Back before my wife was a stay-at-home mom, she helped publish an article demonstrating that two "species" of a certain flower were actually one of the same. Gene flow between the populations was reduced, as their flowering times didn't overlap much, but it was still possible.
There was a Wired article awhile back, talking about herbicide resistance in the coca plant. The point is, evolution happens all the time. If resistance in an organism can occur, either naturally or by getting genes from another species, it will eventually happen.
Pesticides have revolutionized agriculture, but like antibiotics, must be used with caution. Eventually it won't be as amazing as it once was. Older, more primitive techniques, may eventually come back into favor.
From: "Richard M. Smith" Date: December 27, 2005 11:43:49 AM EST To: EPIC_IDOF@mailman.epic.org Subject: [EPIC_IDOF] The Whitehouse Web site is bugged
Hi,
The Whitehouse.gov Web site is bugged! Apparently the Webmaster for the site has hired Webtrends to track visitors around the site using Web bugs and permanent cookies. Here's the Web bug that I found on the home page of the Whitehouse.gov Web site:
Similar Web bugs can be found on other Web pages at the Whitehouse Web site.
Before 9/11, the Clinton administration said this kind of Web tracking is a no-no for U.S. government Web sites:
Because of the unique laws and traditions about government access to citizens' personal information, the presumption should be that "cookies" will not be used at Federal web sites. Under this new Federal policy, "cookies" should not be used at Federal web sites, or by contractors when operating web sites on behalf of agencies, unless, in addition to clear and conspicuous notice, the following conditions are met: a compelling need to gather the data on the site;
Richard M. Smith http://www.computerbytesman.com/
Not to yell conspiracy on Slashdot or anything, but it's an interesting coincidence.
My seven year-old son and I play a fair amount of computer games together. It started with adventure games, that "gateway drug" to the hard stuff like Counterstrike. Some games he can do on his own, like Fable and virtually any FPS (he started on Jedi Outcast, as I recall). Some games spark lots of chatting outside of gaming, such as Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault and discussions of the era and our family history (my step-mother is Japanese-American and was born in the Nevada internment camps). We played Civ 4 and talk about technology and such.
Gaming in general has led to some funny moments as well. He and his young cousin were pretending to shoot other cars from the back seat, wildly making machine gun noises and pointing in all directions. "No, Sam!" I told him harshly. "Use short, controlled bursts!" He smiled and complied with my suggestions.
At this point, the question seems to be, do gas giants ever not have rings? They seem to be celestial vacuum cleaners, attracting all sorts of debris. It's a good thing too, as it probably kept the orbital bombardment of Earth to a minimum.
I spent a few years making case mods. The first was all-black with a window and cathode light, very traditional by today's standards. Back in the day when beige was all you could get, this was pretty flashy. I made a Lego computer too, which was all the rage for awhile.
My pride and joy is the Fossil computer. It's wood and brass, nearly silent, and has a fossil "badge" in the front. I'm not sure if that classifies as weird, but it's a thing of beauty.
My tendency would be to start with adults instead of children for therapeutic reasons. I suspect the main reason they're using children is that people with head trauma can't typically give consent. With children, the parents are able to do so, working around difficult ethics issues.
One of the advantages children have may also be the weakness in this study is that they show extreme plasticity. That is, their neurons are already growing and filling in gaps. Cases such as the "Boy with half a brain" demonstrate such extreme plasticity.
So, I'm somewhat hesitant that this procedure may be of great value to the population they picked. Instead, it may be issues like scarring that cause the most problems. Perhaps doing things like adding nerve growth factor (NGF), reducing inflammation, and keeping trauma victims cold would help more.
Probably the most interesting and controversial is the link between HPV and cervical cancer. They're working on a vaccine that should prevent 70% of cervical cancers. Some groups feel that it shouldn't be given out, as people get the offending HPV variety mostly from sexual transmission.
Of course, here on Slashdot, we're probably fairly safe from such things.
It's interesting that for awhile, people were looking at genetic causes for various diseases such as cancer. Now we're back to the disease model, which turns out to also be due to genetics.
Basically anything that fiddles with your DNA is quite dangerous, be it smoking or radiation and the like. Viruses modify the DNA of millions of cells, most of which are destroyed in the process. Unfortunately a few survive, which can cause mutations that lead to cancer.
I suspect the early exposure to colds actually boosts a child's immune system. They're better able to fight off colds, so though they get more at a younger age, the ones they get later don't modify as many cells. Just a guess, of course. I doubt they'd approve a scientific study on modifying the DNA of small children.
Under the new HIPPA regulations, you have more rights about what happens to your medical record. I'm not an expert, but I believe you can contact them and ask to see your medical record as well as suggest corrections to it.
I highly recommend everyone review their own medical record. I work in the healthcare industry for the web services team. We all dutifully checked them and nearly every one had errors. In once case, a test had been done during an ER visit that required follow-up. It wasn't done at the time and once it was discovered, they immediately started certain cancer-prevention therapies. Scary stuff.
I work for a healthcare organization and one of the applications I support is this system for merging multiple medical records into a single one. We have a team of people whose sole purpose is to take multiple accounts and turn them into one. This extra accounts can be created accidentally, such as when a Jane Doe comes into the ER and their identity is later established. It can happen on accident, such as when a registration person creates a new account instead of finding the old one.
In the last couple years, identity theft and identity fraud have resulted in huge inputs to the system. Where we once had to merge up to three identities, the system now supports merging up to ten. What happens is that a single individual will steal a bunch of different identities and then use them all, typically to get drugs.
So, while the risk of your credit card being stolen and used may be low in certain cases, don't lose your other "proof of identity" stuff: driver's licenses, insurance cards, and your social security number.
While it's easy to jump into the "What's the reason behind mosquitoes" sort of philosophical arguments, the reality is that cancer isn't a single nice, neat package. Even this article falls into the trap - the mechanism they describe is likely just one of many.
Think of cancer as a statistical event. Cellular mechanisms don't work 100% all the time. Most cancer cells are benign and never noticed. A few have very specific things go wrong with them that allow them to grow and spread and kill the host.
Think of it as evolution in miniature. The unsuccessful cancers are destroyed by the immune system, fail to grow, or fail to spread. If a particular cell begins replicating and stumbles upon the correct mutations to allow it to do all three, you have full blown cancer. This is also why chemotherapy stops working after awhile - the cancer cells that are resistant survive, allowing them to continue to grow and thrive.
It's a nasty business, but not a particularly mystical or mysterious one.
Remember that while HIV does admittedly mutate, as do many other viruses, but there seem to be key portions that cannot change without essentially breaking the virus' core functionality.
The trick is to find those key portions and use them in your vaccine.
I've talked with Jay before and he's a very nice guy. I suspect many of the lessons he's learned here were painful ones.
It's also interesting what wasn't talked about. I think Bioware has had some very painful interactions with some of the license holders of various intellectual properties (e.g. D&D and Star Wars). Often times, they're stuck being intermediaries between those groups and the community. I suspect the place isn't always a happy one.
From a builder's perspective (I make NWN mods), I very much appreciate developer's comments on the forums as well as releasing good information and tools to aid my tasks. We're essentially unpaid volunteers that increase the value of their product. I think it's important that developers treat these small groups of rabid mod makers quite well. Folks like Valve and Epic and Bioware have generally done a pretty good job with this, one of the reasons people still play Half-Life, Unreal Tournament, and Neverwinter Nights.
Why not do this with the human body?
on
Internet Immunization
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I always wondered if the future of human defense against viruses was similar. Use "honeypots" with human-like susceptibility (genetically modified pigs or something). Once their immune systems start figuring out what virus is attacking, take a part of the virus DNA and post the code for the world to see.
Individuals at home would have their DNA sequencers crank out a batch and they'd then inoculate themselves, prepping their immune system for the real virus.
This is all future stuff, of course. It could also be prone to problems, such as someone hacking into the system and posting a DNA sequence that does bad things to people. Shucks, the autism/vaccine scares already show people's fear of such things. Might make for a good story, though.
That's fairly amusing. I was half-tempted to try for something along the lines of Facade, except with a fantasy twist. That's like watching a couple go through an emotional train wreck and yet no actual punches are thrown.
Personally, I'm going for the Bioware wool cap. Jobs are overrated.
I've done a number of modules for NWN (Shadowlords, Dreamcatcher, Demon) and am currently working on a NWN2 campaign. I think I'm going to end up taking one of our sidequests and tweaking it slightly to fit the rules.
There's a few tricky parts:
3 NPCs + PC. That's not many people, especially if the PC has henchmen/companions.
No combat. Conflict has to be handled in other ways (assuming there's conflict).
4x4 area. That's tiny. Most of the movement in the story will have to be short, possibly going over the same ground. Think of a medium sized house or a small cave.
That being said, I think we may have a side quest with an interesting premise. I think the competition will be pretty stiff, but it should be a fun exercise.
It was interesting reading the analysis of the survey. I suspect a lot of gaming companies do this, yet keep things fairly quiet. Trade secrets and all.
Still, there were cases where the survey results were being ignored. For example, ground combat was listed as a fairly low priority, yet it still seems to be part of the core design. In another question, people responded that they really wanted to play Klingons, yet it looks like they're not part of the initial races to be offered.
There's always tension in surveys, deciding what really reflects people's interest and what is simply a badly worded question. Hopefully they'll be careful with this one. It would be a shame if they had another Star Wars Galaxies on their hands, deciding that virtually no one could play Jedi even though that's what everyone wanted to do.
The statement said the woman who received the partial facial transplant had "lesions that were extremely difficult and nearly impossible to repair using standard facial surgery methods."
So, it seems like there's no good way to do this otherwise.
We've been having a rather lengthy discussion over at Evil Avatar about this for a few days now.
Of interest is the game's use of Source, using Steam for distribution, and the use of "cartoon-like" graphics. The latter has a few people worried, though who knows what it means.
Slashdot Mirror
Back before my wife was a stay-at-home mom, she helped publish an article demonstrating that two "species" of a certain flower were actually one of the same. Gene flow between the populations was reduced, as their flowering times didn't overlap much, but it was still possible.
There's also "jumping genes", bacteria passing genes around, and forms of horizontal gene transfer.
There was a Wired article awhile back, talking about herbicide resistance in the coca plant. The point is, evolution happens all the time. If resistance in an organism can occur, either naturally or by getting genes from another species, it will eventually happen.
Pesticides have revolutionized agriculture, but like antibiotics, must be used with caution. Eventually it won't be as amazing as it once was. Older, more primitive techniques, may eventually come back into favor.
My seven year-old son and I play a fair amount of computer games together. It started with adventure games, that "gateway drug" to the hard stuff like Counterstrike. Some games he can do on his own, like Fable and virtually any FPS (he started on Jedi Outcast, as I recall). Some games spark lots of chatting outside of gaming, such as Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault and discussions of the era and our family history (my step-mother is Japanese-American and was born in the Nevada internment camps). We played Civ 4 and talk about technology and such.
Gaming in general has led to some funny moments as well. He and his young cousin were pretending to shoot other cars from the back seat, wildly making machine gun noises and pointing in all directions. "No, Sam!" I told him harshly. "Use short, controlled bursts!" He smiled and complied with my suggestions.
. . .don't download tv shows, run a web server from their closet, and download large ISOs of operating systems.
Huh, maybe you shouldn't ask this question on Slashdot.
At this point, the question seems to be, do gas giants ever not have rings? They seem to be celestial vacuum cleaners, attracting all sorts of debris. It's a good thing too, as it probably kept the orbital bombardment of Earth to a minimum.
I spent a few years making case mods. The first was all-black with a window and cathode light, very traditional by today's standards. Back in the day when beige was all you could get, this was pretty flashy. I made a Lego computer too, which was all the rage for awhile.
My pride and joy is the Fossil computer. It's wood and brass, nearly silent, and has a fossil "badge" in the front. I'm not sure if that classifies as weird, but it's a thing of beauty.
My tendency would be to start with adults instead of children for therapeutic reasons. I suspect the main reason they're using children is that people with head trauma can't typically give consent. With children, the parents are able to do so, working around difficult ethics issues.
One of the advantages children have may also be the weakness in this study is that they show extreme plasticity. That is, their neurons are already growing and filling in gaps. Cases such as the "Boy with half a brain" demonstrate such extreme plasticity.
So, I'm somewhat hesitant that this procedure may be of great value to the population they picked. Instead, it may be issues like scarring that cause the most problems. Perhaps doing things like adding nerve growth factor (NGF), reducing inflammation, and keeping trauma victims cold would help more.
How exactly does one fake a colony of cells? A bit of moldy cheese? Take one stem cell colony and just replicate it?
I assume the controvercy is that they didn't have the degree of success they claimed (plus dishonesty in scientific study is generally frowned upon).
Probably the most interesting and controversial is the link between HPV and cervical cancer. They're working on a vaccine that should prevent 70% of cervical cancers. Some groups feel that it shouldn't be given out, as people get the offending HPV variety mostly from sexual transmission.
Of course, here on Slashdot, we're probably fairly safe from such things.
It's interesting that for awhile, people were looking at genetic causes for various diseases such as cancer. Now we're back to the disease model, which turns out to also be due to genetics.
Basically anything that fiddles with your DNA is quite dangerous, be it smoking or radiation and the like. Viruses modify the DNA of millions of cells, most of which are destroyed in the process. Unfortunately a few survive, which can cause mutations that lead to cancer.
I suspect the early exposure to colds actually boosts a child's immune system. They're better able to fight off colds, so though they get more at a younger age, the ones they get later don't modify as many cells. Just a guess, of course. I doubt they'd approve a scientific study on modifying the DNA of small children.
Under the new HIPPA regulations, you have more rights about what happens to your medical record. I'm not an expert, but I believe you can contact them and ask to see your medical record as well as suggest corrections to it.
I highly recommend everyone review their own medical record. I work in the healthcare industry for the web services team. We all dutifully checked them and nearly every one had errors. In once case, a test had been done during an ER visit that required follow-up. It wasn't done at the time and once it was discovered, they immediately started certain cancer-prevention therapies. Scary stuff.
I work for a healthcare organization and one of the applications I support is this system for merging multiple medical records into a single one. We have a team of people whose sole purpose is to take multiple accounts and turn them into one. This extra accounts can be created accidentally, such as when a Jane Doe comes into the ER and their identity is later established. It can happen on accident, such as when a registration person creates a new account instead of finding the old one.
In the last couple years, identity theft and identity fraud have resulted in huge inputs to the system. Where we once had to merge up to three identities, the system now supports merging up to ten. What happens is that a single individual will steal a bunch of different identities and then use them all, typically to get drugs.
So, while the risk of your credit card being stolen and used may be low in certain cases, don't lose your other "proof of identity" stuff: driver's licenses, insurance cards, and your social security number.
While it's easy to jump into the "What's the reason behind mosquitoes" sort of philosophical arguments, the reality is that cancer isn't a single nice, neat package. Even this article falls into the trap - the mechanism they describe is likely just one of many.
Think of cancer as a statistical event. Cellular mechanisms don't work 100% all the time. Most cancer cells are benign and never noticed. A few have very specific things go wrong with them that allow them to grow and spread and kill the host.
Think of it as evolution in miniature. The unsuccessful cancers are destroyed by the immune system, fail to grow, or fail to spread. If a particular cell begins replicating and stumbles upon the correct mutations to allow it to do all three, you have full blown cancer. This is also why chemotherapy stops working after awhile - the cancer cells that are resistant survive, allowing them to continue to grow and thrive.
It's a nasty business, but not a particularly mystical or mysterious one.
Remember that while HIV does admittedly mutate, as do many other viruses, but there seem to be key portions that cannot change without essentially breaking the virus' core functionality.
The trick is to find those key portions and use them in your vaccine.
I've talked with Jay before and he's a very nice guy. I suspect many of the lessons he's learned here were painful ones.
It's also interesting what wasn't talked about. I think Bioware has had some very painful interactions with some of the license holders of various intellectual properties (e.g. D&D and Star Wars). Often times, they're stuck being intermediaries between those groups and the community. I suspect the place isn't always a happy one.
From a builder's perspective (I make NWN mods), I very much appreciate developer's comments on the forums as well as releasing good information and tools to aid my tasks. We're essentially unpaid volunteers that increase the value of their product. I think it's important that developers treat these small groups of rabid mod makers quite well. Folks like Valve and Epic and Bioware have generally done a pretty good job with this, one of the reasons people still play Half-Life, Unreal Tournament, and Neverwinter Nights.
I always wondered if the future of human defense against viruses was similar. Use "honeypots" with human-like susceptibility (genetically modified pigs or something). Once their immune systems start figuring out what virus is attacking, take a part of the virus DNA and post the code for the world to see.
Individuals at home would have their DNA sequencers crank out a batch and they'd then inoculate themselves, prepping their immune system for the real virus.
This is all future stuff, of course. It could also be prone to problems, such as someone hacking into the system and posting a DNA sequence that does bad things to people. Shucks, the autism/vaccine scares already show people's fear of such things. Might make for a good story, though.
That's fairly amusing. I was half-tempted to try for something along the lines of Facade, except with a fantasy twist. That's like watching a couple go through an emotional train wreck and yet no actual punches are thrown.
I've done a number of modules for NWN (Shadowlords, Dreamcatcher, Demon) and am currently working on a NWN2 campaign. I think I'm going to end up taking one of our sidequests and tweaking it slightly to fit the rules.
There's a few tricky parts:
That being said, I think we may have a side quest with an interesting premise. I think the competition will be pretty stiff, but it should be a fun exercise.
But the comments don't come fast enough. Gotta . . . get . . . my . . . fix.
It was interesting reading the analysis of the survey. I suspect a lot of gaming companies do this, yet keep things fairly quiet. Trade secrets and all.
Still, there were cases where the survey results were being ignored. For example, ground combat was listed as a fairly low priority, yet it still seems to be part of the core design. In another question, people responded that they really wanted to play Klingons, yet it looks like they're not part of the initial races to be offered.
There's always tension in surveys, deciding what really reflects people's interest and what is simply a badly worded question. Hopefully they'll be careful with this one. It would be a shame if they had another Star Wars Galaxies on their hands, deciding that virtually no one could play Jedi even though that's what everyone wanted to do.
So, it seems like there's no good way to do this otherwise.
Steve Austin, Luke Skywalker, and Darth Vader all sue for patent infringement.
We've been having a rather lengthy discussion over at Evil Avatar about this for a few days now.
Of interest is the game's use of Source, using Steam for distribution, and the use of "cartoon-like" graphics. The latter has a few people worried, though who knows what it means.