I think every country should start doing exactly the same things to all US citizens. Let's see how long it takes before Americans start to complain about being fingerprinted, cavity searched, and arbitrarily detained.
I like most Americans, but your fucking government is out of control.
I find that, in general, my countrymen and women who are most opposed to ridiculousness like this are the very ones who leave the US the most often. Those numbskulls who approve of treating all international travelers like terrorists on the other hand stay at home
Maybe its that travellers experience security theater firsthand and then become opposed to it. Maybe it's more that people who want full body cavity searches of all people coming into the US are so xenophobic about the evil non-americans trying to steal their precious "freedom" from them that they won't leave. Or maybe it's just that those people who can't see that it's doing nothing are so dumb they don't realize there's anything worth seeing outside of our borders.
Whatever the case, blaming Americans who do venture past our borders is blaming the wrong demographic.
You forgot your sarcasm tag. It's a testament to Bush's awfulness that yet another centrist, milquetoast suit was hailed as liberal saviour.
I am not a lawyer, but as far as the Obama administration arguing for this, doesn't the administration pretty much -have- to defend the law here since it is the government and the government is the defendant? In the case of the "defense of marriage act," the Obama administration had to defend it in court even though Obama thought it should be repealed.
So maybe in this case, Obama felt obligated to defend the DHS in court regardless of how dumb or valid he felt the rules being challenged were.
Now,I think "appropriate place to repeal a bad rule" is trivial compared to actually repealing that bad law. In this case, had the courts struck down DHS's stupid, stupid rules rather than the legislative branch or executive branch dealt with it in a slower manner that allowed plenty of political BS and lobbying efforts, that would be okay in my book.
True, but I do think it's interesting that we're starting to make handhelds that are beyond our visual capacity. Makes me feel somewhat like we've triumphed over nature again.
Anyway, hold the phone, I recall something about slashdot being news for... some group of people... who were those people again?
But, yes, anyone who claims that Apple was lying about it being a "retinal" display is simply attempting to pick a needless fight. Ignore them and move on.
Or they're just pointing out that apple has a ridiculous marketing point right there. Trivial point, trivial counterpoint, it's all trivial, don't just say the counterpoint is silly.
I too was getting the robocaller, but was actually impressed with their efficiency. The one time I remained on the line long enough to talk to someone, all I heard was "Hello (click)" and the line went dead.
They're so efficient they knew just from me breathing rate that I bike everwhere and had no car, so they didn't waste any more of my time!
Either that, or they were so fsking retarded that they couldn't actually work the phones properly.
Why is it that you get in trouble for distributing marijuana for a bigger fish but you don't get in trouble for working as a call operator at some telemarketer who is making illegal telephone calls?
Maybe it's a matter of who is enforcing those laws. Maybe if we put it on the police to track down telemarketers instead of the FTC, we'd start seeing headlines like "Suspected telemarketers accuse Chicago cops of brutality."
Perhaps law enforcement has been less successful at the task of making sure you can't smoke pot. Sure, I'm just saying, I've never had a pot dealer wake me up in the middle of the night to tell me "This is your second notice that your stash of pot is about to expire..."
There is only one sensible reaction from a sensible person:
That after the long ridiculous development process that apperantly still isn't there, there is no way duke nukem forever could be anything other than a terrible amalgamation of different visions. Much like "Too Human" took forever to come out and was pretty poorly executed.
I am by no means an expert on the game industry, but I'm guessing a new duke nukem game won't come out for a long time. You want to buy the rights to duke nukem? Alright, half the cost will be buying what we have made on "Duke nukem forever." What's that? You say the parts of Forever that are there are basically terrible ideas which can't be made into one coherent game? Well, we "invested" so much time and money into making it, no way are we just going to let that go to waste, you have to buy it or you won't get to make a duke nukem game!
There isn't exactly a central command for differentiation, but there are definitely instructions being given to cells, instructions that won't be given to injected cells. The fact that you get teratomas in mice demonstrates that. Moreover we do know a good amount about signaling in the embryo, though we know we don't know it all, and it does seem to be complex compared to our technical abilities.
In the case of the spinal cord, it seems to be quite complex signaling involving FGF from the somites, sonic hedgehog from the notochord, notch signaling between progenitor cells themselves (could be mistaken about that), and retinoic acid to create a correctly patterned spinal cord. Those same signaling events are not going on in adults, the somites and notochord aren't found in adults for one thing, and the stem cell niche disappears.
That is not something we can really control yet in a patient with surgery, let alone just injecting stem cells.
But now it's about money and suddenly they're all up in arms with boycotts and protests...
If you own a business, and know that one of your biggest customers was having financial difficulties, that's probably a bad time to tell them they won't be getting the same discount anymore. That would go double if that same customer somehow was giving you a significant amount of the product you were selling back to them. That's the situation that nature stumbled into: they get a lot of their research from UC, UC is a major customer of their journals, and the UC system has been really hit by the state budget situation. Nature seems to have been extremely arrogant and foolish about their negotiating position.
As to why there wasn't as much concern about the fake journals? No one was expecting much from them. Even before those were uncovered as thinly veiled ads, they would have been placed on the Z list of respected journals, pretty much ignored by everyone. If it's not one of the top journals, you don't read their articles unless you're interested in the content, all the articles coming from those fake journals seem to have been "this drug works." If you don't work on that drug, as the vast majority of faculty at UC don't, then you wouldn't have ever run across those journals. Endnote seems to be licensed to everyone who is connected to the UC system.
Not sure anyone in the UC system would have said those issues didn't matter, but it didn't affect any of them directly, unlike the lack of money.
Because the research isn't there yet. It's not a maybe, this definitely will not work, it will either do absolutely nothing (immune system rejects the cells) or will kill the patient (cells form tumors).
It isn’t understood yet how stem cell communicates with the body to determine and travel to sites of need but results have been observed showing stem cells located near the damage area and dividing there generating new differentiated healthy cells.
I could believe that. New healthy differentiated cells. Would they repair the damage? Does pouring wet concrete onto a damaged building repair it? No, I'm guessing you need more signaling and structure. Embryos don't make their bodies by just grouping a bunch of stem cells in a roughly humanoid shape and then the cells know what to do to make arms and brains. It's complicated.
Additionally, I'd worry about the differentiated part. If you inject a mouse with induced pluripotent stem cells or embryonic stem cells you don't get good things, you get teratomas.
If you inject a mouse chest with undifferentiated stem cells, you start seeing, say, giant bony tumors forming in their lungs among other various types of tumors. The mice for those experiments are immunodeficient because injecting human stem cells into an immune healthy mouse would presumably just result in the mouse immune system eating the cells. If you have ESC (harvested from an embryo that was not you, your twin, or a clone of you) injected into your damaged spinal cord, ideally your body would recognize those aren't your cells and would destroy them, and you'd have just wasted a bunch of money, because if it doesn't, you're growing complex tumors in your central nervous system.
And we don't know how to instruct pluripotent stem cells to all turn into the right type of cell yet.
Maybe there was one time they got it right: The first-person scene [youtube.com] in Doom.
And most of the street fighter movie. There was fighting. Granted, there was very little fighting -on a street-, but there was the fighting. Plus, with a fighting game there's not a whole lot of character development, thus even Jean-Claude Van Damme was able to portray a much more complex character than in the games!
Bonus points for a scene involving a the arcade controls. Also a Godzilla reference that makes no sense.
I'm being serious, street fighter was one of the good ones, even though I suspect they made most of the movie before realizing how god-awful it was going to be, so they made it into a comedy.
Since the onset of puberty has become earlier if anything...
Onset of puberty is, I'm assuming, a complex biological event we don't completely understand, but one that can be affected by multiple factors. One explanation as to why puberty is starting earlier is that BPA did not do anything. Another explanation is that, no, BPA is still having unnatural effects but other factors, like increased hormones in meat, are having some other unnatural effects that would partially mask that.
The following is pure conjecture:
Maybe BPA -is- actually delaying puberty in males, but increased hormone consumption and increased estrogen in the water supply is causing female puberty to happen earlier, causing the effect to wash out. Or suppose BPA is causing ovary development to be delayed, but less incidence of secondhand smoke is causing secondary puberty effects like breast development to happen earlier: puberty would seem to have started earlier, but would actually be more complicated.
I have no idea, I just wanted to caution that there are potential alternative explanations that don't exonerate BPA.
There's a lot of stuff the Free Market can't fix. This isn't one of them.
I'd be more convinced of that had previous established industries built around something that was proven harmful traditionally reacted with an open mind and shut themselves down, rather than engaging in a campaign of FUD about the science.
You know, like if in the 50's the tobacco industry had said "Guys, the scientists are saying these things are killing us, so we're going to switch to growing, uh, potatoes or something. We just want you to be healthy, sorry to all of you who we've inadvertently gotten addicted."
Instead what I expect to happen is plastics companies will continue to sell you BPA free water bottles, capitalizing on the craze, and more importantly hoping that a BPA free water bottle will make you forget about the 3 tons that are still being produced every year and the millions of other products they're selling which can contaminate you, like canned foods.
Worth pointing out that the safety valve that was supposed to prevent this thing, all the plans to stop the flow at the source, and all the dispersants being used to reduce the effects of the oil... all those had never been properly tested either. I think the safety valve had been tested at half the depth it was being used at? So if we make sure it's not going to do any -harm- then we're at least -improving-, even if we don't test efficiency first before we deploy it.
That value seems out of range, considering that you could finance two wars, clean up the BP spill and probably have enough left over to coat New Orleans in gold leaf...
That's their goal, it was going to be a nice surprise for the rest of us, but now you've kind of ruined it...
Slashdot Mirror
Now if only we could get them to ban reporting on twitter whatsoever, that would be real progress.
I think every country should start doing exactly the same things to all US citizens. Let's see how long it takes before Americans start to complain about being fingerprinted, cavity searched, and arbitrarily detained.
I like most Americans, but your fucking government is out of control.
I find that, in general, my countrymen and women who are most opposed to ridiculousness like this are the very ones who leave the US the most often. Those numbskulls who approve of treating all international travelers like terrorists on the other hand stay at home
Maybe its that travellers experience security theater firsthand and then become opposed to it. Maybe it's more that people who want full body cavity searches of all people coming into the US are so xenophobic about the evil non-americans trying to steal their precious "freedom" from them that they won't leave. Or maybe it's just that those people who can't see that it's doing nothing are so dumb they don't realize there's anything worth seeing outside of our borders.
Whatever the case, blaming Americans who do venture past our borders is blaming the wrong demographic.
You forgot your sarcasm tag. It's a testament to Bush's awfulness that yet another centrist, milquetoast suit was hailed as liberal saviour.
I am not a lawyer, but as far as the Obama administration arguing for this, doesn't the administration pretty much -have- to defend the law here since it is the government and the government is the defendant? In the case of the "defense of marriage act," the Obama administration had to defend it in court even though Obama thought it should be repealed.
So maybe in this case, Obama felt obligated to defend the DHS in court regardless of how dumb or valid he felt the rules being challenged were.
Now,I think "appropriate place to repeal a bad rule" is trivial compared to actually repealing that bad law. In this case, had the courts struck down DHS's stupid, stupid rules rather than the legislative branch or executive branch dealt with it in a slower manner that allowed plenty of political BS and lobbying efforts, that would be okay in my book.
McCain would clearly have been worse, just by continuing more of Bush's policies than Obama.
So I guess you didn't buy the whole "Maverick" thing. Not that anyone could blame you for that, McCain didn't believe it himself.
True, but I do think it's interesting that we're starting to make handhelds that are beyond our visual capacity. Makes me feel somewhat like we've triumphed over nature again.
Anyway, hold the phone, I recall something about slashdot being news for... some group of people... who were those people again?
But, yes, anyone who claims that Apple was lying about it being a "retinal" display is simply attempting to pick a needless fight. Ignore them and move on.
Or they're just pointing out that apple has a ridiculous marketing point right there. Trivial point, trivial counterpoint, it's all trivial, don't just say the counterpoint is silly.
I was in a classroom once that had a phone on the wall. You wouldn't think that a classroom would have a car, let alone one with a warranty...
I too was getting the robocaller, but was actually impressed with their efficiency. The one time I remained on the line long enough to talk to someone, all I heard was "Hello (click)" and the line went dead.
They're so efficient they knew just from me breathing rate that I bike everwhere and had no car, so they didn't waste any more of my time!
Either that, or they were so fsking retarded that they couldn't actually work the phones properly.
Why is it that you get in trouble for distributing marijuana for a bigger fish but you don't get in trouble for working as a call operator at some telemarketer who is making illegal telephone calls?
Maybe it's a matter of who is enforcing those laws. Maybe if we put it on the police to track down telemarketers instead of the FTC, we'd start seeing headlines like "Suspected telemarketers accuse Chicago cops of brutality."
Perhaps law enforcement has been less successful at the task of making sure you can't smoke pot. Sure, I'm just saying, I've never had a pot dealer wake me up in the middle of the night to tell me "This is your second notice that your stash of pot is about to expire..."
There is only one sensible reaction from a sensible person:
That after the long ridiculous development process that apperantly still isn't there, there is no way duke nukem forever could be anything other than a terrible amalgamation of different visions. Much like "Too Human" took forever to come out and was pretty poorly executed.
I am by no means an expert on the game industry, but I'm guessing a new duke nukem game won't come out for a long time. You want to buy the rights to duke nukem? Alright, half the cost will be buying what we have made on "Duke nukem forever." What's that? You say the parts of Forever that are there are basically terrible ideas which can't be made into one coherent game? Well, we "invested" so much time and money into making it, no way are we just going to let that go to waste, you have to buy it or you won't get to make a duke nukem game!
There isn't exactly a central command for differentiation, but there are definitely instructions being given to cells, instructions that won't be given to injected cells. The fact that you get teratomas in mice demonstrates that. Moreover we do know a good amount about signaling in the embryo, though we know we don't know it all, and it does seem to be complex compared to our technical abilities.
In the case of the spinal cord, it seems to be quite complex signaling involving FGF from the somites, sonic hedgehog from the notochord, notch signaling between progenitor cells themselves (could be mistaken about that), and retinoic acid to create a correctly patterned spinal cord. Those same signaling events are not going on in adults, the somites and notochord aren't found in adults for one thing, and the stem cell niche disappears.
That is not something we can really control yet in a patient with surgery, let alone just injecting stem cells.
But now it's about money and suddenly they're all up in arms with boycotts and protests...
If you own a business, and know that one of your biggest customers was having financial difficulties, that's probably a bad time to tell them they won't be getting the same discount anymore. That would go double if that same customer somehow was giving you a significant amount of the product you were selling back to them. That's the situation that nature stumbled into: they get a lot of their research from UC, UC is a major customer of their journals, and the UC system has been really hit by the state budget situation. Nature seems to have been extremely arrogant and foolish about their negotiating position.
As to why there wasn't as much concern about the fake journals? No one was expecting much from them. Even before those were uncovered as thinly veiled ads, they would have been placed on the Z list of respected journals, pretty much ignored by everyone. If it's not one of the top journals, you don't read their articles unless you're interested in the content, all the articles coming from those fake journals seem to have been "this drug works." If you don't work on that drug, as the vast majority of faculty at UC don't, then you wouldn't have ever run across those journals. Endnote seems to be licensed to everyone who is connected to the UC system.
Not sure anyone in the UC system would have said those issues didn't matter, but it didn't affect any of them directly, unlike the lack of money.
Because the research isn't there yet. It's not a maybe, this definitely will not work, it will either do absolutely nothing (immune system rejects the cells) or will kill the patient (cells form tumors).
It isn’t understood yet how stem cell communicates with the body to determine and travel to sites of need but results have been observed showing stem cells located near the damage area and dividing there generating new differentiated healthy cells.
I could believe that. New healthy differentiated cells. Would they repair the damage? Does pouring wet concrete onto a damaged building repair it? No, I'm guessing you need more signaling and structure. Embryos don't make their bodies by just grouping a bunch of stem cells in a roughly humanoid shape and then the cells know what to do to make arms and brains. It's complicated.
Additionally, I'd worry about the differentiated part. If you inject a mouse with induced pluripotent stem cells or embryonic stem cells you don't get good things, you get teratomas.
iPSCs injected into immunodeficient mice spontaneously formed teratomas after nine weeks. Teratomas are tumors of multiple lineages containing tissue derived from the three germ layers endoderm, mesoderm and ectoderm; this is unlike other tumors, which typically are of only one cell type. Teratoma formation is a landmark test for pluripotency.
If you inject a mouse chest with undifferentiated stem cells, you start seeing, say, giant bony tumors forming in their lungs among other various types of tumors. The mice for those experiments are immunodeficient because injecting human stem cells into an immune healthy mouse would presumably just result in the mouse immune system eating the cells. If you have ESC (harvested from an embryo that was not you, your twin, or a clone of you) injected into your damaged spinal cord, ideally your body would recognize those aren't your cells and would destroy them, and you'd have just wasted a bunch of money, because if it doesn't, you're growing complex tumors in your central nervous system.
And we don't know how to instruct pluripotent stem cells to all turn into the right type of cell yet.
...to an "oh my god, I could have seen that coming if I was blind" ending in the movie.
Gee, thanks for ruining it for me...
Maybe there was one time they got it right: The first-person scene [youtube.com] in Doom.
And most of the street fighter movie. There was fighting. Granted, there was very little fighting -on a street-, but there was the fighting. Plus, with a fighting game there's not a whole lot of character development, thus even Jean-Claude Van Damme was able to portray a much more complex character than in the games!
Bonus points for a scene involving a the arcade controls. Also a Godzilla reference that makes no sense.
I'm being serious, street fighter was one of the good ones, even though I suspect they made most of the movie before realizing how god-awful it was going to be, so they made it into a comedy.
Even if it costs $10,000 more than the 33mpg one and you only drive 5,000 miles per year. Sure.
When "better" means "for the environment", not "for your personal finances" (which is what we were talking about)?
Yes. Dollar cost to the car is irrelevant.
So 2 out of 3 Americans miss a trick question. Stunning.
So in 80+ years of research the best they can come up with is "There may be an issue with Bisphenol-A"
We haven't cured cancer or the common cold either. Biology is hard.
If something were really, really bad for you, the evidence would be overwhelming.
Cutting off my toe would not be really, really bad for me, but that doesn't mean you can cut off my toe and it would be just fine and dandy.
Since the onset of puberty has become earlier if anything...
Onset of puberty is, I'm assuming, a complex biological event we don't completely understand, but one that can be affected by multiple factors. One explanation as to why puberty is starting earlier is that BPA did not do anything. Another explanation is that, no, BPA is still having unnatural effects but other factors, like increased hormones in meat, are having some other unnatural effects that would partially mask that.
The following is pure conjecture:
Maybe BPA -is- actually delaying puberty in males, but increased hormone consumption and increased estrogen in the water supply is causing female puberty to happen earlier, causing the effect to wash out. Or suppose BPA is causing ovary development to be delayed, but less incidence of secondhand smoke is causing secondary puberty effects like breast development to happen earlier: puberty would seem to have started earlier, but would actually be more complicated.
I have no idea, I just wanted to caution that there are potential alternative explanations that don't exonerate BPA.
There's a lot of stuff the Free Market can't fix. This isn't one of them.
I'd be more convinced of that had previous established industries built around something that was proven harmful traditionally reacted with an open mind and shut themselves down, rather than engaging in a campaign of FUD about the science.
You know, like if in the 50's the tobacco industry had said "Guys, the scientists are saying these things are killing us, so we're going to switch to growing, uh, potatoes or something. We just want you to be healthy, sorry to all of you who we've inadvertently gotten addicted."
Instead what I expect to happen is plastics companies will continue to sell you BPA free water bottles, capitalizing on the craze, and more importantly hoping that a BPA free water bottle will make you forget about the 3 tons that are still being produced every year and the millions of other products they're selling which can contaminate you, like canned foods.
It's probably something you could google.
Worth pointing out that the safety valve that was supposed to prevent this thing, all the plans to stop the flow at the source, and all the dispersants being used to reduce the effects of the oil... all those had never been properly tested either. I think the safety valve had been tested at half the depth it was being used at? So if we make sure it's not going to do any -harm- then we're at least -improving-, even if we don't test efficiency first before we deploy it.
That value seems out of range, considering that you could finance two wars, clean up the BP spill and probably have enough left over to coat New Orleans in gold leaf...
That's their goal, it was going to be a nice surprise for the rest of us, but now you've kind of ruined it...