Actually we can do this already but it's not really made it out of the lab and into the clinic yet.
That's because you aren't creating true "Stem cells" that can differenatiate into any tissue. You are creating 'pluropotent cells' but not anywhere near as pluropotent as a normal stem cell. Unfortunately, as far as I'm aware, no iPS cell has ever been reverted completely enough to differentiate into something useful; ie we can't figure out how to revert alpha islet cells back far enough to differentiate them into beta-cells, and given the amount of focus on trying to do this, it's doubtful that we ever will be able to. So, no, we can't "already do this already".
We have very few clinical uses for stem cells at the moment, but it seems a fairly safe bet that in the timeframe it takes to develop these clinical applications we will also develop a reliable system for generating stem cells from our own somatic cells. I certainly wouldn't (and didn't) spend the money to store umbilical blood cells from my kids.
I'd definitely wager against you; unless of course Bush's policy hindering the use of real stem cells was some how re-implemented. There a multitude of projects just waiting for funding to go into clinical trials. If the results are as promising as they are in rats, we could see approval in just a few years. While iPS are haven't shown promise in curing ANYTHING as they are still completely useless because they are not as pluropotent as a real stem cell.
Ahh, I'm sorry for my lack of clarity; I failed to mention the premise that umbilical cords CONTAIN stem cells, that's what makes them so much more useful than regular tissues made up of only somatic cells.
You are confusing pluripotency with omnipotency. Note my alpha/beta cell example. Just because we can revert to an alpha cell to a pluripotent state doesn't mean we can or ever will be able to make a beta cell from an alpha cell.
But when we will know how to reprogram them, then we will not need Umbilical cells, that aren't of much use today (although they aren't totally useless). We could easily use somatic cells (mature cells in the body) and program them to behave as we want... some nice progress is being made on that field today...
I'm a researcher in this field and what you say is total BS!!! Believing this is like believing that global climate change doesn't exist. Anything you've heard contrary is just Bush pushing bad science to fuhrer his policy decisions. It's MUCH easier to differentiate a truly undifferentiated cell into a desired tissue than to revert an already matured on. It will be easier to cure cancer than preform this feat. We can't even differentiate near cousin islet alph-cells into beta-cells.
If you can find a way to afford it, you'd be stupid not to bank umbilical cord. The benifits of having the cord far outweigh the cost to bank it. Hell, if you find your self in need of a bone marrow transplant, and find your child is a donor, you could potentially use the umbilical stem cells rather than put your child under the knife. If this magical 'cellar differentiation' does somehow become possible in your child's life time, then you simply stop paying the yearly up-keep fees.
No, you are missing parts to your analogy; it should have went like this:
A WI woman claims Honda has kept her from going back to school. She accidentally purchased an all-electric vehicle and when she tried to return it she was convinced to keep it. Later on the back home from the dealership she was unable to refill the car at the gas station because they wouldn't sell her electricity. When she later tried to go to school, she ran out of power and was stranded on the side of the road. It was too late to return the car to Honda as she had put over 100 miles, and with no gas station to bring it to she dropped out of fall and spring semesters.
SPSS is a bad example as there's a decent GNU alternate called PSPP that people could use to verify code. On the other hand is Matlab; it's GNU counterpart is Octave. Octave pretty much blows and doesn't even use the same function names as Matlab.
Overall, its one of the most feature rich KDE based distros, and like in PCLinxOS, I love having the option to restart into another distro. I found the beta releases to have better hardware detection than 11, but the over all system ran too slow for daily use. Maybe my hardware is too old (amd64 Semperon 3200+ )?
After a month of testing, I gave up and went back to kubuntu, but the plasma bar's lack of auto-hide in KDE4 keeps me hunting for something better.
Unless you know of some other agency that sits between the state level and the FBI, I'd can't imagine who else I'd contact; the call is more than likely out of country, not to mention out of state. Further, I have a NJ number, the caller was pretending to be in DC, and my bill goes to MA. Perhaps where you live the police are helpful, in NJ and MA I'd be lucky to convince the staties to touch it.
Oddly, about a 1/2 hr before this story was posted I received a similar vishing scam. CallID said +23456, a guy with an American name but Indian-like accent claiming to be from the "United States Federal Grant Program" said that he was going to send me $5000 in grant money. He explained this was because I was a good taxpayer, that I didn't have any felonies, and that I can be given this money for a variety of reasons ranging from family care to school etc.. His accent, and sentence composition totally gave away that he wasn't a US paid telemarketer. Curious about how the scam worked I played along, verifying information about my address that he some how already had. He continued to explain how his company would be transferring money to me as soon as I send back the info they are going to send me. He went on to explain further, then eventually he asked for my bank account info; I deferred him until later, claiming I didn't have it, hung up and called the FBI.
Oddly, he had such a long story, and the way he extracted info (aside from his accent) seemed pretty reasonable. I could totally see some fool (my mother) assuming that since the incoming number wasn't a normal one, that only possible explanation was that the government could be calling them.
Strangely, the FBI took my call and I spoke with a detective, however, they were unwilling to work with me to try and catch this guy, because the amount of money he was scamming wasn't high enough; apparently he has to scam $300,000 before they will allocate any resources toward the case!!! It's no wonder there's such a problem with this type of scamming.
Once again, you have reached a false conclusion, this time by way of in invalid argument.
Never did I state, or give you any indication that I agree with ANY forced medical procedure on an individual including a forced abortion. Further, you are convoluting the argument as forced procedures have nothing to do with whether or not a undifferentiated cells are a whole human. You are the one being silly, my argument is sound.
If you would like to diverge from the argument that undifferentiated cells are not a complete human and take up the topic of forced medical procedures, then yes, indeed you have now found a questionable argument.
Further you are correct, the point at which a differentiated embryo should be considered a human being is unclear. However, just because I cannot define a clear level of differentiation at which we should start to consider an embryo a human, doesn't mean that we should consider a fully undifferentiated embryo as such. Only in the context of differentiated embryos should we be applying our moral intuitions.
People in my lab do this daily by looking at cancer tumors! Just as the sky is not green, a ball of cancer is not a human being. Further, just because the origin of a ball undifferentiated cells is different, doesn't make them any more human.
If you feel differently, then you should tell your surgeon not to remove your cancer because it too could potentially become a human with the right signaling factors and growth conditions.
That's what I didn't get. If they "won't assert their claims" then why do you need to buy a license from them?
If you do need to buy a license from them, how are they not trolls?
The fact that you thinks its moral, and someone else thinks its immoral is exactly what makes it morally questionable. If you both agreed, it wouldn't be questionable anymore, it would be definitively moral or immoral.
That's absurd. It's like saying that because some one is blind and has been told and now thinks that the sky is green thereby makes the sky is blue a questionable statement.
If they are basing their argument on a false premise then it's invalid argument, and therefore there is nothing to question.
Obviously being a Biologist doesn't require critical thinking skills. Just because you consider it to be a "frog individual" doesn't make it one. Further corn kernels are actually differentiation cells....
It's morons like you that keep biology from becoming a real science; it's sad they let you teach.
This article is about 50 yrs late.
FTA:
"Most of the molecules produced from DNA may not even be proteins, but another chemical known as RNA"
It has been know for years that DNA doesn't directly encode proteins (see the 2006 Nobel prizes in chemistry and medicine), but rather is translated to and RNA message first. Further, overlapping genes were discovered years ago, same goes for rybozymes. Finally methylation has been a suspected epigenitic control mechanism since the 80's.
Can some one explain to me how this is open source or patent free? I went to register on their wiki and with the Licensing terms below. From what I can tell ideas are only shareable within OSDD and not portable to similar efforts in the outside word. Any contribution you make can possibly be patented by them and they are only bound to attempt to make drugs affordable. Sounds like an attempt at getting free labor to me; so long as one person can "afford" the drug, the drug is inherently "affordable" to that person.
I AGREE TO THE FOLLOWING LICENCE TERMS... skiping to section 3....
3 Proprietary Rights
3.1 The Portal, its services, the content, Information, and results of collaborative research including, but not limited to, the identification of drug-able non-toxic targets, in vitro and in vivo validation, in silico screening of molecules, lead optimization, pre-clinical toxicity and clinical trials will constitute ï½Protected Collective Informationï½. You agree that the ownership of Protected Collective Information belongs solely to the OSDD and is the proprietary right of OSDD, to be held in trust on behalf of OSDD by CSIR to be used to further the Vision and Mission.
3.2 Anyone accessing the Protected Collective Information has an obligation to contribute any addition or improvements made to or using such Protected Collective Information or any research result or proprietary rights generated out of the Protected Collective Information, except as provided in these Terms, back to OSDD through this Portal to add to the Protected Collective Information. Any appropriation of the Protected Collective Information to acquire proprietary rights which is in violation of its Vision and Mission to will be violation of these Terms, liable to legal action under the applicable laws.
3.3 By becoming a member of OSDD and using this Portal and in consideration thereof you agree that any Information submitted by you or generated using the Portal shall form a part of the Protected Collective Information to be shared and used by the OSDD members for furtherance of its vision, to be held by OSDD acting through CSIR (India) in trust as Protected Collective Information and you authorize OSDD acting through CSIR (India) to take any action in furtherance of the vision of OSDD. Such actions taken by OSDD acting through CSIR (India) will be informed to its members through the Portal.
3.4 You agree that Protected Collective Information is a valuable proprietary right of OSDD and in consideration of your accessing the Protected Collective Information you promise to submit all further developments or improvements made by you or your agents, to or using the Protected Collective Information back to the OSDD to add to the Protected Collective Information for others to work on it and make further improvements on it.
3.5 You assign to OSDD the worldwide royalty free non exclusive license on any Information submitted by you to Protected Collective Information for the sole purpose of use of OSDD members for furthering the Vision and Mission and for that purpose only. It is understood that if your intellectual property rights are used for any purpose contrary to the Vision and Mission, this assignment shall stand unconditionally revoked.
3.6 In the event of your acquiring any intellectual property rights by making improvements or modifications on any part of the Protected Collective Information, you shall grant an unencumbered worldwide non exclusive right to the OSDD for use of such rights for further research in furtherance of its Vision and Mission.
3.7 You agree that by virtue of using the Protected Collective Information, even partly, on your technology or invention, whether patented or not or kept as your confidential information or not, you shall submit back to the Protected Collective Information the out put or the result of such use, in whatever form, whether such output contains the Information contained in the Protected Collective Information or not.
3.8 You agree that OSDD acting through CSIR may license any research result generated out of OSDD for the sole purpose of furthering the Vision and Mission of OSDD provided that there shall be no direct monetary gain or other benefit for CSIR out of such assignment.
While a similar premise to the open access mandate, its a bit off topic, nevertheless, I'll bite.
I work in a supposedly "open-access environment" where we are encouraged to share, yet everyone still insists on a Nature paper rather than PLoS One Biology. It's a culture problem. Just yesterday I was having this same discussion about drug patentablity with a very pro open access co-worker, and they responded "you know I never though about." Most of the researchers I've had this conversation with conceded, that if they were guaranteed "full funding" they'd be willing to give up patent rights. The problem is most government grants fall far short of full funding.
Often, government grants isn't even enough to finish out the entire research (I'm writing one up right now that won't even cover 1/10 of the project), or funding will be cut in the middle of a project due to a change of interests. Even if your project is successful, congress may not pass the additional funding needed to continue your work. This leaves Hospitals and Universities to pick up the slack, after they've already fronted the added costs of an administrative staff, security and janitorial services, HR benifits, building space, lights, computers, pens, paper, copiers, ink ect..
Until today, even if a fully funded project was to make a discovery, there was no way to bring such a drug to market due to the overwhelming costs of clinical trials. Further, just because US taxpayers paid for the development of a drug, doesn't mean the rest of the world should get it royalty free (unless the was the intention during funding, such as malaria research).
That said, I can't wait for the US to follow India's lead on this one, and would happily return to engineering if they do.
WTF, MEPIS is back to debian again? not that I'm complaining....
I'll keep arch in mind next time I find a must-have app (my guess: a KDE plasma bar that actually hides) that hasn't propagated to my current distro and is too hard to compile myself. 1.5 days in, an it seems openSUSE has everything I'm looking for and even some stuff I didn't know I was missing. Its tight integration with various visualization managers is going to be hard to shake. Plus if I really get paranoid, I might check out AppArmor.
Alas, I'll likely always run a at least one Debian based distro such as Gnusense or Gobuntu (I dual boot - until android is working on my HTC phone and distance ed no longer requires flash and WMV) as I'm a purist at heart.
WOW! I did as you said and tried openSUSE 11, and must say it's quite a bit more impressive than any debian based distro. For years I've resisted RPM distro's after experiencing RPM hell vs APT magic powers. Last time I tried SUSE was right after the Novell acquisition, and there were definitely some holes; SimplyMEPIS was far superior. Unfortunately MEPIS decided to peg it self to Ubuntu (a big mistake) and I've been searching for a new distribution since. Mint and DreamLinux had a similar bleeding edge feel, but Mint sacrifices much speed for eye candy, and let KDE development lag behind their main branches.
Thanks for pointing me toward a better distro.
Yes, but within the context of this particular purchase, there's no need negotiation of the bulk discount. Further, I've seen things on "the point" such as "buy a coffee pot for the office when x dollars is raised". Therefore, the point would work fine in this instance, especially since it's already live (and would possibly incite people to spend their money on better causes than an underpowered laptop).;-)
bulls eye!! The parent is completely on point with this one. One can discuss science with out the basis for a logical argument. The way to fix the science education is to make critical thinking a mandatory part of the curriculum. The Germans have had this requirement since Holocaust, and laugh when they hear our politicians speak because they use all the same kind of rhetoric that they are taught to watch out for.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually we can do this already but it's not really made it out of the lab and into the clinic yet.
That's because you aren't creating true "Stem cells" that can differenatiate into any tissue. You are creating 'pluropotent cells' but not anywhere near as pluropotent as a normal stem cell. Unfortunately, as far as I'm aware, no iPS cell has ever been reverted completely enough to differentiate into something useful; ie we can't figure out how to revert alpha islet cells back far enough to differentiate them into beta-cells, and given the amount of focus on trying to do this, it's doubtful that we ever will be able to. So, no, we can't "already do this already".
We have very few clinical uses for stem cells at the moment, but it seems a fairly safe bet that in the timeframe it takes to develop these clinical applications we will also develop a reliable system for generating stem cells from our own somatic cells. I certainly wouldn't (and didn't) spend the money to store umbilical blood cells from my kids.
I'd definitely wager against you; unless of course Bush's policy hindering the use of real stem cells was some how re-implemented. There a multitude of projects just waiting for funding to go into clinical trials. If the results are as promising as they are in rats, we could see approval in just a few years. While iPS are haven't shown promise in curing ANYTHING as they are still completely useless because they are not as pluropotent as a real stem cell.
Ahh, I'm sorry for my lack of clarity; I failed to mention the premise that umbilical cords CONTAIN stem cells, that's what makes them so much more useful than regular tissues made up of only somatic cells.
You are confusing pluripotency with omnipotency. Note my alpha/beta cell example. Just because we can revert to an alpha cell to a pluripotent state doesn't mean we can or ever will be able to make a beta cell from an alpha cell.
When we will be able to reprogram them (for example) to become insulin islet cells, then we have won the battle. We will cure diabetes.
We already do know how to do this.
But when we will know how to reprogram them, then we will not need Umbilical cells, that aren't of much use today (although they aren't totally useless). We could easily use somatic cells (mature cells in the body) and program them to behave as we want ... some nice progress is being made on that field today ...
I'm a researcher in this field and what you say is total BS!!! Believing this is like believing that global climate change doesn't exist. Anything you've heard contrary is just Bush pushing bad science to fuhrer his policy decisions. It's MUCH easier to differentiate a truly undifferentiated cell into a desired tissue than to revert an already matured on. It will be easier to cure cancer than preform this feat. We can't even differentiate near cousin islet alph-cells into beta-cells. If you can find a way to afford it, you'd be stupid not to bank umbilical cord. The benifits of having the cord far outweigh the cost to bank it. Hell, if you find your self in need of a bone marrow transplant, and find your child is a donor, you could potentially use the umbilical stem cells rather than put your child under the knife. If this magical 'cellar differentiation' does somehow become possible in your child's life time, then you simply stop paying the yearly up-keep fees.
A WI woman claims Honda has kept her from going back to school. She accidentally purchased an all-electric vehicle and when she tried to return it she was convinced to keep it. Later on the back home from the dealership she was unable to refill the car at the gas station because they wouldn't sell her electricity. When she later tried to go to school, she ran out of power and was stranded on the side of the road. It was too late to return the car to Honda as she had put over 100 miles, and with no gas station to bring it to she dropped out of fall and spring semesters.
SPSS is a bad example as there's a decent GNU alternate called PSPP that people could use to verify code. On the other hand is Matlab; it's GNU counterpart is Octave. Octave pretty much blows and doesn't even use the same function names as Matlab.
After a month of testing, I gave up and went back to kubuntu, but the plasma bar's lack of auto-hide in KDE4 keeps me hunting for something better.
Unless you know of some other agency that sits between the state level and the FBI, I'd can't imagine who else I'd contact; the call is more than likely out of country, not to mention out of state. Further, I have a NJ number, the caller was pretending to be in DC, and my bill goes to MA. Perhaps where you live the police are helpful, in NJ and MA I'd be lucky to convince the staties to touch it.
Oddly, about a 1/2 hr before this story was posted I received a similar vishing scam. CallID said +23456, a guy with an American name but Indian-like accent claiming to be from the "United States Federal Grant Program" said that he was going to send me $5000 in grant money. He explained this was because I was a good taxpayer, that I didn't have any felonies, and that I can be given this money for a variety of reasons ranging from family care to school etc.. His accent, and sentence composition totally gave away that he wasn't a US paid telemarketer. Curious about how the scam worked I played along, verifying information about my address that he some how already had. He continued to explain how his company would be transferring money to me as soon as I send back the info they are going to send me. He went on to explain further, then eventually he asked for my bank account info; I deferred him until later, claiming I didn't have it, hung up and called the FBI.
Oddly, he had such a long story, and the way he extracted info (aside from his accent) seemed pretty reasonable. I could totally see some fool (my mother) assuming that since the incoming number wasn't a normal one, that only possible explanation was that the government could be calling them.
Strangely, the FBI took my call and I spoke with a detective, however, they were unwilling to work with me to try and catch this guy, because the amount of money he was scamming wasn't high enough; apparently he has to scam $300,000 before they will allocate any resources toward the case!!! It's no wonder there's such a problem with this type of scamming.
Once again, you have reached a false conclusion, this time by way of in invalid argument.
Never did I state, or give you any indication that I agree with ANY forced medical procedure on an individual including a forced abortion. Further, you are convoluting the argument as forced procedures have nothing to do with whether or not a undifferentiated cells are a whole human. You are the one being silly, my argument is sound.
If you would like to diverge from the argument that undifferentiated cells are not a complete human and take up the topic of forced medical procedures, then yes, indeed you have now found a questionable argument.
Further you are correct, the point at which a differentiated embryo should be considered a human being is unclear. However, just because I cannot define a clear level of differentiation at which we should start to consider an embryo a human, doesn't mean that we should consider a fully undifferentiated embryo as such. Only in the context of differentiated embryos should we be applying our moral intuitions.
So "not animals" only applies to plant life.
Actually, fungi and the three kingdoms of bacteria Protista, Archaea, and Eubacteria, are also not animals.
My analogy is valid; your assertion is untrue.
Anyone with a functional eyeball and an internet connection can look at an undifferentiated ball of cells.
People in my lab do this daily by looking at cancer tumors! Just as the sky is not green, a ball of cancer is not a human being. Further, just because the origin of a ball undifferentiated cells is different, doesn't make them any more human.
If you feel differently, then you should tell your surgeon not to remove your cancer because it too could potentially become a human with the right signaling factors and growth conditions.
That's what I didn't get.
If they "won't assert their claims" then why do you need to buy a license from them?
If you do need to buy a license from them, how are they not trolls?
The fact that you thinks its moral, and someone else thinks its immoral is exactly what makes it morally questionable. If you both agreed, it wouldn't be questionable anymore, it would be definitively moral or immoral.
That's absurd. It's like saying that because some one is blind and has been told and now thinks that the sky is green thereby makes the sky is blue a questionable statement. If they are basing their argument on a false premise then it's invalid argument, and therefore there is nothing to question.
Obviously being a Biologist doesn't require critical thinking skills. Just because you consider it to be a "frog individual" doesn't make it one. Further corn kernels are actually differentiation cells....
It's morons like you that keep biology from becoming a real science; it's sad they let you teach.
Not at all true, I've even found that many functions even have different names than those in Matlab.
This article is about 50 yrs late. FTA: "Most of the molecules produced from DNA may not even be proteins, but another chemical known as RNA"
It has been know for years that DNA doesn't directly encode proteins (see the 2006 Nobel prizes in chemistry and medicine), but rather is translated to and RNA message first. Further, overlapping genes were discovered years ago, same goes for rybozymes. Finally methylation has been a suspected epigenitic control mechanism since the 80's.
Nothing new to see here; move along.
...The next prize they will receive will probably be the Ig Nobel Prize in Biology!
Well, actually considering one of it's uses, I wouldn't be suprised: glowing cats
Can some one explain to me how this is open source or patent free? I went to register on their wiki and with the Licensing terms below. From what I can tell ideas are only shareable within OSDD and not portable to similar efforts in the outside word. Any contribution you make can possibly be patented by them and they are only bound to attempt to make drugs affordable. Sounds like an attempt at getting free labor to me; so long as one person can "afford" the drug, the drug is inherently "affordable" to that person. I AGREE TO THE FOLLOWING LICENCE TERMS ... skiping to section 3....
3 Proprietary Rights
3.1 The Portal, its services, the content, Information, and results of collaborative research including, but not limited to, the identification of drug-able non-toxic targets, in vitro and in vivo validation, in silico screening of molecules, lead optimization, pre-clinical toxicity and clinical trials will constitute ï½Protected Collective Informationï½. You agree that the ownership of Protected Collective Information belongs solely to the OSDD and is the proprietary right of OSDD, to be held in trust on behalf of OSDD by CSIR to be used to further the Vision and Mission.
3.2 Anyone accessing the Protected Collective Information has an obligation to contribute any addition or improvements made to or using such Protected Collective Information or any research result or proprietary rights generated out of the Protected Collective Information, except as provided in these Terms, back to OSDD through this Portal to add to the Protected Collective Information. Any appropriation of the Protected Collective Information to acquire proprietary rights which is in violation of its Vision and Mission to will be violation of these Terms, liable to legal action under the applicable laws.
3.3 By becoming a member of OSDD and using this Portal and in consideration thereof you agree that any Information submitted by you or generated using the Portal shall form a part of the Protected Collective Information to be shared and used by the OSDD members for furtherance of its vision, to be held by OSDD acting through CSIR (India) in trust as Protected Collective Information and you authorize OSDD acting through CSIR (India) to take any action in furtherance of the vision of OSDD. Such actions taken by OSDD acting through CSIR (India) will be informed to its members through the Portal.
3.4 You agree that Protected Collective Information is a valuable proprietary right of OSDD and in consideration of your accessing the Protected Collective Information you promise to submit all further developments or improvements made by you or your agents, to or using the Protected Collective Information back to the OSDD to add to the Protected Collective Information for others to work on it and make further improvements on it.
3.5 You assign to OSDD the worldwide royalty free non exclusive license on any Information submitted by you to Protected Collective Information for the sole purpose of use of OSDD members for furthering the Vision and Mission and for that purpose only. It is understood that if your intellectual property rights are used for any purpose contrary to the Vision and Mission, this assignment shall stand unconditionally revoked.
3.6 In the event of your acquiring any intellectual property rights by making improvements or modifications on any part of the Protected Collective Information, you shall grant an unencumbered worldwide non exclusive right to the OSDD for use of such rights for further research in furtherance of its Vision and Mission.
3.7 You agree that by virtue of using the Protected Collective Information, even partly, on your technology or invention, whether patented or not or kept as your confidential information or not, you shall submit back to the Protected Collective Information the out put or the result of such use, in whatever form, whether such output contains the Information contained in the Protected Collective Information or not.
3.8 You agree that OSDD acting through CSIR may license any research result generated out of OSDD for the sole purpose of furthering the Vision and Mission of OSDD provided that there shall be no direct monetary gain or other benefit for CSIR out of such assignment.
While a similar premise to the open access mandate, its a bit off topic, nevertheless, I'll bite. I work in a supposedly "open-access environment" where we are encouraged to share, yet everyone still insists on a Nature paper rather than PLoS One Biology. It's a culture problem. Just yesterday I was having this same discussion about drug patentablity with a very pro open access co-worker, and they responded "you know I never though about." Most of the researchers I've had this conversation with conceded, that if they were guaranteed "full funding" they'd be willing to give up patent rights. The problem is most government grants fall far short of full funding. Often, government grants isn't even enough to finish out the entire research (I'm writing one up right now that won't even cover 1/10 of the project), or funding will be cut in the middle of a project due to a change of interests. Even if your project is successful, congress may not pass the additional funding needed to continue your work. This leaves Hospitals and Universities to pick up the slack, after they've already fronted the added costs of an administrative staff, security and janitorial services, HR benifits, building space, lights, computers, pens, paper, copiers, ink ect.. Until today, even if a fully funded project was to make a discovery, there was no way to bring such a drug to market due to the overwhelming costs of clinical trials. Further, just because US taxpayers paid for the development of a drug, doesn't mean the rest of the world should get it royalty free (unless the was the intention during funding, such as malaria research). That said, I can't wait for the US to follow India's lead on this one, and would happily return to engineering if they do.
WTF, MEPIS is back to debian again? not that I'm complaining.... I'll keep arch in mind next time I find a must-have app (my guess: a KDE plasma bar that actually hides) that hasn't propagated to my current distro and is too hard to compile myself. 1.5 days in, an it seems openSUSE has everything I'm looking for and even some stuff I didn't know I was missing. Its tight integration with various visualization managers is going to be hard to shake. Plus if I really get paranoid, I might check out AppArmor.
Alas, I'll likely always run a at least one Debian based distro such as Gnusense or Gobuntu (I dual boot - until android is working on my HTC phone and distance ed no longer requires flash and WMV) as I'm a purist at heart.
WOW! I did as you said and tried openSUSE 11, and must say it's quite a bit more impressive than any debian based distro. For years I've resisted RPM distro's after experiencing RPM hell vs APT magic powers. Last time I tried SUSE was right after the Novell acquisition, and there were definitely some holes; SimplyMEPIS was far superior. Unfortunately MEPIS decided to peg it self to Ubuntu (a big mistake) and I've been searching for a new distribution since. Mint and DreamLinux had a similar bleeding edge feel, but Mint sacrifices much speed for eye candy, and let KDE development lag behind their main branches. Thanks for pointing me toward a better distro.
the boardgame is slashdotted, but the google cache is working: http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:http://www.waronterrortheboardgame.com/
Yes, but within the context of this particular purchase, there's no need negotiation of the bulk discount. Further, I've seen things on "the point" such as "buy a coffee pot for the office when x dollars is raised". Therefore, the point would work fine in this instance, especially since it's already live (and would possibly incite people to spend their money on better causes than an underpowered laptop). ;-)
bulls eye!! The parent is completely on point with this one. One can discuss science with out the basis for a logical argument. The way to fix the science education is to make critical thinking a mandatory part of the curriculum. The Germans have had this requirement since Holocaust, and laugh when they hear our politicians speak because they use all the same kind of rhetoric that they are taught to watch out for.