information created with public funding, or even public domain information.
Particularly annoying is when museums and similar institutions assert copyright over images of works that should have fallen into the public domain by now, in direct contradiction of their mission of disseminating those works to the public.
Potentially, governments can also use copyright claims in order to restrict distribution of information that the government finds politically undesirable: statistics, investigative reporting, etc.
Generally, everything a government creates with tax payer money should be public domain.
It is far from clear that Section 7 of the GPL implies that. A cross license just says "whatever patents we have, you can use, and vice versa". A cross license agreement wouldn't impose any conditions on anybody that didn't exist before.
There is a well-defined class of personal issues you can't discriminate based on. The rest is fair game (at least in the US), both for web searches and for question.
I can ask you if you smoke pot. I can not hire you because you have a photo of yourself smoking pot on your MySpace page. I can also not hire because you are a virulent anti-drug crusader and don't like that because I smoke pot.
The problem is that the average person isn't going to have the proper resources to actually get anything done about it.
Then allow them to recover sufficient damages and penalties in civil court. You'll get plenty of lawyers lining up to take such cases on commission. There is no need to criminalize it.
Just another reason why capitalism fails.
By what bizarre reasoning do you connect capitalism with libel laws? Yes, you might face legal problems when saying something bad about a company in the US, but you can defend yourself and you still have a lot more freedom to do so than in any other form of government or economic system that has existed on this planet.
I mean, what do you propose instead? A centrally planned economy? Barter?
What they seem to be saying in so many words is: "There have been so many data breaches that we have lost track of which ones we have already told you about."
Read reviews of Symbian devices: they have great hardware, but their user interface is hard to use and outdated. The OS is also aging. Python doesn't fix any of that.
Nokia makes great hardware; they should switch to Android. They don't stand a chance with S60.
The first electronic paper came from Xerox PARC. It was called Gyricon and was developed years before e-Ink. They were 10-20 years ahead of their time and stopped development just a few years before there was finally a market for the technology.
This game is going to be a fresh look at the future circa about 2035
We're lucky if we get people beyond earth orbit again by then, let alone to Mars. The notion that we'll have Mars-based habitats (like those depicted in the game) is implausible. I think people just don't realize how ill-suited man is to space travel, how difficult and costly it is to keep people alive in space, and how costly it is to get mass up into orbit and beyond.
Manned interplanetary travel will happen eventually (if we don't kill ourselves first), but there's a lot of work to be done on propulsion, ecology, biology, material science, genetic engineering, and unmanned exploration first.
The Phoenix lander had an arm; it could have easily touched these globules to see whether they were liquid as well. It didn't because they were discovered after mission end. The same can happen to you on a manned mission. But let's look at the costs...
The Phoenix mission cost $386 million (development, launch, mission). That sounds like a lot until you realize that a single space shuttle launch costs $500 million. A human mission to Mars costs at least $500 billion if everything goes right. That's more than 1000 probes to Mars (and/or other planets)! And if we started mass producing space probes, the costs would go down very quickly.
For the cost of a single attempt at a manned Mars mission, we could send hundreds of probes to every plant and many planetoids and asteroids, drilling, searching for life, etc. Those probes would send back video, use arms, drive around the surface, analyze samples, fly, drill, explore oceans and gas planets. They could be remotely operated or work autonomously, depending on the situation. Powered by RTGs, they could operate for years and be ready and even available for rent. And we can send up these probes quickly and they can yield results quickly.
The idea that anybody would want to waste money on a manned mission to Mars is extremely frustrating. The scientific output from a manned mission would be tiny compared to what we can gain with unmanned probes.
As for the globules, we will know whether there is liquid water on Mars long before humans ever set foot on it, and at a miniscule fraction of the cost. In fact, the only way we an even have a manned mission to Mars is to gather a lot of data about the planet before going there.
The challenge I see for NetFlix is dealing with the moves towards bandwidth caps - a movie a night is likely to rapidly push people to the cap;
Online distribution is already widespread in other countries, and there doesn't seem to be a move towards "bandwidth" (volume) caps. Instead, providers actually seem to be competing for offering better QoS for streaming and downloading.
The only volume caps companies seem to be implementing are caps on the top 0.1% of users, people who really use many orders of magnitude more volume per month than the median user. That seems reasonable and shouldn't be a problem for Netflix.
The fact that liquid water can be stable on the surface of Mars has been known for a while. Direct observation, of course, is nice. The next question is whether there might be significant open bodies of water (brine) in some locations. Some satellite photographs could be interpreted that way.
The existence of perchlorates adds another dimension, though, because they are such an effective anti-freeze and a potential metabolite. The perchlorates might actually be biologically generated on Mars, somewhat similar to the way organisms on Earth have generated large amounts of oxygen and changed the environment on a global scale. On Earth, reduction in CO2 levels was an important factor in making the climate more hospitable, and on Mars, generation of perchlorates may make the water more accessible.
Re:You can't win if you don't play
on
Linked In Or Out?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
For what it's worth, I've never hired a person because of a facebook profile, but I have not hired plenty of people because of facebook profiles.
Contrary to what you seem to think, the employer/employee relationship goes both ways, and finding and keeping good employees is just as important for you as finding a good job is for them.
So, if you decide based on my Facebook page that we aren't going to get along, it's better for both of us to find that out before you hire me.
On the other hand, if you don't have a decent and convincing online presence yourself, I may not even consider you, and you'll never know.
Slashdot Mirror
I bet that there are NO cures for cancer, NO blind man seeing, and NO crippled people walking due to stem cell research, in our lifetimes.
Medically, there could be cures in less than a decade. But whether we get them depends on how much influence religious radicals continue to wield in our government.
After all, if stem cells are so great, and the cures so close, then why cannot the private sector have funded this research?
They have, to some degree. But they are dependent on government funding, support, and approval, and they are not going to invest in something if there's a risk they can't actually treat people with it.
Furthermore, since stem cell treatments are expected to be cures, they are actually less financially interesting than, say, drug treatments.
wouldn't it be better to not wander into a moral gray area?
This is tissue obtained during a legal procedure, and it's going to be destroyed if it's not used. What exactly do you think is "morally gray" about using it to help people?
Given the deep moral objection a significant part of the community has
I have deep moral objections to Christianity, but that doesn't mean I want to make Christianity illegal. If we're going to live together peacefully, we must get over trying to legislate our moral objections over what other people are doing, and limit ourselves to legislating what we need in order to co-exist.
that adult and other non-destructive forms of stem cell research have been fruitful.
Nobody has any idea how well adult stem cells work relative to embryonic stem cells.
I don't understand the point of lifting the ban other than for purely political purposes
Obama is removing an unjustified interference by Republicans in scientific research that was enacted for "purely political purposes". In different words, Obama is restoring some sanity.
When was the last time you actually saw a static web site?
This "news item" is the equivalent of saying "horse and buggies are disappearing from the streets".
People are more scared of a center-left documentary maker with an eye than the 400 ways they are filmed every day at the school
And that's fairly rational, too: the privacy implications and usage of security cameras are much more predictable than those of a filmmaker running around with a bionic eye.
Few new technologies make economic sense. They need early adopters to allow production to ramp up and get the price down.
And the fact that it doesn't make economic sense is clear from the premium you pay for those cars. Nevertheless, people are willing to pay the premium anyway.
I am not surprised at this turn of events because Dawkins' comments in the God delusion are widely considered to be hateful in nature.
Really? Where's your source?
And what is hateful about telling Christians that they are immoral, irrational, and plain wrong? I mean that's exactly what Christians tell everybody else all the time.
Consider that, in the United states, some 93-96 percent of people believe in God
According to the Pew study, it's more like 85%, but that's assuming that everybody who identifies as a Christian actually is. In my experience, most Christians don't know much about Christian theology, and hence they don't believe in God (i.e., the Christian god), but some other supernatural being.
They should use it to encrypt the Transit Sidney Timetable. That way, they can be certain it won't be pirated.
his office sent 5 letters to Craigslist asking them to better police the "erotic services" section or shut it down.
Strangely enough, the job of "policing" the erotic services section is the job of the police. And if there is actual prostitution being advertised, they could spring into action.
I don't think anything will come of this. If he has proof that there is prostitution, then the immediate question is: why haven't you done anything about the cases you could identify? And all the other ads are just ads where he suspects prostitution but can't prove it; he does not have a right to restrain that speech, even if he doesn't like it.
There's a little bit of prostitution in human society, but more might actually be better. Bonobo society, a society built around sex and prostitution, is a lot more peaceful than human society. We're more like chimps, we resolve conflicts through fighting.
Dates usually require at least dinner and a movie, often several times. That can run into the hundreds of dollars per lay. Marriage-oriented sites require even more money per lay. Craigslist ads seem to generally dispense with such monetary transfers and cut right to the chase. So, obviously, Craigslist has less prostitution than other personal sites. He should go after relationship oriented sites.
Governments all over the world are asserting copyrights on information created with public funding, or even public domain information.
Particularly annoying is when museums and similar institutions assert copyright over images of works that should have fallen into the public domain by now, in direct contradiction of their mission of disseminating those works to the public.
Potentially, governments can also use copyright claims in order to restrict distribution of information that the government finds politically undesirable: statistics, investigative reporting, etc.
Generally, everything a government creates with tax payer money should be public domain.
It is far from clear that Section 7 of the GPL implies that. A cross license just says "whatever patents we have, you can use, and vice versa". A cross license agreement wouldn't impose any conditions on anybody that didn't exist before.
There is a well-defined class of personal issues you can't discriminate based on. The rest is fair game (at least in the US), both for web searches and for question.
I can ask you if you smoke pot. I can not hire you because you have a photo of yourself smoking pot on your MySpace page. I can also not hire because you are a virulent anti-drug crusader and don't like that because I smoke pot.
Who cares what a bunch of random talking heads say? The degree to which the Japanese like or hate is measured by market share.
The problem is that the average person isn't going to have the proper resources to actually get anything done about it.
Then allow them to recover sufficient damages and penalties in civil court. You'll get plenty of lawyers lining up to take such cases on commission. There is no need to criminalize it.
Just another reason why capitalism fails.
By what bizarre reasoning do you connect capitalism with libel laws? Yes, you might face legal problems when saying something bad about a company in the US, but you can defend yourself and you still have a lot more freedom to do so than in any other form of government or economic system that has existed on this planet.
I mean, what do you propose instead? A centrally planned economy? Barter?
What they seem to be saying in so many words is: "There have been so many data breaches that we have lost track of which ones we have already told you about."
The G1 is probably the most easy to use phone around: you turn it on, you enter your Google account info, and it all just works after that.
The G1 has some minor hardware and software issues, but for the first release, it's great.
Read reviews of Symbian devices: they have great hardware, but their user interface is hard to use and outdated. The OS is also aging. Python doesn't fix any of that.
Nokia makes great hardware; they should switch to Android. They don't stand a chance with S60.
The first electronic paper came from Xerox PARC. It was called Gyricon and was developed years before e-Ink. They were 10-20 years ahead of their time and stopped development just a few years before there was finally a market for the technology.
Here's more information:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyricon
This game is going to be a fresh look at the future circa about 2035
We're lucky if we get people beyond earth orbit again by then, let alone to Mars. The notion that we'll have Mars-based habitats (like those depicted in the game) is implausible. I think people just don't realize how ill-suited man is to space travel, how difficult and costly it is to keep people alive in space, and how costly it is to get mass up into orbit and beyond.
Manned interplanetary travel will happen eventually (if we don't kill ourselves first), but there's a lot of work to be done on propulsion, ecology, biology, material science, genetic engineering, and unmanned exploration first.
The Phoenix lander had an arm; it could have easily touched these globules to see whether they were liquid as well. It didn't because they were discovered after mission end. The same can happen to you on a manned mission. But let's look at the costs...
The Phoenix mission cost $386 million (development, launch, mission). That sounds like a lot until you realize that a single space shuttle launch costs $500 million. A human mission to Mars costs at least $500 billion if everything goes right. That's more than 1000 probes to Mars (and/or other planets)! And if we started mass producing space probes, the costs would go down very quickly.
For the cost of a single attempt at a manned Mars mission, we could send hundreds of probes to every plant and many planetoids and asteroids, drilling, searching for life, etc. Those probes would send back video, use arms, drive around the surface, analyze samples, fly, drill, explore oceans and gas planets. They could be remotely operated or work autonomously, depending on the situation. Powered by RTGs, they could operate for years and be ready and even available for rent. And we can send up these probes quickly and they can yield results quickly.
The idea that anybody would want to waste money on a manned mission to Mars is extremely frustrating. The scientific output from a manned mission would be tiny compared to what we can gain with unmanned probes.
As for the globules, we will know whether there is liquid water on Mars long before humans ever set foot on it, and at a miniscule fraction of the cost. In fact, the only way we an even have a manned mission to Mars is to gather a lot of data about the planet before going there.
That depends on how exactly the severance package was determined and what exactly people signed when they took it.
The challenge I see for NetFlix is dealing with the moves towards bandwidth caps - a movie a night is likely to rapidly push people to the cap;
Online distribution is already widespread in other countries, and there doesn't seem to be a move towards "bandwidth" (volume) caps. Instead, providers actually seem to be competing for offering better QoS for streaming and downloading.
The only volume caps companies seem to be implementing are caps on the top 0.1% of users, people who really use many orders of magnitude more volume per month than the median user. That seems reasonable and shouldn't be a problem for Netflix.
The fact that liquid water can be stable on the surface of Mars has been known for a while. Direct observation, of course, is nice. The next question is whether there might be significant open bodies of water (brine) in some locations. Some satellite photographs could be interpreted that way.
The existence of perchlorates adds another dimension, though, because they are such an effective anti-freeze and a potential metabolite. The perchlorates might actually be biologically generated on Mars, somewhat similar to the way organisms on Earth have generated large amounts of oxygen and changed the environment on a global scale. On Earth, reduction in CO2 levels was an important factor in making the climate more hospitable, and on Mars, generation of perchlorates may make the water more accessible.
For what it's worth, I've never hired a person because of a facebook profile, but I have not hired plenty of people because of facebook profiles.
Contrary to what you seem to think, the employer/employee relationship goes both ways, and finding and keeping good employees is just as important for you as finding a good job is for them.
So, if you decide based on my Facebook page that we aren't going to get along, it's better for both of us to find that out before you hire me.
On the other hand, if you don't have a decent and convincing online presence yourself, I may not even consider you, and you'll never know.