Hmm, but I smell the high smell of marijuana growing being handed over to licensed only agro-corporations and individuals will be fined for attempting to grow it themselves under penalties of tax evasion.
All I smell is hypocrisy. The "small" pot growers have their cake and eat it too right now, wanting pot to remain illegal technically, keeping serious competition down, but not really enforced so that they can sell it as they do now. The fact that others are being fined and arrested for what they're getting away with doesn't bother them enough to advocate changing the laws to allow competition.
Furthermore, we have no reason to suspect there's going to be an increase in personal growing and use once the stuff becomes legal. The tobacco industry is huge, but you can grow your own tobacco plants for personal use without any permits of any kind. Very few people do. Growing your own plants, drying them rolling it, and then finally smoking it is tougher than walking down to the gas station, paying $5, and smoking immediately. The marijuana industrial farms are going to blow homegrown competition out of the water for the same reasons and will have no reason in keeping you from growing your own: hardly anyone will
Is there any particular reason you trust them when they say that's the completely undoctored photo and not just a first draft of the photoshopped photo?
Really, who cares? They photoshopped an image for aesthetic reasons, big deal.
The fact that they butcher the truth for something so stupid as aesthetics is a problem. If they're willing to lie about this, it establishes that they don't even just lie about the big things, they're about the same as pathological liars and will even lie about the little stuff you'd have assumed they wouldn't bother lying about.
It's also noteworthy in that photoshopped images could be just as common in PR crises as politicians skewing the truth in speeches. Or at least, it's brought that fact to my attention.
You realize that I wasn't ADVOCATING any of those barriers to nuclear power, right? I'm saying why nuclear hasn't taken off not "I think we shouldn't use nuclear power."
If we go nuclear the risk of a nuclear meltdown or radiation being unleashed is a lot less than the risk of another terrorist attack, another middle east war, another oil spill. I don't understand why people would fear something that hasn't happened over something that has.
Explain to me how nuclear power solves our oil dependence? You're saying we should build nuclear-powered cars?
As I understand it, nuclear could feasibly replace coal-fired power plants. While it's true that we could run electric cars off of nuclear power instead of oil, they could also be run off of coal power. With nuclear power, we would still presumably be using oil for our transportation energy.
Also, if oil is non-renewable because it takes millions of years to re-form, then nuclear fuels are the ultimate non-renewable with a "when is the next supernova due?" regeneration period. And the energy density and relative ease of use is just too good to waste it powering our washing machines and slashdot browsing. Maybe in a few hundred years outer solar system exploration will be in a serious crunch because the lack of a good power source after all the uranium, thorium, plutonium etc. has been used up.
That's kind of a silly argument, no one is in favor of renewables -just- for the renewable aspect. It's the fact that the widely used non-renewables are mostly dirty.
You have a point about using up the nuclear power sources, seems we always consume resources faster than we expect and only think about what's next until it's crunch time. I'd say though that we have to get through the current transition we need to do first. I'm no expert, but it seems that the experts are convinced that nuclear is one of the only viable solutions at this point, nothing else would be able to generate most of the power that coal is now. At least, that's what I've heard. And we probably will be facing the same crunch when it's time to get off nuclear power, but at least we'll get to that stage if we use nuclear now.
I don't know why the government doesn't just fund the development of a bunch of nuclear power plants and put them on the coast or on the ocean somewhere.
Yes you do: mostly a perception issue with the voters, a lot of politics, and some actual reasons. There's the stigma of nuclear power that we have yet to shake, any elected official who votes for nuclear is going to lose the green vote, and the green vote is the big one that really cares about ending fossil fuels. Few elected officials if any could say "sure, bury that radioactive waste in my district, my constituents are aware that they're facing bigger environmental hazards from various superfund sites, not to mention realizing that radioactive waste in a bunker is less of a threat than climate change."
As far as the specific off the coast idea, I myself would be a lot more skeptical of that given recent events. Seems to me if we can't handle pulling oil out of the ground in the gulf, regulating it, and stopping it if there's a problem, we might not be competent to operate a nuclear reactor out there.
By the time you're reporting that event that happened 12-24 hours ago, other sites are reporting on the meta-news. He-said-she-said, or further developing events related to the original news item.
Again, my not being a journalist may be showing here, but that doesn't sound like a bad thing. I -hate- it when I turn on the news, and it's obvious something big happened a few hours ago, and all they're talking about is reactions to the event, or more commonly reactions to reactions.
More importantly, I have a hard time buying the idea that just because most of the other news does that, that's what people actually want. They don't have much alternative, all the other news sites seem to have the "A story that is an hour old is dead" mindset. I don't think non-journalists ever think along those lines, thus I think there would be a subset of consumers who would be more interested in the up to 23 hour news story rather than the house majority leader reacting to the senate minority leader responding to the president's press briefing on the thing that happened 6 hours ago.
You'd be hopelessly behind anyone who wants to discuss or act on the news (which, I think, are the major reasons people want news). You couldn't make any money.
Like I said, it couldn't compete with that game, but it seems to me that most people reading the first-breaking story aren't actually reading it on whichever website broke it first, since the "stories" on from those first breakers are rarely more than a headline and maybe a statement. An in-depth story on the other hand would be linked to, not summarized, by blogs, etc.
That's good that you have an alternative that works for you on your home computer, but you're never going to get my whole department to trade some of those features for security, even the ones who -could- install it themselves. Them using an insecure PDF viewer is problematic for me because I have to use the same network. Thus it's a good thing.
I am not a journalist, but I wonder if the solution to both of those problems is maybe to move back toward a periodical basis for publishing. Just because you -can- update a news website every minute doesn't mean you necessarily -should-, and I think in fact that just because every other website updates every few minutes doesn't mean yours needs to either per se. Maybe if you said "Okay, the front page is going to be updated once a day at noon, that's when the deadline is. A big story breaks an hour after noon, that gives you 23 hours to get the full story and make it coherent rather than publish bits and pieces in a stream of drivel."
It wouldn't get the first scoops, but how profitable is that anyway? Seems like most individuals still don't follow most news stories as fast as they come out, with the BP oil spill most people I know didn't seem to know until a few days after the story broke. It's not like people searching for news on a subject look for first-breaking story.
Heck, maybe people would even go there right after your daily publishing to browse rather than just going to google and getting the story you broke first without giving you any page hits.
Just throwing the suggestion out there. Again, I don't really know what I'm talking about.
Whether the users are happy or not doesn't mean squat to Facebook because their users aren't their customers.
Until their users are so unhappy that they leave and their real customers immediately follow. Look at radio stations. They're in hard times because everyone is listening to their mp3s or internet radio, or something that doesn't have annoying DJs and ads. The fact that you don't pay radio as a customer is irrelevant.
For something that's free, people sure do get enraged when it changes in the slightest, or has bugs, or decides to try to profit from the information that people love to dump on it.
Well, if you promise one thing for free, then go changing it on people, yeah, that annoys them at least a little. They were expecting one thing and had their reasons for agreeing to it in the first place. Those expectations may have been ignorant, but you don't sign up for facebook -after- investigating their privacy policy, that's just not how normal people work.
If you can keep a laser beam on target that long, you might as well use the laser to guide an effective, high explosive round to it.
Sounds like faulty reasoning to me. For one thing, there are many values for "a long time." If you have to hold the guidance laser on the target for 30 seconds, but the defense laser for 20 seconds, those are both non-instantaneous, but when you're talking about an enemy aircraft trying to bomb you, I'd assume that's a world of difference. Also seems like we might not want missiles certain situations, like maybe when the enemy aircraft are in close proximity to friendly aircraft. I'd also expect the effective distance would be different Maybe the lasers have a wider effective range, closer, farther, or both? Are the sea sparrows they're replacing laser guided?
Lastly, I don't know much about laser guidance systems, but couldn't there be countermeasures for laser guidance that wouldn't be possible for a laser boring through the plane? Seems like a plane shining a laser off of itself might be able to redirect the missile, wheras the plane would need to be coated in a very good mirror to deflect the laser?
I'd say that people that stupid deserve whatever they get, except that they are likely to do damage to other systems than their own.
As always, this sentiment annoys me.
Ignorance may be annoying, but it doesn't mean someone "deserves" any misfortune. No one is born knowing "I should not enable javascript in my e-mail." If this slipped through google, who I expect to be better than the average user, who the hell are you to say the average user should have known better and deserves it?
Build a dam across the entrance of the SF bay and capture the power from the tidal flow going in and out every day.
Sounds like a decent idea, lets try it. I've got $10 right here, if we pool that with the money the state is willing to put towards that, we'd have almost $10;)
This sounds more like a case of corporations eroding our civil rights, which has little to do with the war on terror, they're always quick to do that to avoid bad PR. That the FBI asked for information and suggested burstnet drop them is not ideal, yes, but let's not act like this is all the US government going paranoid: plenty of companies in whatever country you live in would screw your rights over too even if your government wouldn't ask them.
One idea, (probably a terrible one but maybe worth mentioning here) is have confessed child molesters do it.
I am not any type of psychologist, nor do I know much about the criminal system, but maybe experiencing that flood of sewage will give them negative associations with those images that they lack naturally. Maybe seeing some CP that would appeal to them among tons of images that would be repugnant to anyone, which sounds like what these screening services have to deal with, would make the whole mess less appealing to them.
On the other hand, I also see the obvious potential dangers of taking non-violent molesters and showing them CP alongside violent images.
From what I've heard, reforming them through prison and counseling doesn't really work. I don't know how convincing the evidence for that is, maybe that's not true, but maybe there's no way to make it worse by viewiing this stuff. I also haven't seen anything to suggest you can deprogram someone's sexuality like that, I've heard that those programs trying to turn gay people straight are complete wastes of time, so it's probably not something that's malleable. TFA talks about decreased sexual appetites with the current workers, that's probably due to the fact that the worst of the worst doesn't appeal to them, wheras that might appeal to the molesters and might be counter-effective.
Who knows? I certainly don't, nor would I be at all interested in these jobs, child molesters, or studying any of the above, but it seems like some criminal psychologist might want to run a small trial of that.
Are you going to suggest banning capitalism in towns with courthouses?
If it will allow me to continue watching videos of cats doing cute things, people falling down in funny ways, breakdancing, and all the other silly but entertaining things I see on youtube, then I'll suggest that yes, communism socialism anarchy or whatever in Marshall Texas is just fine for me personally. Cede it to North Korea for all I care, just don't let Viacom win.
(I should explicitly mention that I am not a lawyer, not from Texas, and am not serious)
Well now in social situations when somebody asks you how many chicken nuggets you want, or how long you have been with the company, you don't look like a retard when you put your hands up and start counting fingers.
Chicken McNuggets come in 6, 10, and sometimes 20 or 50 quantities. So if you're in a McDonalds and counting is involved in your chicken nugget order, you're doing it wrong. And if you're ordering the 50 piece "party bucket" you're probably also doing "avoiding heart disease" wrong too.
Seriously? You can't see the value in forcing kids to learn how to count in their heads?
I see more value in allowing children to come up with their own solutions and find what works best for them. They'll do it anyway, as I did and GP did. Show me a study that demonstrates finger-counting actually impedes math skills and I'll shut up, but I suspect this is just a poorly-researched "It's how I learned it so it's the right way and it's how you'll learn it" relic. One that probably turns more kids off of math at an early stage, before the really fun math.
It's always "in another 5 to 10 years" and then everyone forgets about it and nothing ever comes of it.
Almost none of the exciting medical research projects you're talking about were "forgotten," what happened is they didn't pan out. Cancer drugs have worked in rats but not in humans, various treatments have had promising initial results on cells in a dish, and then in a whole animal they had unexpected side effects, refinements in efficiency and cost proved impossible, etc.
In the cases where you hear "5 to 10 years" and then nothing, one common scenario leading to that is that one of the researchers associated with the exciting project was asked when it might be useful on patients, which the researcher probably had no real idea since it would probably be another researcher or a whole different organization entirely to take it the next step. An honest answer in those cases would be "I have no idea, I hadn't really thought about it beyond there's nothing that I could do immediately and there are other more interesting projects I'll work on next, I'm basically done with this" He or she instead just said "Oh, maybe 5 to 10 years." Whoever he or she told that to liked the sound of that and thought it would make the news item/blog post/story more interesting and stated it as a specific prediction rather than just a random vague guess. And then whoever picked it up, another lab, another researcher in the same lab, a private company, found it didn't make the transition from petri dish to lab rat or lab rat to human clinical trials.
Also possible that the researcher was just trying to hype up his or her own research to get more funding.
Anyway, these projects haven't just been forgotten because we researchers have short memories, and those 5-10 year predictions weren't supposed to be or shouldn't have been promises.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm, but I smell the high smell of marijuana growing being handed over to licensed only agro-corporations and individuals will be fined for attempting to grow it themselves under penalties of tax evasion.
All I smell is hypocrisy. The "small" pot growers have their cake and eat it too right now, wanting pot to remain illegal technically, keeping serious competition down, but not really enforced so that they can sell it as they do now. The fact that others are being fined and arrested for what they're getting away with doesn't bother them enough to advocate changing the laws to allow competition.
Furthermore, we have no reason to suspect there's going to be an increase in personal growing and use once the stuff becomes legal. The tobacco industry is huge, but you can grow your own tobacco plants for personal use without any permits of any kind. Very few people do. Growing your own plants, drying them rolling it, and then finally smoking it is tougher than walking down to the gas station, paying $5, and smoking immediately. The marijuana industrial farms are going to blow homegrown competition out of the water for the same reasons and will have no reason in keeping you from growing your own: hardly anyone will
BP posted the original [bp.com]
Is there any particular reason you trust them when they say that's the completely undoctored photo and not just a first draft of the photoshopped photo?
Really, who cares? They photoshopped an image for aesthetic reasons, big deal.
The fact that they butcher the truth for something so stupid as aesthetics is a problem. If they're willing to lie about this, it establishes that they don't even just lie about the big things, they're about the same as pathological liars and will even lie about the little stuff you'd have assumed they wouldn't bother lying about.
It's also noteworthy in that photoshopped images could be just as common in PR crises as politicians skewing the truth in speeches. Or at least, it's brought that fact to my attention.
You realize that I wasn't ADVOCATING any of those barriers to nuclear power, right? I'm saying why nuclear hasn't taken off not "I think we shouldn't use nuclear power."
If we go nuclear the risk of a nuclear meltdown or radiation being unleashed is a lot less than the risk of another terrorist attack, another middle east war, another oil spill. I don't understand why people would fear something that hasn't happened over something that has.
Explain to me how nuclear power solves our oil dependence? You're saying we should build nuclear-powered cars?
As I understand it, nuclear could feasibly replace coal-fired power plants. While it's true that we could run electric cars off of nuclear power instead of oil, they could also be run off of coal power. With nuclear power, we would still presumably be using oil for our transportation energy.
Also, if oil is non-renewable because it takes millions of years to re-form, then nuclear fuels are the ultimate non-renewable with a "when is the next supernova due?" regeneration period. And the energy density and relative ease of use is just too good to waste it powering our washing machines and slashdot browsing. Maybe in a few hundred years outer solar system exploration will be in a serious crunch because the lack of a good power source after all the uranium, thorium, plutonium etc. has been used up.
That's kind of a silly argument, no one is in favor of renewables -just- for the renewable aspect. It's the fact that the widely used non-renewables are mostly dirty.
You have a point about using up the nuclear power sources, seems we always consume resources faster than we expect and only think about what's next until it's crunch time. I'd say though that we have to get through the current transition we need to do first. I'm no expert, but it seems that the experts are convinced that nuclear is one of the only viable solutions at this point, nothing else would be able to generate most of the power that coal is now. At least, that's what I've heard. And we probably will be facing the same crunch when it's time to get off nuclear power, but at least we'll get to that stage if we use nuclear now.
I don't know why the government doesn't just fund the development of a bunch of nuclear power plants and put them on the coast or on the ocean somewhere.
Yes you do: mostly a perception issue with the voters, a lot of politics, and some actual reasons. There's the stigma of nuclear power that we have yet to shake, any elected official who votes for nuclear is going to lose the green vote, and the green vote is the big one that really cares about ending fossil fuels. Few elected officials if any could say "sure, bury that radioactive waste in my district, my constituents are aware that they're facing bigger environmental hazards from various superfund sites, not to mention realizing that radioactive waste in a bunker is less of a threat than climate change."
As far as the specific off the coast idea, I myself would be a lot more skeptical of that given recent events. Seems to me if we can't handle pulling oil out of the ground in the gulf, regulating it, and stopping it if there's a problem, we might not be competent to operate a nuclear reactor out there.
By the time you're reporting that event that happened 12-24 hours ago, other sites are reporting on the meta-news. He-said-she-said, or further developing events related to the original news item.
Again, my not being a journalist may be showing here, but that doesn't sound like a bad thing. I -hate- it when I turn on the news, and it's obvious something big happened a few hours ago, and all they're talking about is reactions to the event, or more commonly reactions to reactions.
More importantly, I have a hard time buying the idea that just because most of the other news does that, that's what people actually want. They don't have much alternative, all the other news sites seem to have the "A story that is an hour old is dead" mindset. I don't think non-journalists ever think along those lines, thus I think there would be a subset of consumers who would be more interested in the up to 23 hour news story rather than the house majority leader reacting to the senate minority leader responding to the president's press briefing on the thing that happened 6 hours ago.
You'd be hopelessly behind anyone who wants to discuss or act on the news (which, I think, are the major reasons people want news). You couldn't make any money.
Like I said, it couldn't compete with that game, but it seems to me that most people reading the first-breaking story aren't actually reading it on whichever website broke it first, since the "stories" on from those first breakers are rarely more than a headline and maybe a statement. An in-depth story on the other hand would be linked to, not summarized, by blogs, etc.
That's good that you have an alternative that works for you on your home computer, but you're never going to get my whole department to trade some of those features for security, even the ones who -could- install it themselves. Them using an insecure PDF viewer is problematic for me because I have to use the same network. Thus it's a good thing.
I am not a journalist, but I wonder if the solution to both of those problems is maybe to move back toward a periodical basis for publishing. Just because you -can- update a news website every minute doesn't mean you necessarily -should-, and I think in fact that just because every other website updates every few minutes doesn't mean yours needs to either per se. Maybe if you said "Okay, the front page is going to be updated once a day at noon, that's when the deadline is. A big story breaks an hour after noon, that gives you 23 hours to get the full story and make it coherent rather than publish bits and pieces in a stream of drivel."
It wouldn't get the first scoops, but how profitable is that anyway? Seems like most individuals still don't follow most news stories as fast as they come out, with the BP oil spill most people I know didn't seem to know until a few days after the story broke. It's not like people searching for news on a subject look for first-breaking story.
Heck, maybe people would even go there right after your daily publishing to browse rather than just going to google and getting the story you broke first without giving you any page hits.
Just throwing the suggestion out there. Again, I don't really know what I'm talking about.
Whether the users are happy or not doesn't mean squat to Facebook because their users aren't their customers.
Until their users are so unhappy that they leave and their real customers immediately follow. Look at radio stations. They're in hard times because everyone is listening to their mp3s or internet radio, or something that doesn't have annoying DJs and ads. The fact that you don't pay radio as a customer is irrelevant.
For something that's free, people sure do get enraged when it changes in the slightest, or has bugs, or decides to try to profit from the information that people love to dump on it.
Well, if you promise one thing for free, then go changing it on people, yeah, that annoys them at least a little. They were expecting one thing and had their reasons for agreeing to it in the first place. Those expectations may have been ignorant, but you don't sign up for facebook -after- investigating their privacy policy, that's just not how normal people work.
Does that mean that no one deserves fortune either?
It does not mean that, no.
If you can keep a laser beam on target that long, you might as well use the laser to guide an effective, high explosive round to it.
Sounds like faulty reasoning to me. For one thing, there are many values for "a long time." If you have to hold the guidance laser on the target for 30 seconds, but the defense laser for 20 seconds, those are both non-instantaneous, but when you're talking about an enemy aircraft trying to bomb you, I'd assume that's a world of difference. Also seems like we might not want missiles certain situations, like maybe when the enemy aircraft are in close proximity to friendly aircraft. I'd also expect the effective distance would be different Maybe the lasers have a wider effective range, closer, farther, or both? Are the sea sparrows they're replacing laser guided?
Lastly, I don't know much about laser guidance systems, but couldn't there be countermeasures for laser guidance that wouldn't be possible for a laser boring through the plane? Seems like a plane shining a laser off of itself might be able to redirect the missile, wheras the plane would need to be coated in a very good mirror to deflect the laser?
Is it shark-mountable?
Now there's a stupid question. Where do you think the lasers COME FROM? Obviously the shark tank.
I'd say that people that stupid deserve whatever they get, except that they are likely to do damage to other systems than their own.
As always, this sentiment annoys me.
Ignorance may be annoying, but it doesn't mean someone "deserves" any misfortune. No one is born knowing "I should not enable javascript in my e-mail." If this slipped through google, who I expect to be better than the average user, who the hell are you to say the average user should have known better and deserves it?
Build a dam across the entrance of the SF bay and capture the power from the tidal flow going in and out every day.
Sounds like a decent idea, lets try it. I've got $10 right here, if we pool that with the money the state is willing to put towards that, we'd have almost $10 ;)
(Good idea eventually though)
This sounds more like a case of corporations eroding our civil rights, which has little to do with the war on terror, they're always quick to do that to avoid bad PR. That the FBI asked for information and suggested burstnet drop them is not ideal, yes, but let's not act like this is all the US government going paranoid: plenty of companies in whatever country you live in would screw your rights over too even if your government wouldn't ask them.
That and you're preaching to the choir.
Oh yeah, I knew it sounded familiar.
Well, if anyone needed yet another reason not to advocate my idea, it didn't work out in fiction, so it might not work in reality either.
The youtube video of a grandmother viewing "Two chicks one cup" is pretty funny, so you might have an idea there.
Spoiler alert: she is somewhat disturbed and upset.
(If you're interested note that it's on youtube: it does not actually show the actual material, do a search for it)
(warning, even reading the description will make you reach for the brain bleach)
Heck, I don't need wikipedia to reach for the tequila.
And how frequently do you click on random URLs from people you don't know now that you've had that experience?
Look, if you know a better way to play internet russian roulette, I'm all ears. When I play I'm hoping for malware or a virus, not something WORSE!
One idea, (probably a terrible one but maybe worth mentioning here) is have confessed child molesters do it.
I am not any type of psychologist, nor do I know much about the criminal system, but maybe experiencing that flood of sewage will give them negative associations with those images that they lack naturally. Maybe seeing some CP that would appeal to them among tons of images that would be repugnant to anyone, which sounds like what these screening services have to deal with, would make the whole mess less appealing to them.
On the other hand, I also see the obvious potential dangers of taking non-violent molesters and showing them CP alongside violent images.
From what I've heard, reforming them through prison and counseling doesn't really work. I don't know how convincing the evidence for that is, maybe that's not true, but maybe there's no way to make it worse by viewiing this stuff. I also haven't seen anything to suggest you can deprogram someone's sexuality like that, I've heard that those programs trying to turn gay people straight are complete wastes of time, so it's probably not something that's malleable. TFA talks about decreased sexual appetites with the current workers, that's probably due to the fact that the worst of the worst doesn't appeal to them, wheras that might appeal to the molesters and might be counter-effective.
Who knows? I certainly don't, nor would I be at all interested in these jobs, child molesters, or studying any of the above, but it seems like some criminal psychologist might want to run a small trial of that.
Are you going to suggest banning capitalism in towns with courthouses?
If it will allow me to continue watching videos of cats doing cute things, people falling down in funny ways, breakdancing, and all the other silly but entertaining things I see on youtube, then I'll suggest that yes, communism socialism anarchy or whatever in Marshall Texas is just fine for me personally. Cede it to North Korea for all I care, just don't let Viacom win.
(I should explicitly mention that I am not a lawyer, not from Texas, and am not serious)
Well now in social situations when somebody asks you how many chicken nuggets you want, or how long you have been with the company, you don't look like a retard when you put your hands up and start counting fingers.
Chicken McNuggets come in 6, 10, and sometimes 20 or 50 quantities. So if you're in a McDonalds and counting is involved in your chicken nugget order, you're doing it wrong. And if you're ordering the 50 piece "party bucket" you're probably also doing "avoiding heart disease" wrong too.
Seriously? You can't see the value in forcing kids to learn how to count in their heads?
I see more value in allowing children to come up with their own solutions and find what works best for them. They'll do it anyway, as I did and GP did. Show me a study that demonstrates finger-counting actually impedes math skills and I'll shut up, but I suspect this is just a poorly-researched "It's how I learned it so it's the right way and it's how you'll learn it" relic. One that probably turns more kids off of math at an early stage, before the really fun math.
It's always "in another 5 to 10 years" and then everyone forgets about it and nothing ever comes of it.
Almost none of the exciting medical research projects you're talking about were "forgotten," what happened is they didn't pan out. Cancer drugs have worked in rats but not in humans, various treatments have had promising initial results on cells in a dish, and then in a whole animal they had unexpected side effects, refinements in efficiency and cost proved impossible, etc.
In the cases where you hear "5 to 10 years" and then nothing, one common scenario leading to that is that one of the researchers associated with the exciting project was asked when it might be useful on patients, which the researcher probably had no real idea since it would probably be another researcher or a whole different organization entirely to take it the next step. An honest answer in those cases would be "I have no idea, I hadn't really thought about it beyond there's nothing that I could do immediately and there are other more interesting projects I'll work on next, I'm basically done with this" He or she instead just said "Oh, maybe 5 to 10 years." Whoever he or she told that to liked the sound of that and thought it would make the news item/blog post/story more interesting and stated it as a specific prediction rather than just a random vague guess. And then whoever picked it up, another lab, another researcher in the same lab, a private company, found it didn't make the transition from petri dish to lab rat or lab rat to human clinical trials.
Also possible that the researcher was just trying to hype up his or her own research to get more funding.
Anyway, these projects haven't just been forgotten because we researchers have short memories, and those 5-10 year predictions weren't supposed to be or shouldn't have been promises.