How is this an alternative to using aborted fetuses and embryos for harvesting stem cells? This _is_ an aborted embryo (albeit in vitro, but the adults from in vitro embryos seem perfectly normal).
Regarding the destruction of an egg cell, a woman's body does this every month, and a woman starts off with over 100,000 eggs, of which obviously almost all are destroyed at some point.
That's an interesting point regarding the fat cells - I hadn't heard anything about using them for cloning. Thanks for the info!
If we can get a nanobot that can make a basic computing element, a basic structural element, and a basic actuator element, as well as reproduce itself, from water and air (carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen, the same stuff you and diamonds are made of) it would make the industrial revolution pale by comparison.
Imagine having a factory unit that fits in your hand and with a supply of air and water it could make more of itself or make any structure or electronics gizmo you have a program for. Connect yourself to the internet and get free programs to build housing, greenhouses, furniture, computers, wireless nodes for the new internet, cars, solar cells, all without significant human intervention and costing nothing more than water, air, and power, or for the extra cheap using only your own solar cells.
This is the extremely conservative vision, assuming that we will only be able to produce a few basic things with nanomachines (but assuming we can build a nanofactory that reproduces itself), not assuming we will be able to make foodstuffs, cybernetic enhancements, or any of the obvious things that would be handy to have as microscopic machines (blood cleaning & oxygenating machines, cancer finding & eating machines, machines to be the roto-rooter to your clogged arteries, etc).
Oh yeah, and once the technology is mature enough that a self-reproducing version escapes the lab, imagine getting all of this for next to nothing, and giving them away to your friends just because it costs you basically nothing to do so. Oh yeah, and don't forget to save the third world while you're at it.
And don't forget, that's the conservative vision. I cannot imagine that within the next 50 years we won't have nanomachines that do that. If we can avoid everyone killing everyone else in the power struggle that ensues, we will be trading in virtually all of the old problems that aren't social for new ones.
Umm, hence 'most areas'. I think it's silly to live somewhere where prices are so insane, unless you have a $300k+/yr job there that you can't get elsewhere.
That's married loser to you, punk. As I said, we're not all in junior high. Heck, some of those who are in junior high manage to produce fairly adult posts. You should see if you can learn from 'em.
It's spelled dumb. $7,000 is enough for a down payment on a modest house in most areas.
I suggest that you wait until you've lived in the world long enough to have an idea about e.g. buying houses before you tell people off regarding them.
You posted this about 2 seconds before I was going to accuse you of being the troll the admin accused you of being:) I saw the post, checked the parent to make sure you were you, and returned to harass you, and here you are disclaiming the offending post.
I started to retort about how easy it would be to build self replicating lego robots, then I got a clue and used google.
It's been done, as a college project.
The materials certainly are not just details when you're comparing 1) premade legos 2) smelting materials yourself from ore 3) molecules with valences, electric fields, and thermal motion
But I agree with you: if we can do it with one set of materials, it is very likely we can do it with the others. Smalley, however, holds fast that we can't build "real molecular nanotechnology", although as far as I can tell he keeps moving the line of his definition of real molecular nanotechnology, since even he can't refute that cells do it.
The reason it's much, much easier to get robots that were built molecule by molecule to replicate is that they have handy lego-like building blocks available: atoms and molecules. Large robots must find the ore, smelt the ore, mold the molten metal, machine it, etc etc. Nanobots only need a catalyst to induce environmental carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and a few trace elements into their building blocks. Chemists do it all the time.
The hard part is designing and building a molecular level system capable of being programmed and capable of building a duplicate out of the building blocks. As someone else said, once that's done, making another one (or a billion) is trivial.
Faramir was a paragon in the book. Totally wrong in the movie.
The scouring of the Shire was a very important part of the series.
We didn't need Aragorn's plunging off the cliff scene. Especially in the theater version in which the release of Brego (?) [the horse] was left out, it just added nothing.
That said, Peter Jackson did an amazing job on the movies. They are my favorite movies of all time.
Aha! Now I can actually see where you're coming from, and refute it, I think... can you name a 'quantummy effect' that happens at liquid nitrogen temps (other than superconductivity;), and not at room temp? I can't either, and that's what I base my conviction that we don't know when we'll see room temp superconductivity, but it may as likely be soon as late.
I think we're arguing based on the same "feel" for what enables superconductivity, I just have different beliefs about where those things happen than you do. To me, the big barrier was making it 30 kelvins away from absolute zero, which is the zone of weirdness. Once it's out of that weirdness zone, it seems like "merely" a technical problem. That said, if you had said we probably won't see it in 20 years, I would have been right there with you. 50, and I would have been suspicious. However, for 100 years out, I think we are talking out of our hat to project anything other than that things will be very different.
It's nice to know that our feelings for each other are mutual.;-)
Once again, unsubstantiated assertions, now with attempted character bashing.
I am indeed junior league in physics - I don't claim to be otherwise. However, your mild attempts at condescension are lost on me. I think people reading our posts can ferret out who knows what.
Superconductivity is indeed right now more chemistry than physics - last I knew, they were researching chemicals in which the 2D cupric oxide layers were closer together, since there seemed to be a relationship between the distance between layers and the Tc.
Credibility? I am asserting that the fundamental physics at liquid nitrogen temperatures are essentially the same as those at room temperature, while those at near absolute zero are fundamentally different. We have already broken the barrier. Do you deny this? Do you deny that molecules and atoms are whizzing around at breakneck speed in substances at liquid nitrogen temperatures, while they are nearly still in substances at near absolute zero? If you don't deny it, why did you object to it? If you do, then we can suspend the conversation for a bit while you go learn some physics.
Why don't you stop attempting to cast aspersions and put forth some facts?
On what basis do you not "superconductors becoming feasable (sic) at room temperatures anytime soon (i.e. 100 years)"? Do you have any reasoning to back up this position?
I have a BS in Physics, and I worked for Drs. Sheng and Shams on the high Tc superconductivity project at the University of Arkansas (as a lab grunt). Superconductivity was for a very long time only found in the domain of a few degrees celsius above absolute zero. Absolute zero is about 270 degrees celsius below freezing, or about 290 degrees below room temperature. When the only superconductors known worked at these temperatures, your position of disregarding the possibility of room temperature superconductivity made sense.
Then the first high temperature superconductors were discovered, and now we know of substances that superconduct at well over liquid nitrogen temperatures. I believe the highest temperature right now is about 130 or 140 kelvins, about halfway from absolute zero to room temperature. Well, there are no special properties associated with -140 C like there are with near absolute zero. Molecules and atoms are whizzing around at breakneck speed. To claim resolutely that superconductivity can happen at those temperatures, but not at room temperatures, is crazy.
We don't have a good model of superconductivity. I can't project when we'll discover room temperature superconductors; until we have a good model no one can. However, when we've already made one jump of about 70 C in superconducting temperature, and climbed another 50-70 C in less than 15 years since that jump, it seems pretty precipitous to claim, with apparently no knowledge whatsoever in the field, that we won't make the remaining 160 degrees C any time in the near future.
Bullshit. Read the court results on unsigned end user license agreements.
Certainly copyright law applies, but that has nothing to do with contracts, unless you want to call government a social contract.
A license can only give you more rights than copyright would give, not less, unless it's a signed contract. Just because companies tell you you have less rights doesn't mean it's so.
Uh, no. When you buy something, you get what is called "merchanidise" in return for what is called "money".
When you sign a "contract", then you enter into what is called a "contract". When you "buy" something, then it's yours to do with as you please, within the bounds of applicable laws.
Damn. I've been trolled. Oh well, the correction stands.
To toot my own horn (the surgery to let you do that is well worth it):
Magicosm, an online fantasy world, is coming out for Linux this year. We should be releasing sometime around June. It'll run on Mac, Windows, or Linux, and we'll let you take part in a classic fantasy world in every way - complete cradle to grave crafting for everything, build your own cities and governments, research new spells in your lonely wizard tower...
They're telling you that if you download Skype from a server they don't control, then they're not responsible for you installing what you download. I don't know about you, but I think it's pretty fair to not claim responsibility for what someone downloads from someone else's server.
I hear that all the time, but Magicosm seems to run just fine on Windows, Solaris, and Linux. We do have some issues with it being sluggish on the Mac, but I suspect they'll be easy to fix.
The only thing we do special to be cross platform is keep the paths case sensitive and avoid hard-coded absolute paths, which you should do anyway.
We had never done anything with Solaris before the Game Developer's Convention of 2002, but when we got there the only issues were getting the latest version of java3d on the machine and dealing with its strange locale information. It took less than 5 hours to deal with both, and much of that time was spent waiting for the Sun people to bring us the new java3d version.
I see a lot of people posting negative comments about the Real player and policies. I'm not much of a windows user, so I can't really judge. I also haven't thoroughly tried out the new Real release, so I can't tell you if they're doing what they say they're doing. On the other hand, I don't think anyone posting about how awful Real is has done so, either.
As far as I'm concerned, it's your actions now and the trust you can give me for your future actions that affect my opinion of you. If Real is really changing their ways, going for faster and more open codecs, and moving away from forcing me to sign my life away to install a media player, is that something we want to discourage?
The jury is still out on what the new player and registration scheme is like. But as far as I'm concerned, if Real can learn from their mistakes and bad PR to turn around and do the right thing, they should be proud of what they're doing, the editors of Slashdot should be proud of having made a positive difference, and we should be applauding them, not denigrating them.
So let's wait to see their new stripes before we go hunting them.
I started from a much less bad situation than yours, but still pretty tough... single mother, working hard at a factory job to support two kids and rent a trailer house, dependent on family support for pre-school child care, no family members (even extended family members) who had any college education. My mother was no addict. She certainly made some bad decisions, but not chronically, and not anything beyond what most everyone does. She just made them in circumstances that made life very hard, and after they were made there was no way out.
Maybe the difference in our attitude is that your parent was an addict. They made chronicly bad decisions that screwed up their life. However, let me tell you, from someone who's seen the other side - life in a poor household with parents that didn't do anything horribly wrong - that people _need_ help. We have built a culture in which we don't live together with our extended family in one big house. Everyone is expected to go off on their own and support themselves and their dependents. When you're a single mother with no job skills other than being smart and having a good work ethic, with children who are below school age, you simply must have help to survive. What good is it to work two jobs when that just means you have to pay for child care for two children during your second job's working hours? Without familial support, we would probably have been out on the street, and not everyone has familial support.
I had no examples of success through college around me. I'm pretty damned smart, well into the upper.1%, but if I hadn't gotten a full scholarship to college I probably wouldn't have gone. Even as a teenager I had no real feeling that college was going to get me into a different economic strata than my parents had been - I just had no basis for comparison that I could connect to. I didn't know how easily loans were available, or what to do to get them. A day a month with a good social worker could have corrected that. It could still correct that for a lot of people out there who are smart enough to do well in college and in an academic career but not smart enough to get a full scholarship or not emotionally connected enough to an academic career to understand the difference it could make for them. Government supplemented child care for poor people during work hours could make the difference between someone taking welfare and living out of a PO box and someone contributing to society.
Intelligent support for the poor could be a huge boon to the country's productivity and the happiness and welfare of everyone, not just the poor directly affected. It really bothers me to see people argue against it, especially people who claim to have an in that puts weight behind the argument.
Under pre-1970s copyright law, all of this material about telegraphy would have come out of copyright. Someone would have scanned it and made it freely available, probably through Project Gutenberg.
I love these new copyright laws meant to spur innovation... by letting people and corporations get income in perpetuity while producing as little as possible, and locking out the material that no one wants to publish any more. </soapbox>
Slashdot Mirror
How is this an alternative to using aborted fetuses and embryos for harvesting stem cells? This _is_ an aborted embryo (albeit in vitro, but the adults from in vitro embryos seem perfectly normal).
Regarding the destruction of an egg cell, a woman's body does this every month, and a woman starts off with over 100,000 eggs, of which obviously almost all are destroyed at some point.
That's an interesting point regarding the fat cells - I hadn't heard anything about using them for cloning. Thanks for the info!
If we can get a nanobot that can make a basic computing element, a basic structural element, and a basic actuator element, as well as reproduce itself, from water and air (carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen, the same stuff you and diamonds are made of) it would make the industrial revolution pale by comparison.
Imagine having a factory unit that fits in your hand and with a supply of air and water it could make more of itself or make any structure or electronics gizmo you have a program for. Connect yourself to the internet and get free programs to build housing, greenhouses, furniture, computers, wireless nodes for the new internet, cars, solar cells, all without significant human intervention and costing nothing more than water, air, and power, or for the extra cheap using only your own solar cells.
This is the extremely conservative vision, assuming that we will only be able to produce a few basic things with nanomachines (but assuming we can build a nanofactory that reproduces itself), not assuming we will be able to make foodstuffs, cybernetic enhancements, or any of the obvious things that would be handy to have as microscopic machines (blood cleaning & oxygenating machines, cancer finding & eating machines, machines to be the roto-rooter to your clogged arteries, etc).
Oh yeah, and once the technology is mature enough that a self-reproducing version escapes the lab, imagine getting all of this for next to nothing, and giving them away to your friends just because it costs you basically nothing to do so. Oh yeah, and don't forget to save the third world while you're at it.
And don't forget, that's the conservative vision. I cannot imagine that within the next 50 years we won't have nanomachines that do that. If we can avoid everyone killing everyone else in the power struggle that ensues, we will be trading in virtually all of the old problems that aren't social for new ones.
Umm, hence 'most areas'. I think it's silly to live somewhere where prices are so insane, unless you have a $300k+/yr job there that you can't get elsewhere.
I've played realtime 3d games on java, and it doesn't look slow to me. Oh, wait, I _write_ realtime 3d games on java, and it doesn't look slow to me.
That's married loser to you, punk. As I said, we're not all in junior high. Heck, some of those who are in junior high manage to produce fairly adult posts. You should see if you can learn from 'em.
It's spelled dumb. $7,000 is enough for a down payment on a modest house in most areas.
I suggest that you wait until you've lived in the world long enough to have an idea about e.g. buying houses before you tell people off regarding them.
You posted this about 2 seconds before I was going to accuse you of being the troll the admin accused you of being :) I saw the post, checked the parent to make sure you were you, and returned to harass you, and here you are disclaiming the offending post.
Spoilsport.
I started to retort about how easy it would be to build self replicating lego robots, then I got a clue and used google.
It's been done, as a college project.
The materials certainly are not just details when you're comparing
1) premade legos
2) smelting materials yourself from ore
3) molecules with valences, electric fields, and thermal motion
But I agree with you: if we can do it with one set of materials, it is very likely we can do it with the others. Smalley, however, holds fast that we can't build "real molecular nanotechnology", although as far as I can tell he keeps moving the line of his definition of real molecular nanotechnology, since even he can't refute that cells do it.
The reason all satellite tv requires the dish to point south is that the only way to get a geostationary orbit is over the equator.
The reason it's much, much easier to get robots that were built molecule by molecule to replicate is that they have handy lego-like building blocks available: atoms and molecules. Large robots must find the ore, smelt the ore, mold the molten metal, machine it, etc etc. Nanobots only need a catalyst to induce environmental carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and a few trace elements into their building blocks. Chemists do it all the time.
The hard part is designing and building a molecular level system capable of being programmed and capable of building a duplicate out of the building blocks. As someone else said, once that's done, making another one (or a billion) is trivial.
Faramir was a paragon in the book. Totally wrong in the movie.
The scouring of the Shire was a very important part of the series.
We didn't need Aragorn's plunging off the cliff scene. Especially in the theater version in which the release of Brego (?) [the horse] was left out, it just added nothing.
That said, Peter Jackson did an amazing job on the movies. They are my favorite movies of all time.
Aha! Now I can actually see where you're coming from, and refute it, I think... can you name a 'quantummy effect' that happens at liquid nitrogen temps (other than superconductivity ;), and not at room temp? I can't either, and that's what I base my conviction that we don't know when we'll see room temp superconductivity, but it may as likely be soon as late.
;-)
I think we're arguing based on the same "feel" for what enables superconductivity, I just have different beliefs about where those things happen than you do. To me, the big barrier was making it 30 kelvins away from absolute zero, which is the zone of weirdness. Once it's out of that weirdness zone, it seems like "merely" a technical problem. That said, if you had said we probably won't see it in 20 years, I would have been right there with you. 50, and I would have been suspicious. However, for 100 years out, I think we are talking out of our hat to project anything other than that things will be very different.
It's nice to know that our feelings for each other are mutual.
Once again, unsubstantiated assertions, now with attempted character bashing.
I am indeed junior league in physics - I don't claim to be otherwise. However, your mild attempts at condescension are lost on me. I think people reading our posts can ferret out who knows what.
Superconductivity is indeed right now more chemistry than physics - last I knew, they were researching chemicals in which the 2D cupric oxide layers were closer together, since there seemed to be a relationship between the distance between layers and the Tc.
Credibility? I am asserting that the fundamental physics at liquid nitrogen temperatures are essentially the same as those at room temperature, while those at near absolute zero are fundamentally different. We have already broken the barrier. Do you deny this? Do you deny that molecules and atoms are whizzing around at breakneck speed in substances at liquid nitrogen temperatures, while they are nearly still in substances at near absolute zero? If you don't deny it, why did you object to it? If you do, then we can suspend the conversation for a bit while you go learn some physics.
Why don't you stop attempting to cast aspersions and put forth some facts?
On what basis do you not "superconductors becoming feasable (sic) at room temperatures anytime soon (i.e. 100 years)"? Do you have any reasoning to back up this position?
I have a BS in Physics, and I worked for Drs. Sheng and Shams on the high Tc superconductivity project at the University of Arkansas (as a lab grunt). Superconductivity was for a very long time only found in the domain of a few degrees celsius above absolute zero. Absolute zero is about 270 degrees celsius below freezing, or about 290 degrees below room temperature. When the only superconductors known worked at these temperatures, your position of disregarding the possibility of room temperature superconductivity made sense.
Then the first high temperature superconductors were discovered, and now we know of substances that superconduct at well over liquid nitrogen temperatures. I believe the highest temperature right now is about 130 or 140 kelvins, about halfway from absolute zero to room temperature. Well, there are no special properties associated with -140 C like there are with near absolute zero. Molecules and atoms are whizzing around at breakneck speed. To claim resolutely that superconductivity can happen at those temperatures, but not at room temperatures, is crazy.
We don't have a good model of superconductivity. I can't project when we'll discover room temperature superconductors; until we have a good model no one can. However, when we've already made one jump of about 70 C in superconducting temperature, and climbed another 50-70 C in less than 15 years since that jump, it seems pretty precipitous to claim, with apparently no knowledge whatsoever in the field, that we won't make the remaining 160 degrees C any time in the near future.
Only if you have jit active (which, I'll admit, it is by default in modern JVMs).
Bullshit. Read the court results on unsigned end user license agreements.
Certainly copyright law applies, but that has nothing to do with contracts, unless you want to call government a social contract.
A license can only give you more rights than copyright would give, not less, unless it's a signed contract. Just because companies tell you you have less rights doesn't mean it's so.
Uh, no. When you buy something, you get what is called "merchanidise" in return for what is called "money".
When you sign a "contract", then you enter into what is called a "contract". When you "buy" something, then it's yours to do with as you please, within the bounds of applicable laws.
Damn. I've been trolled. Oh well, the correction stands.
The author, Dan O'Dowd, sites variety of
I think you mean
The author, Dan O'Dowd, cites a variety of
To toot my own horn (the surgery to let you do that is well worth it):
Magicosm, an online fantasy world, is coming out for Linux this year. We should be releasing sometime around June. It'll run on Mac, Windows, or Linux, and we'll let you take part in a classic fantasy world in every way - complete cradle to grave crafting for everything, build your own cities and governments, research new spells in your lonely wizard tower...
Check us out!
http://www.magicosm.net
They're telling you that if you download Skype from a server they don't control, then they're not responsible for you installing what you download. I don't know about you, but I think it's pretty fair to not claim responsibility for what someone downloads from someone else's server.
I hear that all the time, but Magicosm seems to run just fine on Windows, Solaris, and Linux. We do have some issues with it being sluggish on the Mac, but I suspect they'll be easy to fix.
The only thing we do special to be cross platform is keep the paths case sensitive and avoid hard-coded absolute paths, which you should do anyway.
We had never done anything with Solaris before the Game Developer's Convention of 2002, but when we got there the only issues were getting the latest version of java3d on the machine and dealing with its strange locale information. It took less than 5 hours to deal with both, and much of that time was spent waiting for the Sun people to bring us the new java3d version.
I see a lot of people posting negative comments about the Real player and policies. I'm not much of a windows user, so I can't really judge. I also haven't thoroughly tried out the new Real release, so I can't tell you if they're doing what they say they're doing. On the other hand, I don't think anyone posting about how awful Real is has done so, either.
As far as I'm concerned, it's your actions now and the trust you can give me for your future actions that affect my opinion of you. If Real is really changing their ways, going for faster and more open codecs, and moving away from forcing me to sign my life away to install a media player, is that something we want to discourage?
The jury is still out on what the new player and registration scheme is like. But as far as I'm concerned, if Real can learn from their mistakes and bad PR to turn around and do the right thing, they should be proud of what they're doing, the editors of Slashdot should be proud of having made a positive difference, and we should be applauding them, not denigrating them.
So let's wait to see their new stripes before we go hunting them.
I started from a much less bad situation than yours, but still pretty tough... single mother, working hard at a factory job to support two kids and rent a trailer house, dependent on family support for pre-school child care, no family members (even extended family members) who had any college education. My mother was no addict. She certainly made some bad decisions, but not chronically, and not anything beyond what most everyone does. She just made them in circumstances that made life very hard, and after they were made there was no way out.
.1%, but if I hadn't gotten a full scholarship to college I probably wouldn't have gone. Even as a teenager I had no real feeling that college was going to get me into a different economic strata than my parents had been - I just had no basis for comparison that I could connect to. I didn't know how easily loans were available, or what to do to get them. A day a month with a good social worker could have corrected that. It could still correct that for a lot of people out there who are smart enough to do well in college and in an academic career but not smart enough to get a full scholarship or not emotionally connected enough to an academic career to understand the difference it could make for them. Government supplemented child care for poor people during work hours could make the difference between someone taking welfare and living out of a PO box and someone contributing to society.
Maybe the difference in our attitude is that your parent was an addict. They made chronicly bad decisions that screwed up their life. However, let me tell you, from someone who's seen the other side - life in a poor household with parents that didn't do anything horribly wrong - that people _need_ help. We have built a culture in which we don't live together with our extended family in one big house. Everyone is expected to go off on their own and support themselves and their dependents. When you're a single mother with no job skills other than being smart and having a good work ethic, with children who are below school age, you simply must have help to survive. What good is it to work two jobs when that just means you have to pay for child care for two children during your second job's working hours? Without familial support, we would probably have been out on the street, and not everyone has familial support.
I had no examples of success through college around me. I'm pretty damned smart, well into the upper
Intelligent support for the poor could be a huge boon to the country's productivity and the happiness and welfare of everyone, not just the poor directly affected. It really bothers me to see people argue against it, especially people who claim to have an in that puts weight behind the argument.
Under pre-1970s copyright law, all of this material about telegraphy would have come out of copyright. Someone would have scanned it and made it freely available, probably through Project Gutenberg.
I love these new copyright laws meant to spur innovation... by letting people and corporations get income in perpetuity while producing as little as possible, and locking out the material that no one wants to publish any more.
</soapbox>
Just to point out, goldfish are carp.