Ok, I will grant that internet tracking and cameras all over the public streets may not equal a "police state". (And having spent a great deal of time in Russia, I have some experience in these areas.)
The crux of the problem is "Does the government have a right to know every thing I am doing and when I am doing it?" (which was the point of my aside regarding cameras watching me in the bathroom).
It would appear that in the UK they have adopted the answer "yes". That they can monitor or track your every behavior.
The productivy argument gets into the fact that when one has large numbers of individuals watching the watched, they are not really doing anything to promote economic productivity. As a result the entire system is a net drag on economic growth. In the UK it appears to be a growing problem in that it is becoming institutionalized.
Although I have visited the U.K. I would give serious thought before going there again. With the observation of internet usasge, the cameras on the street everywhere, etc. it looks like it is turning into a "police state". It would be interesting to know what percentage of the public/private budgets are going into monitoring what everyone else is doing and what fraction of the GDP of the UK that is and whether there is any debate on where it will end? IMO, when you have a camera in my bathroom watching me take a #2, and you have someone watching that in real time you have a real productivity problem for the economy.
One can argue that this is a stew of the publishers' own making. When you charge on the order of $20-30+ to receive a copy of a single article (which presumably costs pennies to distribute) then you are asking for a backlash. I applaud MIT for stepping up to the plate and suggest that the other Ivy League schools do so as well. Though the PLoS work which I believe is largely based at Stanford suggests that this is already in progress.
Even PNAS is slowly increasing its public access articles (and with acknowledgement, their archives are largely open). So the public (and students) have much more access to scientific information than they once did. This does not however keep some publishing groups (e.g. Nature) from going in different directions. It appears to me as if Nature is on a path of only publishing commissioned articles [1] for review which may be very difficult for University's or Government's to regulate.
I would challenge Nature's publishers -- here and in public -- "When and how do you intend to implement an open access policy?"
1. It could be argued that Science is only a step behind.
The concept is based in the perspective of a 100,000 to 3,000 year human time scale perspective, which from astronomical time scales is very very small. Since the time scale from the development of human level civilizations, to transhuman levels of civilizations (with complete nanotechnology capabilities which can easily disassemble Earth like planets (or entire solar systems) appears to be on the order of a few thousand years -- you have to make an argument that development is somehow constrained. Because if the majority of civilizations in our galaxy are older than ours (as Lineweaver's work suggests), then looking for "Earth like planets" is a relatively fruitless exercise, instead we should be searching for Matrioshka Brains or something even beyond those.
This is based on the assumption that the lifetime of a human-like civilization is limited while the lifetime of a Matrioshka Brain type civilization may be billions of years. Feel free to dispute those arguments but I warn you that you had better be prepared to cite references.
The question to ask is not weather there are "Earth" like planets out there. The work by Lineweaver's group already suggests that they are there (simply from a proability basis). The question to ask is where they are relative to our state of development? And if one truly understands computer science, and life science, and nanotechnology, then they are out there, they are developed (much further along than we currently are) and they have most probably have evolved into a Matrioshka Brain architecture. Which leaves us in a sea of picturing planets like our own instead of realizing that solar systems are engineering zones. And FYI, detecting Matrioshka Brains will not be done by the Kepler telescope, it might be done by the JWST, but only if the powers that be decide to survery a large enough area of sky.
While I am all for allowing people to believe in many things -- when one operates in a manner which attempts to "institutionalize" stupidity there I have to draw the line. I have up on one of my web pages the discussion for the DVD "The God who wasn't there". Until we have some scientific evidence that there is some real evidence for Jesus as he is portrayed then the entire basis for Christianity is questionable and secondarily the Bible itself (and therefore Judaism) is hearsay collection of myths. And since the Muslim philosopy is based on those two backgrounds is it not subject to serious question?
And now that I've offended most of the world -- go ahead and mod me down.
When are we going to get a perspective/philosophy based on a modern (real) understanding of the Universe and not based in some ancient collection of relics and myths? And more importantly when is a majority of humanity -- some 6+ billion people -- going to be educated in that perspective? We have been stuck with these perspectives for 1300+, 2000+, 3000+ years. When do we say never again?
I am fairly sure Verizon is not blocking outgoing requests on port 80. What it is blocking is consumer (vs. business) DSL lines on incoming requests on port 80. I believe that because the port addresses are part of the "public" part of TCP/IP commununications that it is possible for providers to filter them. Blocking bittorrent streams on the other hand requires much greater examination of the packets, where they are coming from / going to in part because they may be operating on non-standard ports (I'm not absolutely sure of this but that is my impression).
There has been a lot of work however which has been done by people who want to create completely private networks, bypass government censors (e.g. China), etc. where one creates levels of indirection, levels of encryption, etc. which should be able to bypass such "classical" filtering. The only problem is that most people, except the virus writers, have not learned how to use them.
In case this isn't clear, this is an attempt to try and keep people from running web servers (on port 80) off of a "personal" DSL line. I have ample examples of the various Bots (Google, Yahoo, MS, etc.) browsing my web site on port 8080, but that never took place when I only had port 80 open. Most presumably because Verizon blocked the traffic.
Now of course Verizon could resort to blocking all incoming/outgoing http traffic but this would require more CPU intensive time on their routers.
And then of course we would respond with entirely encrypted protocol transfers. Thus leading to an impass where services we are paying for are disallowed because they cannot be interpreted as "right" or "wrong" services. Welcome to England where it appears that big brother will always be watching you.
I hate to inform people but Verizon hosting DSL lines in the vicinity of Boston is already filtering port 80. This is in an attempt to force people to upgrade from a personal DSL line to a business DSL line. So it is not a content based filter but an incoming/outgoing based filter on that specific port. But it could be argued that in a content neutral specific environment none of the incoming or outgoing content should be filtered.
If you take carbon out of the ground and put it into the atmosphere you have problems (increase in atmospheric CO2, global warming, etc.) If you put it back into the ground (sequestration) that is inherently less efficient than a sustainable cycle. One should take the CO2 out of the atmosphere at precisely the same rate as one puts it back. That requires either a growth in ocean plankton (through fertilization of the oceans with iron and/or phosphorus) or land based solar ponds producing biofuels.
You will be unlikely to get a productive answer from a company operating from an "old school" mindset.
Even if you have an open source browser engine, if it doesn't run on an open source OS, e.g. Linux or BSD then it is worthless.
I am never going to boot Windows just to check the performance of Chrome. And even when I have Xen or VMware running both OSes (though with Wine its becoming less and less important to be able to run windows) I'm still not going to use a browser which does not run natively on an open source OS.
Software which does not run first and foremost on an open source system, e.g. Linux is of little interest, e.g. "trash". As I have yet to see a Chrome release which will run under Linux I place all news regarding such releases in said category, i.e. *Until* chrome runs on Linux it is *trash*. Google marketers are going down a road (close to those which mozilla marketers are going down) of pursuing the dominant (and wrongheaded) position in the marketplace rather than the *right* role in the marketplace (i.e. you, if you are a Google Chrome developer / marketeer, are clearly prostituting yourselves.) I personally, would rather be labeled as someone who was right from a technical standpoint, rather than someone who was right (or temporarily right) from a marketing standpoint. Where are your "moral" and/or "technical" standards?
Yea, yea, yea, I know the counter-arguements "Windows is the dominant force in the marketplace." And the counter-argument is "one should not support that". Where is the marketing strategy that Chrome only runs on Linux? I currently and in the future will tend to discount Chrome because in fact it was not written to run on Linux simultaneously with its operation under Windows (which is to my mind a semi-worthless OS).
Ask them clearly and succinctly with respect to how many tons of carbon they use or are taken out of the ground -- "How many tons of carbon do they put back into the ground?" Converting coal into methane does not negate the environmental impact; and so it is highly questionable as to whether the term "Green" could be applied -- since without clear CO2 sequestration strategies we are highly likely to see global warming and its consequences.
I am sorry but the current marketing program by the "big oil" companies that CH4 is better than C8H18 (octane) or deisel (N-decane and above) are a strong point for dispute!
They are not solving the problem that oxidized carbon (CO2) will be deliverered into the atomosphere and thus contribute to global warming. And they have no plans for dealing with this. No plans for the consequences of global sea level rises, no plans for sequestering the oxidized carbon, etc. In plain sight they are proposing and promoting the destruction of the planet as we currently know it. Is that what we should have as "corporate America"?
In case you have not been following the literature the most recent evidence from Stanford studies indicates foreign embryonic stem cells and their offshoots are eliminated from the body by the immune system within 1-2 months. So cells derived from embryonic stem cells are most likely useless from a long term therapeutic standpoint.
And so it could be argued that government money spent on funding embryonic stem cell research is in effect *useless*. And all of the claims held up by embryonic stem cell researchers for the last decade or more should be held up to the light and seriously examined!
In contrast money spent on adult (self) stem cell research and/or pristine stem cell research (where "pristine" is attempting to isolate the least mutated most replicable cells from an adult) might just be money well spent. I would assert that each of us has a pool of pristine stem cells which could be used -- what we do not have yet is the means to isolate those cells and replicate them to sufficient numbers to be useful for therapeutic purposes.
IMO the "embryonic" stem cell bandwagon is an offshoot of the entire abortion rights / right-wing-left-wing political culture and has little to do with what will actually cure diseases and ultimately aging. And that is what it is really all about -- the living? Isn't it? [And before any right-wingers respond to this please note that this message is anti-embryonic stem cell research -- not because I object to the research from a political or religious perspective -- but because I believe scientifically that it will not work.]
For those of you who have been staring at Nanosystems pgs 400-401 for the last 17 years you may still recognize that this is not true molecular nanotechnology, nor will it be until we set our minds to the task. It is fallacy to believe we have to build up to the gold ring -- we should simply go for it!
Think again "oh so expert one". Tumorogenisis, or in the worst cases teratomas, are *not* a function of whether or not the cells are from "oneself" but are a question of (a) the level of mutation in the genome from which the stem cells are derived; and (b) whether or not the genetic program can properly adapt if it is used in environments which are inherently foreign which are never encountered during "normal" development. Using some pseudo-programming comparisons (a) "How long you would your program work properly if your hard drives were experiencing repeated head crashes in the disk region where the program was stored?"; and (b) "Would your program work very well if it were compiled to run on an x86 architecture and you tried to run it on an IBM System 370 architecture?"
In the typical case, the immune system responds and will eliminate "foreign" cells (including cells derived from foreign derived stem cells) within 1-2 months (based on experiments done at Stanford within the last year). So "foreign" (i.e. embryonic, non-self umbilical, non-self iPSC) cells have a very small chance of surviving for very long w/o immunosuppressive therapy. There may be some "immune system" exempt parts of the body (e.g. spine [which is what Geron is working on] or maybe the brain) but any place which is exposed to the normal immune system (e.g. blood flow) is probably doomed to rejection of non-self cells. Though close MHC type matching which is well defined for bone marrow transplants may eliminate some of this -- but that implies you have ESC or iPSC availability for your MHC types. Currently a low probability.
Now, the hidden dead body under the carpet, which has not explored fully, is the level of DNA microdeletions derived from the misrepair of DNA double strand breaks which may corrupt functional genomes thus leading to a "smorgasborg" of actual genomes in a typical "collection" of cells (some of which may be fine, some of which less fine and some of which may be tumorogenic) if you are working with anything but cells derived from a known, qualified, line of "pristine" stem cells. The bottom line is that the older one is, the less likely one is to be able to (a) create iPSC in the first place [since the genes required for proper differentiation and development have been inactive for 50, 60, 70 years and may have accumulated any number of mutations] -- [it is well known to people working with iPSC that deriving such cells from older individuals is much more difficult than deriving such cells from younger individuals and various researchers, e.g. Derrick Rossi, formerly @ Stanford, currently @ Harvard, have documented the failing capabilities of "aged" stem cells]; and (b) without the complete genomic sequence of each iPSC stem cell line, as may as are necessary (i.e. currently costing ~$100+K/cell line) to prove you have a functional, non-tumorogenic genome) you have no way of knowing whether the cells are "pristine" or "carcinogenic".
There are cells which may be used from most adults to derive either pristine adult stem cells (the simplest route) or used to develop pristine iPSC and subsequently various cell and tissue types (a more complex and more expensive path) but we will not get there for several decades unless people recognize that this can work in the near term future and promote its adoption. I strongly suspect that most people reading/. are not those individuals having the most immediate short term interest in this problem -- though they may have relatives for whom it is an issue bordering on being of critical significance.
Robert Bradbury
Disclosures: I filed a patent in Dec. 2008 for the procedures required to isolate "pristine" stem cells (adult or non-adult) without the requirement of having to sequence an entire genome for each cell line.
The common reviewer of Fermi's Paradox thinks advanced alien civilizations are like our own (leaking radiowaves into space or broadcasting directly to unknown species). That is an assumption that fails upon examination. We are slowly confining our transmissions to either cable or fiber which will eliminate wasteful transmissions to the universe. An advanced reviewer will also recognize that if you want to communicate with an "advanced civilization" you will want to communicate with a civilization that has "taken its star dark", e.g. stars that can no longer be seen in the visible spectrum (but can be seen in the IR spectrum). So communications would be directed and site specific.
Finally, with regard to communication and advanced civilizations, I would say "We don't talk to nematodes and they don't talk to us." It is pointless for civilizations which are too far apart on the evolutionary scale to attempt effective communication. We don't attempt to teach nematodes to read!
But one has to expect the production of an argument. And one would need to take into account how many times earth has wiped out life (or at least set it back a significant number of years).
And then one needs to ascertain what fraction of planets are incomplete in this respect. To that degree the Drake Equation is incomplete.
You raise the point of the transition period. When nanotechnology engineering is impossible to when it is easy.
Pick a time frame and justify it. In my mind it is within the next 50 years. Choose to refute that or not. Because once the disassembly of Mars is feasible then all bets regarding colonizing it are off.
Any individual who enables the untrusted execution of javascript on their computer is crazy (IMO). If the direction of development (Gnome, etc.) is in this direction it is similarly crazy. Unless Javascript is executing in a completely secure virtual machine (read a completely different VM, e.g. enabled by Xen, VMWare, etc.), anyone who uses it is vulnerable.
You have to make a critical distinction between programs that run on your machine (which is what Javascript is) and programs which draw on your display (which was what HTML was designed to do (back in the "early days")). Any program which runs on your machine is vulnerable to the security flaws of said program. In contrast a program which only directs your program to draw on the display can only mess up ones display.
There is a critical lack of distinction between these two circumstances. And if I would make a recommendation to the incoming presidential staff it would be that Javascript should be shut down on all governmental computers!
If you are familiar with the work of Charlie Lineweaver's group in AU, you would be aware that not only should Earth-like planets exist but that a significant number of them are older, and potentially more advanced than we are. This might then lead you to explore whether or not Matrioshka Brains (forms of civilizations significantly more advanced that our own exist.) And indirectly to an understanding that extremely advanced stellar civilizations have very different heat signatures (or detection signatures) from our own. Thus the detection of an earth-like planet is not that significant. The detection of a star going dark, signaling a civilization making a Kardashev-Type-I to a Kardashev-Type-II transition -- now that would be interesting.
The colonization of Mars is one of the stupidest of ideas conceived by humanity. (A) The individuals involved have no understanding with respect to the DNA damage which could occur on a trip to/from Mars. (which of course makes such astronauts ripe for dying of cancer in contrast to their several % lifetime risk which is the allowable increase for current missions) and (B) if they reside on Mars for an extended period they will accumulate even more significant radiation damage.
(1) If you want to go to Mars (and colonize it) (before it is dismantled -- see Matrioshka Brain concepts) *you need a new species*.) It does not need to be too different from us. It could still interbreed with us. But it definitely needs to be engineered to withstand the rigors of space (and that needs significantly more complex DNA repair systems).
(2) Why is there no discussion of creating a species which could colonize Mars? Is there some (flawed) concept that only "God" can create species?
Has it reached anyone's attention that there are people with a significant amount of education and technical skill who do not know what the h*** you are talking about? I.e. they have absolutely no idea who or what "Cowboy Bebop" is? Will he(or she) be on the A-list at the SAG awards, or the inauguration next week? While the comment attracted my attention because I generally like Keanu Reeves, I have no idea what the rest of the story is about.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, I will grant that internet tracking and cameras all over the public streets may not equal a "police state". (And having spent a great deal of time in Russia, I have some experience in these areas.)
The crux of the problem is "Does the government have a right to know every thing I am doing and when I am doing it?" (which was the point of my aside regarding cameras watching me in the bathroom).
It would appear that in the UK they have adopted the answer "yes". That they can monitor or track your every behavior.
The productivy argument gets into the fact that when one has large numbers of individuals watching the watched, they are not really doing anything to promote economic productivity. As a result the entire system is a net drag on economic growth. In the UK it appears to be a growing problem in that it is becoming institutionalized.
Although I have visited the U.K. I would give serious thought before going there again. With the observation of internet usasge, the cameras on the street everywhere, etc. it looks like it is turning into a "police state". It would be interesting to know what percentage of the public/private budgets are going into monitoring what everyone else is doing and what fraction of the GDP of the UK that is and whether there is any debate on where it will end? IMO, when you have a camera in my bathroom watching me take a #2, and you have someone watching that in real time you have a real productivity problem for the economy.
One can argue that this is a stew of the publishers' own making. When you charge on the order of $20-30+ to receive a copy of a single article (which presumably costs pennies to distribute) then you are asking for a backlash. I applaud MIT for stepping up to the plate and suggest that the other Ivy League schools do so as well. Though the PLoS work which I believe is largely based at Stanford suggests that this is already in progress.
Even PNAS is slowly increasing its public access articles (and with acknowledgement, their archives are largely open). So the public (and students) have much more access to scientific information than they once did. This does not however keep some publishing groups (e.g. Nature) from going in different directions. It appears to me as if Nature is on a path of only publishing commissioned articles [1] for review which may be very difficult for University's or Government's to regulate.
I would challenge Nature's publishers -- here and in public -- "When and how do you intend to implement an open access policy?"
1. It could be argued that Science is only a step behind.
The concept is based in the perspective of a 100,000 to 3,000 year human time scale perspective, which from astronomical time scales is very very small. Since the time scale from the development of human level civilizations, to transhuman levels of civilizations (with complete nanotechnology capabilities which can easily disassemble Earth like planets (or entire solar systems) appears to be on the order of a few thousand years -- you have to make an argument that development is somehow constrained. Because if the majority of civilizations in our galaxy are older than ours (as Lineweaver's work suggests), then looking for "Earth like planets" is a relatively fruitless exercise, instead we should be searching for Matrioshka Brains or something even beyond those.
This is based on the assumption that the lifetime of a human-like civilization is limited while the lifetime of a Matrioshka Brain type civilization may be billions of years. Feel free to dispute those arguments but I warn you that you had better be prepared to cite references.
Worthwhile question. Are we the members of an exclusive club or are we the members of a somewhat more global club?
And the current answer is that we just do not know. The answer is interesting either way. But we have to determine which way it goes.
I am voting on the "more global club" basis simply based on the odds of development and when they took place. But I could be very wrong.
R.
The question to ask is not weather there are "Earth" like planets out there. The work by Lineweaver's group already suggests that they are there (simply from a proability basis). The question to ask is where they are relative to our state of development? And if one truly understands computer science, and life science, and nanotechnology, then they are out there, they are developed (much further along than we currently are) and they have most probably have evolved into a Matrioshka Brain architecture. Which leaves us in a sea of picturing planets like our own instead of realizing that solar systems are engineering zones. And FYI, detecting Matrioshka Brains will not be done by the Kepler telescope, it might be done by the JWST, but only if the powers that be decide to survery a large enough area of sky.
While I am all for allowing people to believe in many things -- when one operates in a manner which attempts to "institutionalize" stupidity there I have to draw the line. I have up on one of my web pages the discussion for the DVD "The God who wasn't there". Until we have some scientific evidence that there is some real evidence for Jesus as he is portrayed then the entire basis for Christianity is questionable and secondarily the Bible itself (and therefore Judaism) is hearsay collection of myths. And since the Muslim philosopy is based on those two backgrounds is it not subject to serious question?
And now that I've offended most of the world -- go ahead and mod me down.
When are we going to get a perspective/philosophy based on a modern (real) understanding of the Universe and not based in some ancient collection of relics and myths? And more importantly when is a majority of humanity -- some 6+ billion people -- going to be educated in that perspective? We have been stuck with these perspectives for 1300+, 2000+, 3000+ years. When do we say never again?
I am fairly sure Verizon is not blocking outgoing requests on port 80. What it is blocking is consumer (vs. business) DSL lines on incoming requests on port 80. I believe that because the port addresses are part of the "public" part of TCP/IP commununications that it is possible for providers to filter them. Blocking bittorrent streams on the other hand requires much greater examination of the packets, where they are coming from / going to in part because they may be operating on non-standard ports (I'm not absolutely sure of this but that is my impression).
There has been a lot of work however which has been done by people who want to create completely private networks, bypass government censors (e.g. China), etc. where one creates levels of indirection, levels of encryption, etc. which should be able to bypass such "classical" filtering. The only problem is that most people, except the virus writers, have not learned how to use them.
In case this isn't clear, this is an attempt to try and keep people from running web servers (on port 80) off of a "personal" DSL line. I have ample examples of the various Bots (Google, Yahoo, MS, etc.) browsing my web site on port 8080, but that never took place when I only had port 80 open. Most presumably because Verizon blocked the traffic.
Now of course Verizon could resort to blocking all incoming/outgoing http traffic but this would require more CPU intensive time on their routers.
And then of course we would respond with entirely encrypted protocol transfers. Thus leading to an impass where services we are paying for are disallowed because they cannot be interpreted as "right" or "wrong" services. Welcome to England where it appears that big brother will always be watching you.
I hate to inform people but Verizon hosting DSL lines in the vicinity of Boston is already filtering port 80. This is in an attempt to force people to upgrade from a personal DSL line to a business DSL line. So it is not a content based filter but an incoming/outgoing based filter on that specific port. But it could be argued that in a content neutral specific environment none of the incoming or outgoing content should be filtered.
If you take carbon out of the ground and put it into the atmosphere you have problems (increase in atmospheric CO2, global warming, etc.) If you put it back into the ground (sequestration) that is inherently less efficient than a sustainable cycle. One should take the CO2 out of the atmosphere at precisely the same rate as one puts it back. That requires either a growth in ocean plankton (through fertilization of the oceans with iron and/or phosphorus) or land based solar ponds producing biofuels.
You will be unlikely to get a productive answer from a company operating from an "old school" mindset.
Even if you have an open source browser engine, if it doesn't run on an open source OS, e.g. Linux or BSD then it is worthless.
I am never going to boot Windows just to check the performance of Chrome. And even when I have Xen or VMware running both OSes (though with Wine its becoming less and less important to be able to run windows) I'm still not going to use a browser which does not run natively on an open source OS.
Software which does not run first and foremost on an open source system, e.g. Linux is of little interest, e.g. "trash". As I have yet to see a Chrome release which will run under Linux I place all news regarding such releases in said category, i.e. *Until* chrome runs on Linux it is *trash*. Google marketers are going down a road (close to those which mozilla marketers are going down) of pursuing the dominant (and wrongheaded) position in the marketplace rather than the *right* role in the marketplace (i.e. you, if you are a Google Chrome developer / marketeer, are clearly prostituting yourselves.) I personally, would rather be labeled as someone who was right from a technical standpoint, rather than someone who was right (or temporarily right) from a marketing standpoint. Where are your "moral" and/or "technical" standards?
Yea, yea, yea, I know the counter-arguements "Windows is the dominant force in the marketplace." And the counter-argument is "one should not support that". Where is the marketing strategy that Chrome only runs on Linux? I currently and in the future will tend to discount Chrome because in fact it was not written to run on Linux simultaneously with its operation under Windows (which is to my mind a semi-worthless OS).
Ask them clearly and succinctly with respect to how many tons of carbon they use or are taken out of the ground -- "How many tons of carbon do they put back into the ground?" Converting coal into methane does not negate the environmental impact; and so it is highly questionable as to whether the term "Green" could be applied -- since without clear CO2 sequestration strategies we are highly likely to see global warming and its consequences.
I am sorry but the current marketing program by the "big oil" companies that CH4 is better than C8H18 (octane) or deisel (N-decane and above) are a strong point for dispute!
They are not solving the problem that oxidized carbon (CO2) will be deliverered into the atomosphere and thus contribute to global warming. And they have no plans for dealing with this. No plans for the consequences of global sea level rises, no plans for sequestering the oxidized carbon, etc. In plain sight they are proposing and promoting the destruction of the planet as we currently know it. Is that what we should have as "corporate America"?
Robert
In case you have not been following the literature the most recent evidence from Stanford studies indicates foreign embryonic stem cells and their offshoots are eliminated from the body by the immune system within 1-2 months. So cells derived from embryonic stem cells are most likely useless from a long term therapeutic standpoint.
And so it could be argued that government money spent on funding embryonic stem cell research is in effect *useless*. And all of the claims held up by embryonic stem cell researchers for the last decade or more should be held up to the light and seriously examined!
In contrast money spent on adult (self) stem cell research and/or pristine stem cell research (where "pristine" is attempting to isolate the least mutated most replicable cells from an adult) might just be money well spent. I would assert that each of us has a pool of pristine stem cells which could be used -- what we do not have yet is the means to isolate those cells and replicate them to sufficient numbers to be useful for therapeutic purposes.
IMO the "embryonic" stem cell bandwagon is an offshoot of the entire abortion rights / right-wing-left-wing political culture and has little to do with what will actually cure diseases and ultimately aging. And that is what it is really all about -- the living? Isn't it? [And before any right-wingers respond to this please note that this message is anti-embryonic stem cell research -- not because I object to the research from a political or religious perspective -- but because I believe scientifically that it will not work.]
For those of you who have been staring at Nanosystems pgs 400-401 for the last 17 years you may still recognize that this is not true molecular nanotechnology, nor will it be until we set our minds to the task. It is fallacy to believe we have to build up to the gold ring -- we should simply go for it!
Think again "oh so expert one". Tumorogenisis, or in the worst cases teratomas, are *not* a function of whether or not the cells are from "oneself" but are a question of (a) the level of mutation in the genome from which the stem cells are derived; and (b) whether or not the genetic program can properly adapt if it is used in environments which are inherently foreign which are never encountered during "normal" development. Using some pseudo-programming comparisons (a) "How long you would your program work properly if your hard drives were experiencing repeated head crashes in the disk region where the program was stored?"; and (b) "Would your program work very well if it were compiled to run on an x86 architecture and you tried to run it on an IBM System 370 architecture?"
In the typical case, the immune system responds and will eliminate "foreign" cells (including cells derived from foreign derived stem cells) within 1-2 months (based on experiments done at Stanford within the last year). So "foreign" (i.e. embryonic, non-self umbilical, non-self iPSC) cells have a very small chance of surviving for very long w/o immunosuppressive therapy. There may be some "immune system" exempt parts of the body (e.g. spine [which is what Geron is working on] or maybe the brain) but any place which is exposed to the normal immune system (e.g. blood flow) is probably doomed to rejection of non-self cells. Though close MHC type matching which is well defined for bone marrow transplants may eliminate some of this -- but that implies you have ESC or iPSC availability for your MHC types. Currently a low probability.
Now, the hidden dead body under the carpet, which has not explored fully, is the level of DNA microdeletions derived from the misrepair of DNA double strand breaks which may corrupt functional genomes thus leading to a "smorgasborg" of actual genomes in a typical "collection" of cells (some of which may be fine, some of which less fine and some of which may be tumorogenic) if you are working with anything but cells derived from a known, qualified, line of "pristine" stem cells. The bottom line is that the older one is, the less likely one is to be able to (a) create iPSC in the first place [since the genes required for proper differentiation and development have been inactive for 50, 60, 70 years and may have accumulated any number of mutations] -- [it is well known to people working with iPSC that deriving such cells from older individuals is much more difficult than deriving such cells from younger individuals and various researchers, e.g. Derrick Rossi, formerly @ Stanford, currently @ Harvard, have documented the failing capabilities of "aged" stem cells]; and (b) without the complete genomic sequence of each iPSC stem cell line, as may as are necessary (i.e. currently costing ~$100+K/cell line) to prove you have a functional, non-tumorogenic genome) you have no way of knowing whether the cells are "pristine" or "carcinogenic".
There are cells which may be used from most adults to derive either pristine adult stem cells (the simplest route) or used to develop pristine iPSC and subsequently various cell and tissue types (a more complex and more expensive path) but we will not get there for several decades unless people recognize that this can work in the near term future and promote its adoption. I strongly suspect that most people reading /. are not those individuals having the most immediate short term interest in this problem -- though they may have relatives for whom it is an issue bordering on being of critical significance.
Robert Bradbury
Disclosures: I filed a patent in Dec. 2008 for the procedures required to isolate "pristine" stem cells (adult or non-adult) without the requirement of having to sequence an entire genome for each cell line.
The common reviewer of Fermi's Paradox thinks advanced alien civilizations are like our own (leaking radiowaves into space or broadcasting directly to unknown species). That is an assumption that fails upon examination. We are slowly confining our transmissions to either cable or fiber which will eliminate wasteful transmissions to the universe. An advanced reviewer will also recognize that if you want to communicate with an "advanced civilization" you will want to communicate with a civilization that has "taken its star dark", e.g. stars that can no longer be seen in the visible spectrum (but can be seen in the IR spectrum). So communications would be directed and site specific.
Finally, with regard to communication and advanced civilizations, I would say "We don't talk to nematodes and they don't talk to us." It is pointless for civilizations which are too far apart on the evolutionary scale to attempt effective communication. We don't attempt to teach nematodes to read!
But one has to expect the production of an argument. And one would need to take into account how many times earth has wiped out life (or at least set it back a significant number of years).
And then one needs to ascertain what fraction of planets are incomplete in this respect. To that degree the Drake Equation is incomplete.
You raise the point of the transition period. When nanotechnology engineering is impossible to when it is easy.
Pick a time frame and justify it. In my mind it is within the next 50 years. Choose to refute that or not. Because once the disassembly of Mars is feasible then all bets regarding colonizing it are off.
Any individual who enables the untrusted execution of javascript on their computer is crazy (IMO). If the direction of development (Gnome, etc.) is in this direction it is similarly crazy. Unless Javascript is executing in a completely secure virtual machine (read a completely different VM, e.g. enabled by Xen, VMWare, etc.), anyone who uses it is vulnerable.
You have to make a critical distinction between programs that run on your machine (which is what Javascript is) and programs which draw on your display (which was what HTML was designed to do (back in the "early days")). Any program which runs on your machine is vulnerable to the security flaws of said program. In contrast a program which only directs your program to draw on the display can only mess up ones display.
There is a critical lack of distinction between these two circumstances. And if I would make a recommendation to the incoming presidential staff it would be that Javascript should be shut down on all governmental computers!
If you are familiar with the work of Charlie Lineweaver's group in AU, you would be aware that not only should Earth-like planets exist but that a significant number of them are older, and potentially more advanced than we are. This might then lead you to explore whether or not Matrioshka Brains (forms of civilizations significantly more advanced that our own exist.) And indirectly to an understanding that extremely advanced stellar civilizations have very different heat signatures (or detection signatures) from our own. Thus the detection of an earth-like planet is not that significant. The detection of a star going dark, signaling a civilization making a Kardashev-Type-I to a Kardashev-Type-II transition -- now that would be interesting.
The colonization of Mars is one of the stupidest of ideas conceived by humanity. (A) The individuals involved have no understanding with respect to the DNA damage which could occur on a trip to/from Mars. (which of course makes such astronauts ripe for dying of cancer in contrast to their several % lifetime risk which is the allowable increase for current missions) and (B) if they reside on Mars for an extended period they will accumulate even more significant radiation damage.
(1) If you want to go to Mars (and colonize it) (before it is dismantled -- see Matrioshka Brain concepts) *you need a new species*.) It does not need to be too different from us. It could still interbreed with us. But it definitely needs to be engineered to withstand the rigors of space (and that needs significantly more complex DNA repair systems).
(2) Why is there no discussion of creating a species which could colonize Mars? Is there some (flawed) concept that only "God" can create species?
Has it reached anyone's attention that there are people with a significant amount of education and technical skill who do not know what the h*** you are talking about? I.e. they have absolutely no idea who or what "Cowboy Bebop" is? Will he(or she) be on the A-list at the SAG awards, or the inauguration next week? While the comment attracted my attention because I generally like Keanu Reeves, I have no idea what the rest of the story is about.