I'm assuming you're extending my critique to governmental practices through clever use of satire, rather than claiming that the pracitice of unfunded, undebited obligations is acceptable for both government *and* corporations, yes yes?
Yes. You got it in one. B-)
(Although the straight point remains valid: Legislators are unlikely to impose corrective requirements on corporations, for fear that doing so would lead to broader exposure of their own massive fraud.)
Why not focus on the REAL crime in accounting: the handling of pensions and health care obligations? For decades they were allowed to basically say, "hey, when it comes time to pay you, trust us, we'll have new revenues, and we'll pay you out of that". By not putting these obligations on the balance sheet now, millions of workers' pensions are at risk, and the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation may go bankrupt [...]
Why should the government make the companies do that? They do exactly the same thing with Social Security. Just substitute "Federal Treasury" for "Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation".
The fed "borrows" from the Social Security "trust fund", substituting special treasury bonds with ridiculously low interest rates, and these bonds are NOT included in the national debt calculation. Then the fed spends the money - which will eventually have to be made up from other taxes.
In the idealized theory, the market must have perfect information about products.
Actually, market theories take into account the COST of information and the tradeoffs of paying more for better (but still imperfect) info versus absorbing more risk by deciding on less info, or less reliable info.
Other work relates to decision making on imperfect information and asymetric information situations (where buyers and sellers have different info resources).
"Linking" is a well-understood term-of-art in comptuer science and "talking through socket" doesn't qualify.
Sounds to me like Rabinovitch could answer Maryanovsky's objections by distributing source to the Jin-plus-sockets-adapter and source to a do-nothing socket-plugin to replace his chat application (without performing its chat function). That would make the modified Jin compile and run from the supplied sources - as Jin - without the proprietary code.
(It would also provide a skeleton in case somebody else wanted to build an open-source chat plugin that connects to Jin via Rabinovitch's mods.)
This entire thing comes down to the ability to pick a lock so someone can replace the flash card.
Now that we know the machine itself is virus-susceptable, the next steps are:
1) See if the smartcard reader code has a vulnerability. (Any bets on a buffer overflow bug?)
2) If so, design a virus that can do the initial infection via the smartcard slot.
Succeed at 2) and you can carry a bogus smartcard in, insert it while you "vote", and infect a voting machine. Since the machines are apparently capable of passing the infection during the post-election vote collection process, you can take over the precinct (either all the remaining machines or the one doing the totals) by infecting one voting machine.
Design the virus to self-destruct after doing its dirty work and you don't even leave tracks.
As I understand it, they acquired the elections division (and the horribly flawed design) in a merger.
Apparently upper management has seen no corporate advantage to ordering the ATM team to do a redesign. (If nothing else, it would compromise their claims that the machines are just fine as is.)
If this can't finally nail the coffin lid shut... Then I don't know what can.
I know what can:
An election where such a virus is released into the machines and transfers ALL the votes for the candidates in ALL the affected machines to the Nth "third party" candidate in each partisan race, a pseudo-random one in any non-partisan race, and discards all votes on any propositions.
Let's see 'em certify THAT as the correct election result! B-)
I was facitiously referring to the second release of the first movie following its own first release by less than a week, i.e. to the possibility that, viewing the first movie within a week of its initial release I had somehow seen the second release.
Other postings have clarified the issue: Apparently the "Episode IV" was in the "crawl" of the original release of the original film. But the TITLE did not contain "Episode IV" until the second release (by which time there were other episodes, so they needed disambiguation).
First, he didn't start with Episode IV. He started with a movie called "Star Wars". Empire was the first movie to carry an episode number, and the original Star Wars did not get its "Episode IV" subtitle until its re-release.
Huh?
I'd have sworn I'd seen it on the first release WITH the IV (and wondered about it at the time).
If you'll re-read the posting, you'll see that the example was indeed a specific protein.
Of course the recognized common allergens are unlikely to be cloned, due to the risk of suit you mentioned. (At least until precedent or legislation gives a shield to the companies performing genetic engineering.)
But it's possible to become allergic to just about ANYTHING. The fact that some particluar protien is not recognized as an especially likely allergen does NOT mean that it is NOT and allergen, or that it does NOT produce an allergy - possibly a deadly one - in a significant number of people.
Clone enough protiens and a significant number of people will become allergic to multiple food types, who would have been allergic to only one of them otherwise.
Given the widespread use of certain products in food processing, it's already very difficult to avoid even a single grain. For instance: A corn allergy currently means avoiding cornstarch, fructose, dextrose, maltodextrin, modified food starch, and a host of other fine-print ingredients. That means avoiding virtually all restaurants and fast food chains. And virtuall all name-brand vitamin suplements and most drug formulations. The diet is reduced to a very small subset of available products and a few items on the menu of a few restaurants that have been individually vetted. And it means checking the label EVERY TIME, as manufacturers occasionally reformulate their products. This DESPITE the fact that food and drug manufacturers are aware that corn allergies are common.
Now imagine what life would be like - or how long it would last - for someone allergic to a corn protein or polysaccaride sequence that some GM engineer ports to, say, wheat, or potatoes, and the government lets it into the commercial food supply and drug manufacturing process WITHOUT labeling requirements.
Is there any evidence to suggest that GM crops are bad for humans?
Yes.
A major problem is allergies.
Much of genetic engineering for crops consists of copying a gene or set of genes from one species to another, in order to confer its advantages on the engineered organism. This results in the engineered plant making a set of protiens (and their fallout products) that were previously lacking in that organism.
Now suppose you're violently allergic to, say, some cell membrane protien in peanuts. Eat a trace of a peanut and you end up in the hospital. Eat a handfull and you might suddenly die. But if you avoid peanuts you're fine, right?
Then suppose somebody discovers that this protien confers a resistance to a quickly-degraded herbicide that gets most of the weeds that currently infest corn, wheat, and soybean fields and rice paddies. So they clone it into corn, wheat, soybeans, and rice. This produces new strains that are easier to grow: Plant 'em, spray once with the herbicide to kill the weeds but not the crops, and get high yields with little effort. The new strains are cheaper to grow and quickly displace their competition.
And now you're deathly allergic to peanuts, corn, wheat, soy, and rice.
Or at least to the GM versions of the corn, wheat, soy, and rice.
But you can't tell from the labeling which strains of corn, wheat, soy, or rice are in any given product you buy.
And once they're growing in the fields, they produce polen that fertilizes OTHER corn, wheat, soy, or rice. A few generations later even some "unmodified" strains (such as those grown by the organic farmer in the next field downwind) will contain it. If the advantage is sufficient it becomes pervasive.
That's just one example. Iterate for other sources of useful protiens. Iterate using animals. Iterate for genes that produce powerful hormones or drug precursors, which may affect you when consumed orally. Iterate for airborne allergens. And so on.
Wasnt there a reality show that received more votes for that than the presidental?
Yes.
But it was because of massive autodialer vote fraud.
Want to do the presidential election that way? I've got three phone lines with modems on them all ready to go, and that's just at home. B-)
It's a LOT less work than infiltrating Diebold, reverse-engineering their software, driving vans of illegals from one polling place to another, or filling out reams of motor-voter registration forms and absentee ballot requests.
With the number of phone lines the political parties have I bet we could FAR surpass 100% turnout.
What is it going to take for these chimps to realize that a voting process WITH AN AUDIT TRAIL is the only way to hold an election?
Even an audit trail won't help if, as in this case, the ballot comes with default votes already made which must be unchecked and replaced with the voters' own choices.
The default should be "no vote", not the (political) machine's choices. Pre-checking boxes constitutes MASSIVE vote fraud.
Of course the article only mentioned that in paragraph 40 of 42. Way to bury the REALLY important issue, guys. (Even skipping to the last couple paragraphs to find out what you're hiding would probably miss that.)
When was the last time that every news agency in the world focused on the voting in Germany, France, or UK? The US is under a spotlight and a microscope in everything it does.
Well, pretty much all of Europe follows European voting - and U.S. voting. Sorry you guys don't care about the rest of the world,
Many of us DO care about the rest of the world.
Unfortunately, most of our news media are run by elitist morons with political agendas who think the rest of us are even dumber and more provincial than they are, don't need any actual news, but do need to be dragged by propaganda techniques (notably including strategic omission) into politically desirable ways of thinking and acting.
You'll notice the grandfater posting was talking about the focus of news agencies, and while he said "worldwide" he no doubt is basing his opinion on the pap served here.
They tell US about local "irregularities" whenever their candidates lose. They ignore any issues with votes in other countries: Mentioning problems elsewhere doesn't serve their interests. But omitting it gives the impression that voting irregularities here are a local anomaly, that the US system is more corrupt than those of other countries. This helps reenforce their message.... but I can't quite see how that justifies vote fraud)
Neither can we. That's why so many of us are griping about it.
The dangerous thing about both election corruption and news of it that political stability depends on the perceived honesty of the elections. If a loser thinks they don't represent the will of the people (or at least the subset that's armed and willing to fight over the issue), he may convince himself that it would be possible to reverse the result by force of arms...
However, key to a good diet is enough proteins. Too many young girls start eating only pizza, salads, pasta, etc. and get malnutrition as a result from going "veggie". A veggie-diet without enough proteins and variation is no veggie-diet in my book. Correct veggie recepees have been used for thousands of years in the East, based on the Vedic Science of Ayur-veda (knowledge about life).
Another risk is B12 deficiency - it is NOT found in plants, humans and their intestinal flora don't synthesize it, and permanent nerve damage occurs if it goes on too long. (Folic acid masks the early warning symptoms, too, so if you suplement that your first sign you're in trouble ocurs once damage is permanent.)
It only takes a TINY bit of B12, and it's present in most animal material So as a lacto-ovo type you should be safe. But vegans have a serious risk.
I understand that the Vedic diets are NOT a protection against this. When they were developed in India the grain had enough insect parts and animal droppings to provide the required levels of B12. (Indeed, it still may.) But under US food inspection laws such contaminants are so vigorously suppressed (to prevent disease from bacteria and parasites) that these same diets become dangerously low in B12.
... it also drastically reduces the effectiveness of the immune system at fighting off infection (and the resulting stresses which, in turn, re-raise the cancer risk.)
(Note that the main problem, of course, is death and disability from the infections, not the marginal cancer re-increase.)
"There is no free lunch -- we are all doomed," Dr. Sharpless said. But he quickly modified his comment by noting that a calorically restricted diet is one intervention that is known to increase lifespan and reduce cancer, at least in laboratory mice.
Unfortunately, caloric restriction only raises the life expectancy of rodents in the laboratory, not when exposed to natural conditions. While it reduces risk of cancer, it also drastically reduces the effectiveness of the immune system at fighting off infection (and the resulting stresses which, in turn, re-raise the cancer risk.)
This has been known for decades by those educated in food & nutrition science. Unfortunately, the news has apparently not spread widely in other fields.
So while there is a strategy that reduces both of these TWO problems, it does it at the cost of creating a third. Again no free lunch.
Though there may be useful insights from the lab results, life extention strategies based on caloric restriction in the real world seem unlikely to be successful.
In this present work, it is a gene that, in a way, computes a differential equation--weighing the importance of replacing cells using stem cells from its cache against the risk that the replication of cells will result in a cancerous cell. "To offset the increasing risk of cancer as a person ages, the gene gradually reduces the ability of stem cells to proliferate."
If I understand it correctly, this is a SLIGHT mischaracterization. It's not about risk of creation of cancer cells so much as it is about limiting tumor size - generally in malfunctioning differentiated cells - and limiting stem cells is an undesirable side-effect of how it's done (though it WOULD also limit a stem-cell tumor, if such exist).
The mechanism (or set of mechanisms) is a limit on how many times a non-gamette cell may replicate. Thus when a cell mutates so that it, and its progeny, continue to replicate (ignoring their normal limits), the resulting tumor reaches a maximum size (say-pea sized) and stops growing. (It may even die off, as cells die TRYING to replicate with an "expired meter", or are no longer replaced fast enough to stay ahead of immune-system attacks).
The smaller the tumor when it hits the limit, the better (and the less likely some cell within it will acquire the ADDITIONAL mutations necessary to escape this limit, founding an "immortalized" tumor cell line). But there's the downside that the limit also results in cellular senescence - inability of the body to replace tissue in late age, because the "counter" in the otherwise-fine cells is running out.
So the limit apparently evolves with the typical lifespan of the population, allowing enough replication that cellular senescence doesn't begin to occur in normal inividuals until virtually all of them would be dead (or otherwise no longer an asset to the species) due to other causes. (I vuagely recall reports of research suggesting the typicall setting is something like twice as many cell replications as are necessary to avoid senescence by the age where about 95% of the population would be dead.)
Meanwhile other protective mechanisms (such as the metabolically-expensive production of antioxidant enzymes) co-evolve to trade off keeping the cancer rate down against resource consumption, given the typical lifespan due to risks and the cell-reproductive limit setting. (THESE are the "twiddle settings" that trade off CREATION of a cancer cell against other life-shortening factors.)
The settigs of these protective mechanisms apparently evolve quite rapidly, so they tend to closely track the lifespan-due-to-circumstances of most species that have been in their niche for a while. But the human lifespan has been drastically extended in a period that is evolutionarilly VERY short, thanks to weapons (protection against predation and improved hunting success), agriculture, animal domesitication, lore transmission, medicine, and other technological and cultural improvements in lifestyle. So plenty of people live to the "threescore and ten" or so years when the current setting of the cell replication limit tends to cause fatal system failures.
Research such as this, identifying the details of the mechanisms, should lead to interventions to compensate for the now incorrectly-low setting of this "tuning knob" in the human genome.
What bugs me is that the darned things burn out in a year or so.
This is NUTS for a fluorescent with an inverter - including a high-frequency transformer - built in.
It's perfectly possible to drive a fluorescent with a cold cathode which would have a life measured in decades, using electronics that also won't fry in a similar period.
If they did THAT there wouldn't be such an issue with disposing of the tubes.
(Of course there would be the issue of lowered repeat sales...)
Unfortunately, the mercury content means that, starting a couple months ago in my town, I can't discard the CFL in the trash. It has to go to the toxic waste disposal site.
Any guesses about whether the gasoline for the trip to dispose of them - even if I stored several and dumped 'em all at once - exceeds the savings in energy vs. incandescants?
Or in dollar cost?
(Not to mention the cost of my TIME, in fractions-of-a-life.)
Slashdot Mirror
I understand that the Diebold voting machine (and associated division) was purchased from another company, not designed by the ATM group.
I'm assuming you're extending my critique to governmental practices through clever use of satire, rather than claiming that the pracitice of unfunded, undebited obligations is acceptable for both government *and* corporations, yes yes?
Yes. You got it in one. B-)
(Although the straight point remains valid: Legislators are unlikely to impose corrective requirements on corporations, for fear that doing so would lead to broader exposure of their own massive fraud.)
Why not focus on the REAL crime in accounting: the handling of pensions and health care obligations? For decades they were allowed to basically say, "hey, when it comes time to pay you, trust us, we'll have new revenues, and we'll pay you out of that". By not putting these obligations on the balance sheet now, millions of workers' pensions are at risk, and the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation may go bankrupt [...]
Why should the government make the companies do that? They do exactly the same thing with Social Security. Just substitute "Federal Treasury" for "Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation".
The fed "borrows" from the Social Security "trust fund", substituting special treasury bonds with ridiculously low interest rates, and these bonds are NOT included in the national debt calculation. Then the fed spends the money - which will eventually have to be made up from other taxes.
Hasn't Wine gotten adequate Win98 compatability YET?
In the idealized theory, the market must have perfect information about products.
Actually, market theories take into account the COST of information and the tradeoffs of paying more for better (but still imperfect) info versus absorbing more risk by deciding on less info, or less reliable info.
Other work relates to decision making on imperfect information and asymetric information situations (where buyers and sellers have different info resources).
"Linking" is a well-understood term-of-art in comptuer science and "talking through socket" doesn't qualify.
Sounds to me like Rabinovitch could answer Maryanovsky's objections by distributing source to the Jin-plus-sockets-adapter and source to a do-nothing socket-plugin to replace his chat application (without performing its chat function). That would make the modified Jin compile and run from the supplied sources - as Jin - without the proprietary code.
(It would also provide a skeleton in case somebody else wanted to build an open-source chat plugin that connects to Jin via Rabinovitch's mods.)
This entire thing comes down to the ability to pick a lock so someone can replace the flash card.
Now that we know the machine itself is virus-susceptable, the next steps are:
1) See if the smartcard reader code has a vulnerability. (Any bets on a buffer overflow bug?)
2) If so, design a virus that can do the initial infection via the smartcard slot.
Succeed at 2) and you can carry a bogus smartcard in, insert it while you "vote", and infect a voting machine. Since the machines are apparently capable of passing the infection during the post-election vote collection process, you can take over the precinct (either all the remaining machines or the one doing the totals) by infecting one voting machine.
Design the virus to self-destruct after doing its dirty work and you don't even leave tracks.
As I understand it, they acquired the elections division (and the horribly flawed design) in a merger.
Apparently upper management has seen no corporate advantage to ordering the ATM team to do a redesign. (If nothing else, it would compromise their claims that the machines are just fine as is.)
If this can't finally nail the coffin lid shut ... Then I don't know what can.
I know what can:
An election where such a virus is released into the machines and transfers ALL the votes for the candidates in ALL the affected machines to the Nth "third party" candidate in each partisan race, a pseudo-random one in any non-partisan race, and discards all votes on any propositions.
Let's see 'em certify THAT as the correct election result! B-)
I think you're confused about what I said.
I was facitiously referring to the second release of the first movie following its own first release by less than a week, i.e. to the possibility that, viewing the first movie within a week of its initial release I had somehow seen the second release.
Other postings have clarified the issue: Apparently the "Episode IV" was in the "crawl" of the original release of the original film. But the TITLE did not contain "Episode IV" until the second release (by which time there were other episodes, so they needed disambiguation).
it may be that you just watched the later release and do not remember.
Did the second release follow the first by less than a week? B-)
First, he didn't start with Episode IV. He started with a movie called "Star Wars". Empire was the first movie to carry an episode number, and the original Star Wars did not get its "Episode IV" subtitle until its re-release.
Huh?
I'd have sworn I'd seen it on the first release WITH the IV (and wondered about it at the time).
If you'll re-read the posting, you'll see that the example was indeed a specific protein.
Of course the recognized common allergens are unlikely to be cloned, due to the risk of suit you mentioned. (At least until precedent or legislation gives a shield to the companies performing genetic engineering.)
But it's possible to become allergic to just about ANYTHING. The fact that some particluar protien is not recognized as an especially likely allergen does NOT mean that it is NOT and allergen, or that it does NOT produce an allergy - possibly a deadly one - in a significant number of people.
Clone enough protiens and a significant number of people will become allergic to multiple food types, who would have been allergic to only one of them otherwise.
Given the widespread use of certain products in food processing, it's already very difficult to avoid even a single grain. For instance: A corn allergy currently means avoiding cornstarch, fructose, dextrose, maltodextrin, modified food starch, and a host of other fine-print ingredients. That means avoiding virtually all restaurants and fast food chains. And virtuall all name-brand vitamin suplements and most drug formulations. The diet is reduced to a very small subset of available products and a few items on the menu of a few restaurants that have been individually vetted. And it means checking the label EVERY TIME, as manufacturers occasionally reformulate their products. This DESPITE the fact that food and drug manufacturers are aware that corn allergies are common.
Now imagine what life would be like - or how long it would last - for someone allergic to a corn protein or polysaccaride sequence that some GM engineer ports to, say, wheat, or potatoes, and the government lets it into the commercial food supply and drug manufacturing process WITHOUT labeling requirements.
Of all the people I've known with adverse allergies, not one was breastfed.
Well, now you know at least one.
Is there any evidence to suggest that GM crops are bad for humans?
Yes.
A major problem is allergies.
Much of genetic engineering for crops consists of copying a gene or set of genes from one species to another, in order to confer its advantages on the engineered organism. This results in the engineered plant making a set of protiens (and their fallout products) that were previously lacking in that organism.
Now suppose you're violently allergic to, say, some cell membrane protien in peanuts. Eat a trace of a peanut and you end up in the hospital. Eat a handfull and you might suddenly die. But if you avoid peanuts you're fine, right?
Then suppose somebody discovers that this protien confers a resistance to a quickly-degraded herbicide that gets most of the weeds that currently infest corn, wheat, and soybean fields and rice paddies. So they clone it into corn, wheat, soybeans, and rice. This produces new strains that are easier to grow: Plant 'em, spray once with the herbicide to kill the weeds but not the crops, and get high yields with little effort. The new strains are cheaper to grow and quickly displace their competition.
And now you're deathly allergic to peanuts, corn, wheat, soy, and rice.
Or at least to the GM versions of the corn, wheat, soy, and rice.
But you can't tell from the labeling which strains of corn, wheat, soy, or rice are in any given product you buy.
And once they're growing in the fields, they produce polen that fertilizes OTHER corn, wheat, soy, or rice. A few generations later even some "unmodified" strains (such as those grown by the organic farmer in the next field downwind) will contain it. If the advantage is sufficient it becomes pervasive.
That's just one example. Iterate for other sources of useful protiens. Iterate using animals. Iterate for genes that produce powerful hormones or drug precursors, which may affect you when consumed orally. Iterate for airborne allergens. And so on.
Yes.
But it was because of massive autodialer vote fraud.
Want to do the presidential election that way? I've got three phone lines with modems on them all ready to go, and that's just at home. B-)
It's a LOT less work than infiltrating Diebold, reverse-engineering their software, driving vans of illegals from one polling place to another, or filling out reams of motor-voter registration forms and absentee ballot requests.
With the number of phone lines the political parties have I bet we could FAR surpass 100% turnout.
Even an audit trail won't help if, as in this case, the ballot comes with default votes already made which must be unchecked and replaced with the voters' own choices.
The default should be "no vote", not the (political) machine's choices. Pre-checking boxes constitutes MASSIVE vote fraud.
Of course the article only mentioned that in paragraph 40 of 42. Way to bury the REALLY important issue, guys. (Even skipping to the last couple paragraphs to find out what you're hiding would probably miss that.)
When was the last time that every news agency in the world focused on the voting in Germany, France, or UK? The US is under a spotlight and a microscope in everything it does.
... but I can't quite see how that justifies vote fraud)
Well, pretty much all of Europe follows European voting - and U.S. voting. Sorry you guys don't care about the rest of the world,
Many of us DO care about the rest of the world.
Unfortunately, most of our news media are run by elitist morons with political agendas who think the rest of us are even dumber and more provincial than they are, don't need any actual news, but do need to be dragged by propaganda techniques (notably including strategic omission) into politically desirable ways of thinking and acting.
You'll notice the grandfater posting was talking about the focus of news agencies, and while he said "worldwide" he no doubt is basing his opinion on the pap served here.
They tell US about local "irregularities" whenever their candidates lose. They ignore any issues with votes in other countries: Mentioning problems elsewhere doesn't serve their interests. But omitting it gives the impression that voting irregularities here are a local anomaly, that the US system is more corrupt than those of other countries. This helps reenforce their message.
Neither can we. That's why so many of us are griping about it.
The dangerous thing about both election corruption and news of it that political stability depends on the perceived honesty of the elections. If a loser thinks they don't represent the will of the people (or at least the subset that's armed and willing to fight over the issue), he may convince himself that it would be possible to reverse the result by force of arms...
However, key to a good diet is enough proteins. Too many young girls start eating only pizza, salads, pasta, etc. and get malnutrition as a result from going "veggie". A veggie-diet without enough proteins and variation is no veggie-diet in my book. Correct veggie recepees have been used for thousands of years in the East, based on the Vedic Science of Ayur-veda (knowledge about life).
Another risk is B12 deficiency - it is NOT found in plants, humans and their intestinal flora don't synthesize it, and permanent nerve damage occurs if it goes on too long. (Folic acid masks the early warning symptoms, too, so if you suplement that your first sign you're in trouble ocurs once damage is permanent.)
It only takes a TINY bit of B12, and it's present in most animal material So as a lacto-ovo type you should be safe. But vegans have a serious risk.
I understand that the Vedic diets are NOT a protection against this. When they were developed in India the grain had enough insect parts and animal droppings to provide the required levels of B12. (Indeed, it still may.) But under US food inspection laws such contaminants are so vigorously suppressed (to prevent disease from bacteria and parasites) that these same diets become dangerously low in B12.
... it also drastically reduces the effectiveness of the immune system at fighting off infection (and the resulting stresses which, in turn, re-raise the cancer risk.)
(Note that the main problem, of course, is death and disability from the infections, not the marginal cancer re-increase.)
"There is no free lunch -- we are all doomed," Dr. Sharpless said. But he quickly modified his comment by noting that a calorically restricted diet is one intervention that is known to increase lifespan and reduce cancer, at least in laboratory mice.
Unfortunately, caloric restriction only raises the life expectancy of rodents in the laboratory, not when exposed to natural conditions. While it reduces risk of cancer, it also drastically reduces the effectiveness of the immune system at fighting off infection (and the resulting stresses which, in turn, re-raise the cancer risk.)
This has been known for decades by those educated in food & nutrition science. Unfortunately, the news has apparently not spread widely in other fields.
So while there is a strategy that reduces both of these TWO problems, it does it at the cost of creating a third. Again no free lunch.
Though there may be useful insights from the lab results, life extention strategies based on caloric restriction in the real world seem unlikely to be successful.
In this present work, it is a gene that, in a way, computes a differential equation--weighing the importance of replacing cells using stem cells from its cache against the risk that the replication of cells will result in a cancerous cell. "To offset the increasing risk of cancer as a person ages, the gene gradually reduces the ability of stem cells to proliferate."
If I understand it correctly, this is a SLIGHT mischaracterization. It's not about risk of creation of cancer cells so much as it is about limiting tumor size - generally in malfunctioning differentiated cells - and limiting stem cells is an undesirable side-effect of how it's done (though it WOULD also limit a stem-cell tumor, if such exist).
The mechanism (or set of mechanisms) is a limit on how many times a non-gamette cell may replicate. Thus when a cell mutates so that it, and its progeny, continue to replicate (ignoring their normal limits), the resulting tumor reaches a maximum size (say-pea sized) and stops growing. (It may even die off, as cells die TRYING to replicate with an "expired meter", or are no longer replaced fast enough to stay ahead of immune-system attacks).
The smaller the tumor when it hits the limit, the better (and the less likely some cell within it will acquire the ADDITIONAL mutations necessary to escape this limit, founding an "immortalized" tumor cell line). But there's the downside that the limit also results in cellular senescence - inability of the body to replace tissue in late age, because the "counter" in the otherwise-fine cells is running out.
So the limit apparently evolves with the typical lifespan of the population, allowing enough replication that cellular senescence doesn't begin to occur in normal inividuals until virtually all of them would be dead (or otherwise no longer an asset to the species) due to other causes. (I vuagely recall reports of research suggesting the typicall setting is something like twice as many cell replications as are necessary to avoid senescence by the age where about 95% of the population would be dead.)
Meanwhile other protective mechanisms (such as the metabolically-expensive production of antioxidant enzymes) co-evolve to trade off keeping the cancer rate down against resource consumption, given the typical lifespan due to risks and the cell-reproductive limit setting. (THESE are the "twiddle settings" that trade off CREATION of a cancer cell against other life-shortening factors.)
The settigs of these protective mechanisms apparently evolve quite rapidly, so they tend to closely track the lifespan-due-to-circumstances of most species that have been in their niche for a while. But the human lifespan has been drastically extended in a period that is evolutionarilly VERY short, thanks to weapons (protection against predation and improved hunting success), agriculture, animal domesitication, lore transmission, medicine, and other technological and cultural improvements in lifestyle. So plenty of people live to the "threescore and ten" or so years when the current setting of the cell replication limit tends to cause fatal system failures.
Research such as this, identifying the details of the mechanisms, should lead to interventions to compensate for the now incorrectly-low setting of this "tuning knob" in the human genome.
I just downloaded the whole thing at max speed on my DSL line from the server pointed to by the original link.
I presume it just got swamped for a bit and has now recovered, the load has backed off, or the ISP has boosted capacity due to the load.
What bugs me is that the darned things burn out in a year or so.
This is NUTS for a fluorescent with an inverter - including a high-frequency transformer - built in.
It's perfectly possible to drive a fluorescent with a cold cathode which would have a life measured in decades, using electronics that also won't fry in a similar period.
If they did THAT there wouldn't be such an issue with disposing of the tubes.
(Of course there would be the issue of lowered repeat sales...)
Unfortunately, the mercury content means that, starting a couple months ago in my town, I can't discard the CFL in the trash. It has to go to the toxic waste disposal site.
Any guesses about whether the gasoline for the trip to dispose of them - even if I stored several and dumped 'em all at once - exceeds the savings in energy vs. incandescants?
Or in dollar cost?
(Not to mention the cost of my TIME, in fractions-of-a-life.)