No, is the answer to your question. Can we eventually make an omnipotent cell out of an adult cell? Possibly.
The difficulty is this: eggs are more than just their genes. Before an egg is fertilized, it is primed for becoming an embryo, especially in regards to the plan for the development of the embryo. Long story short, eggs are organized in such a way that acts as a blueprint for the development of the embryo and fetus. There is an interesting case about a species of some sort of shelled invertebrate that follow an interesting inheritence pattern. These invertebrates have spiral shells that can turn either left or right; when a right-turning male is mated with a left-turning female, all of the offspring turn left. But when a left-turning male is mated with a right-turning male, all of the offspring turn right! These organisms do not follow Mendelian inheritance patterns; rather, all of the children develop to follow the same phenotype (not genotype) of the mother. This is because the conditions that define the way the embryo develops already exist in the egg prior to fertilization, and it is these previously expressed proteins and mRNAs in a specific arrangement that give an egg the special ability of developing into a new organism.
I am sorry that that was a very hard paragraph to understand; I just condensed about a chapter of a biology textbook, and I hope that the message still comes across.
I can see that. That doesn't mean that most people, either on slashdot or in "real life" don't seem to appreciate that. And it is jokes that like that lead to prejudices and the ignorance we have now...that's what I was reacting to.
That stem cell is pluripotent. In the lingo, that means it can turn into any bodily tissue. That stem cell is NOT omnipotent. An omnipotent stem cell can turn into any bodily tissue as well as the placenta and umbilical cord. A fertilized egg is omnipotent. Only a fertilized egg is omnipotent. Only a fertilized egg can turn into a living, breathing human being.
The fact that the belief that embryonic stem cells (not embryos) can turn into humans persists even on slashdto just proves how sadly misinformed or simply uneducated the public (of the world) as a whole is. That is the biggest problem that science faces. People fear things they do not understand, especially when they have perversely imaginitive institutions like Hollywood to put a bunch of false ideas in their heads; until scientists can explain in terms simple enough for people to understand (and people take the time to try to understand), people will continue to rebel against it, and view it as evil and immoral.
My proposal is to have you listen to just one lecture by the economics professor at your local, yokel, community college. Addiction, in terms of economics, is every company's wet dream. Why do you think there is so much contempt for Apple Fanbois? Apple has what everyone wants: a set of 'educated' people with expendable income who need their products. If some substance were to be addictive, some other company will soon develop an equally good replacement with MORE addiction. Because more addiction means more people buying it, and so more money for the company. You should have learned that in Econ 99 (that would be econ for art majors...)
It's a great feature that SanDisk has a flash drive that can be driven over. However, I can't think of the number of times I have forgotten those little buggers in my pockets when they've gone in the wash and the number of time they've come out and still worked perfectly normally. I have got to say, in a day and age when things break if you look at them wrong, it's great that we have invented the 21st century's response to the swiss army knife.
What do you mean, they can't get a warrant "retroactively?"
From Oxford American Dictionary:
Retroactively: Taking effect from a date in the past.
That means that in three years time, the government can go and retroactively get their warrant. But even so, in order to store all the phone conversations of international calls of just 1/4 of the US, it would take ungodly googobs of storage. You say that it is "likely waaaaay too much data to peek at it all," which is true because there would have to be underground tunnel systems to rival al Qaeda's to store all the tape it's on; hell, there is likely too much data to store it all for a time more than three years. In order for this to be effective, it would have to be more targeted.
But even so, if they had you on tape for three years, they could still happily saunter into court and get their retroactive warrant. D'oh!
Just like whenever some top brass somewhere says "No comment," to a charged question, the forced lack of facebook profiles is just going to lead people to automatically assume that there is some bad stuff going down at Kent State. Can anyone say Ohio National Guard?
If you read the article (or the one at The New York Times), you will notice that in both cases, both authors attribute the cell phone comparison to "the organizations." Neither author was responsible for that.
Of course you would like to have an OS that is late rather than one that is early and feels rushed, or even on time and feels rushed. But the point that I think a lot of people are trying to make is that Vista is an OS that is late, but it's also an OS that feels rushed.
People talk about slashdot dupes but normally they're talking about articles. However, I swear that I saw the parent and grandparent posts when the article about the decision in the Eolas suit came out.
Before asking badly designed rhetorical questions, maybe you should know a little more about your subject. Mac OS X handles all of their graphics through PDF. That's what it sends to printers, and that's what its windowing layer, Quartz, uses. So maybe XPS does that, but so does PDF.
In addition, PDF supplies "options and features" that are "widely applicable to many different levels and applications." I mean, Macrodobe is basing a whole new Flash application type system around PDF. As I said, Mac OS X uses PDF exclusively for displaying any sort of graphical content. So not only is PDF the standard for portable documents it is extremely versatile.
I know that the general stereotype is that OS X is an operating system that Granny can use, but surprisingly, it also has some of the nice "pro" features. Once you now what you're doing, things can be done amazingly quickly, from the ease of scripting with Apple Script and Automator to the ability to almost exclusively use the keyboard. I've found that I can go days without using the mouse in OS X. The customizable keyboard shortcuts available in system preferences mean no needing to navigate to menus, the application (Cmd-Tab) and window (Cmd-`) switcher and the ability to have the tab button focus on every single UI element (buttons, text boxes, drop-down menus) means that the mouse is almost completely superfluous. I've found this useful because using trackpads can get to be very annoying after a while...
With the new Intel Macs, there would be no need for a Mac version of Vista. You would be able to dual-boot Vista on that iMac, and quite probably, eventually be able to open up Vista in a window on an OS X desktop a la a VMWare-type solution.
Yes, chaos/disorder as entropy is a simplification, but in the context of the post of I was replying to, it is a simplification that makes sense. All the linked article states are esoteric regions where the entropy-chaos simplification breaks down. On something as "simple" (thermodynamically speaking) as basic biochemical processes, entropy really does equate fairly well with disorder. The similitude breaks down on barriers between physical states (freezing/melting; concentration of a solution to saturation; etc), but none of those are encountered within a cell, or within the "operational range" of biological reactions.
You and your entropy. Entropy only means that chaos increases if no energy is expended to order the system. Think about a messy room (your mother's basement?). It's going to be messy until someone gets fed up with the smell of rotting pizza crusts, at which point they will expend energy and order the system. The entropy of the room decreases because energy was infused into the system. Entropy always increases, but only on a universal scale because no energy can enter or leave the universe. There is no other system of which that is true.
So now, we can move on to molecular biology. The two abstract things you need for life are the ability to get energy from your environment and a way to order yourself. DNA and proteins do this. Lab experiments have shown that ammonia, water, oxygen and methane, in a closed flask, will generate amino acids if they twirl them around enough and give them some energy (your lightning strike). If these amino acids can make an energy gradient by harvesting electrons from something common on a primordial earth, like Hydrogen Sulfide, then you have energy. And if get an amino acids that can store its code on something like DNA...you have life. Now, that's a whole lot of ifs. And, taken together, a very low probability. But, like someone else mentioned, these small molecular reactions would be going on thousands of time a second with a hundreds of moles of materials over a billion years. That's a ludicrous number of chances for something to get it right. And the thing is, once it's right, there is no need for it to happen again. Once you have the system that maintains order and a source of energy, you are good to go. It's the miracle of life.
I've worked in a research lab. In fact, that lab got funding from Google and also from Microsoft. The project to be worked on was designing and building cheap and easy-to-assemble robot kits that can be used in a classroom setting to teach both computer science and robotics in a fun and hands-on manner. The $400,000 from Google and Microsoft would have funded the lab (which has a staff of eight or nine people) for a year. This $400,000, combined with a few smaller grants, were enough to hire a designer to design the hardware that would run the robot, and hire a mechanical engineer to propose a few designs for possible robots. 1.5 million a year would provide plenty of dough to keep things running smoothly (especially if they're using mostly grad students). 1.5 million might be chump change for Google or Microsoft (and most likely Sun), but it is all that the founders of the lab asked for (because this is how things work when asking for money), based on a reasonable estimate of yearly costs.
Slashdot Mirror
No, is the answer to your question. Can we eventually make an omnipotent cell out of an adult cell? Possibly.
The difficulty is this: eggs are more than just their genes. Before an egg is fertilized, it is primed for becoming an embryo, especially in regards to the plan for the development of the embryo. Long story short, eggs are organized in such a way that acts as a blueprint for the development of the embryo and fetus. There is an interesting case about a species of some sort of shelled invertebrate that follow an interesting inheritence pattern. These invertebrates have spiral shells that can turn either left or right; when a right-turning male is mated with a left-turning female, all of the offspring turn left. But when a left-turning male is mated with a right-turning male, all of the offspring turn right! These organisms do not follow Mendelian inheritance patterns; rather, all of the children develop to follow the same phenotype (not genotype) of the mother. This is because the conditions that define the way the embryo develops already exist in the egg prior to fertilization, and it is these previously expressed proteins and mRNAs in a specific arrangement that give an egg the special ability of developing into a new organism.
I am sorry that that was a very hard paragraph to understand; I just condensed about a chapter of a biology textbook, and I hope that the message still comes across.
I can see that. That doesn't mean that most people, either on slashdot or in "real life" don't seem to appreciate that. And it is jokes that like that lead to prejudices and the ignorance we have now...that's what I was reacting to.
No it can't.
That stem cell is pluripotent. In the lingo, that means it can turn into any bodily tissue. That stem cell is NOT omnipotent. An omnipotent stem cell can turn into any bodily tissue as well as the placenta and umbilical cord. A fertilized egg is omnipotent. Only a fertilized egg is omnipotent. Only a fertilized egg can turn into a living, breathing human being.
The fact that the belief that embryonic stem cells (not embryos) can turn into humans persists even on slashdto just proves how sadly misinformed or simply uneducated the public (of the world) as a whole is. That is the biggest problem that science faces. People fear things they do not understand, especially when they have perversely imaginitive institutions like Hollywood to put a bunch of false ideas in their heads; until scientists can explain in terms simple enough for people to understand (and people take the time to try to understand), people will continue to rebel against it, and view it as evil and immoral.
The article (to my view) didn't mention any of the names of the programs, and I don't speak or read German, so I don't know how to find the names.
But I would swear by a nifty little app (for mac), Little Snitch which does seem to block both outgoing and incoming traffic perfectly.
My proposal is to have you listen to just one lecture by the economics professor at your local, yokel, community college. Addiction, in terms of economics, is every company's wet dream. Why do you think there is so much contempt for Apple Fanbois? Apple has what everyone wants: a set of 'educated' people with expendable income who need their products. If some substance were to be addictive, some other company will soon develop an equally good replacement with MORE addiction. Because more addiction means more people buying it, and so more money for the company. You should have learned that in Econ 99 (that would be econ for art majors...)
It's a great feature that SanDisk has a flash drive that can be driven over. However, I can't think of the number of times I have forgotten those little buggers in my pockets when they've gone in the wash and the number of time they've come out and still worked perfectly normally. I have got to say, in a day and age when things break if you look at them wrong, it's great that we have invented the 21st century's response to the swiss army knife.
What do you mean, they can't get a warrant "retroactively?"
From Oxford American Dictionary:
Retroactively: Taking effect from a date in the past.
That means that in three years time, the government can go and retroactively get their warrant. But even so, in order to store all the phone conversations of international calls of just 1/4 of the US, it would take ungodly googobs of storage. You say that it is "likely waaaaay too much data to peek at it all," which is true because there would have to be underground tunnel systems to rival al Qaeda's to store all the tape it's on; hell, there is likely too much data to store it all for a time more than three years. In order for this to be effective, it would have to be more targeted.
But even so, if they had you on tape for three years, they could still happily saunter into court and get their retroactive warrant. D'oh!
It would be cheaper to put him on the payroll.
Too bad your headtop set wasn't set to receive the from the executives on the same wavelength.*
*Unless said executives include Rob Glaser, Larry Ellison, or Jonathan Schwartz
Now that's what I call a slashback! Nothing like having the same comments from the original article...
Just like whenever some top brass somewhere says "No comment," to a charged question, the forced lack of facebook profiles is just going to lead people to automatically assume that there is some bad stuff going down at Kent State. Can anyone say Ohio National Guard?
If you read the article (or the one at The New York Times), you will notice that in both cases, both authors attribute the cell phone comparison to "the organizations." Neither author was responsible for that.
Of course you would like to have an OS that is late rather than one that is early and feels rushed, or even on time and feels rushed. But the point that I think a lot of people are trying to make is that Vista is an OS that is late, but it's also an OS that feels rushed.
People talk about slashdot dupes but normally they're talking about articles. However, I swear that I saw the parent and grandparent posts when the article about the decision in the Eolas suit came out.
Before asking badly designed rhetorical questions, maybe you should know a little more about your subject. Mac OS X handles all of their graphics through PDF. That's what it sends to printers, and that's what its windowing layer, Quartz, uses. So maybe XPS does that, but so does PDF. In addition, PDF supplies "options and features" that are "widely applicable to many different levels and applications." I mean, Macrodobe is basing a whole new Flash application type system around PDF. As I said, Mac OS X uses PDF exclusively for displaying any sort of graphical content. So not only is PDF the standard for portable documents it is extremely versatile.
I'm sure that the **AA would help Ars Technica with legal proceedings to sue those involved in this "paragraph stealing"
That depending on the movie that follows it, that sound is the best part of the sitting...
I know that the general stereotype is that OS X is an operating system that Granny can use, but surprisingly, it also has some of the nice "pro" features. Once you now what you're doing, things can be done amazingly quickly, from the ease of scripting with Apple Script and Automator to the ability to almost exclusively use the keyboard. I've found that I can go days without using the mouse in OS X. The customizable keyboard shortcuts available in system preferences mean no needing to navigate to menus, the application (Cmd-Tab) and window (Cmd-`) switcher and the ability to have the tab button focus on every single UI element (buttons, text boxes, drop-down menus) means that the mouse is almost completely superfluous. I've found this useful because using trackpads can get to be very annoying after a while...
With the new Intel Macs, there would be no need for a Mac version of Vista. You would be able to dual-boot Vista on that iMac, and quite probably, eventually be able to open up Vista in a window on an OS X desktop a la a VMWare-type solution.
Dude, check out his ID! With one that low, he must be. D'oh!
Because the same site was posted on Ars Technica, where they have real news, yesterday. I mean...of course its slashvertising!!!
Who the hell are you? Steve Jobs?
Yes, chaos/disorder as entropy is a simplification, but in the context of the post of I was replying to, it is a simplification that makes sense. All the linked article states are esoteric regions where the entropy-chaos simplification breaks down. On something as "simple" (thermodynamically speaking) as basic biochemical processes, entropy really does equate fairly well with disorder. The similitude breaks down on barriers between physical states (freezing/melting; concentration of a solution to saturation; etc), but none of those are encountered within a cell, or within the "operational range" of biological reactions.
Psssht, Google doesn't care about the linux/mac children either. Well, maybe they'll throw a penniless mac child a Gmail notifier. But that's it.
You and your entropy. Entropy only means that chaos increases if no energy is expended to order the system. Think about a messy room (your mother's basement?). It's going to be messy until someone gets fed up with the smell of rotting pizza crusts, at which point they will expend energy and order the system. The entropy of the room decreases because energy was infused into the system. Entropy always increases, but only on a universal scale because no energy can enter or leave the universe. There is no other system of which that is true.
So now, we can move on to molecular biology. The two abstract things you need for life are the ability to get energy from your environment and a way to order yourself. DNA and proteins do this. Lab experiments have shown that ammonia, water, oxygen and methane, in a closed flask, will generate amino acids if they twirl them around enough and give them some energy (your lightning strike). If these amino acids can make an energy gradient by harvesting electrons from something common on a primordial earth, like Hydrogen Sulfide, then you have energy. And if get an amino acids that can store its code on something like DNA...you have life. Now, that's a whole lot of ifs. And, taken together, a very low probability. But, like someone else mentioned, these small molecular reactions would be going on thousands of time a second with a hundreds of moles of materials over a billion years. That's a ludicrous number of chances for something to get it right. And the thing is, once it's right, there is no need for it to happen again. Once you have the system that maintains order and a source of energy, you are good to go. It's the miracle of life.
I've worked in a research lab. In fact, that lab got funding from Google and also from Microsoft. The project to be worked on was designing and building cheap and easy-to-assemble robot kits that can be used in a classroom setting to teach both computer science and robotics in a fun and hands-on manner. The $400,000 from Google and Microsoft would have funded the lab (which has a staff of eight or nine people) for a year. This $400,000, combined with a few smaller grants, were enough to hire a designer to design the hardware that would run the robot, and hire a mechanical engineer to propose a few designs for possible robots. 1.5 million a year would provide plenty of dough to keep things running smoothly (especially if they're using mostly grad students). 1.5 million might be chump change for Google or Microsoft (and most likely Sun), but it is all that the founders of the lab asked for (because this is how things work when asking for money), based on a reasonable estimate of yearly costs.