I should be clear, I can see the hazard, certainly. I am, however, having a hard time picturing the terrorists we're all focusing on right now doing anything more than killing themselves painfully with Ebola.
Were North Korea to get their hands on Ebola, sure, they're crazy enough to use it to wipe the rest of the world out, and there are probably individuals who would be willing and capable of deploying Ebola. I was merely making some gallows humor.
If you were to jam the GPS signal on your car, would the cops notice, realize what you were doing, and arrest you for it, or would they just assume the unit was faulty?
If these things become widespread, I'm guessing they'll get wise to that fact...
It's hard to guess that it's sarchasm when there are so many morons out there who actually believe that.
Relatively few morons who actually believe that are on slashdot. If someone is saying that here, it's safe to assume they're either joking or are trolling.
Just witness the vast numbers of "take away all my rights, just protect me from the terrorists" right wing idiots out there.
I'm far left wing, but I have to say, it's unfair to pin that on right wingers. That's the "idiot of any political leaning" response, not right wing.
The right wing response is more along the lines of "Kill them all, let God sort them out." Which, I'll admit, after terrorist attacks I very briefly see where they're coming from before my brain starts working again. But anyway, their response is not what you described.
They'll have it for "critical personnel," AKA not you or I, and certainly not the people who would actually be encountering ebola.
That said, I don't know much about this antisense treatment, but it seems to be based on oligonucleotides, short DNA sequences. Oligos aren't too expensive, have a long shelf life (for my applications anyway) and when dehydrated can be stored at room temperature for quite a while. If antisense therapy works for a wide variety of viruses, it could make sense for large cities and major international airports to have a "toolkit" of antisense oligos ready to go for a variety of outbreaks, and this wouldn't be too expensive to maintain. If ebola entered the network of airports and large outbreaks started, you could have the therapy right there. Influenza? Same thing.
But with ebola, the time you have is extremely short, and if an outbreak happened in a large city, I doubt anything could be deployed soon enough. And there's no way cities are going to spend the money to keep enough to dose everyone on hand. And that still wouldn't help the populations in Africa who would be exposed first.
By the way, I find it somewhat strange that "terrorism" is mentioned as a reason here. I guess it's possible that terrorists have biological safety cabinets and autoclaves, and certainly it's dangerous to underestimate terror threats, but I'm imagining Osama bin Laden saying "Lets get some of this Ebola." Terrorist lackey number one obtains a jar of infected blood, hands it to Osama without gloves, and two days later they're all bleeding to death from every orifice.
"look, I -understand- your heart has stopped, sir, but if you'll just be patient with me--heh, "patient"--I'll trace these tubes back to...the...appropriate bits of--OK, that's the one..."
Personal responsibility is a wonderful thing, but nurses a) often don't have the luxury of time...
Well, maybe if the nurse hadn't stopped to make and laugh at his or her own pun...
Whatever has happened to personal responsibility? Why is this such a problem? If a nurse is doing their job, then they will follow the tubing back to the source to ensure that they are connecting the right ones.
Exactly what I've been saying about stop lights, seat belts, speed limits, crosswalks, and turn signals for years! Just be responsible and everything will work out alright, no accidents!
Anyone care to comment on... hang on, just got a text that TF2 is extremely overrated and blah blah blah.. and oh, I've just been tapped on the shoulder and someone is telling me that sex is overrated. My wife.
You can buy antibiotics at any vet supply house.... It's not like they're hard to get without a prescription.
You know that, and I guess I know that too, but if someone is so ignorant that they think antibiotics are miracle drugs that should be taken for every cough or flu, then they're probably ignorant enough not to know how easy it is to get antibiotics. As I understand it, a significant amount of people who take antibiotics pointlessly are getting prescriptions for it. If you come to their door and say "Here!" then that's worse, because actually making an appointment and then paying the bill probably inhibits them from just taking it every week.
Companies like Symantec and Norton didn't start off as antivirus companies. They build tools and utilities. If by some miracle all of the botnets, trojans, and virus infections were to vanish from the world, I imagine that they would go back to making tools. It was virus makers that created the market, not Symantec and Norton.
Eh, I'd say that depends on how much they've invested in their antivirus business and how much of their profits come from antivirus. If they now only get 20% of their profits from tools and utilities, I doubt they'd be happy to lose that 80%.
It's not like those guys go to work motivated to make tools and antivirus is just a necessary evil. They go to make money.
Interesting, but in my experience, most embryologists don't bat an eye at calling a blastocyst an embryo.
I have not yet heard one person opposed to stem cell research suggest actually stopping in vitro fertilization,which would be the only way to stop these embryos from being killed.
It's true, the talking heads aren't calling for an end to IVF in the ESC debate, but they're only the loudest voices. In fact people have been calling for an end on IVF for a while, at my catholic grade school they did emphasize that. Matter of fact, they also oppose birth control methods that don't prevent conception, such as IUDs unless I'm mistaken.
Pretty callous group of that group of out of touch old men, demanding that any fertile woman gets saddled with as many babies as possible and any couple having trouble conceiving be cursed with no babies, but they are at least somewhat consistent.
Blastocysts, which is the correct, but less headline grabbing, name for the clump of cells the "Embryotic Stems cells"
Blastocyst is a more precise term, but let's be clear about one thing: blastocysts ARE embryos. The term "embryonic stem cells" was invented by one if the pioneers in the field, not someone on fox news trying to paint them in a bad light. It's an accurate term.
It's as poor an argument to base opposition to a religious belief on a question that science is completely unable to answer in the first place.
If you're applying religion to science, you can't act as if doing the reverse is wrong. Prove to me when the soul starts using science, or keep your beliefs about when in embryogenesis the soul starts to yourself.
My personal opinion is that breakthroughs from adult stem cells have easily eclipsed the promise of embryonic stem cells Pluripotent Adult Stem Cells [usnews.com]. We could simply avoid any moral hazards by continuing research on those since there are no objections from any side on their use.
Adult neural stem cells have been identified, but they're in the middle of the brain. Find me a population of adult stem cells that can repair a human spinal cord, without blending up the patient's brain first, and we'll talk. Otherwise, we continue researching both. If one proves to work for everything we need from stem cells, then we'll stop working on the other one. That day hasn't come yet.
This way, when some writes the likes of "On the basis of my understanding of the universe and my beliefs in a higher being who will punish me for eternity if i disagree to this, I officially support this". Either the public pressure or the self embarassment would deal with the fools, who look up to impose their beliefs on the rest of us just beacuse they are( or lobbist are) in a position to do so.
Realxmp said exactly what I was going to say about the first part, but on this second part, unfortunately that's not true. There are far too many constituents who see no problems with policy based on religion. Blatantly based on. Like as in, they argue whether or not taxes are justified by scripture. If a politician were to say "God wants us to outlaw ESC research," that would just be a very concise way of saying exactly what they were trying to get across, and those people voting for them wouldn't be shamed, they would say "well put."
I'm really not trying to flame/troll/etc, but these "X turns N years old" stories are among the stupidest, most worthless non-story, non-news items ever posted on Slashdot.
I don't know about that. Although I could have done the math, I didn't put 95 and 15 together to make 110. I realize that windows 95 is ancient, but it came out about the same time I started noticing computers. In the back of my head, its somehow always cutting edge, I think of windows 95 and my first thought was that commercial on youtube, and there's a flash of "THE FUTURE IS NOW!"
It's kind of like how when you first started noticing girls, you had your first real crush, and maybe you look back now and don't know what you possibly thought was attractive in her at the time, and on her facebook page now she mentions she's a creationist and you see that she's 50 pounds overweight... but whenever you hear her first name you sometimes think "Oh that's that bodacious babe in algebra... wait, no..."
Anyway, nerd nostalgia is at type of news for nerds. I care.
Isolate a population of adult neural stem cells in a person with a spinal cord injury, without resorting to homogenizing (grinding up) their brain for FACS and I'll admit that maybe adult stem cell technology will be good enough for therapy.
Otherwise, yeah, adult stem cells are convenient to some things, but are not the end all be all you're suggesting they are. We had good advances with carriage technology a long time before we got the internal combustion engine working, but it would have been extremely shortsighted to suggest that we shouldn't research internal combustion engines.
Furthermore, from a research standpoint, ESC are absolutely indispensable. You can't use adult stem cells to study early development.
Treating human life as something that should be nurtured and not harvested is not something that is exclusive to religion. There are moral implications way beyond any silly mumbo jumbo myths.
Some vegetarians say similar things about eating meat, yet I think few people would suggest we should outlaw anyone from eating meat, and I think many more of us are in agreement that their morals should not dictate what we eat. Similarly, those with objections to ESC research should avoid doing ESC research and should not use any cures derived from ESC research.
(and FYI, we never would have gotten IPSC without ESC research, so if you're opposed to ESC research, IPSC is also not kosher for you.)
Vegetarians' tax money goes to farm subsidies, some of which is spent on meat, so don't suggest that federal funding is a unique facet for ESC research either.
They can't be obtained from abortions or miscarriages, which occur later, but rather are typically surplus IVF embryos.
Correct, embryos harvested for ESC are 5 days post fertilization. A pregnancy test would not show that a woman is carrying a blastocyst at this point, so it is impossible that abortions will be used to supply ESC: you don't get an abortion 5 days after conception because you don't know you're pregnant.
By the time you know you're pregnant, that embryo's stem cells have continued with development past the point of pluripotency, the ability to make any type of cell.
They sidestep a lot of ethical objections by not having any sort of nervous system, or indeed any tissue differentiation apart from a separate type of cell on the outside of the sphere that is destined to form a placenta.
Unfortunately, the people who object to ESC are less concerned with cell biology or anything tangible or proveable and more concerned about souls. If it has a soul, it's murder, they say.
My question to such people is how do you know the soul is started at conception? The scripture they quote as proof is ambiguous at best (and in my opinion doesn't say much of anything relevant to the matter). I think scripture is a terrible basis for policy decisions as a rule. More importantly, it's my understanding that up until 12 days post fertilization, the embryo can split to form twins. Are these people suggesting that a twin is only half a person? Are they some type of special exception? Does twinning cause these people to question their interpretations? Of course not.
Biology and religion have never squared well with each other, and it's pure insanity to combine those two with laws.
It also looks like she only made like $50 between several years. That comes down to like $1-2 a month. Why not just drop the ads and continue blogging? If you really need a few dollars, just find a few bottles from the street and return them to stores.
Sure, that's what she should do once she pays the $300 they're demanding from her now for making that $50. Doesn't change the fact that it's idiotic -now-.
That would be like me saying I can't put a GPS on my car to keep tabs on where it goes when my son drives it.
I don't know about "can't," but maybe you shouldn't (unless you have reason to think he's running drugs across the border.) If he's old enough to drive, then he's old enough to be off the leash a little. Trying to keep tabs on him at all times might just make him be less open about where he was with you.
Similarly, there are situations where I could understand electronic monitoring of employees, but in most cases I'd expect surveillance would just make the employer/employee relationship more adversarial and less productive.
Note that I am not a parent, nor do I know anything about management. Idle speculation and gut feelings only.
That's 6849 barrels of oil per day they are going to save (the rough amount required to produce 500MW per day)
If I'm reading it right, the wiki page mentions they only use oil for about 18% of their electrical needs. Iran, being rich in natural gas AND oil, uses that for a lot more of it's electricity.
So I'm guessing they're not going to be saving all that much oil with this.
It's made some of us worry. Some would argue that the US and Israel terrorize plenty of people worldwide, and so what goes around comes around. I would counter that two wrongs don't make a right, and most of the people killed in a nuclear blast or dirty bomb won't be the people who decided the US should be a bully in the first place. Others would argue that the US has nukes and we're the only ones who have ever used them, why shouldn't Iran have them? I would counter that we need fewer nuclear-armed hotheaded politicians not fewer. If Iran getting nukes means the US loses its nukes, and I trusted Iran to not use them as much as I trust the US to not use them, then fine, fair trade, my national pride doesn't require my country to have weapons of mass destruction and I'd be more proud that we were mature enough to give them up.
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I should be clear, I can see the hazard, certainly. I am, however, having a hard time picturing the terrorists we're all focusing on right now doing anything more than killing themselves painfully with Ebola.
Were North Korea to get their hands on Ebola, sure, they're crazy enough to use it to wipe the rest of the world out, and there are probably individuals who would be willing and capable of deploying Ebola. I was merely making some gallows humor.
If you were to jam the GPS signal on your car, would the cops notice, realize what you were doing, and arrest you for it, or would they just assume the unit was faulty?
If these things become widespread, I'm guessing they'll get wise to that fact...
It's hard to guess that it's sarchasm when there are so many morons out there who actually believe that.
Relatively few morons who actually believe that are on slashdot. If someone is saying that here, it's safe to assume they're either joking or are trolling.
Just witness the vast numbers of "take away all my rights, just protect me from the terrorists" right wing idiots out there.
I'm far left wing, but I have to say, it's unfair to pin that on right wingers. That's the "idiot of any political leaning" response, not right wing.
The right wing response is more along the lines of "Kill them all, let God sort them out." Which, I'll admit, after terrorist attacks I very briefly see where they're coming from before my brain starts working again. But anyway, their response is not what you described.
They'll have it for "critical personnel," AKA not you or I, and certainly not the people who would actually be encountering ebola.
That said, I don't know much about this antisense treatment, but it seems to be based on oligonucleotides, short DNA sequences. Oligos aren't too expensive, have a long shelf life (for my applications anyway) and when dehydrated can be stored at room temperature for quite a while. If antisense therapy works for a wide variety of viruses, it could make sense for large cities and major international airports to have a "toolkit" of antisense oligos ready to go for a variety of outbreaks, and this wouldn't be too expensive to maintain. If ebola entered the network of airports and large outbreaks started, you could have the therapy right there. Influenza? Same thing.
But with ebola, the time you have is extremely short, and if an outbreak happened in a large city, I doubt anything could be deployed soon enough. And there's no way cities are going to spend the money to keep enough to dose everyone on hand. And that still wouldn't help the populations in Africa who would be exposed first.
By the way, I find it somewhat strange that "terrorism" is mentioned as a reason here. I guess it's possible that terrorists have biological safety cabinets and autoclaves, and certainly it's dangerous to underestimate terror threats, but I'm imagining Osama bin Laden saying "Lets get some of this Ebola." Terrorist lackey number one obtains a jar of infected blood, hands it to Osama without gloves, and two days later they're all bleeding to death from every orifice.
"look, I -understand- your heart has stopped, sir, but if you'll just be patient with me--heh, "patient"--I'll trace these tubes back to...the...appropriate bits of--OK, that's the one..."
Personal responsibility is a wonderful thing, but nurses a) often don't have the luxury of time...
Well, maybe if the nurse hadn't stopped to make and laugh at his or her own pun...
Whatever has happened to personal responsibility? Why is this such a problem? If a nurse is doing their job, then they will follow the tubing back to the source to ensure that they are connecting the right ones.
Exactly what I've been saying about stop lights, seat belts, speed limits, crosswalks, and turn signals for years! Just be responsible and everything will work out alright, no accidents!
There's really a trend in going all "That movie sucks!" against every popular movie, and I'm getting tired of it.
That's pretty much anything popular ever, at least on the internet.
For example, just tossing this out there
I like the following
-Rap music
-Halo 3
-Team fortress 2
-Sex
-The Matrix
-Inception
-Beer
Anyone care to comment on... hang on, just got a text that TF2 is extremely overrated and blah blah blah.. and oh, I've just been tapped on the shoulder and someone is telling me that sex is overrated. My wife.
I installed a spam-repelling rock to my motherboard. Haven't gotten a single piece of spam since then on that computer.
You can buy antibiotics at any vet supply house.... It's not like they're hard to get without a prescription.
You know that, and I guess I know that too, but if someone is so ignorant that they think antibiotics are miracle drugs that should be taken for every cough or flu, then they're probably ignorant enough not to know how easy it is to get antibiotics. As I understand it, a significant amount of people who take antibiotics pointlessly are getting prescriptions for it. If you come to their door and say "Here!" then that's worse, because actually making an appointment and then paying the bill probably inhibits them from just taking it every week.
Companies like Symantec and Norton didn't start off as antivirus companies. They build tools and utilities. If by some miracle all of the botnets, trojans, and virus infections were to vanish from the world, I imagine that they would go back to making tools. It was virus makers that created the market, not Symantec and Norton.
Eh, I'd say that depends on how much they've invested in their antivirus business and how much of their profits come from antivirus. If they now only get 20% of their profits from tools and utilities, I doubt they'd be happy to lose that 80%.
It's not like those guys go to work motivated to make tools and antivirus is just a necessary evil. They go to make money.
Interesting, but in my experience, most embryologists don't bat an eye at calling a blastocyst an embryo.
I have not yet heard one person opposed to stem cell research suggest actually stopping in vitro fertilization,which would be the only way to stop these embryos from being killed.
It's true, the talking heads aren't calling for an end to IVF in the ESC debate, but they're only the loudest voices. In fact people have been calling for an end on IVF for a while, at my catholic grade school they did emphasize that. Matter of fact, they also oppose birth control methods that don't prevent conception, such as IUDs unless I'm mistaken.
Pretty callous group of that group of out of touch old men, demanding that any fertile woman gets saddled with as many babies as possible and any couple having trouble conceiving be cursed with no babies, but they are at least somewhat consistent.
The thing is, "where it is," is in Russia. They might object to the US breaking in, rather violently in fact.
Not sure he was suggesting the US do it. Maybe he was under the impression the Russians had forgotten about it.
Blastocysts, which is the correct, but less headline grabbing, name for the clump of cells the "Embryotic Stems cells"
Blastocyst is a more precise term, but let's be clear about one thing: blastocysts ARE embryos. The term "embryonic stem cells" was invented by one if the pioneers in the field, not someone on fox news trying to paint them in a bad light. It's an accurate term.
It's as poor an argument to base opposition to a religious belief on a question that science is completely unable to answer in the first place.
If you're applying religion to science, you can't act as if doing the reverse is wrong. Prove to me when the soul starts using science, or keep your beliefs about when in embryogenesis the soul starts to yourself.
My personal opinion is that breakthroughs from adult stem cells have easily eclipsed the promise of embryonic stem cells Pluripotent Adult Stem Cells [usnews.com]. We could simply avoid any moral hazards by continuing research on those since there are no objections from any side on their use.
Adult neural stem cells have been identified, but they're in the middle of the brain. Find me a population of adult stem cells that can repair a human spinal cord, without blending up the patient's brain first, and we'll talk. Otherwise, we continue researching both. If one proves to work for everything we need from stem cells, then we'll stop working on the other one. That day hasn't come yet.
This way, when some writes the likes of "On the basis of my understanding of the universe and my beliefs in a higher being who will punish me for eternity if i
disagree to this, I officially support this".
Either the public pressure or the self embarassment would deal with the fools, who look up to impose their beliefs on the rest of us just beacuse they are( or lobbist are) in a position to do so.
Realxmp said exactly what I was going to say about the first part, but on this second part, unfortunately that's not true. There are far too many constituents who see no problems with policy based on religion. Blatantly based on. Like as in, they argue whether or not taxes are justified by scripture. If a politician were to say "God wants us to outlaw ESC research," that would just be a very concise way of saying exactly what they were trying to get across, and those people voting for them wouldn't be shamed, they would say "well put."
The same objection would be raised if we had to end a 20-year-old's life to save my mother...
Because a 20 year old has a nervous system and a soul if you believe in them. That's why we were discussing those things about embryos...
I'm really not trying to flame/troll/etc, but these "X turns N years old" stories are among the stupidest, most worthless non-story, non-news items ever posted on Slashdot.
I don't know about that. Although I could have done the math, I didn't put 95 and 15 together to make 110. I realize that windows 95 is ancient, but it came out about the same time I started noticing computers. In the back of my head, its somehow always cutting edge, I think of windows 95 and my first thought was that commercial on youtube, and there's a flash of "THE FUTURE IS NOW!"
It's kind of like how when you first started noticing girls, you had your first real crush, and maybe you look back now and don't know what you possibly thought was attractive in her at the time, and on her facebook page now she mentions she's a creationist and you see that she's 50 pounds overweight... but whenever you hear her first name you sometimes think "Oh that's that bodacious babe in algebra... wait, no..."
Anyway, nerd nostalgia is at type of news for nerds. I care.
Isolate a population of adult neural stem cells in a person with a spinal cord injury, without resorting to homogenizing (grinding up) their brain for FACS and I'll admit that maybe adult stem cell technology will be good enough for therapy.
Otherwise, yeah, adult stem cells are convenient to some things, but are not the end all be all you're suggesting they are. We had good advances with carriage technology a long time before we got the internal combustion engine working, but it would have been extremely shortsighted to suggest that we shouldn't research internal combustion engines.
Furthermore, from a research standpoint, ESC are absolutely indispensable. You can't use adult stem cells to study early development.
Treating human life as something that should be nurtured and not harvested is not something that is exclusive to religion. There are moral implications way beyond any silly mumbo jumbo myths.
Some vegetarians say similar things about eating meat, yet I think few people would suggest we should outlaw anyone from eating meat, and I think many more of us are in agreement that their morals should not dictate what we eat. Similarly, those with objections to ESC research should avoid doing ESC research and should not use any cures derived from ESC research.
(and FYI, we never would have gotten IPSC without ESC research, so if you're opposed to ESC research, IPSC is also not kosher for you.)
Vegetarians' tax money goes to farm subsidies, some of which is spent on meat, so don't suggest that federal funding is a unique facet for ESC research either.
They can't be obtained from abortions or miscarriages, which occur later, but rather are typically surplus IVF embryos.
Correct, embryos harvested for ESC are 5 days post fertilization. A pregnancy test would not show that a woman is carrying a blastocyst at this point, so it is impossible that abortions will be used to supply ESC: you don't get an abortion 5 days after conception because you don't know you're pregnant.
By the time you know you're pregnant, that embryo's stem cells have continued with development past the point of pluripotency, the ability to make any type of cell.
They sidestep a lot of ethical objections by not having any sort of nervous system, or indeed any tissue differentiation apart from a separate type of cell on the outside of the sphere that is destined to form a placenta.
Unfortunately, the people who object to ESC are less concerned with cell biology or anything tangible or proveable and more concerned about souls. If it has a soul, it's murder, they say.
My question to such people is how do you know the soul is started at conception? The scripture they quote as proof is ambiguous at best (and in my opinion doesn't say much of anything relevant to the matter). I think scripture is a terrible basis for policy decisions as a rule. More importantly, it's my understanding that up until 12 days post fertilization, the embryo can split to form twins. Are these people suggesting that a twin is only half a person? Are they some type of special exception? Does twinning cause these people to question their interpretations? Of course not.
Biology and religion have never squared well with each other, and it's pure insanity to combine those two with laws.
Moderated troll, and 7 replies all arguing that he should be playing on the PC instead of the 360, and people act as if console fanboys are bad...
It also looks like she only made like $50 between several years. That comes down to like $1-2 a month. Why not just drop the ads and continue blogging? If you really need a few dollars, just find a few bottles from the street and return them to stores.
Sure, that's what she should do once she pays the $300 they're demanding from her now for making that $50. Doesn't change the fact that it's idiotic -now-.
That would be like me saying I can't put a GPS on my car to keep tabs on where it goes when my son drives it.
I don't know about "can't," but maybe you shouldn't (unless you have reason to think he's running drugs across the border.) If he's old enough to drive, then he's old enough to be off the leash a little. Trying to keep tabs on him at all times might just make him be less open about where he was with you.
Similarly, there are situations where I could understand electronic monitoring of employees, but in most cases I'd expect surveillance would just make the employer/employee relationship more adversarial and less productive.
Note that I am not a parent, nor do I know anything about management. Idle speculation and gut feelings only.
That's 6849 barrels of oil per day they are going to save (the rough amount required to produce 500MW per day)
If I'm reading it right, the wiki page mentions they only use oil for about 18% of their electrical needs. Iran, being rich in natural gas AND oil, uses that for a lot more of it's electricity.
So I'm guessing they're not going to be saving all that much oil with this.
What has Iran ever done to us
It's made some of us worry. Some would argue that the US and Israel terrorize plenty of people worldwide, and so what goes around comes around. I would counter that two wrongs don't make a right, and most of the people killed in a nuclear blast or dirty bomb won't be the people who decided the US should be a bully in the first place. Others would argue that the US has nukes and we're the only ones who have ever used them, why shouldn't Iran have them? I would counter that we need fewer nuclear-armed hotheaded politicians not fewer. If Iran getting nukes means the US loses its nukes, and I trusted Iran to not use them as much as I trust the US to not use them, then fine, fair trade, my national pride doesn't require my country to have weapons of mass destruction and I'd be more proud that we were mature enough to give them up.