Well Bob, this should be an interesting match up because Ramirez has never given up a hit in post season play on Tuesday night games against left handed batters during a lunar eclipse.
And it's unlikely that he ever will, given that the eclipse is on Wednesday....
Like blaming a sitting president for deficit spending when the Congress is the one with the power to spend.
I thought this was what the Presidential veto power was for...?
George W. Bush hasn't vetoed a single bill during his entire term in office. That hasn't happened since the Presidency of James Garfield in 1881--who was, to be fair, assassinated after less than a year in office. The last full-term President not to do so was John Quincy Adams, a hundred and seventy-five years ago.
What happened?
If Bush had vetoed the budget bill, it would have gone back to Congress. A two-thirds majority of both the House and Senate could override such a veto--in that case, Bush would indeed be blameless for deficit spending. Indeed, it probably wouldn't have had to go that far. A press appearance or two with Bush saying, "I intend to veto any budget that is not balanced" would probably be sufficient to bring Congress into line.
But since Bush didn't veto the spending bill, and couldn't persuade a Republican House and a Republican Senate to spend within their means, and led the country from surplus to record deficits--yeah, he can be blamed.
10,234 any day, I know what they mean and even if you don't know my system you know what they mean as well.
Er, no. It's still ambiguous.
Under the old European system, they used a decimal comma. 10,234 is a little bit more than ten to a European. A million dollars is $1.000.000,00 on their side of the ocean, and $1,000,000.00 over here.
Where possible, I try to use the correct SI format, which marks only the decimal separator (comma or point) and uses spaces to group blocks of digits:
$1 000 000.00 or
$1 000 000,00.
Unfortunately, one then has to worry about a line break being inserted into the middle of a number--it's a pain in the neck always having to insert nonbreaking spaces. (Actually, I can't figure out how to insert one in these comments, which is why I put the examples above on separate lines.)
Sweet Zombie Jesus, why did anyone let him near AvP? I saw it two days ago and I'm still so fucking angry I want to take an angle-grinder to the guy's face.
Really? I heard it was a great comedy. I mean, really great. Bust-a-gut funny. Tears rolling down your cheeks funny.
It was a comedy, right? Right?
Re:I won't support EMBRYONIC stem cell research un
on
Stem Cell Symposium
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I cannot support because a embryo is a human being with the same rights as anyone else.
What makes a human being?
What endows it with rights?
And are you sure that all human beings have the same rights?
In the United States, adults are indeed endowed with a plethora of rights. Foreign nationals in the country--be they Saudi Arabian, Chinese, Mexican, British, or Canadian--are subject to arbitrary detention and deportation. ("Papers, please!") Criminals have been deprived of certain rights--freedom of movement, possibly even the right to their own lives--for the benefit of the rest of society. Children have a sharply circumscribed set of rights. Their parents or the state are empowered to make decisions on their behalf (including with respect to medical procedures), and to direct their actions.
So to equate an embryo with a human being, and then blithely state that they are endowed with the full rights attendant to that status is a tad imprecise.
A much more complicated question is the one of what constitutes a human being in the first place.
As I read it, the parent has a very clearcut definition which suits him or her. Spermatazoans are not human, ova are not human. Once sperm fertilizes egg (bam!) that single fertilized cell is a human being.
Okay. What if that bar is too low, or too high? What if--apologies to Monty Python--every sperm is sacred? I imagine that most Slashdot readers probably feel that sperm is disposable, but why should that be so? Every one is half of a potential baby; the same can be said for every unfertilized egg. This takes us to the strict Catholic doctrine that birth control is murder, and fornication for pleasure a sin.
Going the other way things get quite complicated, too. After sperm meets egg, it still has a rough ride ahead. The newly-assembled embryo has to make its way from the oviduct to the lumen of the uterus, and eventually implant itself in the unterine lining. It undergoes several divisions during this process, and takes five or six days to do so.
All through these early stages, the embryo is very vulnerable, and a significant fraction of them never make it. Indeed, spontaneous abortions in the first week or two are quite common. The body probably disposes of about half of all fertilized embroyos, either because a genetic defect is detected, or just because conditions aren't right--or plain old bad luck. Really, the body itself is quite cavalier about expelling embryos is doesn't like or doesn't want. (These early terminations are sometimes referred to as "chemical" pregnancies, because often only sensitive biochemical tests can reveal that they took place. The mother's period might be a bit late that month.)
Jump ahead to about week 12. The major internal organ systems have appeared, though their function is for the most part quite limited. The fetus is a couple of inches long. At week 14 or so, eyelids, some musculature, fingernails, and sex organs have formed. The fetus begins to make spontaneous movements (albeit far too weakly for the mother to detect) and is about three inches long. The earliest surviving premature baby was born at about 22 weeks, if my memory serves. (There is a 50% chance of survival with extensive medical intervention at about the 26 week mark.)
A full term pregnancy is about 40 weeks in length.
A lot of people are content to not really think of the fetus as a "human being" until it has achieved some minimum level of development. Some peg it to the development of certain internal or external features (often around the end of the first trimester) while others apply a (shifting) target based on when a fetus is likely to be able to survive on its own. Maybe we should choose an early stage--the formation of a blastocyst (around the sixteen-cell stage) or the formation of the placenta (about four weeks, IIRC)?
Then of course there's the question of in vitro fertilization. Common practice in many places is t
Re:Just because we can?
on
Flying By Brain
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· Score: 2, Informative
I know that these experiments are fundamentally wrong , no matter what justification you choose to attach to them. They go way beyond normal experimentation, because they directly affect consciousness,
Well, no--they don't, unless you use a really loose definition of consciousness.
The construction being used in the Florida study wasn't a brain. It was twenty-five thousand cultured neurons in a dish. (For comparison, a human brain contains roughly a hundred billion neurons; a rat brain one or two hundred million. A fruit fly has about a hundred thousand neurons: four times as many as were used in this experiment.) On this scale, neuronal cells don't exhibit consciousness--are fruit flies conscious? They're just another cell type that happens to have certain properties. Some of those properties--their ability to transmit and regulate small electric currents, and their ability to form interconnects in response to various stimuli--make them appropriate for an adaptive system, but they are not thinking or conscious.
If a scientist takes cells from a particular organ of the body and grows them in a petri dish, they will often exhibit some of the properties that they showed in the bulk organ. Neuronal cells can conduct electrical impulses, for example. Cardiomyocytes (heart muscle cells) can form sheets and twitch in synchrony. Osteoblasts (bone cells) will start to mineralize. That doesn't mean that neuronal, cardiomyocyte, or osteoblast cultures are little tiny brains, hearts, or bones. It certainly would be absurd to treat them as such from a legal, moral, ethical, or scientific standpoint.
You have hospitals with 5, 6, and 8 day waits for urgent heart surgery!
Those are median wait times in each category, not absolute waiting times. The queues are dynamic--if you need surgery *now*, you'll probably be next in the operating room. In some cases, you'll be airlifted to a facility with operating space or specific expertise.
The more important figure is the percentage of patients who receive care within the recommended maximum waiting time (RMWT). Cardiologists are generally pretty good at estimating how long a patient can wait for surgery without significant deterioration, and if most patients receive surgery within that timeframe, then the system is working.
The hospital with the poorest RMWT performance is Sudbury Regional, and it's a rather special case. It services essentially all of northern Ontario--that's an area larger than all of France, but very thinly populated. It's tough to get physicians to practice up there, and sometimes difficult for patients to travel to the hospital. Delivering service in such an area is a challenge that few healthcare systems anywhere have to face. North of Sudbury, many roads are closed for extended periods due to snowfall in the winter.
And who the heck has "Elective" heart surgery?
The categories are based on degree of urgency. As I mentioned before, a cardiologist can tell the difference between "This patient has a bit of a leaky valve but otherwise seems fairly healthy. A replacement should probably be performed in the next few months to head off future problems" and "This patient is turning purple in my office and needs quadruple bypass surgery now". "Elective" surgeries are ones that the hospital can shuffle around a bit to make most efficient use of surgeons' time, or to make room for urgent cases.
And Angioplasty at most of those hospitals is over a week, sometimes 2?
Those are in the cases where angioplasty was not performed at the same time as a diagnostic cardiac catheterization--which is done in about half of cases. This in turn strongly suggests that these are less urgent cases. The median wait time for cardiac catheterization urgent cases is two days, and three quarters of urgent patients undergo cardiac cath within the RMWT.
Glad we don't have your "wonderful" health care system here...
It is, of course, your choice.
I note that there are more American without health insurance of any kind than there are Canadians--total.
In Canada, which has universal healthcare, a diagnosis of cardiac disease is virtually a death sentence. Most Canadian heart patients die while sitting on the waiting list for the next available OR, for surgery that is absolutely routine.
Where in God's name do you get a statement like that? Wait times in recent years have been a shade longer than they ought to be for some cardiac procedures, but but the idea that "most" Canadian heat patients die waiting for care is laughable. More important, it's not supported by statistics. Here are links to current numbers for Ontario waiting times for heart procedures. (stats are for the three months ending June 2004; there are further links on the page for historical data.) Open heart surgery; angioplasty; cardiac catheterization.
The median wait times for urgent/emergent, semi-urgent, and elective cardiac surgery were three, seven, and twenty-five days, respectively. Four out of five patients receive cardiac surgery within the "recommended maximum waiting time". Despite that, even the ones that do wait longer usually don't die waiting--the RMWTs are a bit conservative.
In Canada, the AVERAGE wait for hip replacement surgery is THREE YEARS.
Not sure where you get this statistic, either. I agree that the wait times for joint replacement surgeries in most provinces are far too long, but three years is overstating the case. There are anecdotes reporting wait times of up to two years for some orthopedic surgeons at some facilities. The UHN (the largest hospital network in Toronto) cites wait times of 13 to 43 weeks for elective joint replacements at the moment; other Ontario hospitals are scheduled to begin making those figures available this coming April.
Her regional healthcare administrators were killing her, one day at a time, by refusing to let real specialists look at her and maybe make a difference in her life. That would have cost money.
Which "real specialists" was she not referred to? In some circumstances, I can see local specialists having long waiting lists, but outright refusal to refer a patient to a specialist for medically necessary evaluations or procedures isn't cost containment--it's malpractice. It's also perfectly kosher to ask for a second physician's opinion, and seek a referral through him. If none of the doctors who saw her were willing to refer her to another specialist then maybe, regrettably, there genuinely wasn't anything that could be done.
Canadian hospitals ROUTINELY close to all but emergency cases for the last couple of months of the year, when they run out of money. If you have a non-emergency in November, you will just have to wait until January and the new fiscal year.
Are you insane? Canadian hospitals are open and providing the same level of service year-round. You may have a longer wait for some services in the winter, particularly if you show up in the emergency room with a relatively non-emergent problem--it's flu season, and there are more slips and falls, and so forth.
I am also skeptical of your claim since most hospitals operate on the same fiscal year as the provincial governments that fund them. If they were to stop carrying out procedures because they ran out of money at the end of the fiscal year, it would be in March, not December.
From some of your other posts, I gather that your experiences were in Quebec. My own experience is with Ontario's hospitals. Since each province operates its own healthcare system (within the federally-mandated bounds of the Canada Health Act) I suppose it's possible that Quebec health administrators are the bumbling murderers you make them out to be--but I suspect that you're just full of it.
The only reason oil and other petrochemicals are utilized is that they cost less than the alternatives.
The Stone Age didn't end because we ran out of stone. Nor was it because stone became too costly to extract from the ground.
We ought to be developing new tools now; not blithely continuing to use fossil fuels that are extraordinarily costly in every way except strict dollar accounting.
American medical care is expensive because of artificial supply constraints at every step. When I went through pre-med in college, anyone could tell you that the process is designed to "weed out" the pool of potential doctors; that phrase is the mantra in every course.
Reminds me of an old riddle:
Question: What do you call the med student who graduates at the bottom of his class?
Answer: Doctor.
It's like the court system. "Innocent until proven guilty" means that yes, some guilty men will go free. Sometimes it might not even be for a very "good" reason (got off on a technicality, slimy defense lawyer). Nevertheless, we've decided that strong--albeit not infallible--precautions to prevent innocent persons from going to jail are a worthwhile compromise.
Similarly, we tend to assume that med students aren't up to the task until they prove themselves. Even the guy at the bottom of the class gets to be called Doctor--society won't tolerate it if he gets out of school and kills patients for a couple of years before somebody notices he's incompetent and pulls his license.
...the organic content is consumed by algae under strong UV illumination.
The parent probably means that the organic content is digested by algae (or more likely bacteria...) and then the output water is filtered and treated with UV to kill any residual live bits.
Strong UV illumination will kill algae--and most other creatures in water, for that matter.
After all, if they say, for example, 'Talk to your doc about cholesterol' they will still sell more cholesterol lowering drugs.
This is true. In Canada, radio, print, and televions ads are allowed to discuss either a specific medical condition and encourage you to talk to your doctor about it, or to tell you the name of the (prescription) drug, but not what it treats.
Since these ads continue to be displayed, I can only conclude that they have some effectiveness. And as long as people are consulting their physicians to decide on and manage their medication, it's probably not a bad thing.
Watching U.S. drug ads on television, I'm a little concerned...or amused. I remember an antidepressant ad from a few years ago where they did everything humanly possible to show distracting visuals with positive associations (butterflies flitting about, the protagonist bouncing about gleefully) to try to distract the viewer from the rapid-fire spoken delivery of the list of side effects.
Look at the original example. The indies are paying $100,000 a year to the stations, and the record companies are paying a total of $30m a year to the indies!
That's a hundred thousand dollars per year to each station. The indie 'promoters' are taking a cut, but the majority of the payola they receive from the record companies does go into the 'promotions' money paid to the radio stations.
It would also be very difficult, legally and politically, for a label to channel money directly to the radio stations even if it was 'expressly' not payola. ("We're going to give you a hundred grand this year to play what you want--*wink* *wink*") The label wouldn't see any benefit from this, either--all it means is that the payola isn't laundered through a middleman.
Atoms can only absorb discrete frequencies of radiation and wouldn't provide the continuous responce across large parts of the EM spectrum like we see in the index of refraction of materials.
I agree with your point that this material certainly shouldn't be treated like it has a bulk index of refraction--a monatomic layer is definitely in the realm of weird quantum effects.
It should be noted that this system can't be treated like distinct atoms, however. It's effectively one giant molecule, with a very complicated electron cloud surrounding a layer of nuclei. In the ideal case where this system is perfectly flat, you (er, a solid state physics grad student) can probably come up with a reasonable idea of what its absorption and emission spectra look like. (I wouldn't be surprised if a creature like this showed not insignificant fluorescence.) On the other hand, as soon as you start to bend this stuff, or introduce small defects, or do anything else to it, it gets a lot more complicated. You get a whole pile of nonlinear effects, and I wouldn't be surprised of there were broadband absorption. (Actually, that absorption could be used to tell you all about the stresses and defects in a particular sample of the material. Can I have my patent now?)
... not only were there prices competitive with places like Future Shop, but they also had...a selection of computer parts...
That's kind of the problem--Future Shop's prices aren't very good either.
For computer hardware and parts, for example, you're much better off going to one of the shops downtown on College Street (around Chinatown) than you are buying from Future Shop or Best Buy (now owned by the same company, anyway.)
And then the Google cache also. Which, on a public machine, you may or may not [know] is there, and may not have access to.
How is this different from any other software that might or might not be running on a public machine? The local library or Internet cafe might install a keylogger, or a screen grabber, or any number of other nasty things--none of which you necessarily know about or have access to. I imagine that a significant fraction of Internet users don't know that their browser has a cache that might preserve something that they wish to conceal.
Nothing special about this. We already knew that you can't trust a machine that's administered by someone else.
I have this funny feeling you didn't RTFA before you decided that this was a worthless story.
I have a feeling the parent didn't read the story closely enough to decide that the grandparent was wrong.
Nature's phrasing is a bit misleading. Mimivirus, like all other known viruses, requires the protein synthesis machinery of a host cell to reproduce and to carry out the synthesis of the proteins described. (For mimivirus, the hosts are amoebae.) I mean, it's impressively large--it carries a lot of genetic material inside its protein coat, and it's comparable in size to some of the smallest bacteria (mycoplasma)--but it's not alive.
While the Nature blurb says that "it can make about 150 of its own proteins, along with chemical chaperones to help the proteins to fold in the right way. It can even repair its own DNA if it gets damaged, unlike normal viruses", what they mean is that it carries genes that when expressed by the host cell can carry out those functions. The virus, by itself, can't do protein synthesis, so it can't make the proteins that carry out DNA repair or other described functions.
It's very interesting and unusual for a virus to carry genes for these functions--all other known viruses rely on their hosts to provide them, or do without--but it definitely doesn't make the virus alive. The grandparent poster is quite right, and it's made quite clear in the linked PubMed abstract to the original Science article. The Nature piece is in their News section, written by a staff writer. It's not a peer-reviewed article, and the terminology is regrettably confusing.
The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall
mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots. And as you go forth today remember always
your duty is
clear: To build and maintain those robots. Thank you.
Military school Commandant's graduation address in "The Secret War of Lisa Simpson"
Other Slashdotters have rightly pointed out that this is approaching the absurd, given that the camera has a) a weak flash; and b) very little glass (small and likely low quality lenses).
It should also be noted that the CCD is probably pretty tiny, too.
Question: What do you get when you combine low-to-moderate ambient light levels with a poor flash, a fairly small aperture lens, and a tiny, overdriven CCD with miniscule pixels?
Answer: Crappy images. I shudder to think how noisy those pictures are going to be. Sure, you can average groups of pixels--say, in 2x2 blocks--to smooth out the noise, but then you're back to a 1 megapixel camera anyway.
The press release meanwhile states that the phone will "take the same quality pictures one gets from a top-end digital camera." Idiots. I bet it drops calls, too.
... noted that the fruit fly has five chromosomes and humans have 23... ... potatoes have over forty.
Minor nitpick--humans actually have 46 chromosomes in most cells, in 23 pairs. Technically, a haploid number of 23 and a diploid chromosome number of 46. Most of the members of those pairs are quite similar to one another (in healthy individuals) but the sex chromosomes are quite different in males--the familiar X and Y chromosomes.
Some species, most often among plants, have a polyploid genome--their chromosomes are allocated in groups of three, four, or more. Potatoes, which you mentioned, are tetraploid; they have twelve groups of four similar chromosomes, giving a total chromosome number of 48 to which the parent alluded.
Oats are hexaploid, with a haploid number of 7 and a chromosome number of 42. (They may or may not be the answer to live, the Universe, and everything; research is ongoing.)
Sugarcane is octaploid: haploid number 10, chromosome number 80.
Polyploidy can arise spontaneously, when gametes (sex cells) are formed that contain a full diploid set of chromosomes, instead of the usual haploid set. Fertilization with a regular haploid gamete results in triploidy--these offspring are infertile, because they can't divide their genetic material evenly to produce new sex cells. Fertilization with another diploid gamete produces fertile, tetraploid offspring. (Later, rinse, and repeat for higher ploidy levels.) Here is a good site with more details on polyploidy in plants.
Another nifty phenomenon is the formation of polytene chromosomes. These show up in some species where certain cells undergo multiple rounds of DNA replication without cell division. This can create tens, hundreds, or even thousands of parallel strands of identical DNA. The canonical example is in the Drosophila (fruit fly) salivary gland, where the multiple copies of each gene in principle allow for much more rapid synthesis of important proteins. These polytene chromosomes are large enough to be easily stained and visualized with light microscopy--a task that is much more difficult in regular chromosomes.
If having massive infrastructure to support downloads was cheap, Apple would be making more than a marginal profit.
Actually, $0.45 is a high estimate for distribution costs. Apple retains about four cents from the sale of each track. The lion's share--about two thirds of your $0.99--goes to labels.
I assume if you can afford a plane ticket you can afford a cheap pocket radio and headphones.
On the other hand, earplugs would be cheaper...
Airports--among many other public areas--are often loud. Whether it's a television, or muzak, or jets taking off, or infants screaming, noisy distractions are a fact of life. You can't get an off button for all of them. Or should we advocate strangling any child that cries?*
Under that Pictures of each canidate, and the parties that support them.
Nope. You're still making the system too complicated. No pictures necessary; just the candidates' name and party affiliation (the latter is even optional.)
Pictures are an invitation to disaster--remember the debacle when Time altered OJ Simpson's mugshot photo for their cover, probably to make him look more threatening. (Links: Time mugshot image; comparison with Newsweek print of same image.)
What if you discover partway through election day that your candidate's image is being garbled? What if the tint or contrast settings on some of the screens are off, so your candidate looks purple? No pictures, thank you.
You select one and press the vote button at the bottom, It then verifies you want that canidate, yes / no with no going back.
You forgot the last steps: the machine then prints a human-readable (optionally also machine-readable) ballot with all your votes, which you verify and drop in the ballot box before you leave. A touchscreen system with no paper trail is unacceptable.
It's an interesting question. I suppose there's the "if it quacks like a duck" argument--if a VOIP provider is selling devices that act like telephone handsets, then they should have to live up to the same--or similar--standards as POTS. Perhaps there ought to be regulation of quality of service (how many nines of reliability does your cable internet service usually demonstrate? Two in a bad year; three in a good one? How about your POTS? Five. For decades.) Perhaps there needs to be a framework to control deceptive billing practices--this one isn't a technical issue, and probably is properly addressed through regulation. Telephone service isn't just about getting a dialtone to the customer, it's also about billing them for that dialtone and all that comes with it.
There's the technical question of things like 911 emergency service. A generation has grown up used to the idea that 911 'just works', and there's a fair argument that it should be an indispensible part of basic telephone service.
There's the cynical argument that others have raised: if the feds don't regulate it, the states will--and that will screw things up royally. They're quite right--a patchwork of state legislation will mean you can never make a phone call again....
If I'm streaming bits from my computer to my friends computer across the country, what business of the government is it if it's voice or anything else.
In that case, I agree with the parent poster--the government has no business regulating that, and really would have a difficult time trying to enforce such regulation. I think the real concern is where third-party companies are offering a product as a "telephone service" (or substitute for same) to consumers. If a corporation is going to present itself to consumers as a telephone company, it may not be unreasonable for certain obligations to consequently apply.
The situation with Paypal comes to mind. A lot of people are upset because Paypal offers many services that are very similar to those of a conventional bank, but Paypal is not subject to the same rules and regulations as a legally recognized bank. Paypal's dispute resolution process seems to many people to be arbitrary and deeply flawed, and certainly extends to Paypal more rights and powers than are granted to a regular bank. Similarly, a "real" phone company can't arbitrarily disconnect your telephone service; an unregulated VOIP provider likely could (did you read the terms of service closely? All the fine print? No? Oops. Who ya gonna call? Hope you didn't need to talk to anyone this weekend.)
Slashdot Mirror
And it's unlikely that he ever will, given that the eclipse is on Wednesday....
I thought this was what the Presidential veto power was for...?
George W. Bush hasn't vetoed a single bill during his entire term in office. That hasn't happened since the Presidency of James Garfield in 1881--who was, to be fair, assassinated after less than a year in office. The last full-term President not to do so was John Quincy Adams, a hundred and seventy-five years ago.
What happened?
If Bush had vetoed the budget bill, it would have gone back to Congress. A two-thirds majority of both the House and Senate could override such a veto--in that case, Bush would indeed be blameless for deficit spending. Indeed, it probably wouldn't have had to go that far. A press appearance or two with Bush saying, "I intend to veto any budget that is not balanced" would probably be sufficient to bring Congress into line.
But since Bush didn't veto the spending bill, and couldn't persuade a Republican House and a Republican Senate to spend within their means, and led the country from surplus to record deficits--yeah, he can be blamed.
Er, no. It's still ambiguous.
Under the old European system, they used a decimal comma. 10,234 is a little bit more than ten to a European. A million dollars is $1.000.000,00 on their side of the ocean, and $1,000,000.00 over here.
Where possible, I try to use the correct SI format, which marks only the decimal separator (comma or point) and uses spaces to group blocks of digits:
Unfortunately, one then has to worry about a line break being inserted into the middle of a number--it's a pain in the neck always having to insert nonbreaking spaces. (Actually, I can't figure out how to insert one in these comments, which is why I put the examples above on separate lines.)Really? I heard it was a great comedy. I mean, really great. Bust-a-gut funny. Tears rolling down your cheeks funny.
It was a comedy, right? Right?
What makes a human being?
What endows it with rights?
And are you sure that all human beings have the same rights?
In the United States, adults are indeed endowed with a plethora of rights. Foreign nationals in the country--be they Saudi Arabian, Chinese, Mexican, British, or Canadian--are subject to arbitrary detention and deportation. ("Papers, please!") Criminals have been deprived of certain rights--freedom of movement, possibly even the right to their own lives--for the benefit of the rest of society. Children have a sharply circumscribed set of rights. Their parents or the state are empowered to make decisions on their behalf (including with respect to medical procedures), and to direct their actions.
So to equate an embryo with a human being, and then blithely state that they are endowed with the full rights attendant to that status is a tad imprecise.
A much more complicated question is the one of what constitutes a human being in the first place.
As I read it, the parent has a very clearcut definition which suits him or her. Spermatazoans are not human, ova are not human. Once sperm fertilizes egg (bam!) that single fertilized cell is a human being.
Okay. What if that bar is too low, or too high? What if--apologies to Monty Python--every sperm is sacred? I imagine that most Slashdot readers probably feel that sperm is disposable, but why should that be so? Every one is half of a potential baby; the same can be said for every unfertilized egg. This takes us to the strict Catholic doctrine that birth control is murder, and fornication for pleasure a sin.
Going the other way things get quite complicated, too. After sperm meets egg, it still has a rough ride ahead. The newly-assembled embryo has to make its way from the oviduct to the lumen of the uterus, and eventually implant itself in the unterine lining. It undergoes several divisions during this process, and takes five or six days to do so.
All through these early stages, the embryo is very vulnerable, and a significant fraction of them never make it. Indeed, spontaneous abortions in the first week or two are quite common. The body probably disposes of about half of all fertilized embroyos, either because a genetic defect is detected, or just because conditions aren't right--or plain old bad luck. Really, the body itself is quite cavalier about expelling embryos is doesn't like or doesn't want. (These early terminations are sometimes referred to as "chemical" pregnancies, because often only sensitive biochemical tests can reveal that they took place. The mother's period might be a bit late that month.)
Jump ahead to about week 12. The major internal organ systems have appeared, though their function is for the most part quite limited. The fetus is a couple of inches long. At week 14 or so, eyelids, some musculature, fingernails, and sex organs have formed. The fetus begins to make spontaneous movements (albeit far too weakly for the mother to detect) and is about three inches long. The earliest surviving premature baby was born at about 22 weeks, if my memory serves. (There is a 50% chance of survival with extensive medical intervention at about the 26 week mark.) A full term pregnancy is about 40 weeks in length.
A lot of people are content to not really think of the fetus as a "human being" until it has achieved some minimum level of development. Some peg it to the development of certain internal or external features (often around the end of the first trimester) while others apply a (shifting) target based on when a fetus is likely to be able to survive on its own. Maybe we should choose an early stage--the formation of a blastocyst (around the sixteen-cell stage) or the formation of the placenta (about four weeks, IIRC)?
Then of course there's the question of in vitro fertilization. Common practice in many places is t
Well, no--they don't, unless you use a really loose definition of consciousness.
The construction being used in the Florida study wasn't a brain. It was twenty-five thousand cultured neurons in a dish. (For comparison, a human brain contains roughly a hundred billion neurons; a rat brain one or two hundred million. A fruit fly has about a hundred thousand neurons: four times as many as were used in this experiment.) On this scale, neuronal cells don't exhibit consciousness--are fruit flies conscious? They're just another cell type that happens to have certain properties. Some of those properties--their ability to transmit and regulate small electric currents, and their ability to form interconnects in response to various stimuli--make them appropriate for an adaptive system, but they are not thinking or conscious.
If a scientist takes cells from a particular organ of the body and grows them in a petri dish, they will often exhibit some of the properties that they showed in the bulk organ. Neuronal cells can conduct electrical impulses, for example. Cardiomyocytes (heart muscle cells) can form sheets and twitch in synchrony. Osteoblasts (bone cells) will start to mineralize. That doesn't mean that neuronal, cardiomyocyte, or osteoblast cultures are little tiny brains, hearts, or bones. It certainly would be absurd to treat them as such from a legal, moral, ethical, or scientific standpoint.
For a moment there, I thought you were going to say,
Those are median wait times in each category, not absolute waiting times. The queues are dynamic--if you need surgery *now*, you'll probably be next in the operating room. In some cases, you'll be airlifted to a facility with operating space or specific expertise.
The more important figure is the percentage of patients who receive care within the recommended maximum waiting time (RMWT). Cardiologists are generally pretty good at estimating how long a patient can wait for surgery without significant deterioration, and if most patients receive surgery within that timeframe, then the system is working.
The hospital with the poorest RMWT performance is Sudbury Regional, and it's a rather special case. It services essentially all of northern Ontario--that's an area larger than all of France, but very thinly populated. It's tough to get physicians to practice up there, and sometimes difficult for patients to travel to the hospital. Delivering service in such an area is a challenge that few healthcare systems anywhere have to face. North of Sudbury, many roads are closed for extended periods due to snowfall in the winter.
And who the heck has "Elective" heart surgery?
The categories are based on degree of urgency. As I mentioned before, a cardiologist can tell the difference between "This patient has a bit of a leaky valve but otherwise seems fairly healthy. A replacement should probably be performed in the next few months to head off future problems" and "This patient is turning purple in my office and needs quadruple bypass surgery now". "Elective" surgeries are ones that the hospital can shuffle around a bit to make most efficient use of surgeons' time, or to make room for urgent cases.
And Angioplasty at most of those hospitals is over a week, sometimes 2?
Those are in the cases where angioplasty was not performed at the same time as a diagnostic cardiac catheterization--which is done in about half of cases. This in turn strongly suggests that these are less urgent cases. The median wait time for cardiac catheterization urgent cases is two days, and three quarters of urgent patients undergo cardiac cath within the RMWT.
Glad we don't have your "wonderful" health care system here...
It is, of course, your choice.
I note that there are more American without health insurance of any kind than there are Canadians--total.
Where in God's name do you get a statement like that? Wait times in recent years have been a shade longer than they ought to be for some cardiac procedures, but but the idea that "most" Canadian heat patients die waiting for care is laughable. More important, it's not supported by statistics. Here are links to current numbers for Ontario waiting times for heart procedures. (stats are for the three months ending June 2004; there are further links on the page for historical data.) Open heart surgery; angioplasty; cardiac catheterization.
The median wait times for urgent/emergent, semi-urgent, and elective cardiac surgery were three, seven, and twenty-five days, respectively. Four out of five patients receive cardiac surgery within the "recommended maximum waiting time". Despite that, even the ones that do wait longer usually don't die waiting--the RMWTs are a bit conservative.
In Canada, the AVERAGE wait for hip replacement surgery is THREE YEARS.
Not sure where you get this statistic, either. I agree that the wait times for joint replacement surgeries in most provinces are far too long, but three years is overstating the case. There are anecdotes reporting wait times of up to two years for some orthopedic surgeons at some facilities. The UHN (the largest hospital network in Toronto) cites wait times of 13 to 43 weeks for elective joint replacements at the moment; other Ontario hospitals are scheduled to begin making those figures available this coming April.
Her regional healthcare administrators were killing her, one day at a time, by refusing to let real specialists look at her and maybe make a difference in her life. That would have cost money.
Which "real specialists" was she not referred to? In some circumstances, I can see local specialists having long waiting lists, but outright refusal to refer a patient to a specialist for medically necessary evaluations or procedures isn't cost containment--it's malpractice. It's also perfectly kosher to ask for a second physician's opinion, and seek a referral through him. If none of the doctors who saw her were willing to refer her to another specialist then maybe, regrettably, there genuinely wasn't anything that could be done.
Canadian hospitals ROUTINELY close to all but emergency cases for the last couple of months of the year, when they run out of money. If you have a non-emergency in November, you will just have to wait until January and the new fiscal year.
Are you insane? Canadian hospitals are open and providing the same level of service year-round. You may have a longer wait for some services in the winter, particularly if you show up in the emergency room with a relatively non-emergent problem--it's flu season, and there are more slips and falls, and so forth.
I am also skeptical of your claim since most hospitals operate on the same fiscal year as the provincial governments that fund them. If they were to stop carrying out procedures because they ran out of money at the end of the fiscal year, it would be in March, not December.
From some of your other posts, I gather that your experiences were in Quebec. My own experience is with Ontario's hospitals. Since each province operates its own healthcare system (within the federally-mandated bounds of the Canada Health Act) I suppose it's possible that Quebec health administrators are the bumbling murderers you make them out to be--but I suspect that you're just full of it.
The Stone Age didn't end because we ran out of stone. Nor was it because stone became too costly to extract from the ground.
We ought to be developing new tools now; not blithely continuing to use fossil fuels that are extraordinarily costly in every way except strict dollar accounting.
Reminds me of an old riddle:
It's like the court system. "Innocent until proven guilty" means that yes, some guilty men will go free. Sometimes it might not even be for a very "good" reason (got off on a technicality, slimy defense lawyer). Nevertheless, we've decided that strong--albeit not infallible--precautions to prevent innocent persons from going to jail are a worthwhile compromise.Similarly, we tend to assume that med students aren't up to the task until they prove themselves. Even the guy at the bottom of the class gets to be called Doctor--society won't tolerate it if he gets out of school and kills patients for a couple of years before somebody notices he's incompetent and pulls his license.
The parent probably means that the organic content is digested by algae (or more likely bacteria...) and then the output water is filtered and treated with UV to kill any residual live bits.
Strong UV illumination will kill algae--and most other creatures in water, for that matter.
This is true. In Canada, radio, print, and televions ads are allowed to discuss either a specific medical condition and encourage you to talk to your doctor about it, or to tell you the name of the (prescription) drug, but not what it treats.
Since these ads continue to be displayed, I can only conclude that they have some effectiveness. And as long as people are consulting their physicians to decide on and manage their medication, it's probably not a bad thing.
Watching U.S. drug ads on television, I'm a little concerned...or amused. I remember an antidepressant ad from a few years ago where they did everything humanly possible to show distracting visuals with positive associations (butterflies flitting about, the protagonist bouncing about gleefully) to try to distract the viewer from the rapid-fire spoken delivery of the list of side effects.
That's a hundred thousand dollars per year to each station. The indie 'promoters' are taking a cut, but the majority of the payola they receive from the record companies does go into the 'promotions' money paid to the radio stations.
It would also be very difficult, legally and politically, for a label to channel money directly to the radio stations even if it was 'expressly' not payola. ("We're going to give you a hundred grand this year to play what you want--*wink* *wink*") The label wouldn't see any benefit from this, either--all it means is that the payola isn't laundered through a middleman.
I agree with your point that this material certainly shouldn't be treated like it has a bulk index of refraction--a monatomic layer is definitely in the realm of weird quantum effects.
It should be noted that this system can't be treated like distinct atoms, however. It's effectively one giant molecule, with a very complicated electron cloud surrounding a layer of nuclei. In the ideal case where this system is perfectly flat, you (er, a solid state physics grad student) can probably come up with a reasonable idea of what its absorption and emission spectra look like. (I wouldn't be surprised if a creature like this showed not insignificant fluorescence.) On the other hand, as soon as you start to bend this stuff, or introduce small defects, or do anything else to it, it gets a lot more complicated. You get a whole pile of nonlinear effects, and I wouldn't be surprised of there were broadband absorption. (Actually, that absorption could be used to tell you all about the stresses and defects in a particular sample of the material. Can I have my patent now?)
That's kind of the problem--Future Shop's prices aren't very good either.
For computer hardware and parts, for example, you're much better off going to one of the shops downtown on College Street (around Chinatown) than you are buying from Future Shop or Best Buy (now owned by the same company, anyway.)
How is this different from any other software that might or might not be running on a public machine? The local library or Internet cafe might install a keylogger, or a screen grabber, or any number of other nasty things--none of which you necessarily know about or have access to. I imagine that a significant fraction of Internet users don't know that their browser has a cache that might preserve something that they wish to conceal.
Nothing special about this. We already knew that you can't trust a machine that's administered by someone else.
I have a feeling the parent didn't read the story closely enough to decide that the grandparent was wrong.
Nature's phrasing is a bit misleading. Mimivirus, like all other known viruses, requires the protein synthesis machinery of a host cell to reproduce and to carry out the synthesis of the proteins described. (For mimivirus, the hosts are amoebae.) I mean, it's impressively large--it carries a lot of genetic material inside its protein coat, and it's comparable in size to some of the smallest bacteria (mycoplasma)--but it's not alive.
While the Nature blurb says that "it can make about 150 of its own proteins, along with chemical chaperones to help the proteins to fold in the right way. It can even repair its own DNA if it gets damaged, unlike normal viruses", what they mean is that it carries genes that when expressed by the host cell can carry out those functions. The virus, by itself, can't do protein synthesis, so it can't make the proteins that carry out DNA repair or other described functions.
It's very interesting and unusual for a virus to carry genes for these functions--all other known viruses rely on their hosts to provide them, or do without--but it definitely doesn't make the virus alive. The grandparent poster is quite right, and it's made quite clear in the linked PubMed abstract to the original Science article. The Nature piece is in their News section, written by a staff writer. It's not a peer-reviewed article, and the terminology is regrettably confusing.
Other Slashdotters have rightly pointed out that this is approaching the absurd, given that the camera has a) a weak flash; and b) very little glass (small and likely low quality lenses).
It should also be noted that the CCD is probably pretty tiny, too.
Question: What do you get when you combine low-to-moderate ambient light levels with a poor flash, a fairly small aperture lens, and a tiny, overdriven CCD with miniscule pixels?
Answer: Crappy images. I shudder to think how noisy those pictures are going to be. Sure, you can average groups of pixels--say, in 2x2 blocks--to smooth out the noise, but then you're back to a 1 megapixel camera anyway.
The press release meanwhile states that the phone will "take the same quality pictures one gets from a top-end digital camera." Idiots. I bet it drops calls, too.
Minor nitpick--humans actually have 46 chromosomes in most cells, in 23 pairs. Technically, a haploid number of 23 and a diploid chromosome number of 46. Most of the members of those pairs are quite similar to one another (in healthy individuals) but the sex chromosomes are quite different in males--the familiar X and Y chromosomes.
Some species, most often among plants, have a polyploid genome--their chromosomes are allocated in groups of three, four, or more. Potatoes, which you mentioned, are tetraploid; they have twelve groups of four similar chromosomes, giving a total chromosome number of 48 to which the parent alluded.
Oats are hexaploid, with a haploid number of 7 and a chromosome number of 42. (They may or may not be the answer to live, the Universe, and everything; research is ongoing.)
Sugarcane is octaploid: haploid number 10, chromosome number 80.
Polyploidy can arise spontaneously, when gametes (sex cells) are formed that contain a full diploid set of chromosomes, instead of the usual haploid set. Fertilization with a regular haploid gamete results in triploidy--these offspring are infertile, because they can't divide their genetic material evenly to produce new sex cells. Fertilization with another diploid gamete produces fertile, tetraploid offspring. (Later, rinse, and repeat for higher ploidy levels.) Here is a good site with more details on polyploidy in plants.
Another nifty phenomenon is the formation of polytene chromosomes. These show up in some species where certain cells undergo multiple rounds of DNA replication without cell division. This can create tens, hundreds, or even thousands of parallel strands of identical DNA. The canonical example is in the Drosophila (fruit fly) salivary gland, where the multiple copies of each gene in principle allow for much more rapid synthesis of important proteins. These polytene chromosomes are large enough to be easily stained and visualized with light microscopy--a task that is much more difficult in regular chromosomes.
Actually, $0.45 is a high estimate for distribution costs. Apple retains about four cents from the sale of each track. The lion's share--about two thirds of your $0.99--goes to labels.
On the other hand, earplugs would be cheaper...
Airports--among many other public areas--are often loud. Whether it's a television, or muzak, or jets taking off, or infants screaming, noisy distractions are a fact of life. You can't get an off button for all of them. Or should we advocate strangling any child that cries?*
*Okay, maybe some of them deserve it.
Pictures are an invitation to disaster--remember the debacle when Time altered OJ Simpson's mugshot photo for their cover, probably to make him look more threatening. (Links: Time mugshot image; comparison with Newsweek print of same image.)
What if you discover partway through election day that your candidate's image is being garbled? What if the tint or contrast settings on some of the screens are off, so your candidate looks purple? No pictures, thank you.
You select one and press the vote button at the bottom, It then verifies you want that canidate, yes / no with no going back.
You forgot the last steps: the machine then prints a human-readable (optionally also machine-readable) ballot with all your votes, which you verify and drop in the ballot box before you leave. A touchscreen system with no paper trail is unacceptable.
It's an interesting question. I suppose there's the "if it quacks like a duck" argument--if a VOIP provider is selling devices that act like telephone handsets, then they should have to live up to the same--or similar--standards as POTS. Perhaps there ought to be regulation of quality of service (how many nines of reliability does your cable internet service usually demonstrate? Two in a bad year; three in a good one? How about your POTS? Five. For decades.) Perhaps there needs to be a framework to control deceptive billing practices--this one isn't a technical issue, and probably is properly addressed through regulation. Telephone service isn't just about getting a dialtone to the customer, it's also about billing them for that dialtone and all that comes with it.
There's the technical question of things like 911 emergency service. A generation has grown up used to the idea that 911 'just works', and there's a fair argument that it should be an indispensible part of basic telephone service.
There's the cynical argument that others have raised: if the feds don't regulate it, the states will--and that will screw things up royally. They're quite right--a patchwork of state legislation will mean you can never make a phone call again....
If I'm streaming bits from my computer to my friends computer across the country, what business of the government is it if it's voice or anything else.
In that case, I agree with the parent poster--the government has no business regulating that, and really would have a difficult time trying to enforce such regulation. I think the real concern is where third-party companies are offering a product as a "telephone service" (or substitute for same) to consumers. If a corporation is going to present itself to consumers as a telephone company, it may not be unreasonable for certain obligations to consequently apply.
The situation with Paypal comes to mind. A lot of people are upset because Paypal offers many services that are very similar to those of a conventional bank, but Paypal is not subject to the same rules and regulations as a legally recognized bank. Paypal's dispute resolution process seems to many people to be arbitrary and deeply flawed, and certainly extends to Paypal more rights and powers than are granted to a regular bank. Similarly, a "real" phone company can't arbitrarily disconnect your telephone service; an unregulated VOIP provider likely could (did you read the terms of service closely? All the fine print? No? Oops. Who ya gonna call? Hope you didn't need to talk to anyone this weekend.)