As far as I understand it, embryonic stem cells are totally undifferentiated cells. Adult stem cells are generally somewhat differentiated. Thus you get the stem cells in this article, which are cardiac stem cells. They don't have the potential of embryonic stem cells to grow into anything, but they can still be used to help regrow damaged cardiac cells.
Of course, when it comes to actual therapy, techniques will have to be developed that rely on adult stem cells. The whole point of stem cell therapy is that you use your own stem cells to regrow tissue that won't be rejected by your body. If you use embryonic stem cells to regrow stuff, because the stuff regrown is still a foreign body, you'd still be stuck with all the anti-rejection medication current transplant recipients need.
The primary use of embryonic stem cells is not therepeutic, it's research oriented. Because embryonic stem cells are undifferentiated, it's easier to use them to do research. The idea is that the techniques developed using easy to obtain embryonic stem cells can then be translated into using adult stem cells, which is where the therapies are going to come from.
I'm not a microbiologist, but that's what I've picked up from the debate.
Strange, I would have said nearly the same thing about the original poster.
Re:This would be really helpful for someone I know
on
Stem Cells in the Heart?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Mindless slashdot posters aside too. This involves cardiac stem cells, not embryonic. That means no embryos are destroyed to harvest them, which means no theologans (or even any theologians) are going to be complaining about it. The debate is about embryonic stem cells, not stem cells. Note the emphasis on embryonic. In the future, please keep your flamebait on topic.
Also, this development would not help your friend. These are cardiac stem cells, so they can only develop into cardiac tissue. The aorta is a blood vessel, and is composed of material very different to the heart. It wouldn't help with the visible scar tissue for the same reason.
I'm sure the ISPs wouldn't mind - as long as the government provides the data storage center and pipe to the same. I just don't want to be the poor sucker that's expected to develop an algorithm to efficiently search the steaming pile of crap that results from that sort of requirement.
In either case, both should be legally free to post whatever they like about each other - bearing in mind that both can still be sued for libel if what they write is incorrect and defamatory. However, the teacher should, and probably would, face additional penalties if they posted something like that, as it constitutes unprofessional behaviour. For the teacher, the school is an employer like any other. The school can sack the teacher for the same reason any employer could. However, to the student, the school is not an employer, it is a representative of the government.
No, read the article (or even the summary). The "improved" version isn't improved over the original, it's improved over previous pirated copies. Watching the DVD rip is still going to be lower-quality (in terms of audio-visual) than watching the DVD.
No entity that I've ever heard of, be it 'godly' or philosophical has ever remained static throughout all time, to provide a consistent definition to what is inalienable and what is not
Well, the Christian God claims constancy; whether you choose to believe it or not is another thing. Any moral system based on rules tends to be absolute - A,B and C are always bad, X, Y and Z are always good.
Additionally, as religion is very much about interpretation as much as anything else, one man's belief on what his god wants may vary from another within the same church, to say nothing of another religion all together.
That just means that people may not agree on their inalienable rights. I'm not making any comments on the specifics of humanity's inalienable rights, all I'm saying is that the very concept is predicated on some form of absolute authority. If you (as an individual or society) do not acknowledge any absolute authority, then the most you can hope for is a right you grant to yourself.
the right to kill someone) is taken away in favor of the alternative (the would-be victim's right to life).
In which case, your rights are not inalienable. I'm not talking about rights in general, I'm talking solely about inalienable rights - rights which cannot be taken away.
If your attitude is that rights are only social constructs, then there are no such things as inalienable rights; given sufficient change to society, then its needs may change, therefore your rights may change. If there came a point where it was desirous for society to have its citizens kill each other (say, overpopulation and famine), then your right to kill would be reinstated to conform to the needs of society.
If society, a dynamic entity, dictates your rights, then it is necessary that your rights be dynamic as well. The only way to have inalienable rights is to have a static entity dictating your rights. That could be either a god, or a philosophy, but it has to be something that is absolute, otherwise your rights change as the entity dictating them changes.
The point is that man can only have inalienable rights if there is something "higher" than him in order to grant him those rights. Depending on your philosophy, you might say that that thing is a particular god, you might say "greatest good for the greatest number", you might say "do unto others as you would have them do unto you".
But if you say "Humans are just highly developed animals, ethics is just an adaptation to create a functional society", if you deny that there is any absolute ethical framework in the universe, or if you say that morality is relative, then you cannot also claim that you have inalienable rights. If you don't believe in an absolute right and wrong, then you also cannot have inalienable rights - because it is not necessarily wrong to circumscribe those rights. It's all relative.
What's important here is that the GPL was recognized as legal and beneficial. The judge ruled the GPL.
Not really. He ruled that the plaintiff did not supply sufficient evidence to demonstrate that the GPL constituted an antitrust situation. There was no ruling one way or the other as to wether the GPL is a valid contract, or if it is valid to compel the licensor to distribute their own work free of charge; since neither of these things were challenged by the plaintiff, the court assumed them to be true in it's judgements. In my not-legally-trained opinion, these things are the things more likely to be challenged in court; the antitrust/price-fixing thing was out of left field.
Blacks were bred to have more physical ability by slave owners, much like dog breeds were bred to encourage certain traits. There is no gene for it and these qualities will in fact recede over time.
You do realize that breeding like to like is genetic manipulation? That what you are essentially doing is reinforcing genes that express the desirous trait and eliminating genes that don't? Physical ability may have been bred in to certain people, as you suggest, and it may recede over time, but it's still a genetic trait.
All other factors being equal, having a more resilient skull will make you a better boxer.
It's pretty freaking obvious that there are genetic differences between races. That means there is quite a distinct possiblity that the expression of these differences is going to create affinities for certain activities within various races. Saying "some races are better than others at certain things" isn't racism - it's saying what anyone whose watched the Olympics can tell you. Of course, that doesn't necessarily imply that these affinities are genetic; they could just as easily be cultural (for example, Australia tends to do well in swim events, despite being from similar genetic stock to Britain and the US).
Then again, the Olympics is comparing highly trained athletes against each other - this tends to eliminate other factors, and make unmodifiable factors (like genetics) more pronounced. However, when you take it back to the general population, factors like education, health, environment and culture are likely to make a larger impact on individual ability than racial genetic tendancies.
With a dock that provided VGA and USB, it could connect to external hard drives, monitor, mouse/keyboard etc and become the core of a desktop machine.
That's still essentially a PC, just with a hot-swappable CPU. I don't really see that catching on; what advantage do you have in being able to pick your CPU up, walk around and take calls on it?
It might save a little money - you can get low-end CPUs quite cheaply these days - but it would have a nasty effect on your system. Can you imagine the lag on a system that has its CPU communicate with the bus over USB?
I think someone needs to look up the definition of ubiquitous. It doesn't mean "everyone owns one", "necessities of life" it means "they're everywhere". Once you can walk through an American town without seeing a single car, then you can claim that automobiles are not ubiquitous.
... a worthy opponent against the RIAA.
I hope XM tears em a new one.
Why would they? If it's going to cost them 10 million to "tear em a new one" in court, or 0.5 million in re-negotiated royalty fees, the choice is pretty clear. I'm not too up on corporate law, but it may be possible for shareholders to sue the directors if they tried to fight this when it was more economical to cave in. Warchest or no, companies are made to be profitable. It doesn't matter if they're the RIAA, XM, or Wallmart, they're not going to pay to fight someone else's battle.
Expect this to be over very shortly as XM and the RIAA sort out a new licensing deal. The legal threat is just a strong-arm political tactic by the RIAA.
A standard compliant website more or less guarantees that your website will work atleast decently now, tomorrow and in the far future. A non-standard with hacks might just aswell not render at all in 4 years.
True, I suppose, except that limiting your site to standards that are properly implemented across all (or even the major) browsers can significantly limit the flexibility of your design.
I doubt many of my pages validate, because I often use the underscore hack to write CSS that renders correctly on both IE and Mozilla. (IE parses _width as if it were width, so if you use "width: 40px; _width: 50px;" you get 40px on proper browsers and 50px on IE.
However, when I'm developing, I write firstly to the spec, check it renders correctly in browser that is close to the standards (firefox,opera), validate it, and when it validates, I go about adding hacks to make IE render it correctly.
I do care about standards, but not as much as I do about my website actually working properly. Pragmatism first, idealism second.
Ten years ago, the Internet was all about low-bandwidth applications like chat and email. Five years ago, bandwidth needs went up as people started downloading MP3s. And now bandwidth demand is surging again with video.
That's one way to look at it. The other way is that networking technology developed that increased bandwidth, and so made (along with compression tech) MP3-swapping a viable possibility. Fast forward, and broadband has developed to such an extend that internet-delivered video is becoming viable.
Personally I think that's a much more likely scenario - technology development primarily enables application, rather than application primarily pushing technology forward - although of course there is some element of both.
If we can replicate, then presumably we've cracked the problem of turning energy to matter and back
Not necessarily. I'm not a trekky, so I don't know how these things work in detail, but there's two different ways they could work. Firstly, by transforming energy into matter, or secondly, by transmuting one type of matter in to another.
Besides, there may well be incredible inefficiencies in the technology. It may be efficient to generate matter from energy, but trying to reverse the process may be significantly more inefficient.
Slashdot Mirror
Further info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adult_stem_cells
As far as I understand it, embryonic stem cells are totally undifferentiated cells. Adult stem cells are generally somewhat differentiated. Thus you get the stem cells in this article, which are cardiac stem cells. They don't have the potential of embryonic stem cells to grow into anything, but they can still be used to help regrow damaged cardiac cells.
Of course, when it comes to actual therapy, techniques will have to be developed that rely on adult stem cells. The whole point of stem cell therapy is that you use your own stem cells to regrow tissue that won't be rejected by your body. If you use embryonic stem cells to regrow stuff, because the stuff regrown is still a foreign body, you'd still be stuck with all the anti-rejection medication current transplant recipients need.
The primary use of embryonic stem cells is not therepeutic, it's research oriented. Because embryonic stem cells are undifferentiated, it's easier to use them to do research. The idea is that the techniques developed using easy to obtain embryonic stem cells can then be translated into using adult stem cells, which is where the therapies are going to come from.
I'm not a microbiologist, but that's what I've picked up from the debate.
Strange, I would have said nearly the same thing about the original poster.
Mindless slashdot posters aside too. This involves cardiac stem cells, not embryonic. That means no embryos are destroyed to harvest them, which means no theologans (or even any theologians) are going to be complaining about it. The debate is about embryonic stem cells, not stem cells. Note the emphasis on embryonic. In the future, please keep your flamebait on topic.
Also, this development would not help your friend. These are cardiac stem cells, so they can only develop into cardiac tissue. The aorta is a blood vessel, and is composed of material very different to the heart. It wouldn't help with the visible scar tissue for the same reason.
The much more important factor than 10 deaths, is how many thousands of hours of lost productivity are there?
Boss, is that you?
I'm sure the ISPs wouldn't mind - as long as the government provides the data storage center and pipe to the same. I just don't want to be the poor sucker that's expected to develop an algorithm to efficiently search the steaming pile of crap that results from that sort of requirement.
for people who don't think Microsoft can make an effective search engine: People said Microsoft couldn't make a decent browser in 1996
People are saying that in 2006 too.
Perfecting the flying car isn't too hard. Perfecting the average driver, now that's a tough one.
In either case, both should be legally free to post whatever they like about each other - bearing in mind that both can still be sued for libel if what they write is incorrect and defamatory. However, the teacher should, and probably would, face additional penalties if they posted something like that, as it constitutes unprofessional behaviour. For the teacher, the school is an employer like any other. The school can sack the teacher for the same reason any employer could. However, to the student, the school is not an employer, it is a representative of the government.
No, read the article (or even the summary). The "improved" version isn't improved over the original, it's improved over previous pirated copies. Watching the DVD rip is still going to be lower-quality (in terms of audio-visual) than watching the DVD.
No entity that I've ever heard of, be it 'godly' or philosophical has ever remained static throughout all time, to provide a consistent definition to what is inalienable and what is not
Well, the Christian God claims constancy; whether you choose to believe it or not is another thing. Any moral system based on rules tends to be absolute - A,B and C are always bad, X, Y and Z are always good.
Additionally, as religion is very much about interpretation as much as anything else, one man's belief on what his god wants may vary from another within the same church, to say nothing of another religion all together.
That just means that people may not agree on their inalienable rights. I'm not making any comments on the specifics of humanity's inalienable rights, all I'm saying is that the very concept is predicated on some form of absolute authority. If you (as an individual or society) do not acknowledge any absolute authority, then the most you can hope for is a right you grant to yourself.
the right to kill someone) is taken away in favor of the alternative (the would-be victim's right to life).
In which case, your rights are not inalienable. I'm not talking about rights in general, I'm talking solely about inalienable rights - rights which cannot be taken away.
If your attitude is that rights are only social constructs, then there are no such things as inalienable rights; given sufficient change to society, then its needs may change, therefore your rights may change. If there came a point where it was desirous for society to have its citizens kill each other (say, overpopulation and famine), then your right to kill would be reinstated to conform to the needs of society.
If society, a dynamic entity, dictates your rights, then it is necessary that your rights be dynamic as well. The only way to have inalienable rights is to have a static entity dictating your rights. That could be either a god, or a philosophy, but it has to be something that is absolute, otherwise your rights change as the entity dictating them changes.
The point is that man can only have inalienable rights if there is something "higher" than him in order to grant him those rights. Depending on your philosophy, you might say that that thing is a particular god, you might say "greatest good for the greatest number", you might say "do unto others as you would have them do unto you".
But if you say "Humans are just highly developed animals, ethics is just an adaptation to create a functional society", if you deny that there is any absolute ethical framework in the universe, or if you say that morality is relative, then you cannot also claim that you have inalienable rights. If you don't believe in an absolute right and wrong, then you also cannot have inalienable rights - because it is not necessarily wrong to circumscribe those rights. It's all relative.
licensee*. Note to self: wake up before posting.
What's important here is that the GPL was recognized as legal and beneficial. The judge ruled the GPL.
Not really. He ruled that the plaintiff did not supply sufficient evidence to demonstrate that the GPL constituted an antitrust situation. There was no ruling one way or the other as to wether the GPL is a valid contract, or if it is valid to compel the licensor to distribute their own work free of charge; since neither of these things were challenged by the plaintiff, the court assumed them to be true in it's judgements. In my not-legally-trained opinion, these things are the things more likely to be challenged in court; the antitrust/price-fixing thing was out of left field.
Blacks were bred to have more physical ability by slave owners, much like dog breeds were bred to encourage certain traits. There is no gene for it and these qualities will in fact recede over time.
You do realize that breeding like to like is genetic manipulation? That what you are essentially doing is reinforcing genes that express the desirous trait and eliminating genes that don't? Physical ability may have been bred in to certain people, as you suggest, and it may recede over time, but it's still a genetic trait.
All other factors being equal, having a more resilient skull will make you a better boxer.
It's pretty freaking obvious that there are genetic differences between races. That means there is quite a distinct possiblity that the expression of these differences is going to create affinities for certain activities within various races. Saying "some races are better than others at certain things" isn't racism - it's saying what anyone whose watched the Olympics can tell you. Of course, that doesn't necessarily imply that these affinities are genetic; they could just as easily be cultural (for example, Australia tends to do well in swim events, despite being from similar genetic stock to Britain and the US).
Then again, the Olympics is comparing highly trained athletes against each other - this tends to eliminate other factors, and make unmodifiable factors (like genetics) more pronounced. However, when you take it back to the general population, factors like education, health, environment and culture are likely to make a larger impact on individual ability than racial genetic tendancies.
With a dock that provided VGA and USB, it could connect to external hard drives, monitor, mouse/keyboard etc and become the core of a desktop machine.
That's still essentially a PC, just with a hot-swappable CPU. I don't really see that catching on; what advantage do you have in being able to pick your CPU up, walk around and take calls on it?
It might save a little money - you can get low-end CPUs quite cheaply these days - but it would have a nasty effect on your system. Can you imagine the lag on a system that has its CPU communicate with the bus over USB?
I think someone needs to look up the definition of ubiquitous. It doesn't mean "everyone owns one", "necessities of life" it means "they're everywhere". Once you can walk through an American town without seeing a single car, then you can claim that automobiles are not ubiquitous.
... a worthy opponent against the RIAA. I hope XM tears em a new one.
Why would they? If it's going to cost them 10 million to "tear em a new one" in court, or 0.5 million in re-negotiated royalty fees, the choice is pretty clear. I'm not too up on corporate law, but it may be possible for shareholders to sue the directors if they tried to fight this when it was more economical to cave in. Warchest or no, companies are made to be profitable. It doesn't matter if they're the RIAA, XM, or Wallmart, they're not going to pay to fight someone else's battle.
Expect this to be over very shortly as XM and the RIAA sort out a new licensing deal. The legal threat is just a strong-arm political tactic by the RIAA.
Hmm, looks like a communist got some mod points
A standard compliant website more or less guarantees that your website will work atleast decently now, tomorrow and in the far future. A non-standard with hacks might just aswell not render at all in 4 years.
True, I suppose, except that limiting your site to standards that are properly implemented across all (or even the major) browsers can significantly limit the flexibility of your design.
I doubt many of my pages validate, because I often use the underscore hack to write CSS that renders correctly on both IE and Mozilla. (IE parses _width as if it were width, so if you use "width: 40px; _width: 50px;" you get 40px on proper browsers and 50px on IE.
However, when I'm developing, I write firstly to the spec, check it renders correctly in browser that is close to the standards (firefox,opera), validate it, and when it validates, I go about adding hacks to make IE render it correctly.
I do care about standards, but not as much as I do about my website actually working properly. Pragmatism first, idealism second.
Because atoms are bloody huge compared to electrons?
Ten years ago, the Internet was all about low-bandwidth applications like chat and email. Five years ago, bandwidth needs went up as people started downloading MP3s. And now bandwidth demand is surging again with video.
That's one way to look at it. The other way is that networking technology developed that increased bandwidth, and so made (along with compression tech) MP3-swapping a viable possibility. Fast forward, and broadband has developed to such an extend that internet-delivered video is becoming viable.
Personally I think that's a much more likely scenario - technology development primarily enables application, rather than application primarily pushing technology forward - although of course there is some element of both.
If we can replicate, then presumably we've cracked the problem of turning energy to matter and back
Not necessarily. I'm not a trekky, so I don't know how these things work in detail, but there's two different ways they could work. Firstly, by transforming energy into matter, or secondly, by transmuting one type of matter in to another.
Besides, there may well be incredible inefficiencies in the technology. It may be efficient to generate matter from energy, but trying to reverse the process may be significantly more inefficient.