You sir are no better than who you responded to because you pidgin-holed a large group of people by saying something obtuse. It edges on trolling (though I doubt you will me modded as such).
It was snarky, but so was the GP. I did respond in kind. That's what is needed sometimes. Tubesteak was acting as if this is a crime, it's not, it's valuable research with good goals. He might value rat life differently. That's fine, but it's worth pointing out that animal rights advocates who speak out against paralyzing animals to find cures for paralysis rarely think they have anything to gain from that research. I think if they did realize they had something to gain from it, or if they had an ounce of empathy for those who are paralyzed, they would feel differently.
I do hate it when people word things that they think some groups might find disgusting so that it is round about.
It's important to remember that when reading about research on/., rarely are the summary or "the article" actually written by the scientists themselves. "TFA" is usually written by a staff writer at websites like newscientist, and the summaries are written by/.ers. Occasionally, a link is provided to the real paper, as it was here. That's the actual stuff straight from the horse's mouth. Before you critique the scientists for being incomplete or not including information, make sure you're reading the article that the scientists wrote to see if they did that, but the chain of people who brought it to slashdot left it out.
Tubesteak was taking advantage of that, acting as if the scientists were trying to cover up that information, when in fact they made no attempt to conceal it.
When the right was doing things the left didn't like and the left protested, some ridiculous arguments were brought out. Now the left is doing things the right doesn't like, the right is protesting as it has every right to do. My signature is just highlighting the fact that the left isn't quite stooping to the response the right had to protests. I was not seriously trying to equate the two, just taking the opportunity to act superior.
I'd also like to point out that despite the caps, "Especially because the federal government... has ABSOLUTELY NO RIGHT to touch health care," is debatable at best. I'd say the government has the right to do whatever we (the people, not the left) want it to do.
That is usually code for "we severed the spine so we could test out this technique"
That is usually code for "I disapprove of this research and will continue to do so right up until I get a spinal cord injury, at which point I will promptly forget I was ever opposed to it and will gripe about the research taking too long."
And what's even better is when I try to cite the safe harbor laws or portion limits on Slashdot, I'm ridiculed over and over... despite my analysis being correct!
Uh... someone in that thread said that was a guideline, not a law. I have no idea if that's true or not. You weren't ridiculed, people just disagreed with you. One said that bit about guideline vs law, another disagreed with your interpretation of said guideline, and one guy made a joke (the butt of which was Lessig, not you.) Last, is it really "over and over" if it's just multiple people responding to one post? That was one thread you linked to there. It's not like you've become a running joke for it.
I was going to say someone in town should solve the problem by fertilizing his crops with radiation, and then going in with a geiger counter to show that his garlic is already too radioactive to be "organic" so the tower wouldn't be so bad.
Then I realized 1: that would probably be somewhat irresponsible and illegal and more importantly 2: Anyone sufficiently motivated would face ordering the radioactive stuff... ON DIALUP.
Not as poor as black and white television would look to people who can see in more than black and white.
A story from a while back showed that people who watched black and white TV as kids still often have monochromatic dreams. That to me suggests the brain might handle stepping DOWN in number of colors without much complaint. I'd be more concerned with "would the increased range of colors be extremely distracting, or cause seizures in those of us who have lived without 4 color channels?" It might be constant information overload.
I'd be happy to see in IR, but I'd undergo treatment to become a tetrachromat. That seems a little more likely, since there seem to be people who are tetrachromats.
I see that I did go off on a tangent there when you weren't actually advocating that viewpoint.
I will point out that, especially with the viral method of transfection, you'd be much more likely to get cancer from this rather than GMO. I'm optimistic that if someone were offering to cure colorblindness by this method, someone would point out that and buisiness would dry up as people weigh the risks. I'm less optimistic that if they figure out how to do gene therapy without viral transfection or increased risk of cancer, GMO protesters will trust scientists.
Heck, I suspect the "infectedwithrage" tag currently on the story isn't completely sarcastic, and we're supposed to be at least a little more science oriented than the average joes.
Shockingly enough, people are willing to take larger risks to solve more serious problems, and for most of the people who object to GM crops, some previously incurable disease is a much larger problem than food supply, which is already good and solved if you have the money.
Disclaimer: I easily might not know what I'm talking about here, and as a (non agricultural) biologist myself, I'm probably skewed opinion towards the "we can improve on nature without serious consequence" end of things.
We do have enough food I guess, and we do have advanced ways of making that much food. It would be great if the cost of GOOD food came down, if we could make the food better, and if we could get away from some agriculture methods, assuming the risk was low enough.
You can get all the calories you need in a day for about ten cents. If you want healthy food, that strains some people's budget. Seems to me that if we made a fresh salad cheaper than a microwave burrito or what have you, a decent amount of the of obesity and malnutrition problems poorer america faces would dissapear. I believe that when the price of produce drops, the quality of life increases, even though we have enough food for everyone to not starve.
Second, again on the "nutrition could be improved" end, some crops can be healthier for you. Golden rice is one example I've heard of. Vitamin A deficiency is apperantly a big problem in the developing world, especially parts in which rice is a staple of the diet. Rice which has been engineered to contain more beta carotene, great idea.
Third, we could use crops which didn't require as much fertilizer, pesticides, and other ecologically damaging maintenece. I'm sure there are more environmentally sound methods of crop production that don't require genetic modification, but to each one, I'd ask why they aren't being used right now. If it's an efficiency question, or just more expensive, then that gets into my first point.
Most GM protests and protesters I've heard of have focused more on costumes than actual risks, which makes me think that they might not be motivated by risks so much as FUD.
I'd wait until they find a way to make it work without injecting the viruses into your eyes. I haven't been following gene therapy or viral transfection, I'm assuming there's still the problem that these viruses still insert their genes into your genome at random, potentially interrupting, say retinoblastoma. I think if that happened you'd be many times more likely to develop the cancer the protein is named after.
What?!? NO! GOD NO! The best disinfectant is often sunshine, as the old (slightly inaccurate) saying goes. Lack of information is EXACTLY how these bogus* scientists make inroads. And in many cases it's extremely dangerous. In Mattthias Rath's case, he was leading studies that are scientifically and ethically worse** than the Tuskegee syphilis experiments.
These cases need to be talked about until people get angry enough about it to stop if from happening.
*by that I mean the type of bogus that you can't sue about. Actually, for the purposes of libel lawsuits, I retract that and apologize for using it. My delete key is acting up, that's why I didn't edit it out.
** another statement I really mean to redact for legal purposes. Damn delete key being broken.
I can accept that alien scientists would use english, but I don't think they'd say "similar to our own" if they were going to immediately say how different the two planets were. Good communication is good communication.~
Just so we're clear, the blame lies with the doctors. I can't fault non-biologists or non-medical personell for not knowing that viruses aren't affected by antibiotics. The doctors who risk creating a pandemic because it's easier than convincing some people pills won't make it work magically, those are the people who should honestly face criminal charges.
Disinfectants usually physically break apart the bacteria and the common methods of antibiotic resistance don't protect against this.
Yes, but think of how terrible it will be if bacteria ever do develop resistance to those disinfectants. If bacteria become resistant to ethanol for example, our nation's beer and liquor supply could become contaminated. And if cruddy sci fi TV shows have taught me anything, using disinfectants which dry out or physically break up bacteria will only teach them to survive that, and they will then spread that resistance to other animals, such as velociraptors, creating super velociraptors. You'll try to blow them up, but they'll regenerate, like the broomsticks in Fantasia.
Which is terrifying. I'm going to have to take the rest of the day off to prepare.
But he is not a scientist. His "interest" in science is mentioned in passing, but has no bearing on the story at all.
he's touring some type of labs when he gets bitten by a genetically spliced spider.
Yes.. touring it - as opposed to working in it... and he's doing it with the rest of his class it's a frigging field trip.
He doesn't actually make the webslingers, yes, but frankly that always struck me as poor storytelling in the first place.
So, the demonstration of his application of science is "poor storytelling"? Way to miss the point.
I recall him still being very into physics although the movie didn't focus on that.
Thank you for making my point for me.
Doc Oc is another thing I think you got wrong
How exactly did I get it wrong? You just repeated what I wrote - he got corrupted by the "evil science".
that wasn't "mad scientist"
Please quote the part of my post where I said it was.
the first two spiderman films, the ones people actually watched, portray science as a powerful force which can be used for good but can also be bent to evil purposes.
Well, next time you might want to provide some examples of that to back up your claim, because all you did was prove that I was correct.
I brought up the webslingers not to say storytelling should beat out science, but to point out it's not that the movie makers just hated the idea of a protagonist who was a scientist, it just flowed better. There was a reason. Same with being a student with an interest in science rather than being a scientist. Those were decisions to make the movie feel less contrived, not "portraying science as evil."
Well, next time you might want to provide some examples of that to back up your claim, because all you did was prove that I was correct.
Contrast that with the recent movies.. Peter never does any science, or uses his intelligence to solve problems. The webbing and shooters are now part of his "mutation" (regardless that if that were the case, it should come out of his ass, rather than his wrists), and science is merely an evil corrupting influence on good, honest men like Norman Osborn or Otto Octavius.
Uh... did you actually SEE the movies?
(Spoilers)
It's been a while since I did, but as I recall, his powers are still science based: he's touring some type of labs when he gets bitten by a genetically spliced spider. He doesn't actually make the webslingers, yes, but frankly that always struck me as poor storytelling in the first place. He's lucky enough to get bitten by a radioactive spider, shortly thereafter but independently he makes these amazing inventions... I may have to turn in my nerd license, but in my opinion, the simpler "they're both from the spider" works a lot better in the movie. Anyway, I recall him still being very into physics although the movie didn't focus on that. He was touring Doc Oc's lab, as Parker, when it went wrong. Doc Oc is another thing I think you got wrong: he was a good scientist going after noble goals. He got evil'd by science, sure, but that wasn't "mad scientist" it was "good guy gets posessed by out of control technology, and eventually triumphs over it with self-sacrifice." And then there was the terrible in all ways 3rd movie, in which science is sorta evil, but that whole movie was total shit. Anyway, I think the first two spiderman films, the ones people actually watched, portray science as a powerful force which can be used for good but can also be bent to evil purposes.
Coincidentally, I think this is a much more accurate message than "Science is always good" or "Science is cool."
Concerning Godwin's law... who exactly was Al Gore's father ? Who started Al Gore's (not that successfull, certainly not at first) political career ? And what were the viewpoints Al Gore defended originally.
Are you suggesting that Al Gore's father and the guy who started his career... was Hitler?
Also, the James Hansons and Al Gores of the world are (and let's be brutally honest here) as far from "scientific" as you can get.
Are they in your opinion really "as far from scientific as you can get" or do you just disagree with some of their interpretations of the data? I've criticisms of every study making any conclusions about climate change, and I've heard an argument that we don't have enough evidence to really justify policy change. But that's all disagreements about interpretation. Scientists always do that (well, they do that if they actually care about the data and aren't sleeping during presentations or thinking about their own research... or just sex...).
If James Hanson and Al Gore make their arguments based on faith or "I believe based on what God told me" then yes, they would be as far from scientific as you can get, but "This person interprets the data differently than I do" is not the same as "not scientific." Lumping them in with fake pharmacists is going way too far, and if you're going to go down that road, why don't you go for the full Godwin?
That said, if they actually did buy older PS3's, take the steep learning curve to SPU programming, port all of their code to a 100% custom platform with hard-to-use tools, and heavily optimize the SPU code, they would probably be running their algorithms significantly faster on PS3 SPU's than on the XBOX 360 GPU.
I know next to nothing about parallel processing or either game console, but I have to ask couldn't they simply use more 360s and get the same speed, without having to spend time doing all of that?
Again, the -vast- majority of mutations are deleterious. Mutations are random changes. A bacterium, while simple compared to a vertebrate cell, is still a finely tuned machine. Making a random change in it would be like randomly soldering in a wire on your motherboard: it probably would be very bad. The odds that it does something useful are astronomically low. The odds that the first mutation would be something that kills the bacterium or cripples it are extremely high.
A single mutation event doesn't often build a characteristic out of nothing either. I would guess the bacteria don't have mechanisms to deal with that level of radiation. Mutations might occur which optimizes their innate DNA repair mechanisms to deal with the types of damage the radioactive metals would cause, that is possible. One bacterium has a mutation in it's machinery that slightly optimizes it to deal with the damage the radioactive metals are causing, it has a slight advantage, in one of it's progeny, another mutation increasing the efficiency of dealing with that type of damage... Eventually I think the bacteria might have no problem with it, that would depend on the type of DNA damage and the frequency. Repairing double stranded breaks, which happens with ionizing radiation I believe, is very difficult. If this is happening often enough, the adaptation process might never get a chance to work before the bacteria subjected to it die off. If it were infrequent enough and minor enough, sure.
The time scale I also have no idea about. I think its safe to assume it would be faster than eukaryotic organisms, and there are plants near Chernobyl which have already adapted to conditions there.
Single-celled organisms mutate very easily, and we could easily have a serious problem on our hands if the bacteria turn into something that is dangerous to us and then multiply out of control.
They already multiply rapidly. There is in fact only one control on their numbers: availability of food. That's a big barrier that isn't going to be overcome with an increased mutation rate: they already mutate so rapidly that the increased presence of radiation probably won't significantly change things. In fact, if anything it will probably limit their numbers for a short time. They only have one chromesome, if a vital gene gets damaged they have no backup. They also generally have less machinery devoted to repair than we do. They're generally far more sensitive to radiation and UV light because of that. As you probably are aware, the vast majority of mutations have bad effects. Also most bacteria aren't parasitic, these ones probably won't bother with humans.
They might mutate faster and might acquire some characteristics they wouldnt' if they weren't in a radioactive environment. It's conceivable they might over time develop characters that would enable them to feast on human flesh. In all likelyhood though, the only way that would arise is if it were an advantage. The only way it would be an advantage is if they COULD feed on human flesh. Don't go swimming consistently in these irradiated environments where the bacteria are working and they probably won't learn to eat you. And that's in your advantage anyway, since these are irradiated environments.
Slashdot Mirror
You sir are no better than who you responded to because you pidgin-holed a large group of people by saying something obtuse. It edges on trolling (though I doubt you will me modded as such).
It was snarky, but so was the GP. I did respond in kind. That's what is needed sometimes. Tubesteak was acting as if this is a crime, it's not, it's valuable research with good goals. He might value rat life differently. That's fine, but it's worth pointing out that animal rights advocates who speak out against paralyzing animals to find cures for paralysis rarely think they have anything to gain from that research. I think if they did realize they had something to gain from it, or if they had an ounce of empathy for those who are paralyzed, they would feel differently.
I do hate it when people word things that they think some groups might find disgusting so that it is round about.
That wasn't what happened. The authors explained their methods in detail inthe actual nature article.
It's important to remember that when reading about research on /., rarely are the summary or "the article" actually written by the scientists themselves. "TFA" is usually written by a staff writer at websites like newscientist, and the summaries are written by /.ers. Occasionally, a link is provided to the real paper, as it was here. That's the actual stuff straight from the horse's mouth. Before you critique the scientists for being incomplete or not including information, make sure you're reading the article that the scientists wrote to see if they did that, but the chain of people who brought it to slashdot left it out.
Tubesteak was taking advantage of that, acting as if the scientists were trying to cover up that information, when in fact they made no attempt to conceal it.
When the right was doing things the left didn't like and the left protested, some ridiculous arguments were brought out. Now the left is doing things the right doesn't like, the right is protesting as it has every right to do. My signature is just highlighting the fact that the left isn't quite stooping to the response the right had to protests. I was not seriously trying to equate the two, just taking the opportunity to act superior.
I'd also like to point out that despite the caps, "Especially because the federal government... has ABSOLUTELY NO RIGHT to touch health care," is debatable at best. I'd say the government has the right to do whatever we (the people, not the left) want it to do.
That is usually code for "we severed the spine so we could test out this technique"
That is usually code for "I disapprove of this research and will continue to do so right up until I get a spinal cord injury, at which point I will promptly forget I was ever opposed to it and will gripe about the research taking too long."
And what's even better is when I try to cite the safe harbor laws or portion limits on Slashdot, I'm ridiculed over and over ... despite my analysis being correct!
Uh... someone in that thread said that was a guideline, not a law. I have no idea if that's true or not. You weren't ridiculed, people just disagreed with you. One said that bit about guideline vs law, another disagreed with your interpretation of said guideline, and one guy made a joke (the butt of which was Lessig, not you.) Last, is it really "over and over" if it's just multiple people responding to one post? That was one thread you linked to there. It's not like you've become a running joke for it.
I was going to say someone in town should solve the problem by fertilizing his crops with radiation, and then going in with a geiger counter to show that his garlic is already too radioactive to be "organic" so the tower wouldn't be so bad.
Then I realized 1: that would probably be somewhat irresponsible and illegal and more importantly 2: Anyone sufficiently motivated would face ordering the radioactive stuff... ON DIALUP.
Not as poor as black and white television would look to people who can see in more than black and white.
A story from a while back showed that people who watched black and white TV as kids still often have monochromatic dreams. That to me suggests the brain might handle stepping DOWN in number of colors without much complaint. I'd be more concerned with "would the increased range of colors be extremely distracting, or cause seizures in those of us who have lived without 4 color channels?" It might be constant information overload.
I'd be happy to see in IR, but I'd undergo treatment to become a tetrachromat. That seems a little more likely, since there seem to be people who are tetrachromats.
I see that I did go off on a tangent there when you weren't actually advocating that viewpoint.
I will point out that, especially with the viral method of transfection, you'd be much more likely to get cancer from this rather than GMO. I'm optimistic that if someone were offering to cure colorblindness by this method, someone would point out that and buisiness would dry up as people weigh the risks. I'm less optimistic that if they figure out how to do gene therapy without viral transfection or increased risk of cancer, GMO protesters will trust scientists.
Heck, I suspect the "infectedwithrage" tag currently on the story isn't completely sarcastic, and we're supposed to be at least a little more science oriented than the average joes.
Shockingly enough, people are willing to take larger risks to solve more serious problems, and for most of the people who object to GM crops, some previously incurable disease is a much larger problem than food supply, which is already good and solved if you have the money.
Disclaimer: I easily might not know what I'm talking about here, and as a (non agricultural) biologist myself, I'm probably skewed opinion towards the "we can improve on nature without serious consequence" end of things.
We do have enough food I guess, and we do have advanced ways of making that much food. It would be great if the cost of GOOD food came down, if we could make the food better, and if we could get away from some agriculture methods, assuming the risk was low enough.
You can get all the calories you need in a day for about ten cents. If you want healthy food, that strains some people's budget. Seems to me that if we made a fresh salad cheaper than a microwave burrito or what have you, a decent amount of the of obesity and malnutrition problems poorer america faces would dissapear. I believe that when the price of produce drops, the quality of life increases, even though we have enough food for everyone to not starve.
Second, again on the "nutrition could be improved" end, some crops can be healthier for you. Golden rice is one example I've heard of. Vitamin A deficiency is apperantly a big problem in the developing world, especially parts in which rice is a staple of the diet. Rice which has been engineered to contain more beta carotene, great idea.
Third, we could use crops which didn't require as much fertilizer, pesticides, and other ecologically damaging maintenece. I'm sure there are more environmentally sound methods of crop production that don't require genetic modification, but to each one, I'd ask why they aren't being used right now. If it's an efficiency question, or just more expensive, then that gets into my first point.
Most GM protests and protesters I've heard of have focused more on costumes than actual risks, which makes me think that they might not be motivated by risks so much as FUD.
I'd wait until they find a way to make it work without injecting the viruses into your eyes. I haven't been following gene therapy or viral transfection, I'm assuming there's still the problem that these viruses still insert their genes into your genome at random, potentially interrupting, say retinoblastoma. I think if that happened you'd be many times more likely to develop the cancer the protein is named after.
What?!? NO! GOD NO! The best disinfectant is often sunshine, as the old (slightly inaccurate) saying goes. Lack of information is EXACTLY how these bogus* scientists make inroads. And in many cases it's extremely dangerous. In Mattthias Rath's case, he was leading studies that are scientifically and ethically worse** than the Tuskegee syphilis experiments.
These cases need to be talked about until people get angry enough about it to stop if from happening.
*by that I mean the type of bogus that you can't sue about. Actually, for the purposes of libel lawsuits, I retract that and apologize for using it. My delete key is acting up, that's why I didn't edit it out.
** another statement I really mean to redact for legal purposes. Damn delete key being broken.
I can accept that alien scientists would use english, but I don't think they'd say "similar to our own" if they were going to immediately say how different the two planets were. Good communication is good communication.~
Sure, them too.
Just so we're clear, the blame lies with the doctors. I can't fault non-biologists or non-medical personell for not knowing that viruses aren't affected by antibiotics. The doctors who risk creating a pandemic because it's easier than convincing some people pills won't make it work magically, those are the people who should honestly face criminal charges.
Disinfectants usually physically break apart the bacteria and the common methods of antibiotic resistance don't protect against this.
Yes, but think of how terrible it will be if bacteria ever do develop resistance to those disinfectants. If bacteria become resistant to ethanol for example, our nation's beer and liquor supply could become contaminated. And if cruddy sci fi TV shows have taught me anything, using disinfectants which dry out or physically break up bacteria will only teach them to survive that, and they will then spread that resistance to other animals, such as velociraptors, creating super velociraptors. You'll try to blow them up, but they'll regenerate, like the broomsticks in Fantasia.
Which is terrifying. I'm going to have to take the rest of the day off to prepare.
Prove that this will save lives as the drivers license does and I'm sure some politician will hurt himself rushing to say it in front of a camera.
Uh... did you actually SEE the movies?
Yes, I did.
(Spoilers)
It's been a while since I did
Maybe that's your problem then.
as I recall, his powers are still science based:
But he is not a scientist. His "interest" in science is mentioned in passing, but has no bearing on the story at all.
he's touring some type of labs when he gets bitten by a genetically spliced spider.
Yes.. touring it - as opposed to working in it... and he's doing it with the rest of his class it's a frigging field trip.
He doesn't actually make the webslingers, yes, but frankly that always struck me as poor storytelling in the first place.
So, the demonstration of his application of science is "poor storytelling"? Way to miss the point.
I recall him still being very into physics although the movie didn't focus on that.
Thank you for making my point for me.
Doc Oc is another thing I think you got wrong
How exactly did I get it wrong? You just repeated what I wrote - he got corrupted by the "evil science".
that wasn't "mad scientist"
Please quote the part of my post where I said it was.
the first two spiderman films, the ones people actually watched, portray science as a powerful force which can be used for good but can also be bent to evil purposes.
Well, next time you might want to provide some examples of that to back up your claim, because all you did was prove that I was correct.
I brought up the webslingers not to say storytelling should beat out science, but to point out it's not that the movie makers just hated the idea of a protagonist who was a scientist, it just flowed better. There was a reason. Same with being a student with an interest in science rather than being a scientist. Those were decisions to make the movie feel less contrived, not "portraying science as evil."
Well, next time you might want to provide some examples of that to back up your claim, because all you did was prove that I was correct.
Next time, relax. This isn't a debate.
Contrast that with the recent movies.. Peter never does any science, or uses his intelligence to solve problems. The webbing and shooters are now part of his "mutation" (regardless that if that were the case, it should come out of his ass, rather than his wrists), and science is merely an evil corrupting influence on good, honest men like Norman Osborn or Otto Octavius.
Uh... did you actually SEE the movies?
(Spoilers)
It's been a while since I did, but as I recall, his powers are still science based: he's touring some type of labs when he gets bitten by a genetically spliced spider. He doesn't actually make the webslingers, yes, but frankly that always struck me as poor storytelling in the first place. He's lucky enough to get bitten by a radioactive spider, shortly thereafter but independently he makes these amazing inventions... I may have to turn in my nerd license, but in my opinion, the simpler "they're both from the spider" works a lot better in the movie. Anyway, I recall him still being very into physics although the movie didn't focus on that. He was touring Doc Oc's lab, as Parker, when it went wrong. Doc Oc is another thing I think you got wrong: he was a good scientist going after noble goals. He got evil'd by science, sure, but that wasn't "mad scientist" it was "good guy gets posessed by out of control technology, and eventually triumphs over it with self-sacrifice." And then there was the terrible in all ways 3rd movie, in which science is sorta evil, but that whole movie was total shit.
Anyway, I think the first two spiderman films, the ones people actually watched, portray science as a powerful force which can be used for good but can also be bent to evil purposes.
Coincidentally, I think this is a much more accurate message than "Science is always good" or "Science is cool."
Concerning Godwin's law ... who exactly was Al Gore's father ? Who started Al Gore's (not that successfull, certainly not at first) political career ? And what were the viewpoints Al Gore defended originally.
Are you suggesting that Al Gore's father and the guy who started his career... was Hitler?
Also, the James Hansons and Al Gores of the world are (and let's be brutally honest here) as far from "scientific" as you can get.
Are they in your opinion really "as far from scientific as you can get" or do you just disagree with some of their interpretations of the data? I've criticisms of every study making any conclusions about climate change, and I've heard an argument that we don't have enough evidence to really justify policy change. But that's all disagreements about interpretation. Scientists always do that (well, they do that if they actually care about the data and aren't sleeping during presentations or thinking about their own research... or just sex...).
If James Hanson and Al Gore make their arguments based on faith or "I believe based on what God told me" then yes, they would be as far from scientific as you can get, but "This person interprets the data differently than I do" is not the same as "not scientific." Lumping them in with fake pharmacists is going way too far, and if you're going to go down that road, why don't you go for the full Godwin?
That said, if they actually did buy older PS3's, take the steep learning curve to SPU programming, port all of their code to a 100% custom platform with hard-to-use tools, and heavily optimize the SPU code, they would probably be running their algorithms significantly faster on PS3 SPU's than on the XBOX 360 GPU.
I know next to nothing about parallel processing or either game console, but I have to ask couldn't they simply use more 360s and get the same speed, without having to spend time doing all of that?
Again, the -vast- majority of mutations are deleterious. Mutations are random changes. A bacterium, while simple compared to a vertebrate cell, is still a finely tuned machine. Making a random change in it would be like randomly soldering in a wire on your motherboard: it probably would be very bad. The odds that it does something useful are astronomically low. The odds that the first mutation would be something that kills the bacterium or cripples it are extremely high.
A single mutation event doesn't often build a characteristic out of nothing either. I would guess the bacteria don't have mechanisms to deal with that level of radiation. Mutations might occur which optimizes their innate DNA repair mechanisms to deal with the types of damage the radioactive metals would cause, that is possible. One bacterium has a mutation in it's machinery that slightly optimizes it to deal with the damage the radioactive metals are causing, it has a slight advantage, in one of it's progeny, another mutation increasing the efficiency of dealing with that type of damage... Eventually I think the bacteria might have no problem with it, that would depend on the type of DNA damage and the frequency. Repairing double stranded breaks, which happens with ionizing radiation I believe, is very difficult. If this is happening often enough, the adaptation process might never get a chance to work before the bacteria subjected to it die off. If it were infrequent enough and minor enough, sure.
The time scale I also have no idea about. I think its safe to assume it would be faster than eukaryotic organisms, and there are plants near Chernobyl which have already adapted to conditions there.
Single-celled organisms mutate very easily, and we could easily have a serious problem on our hands if the bacteria turn into something that is dangerous to us and then multiply out of control.
They already multiply rapidly. There is in fact only one control on their numbers: availability of food. That's a big barrier that isn't going to be overcome with an increased mutation rate: they already mutate so rapidly that the increased presence of radiation probably won't significantly change things. In fact, if anything it will probably limit their numbers for a short time. They only have one chromesome, if a vital gene gets damaged they have no backup. They also generally have less machinery devoted to repair than we do. They're generally far more sensitive to radiation and UV light because of that. As you probably are aware, the vast majority of mutations have bad effects. Also most bacteria aren't parasitic, these ones probably won't bother with humans.
They might mutate faster and might acquire some characteristics they wouldnt' if they weren't in a radioactive environment. It's conceivable they might over time develop characters that would enable them to feast on human flesh. In all likelyhood though, the only way that would arise is if it were an advantage. The only way it would be an advantage is if they COULD feed on human flesh. Don't go swimming consistently in these irradiated environments where the bacteria are working and they probably won't learn to eat you. And that's in your advantage anyway, since these are irradiated environments.
The post office's carrier pigeons failed to deliver the blu ray with that part of the message.
Dude. Someone _died_ here. Where's your compassion?
Wait, I'm being insensitive to the one guy on /. that was -not- the butt of my joke? How so?