When did it become civil discourse to respond to someone's comment with "you fucking idiot"?
Jesus Christ, every time I express a strong dissenting opinion on slashdot I get multiple replies with telling me to fuck myself, calling me an asshole, calling me an idiot.
Can't you people disagree with my disagreement and leave it at that? Do you have to throw out a non-stop stream of epithets along the way? Am I really not deserving of respect or life itself simply because I disagree with you?
If you're saying it's more transparent and more satisfying to the parent to see them tried locally then I suppose that's possible. But if you're arguing that military sentences are lax then you'd be dead wrong. "Unspecified disciplinary action" sounds like you believe it will all be swept under the rug, but if the solider has actually been turned over to the provost marshal and shipped home his life is over. The Uniform Code of Military Justice does not fuck around, and soldiers don't get off easily.
It's a problem with our military, and with any military operating abroad, for crimes off-base to be covered up within platoons or reported by the foreign national to a service member who, whether acting honorably or not, doesn't correctly refer it to the military police. But even implying that the official procedure doesn't sufficiently investigate and punish the crimes of service members is dead wrong. In many cases the punishment is far more than people would receive in civilian courts, either American or those of the host country, and it's almost never less.
Don't forget that military law is very strictly followed and absolutely vicious in its penalties. There are numerous instances in which crimes are silenced or covered up at the unit level, but once the wheels get rolling the JAG will cremate your ass. A friend of mine was killed downtown by a soldier driving drunk. Because he was off-duty and off-base at the time he was tried in civilian court, resulting in a two year sentence and a dishonorable discharge. I was told he could easily have gotten life in the stockade if it had happened on-base and he'd thus been tried by an advocate.
I don't really appreciate it when people conflate the cover ups and obstructionist solidarity that occurs between enlisted men with lax discipline and global, willful ignorance of criminal behavior throughout the command. Not being prosecuting because your sergeant helped you cover it up is one thing, and common enough, but officers rarely tolerate such a cover up when they find out, and in cases actually prosecuted military justice is usually too harsh, not too lax.
It was only a matter of time before the absurdly loose libel laws and near total lack of privacy law in the UK combined in some manner even more horrifying than either of them were individually.
Yes, because simply ignoring government officials, right up until the time you shoot them, is totally the most efficient and rational way of objecting to their conduct.
Adaptations of this quote to every possible privacy or liberty issue deeply offend me.
This poem was the poignant reflection of a German theologian who was actually very humble and self-effacing in his phrasing. He supported Hitler initially but became disillusioned with the totalitarianism of the National Socialists (Nazis) somewhat quickly and spearheaded a group of German clergy who opposed the party. Most of the group caved, but he stayed the course and was finally arrested in 1937. He spent the rest of the war in concentration camps, right up until liberation day. As I understand it he hardly waited till the last moment or until everyone else was gone before he objected, and he felt more guilt about what he *did* tolerate than most other Germans ever did.
So in short, the quote concerns Nazis coming to kill you after eliminating every other scapegoat and dissenting voice in the entire nation. It's petulent, hyperbolic, and actually a rather clear invocation of Godwin's Law to immediately invoke it and pervert it for every piddling privacy violation or TSA bullshit-festival.
I understand you're making an important point about social tragedy and slippery slopes, but they're not Nazis and they're not coming to *kill* you, for God sake. If you absolutely most invoke it, at least quote the original rather than making indulgent, self-righteous parodies, and please consider saving it for more extreme situations.
I always object to people who call driving a right, because political discourse is confused to the point where people confuse rights with liberties.
A right is something you have the privilege to do within the bounds of constitutional law, a thing in which no other citizen can discriminate against you or prevent you from doing, nor the government where it acts as an employer, a buyer of goods, etc. A liberty is generally something the government cannot prevent you from doing, under almost any circumstances. So they're very similar, but not the same.
Driving may have been ruled a right, but it comes with high social costs and responsibilities. It's entirely fair for a legitimate government to certify and restrict drivers in some ways. Many people define driving as a "right" when their argument really defines a liberty, something to which they have absolute privilege and over which they perceive any government oversight as some illegitimate, collectivist intrusion. That always seems to me like social-Darwinist propaganda, the notion that a tool almost entirely dependent on trillions of dollars in public infrastructure and able to kill people at any moment should be an unrestricted, guaranteed 'right'.
I still believe that driving is a privilege in the sense that it can be taken away in response to repeatedly shirking your share of the social costs or endangering other people. It is, if you will, both a right and a privilege. If police or courts are overstepping their bounds in pushing some ludicrous, alternate definition of driving as exclusively a privilege which you enjoy at the pleasure of the state, then directly attack those policies rather than inventing a second alternate reality in which you have unrestricted access to automobiles at all times and without any social responsibility attached.
reign in the absurd salaries that hospital executives can make
So with all the places career executives can work you want to make hospitals, of all places, less attractive? Anyone who excels in managing the people and facilities who save lives and successfully controls costs while doing so deserves a damn high salary indeed. They need some new merit-based pay rules, clearly, to make those two goals major priorities in their work, but again anyone who can do those two things well is an irreplaceable asset.
Sometimes I think this about privacy and surveillance issues. People argue that a cop watching things on the street corner and a camera on the light post are totally different in every possible way, and the second is absolutely unacceptable.
Sometimes people get so carried away when technology is involved they ignore the underlying issue, about which they're actually right, and get so lost in techno-bashing that they just sound like Luddite freaks. When it comes to surveillance I don't give a shit about how they watch me, I care if I'm being watched. Are these people saying it's ok to simply hire a thousand cops to watch every street corner all the time or what?
Supreme Courts don't examine criminal cases to determine the Truth. They almost never examine them for anything but findings of law: was the case tried in good accordance with all criminal and trial laws that applied? If they think it was, the lower court rulings stand. If they think it wasn't, they direct the lower court to retry the case or some such thing. Supreme Court decisions don't examine or comment on whether the accused is guilty or innocent, and they don't even care 'what really happened' or 'who the real killer was'.
As such it's awfully difficult to imagine many cases in which their decisions could bring shame to anyone except a bad lawyer.
An 11% improvement in a subjective, multifactorial category like 'relaxation' and they're calling it the World's Best Music for that purpose? Why are we reading this mumbo jumbo, even in idle?
I don't know whose editorial judgment sucks more, samzenpus or Timothy. I'd say samzen just took a major lead for the day, though.
Great. Another industry that can blame massive price increases on some sort of natural disaster or political instability, and conveniently leave prices there when the danger has passed.
How long do you think it will take for prices to come back down once all of these plants are repaired or replaced? Will they ever come down? Southeast asian semi-conductor manufacturing is already rife with price-fixing and other grossly anti-competitive practices. Throw in this flooding which, albeit temporarily, provides a real excuse for some short supply and weakened competition and I bet we'll never hear the end of it.
I just meant to argue that you can't burn more energy without giving it a place to go. With DNP, that energy went into sheer heat production, and thus despite its effectiveness people were uncomfortable or dangerously unhealthy while taking it. You're right that it's not totally analogous to a biomechanical device diverting some glucose.
I guess my underlying point is that cells are unbelievably delicate and that thermodynamics works just the same at the cellular level as it does in a car. The rate of energy transformation, the optimum temperature of reactions, and the quanta used in transporting energy have been tuned to unbelievable precision in living organisms; many of the proteins involved have been so highly conserved that you can take them out of a human, put them into yeast, and they'll still work perfectly at the exact same tasks they performed for the human. That the most complex and the most simple eukaryotes can freely exchange power plants strongly suggests that the way life uses energy is so delicate, so specific, that anyone who tried any other way in the last 1.5 billion years is now dead.
Now thermodynamics isn't my specialty, but I know energy transformations usually also release an amount of energy to the environment, usually as heat, in some proportion to the energy change of the reaction itself. Saying you can run an artificial metabolic device inside a human being, and then intentionally overclock for the express purpose of consuming more energy, without releasing a dangerous amount of heat is nonsense. Most people bringing up the weight loss thing haven't been aware of the heat that could be produced or even mentioned the idea of where the excess heat and electricity could go. Even those who do mention it, by suggesting things like charging batteries with the excess, still aren't understanding the amount of heat that will be lost in transforming chemical energy into electrical action and then back into chemical energy (in the form of the electrochemical gradient of a charged battery).
For people used to computers and cars it can be difficult to comprehend how little energy it takes to profoundly damage living things at the cellular level, and how small the windows for safe interaction with biological systems really are.
"High" fructose corn syrup is still 45% glucose. Regular sugar is only 50%.
I don't really understand why HFC is so dangerous metabolically, but in terms of every day chemistry it's almost identical to ordinary sugar, and an electrical device only cares about the chemistry.
I love how people who lecture me on physics or computer science when I make a mistake are yapping on about biology likes it's the easiest thing in the world. Of course you can just turn it up to lose weight!
When it's AI or nanotechnology 95% of the responses are "what could possibly go wrong", but when it's biology they think we can just change whatever we want. Weight loss device indeed....
I suspect they're not at all worried about the issues you bring up, the body handles hydrogen peroxide just fine and the problem they're trying to solve is to how to get -more- energy out of the reaction, not less.
You're totally missing my point, and you're misunderstanding their research. They're not trying to get more energy out of the reaction at all, and no one is saying they should be trying to get less.
All the cell does is substitute itself for a single step in the break down of glucose to divert the energy to the implanted device; it doesn't change the net energy released by the reaction whatsoever. The device is just stealing some energy; it doesn't re-engineer the reactions involved.
The device gets its energy by substituting itself for a single step in the break-down of glucose; there are dozens of steps. Well over 95% of the energy in sugar will still be available for your body to use in the ordinary way.
In other words all the implant does is use the enzyme glucose oxidase to turn this into that. The full process cooks it all the way down to water and carbon dioxide.
No. Read my other posts and you'll learn why. You can't control weight by simply changing the amount of energy your biochemistry uses; see this drug as one example of why not. DNP
If only that were true. Without coupling the energy to some kind of useful work, however, letting people eat more than they need is impossible. Human bodies are still subject to physics: you can't just turn up the thermostat and assume the room will stay the same temperature, nor can people simply burn more energy while living the same life style in the same body.
Just generating an electrical charge with the excess calories, as the implant would do, isn't effective: where does the charge go? It can't keep building up in the human body; eventually it will leak enough to start damaging things, and the escaping charge could even stop your heart once you happened to ground yourself on something. If you simply let the energy disperse as heat it will cook people to death (this drug let people sweat off their excess pounds by simply doing more biochemical work, just as you're proposing for the implant, and the drug caused dangerous hyperthermia. DNP).
Not to mention that the device doesn't burn the extra calories completely; if I'm reading right it only substitutes itself for a single step in the oxidation of glucose, and after that your body still has to deal with all the remaining energy (at least 95% of the available total) the old fashioned way.
A device like this breaks down glucose, which releases energy. If you couple that energy to building something else in your body, or use it to make electricity as the implant is doing, then that's fine. But breaking glucose to increase your metabolism will just lead to producing so much electricity in the implant that it starts fucking with your nervous system or even stops your heart (which would happen at much lower power levels than you'd think).
There's one more option for dispersing the excess energy you'd get from increasing your metabolism, of course: it could just be used as heat. But increasing your metabolism by simply turning up the thermostat is dangerous, and gets you much too hot very quickly. There's actually a drug called DNP that does just that, but making your mitochondria waste a lot of energy in the production of ATP. While DNP effectively increases your metabolism and was used as a weight loss drug in the 1930's, it also leads to cataracts and cases of lethal hyperthermia (translation: cooking yourself to death from the inside) so it was discontinued. Athletes and body builders still use it to burn fat fast, but it's really dangerous and can't be used on a regular basis.
Animals actually use special fatty tissues, called brown fats, that wastes energy in exactly the way that DNP would force your entire body to waste energy. It appears in babies or on vital areas in cold-weather animals as organic heating pads, and some animals also use it to regulate or recover from hibernation.
This is a little scary. At the best of times their pathway will involve creating highly dangerous hydrogen peroxide as a primary product. Other normal biological processes make peroxide, too, but it's still scary shit. When you put hydrogen peroxide on a cut in your hand that bubbling your hear is the sound of the peroxide eating through the contents of every damaged cell in the place.
There's also the creation of superoxide radicals, singlet oxygen, etc. to consider. Any enzyme that binds oxygen or catalyzes oxygen-related reactions generates some of these free radicals here and there; it's just the way life works. Hemoglobin does it in blood cells, cytochrome oxidase does it in mitochondria while making bio-energy the old-fashioned way, and the glucose oxidase used in this fuel cell does it. And those free radicals can go through your DNA like a wood chipper through an IKEA end table.
Ultimately this story is a little ague, and the studies they describe aren't nearly long enough to have any idea whether the rate of free radical production is too high. The rat survived for 40 days, but we want to put this into people and let it work for 40 years.
And don't forget that glucose contains 100 times more energy than cells normally work with directly: living cells put glucose through dozens of intermediate chemical reactions, each harvesting just a bit of energy, to transform its 686 kilocalories per mole into a cellular energy source containing a safe, usable 7.3 kilocalories per mole. I'm not saying they don't know what they're doing, but using glucose for anything in living cells is like dismantling an artillery shell into a pile of fire starters. It's ridiculously complicated, and the biological mechanisms for doing it have been very, very highly conserved by evolution for billions of years, meaning there's one way to get it right and about a trillion ways (literally) to get it wrong. Starting with an existing enzyme lessens most of those concerns, but it's still a dangerous process and easy to fuck up.
Anyway, I'm not trying to piss on their parade or play the armchair academic here; I think this is great and I'm sure they know what they're doing. I just thought you'd be interested to know where the concerns are and why this is such an ambitious project.
Yeah, prepare to mod me down, but I'm one of those people who thinks communism hasn't really been tried.
I understand that every social theory gets about 500% more complicated once you take it out of your mental laboratory, but saying that communism is a failure based on the attempts of brain-damaged megalomaniacs like Stalin and Kim Jong Ill is kind of ridiculous. Very few systems have ever been communist even in name, and none have been even remotely close in practice. Not all communist thinkers advocate blind, mooney-eyed collectivism or some socialist plutocracy masquerading as communism; Marx himself never suggested anything of the sort, either.
Human nature probably makes communism the most difficult government to implement, but "most difficult" isn't a synonym for "impossible" and I still think a communist system could be the most rewarding.
I see the first five responses were about science fiction scenarios in which nanomachines destroyed human life.
All that's really necessary to prevent the machines from getting out of control, however, is to design them with some chemical dependencies. If it needs gold or it can only incorporate carbon from certain uncommon molecules to grow then it can't get very far. Plus, natural selection will be true in part with any self-replicating thing. If they get out they'll have to struggle for resources just like any other form of life. There isn't any reason to automatically assume they'll be better at it simply because they're artificial.
There are even scenarios in which it might be nice to design nanomechanical organisms with the express purpose of setting them free; I'd sure like an organism that got along by fixing the carbon in carbon monoxide, the ozone in smog, and the nitrogen in nitrogen dioxide to replicate itself. It could make Los Angeles habitable again, and its reproduction would be limited to the rate at which we produce pollutants.
Unions fighting to keep featherbedding [wikipedia.org] in place and prices high. Just another reason that unions have far outlived their usefulness.
I'll never forget when my hometown newspaper laid off some people and the union "accused them of firing workers to save money." I mean, how dare a corporation stop giving money to people it doesn't need?
I still think unions are a net positive; without them American workers might still be abused just the way those poor bastards in Foxconn factories are today. But some unions are certainly worthless, protectionist roadblocks on the road to progress. I have to admit that on the scale of stupid organizations, a bad union falls way down near the bottom.
Slashdot Mirror
When did it become civil discourse to respond to someone's comment with "you fucking idiot"?
Jesus Christ, every time I express a strong dissenting opinion on slashdot I get multiple replies with telling me to fuck myself, calling me an asshole, calling me an idiot.
Can't you people disagree with my disagreement and leave it at that? Do you have to throw out a non-stop stream of epithets along the way? Am I really not deserving of respect or life itself simply because I disagree with you?
If you're saying it's more transparent and more satisfying to the parent to see them tried locally then I suppose that's possible. But if you're arguing that military sentences are lax then you'd be dead wrong. "Unspecified disciplinary action" sounds like you believe it will all be swept under the rug, but if the solider has actually been turned over to the provost marshal and shipped home his life is over. The Uniform Code of Military Justice does not fuck around, and soldiers don't get off easily.
It's a problem with our military, and with any military operating abroad, for crimes off-base to be covered up within platoons or reported by the foreign national to a service member who, whether acting honorably or not, doesn't correctly refer it to the military police. But even implying that the official procedure doesn't sufficiently investigate and punish the crimes of service members is dead wrong. In many cases the punishment is far more than people would receive in civilian courts, either American or those of the host country, and it's almost never less.
Don't forget that military law is very strictly followed and absolutely vicious in its penalties. There are numerous instances in which crimes are silenced or covered up at the unit level, but once the wheels get rolling the JAG will cremate your ass. A friend of mine was killed downtown by a soldier driving drunk. Because he was off-duty and off-base at the time he was tried in civilian court, resulting in a two year sentence and a dishonorable discharge. I was told he could easily have gotten life in the stockade if it had happened on-base and he'd thus been tried by an advocate.
I don't really appreciate it when people conflate the cover ups and obstructionist solidarity that occurs between enlisted men with lax discipline and global, willful ignorance of criminal behavior throughout the command. Not being prosecuting because your sergeant helped you cover it up is one thing, and common enough, but officers rarely tolerate such a cover up when they find out, and in cases actually prosecuted military justice is usually too harsh, not too lax.
Funny you should be talking about penis size, Eunuchswear....
It was only a matter of time before the absurdly loose libel laws and near total lack of privacy law in the UK combined in some manner even more horrifying than either of them were individually.
Synergy at its darkest.
Yes, because simply ignoring government officials, right up until the time you shoot them, is totally the most efficient and rational way of objecting to their conduct.
Adaptations of this quote to every possible privacy or liberty issue deeply offend me.
This poem was the poignant reflection of a German theologian who was actually very humble and self-effacing in his phrasing. He supported Hitler initially but became disillusioned with the totalitarianism of the National Socialists (Nazis) somewhat quickly and spearheaded a group of German clergy who opposed the party. Most of the group caved, but he stayed the course and was finally arrested in 1937. He spent the rest of the war in concentration camps, right up until liberation day. As I understand it he hardly waited till the last moment or until everyone else was gone before he objected, and he felt more guilt about what he *did* tolerate than most other Germans ever did.
So in short, the quote concerns Nazis coming to kill you after eliminating every other scapegoat and dissenting voice in the entire nation. It's petulent, hyperbolic, and actually a rather clear invocation of Godwin's Law to immediately invoke it and pervert it for every piddling privacy violation or TSA bullshit-festival.
I understand you're making an important point about social tragedy and slippery slopes, but they're not Nazis and they're not coming to *kill* you, for God sake. If you absolutely most invoke it, at least quote the original rather than making indulgent, self-righteous parodies, and please consider saving it for more extreme situations.
I always object to people who call driving a right, because political discourse is confused to the point where people confuse rights with liberties.
A right is something you have the privilege to do within the bounds of constitutional law, a thing in which no other citizen can discriminate against you or prevent you from doing, nor the government where it acts as an employer, a buyer of goods, etc. A liberty is generally something the government cannot prevent you from doing, under almost any circumstances. So they're very similar, but not the same.
Driving may have been ruled a right, but it comes with high social costs and responsibilities. It's entirely fair for a legitimate government to certify and restrict drivers in some ways. Many people define driving as a "right" when their argument really defines a liberty, something to which they have absolute privilege and over which they perceive any government oversight as some illegitimate, collectivist intrusion. That always seems to me like social-Darwinist propaganda, the notion that a tool almost entirely dependent on trillions of dollars in public infrastructure and able to kill people at any moment should be an unrestricted, guaranteed 'right'.
I still believe that driving is a privilege in the sense that it can be taken away in response to repeatedly shirking your share of the social costs or endangering other people. It is, if you will, both a right and a privilege. If police or courts are overstepping their bounds in pushing some ludicrous, alternate definition of driving as exclusively a privilege which you enjoy at the pleasure of the state, then directly attack those policies rather than inventing a second alternate reality in which you have unrestricted access to automobiles at all times and without any social responsibility attached.
reign in the absurd salaries that hospital executives can make
So with all the places career executives can work you want to make hospitals, of all places, less attractive? Anyone who excels in managing the people and facilities who save lives and successfully controls costs while doing so deserves a damn high salary indeed. They need some new merit-based pay rules, clearly, to make those two goals major priorities in their work, but again anyone who can do those two things well is an irreplaceable asset.
Sometimes I think this about privacy and surveillance issues. People argue that a cop watching things on the street corner and a camera on the light post are totally different in every possible way, and the second is absolutely unacceptable.
Sometimes people get so carried away when technology is involved they ignore the underlying issue, about which they're actually right, and get so lost in techno-bashing that they just sound like Luddite freaks. When it comes to surveillance I don't give a shit about how they watch me, I care if I'm being watched. Are these people saying it's ok to simply hire a thousand cops to watch every street corner all the time or what?
Supreme Courts don't examine criminal cases to determine the Truth. They almost never examine them for anything but findings of law: was the case tried in good accordance with all criminal and trial laws that applied? If they think it was, the lower court rulings stand. If they think it wasn't, they direct the lower court to retry the case or some such thing. Supreme Court decisions don't examine or comment on whether the accused is guilty or innocent, and they don't even care 'what really happened' or 'who the real killer was'.
As such it's awfully difficult to imagine many cases in which their decisions could bring shame to anyone except a bad lawyer.
An 11% improvement in a subjective, multifactorial category like 'relaxation' and they're calling it the World's Best Music for that purpose? Why are we reading this mumbo jumbo, even in idle?
I don't know whose editorial judgment sucks more, samzenpus or Timothy. I'd say samzen just took a major lead for the day, though.
Great. Another industry that can blame massive price increases on some sort of natural disaster or political instability, and conveniently leave prices there when the danger has passed.
How long do you think it will take for prices to come back down once all of these plants are repaired or replaced? Will they ever come down? Southeast asian semi-conductor manufacturing is already rife with price-fixing and other grossly anti-competitive practices. Throw in this flooding which, albeit temporarily, provides a real excuse for some short supply and weakened competition and I bet we'll never hear the end of it.
I just meant to argue that you can't burn more energy without giving it a place to go. With DNP, that energy went into sheer heat production, and thus despite its effectiveness people were uncomfortable or dangerously unhealthy while taking it. You're right that it's not totally analogous to a biomechanical device diverting some glucose.
I guess my underlying point is that cells are unbelievably delicate and that thermodynamics works just the same at the cellular level as it does in a car. The rate of energy transformation, the optimum temperature of reactions, and the quanta used in transporting energy have been tuned to unbelievable precision in living organisms; many of the proteins involved have been so highly conserved that you can take them out of a human, put them into yeast, and they'll still work perfectly at the exact same tasks they performed for the human. That the most complex and the most simple eukaryotes can freely exchange power plants strongly suggests that the way life uses energy is so delicate, so specific, that anyone who tried any other way in the last 1.5 billion years is now dead.
Now thermodynamics isn't my specialty, but I know energy transformations usually also release an amount of energy to the environment, usually as heat, in some proportion to the energy change of the reaction itself. Saying you can run an artificial metabolic device inside a human being, and then intentionally overclock for the express purpose of consuming more energy, without releasing a dangerous amount of heat is nonsense. Most people bringing up the weight loss thing haven't been aware of the heat that could be produced or even mentioned the idea of where the excess heat and electricity could go. Even those who do mention it, by suggesting things like charging batteries with the excess, still aren't understanding the amount of heat that will be lost in transforming chemical energy into electrical action and then back into chemical energy (in the form of the electrochemical gradient of a charged battery).
For people used to computers and cars it can be difficult to comprehend how little energy it takes to profoundly damage living things at the cellular level, and how small the windows for safe interaction with biological systems really are.
"High" fructose corn syrup is still 45% glucose. Regular sugar is only 50%.
I don't really understand why HFC is so dangerous metabolically, but in terms of every day chemistry it's almost identical to ordinary sugar, and an electrical device only cares about the chemistry.
I love how people who lecture me on physics or computer science when I make a mistake are yapping on about biology likes it's the easiest thing in the world. Of course you can just turn it up to lose weight!
When it's AI or nanotechnology 95% of the responses are "what could possibly go wrong", but when it's biology they think we can just change whatever we want. Weight loss device indeed....
I suspect they're not at all worried about the issues you bring up, the body handles hydrogen peroxide just fine and the problem they're trying to solve is to how to get -more- energy out of the reaction, not less.
You're totally missing my point, and you're misunderstanding their research. They're not trying to get more energy out of the reaction at all, and no one is saying they should be trying to get less.
All the cell does is substitute itself for a single step in the break down of glucose to divert the energy to the implanted device; it doesn't change the net energy released by the reaction whatsoever. The device is just stealing some energy; it doesn't re-engineer the reactions involved.
The device gets its energy by substituting itself for a single step in the break-down of glucose; there are dozens of steps. Well over 95% of the energy in sugar will still be available for your body to use in the ordinary way.
In other words all the implant does is use the enzyme glucose oxidase to turn this into that. The full process cooks it all the way down to water and carbon dioxide.
No. Read my other posts and you'll learn why. You can't control weight by simply changing the amount of energy your biochemistry uses; see this drug as one example of why not. DNP
If only that were true. Without coupling the energy to some kind of useful work, however, letting people eat more than they need is impossible. Human bodies are still subject to physics: you can't just turn up the thermostat and assume the room will stay the same temperature, nor can people simply burn more energy while living the same life style in the same body.
Just generating an electrical charge with the excess calories, as the implant would do, isn't effective: where does the charge go? It can't keep building up in the human body; eventually it will leak enough to start damaging things, and the escaping charge could even stop your heart once you happened to ground yourself on something. If you simply let the energy disperse as heat it will cook people to death (this drug let people sweat off their excess pounds by simply doing more biochemical work, just as you're proposing for the implant, and the drug caused dangerous hyperthermia. DNP).
Not to mention that the device doesn't burn the extra calories completely; if I'm reading right it only substitutes itself for a single step in the oxidation of glucose, and after that your body still has to deal with all the remaining energy (at least 95% of the available total) the old fashioned way.
No.
A device like this breaks down glucose, which releases energy. If you couple that energy to building something else in your body, or use it to make electricity as the implant is doing, then that's fine. But breaking glucose to increase your metabolism will just lead to producing so much electricity in the implant that it starts fucking with your nervous system or even stops your heart (which would happen at much lower power levels than you'd think).
There's one more option for dispersing the excess energy you'd get from increasing your metabolism, of course: it could just be used as heat. But increasing your metabolism by simply turning up the thermostat is dangerous, and gets you much too hot very quickly. There's actually a drug called DNP that does just that, but making your mitochondria waste a lot of energy in the production of ATP. While DNP effectively increases your metabolism and was used as a weight loss drug in the 1930's, it also leads to cataracts and cases of lethal hyperthermia (translation: cooking yourself to death from the inside) so it was discontinued. Athletes and body builders still use it to burn fat fast, but it's really dangerous and can't be used on a regular basis.
Animals actually use special fatty tissues, called brown fats, that wastes energy in exactly the way that DNP would force your entire body to waste energy. It appears in babies or on vital areas in cold-weather animals as organic heating pads, and some animals also use it to regulate or recover from hibernation.
This is a little scary. At the best of times their pathway will involve creating highly dangerous hydrogen peroxide as a primary product. Other normal biological processes make peroxide, too, but it's still scary shit. When you put hydrogen peroxide on a cut in your hand that bubbling your hear is the sound of the peroxide eating through the contents of every damaged cell in the place.
There's also the creation of superoxide radicals, singlet oxygen, etc. to consider. Any enzyme that binds oxygen or catalyzes oxygen-related reactions generates some of these free radicals here and there; it's just the way life works. Hemoglobin does it in blood cells, cytochrome oxidase does it in mitochondria while making bio-energy the old-fashioned way, and the glucose oxidase used in this fuel cell does it. And those free radicals can go through your DNA like a wood chipper through an IKEA end table.
Ultimately this story is a little ague, and the studies they describe aren't nearly long enough to have any idea whether the rate of free radical production is too high. The rat survived for 40 days, but we want to put this into people and let it work for 40 years.
And don't forget that glucose contains 100 times more energy than cells normally work with directly: living cells put glucose through dozens of intermediate chemical reactions, each harvesting just a bit of energy, to transform its 686 kilocalories per mole into a cellular energy source containing a safe, usable 7.3 kilocalories per mole. I'm not saying they don't know what they're doing, but using glucose for anything in living cells is like dismantling an artillery shell into a pile of fire starters. It's ridiculously complicated, and the biological mechanisms for doing it have been very, very highly conserved by evolution for billions of years, meaning there's one way to get it right and about a trillion ways (literally) to get it wrong. Starting with an existing enzyme lessens most of those concerns, but it's still a dangerous process and easy to fuck up.
Anyway, I'm not trying to piss on their parade or play the armchair academic here; I think this is great and I'm sure they know what they're doing. I just thought you'd be interested to know where the concerns are and why this is such an ambitious project.
Yeah, prepare to mod me down, but I'm one of those people who thinks communism hasn't really been tried.
I understand that every social theory gets about 500% more complicated once you take it out of your mental laboratory, but saying that communism is a failure based on the attempts of brain-damaged megalomaniacs like Stalin and Kim Jong Ill is kind of ridiculous. Very few systems have ever been communist even in name, and none have been even remotely close in practice. Not all communist thinkers advocate blind, mooney-eyed collectivism or some socialist plutocracy masquerading as communism; Marx himself never suggested anything of the sort, either.
Human nature probably makes communism the most difficult government to implement, but "most difficult" isn't a synonym for "impossible" and I still think a communist system could be the most rewarding.
I see the first five responses were about science fiction scenarios in which nanomachines destroyed human life.
All that's really necessary to prevent the machines from getting out of control, however, is to design them with some chemical dependencies. If it needs gold or it can only incorporate carbon from certain uncommon molecules to grow then it can't get very far. Plus, natural selection will be true in part with any self-replicating thing. If they get out they'll have to struggle for resources just like any other form of life. There isn't any reason to automatically assume they'll be better at it simply because they're artificial.
There are even scenarios in which it might be nice to design nanomechanical organisms with the express purpose of setting them free; I'd sure like an organism that got along by fixing the carbon in carbon monoxide, the ozone in smog, and the nitrogen in nitrogen dioxide to replicate itself. It could make Los Angeles habitable again, and its reproduction would be limited to the rate at which we produce pollutants.
Unions fighting to keep featherbedding [wikipedia.org] in place and prices high. Just another reason that unions have far outlived their usefulness.
I'll never forget when my hometown newspaper laid off some people and the union "accused them of firing workers to save money." I mean, how dare a corporation stop giving money to people it doesn't need?
I still think unions are a net positive; without them American workers might still be abused just the way those poor bastards in Foxconn factories are today. But some unions are certainly worthless, protectionist roadblocks on the road to progress. I have to admit that on the scale of stupid organizations, a bad union falls way down near the bottom.