Cloning whole human bodies isn't really the point. Being able to grow organs and limbs is the point. Ultimately this research could do away with things like spending your life in a wheel chair because you damaged your spine or lost your legs.
Simply put if he is in fact resigning rather than being fired, then it is more likely a case that the facts lean towards his story, but the whole thing makes the institution look bad, so they'll rather pay him off and send him on his way.
There'd be absolutely no reason to recant. The source of the eggs in no way influences the results, and ultimately those results will have to be verified by other researchers.
Hwang also paid for the eggs- about 1,400 dollars per donor, from his own pocket- but claimed in his _Nature_ paper that the eggs were from volunteers
Sounds voluntary to me. They volunteered their eggs when he voluneered to pay for them.
but the fact that he's resigning and his collaborator is rushing to distance himself is pretty telling
Doesn't mean a thing. The institution will want to save face so they'll ask him to resign. If they were confident of their case they'd fire him. His fellow researchers will distance themselves so they don't get hassled by the powers that be. For all we know behind closed doors they are completely on his side.
PhD Supervisors don't have anywhere near the kind of power you claim.
Another difference is that there is no shortage of music. In fact there is a massive oversupply. Particularly in the pop sphere, the stuff the labels push the most, the artists are a dime a dozen (actually if you're paying a dime you've been overcharged). When it comes to real musicians there is more variety even though they could all be considered to fall within some arbitrarily determined 'genre'. Even so much of this music is similar enough that it is semi-interchangeable. Girl/boy bands and similar pop trash are litereally 100% interchangeable. These types do have the occasional fun track, something that can be listened to for a short while before it gets boring and is never played again - being disposable I'd pay 5c, no more than 10c, per track. For real music I'd be willing to go as high as 50c a track, but that is pretty much my outside limit.
Children should be educated from birth to view advertising as a parasite. When we were teenagers we had immense fun deconstructing and making fun of adverts in all media. Then again I had parents who taught us to be critical thinkers, especially where corporations or government was involved.
Or look at Telkom in South Africa - poor quality service, slow roll-out of lines and extremely high prices. These thieves pull in a billion dollars in profit every year.
As you say it relies on the existence of competition. It is easy to privatise an airline because multiple companies making use of the skies and airport facilities is fairly easy to implement, but if you want to privatise water supply, electricity supply, telecommunications and railways you have to insure that the basic infrastructure remains the property of the general public. We can't exactly have competitors laying competing railway lines everywhere.
Privatising healthcare and such is pretty much guaranteed to raise, not lower prices, because medical services are a basic requirement and there really is no need to actually compete with your neighbours. Your customers can hardly shop around for the best value-for-money hospital and ambulance service.
And things get very dangerous if you privatise the police or prison services. US forfeiture laws effectively gave narc squads a profit motive and there has been rampant abuse of those laws - the main problem is that the law doesn't require a conviction to steal an accused's property, but imagine what would happen if the police earned income based on number of arrests and on number of convictions. Planting evidence and framing would become an integral part of basic training.
Well then you won't mind if we come round and install cameras and microphones in every room of your home. We'll also need to put them in your vehicle. And we'll have someone follow you around with a mobile unit.
You don't mind of course because you have nothing to hide.
If you're into having the government spy on you please move to a proper authoritarian police state where you belong. You'll even be able to get rewards for ratting out your neighbours. Hitler and Stalin loved people like you.
"Can you guarantee that everyone breaking the speed limit has the ability to handle the vehicle properly"
Can we guarantee that everyone travelling at the speed limit has the ability to handle the vehicle properly?
How has the speed limit been determined? Is it for a specific combination of vehicle weight, brake power and reflex speed? What if my brakes are much better? What if my vehicle is much heavier? What if I happen to not be particularly observant or alert (a common problem with excessively low speed limits)?
I notice when I drive a car for a while instead of using my motorcycle or bicycle I do become progressively less aware of the details of the road and what is going around my vehicle. Any vehicle with a plush suspension is pretty much designed to distance the driver from the road - I hate cars with soft suspension, but most people seem to love them (these people also love automatic transmission).
They definitely have a use for it. I'm sure they might sell it if they were desperate, but these cheap computers give them access to information.
People who need an education can by definition afford to pay for one. People who need books can afford to buy them. Spreading literacy is just part of asinine socialist thinking.
I've no doubt he has rounded his calculation. It's close enough for government work.
Software vendors always forget to convert to a local equivalent. I often see them showing that if you convert the price into US Dollars it is actually lower than what they charge in the US, but forget that the country where they're trying to sell their software people earn on average a lot less than in the US. Then they throw up their hands, whine about piracy and expect locals to care. They're certainly not going to care about not paying for the product of a mega-wealthy company like Microsoft.
It will just automate what A&R people and record executives already do - find/make groups that sound exactly like every other one. Thankfully the trash you hear on the radio is not indicative of the vast sea of new music being produced every day.
And they were wrong. Just because he offended the community is no justification for harassment. What you're saying is the judge was happy to help the community harass this guy for having opinions they didn't like.
Now if that guy should come back, make sure there are no further crimes on which they can bust him, then put the flag etc. up to give the community the finger.
Funny how the community is willing to use police state tactics to suppress and opinion they don't like.
"that more people are killed each year by excessive speed"
Excessive perhaps, but what is excessive speed? Exceeding the speed limit? How was it determined? What if I am a better driver or have a better vehicle? What if your vehicle weighs three times what mine does? Speed limits are basically arbitrary. And lower limits don't equal safer roads, even if people adhere to those lower limits.
This is however no worse than the situation with closed source products. Microsoft also passes the buck and typically so does the vendor of the application that isn't working.
People pay attention to where their bowl of rice is coming from. We don't want them paying less attention to their senator/representative job than they already do.
I don't think they should keep their day jobs while they're a representative, but I do think we should do away with politics being considered a career. Making it a career attracts politicians and the last thing we need is representation by politicians. Much better if civic-minded ordinary people get involved. People who understand the two words in public service.
My uncle was a farmer his whole life. In his 50s he decided he wasn't happy with the way the town was being run so he ran for mayor. He won and proceeded to implement changes to improve things. Because he didn't care about getting re-elected, being in politics was not a career and he did it because he really wanted to contribute, he was able to do things that a career politician would never do, because it could make them unpopular in the short-term. There are few, if any, career politicians who are not first and foremost concerned with getting re-elected.
"application must overcome the hurdles of utility, novelty, and nonobviousness found in U.S. patent laws"
I'm sure they must already have waived all three conditions. Either that or those in the patent office are several leagues below moron considering what they consider novel and non-obvious.
I agree. $5 for a movie, 10c for a song. I will listen to a song more, but 99% of the time I eventually get bored with it and move on.
What the market needs is competition. Music and movies have no inherent value. Bands and studios should be competing on price given that there is no shortage of content.
Slashdot Mirror
Cloning whole human bodies isn't really the point. Being able to grow organs and limbs is the point. Ultimately this research could do away with things like spending your life in a wheel chair because you damaged your spine or lost your legs.
Simply put if he is in fact resigning rather than being fired, then it is more likely a case that the facts lean towards his story, but the whole thing makes the institution look bad, so they'll rather pay him off and send him on his way.
recanted his work on the topic
There'd be absolutely no reason to recant. The source of the eggs in no way influences the results, and ultimately those results will have to be verified by other researchers.
Sounds voluntary to me. They volunteered their eggs when he voluneered to pay for them.
but the fact that he's resigning and his collaborator is rushing to distance himself is pretty telling
Doesn't mean a thing. The institution will want to save face so they'll ask him to resign. If they were confident of their case they'd fire him. His fellow researchers will distance themselves so they don't get hassled by the powers that be. For all we know behind closed doors they are completely on his side.
PhD Supervisors don't have anywhere near the kind of power you claim.
That's what things like peer review are for. It is human nature to get blinded by your own excitement and enthusiasm. Mistakes happen.
Another difference is that there is no shortage of music. In fact there is a massive oversupply. Particularly in the pop sphere, the stuff the labels push the most, the artists are a dime a dozen (actually if you're paying a dime you've been overcharged). When it comes to real musicians there is more variety even though they could all be considered to fall within some arbitrarily determined 'genre'. Even so much of this music is similar enough that it is semi-interchangeable. Girl/boy bands and similar pop trash are litereally 100% interchangeable. These types do have the occasional fun track, something that can be listened to for a short while before it gets boring and is never played again - being disposable I'd pay 5c, no more than 10c, per track. For real music I'd be willing to go as high as 50c a track, but that is pretty much my outside limit.
The labels start making money pretty quickly. It is only the artists that have to reach multimillion sales to just break even.
Children should be educated from birth to view advertising as a parasite. When we were teenagers we had immense fun deconstructing and making fun of adverts in all media. Then again I had parents who taught us to be critical thinkers, especially where corporations or government was involved.
Or look at Telkom in South Africa - poor quality service, slow roll-out of lines and extremely high prices. These thieves pull in a billion dollars in profit every year.
As you say it relies on the existence of competition. It is easy to privatise an airline because multiple companies making use of the skies and airport facilities is fairly easy to implement, but if you want to privatise water supply, electricity supply, telecommunications and railways you have to insure that the basic infrastructure remains the property of the general public. We can't exactly have competitors laying competing railway lines everywhere.
Privatising healthcare and such is pretty much guaranteed to raise, not lower prices, because medical services are a basic requirement and there really is no need to actually compete with your neighbours. Your customers can hardly shop around for the best value-for-money hospital and ambulance service.
And things get very dangerous if you privatise the police or prison services. US forfeiture laws effectively gave narc squads a profit motive and there has been rampant abuse of those laws - the main problem is that the law doesn't require a conviction to steal an accused's property, but imagine what would happen if the police earned income based on number of arrests and on number of convictions. Planting evidence and framing would become an integral part of basic training.
Well then you won't mind if we come round and install cameras and microphones in every room of your home. We'll also need to put them in your vehicle. And we'll have someone follow you around with a mobile unit.
You don't mind of course because you have nothing to hide.
If you're into having the government spy on you please move to a proper authoritarian police state where you belong. You'll even be able to get rewards for ratting out your neighbours. Hitler and Stalin loved people like you.
"Can you guarantee that everyone breaking the speed limit has the ability to handle the vehicle properly"
Can we guarantee that everyone travelling at the speed limit has the ability to handle the vehicle properly?
How has the speed limit been determined? Is it for a specific combination of vehicle weight, brake power and reflex speed? What if my brakes are much better? What if my vehicle is much heavier? What if I happen to not be particularly observant or alert (a common problem with excessively low speed limits)?
I notice when I drive a car for a while instead of using my motorcycle or bicycle I do become progressively less aware of the details of the road and what is going around my vehicle. Any vehicle with a plush suspension is pretty much designed to distance the driver from the road - I hate cars with soft suspension, but most people seem to love them (these people also love automatic transmission).
Yes, it would be nice if they wouldn't take on this particular US export.
They definitely have a use for it. I'm sure they might sell it if they were desperate, but these cheap computers give them access to information.
People who need an education can by definition afford to pay for one. People who need books can afford to buy them. Spreading literacy is just part of asinine socialist thinking.
I've no doubt he has rounded his calculation. It's close enough for government work.
Software vendors always forget to convert to a local equivalent. I often see them showing that if you convert the price into US Dollars it is actually lower than what they charge in the US, but forget that the country where they're trying to sell their software people earn on average a lot less than in the US. Then they throw up their hands, whine about piracy and expect locals to care. They're certainly not going to care about not paying for the product of a mega-wealthy company like Microsoft.
No, you subsidise the huge marketing costs.
It will just automate what A&R people and record executives already do - find/make groups that sound exactly like every other one. Thankfully the trash you hear on the radio is not indicative of the vast sea of new music being produced every day.
And they were wrong. Just because he offended the community is no justification for harassment. What you're saying is the judge was happy to help the community harass this guy for having opinions they didn't like.
Now if that guy should come back, make sure there are no further crimes on which they can bust him, then put the flag etc. up to give the community the finger.
Funny how the community is willing to use police state tactics to suppress and opinion they don't like.
"that more people are killed each year by excessive speed"
Excessive perhaps, but what is excessive speed? Exceeding the speed limit? How was it determined? What if I am a better driver or have a better vehicle? What if your vehicle weighs three times what mine does? Speed limits are basically arbitrary. And lower limits don't equal safer roads, even if people adhere to those lower limits.
This is however no worse than the situation with closed source products. Microsoft also passes the buck and typically so does the vendor of the application that isn't working.
How does the cost of NASA compare the amount squandered on the military?
I don't think they should keep their day jobs while they're a representative, but I do think we should do away with politics being considered a career. Making it a career attracts politicians and the last thing we need is representation by politicians. Much better if civic-minded ordinary people get involved. People who understand the two words in public service.
My uncle was a farmer his whole life. In his 50s he decided he wasn't happy with the way the town was being run so he ran for mayor. He won and proceeded to implement changes to improve things. Because he didn't care about getting re-elected, being in politics was not a career and he did it because he really wanted to contribute, he was able to do things that a career politician would never do, because it could make them unpopular in the short-term. There are few, if any, career politicians who are not first and foremost concerned with getting re-elected.
"application must overcome the hurdles of utility, novelty, and nonobviousness found in U.S. patent laws"
I'm sure they must already have waived all three conditions. Either that or those in the patent office are several leagues below moron considering what they consider novel and non-obvious.
Losing your license is far easier than damaging or losing a CD.
In reality the music label should replace your disc for cost of the materials.
I agree. $5 for a movie, 10c for a song. I will listen to a song more, but 99% of the time I eventually get bored with it and move on.
What the market needs is competition. Music and movies have no inherent value. Bands and studios should be competing on price given that there is no shortage of content.