For instance, I know how to produce crystal meth. Have I ever done it? No. Will I ever do it? Not unless there is a very very damned good reason to.
Why is that? Part of gaining dangerous knowledge is also gaining knowledge of everything that can go wrong. That is to say, gaining dangerous knowledge goes hand in hand with gaining the knowledge of why you shouldn't use it.
Take for instance, nuclear bombs. Anyone who knows how these work and what they do knows exactly why you should never, ever build one, or if you must build one, why you should look for every possible way to avoid deployment.
Its why epidemiolgists know better than to create superbugs, and if they absolutely must, why absurdly strong biocontainment is necessary.
The police's line of "this is very specialist knowledge that had to be purposefully sought out, and could put people in danger." Is absolute madness. Perhaps he looked it up because he feared somebody planting one? (Maybe he's a catholic and considered visiting a protestant irish community on holiday, and wanted to be able to identify a pipe or carbomb in ase he was unlucky enough to get stuck with one?) Perhaps he was interested in becoming a licensed pyrotechnician?
"Dangerous information puts the public at risk" translates into just about *every* specialist field. Anatomy? Check! Somebody COULD use that information to become a more efficient serial killer. Medicine? Check! Somebody could use it to devise new narcotics! IT? Check! Somebody could use it to disrupt all those fucking CCD cameras all over england.
Apparently, the fact that I know that you can harvest reasonably high quality platinum catayst from a defunct catayltic converter from a scrap yard, and use it to create nitric acid for creating IEDs from dryer lint and stale urine means I should be arrested.
Clearly I pose a threat to the crown somehow.
Heaven forbid that I spend a few hours reading, or worse!, maintaining some wikipedia articles!
Knowledge is only dangerous to the stupid, who increase their vulnerability through embracing ignorance as a means of safety. (If no one knows about nuclear physics, we don't have to worry about nuclear bombs. Nevermind all the obviously beneficial applications of that knowledge. We want to feel safe, so we ban the knowledge itself. What's that? Somebody born 2 generations later dumped a bunch of pitchblende near a reservoir, and now the city is drinking uranium salt in the drinking water? Well, we don't know any better now, because we banned knowledge of nuclear physics. So we could be safe.)
I hope the brittish people fucking riot over this.
What if you strongly ionized the neon prior to pump excitation?
If you shred off the outer valences, and simultaneously expose the gain medium to a very strong positive static potential, the neon ions would be much easier to excite.
Part of the energy in the emission would come from the already altered groundstate of the gain medium, rather than having to come from the pump source.
Eg, you use a very hard UV laser, (much easier to make) and hold the neon in an electrically agitated state.
It might not be as "clean" in terms of being a pure xray laser..(electrons bumped out of the containing vessel by the uv photons would be snatched up by the very electron hungry neon ions, releasing other species of photon.) But it would be easier to assemble.
A laser is a stimulated light source. It emits under stimulation. Part of that stimulation is self generated.
Like a transistor, it continues to operate for a short time when the source of the stimulation gets shut off. Likewise, when the beam is turned on, it takes a tiny amount of time for the photon avalanche to occur. (Speed of photon propogation is not the same as C in vaccuum.)
Thus, the speed of the laser is how fast it is on/offable.
I can't think of any materials with which to create an xray mirror... not of sufficient quality anyway. Without some of those, and an xray beam splitter, you couldn't possibly self amplify...
If this were built on a very tiny scale, so that the neon atoms were all in a row (trap them inside a nanotube maybe?) Perahps a nanoscale version could be made directional? (Or at least have a directional bias)
These were taken with an AFM, (atomic force microscope. Essentially a single atom stuck to the end of a nanoscopic cantelever) but this xray laser light source would theoretically permit direct image capture, at very high speeds.
Xray wavelengths are very tiny. The only light with a smaller wavelength is gamma ray emissions.
Xrays are frequently used to study crystal structues, but the very precise nature and rapid activation speed of this source makes it useful for a whole lot more.
Atomic = the lasing medium is made of single, free atoms of the same element.
Xray = emits photons in the xray portion of the spectrum.
Laser = light is amplified by the stimulated emission of radiation. A source light source causes electrons in the laser's gain medium to fall out of their normal orbitals. When the fall back in, they emit a photon of a very specific wavelength. These photons bump more electrons out, more photons get produced, and the beam amplifies.
So, an atomic xray laser is a laser using atomic monomers as the gain medium, that produces coherent xray radiation.
Now then. Xray radiation is a powerful ionising radiation. This is not a toy. It does very bad things to living tissue, and can destroy chemical bonds purely from the beam's energy. It is a penetrating radiation, and is therefor dangerous even through walls. Keep out of reach of children and slashdot posters.
I don't mean if this is useful or not, the article clearly states how it is.
I mean, the pump laser, the one that excites the lasing medium (in this case neon gas). Does it have to be x-ray?
Would a coherent beam of some other, more easily produced frequency, or even a highly charged cathode beam, be sufficient to induce the xray emission cascade as well?
See my post further down. This is an abusive and unconsionable approach.
Sayinng:
"We think our games are worth more than 60$, and we won't compromise on that!"
Then colluding with console and OS makers to artificially remove alternatives from the market, is functionally identical (though addmittetly highly embellished to increase absurdity and shock value as a purposeful argument ad absurdium) to the following:
"I think women should fall all over themselves to have sex with me, because I feel I am obviously a sex *GOD*! I refuse to accept your argument that my breath stinks and my overweight physique is unattractive are direct indicators against my self image! I will *MAKE* it so women have sex with me, or they won't have sex at all!"
Then colluding with doctors and obgyns to chemically abort male fetuses and castrate more attractive men.
The ideology is the same in both circumstances, and just as horrid.
Market price is set *BY THE MARKET*. That is how free market capitalism **WORKS**.
Then the smart thing to do is offer the game at 30$.
This is within the "I will consider buying it despite the fact that hype is almost always a lie" threshold of most used game purchasers.
Selling at 30$ will cause new games to fly off the shelves like hotcakes, which directly undercuts the used game marketplace, and does it the CORRECT way.
The problem, is that PHB thinks that because all the other game developers are selling at 60$, they *must* sell at 60$ as well. The fact that second hand sales are a problem is a deadpan indicator that the unit price is too high.
"We think our games are worth more than 30$ at market!"
Yeah, well, I think that women should fall all over themselves wanting to have sex with me, but that doesn't make it the truth, now does it?
The game industry needs to stop trying to dictate reality, and listen to the market.
GGP requested a quick explanation of how the motion picture and recording industries grew to be so powerful in the US. A complete timeline would have taken too long. Note how I left out such things as the sherman antitrust law pssing, the dissolution of standard oil, and a whole host of other historical events.
I covered the late 70s, with the "deregulation" era. Reagan was president at that time, and was a big supporter of that "activity." Its when all kinds of hell broke loose, and political corruption really took root.
Again, I breezed through it on fast forward and left all sorts of stuff out, for sake of brevity. (Even then, it is still big by/. Standards.)
For a full and unabridged history, consult the local library and make use of their reference section, specifically their periodicals and microfilm archives.
Intellectual properties (designs, software, music, audio, et al) are not durable goods.
The durable good portion of apple's offerings are made from offshored parts and assemblages. These are not american products. They are korean products, chinese products, thai products, et al. The american portion is the design specification; a soft good.
Note, it is a relic from the 1950s, post military industrial boom. It is a relic from the durable goods era, and predates the disposable goods era. Rather than leave the us, it expanded into a niche market and stayed there.
But other than weapons grade items (bombs, rifles, other killing appliances) and highly regulated products (aviation, automotive) can you name a single us made durable good that is world renouned for quality?
It used to be that many products were known that way.
Time for some Peabody's improbable history, so step into the wayback machine Sherman, and let's look at the US as it was 100 years ago.
In 1912, the US was a heavily invested industrial nation, specializing in steel, oil refinement, textiles, industrial machinery, and scientific advancements. It had reached this status through the addage "you get what you pay for", and "the american way." (Which back then meant taking pride in your work, producing only quality goods, and being judged by the quality of your work and of your word. This motif was euphamistically referred to as free market capitalism, since it relied on heavy competition between stakeholders to provide only the finest goods at prices that were reasonable, and the buyers bought for quality and durability. Your products directly influenced your brand's desirability.)
Over the course of the next 30 to 40 years, these industries vied heavily with one another, eliminating competition, and then reached a certain threshold where they realized that competing with one another was counter productive to producing profits. This is pre rico act, pre sherman act. These idustries had established a thriving local enconomy based on quality goods, which people had become accustomed to buying, and which had greatly improved the quality of living of their native demographic populations. As such, worker wages had gone up, unions had formed, and other "this hurts our profits" influences surfaced. (Additionally, the depression caused many contenders to go under, allowing for a "land grab" by the survivors, accellerating the development of the oligopoly.)
At first, these companies agreed to not poach each other's profits through initiating pricewars, and instead agreed that they would increase the wealth of their directors and financiers through the reduction of quality in the merchandise produced. As quality dropped, the need for employees that had grown up on an ethic for perfection waned, and with that, the ethic itself also waned. Eventually, the only real characteristic that differentiated a us worker from a cheap foriegn one was the price of employment.
Skip ahead another 30 to 40 years, after the momentary military industrial booms of the 30s and 40s, to the 60s and 70s. "Deregulation" was the buzzword. Restrictions that had been put in place to protect american citizens from corporate interests were discarded like used toilet paper. Trade tarrifs dropped like sleezy curtains at a peep show. Outsourcing began.
Over the next 30 to 40 years, most of america's manufacturing industry had flown the coop, electing to capitalize on the post free love generation's niavite' and inherited buying power with cheaply made foreign built products. Buying american made started getting much much harder. Even commodity items like clothes and shoes couldn't compete with the cheaper, and often inferior foriegn labor that was made protiable by dropping the trade tarrif walls. The old vangard of US corporate power had officially left the US.
In the wake of the second world war, the US motion picture and recording industries sprang into being, thanks to the developments in film and radio technologies, coupled with the obvious propoganda potentials of those mediums. In the ww2 and post era, these industries flourished while the old industrial center declined. The US work ethic had diminished to such an extent by the 60s, that entertainment and pleasure were basically the primary motivational force in people's lives. The idolization of hollywood actors and actresses really came alive. This generation was blinded by hollywood and television, greedily assimilated the "disposable goods" philosophy, and the media industry grew like crazy. (There is no coincidence that this is the golden age of filmography and music in the US. The vast majority of holdings of those industries were created during this time frame. It was a perfect storm for the entertainment industry.) During this time, the technology to really export entertainment to other countries came into
I live in the US. Our major exports are IP (movies, recordings, blueprints, and software all together in one group), raw food stuffs, military equipment/aviation goodies, and bad legislation.
Eg, other than corrupt factory farm operations, (why's the park smell so stinky mommy? That's just the columbia meat packing plant on the hill dear.) And aerospace + military industrial (lockheed martin, boeing, and pals), intellectual property is about the only relevant industry the US has, other than bullshit like the bank and loan infrastructure.
This is why politicians are all too happy to take bribes err.... "campaign contributions" from those industries, and why they are treated like sacred cows in terms of regulatory compliance issues, and in terms of getting carte blanc with proposing legislation.
The US is anemic as hell. My government knows it. They want golden parachutes for when the shit hits, so they stay cuddly with multinationals.
"We are the executive branch, we enact laws, not enforce them. We suggest you petition the judiciary... wait? They don't accept petitions? Well, sucks to be you then."
Many of the ethical concerns over embryonic cells would be ended if the collection method was nondestructive.
The problem was hamfisted legislation that treats embryonic blast collection as being equal to murdering babies.
There are single cell extraction techniques which allow cells to be nondestructively collected. This process is used in screening for ivf, prior to embryo selection. (This is how they pick only safe embryos, and not ones likely to produce children with developmental disorders.)
I would rather see legislation prohibiting destructive collection, than against any collection at all.
The issue here, is that we have cells previously collected using the destructive methods prior to the moratorium sitting in freezers, when those tissues could be used for fundamental research.
It is my understanding that demand for these lines is high, as many cultures were co-cultured with mouse tissue for purposes of expediency. This limits the number of "purely human" cultures that are suitale for medical research to a much smaller subset of the already limited cell lines available. (Note, the mouse contaminated lines are not genetically blended. They are just heterogenous.)
What I would personally like to see is an end to the moratorium on federal funding for embryonic cells, with the provision that all NEW lines be derived nondestructively.
Doing that would radically reduce the ethical concerns surrounding their use.
Our ability to create, use, and evaluate adult stemcells is directly tied to the fundamental research done with embryonic ones.
However, I don't support your position on unfettered research. To me that opens far too big of a pandora's box into the realm of public health. Oversight and good proceedure are vital to good research.
That does help, but the title is misleading. Embrionic stemcells are usually implied to be the pluripotent kind.
This is an interesting development, as it means the researchers were successful in reliably creating retinal epithelial cells from such a culture.
This increases my excitement about the trial. I still don't see why they elected to use an embryonic line instead of a host derived ips line.
A prior poster commented that it was due to the wording of their trial's funding, which is why I ask. Why was the funding grant for the trial tied exclusively to embryonic cell cultures?
The actual merit of the trial is that cultured retinal epithelial cells appear safe, and effective.
The source of the tissue shouldn't matter a whole lot after being differentiated, other than the ethical concerns. Given the scarcity of embryonic lines for research into pluripotency, wouldn't it have made more sense to keep them there?
There is no doubt that embryonic stemcells can theoretically cure any age related degenerative disorder, and a number of genetically inherited degenerative disorders.
Afterall, if left alone, these cells produce entire functioning bodies.
The problem comes from understanding the complex game of chemical "charades" these cells play with one another to control the way the cells differintiate.
I have no qualms about them being studied in a laboratory to unlock those secrets, but blindly injecting them into patients given what we have learned suggests this is a rash and dangerous enterprise. A totipotent culture can only become a specific tissue type, and is much safer. (Like bone marrow.) If cultured from the patient directly, the graft won't suffer host rejection either.
I just don't understand the desire to put potentially dagerous cell lines into patients who are deperate. It smacks of callousness and wrecklessness.
Slashdot Mirror
For instance, I know how to produce crystal meth. Have I ever done it? No. Will I ever do it? Not unless there is a very very damned good reason to.
Why is that? Part of gaining dangerous knowledge is also gaining knowledge of everything that can go wrong. That is to say, gaining dangerous knowledge goes hand in hand with gaining the knowledge of why you shouldn't use it.
Take for instance, nuclear bombs. Anyone who knows how these work and what they do knows exactly why you should never, ever build one, or if you must build one, why you should look for every possible way to avoid deployment.
Its why epidemiolgists know better than to create superbugs, and if they absolutely must, why absurdly strong biocontainment is necessary.
The police's line of "this is very specialist knowledge that had to be purposefully sought out, and could put people in danger." Is absolute madness. Perhaps he looked it up because he feared somebody planting one? (Maybe he's a catholic and considered visiting a protestant irish community on holiday, and wanted to be able to identify a pipe or carbomb in ase he was unlucky enough to get stuck with one?) Perhaps he was interested in becoming a licensed pyrotechnician?
"Dangerous information puts the public at risk" translates into just about *every* specialist field. Anatomy? Check! Somebody COULD use that information to become a more efficient serial killer. Medicine? Check! Somebody could use it to devise new narcotics! IT? Check! Somebody could use it to disrupt all those fucking CCD cameras all over england.
Apparently, the fact that I know that you can harvest reasonably high quality platinum catayst from a defunct catayltic converter from a scrap yard, and use it to create nitric acid for creating IEDs from dryer lint and stale urine means I should be arrested.
Clearly I pose a threat to the crown somehow.
Heaven forbid that I spend a few hours reading, or worse!, maintaining some wikipedia articles!
Knowledge is only dangerous to the stupid, who increase their vulnerability through embracing ignorance as a means of safety. (If no one knows about nuclear physics, we don't have to worry about nuclear bombs. Nevermind all the obviously beneficial applications of that knowledge. We want to feel safe, so we ban the knowledge itself. What's that? Somebody born 2 generations later dumped a bunch of pitchblende near a reservoir, and now the city is drinking uranium salt in the drinking water? Well, we don't know any better now, because we banned knowledge of nuclear physics. So we could be safe.)
I hope the brittish people fucking riot over this.
What if you strongly ionized the neon prior to pump excitation?
If you shred off the outer valences, and simultaneously expose the gain medium to a very strong positive static potential, the neon ions would be much easier to excite.
Part of the energy in the emission would come from the already altered groundstate of the gain medium, rather than having to come from the pump source.
Eg, you use a very hard UV laser, (much easier to make) and hold the neon in an electrically agitated state.
It might not be as "clean" in terms of being a pure xray laser..(electrons bumped out of the containing vessel by the uv photons would be snatched up by the very electron hungry neon ions, releasing other species of photon.) But it would be easier to assemble.
Don't forget the avalanche period.
A laser is a stimulated light source. It emits under stimulation. Part of that stimulation is self generated.
Like a transistor, it continues to operate for a short time when the source of the stimulation gets shut off. Likewise, when the beam is turned on, it takes a tiny amount of time for the photon avalanche to occur. (Speed of photon propogation is not the same as C in vaccuum.)
Thus, the speed of the laser is how fast it is on/offable.
Fantastic. I shall read it when I have more time!
I can't think of any materials with which to create an xray mirror... not of sufficient quality anyway. Without some of those, and an xray beam splitter, you couldn't possibly self amplify...
If this were built on a very tiny scale, so that the neon atoms were all in a row (trap them inside a nanotube maybe?) Perahps a nanoscale version could be made directional? (Or at least have a directional bias)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8225491.stm
These were taken with an AFM, (atomic force microscope. Essentially a single atom stuck to the end of a nanoscopic cantelever) but this xray laser light source would theoretically permit direct image capture, at very high speeds.
Xray wavelengths are very tiny. The only light with a smaller wavelength is gamma ray emissions.
Xrays are frequently used to study crystal structues, but the very precise nature and rapid activation speed of this source makes it useful for a whole lot more.
Disect the terms.
Atomic = the lasing medium is made of single, free atoms of the same element.
Xray = emits photons in the xray portion of the spectrum.
Laser = light is amplified by the stimulated emission of radiation. A source light source causes electrons in the laser's gain medium to fall out of their normal orbitals. When the fall back in, they emit a photon of a very specific wavelength. These photons bump more electrons out, more photons get produced, and the beam amplifies.
So, an atomic xray laser is a laser using atomic monomers as the gain medium, that produces coherent xray radiation.
Now then. Xray radiation is a powerful ionising radiation. This is not a toy. It does very bad things to living tissue, and can destroy chemical bonds purely from the beam's energy. It is a penetrating radiation, and is therefor dangerous even through walls. Keep out of reach of children and slashdot posters.
Nonsense.
This is a fantastic advancement. Remember those photographs of alkanes that showed the P orbital zones slashdot ran a story on sometime last year
Remember how fuzzy they were?
This badboy would make thoe pictures much, much clearer.
I don't mean if this is useful or not, the article clearly states how it is.
I mean, the pump laser, the one that excites the lasing medium (in this case neon gas). Does it have to be x-ray?
Would a coherent beam of some other, more easily produced frequency, or even a highly charged cathode beam, be sufficient to induce the xray emission cascade as well?
See my post further down. This is an abusive and unconsionable approach.
Sayinng:
"We think our games are worth more than 60$, and we won't compromise on that!"
Then colluding with console and OS makers to artificially remove alternatives from the market, is functionally identical (though addmittetly highly embellished to increase absurdity and shock value as a purposeful argument ad absurdium) to the following:
"I think women should fall all over themselves to have sex with me, because I feel I am obviously a sex *GOD*! I refuse to accept your argument that my breath stinks and my overweight physique is unattractive are direct indicators against my self image! I will *MAKE* it so women have sex with me, or they won't have sex at all!"
Then colluding with doctors and obgyns to chemically abort male fetuses and castrate more attractive men.
The ideology is the same in both circumstances, and just as horrid.
Market price is set *BY THE MARKET*. That is how free market capitalism **WORKS**.
Then the smart thing to do is offer the game at 30$.
This is within the "I will consider buying it despite the fact that hype is almost always a lie" threshold of most used game purchasers.
Selling at 30$ will cause new games to fly off the shelves like hotcakes, which directly undercuts the used game marketplace, and does it the CORRECT way.
The problem, is that PHB thinks that because all the other game developers are selling at 60$, they *must* sell at 60$ as well. The fact that second hand sales are a problem is a deadpan indicator that the unit price is too high.
"We think our games are worth more than 30$ at market!"
Yeah, well, I think that women should fall all over themselves wanting to have sex with me, but that doesn't make it the truth, now does it?
The game industry needs to stop trying to dictate reality, and listen to the market.
GGP requested a quick explanation of how the motion picture and recording industries grew to be so powerful in the US. A complete timeline would have taken too long. Note how I left out such things as the sherman antitrust law pssing, the dissolution of standard oil, and a whole host of other historical events.
I covered the late 70s, with the "deregulation" era. Reagan was president at that time, and was a big supporter of that "activity." Its when all kinds of hell broke loose, and political corruption really took root.
Again, I breezed through it on fast forward and left all sorts of stuff out, for sake of brevity. (Even then, it is still big by /. Standards.)
For a full and unabridged history, consult the local library and make use of their reference section, specifically their periodicals and microfilm archives.
Intellectual properties (designs, software, music, audio, et al) are not durable goods.
The durable good portion of apple's offerings are made from offshored parts and assemblages. These are not american products. They are korean products, chinese products, thai products, et al. The american portion is the design specification; a soft good.
Try again.
Also, read their abridged company history, then contrast to my quick and dirty improbable history.
http://www.cat.com/about-the-company
Note, it is a relic from the 1950s, post military industrial boom. It is a relic from the durable goods era, and predates the disposable goods era. Rather than leave the us, it expanded into a niche market and stayed there.
Caterpillar predominantly makes industrial motorvehicles. (Fork lifts, back hoes, trenchers, etc.) These are government regulated. Hence, excluded.
Try again.
But other than weapons grade items (bombs, rifles, other killing appliances) and highly regulated products (aviation, automotive) can you name a single us made durable good that is world renouned for quality?
It used to be that many products were known that way.
Time for some Peabody's improbable history, so step into the wayback machine Sherman, and let's look at the US as it was 100 years ago.
In 1912, the US was a heavily invested industrial nation, specializing in steel, oil refinement, textiles, industrial machinery, and scientific advancements. It had reached this status through the addage "you get what you pay for", and "the american way." (Which back then meant taking pride in your work, producing only quality goods, and being judged by the quality of your work and of your word. This motif was euphamistically referred to as free market capitalism, since it relied on heavy competition between stakeholders to provide only the finest goods at prices that were reasonable, and the buyers bought for quality and durability. Your products directly influenced your brand's desirability.)
Over the course of the next 30 to 40 years, these industries vied heavily with one another, eliminating competition, and then reached a certain threshold where they realized that competing with one another was counter productive to producing profits. This is pre rico act, pre sherman act. These idustries had established a thriving local enconomy based on quality goods, which people had become accustomed to buying, and which had greatly improved the quality of living of their native demographic populations. As such, worker wages had gone up, unions had formed, and other "this hurts our profits" influences surfaced. (Additionally, the depression caused many contenders to go under, allowing for a "land grab" by the survivors, accellerating the development of the oligopoly.)
At first, these companies agreed to not poach each other's profits through initiating pricewars, and instead agreed that they would increase the wealth of their directors and financiers through the reduction of quality in the merchandise produced. As quality dropped, the need for employees that had grown up on an ethic for perfection waned, and with that, the ethic itself also waned. Eventually, the only real characteristic that differentiated a us worker from a cheap foriegn one was the price of employment.
Skip ahead another 30 to 40 years, after the momentary military industrial booms of the 30s and 40s, to the 60s and 70s. "Deregulation" was the buzzword. Restrictions that had been put in place to protect american citizens from corporate interests were discarded like used toilet paper. Trade tarrifs dropped like sleezy curtains at a peep show. Outsourcing began.
Over the next 30 to 40 years, most of america's manufacturing industry had flown the coop, electing to capitalize on the post free love generation's niavite' and inherited buying power with cheaply made foreign built products. Buying american made started getting much much harder. Even commodity items like clothes and shoes couldn't compete with the cheaper, and often inferior foriegn labor that was made protiable by dropping the trade tarrif walls. The old vangard of US corporate power had officially left the US.
In the wake of the second world war, the US motion picture and recording industries sprang into being, thanks to the developments in film and radio technologies, coupled with the obvious propoganda potentials of those mediums. In the ww2 and post era, these industries flourished while the old industrial center declined. The US work ethic had diminished to such an extent by the 60s, that entertainment and pleasure were basically the primary motivational force in people's lives. The idolization of hollywood actors and actresses really came alive. This generation was blinded by hollywood and television, greedily assimilated the "disposable goods" philosophy, and the media industry grew like crazy. (There is no coincidence that this is the golden age of filmography and music in the US. The vast majority of holdings of those industries were created during this time frame. It was a perfect storm for the entertainment industry.) During this time, the technology to really export entertainment to other countries came into
I would say its worse than that.
I live in the US. Our major exports are IP (movies, recordings, blueprints, and software all together in one group), raw food stuffs, military equipment/aviation goodies, and bad legislation.
Eg, other than corrupt factory farm operations, (why's the park smell so stinky mommy? That's just the columbia meat packing plant on the hill dear.) And aerospace + military industrial (lockheed martin, boeing, and pals), intellectual property is about the only relevant industry the US has, other than bullshit like the bank and loan infrastructure.
This is why politicians are all too happy to take bribes err.... "campaign contributions" from those industries, and why they are treated like sacred cows in terms of regulatory compliance issues, and in terms of getting carte blanc with proposing legislation.
The US is anemic as hell. My government knows it. They want golden parachutes for when the shit hits, so they stay cuddly with multinationals.
No, the US govt is the MPAA's bitch.
The US embassy serves the US govt.
As such, the MPAA's cozy relationship with US politicians permits these sorts of things.
No quid pr quo my hairy white ass.
Poe?
I realize that laudum contains alcohol, but is not exactly what envision by "hard liquor."
Then again, I suppose its the "poppy" version of gin..... (gin also being medicinal in origin and commonly misused.)
Not purpetually. Normal (non cancerous) cell lines can only be divided 50 times before reaching senecense.
An aging stemcell line can only be reprimed that way for so long before the cells just sit in the dish and do nothing.
My bet's on something in the likes of:
"We are the executive branch, we enact laws, not enforce them. We suggest you petition the judiciary... wait? They don't accept petitions? Well, sucks to be you then."
Many of the ethical concerns over embryonic cells would be ended if the collection method was nondestructive.
The problem was hamfisted legislation that treats embryonic blast collection as being equal to murdering babies.
There are single cell extraction techniques which allow cells to be nondestructively collected. This process is used in screening for ivf, prior to embryo selection. (This is how they pick only safe embryos, and not ones likely to produce children with developmental disorders.)
I would rather see legislation prohibiting destructive collection, than against any collection at all.
The issue here, is that we have cells previously collected using the destructive methods prior to the moratorium sitting in freezers, when those tissues could be used for fundamental research.
It is my understanding that demand for these lines is high, as many cultures were co-cultured with mouse tissue for purposes of expediency. This limits the number of "purely human" cultures that are suitale for medical research to a much smaller subset of the already limited cell lines available. (Note, the mouse contaminated lines are not genetically blended. They are just heterogenous.)
What I would personally like to see is an end to the moratorium on federal funding for embryonic cells, with the provision that all NEW lines be derived nondestructively.
Doing that would radically reduce the ethical concerns surrounding their use.
Our ability to create, use, and evaluate adult stemcells is directly tied to the fundamental research done with embryonic ones.
However, I don't support your position on unfettered research. To me that opens far too big of a pandora's box into the realm of public health. Oversight and good proceedure are vital to good research.
That does help, but the title is misleading. Embrionic stemcells are usually implied to be the pluripotent kind.
This is an interesting development, as it means the researchers were successful in reliably creating retinal epithelial cells from such a culture.
This increases my excitement about the trial. I still don't see why they elected to use an embryonic line instead of a host derived ips line.
A prior poster commented that it was due to the wording of their trial's funding, which is why I ask. Why was the funding grant for the trial tied exclusively to embryonic cell cultures?
The actual merit of the trial is that cultured retinal epithelial cells appear safe, and effective.
The source of the tissue shouldn't matter a whole lot after being differentiated, other than the ethical concerns. Given the scarcity of embryonic lines for research into pluripotency, wouldn't it have made more sense to keep them there?
There is no doubt that embryonic stemcells can theoretically cure any age related degenerative disorder, and a number of genetically inherited degenerative disorders.
Afterall, if left alone, these cells produce entire functioning bodies.
The problem comes from understanding the complex game of chemical "charades" these cells play with one another to control the way the cells differintiate.
I have no qualms about them being studied in a laboratory to unlock those secrets, but blindly injecting them into patients given what we have learned suggests this is a rash and dangerous enterprise. A totipotent culture can only become a specific tissue type, and is much safer. (Like bone marrow.) If cultured from the patient directly, the graft won't suffer host rejection either.
I just don't understand the desire to put potentially dagerous cell lines into patients who are deperate. It smacks of callousness and wrecklessness.