I didn't mean being like sliders was bad, that was a good backdrop. The bad part was the kromag equivalent, except this one was omnipotent, yet incompetent alien gods.
To be fair, the whole gods aspect was often quite well done. Still, I'm saying it wasn't the real draw for the show, and got silly after a while.
My opinion: the first series' only asset was an oddly funny MacGyver faced with alternate realities, usually having to shoot his way out. The show really seemed like a one trick pony. Without MacGyver or the humor, what do you have? Sliders with alien gods that are incredibly advanced but somehow so incompetent that they always lose to 4 people with guns?
What it means in Diplomatese is that they are going to set up a commiteee first, talk to each and every nation about their preferences, and then create a document
which will enshrine the wishes of the US government and it's corporate owners, which will then be signed into treaty in secret under the guise of fighting child porn, piracy, and terrorism.
I think you're overthinking the process here, the one you described takes too long.
Say what you want about the US, but do you really want China and Saudi Arabia defining global internet standards?
It's my understanding, from Glorious People's North Korean Daily Enlightening News Broadcast, that Dear Leader already does a fine job defining global Internet standards, and there is no better judge than him.
Also, anyone who says otherwise is an american imperialist scum, even the ones from Brazil, India, China, Saudi Arabia and South Africa.
Actually it was the original post that cast things as a "simple extreme"
Ah, my bad, though I could make a case for blaming it on the threshold (which I set...)
The world is full of nations with different sized governments. Which governments do you think are more appropriately sized? Which nations would you (language issues aside) seriously consider living in?
Japan doesn't really have a military. That seems like a good deal. Taxes going to paying off pointless wars is a huge waste in my book. I'm for increased spending on social welfare, I'd rather have my tax dollars going to support lazy people who don't deserve it than my tax dollars going to blowing up people who don't deserve it. This seems at odds with what most Americans want.
I have lived there before. The language and cultural barriers were significant.
Many European countries which similarly spend more on social welfare and less on military are also strong possibilities in my near future.
Folks, please -- the whole "government == bad" thing is naive in the extreme. It can only be said by people who haven't the slightest bit of experience in places with little or no government. I'm not saying "government == good", because it certainly is not.
Unfortunately, many voters have a hard time considering abstract things in anything other than simple extremes. You actually did it too though:
There are plenty of places you can live right now with little or no government and the result is certainly not increased freedom. In such cases you're either living nearly isolated (which limits your options) or you're dealing with bandits and warlords (which limits your options).
Few people are arguing for -no- government, those that are are so out of touch that we'd really all be better off if we just ignored them. Most serious people who say "big government is bad" would advocate smaller government, less spending, fewer regulations on business or personal freedoms (or both.) I would say I'm for "smaller governments." By that I would mean unnecessary regulations and spending should be cut, which I think everyone would agree with. We mostly disagree with what's necessary vs unnecessary.
What it does know is that it has the power of a mob. Arrest one person in a mob? You still have a mob.
On the other hand, start shooting just a few individuals in a mob, and you'll disperse the mob even if you don't have enough bullets for everyone in the mob. If they start a few arresting/suing individuals with the heavy handed tactics they're going to use, I suspect fewer people will participate. Ten years ago I may have considered LOIC to be a worthy cause and participated, but would have been scared back to my pillow fort if they started going after individuals. Today I'm just too jaded and cowardly to leave my pillow fort in the first place.
Hurray, we can turn safely contained pollution on/in the ground into air pollution!
You're presenting it as instead of landfill bulk, we now have pollution in the air. That's a false dichotomy. We're already going to burn oil, doesn't matter if we get the oil from plastic recycled or "fresh" from the ground.
This way we have only the air pollution instead of air pollution, plastic bottles in the sea, AND oil spills in the gulf of Mexico.
Air Force, meet Streisand Effect. You to are about to get to know each other quite well I think.
I doubt their intent was to keep this thing under more wraps. I would guess this is someone who is just trying to cover their ass. The "in order to keep classified material off unclassified computer systems" sounds like something that, despite being completely idiotic in this case, is still someone's job. I could definitely imagine a general or congressman getting upset because airmen were viewing wikileaks and, I don't know "getting demoralized" or something, and someone's ass being on the line as a scapegoat for that technicality.
The fact that it will do nothing in terms of the information getting out doesn't matter to the people doing it: their jobs are still safer. It seems to me that extremely few people in the military or government ever got in trouble for erring on the side of "censor it."
Carrying one of these puppies comes with the cool prestige of being able to hit on the classy girl at the bar with James Bond lines like "Either I *am* a spy, or I'm getting spied *on*--that's for you to decide, my darling."
Heck, I get that now Taliban plutonium Iran Allah Washington DC.
I was actually enjoying your comment until encountering this bit of prejudicial age-ist nonsense
...at which point I spit my prune juice out and shook my cane at the screen. I didn't fight the communists of Hollywood daily for 40 years just to be OFFENDED by something I read on the INTERNET!!!
Second the reason 68% of Americans don't have broadband is because the FCC REDEFINED it. It used to be 256k was called "broadband" and now they redefined it as 4000k so tons of people (including me) suddenly are considered non-broadband even though we purchased Broadband lines (like DSL or cable).
It's basically 1984. Redefine the words and change the meaning. (shrug):-)
I know! My dell circa 1995 was "cutting edge!" Now just a of a decade-and-a-half later, it's been downgraded to "Wait, is that YOUR computer or your grandmother's?" status? It's just not right them changing the standards! Darn government interference!
Ron Paul, Julian Assange, cows, hockey, Vladimir Putin and PayPal? I'm sorry, that's one orgy I don't want to be invited to.
Why not!?! I don't know how conversations usually go before, during, or after interspecies orgies usually go, but I'm guessing the most interesting ones ever would be at THAT orgy. The book deal alone would probably cover the therapy bills.
We don't have to wonder, since the SecDef has said that no US soldiers, missions, or security were harmed or jeapordized by the Wikileaks releases. So what are they so mad about?
Wounded, stupid national pride. Some of our knuckle-dragging citizens take great pride in our military strength, as if an obscene amount of their tax dollars spent on defending against largely imagined enemies somehow makes them great. The idea that one somewhat effete-looking foreigner beat the military is confusing and upsetting to them. That pride is already hurt because we were unable to pull off decisive victories in both the wars we started.
It's kind of like if the math geek the varsity football team looked down on took the quarterback's lunch money right after they lost to a junior team. Whether or not the QB had stolen that money from someone in the first place, even though the math geek stealing the money had nothing to do with their inability to win, and even though nothing bad came about the money stolen has little to do with it.
Just a few generations ago, some people considered Africans subhuman. Some people considered the mildly retarded subhuman. Some considered Jews subhuman.
My standards for "personhood" include "having a central nervous system" and "are recognizably human?" I'm inherently biased in favor of those standards, but I think they're better than the standards that racists use.
If you really value ESCs, just saying that they aren't human isn't enough to quell this fear. You'd have to give your logical reasons why...
That would have been completely tangential to my point though (which was that ESC research is still valuable). More important, stating my reasons why I don't consider IVF embryos human lives would have been redundant with the reasons mentioned by others here already.
So you have no objection to being forced under the dissection knife right or forced to be experimented on in order to help figure out how adults age? It's the same argument.
No, an embryonic stem cell is not a person by anyone's standards. A leftover embryo from IVF scheduled for incineration is not a person by my standards. I am a person by my standards.
You seem to be arguing that we should cover up the fact that iPSCs so that they don't think ESCs are useless and therefore allow them to be banned. Is this correct?
You know full well it's not. I'm not advocating covering anything up. It would be nice though if people realized there was more benefit from ESC research than repairing spinal cords.
Sorry to be a stickler over terms, but "adult stem cell" and "induced pluripotent stem cells" are two different things. An adult stem cell is a stem cell from the adult (or child) body which can effectively be used as is. These generally have a narrower range of fates. You can take a blood stem cell and it will produce blood cells. It will not produce neurons, but you don't have to change it's epigenetics to get it to produce blood.
iPS on the other hand are cells which don't need to be stem cells initially, but have to be epigenetically "reset" to produce anything. To do this, you need to manipulate it a bit to make it more like an embryonic stem cell. The upside is that it can produce, say, spinal cord neurons, and you avoid host rejection since you can use a patient's own cells. The downside is that the manipulations are very low efficiency and the risk of producing cancer is likely increased.
Two different things. This is a "score" for iPS, not adult stem cells. I guess it's not too important if you're more concerned with "They're not harvested from embryos" than accuracy, but there is a real difference.
To clarify, the blurb from "inquirer.net" was light on that detail but was not written by the scientists involved in the research. They undoubtedly wrote it up and submitted it for peer-review, and will include the experimental details.
It may also be that they did a control of the same things with embryonic stem cells. It would make sense: if the iPS monkeys didn't recover the same mobility the ESC monkeys did, that would be important to know.
Not quite, ESC are mostly used right now for basic research into cell biology. One fairly small down side to results like these, where adult stem cells or IPsC get results for treatment, is that people forget the fact that there's more to learn here than how to repair a spinal cord. We haven't figured out how a fertilized egg becomes a full human, ESC are a valuable tool to that end. If people get the idea that there's nothing more to do with ESC since we can fix monkey spinal cords, ESC research is going to become illegal.
These actually are "induced pluripotent stem cells" not "adult stem cells." The difference being that these are adult skin cells (fibroblasts technically) that have been manipulated, likely by viral transfection of 3 or 4 genes (genes which have been linked to cancer) to become -like- embryonic stem cells.
Adult stem cells which would regenerate your spinal cord without manipulation have not really been done much. There is a population of stem cells found in mouse whisker roots that seem to do the job, and I'm not sure why that hasn't gotten more press. There might be some in the center of your brain, but I don't think harvesting those have been considered as treatment for CNS injuries for obvious reasons.
Embryonic stem cells and IPsC both appear to have the same broad range of potential fates, wheras most people don't think adult stem cell populations would.
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I didn't mean being like sliders was bad, that was a good backdrop. The bad part was the kromag equivalent, except this one was omnipotent, yet incompetent alien gods.
To be fair, the whole gods aspect was often quite well done. Still, I'm saying it wasn't the real draw for the show, and got silly after a while.
My opinion: the first series' only asset was an oddly funny MacGyver faced with alternate realities, usually having to shoot his way out. The show really seemed like a one trick pony. Without MacGyver or the humor, what do you have? Sliders with alien gods that are incredibly advanced but somehow so incompetent that they always lose to 4 people with guns?
What it means in Diplomatese is that they are going to set up a commiteee first, talk to each and every nation about their preferences, and then create a document
which will enshrine the wishes of the US government and it's corporate owners, which will then be signed into treaty in secret under the guise of fighting child porn, piracy, and terrorism.
I think you're overthinking the process here, the one you described takes too long.
Say what you want about the US, but do you really want China and Saudi Arabia defining global internet standards?
It's my understanding, from Glorious People's North Korean Daily Enlightening News Broadcast, that Dear Leader already does a fine job defining global Internet standards, and there is no better judge than him.
Also, anyone who says otherwise is an american imperialist scum, even the ones from Brazil, India, China, Saudi Arabia and South Africa.
Actually it was the original post that cast things as a "simple extreme"
Ah, my bad, though I could make a case for blaming it on the threshold (which I set...)
The world is full of nations with different sized governments. Which governments do you think are more appropriately sized? Which nations would you (language issues aside) seriously consider living in?
Japan doesn't really have a military. That seems like a good deal. Taxes going to paying off pointless wars is a huge waste in my book. I'm for increased spending on social welfare, I'd rather have my tax dollars going to support lazy people who don't deserve it than my tax dollars going to blowing up people who don't deserve it. This seems at odds with what most Americans want.
I have lived there before. The language and cultural barriers were significant.
Many European countries which similarly spend more on social welfare and less on military are also strong possibilities in my near future.
Folks, please -- the whole "government == bad" thing is naive in the extreme. It can only be said by people who haven't the slightest bit of experience in places with little or no government. I'm not saying "government == good", because it certainly is not.
Unfortunately, many voters have a hard time considering abstract things in anything other than simple extremes. You actually did it too though:
There are plenty of places you can live right now with little or no government and the result is certainly not increased freedom. In such cases you're either living nearly isolated (which limits your options) or you're dealing with bandits and warlords (which limits your options).
Few people are arguing for -no- government, those that are are so out of touch that we'd really all be better off if we just ignored them. Most serious people who say "big government is bad" would advocate smaller government, less spending, fewer regulations on business or personal freedoms (or both.) I would say I'm for "smaller governments." By that I would mean unnecessary regulations and spending should be cut, which I think everyone would agree with. We mostly disagree with what's necessary vs unnecessary.
I'm going to have to rub salt in your wounds, which will probably just boil your blood more.
I always enter "Alex Dick." Not so much because of the anonymous thing, more that then it says "document created by A Dick."
What it does know is that it has the power of a mob. Arrest one person in a mob? You still have a mob.
On the other hand, start shooting just a few individuals in a mob, and you'll disperse the mob even if you don't have enough bullets for everyone in the mob. If they start a few arresting/suing individuals with the heavy handed tactics they're going to use, I suspect fewer people will participate. Ten years ago I may have considered LOIC to be a worthy cause and participated, but would have been scared back to my pillow fort if they started going after individuals. Today I'm just too jaded and cowardly to leave my pillow fort in the first place.
Hurray, we can turn safely contained pollution on/in the ground into air pollution!
You're presenting it as instead of landfill bulk, we now have pollution in the air. That's a false dichotomy. We're already going to burn oil, doesn't matter if we get the oil from plastic recycled or "fresh" from the ground.
This way we have only the air pollution instead of air pollution, plastic bottles in the sea, AND oil spills in the gulf of Mexico.
Air Force, meet Streisand Effect. You to are about to get to know each other quite well I think.
I doubt their intent was to keep this thing under more wraps. I would guess this is someone who is just trying to cover their ass. The "in order to keep classified material off unclassified computer systems" sounds like something that, despite being completely idiotic in this case, is still someone's job. I could definitely imagine a general or congressman getting upset because airmen were viewing wikileaks and, I don't know "getting demoralized" or something, and someone's ass being on the line as a scapegoat for that technicality.
The fact that it will do nothing in terms of the information getting out doesn't matter to the people doing it: their jobs are still safer. It seems to me that extremely few people in the military or government ever got in trouble for erring on the side of "censor it."
Carrying one of these puppies comes with the cool prestige of being able to hit on the classy girl at the bar with James Bond lines like "Either I *am* a spy, or I'm getting spied *on*--that's for you to decide, my darling."
Heck, I get that now Taliban plutonium Iran Allah Washington DC.
I was actually enjoying your comment until encountering this bit of prejudicial age-ist nonsense
...at which point I spit my prune juice out and shook my cane at the screen. I didn't fight the communists of Hollywood daily for 40 years just to be OFFENDED by something I read on the INTERNET!!!
I'm so mad, I JUST CRAPPED MY PANTS!
For my next trick, I'll show how letting two gay men get married to each other shouldn't cause millions of straight people to get divorced.
No please!!! I need an excuse for my super conservative soon to be ex-inlaws!!! They have more guns than they do bibles!!!
Second the reason 68% of Americans don't have broadband is because the FCC REDEFINED it. It used to be 256k was called "broadband" and now they redefined it as 4000k so tons of people (including me) suddenly are considered non-broadband even though we purchased Broadband lines (like DSL or cable).
It's basically 1984. Redefine the words and change the meaning. (shrug) :-)
I know! My dell circa 1995 was "cutting edge!" Now just a of a decade-and-a-half later, it's been downgraded to "Wait, is that YOUR computer or your grandmother's?" status? It's just not right them changing the standards! Darn government interference!
Not sure why anyone would register with any of the Gawker sites
Sometimes I get tired of the rampant optimism on slashdot.
Foreigners on foot have been beating the US military machinery for 50 years now.
They just don't get it.
I never said they had any sense whatsoever, just that's what they're thinking.
Ron Paul, Julian Assange, cows, hockey, Vladimir Putin and PayPal? I'm sorry, that's one orgy I don't want to be invited to.
Why not!?! I don't know how conversations usually go before, during, or after interspecies orgies usually go, but I'm guessing the most interesting ones ever would be at THAT orgy. The book deal alone would probably cover the therapy bills.
We don't have to wonder, since the SecDef has said that no US soldiers, missions, or security were harmed or jeapordized by the Wikileaks releases. So what are they so mad about?
Wounded, stupid national pride. Some of our knuckle-dragging citizens take great pride in our military strength, as if an obscene amount of their tax dollars spent on defending against largely imagined enemies somehow makes them great. The idea that one somewhat effete-looking foreigner beat the military is confusing and upsetting to them. That pride is already hurt because we were unable to pull off decisive victories in both the wars we started.
It's kind of like if the math geek the varsity football team looked down on took the quarterback's lunch money right after they lost to a junior team. Whether or not the QB had stolen that money from someone in the first place, even though the math geek stealing the money had nothing to do with their inability to win, and even though nothing bad came about the money stolen has little to do with it.
Just a few generations ago, some people considered Africans subhuman. Some people considered the mildly retarded subhuman. Some considered Jews subhuman.
My standards for "personhood" include "having a central nervous system" and "are recognizably human?" I'm inherently biased in favor of those standards, but I think they're better than the standards that racists use.
If you really value ESCs, just saying that they aren't human isn't enough to quell this fear. You'd have to give your logical reasons why ...
That would have been completely tangential to my point though (which was that ESC research is still valuable). More important, stating my reasons why I don't consider IVF embryos human lives would have been redundant with the reasons mentioned by others here already.
So you have no objection to being forced under the dissection knife right or forced to be experimented on in order to help figure out how adults age? It's the same argument.
No, an embryonic stem cell is not a person by anyone's standards. A leftover embryo from IVF scheduled for incineration is not a person by my standards. I am a person by my standards.
You seem to be arguing that we should cover up the fact that iPSCs so that they don't think ESCs are useless and therefore allow them to be banned. Is this correct?
You know full well it's not. I'm not advocating covering anything up. It would be nice though if people realized there was more benefit from ESC research than repairing spinal cords.
Yeah, what bknabe said: http://stemcells.nih.gov/info/basics/basics10.asp [nih.gov]. Score another one for adult stem cells.
Sorry to be a stickler over terms, but "adult stem cell" and "induced pluripotent stem cells" are two different things. An adult stem cell is a stem cell from the adult (or child) body which can effectively be used as is. These generally have a narrower range of fates. You can take a blood stem cell and it will produce blood cells. It will not produce neurons, but you don't have to change it's epigenetics to get it to produce blood.
iPS on the other hand are cells which don't need to be stem cells initially, but have to be epigenetically "reset" to produce anything. To do this, you need to manipulate it a bit to make it more like an embryonic stem cell. The upside is that it can produce, say, spinal cord neurons, and you avoid host rejection since you can use a patient's own cells. The downside is that the manipulations are very low efficiency and the risk of producing cancer is likely increased.
Two different things. This is a "score" for iPS, not adult stem cells. I guess it's not too important if you're more concerned with "They're not harvested from embryos" than accuracy, but there is a real difference.
To clarify, the blurb from "inquirer.net" was light on that detail but was not written by the scientists involved in the research. They undoubtedly wrote it up and submitted it for peer-review, and will include the experimental details.
It may also be that they did a control of the same things with embryonic stem cells. It would make sense: if the iPS monkeys didn't recover the same mobility the ESC monkeys did, that would be important to know.
So not embryonic stem cells. Everybody wins.
Not quite, ESC are mostly used right now for basic research into cell biology. One fairly small down side to results like these, where adult stem cells or IPsC get results for treatment, is that people forget the fact that there's more to learn here than how to repair a spinal cord. We haven't figured out how a fertilized egg becomes a full human, ESC are a valuable tool to that end. If people get the idea that there's nothing more to do with ESC since we can fix monkey spinal cords, ESC research is going to become illegal.
These actually are "induced pluripotent stem cells" not "adult stem cells." The difference being that these are adult skin cells (fibroblasts technically) that have been manipulated, likely by viral transfection of 3 or 4 genes (genes which have been linked to cancer) to become -like- embryonic stem cells.
Adult stem cells which would regenerate your spinal cord without manipulation have not really been done much. There is a population of stem cells found in mouse whisker roots that seem to do the job, and I'm not sure why that hasn't gotten more press. There might be some in the center of your brain, but I don't think harvesting those have been considered as treatment for CNS injuries for obvious reasons.
Embryonic stem cells and IPsC both appear to have the same broad range of potential fates, wheras most people don't think adult stem cell populations would.