You bring up a good point. There was not, in fact, zero funding for embryonic stem cell research, only far far less funding than for adult stem cell research. But if that wasn't enough, maybe the 30 year head start helped too:
From nih.gov:
"Scientists have only been able to do experiments with human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) since 1998, when a group led by Dr. James Thomson at the University of Wisconsin developed a technique to isolate and grow the cells. Although hESCs are thought to offer potential cures and therapies for many devastating diseases, research using them is still in its early stages.
In late January 2009, the California-based company Geron received FDA clearance to begin the first human clinical trial of cells derived from human embryonic stem cells.
Adult stem cells such as blood-forming stem cells in bone marrow (called hematopoietic stem cells, or HSCs) are currently the only type of stem cell commonly used to treat human diseases. Doctors have been transferring HSCs in bone marrow transplants for over 40 years and advances in techniques of collecting, or "harvesting" HSCs have been made.
So they have been doing embryonic stem cell research for 12 years and have been greenlit for human trials for a little over 1 year, while adult stem cells have been in use for 40.
Which, presumably, has nothing to do with the fact that it was extremely inconvenient to do any work at all with embryonic stem cells, since you had to maintain the books in such a way as it was clear and provable on demand that none of your federal funding went toward it (unless you were using one of the existing lines that were contaminated to the point of uselessness).
People who oppose embryonic stem cell research love to point out that embryonic stem cell research has had few useful results, but the irony is that they're largely to credit/blame for that.
<p>You have to put paragraph tags in. If you just add line breaks, slashdot removes them.
For example, this sentence starts two lines below the previous sentence.</p>
<p>But this sentence is in a separate set of paragraph tags from all of the previous text. Note that I added fake paragraph tags where I put the real ones in this text.</p>
Ok..... So..... Should we apologize to you, or something? It's entertainment. Many people enjoy it. You do not. Why does discussion about it offend your ears so much? And for that matter, why do you feel the need to be so antagonistic about it?
Lost is, quite possibly, the most overrated show that has ever been on television.
And that, is quite possibly, the most overstated sentence that has ever been on Slashdot. Or maybe that one is. No, probably neither. Still an overstatement.
Re:Do you want more religion with your scifi?
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That's an odd conclusion.... just so we're clear, you're saying that the creators of Lost crafted a finale that has heavily polarized their primarily American fan base with a vaguely supernatural ending, and the whole reason that they did it is that they are Americans, and are therefore obsessed with religion. You don't find it a tad unfair to define a person by his country of origin before learning anything about him? Could you *name* any of the creators of Lost without first running to wikipedia to look it up? It's all fine and dandy to talk about America being obsessed with religion when we're talking about political/religious movements, voter trends, etc., but do you really want to apply broad generalizations to specific people?
Re:Lost: Seinfield for the [*] generation
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You probably watched from some time in the middle. The show, I imagine, would be completely unwatchable if you didn't start at the beginning. As for the comparison to "Are you smarter than a 5th grader?".... seriously? Couldn't you have at least picked a show that *has* drama, (scripted) dialog, plot, and characters? I mean, a bad show would have done just fine for your point, but a game show?
Re:Sounds like X-files and Twin Peaks
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Was Ben holding onto that fantasy? In the flash sideways, he and his dad still went to the island as part of the Dharma Initiative. And, presumably, when they went, it wasn't on the bottom of the ocean.
He spoke a bit imprecisely, but "Yes, Texas' size does influence the publishers of the text book" is exactly what he is referring to. Not only does it directly impact students in Texas, but it exerts influence on what students will see everywhere. The original point of this not being remotely equivalent to a single crackpot teacher seems pretty sound to me.
Apart from the John Jay quote, how does any of the support the idea of a Christian nation? Do you think you have to be Christian to believe in the concept of God or a creator? Jefferson and Franklin were famously Deist.
Also, calling people who want to play a game to be entertained rather than to get a realistic flying experience the "lowest common denominator" is a bit condescending, don't you think?
You said that a particular scenario when I used the scenario as illustrative and not definite, was "extremely contrived and strained next to the scenario where they share in the guilt"
I wasn't describing just your particular scenario. I was describing any scenario I could come up with.
In my scenario, a number of different things could have happened to which they would share guilt but not be criminally liable/guilty.
Yes, and I found your scenario possible but far fetched.
You seemed to get lost on the entire separation between the two.
I see you also got lost on the difference between wrong and illegal.
No I didn't. I'm really not saying a whole lot for you to disagree with, and the fact that you continue to argue on more than purely subjective grounds suggests to me that you aren't really getting what I'm saying. Which, when I think about it, doesn't particularly matter to me one way or another, so I'll happily agree to disagree here.
So the proposed explanation for the girls being complicit in $20,000 worth of damage is that the boys told them that some uncle had said it was ok to "knock out a wall" for construction purposes. hey, I'm not saying it's impossible. That seems a particularly poor hypothetical explanation, but my point was not that it is not at all possible but rather the scenario in which all of the girls are free of guilt and none of the boys are seems extremely contrived and strained next to the scenario where they share in the guilt, and I think your response illustrates that nicely.
Palin had already stepped down as governor when this happened. The presidential race was over, she hadn't been governor or a presidential candidate for a while (several months). So the suggestion of puling strings and so on is sort of misplaced when there are so many legitimate reasons for not prosecuting the girls.
So you are incredulous that Palin still has the ability to pull strings or that she still has the motivation? Because neither of those seems particularly hard to swallow. Palin remains an extremely influential figure, so the ability to pull strings seems a given to me. And as for motivation, well, keeping her daughter out of trouble is one motivation. Saving herself public embarrassment since she continues to be an influential public figure is also reasonable.
That's a fair point, and there are certainly still things I don't know about the events and can't comfortably assume, but the situation where they are genuinely innocent of wrongdoing seems far more contrived than the one where they share in the guilt. Sounds like there were 12 teens total, 7 of which were girls who ended up not being charged.
The place suffered extensive damage, so I suppose we would have to conjecture that the boys broke in first, invited the girls over, pretending to own the place or otherwise have a right to be there, none of the 7 girls knew otherwise, none of the 5 boys accidentally let it slip to any of the 7 girls, the 5 boys trashed the place and the girls believed that at least one of these boys had the authority to do so.
The story goes on to allege several other "facts" about the case, such as Willow being the one who led them to the house in the first place, and everyone being together at the time the house was broken into, but I don't know how much everyone has admitted or what their stories were so I'll stick to the most basic of facts, which still have me extremely skeptical that the girls are all innocent parties.
It actually does matter if you "lock it down or not." That is what Intellectual Property and rights are all about. For example, I can come up with a product or even just a name for something and even use it for a while. But if I don't actively protect it then I can actually lose the rights to it!
Yeah? That's not about protecting it from being stolen. That's about protecting its status as legally yours. So you're equivocating a bit on the notion of "locking something down". You don't have the right to things in my house because I don't protect them, and you never will. Having to fight to protect intellectual property rights is more akin to having to establish an item as yours in the first place, and it's because all ideas share one space. I can have a car and you can have the same model of car. If I drive my car, I'm fine. But if I go take your car, it's stealing. With intellectual property, on the other hand, there's only one car, and both of us claim to own it. If you can convince a court that it's yours, then you legally get it.
On another occasion, someone stole my bike from 7-Eleven while I was playing Street Fight II. I was so upset! I just ran in for a quick game (only 25 cents on me). And when I looked back to check (in between rounds) I saw my bike missing. Was it my fault? Yes. Should I have had a chain to put on it? Yes. Should a random person have taken it? No. So from your mind set, I did nothing wrong, the person who took the bike is the only one to blame.
That's exactly right. You did nothing wrong in leaving your bike unsecured. Stupid, maybe. Wrong, no. You are not at all to blame for it being stolen. Failure to prevent an event is not equivalent to being responsible for the event. It's exactly this sort of "blame the victim" mentality that he was saying is wrong. It was his whole point.
Besides, where do you draw a line? If you had locked it up and it was stolen anyway, is it your fault for not taking *good enough* precautions? Do we generally rule that the victim is at fault if he or she hasn't tried at some arbitrary threshold we call "good enough" to prevent the crime? So if a woman is raped in a dark alley, that's totally her fault, but if she's raped by a close friend, that's only partly her fault for choosing friends poorly. If she had also taken kung fu, but was still overpowered, then and only then could we assign her no blame at all in clear conscience.
"officially" having 3 hours* of homework per class according to pretty much every document the school had.
So, translation: "Teachers are free to give you up to 3 hours of homework for any given day, but are generally assumed not to do this consistently on a daily basis, because that would be absurd." Yes? Or was homework not actually for a grade at your school?
So, I guess if you wanted to screw with them, you could forge some fake documents that implicate you or, perhaps better, someone important, in a crime and keep them in a safety deposit box. Hell, you could probably pull off some pretty nifty grifts with that as the hook, because the guy is surely going to assume that you didn't *intend* for it to be seen:)
I have no idea what she may or may not have done while she was there, but there's no way that she thought it was legal for her to be in that house doing whatever it was she was doing. Let's say, for sake of argument, that some random guy broke down my front door and then, later, Willow Palin noticed my door was open, walked in, spent several hours hanging out in my house, broke nothing and took nothing. Unless I'm crazy (which is always a possibility), it's still criminal trespassing. If she accompanied the guy as he broke my door down and hung out with him and then neglected to tell anyone about it, IANAL, but that sort of complicity seems like it should be worth some equivalent of an accessory charge.
And finally, the fact that the girls were let off scot free and the boys were all charged really bugs me. There are facts I don't know, but the fact that *all* the girls were freed and *all* the boys were punished suggests the sort of sexist doublestandard I've become all too used to in this society. Surely girls are too sweet and innocent to have done such a thing!
Hmmm, don't know. Moot point now since most places seem to figure it out if you try it. The fact that they do notice seems to suggest that they perform a hash on your security question...
Which brings up an interesting idea. If that's how they detect that your security answer is the same as your password, reverse the case of all the letters and you have an easy to remember permutation of your password that should pass a hash check
My bank now requires me to answer a security question *and* input my password in order to log in. And it picks a random one of my security questions (of which I was required to have 5 or so), which means I have to remember 6 distinct passwords for my bank. Shoot me.
"He gained access to Twitter accounts by simply working out the answers to password reminder questions on targets' e-mail accounts, according to investigators. "
Seriously, I hate those things. When it used to be allowed, I always just retyped my password into the answers for those security questions. It's always really easy stuff to socially engineer or, in the case of a public figure, look up on google... Did he figure out the name of Obama's first pet, where he went to school, his first job, his mother's maiden name, or what? All of those things have got to be fairly easy to work out.
Slashdot Mirror
You bring up a good point. There was not, in fact, zero funding for embryonic stem cell research, only far far less funding than for adult stem cell research. But if that wasn't enough, maybe the 30 year head start helped too:
From nih.gov:
"Scientists have only been able to do experiments with human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) since 1998, when a group led by Dr. James Thomson at the University of Wisconsin developed a technique to isolate and grow the cells. Although hESCs are thought to offer potential cures and therapies for many devastating diseases, research using them is still in its early stages. In late January 2009, the California-based company Geron received FDA clearance to begin the first human clinical trial of cells derived from human embryonic stem cells. Adult stem cells such as blood-forming stem cells in bone marrow (called hematopoietic stem cells, or HSCs) are currently the only type of stem cell commonly used to treat human diseases. Doctors have been transferring HSCs in bone marrow transplants for over 40 years and advances in techniques of collecting, or "harvesting" HSCs have been made.
So they have been doing embryonic stem cell research for 12 years and have been greenlit for human trials for a little over 1 year, while adult stem cells have been in use for 40.
Fair point. I suppose you can't add links though... but how often do you need to do that?
Which, presumably, has nothing to do with the fact that it was extremely inconvenient to do any work at all with embryonic stem cells, since you had to maintain the books in such a way as it was clear and provable on demand that none of your federal funding went toward it (unless you were using one of the existing lines that were contaminated to the point of uselessness).
People who oppose embryonic stem cell research love to point out that embryonic stem cell research has had few useful results, but the irony is that they're largely to credit/blame for that.
<p>You have to put paragraph tags in. If you just add line breaks, slashdot removes them. For example, this sentence starts two lines below the previous sentence.</p>
<p>But this sentence is in a separate set of paragraph tags from all of the previous text. Note that I added fake paragraph tags where I put the real ones in this text.</p>
Lost is, quite possibly, the most overrated show that has ever been on television.
And that, is quite possibly, the most overstated sentence that has ever been on Slashdot. Or maybe that one is. No, probably neither. Still an overstatement.
That's an odd conclusion.... just so we're clear, you're saying that the creators of Lost crafted a finale that has heavily polarized their primarily American fan base with a vaguely supernatural ending, and the whole reason that they did it is that they are Americans, and are therefore obsessed with religion. You don't find it a tad unfair to define a person by his country of origin before learning anything about him? Could you *name* any of the creators of Lost without first running to wikipedia to look it up? It's all fine and dandy to talk about America being obsessed with religion when we're talking about political/religious movements, voter trends, etc., but do you really want to apply broad generalizations to specific people?
You probably watched from some time in the middle. The show, I imagine, would be completely unwatchable if you didn't start at the beginning. As for the comparison to "Are you smarter than a 5th grader?".... seriously? Couldn't you have at least picked a show that *has* drama, (scripted) dialog, plot, and characters? I mean, a bad show would have done just fine for your point, but a game show?
Don't forget J. Michael Straczynski
Was Ben holding onto that fantasy? In the flash sideways, he and his dad still went to the island as part of the Dharma Initiative. And, presumably, when they went, it wasn't on the bottom of the ocean.
He spoke a bit imprecisely, but "Yes, Texas' size does influence the publishers of the text book" is exactly what he is referring to. Not only does it directly impact students in Texas, but it exerts influence on what students will see everywhere. The original point of this not being remotely equivalent to a single crackpot teacher seems pretty sound to me.
Apart from the John Jay quote, how does any of the support the idea of a Christian nation? Do you think you have to be Christian to believe in the concept of God or a creator? Jefferson and Franklin were famously Deist.
Also, calling people who want to play a game to be entertained rather than to get a realistic flying experience the "lowest common denominator" is a bit condescending, don't you think?
You said that a particular scenario when I used the scenario as illustrative and not definite, was "extremely contrived and strained next to the scenario where they share in the guilt"
I wasn't describing just your particular scenario. I was describing any scenario I could come up with.
In my scenario, a number of different things could have happened to which they would share guilt but not be criminally liable/guilty.
Yes, and I found your scenario possible but far fetched.
You seemed to get lost on the entire separation between the two.
To you, perhaps.
I see you also got lost on the difference between wrong and illegal.
No I didn't. I'm really not saying a whole lot for you to disagree with, and the fact that you continue to argue on more than purely subjective grounds suggests to me that you aren't really getting what I'm saying. Which, when I think about it, doesn't particularly matter to me one way or another, so I'll happily agree to disagree here.
Palin had already stepped down as governor when this happened. The presidential race was over, she hadn't been governor or a presidential candidate for a while (several months). So the suggestion of puling strings and so on is sort of misplaced when there are so many legitimate reasons for not prosecuting the girls.
So you are incredulous that Palin still has the ability to pull strings or that she still has the motivation? Because neither of those seems particularly hard to swallow. Palin remains an extremely influential figure, so the ability to pull strings seems a given to me. And as for motivation, well, keeping her daughter out of trouble is one motivation. Saving herself public embarrassment since she continues to be an influential public figure is also reasonable.
That's a fair point, and there are certainly still things I don't know about the events and can't comfortably assume, but the situation where they are genuinely innocent of wrongdoing seems far more contrived than the one where they share in the guilt. Sounds like there were 12 teens total, 7 of which were girls who ended up not being charged.
The place suffered extensive damage, so I suppose we would have to conjecture that the boys broke in first, invited the girls over, pretending to own the place or otherwise have a right to be there, none of the 7 girls knew otherwise, none of the 5 boys accidentally let it slip to any of the 7 girls, the 5 boys trashed the place and the girls believed that at least one of these boys had the authority to do so.
The story goes on to allege several other "facts" about the case, such as Willow being the one who led them to the house in the first place, and everyone being together at the time the house was broken into, but I don't know how much everyone has admitted or what their stories were so I'll stick to the most basic of facts, which still have me extremely skeptical that the girls are all innocent parties.
I can have a car and you can have the same model of car. If I drive my car, I'm fine. But if I go take your car, it's stealing.
I also considered using milkshakes for this analogy, but I figured "hey, it's slashdot; let's go with cars."
It actually does matter if you "lock it down or not." That is what Intellectual Property and rights are all about. For example, I can come up with a product or even just a name for something and even use it for a while. But if I don't actively protect it then I can actually lose the rights to it!
Yeah? That's not about protecting it from being stolen. That's about protecting its status as legally yours. So you're equivocating a bit on the notion of "locking something down". You don't have the right to things in my house because I don't protect them, and you never will. Having to fight to protect intellectual property rights is more akin to having to establish an item as yours in the first place, and it's because all ideas share one space. I can have a car and you can have the same model of car. If I drive my car, I'm fine. But if I go take your car, it's stealing. With intellectual property, on the other hand, there's only one car, and both of us claim to own it. If you can convince a court that it's yours, then you legally get it.
On another occasion, someone stole my bike from 7-Eleven while I was playing Street Fight II. I was so upset! I just ran in for a quick game (only 25 cents on me). And when I looked back to check (in between rounds) I saw my bike missing. Was it my fault? Yes. Should I have had a chain to put on it? Yes. Should a random person have taken it? No. So from your mind set, I did nothing wrong, the person who took the bike is the only one to blame.
That's exactly right. You did nothing wrong in leaving your bike unsecured. Stupid, maybe. Wrong, no. You are not at all to blame for it being stolen. Failure to prevent an event is not equivalent to being responsible for the event. It's exactly this sort of "blame the victim" mentality that he was saying is wrong. It was his whole point.
Besides, where do you draw a line? If you had locked it up and it was stolen anyway, is it your fault for not taking *good enough* precautions? Do we generally rule that the victim is at fault if he or she hasn't tried at some arbitrary threshold we call "good enough" to prevent the crime? So if a woman is raped in a dark alley, that's totally her fault, but if she's raped by a close friend, that's only partly her fault for choosing friends poorly. If she had also taken kung fu, but was still overpowered, then and only then could we assign her no blame at all in clear conscience.
Nope, modern highschools in america
And by this, you presumably mean your high school specifically.
"officially" having 3 hours* of homework per class according to pretty much every document the school had.
So, translation: "Teachers are free to give you up to 3 hours of homework for any given day, but are generally assumed not to do this consistently on a daily basis, because that would be absurd." Yes? Or was homework not actually for a grade at your school?
So, I guess if you wanted to screw with them, you could forge some fake documents that implicate you or, perhaps better, someone important, in a crime and keep them in a safety deposit box. Hell, you could probably pull off some pretty nifty grifts with that as the hook, because the guy is surely going to assume that you didn't *intend* for it to be seen :)
I have no idea what she may or may not have done while she was there, but there's no way that she thought it was legal for her to be in that house doing whatever it was she was doing. Let's say, for sake of argument, that some random guy broke down my front door and then, later, Willow Palin noticed my door was open, walked in, spent several hours hanging out in my house, broke nothing and took nothing. Unless I'm crazy (which is always a possibility), it's still criminal trespassing. If she accompanied the guy as he broke my door down and hung out with him and then neglected to tell anyone about it, IANAL, but that sort of complicity seems like it should be worth some equivalent of an accessory charge.
And finally, the fact that the girls were let off scot free and the boys were all charged really bugs me. There are facts I don't know, but the fact that *all* the girls were freed and *all* the boys were punished suggests the sort of sexist doublestandard I've become all too used to in this society. Surely girls are too sweet and innocent to have done such a thing!
Hmmm, don't know. Moot point now since most places seem to figure it out if you try it. The fact that they do notice seems to suggest that they perform a hash on your security question...
Which brings up an interesting idea. If that's how they detect that your security answer is the same as your password, reverse the case of all the letters and you have an easy to remember permutation of your password that should pass a hash check
My bank now requires me to answer a security question *and* input my password in order to log in. And it picks a random one of my security questions (of which I was required to have 5 or so), which means I have to remember 6 distinct passwords for my bank. Shoot me.
"He gained access to Twitter accounts by simply working out the answers to password reminder questions on targets' e-mail accounts, according to investigators. " Seriously, I hate those things. When it used to be allowed, I always just retyped my password into the answers for those security questions. It's always really easy stuff to socially engineer or, in the case of a public figure, look up on google... Did he figure out the name of Obama's first pet, where he went to school, his first job, his mother's maiden name, or what? All of those things have got to be fairly easy to work out.