I would like to see the freedom of self-governance, in some form, for the Chinese people. I can't say that I see it today. (BTW, do you consider Taiwan/Tibet/whatever purely internal matters for the People's Republic?)
Maybe I'm stupid, but is there any reason to believe that the embryonic-derived cells won't start expressing relevant surface proteins when they divide and differentiate to replace damaged tissue?
Dolly was a clone based only on nuclear DNA. The mitochondria came from the original egg donor, and were pristine. What has been discussed is the telomeres, but they are maintained during fetal development. One possible other reason for the issues could be invalid genetic imprinting ("epigenetical factors"), which means that all cells in Dolly in a slight way were still "tagged" with a trace from the original mammary cell.
Regarding other stem cells, bone marrow stem cells are in fact quite active through all of life, as you have this thing called blood. The most rapid cell production is in the small intestine, rather than the skin. I would also say that most of the evident aging of skin is due to the underlying structures, but I guess there are differences as well.
The simplest way to "adapt" a stem cell to your DNA would be attempting a nuclear transfer, but then you would just get the possible issues with Dolly all over again. I think that a rather natural repair should be enough -- a mechanical implant could assist the heart during the period needed. We should also not keep any illusions that fetal development is "fast". Consider the size of your heart versus the size of the heart of a newborn, or the size of the complete child, for that matter. And if we would have to wait for months for a fatal injury to be repaired, some mechanical assistance would obviously be needed anyway during that period. Alternatively, some artificial stimulation, in addition to the bone marrow cleanup, would be needed, but then the natural rates of repair are not that relevant anyway.
If I had a fortune, I would be far more likely to do whatever in my power to use it to prolong my life, if I knew that I couldn't even influence what would happen with it when I was gone......
Fetal cells can't come from yourself, unless you do therapeutic cloning. Extracting bone marrow cells is nowadays a rather common procedure. (That is: not groundbreaking in connection to cancer treatment.) Using your own adult cells would avoid the problem of rejection. Fetal cells are (generally) easier to grow in a medium, as they are overall more flexible. If I continue on this tangent, it's also possible that fetal cells, if not rejected, would be slightly more likely to develop into a tumor, unless properly regulated; especially as many treatments will also contain some kind of growth stimulation at some stage.
So, they are not alike. There are some clear differences. The main issue about adult cells is of course their potency, can one get to a cell that will differentiate to the desired tissue, and longevity -- is the telomeres already quite shortened. Research in both fields is a good thing, but let's not fool ourselves into thinking there are not pros and cons both ways.
They're still not too specific about what those servers are. The basic premise that it's lots of cheap stuff is one thing, but cheap (in this area), might still mean a 2-socket Xeon/Opteron (a rather odd definition of cheap) versus gigantic Itanium/SPARC/POWER machines. The balance between disk and RAM is probably also not that of a typical desktop.
The main problem here is not nuclear processes, but well chemical ones. Molecules of oxygen are readily transformed into water and CO2 (and back). Hey, that is WHY we breath at all. This also means that, to track the atoms, you've to track the complete system of water (huge volumes) and other oxidation reactions. Wikipedia gives the number 1.4 x 10^9 km^3, that is 1.4*10^9*10^15 dm^3 (= liters) = 1.4 * 10^24 liters. And you can fit about 55 moles of water into each of those, which would match over 1 cubic meter of oxygen.
This would naively result in the conclusion that you are far more likely to share nitrogen molecules with someone else, than oxygen. However, nitrogen is continuously dissolved into the sea. Although there is an equilibrium, some fraction can stay there for quite some time. Nitrogen is also transformed into C-13 (there we have the nuclear processes again). Then we have nitrogen fixation done by microbes (and internal combustion engines), which means the material is entering the biosphere, possibly to get literally stuck in a tree for a hundred years.
I imagine some data on the results of air-based nuclear tests would actually give the most relevant data for how the different elements are dispersed (do the heightened levels of radioisotopes of oxygen/nitrogen disappear from the atmosphere according to their physical decay, or faster by taking part in other processes?).
Of course, the interesting part is if this happens within roughly 32 generations or not. At that point, your average descendant will have about 1 single base pair inherited from you! (If there is just a single lineage pointing back at you.) After that, it woulnd't even be theoretically possible to trace the inheritance through what's left in the genome. Contrast that to the "happy" bastards that have given their Y chromosomes roughly intact to countless millions, in only a few hundred years.
Of course, your autosomal DNA may also be heavily representend in the descendants, but that will and must be at the cost of someone else. Naturally, on the other hand, 99.x % of both your genomes would have been identical, so the time before any base pair where you differ from any other germ line human today genome is eradicated might be quite a bit sooner.
Finally, I expect a lot of us/.ers to be in the "20 %" section anyway.
Just FYI, you can drive just fine from the northern-most parts of Finland to southwest Portugal and never cross any traditional border check (involving stopping/customs/passport check, just drive through). The only hassle would be that you have to cross one toll bridge (or take the ferry) and you may want to use the toll parts of the French highway network. This distance would be 4243 kilometers (2637 miles according to Google Earth) if you just go straight along the globe, ignoring that this would take you right into the Atlantic ocean and the details of that the road network is naturally not that straight. As a comparison, the distance Washington DC - San Francisco, measured in the same manner, is "only" 2438 miles.
As another point of reference, although Europe (and the E.U.) as a whole are quite densely populated, Sweden has about 1/20 of the land area of the U.S., but a 1/30 of the population. Even if you would be able to go the most direct route, you could drive for almost 1000 miles (1600 km, equal to New York - Minneapolis) without leaving the borders. Yes, there are actual roads to drive on, as well, although the quality deteriorates if you leave the main ones in sparsely populated areas. And, as I noted, the border is nothing more than a sign along the road.
You can also easily find two sites with the parameters "significant city" and "major airport" with more than a 6 hour drive, in one direction, between them, within for example Germany and France.
SAS (maybe other airlines as well) provides the Connexion by Boeing service, even trademarked as such, on their trans-Atlantic (and other longhaul, AFAIK) flights, even though it's served by Airbus planes. I had a backlog of work to finish and it was a breeze to get 800 kbps in mid-air while passing over Greenland and switching to my third laptop battery. Ok, that last bit mentions part of the problem (as noted by others), but it was still a great service, "even" in economy class.
In other news, Kerrigan announces his retirement from active operations, to focus his attention on the Kerrigan and Mrs. Kerrigan foundation, trying to improve his image through charity.
If it were to come to a recall, it would certainly be news for other manufacturers. Now, it's hard to tell from these anecdotes (but, anecdotes with pictures) how frequent it really is, but I clearly remember Dell's different battery recalls being reported quite widely.
On the general hot/loud issues I agree with you, they are not reported as news for other manufacturers, but they are certainly mentioned in reviews of specific models. They are not blindly accepted.
Forget it, the CNet screenshot does look like a normal dialog box. Then I guess they are just lazy, or highly speculatively there's some signing of the macros involved that doesn't play well with older versions. I doubt that, though, the point of adding signing was rather to stop macros to autorun in new versions, not stop them in the old ones (like wide-open good old O97).
Task panes (i.e. non-modal dialog boxes integrated in the window border) were added as a new UI object in Office XP. Quite a lot of things that could have been made into wizards or plain dialog boxes in older versions are panes in XP/2003. I guess this download makes use of that GUI style as well.
"Smart tags" were also introduced in Office XP, the most popular one being the one where you choose the paste settings after you've seen the results of pasting with default settings, but it wouldn't make even less sense to package this functionality as a tag.
Of course MS loves to see massive use of their formats. Can we really blame them for that?
On the other hand, one point with (some of) the CC licenses is continued editing; although another point is to maintain the distinction against public domain with "full edit/no attribution" rights. That is, a PDF version might not technically hinder you from integrating a CC work into your own document, but if you use MS Office (or even OO.org), a MS Office document might mean an easier way to do it. This means that we can't say that distribution in ONLY a highly presentation-centric format like PDF would be a good thing, despite it being open.
Lots of people use MS Office and won't convert to anything else if this "licensing wizard" download was missing. It might encourage a few to license works in a clear and less restrictive manner. I see nothing wrong in that.
Well, if you don't ever intend to use your rights, it's practically in the public domain. Adding a license makes it obvious, you can't go back later and say "hey, I DO want full rights to this". If, on the other hand, everything was free that wasn't explicitly tagged, I think we would run into even more draconian assertions of all material that should be protected: imagine that you see some rather long excerpt where the copyright note is NOT present, and imagine if that meant a practical carte blanche to copy it?
The change of the image will be a well planned and smooth transition until 2008. Maybe MS will hire Jeri Ryan as his replacement somewhere along the road, and then there won't be any disagreement about the picture.
Your parent is right. The user mode code can control what happens to data, without ever mapping it to its own memory. You are right in that it's not processed, but that's not what the original post said.
Well, C# has unsafe arrays, while VB.NET only exposes them quite indirectly through the marshalling API. Some other language implementations also uses some dose of reflection/late binding to implement certain features. You can sometimes avoid use features, but this will sometimes result in code that is "non-idiomatic" in that language. I like the.NET framework, but it's no panacea for a language-agnostic future.
Compared to the national average, I wouldn't at all be surprised if it is. Ok, that depends on what set the average is computed over, but wouldn't the average be something like cut'n'paste VB/PHP code with no abstraction or usability whatsoever?
Of course this varies for different parts of the Google Earth material, but quite a lot of it is from a very steep angle. You can't tell the true height of the buildings from those pictures (maybe indirectly from shadows, but unless you know the time of day, latitude and time of year, that's a guess based on some object you think you know the size for). This algorithm is similar in scope to what we do when we face a 2D image, deciding what structures indicates depth. It still needs depth cues, arguably more obvious ones than a reasonably skilled human; which in this case is just about any human with functioning eyesight and an age above five years.
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Now I understand why they get no Chinese tourists.
I would like to see the freedom of self-governance, in some form, for the Chinese people. I can't say that I see it today. (BTW, do you consider Taiwan/Tibet/whatever purely internal matters for the People's Republic?)
Maybe I'm stupid, but is there any reason to believe that the embryonic-derived cells won't start expressing relevant surface proteins when they divide and differentiate to replace damaged tissue?
Regarding other stem cells, bone marrow stem cells are in fact quite active through all of life, as you have this thing called blood. The most rapid cell production is in the small intestine, rather than the skin. I would also say that most of the evident aging of skin is due to the underlying structures, but I guess there are differences as well.
The simplest way to "adapt" a stem cell to your DNA would be attempting a nuclear transfer, but then you would just get the possible issues with Dolly all over again. I think that a rather natural repair should be enough -- a mechanical implant could assist the heart during the period needed. We should also not keep any illusions that fetal development is "fast". Consider the size of your heart versus the size of the heart of a newborn, or the size of the complete child, for that matter. And if we would have to wait for months for a fatal injury to be repaired, some mechanical assistance would obviously be needed anyway during that period. Alternatively, some artificial stimulation, in addition to the bone marrow cleanup, would be needed, but then the natural rates of repair are not that relevant anyway.
If I had a fortune, I would be far more likely to do whatever in my power to use it to prolong my life, if I knew that I couldn't even influence what would happen with it when I was gone......
So, they are not alike. There are some clear differences. The main issue about adult cells is of course their potency, can one get to a cell that will differentiate to the desired tissue, and longevity -- is the telomeres already quite shortened. Research in both fields is a good thing, but let's not fool ourselves into thinking there are not pros and cons both ways.
They're still not too specific about what those servers are. The basic premise that it's lots of cheap stuff is one thing, but cheap (in this area), might still mean a 2-socket Xeon/Opteron (a rather odd definition of cheap) versus gigantic Itanium/SPARC/POWER machines. The balance between disk and RAM is probably also not that of a typical desktop.
This would naively result in the conclusion that you are far more likely to share nitrogen molecules with someone else, than oxygen. However, nitrogen is continuously dissolved into the sea. Although there is an equilibrium, some fraction can stay there for quite some time. Nitrogen is also transformed into C-13 (there we have the nuclear processes again). Then we have nitrogen fixation done by microbes (and internal combustion engines), which means the material is entering the biosphere, possibly to get literally stuck in a tree for a hundred years.
I imagine some data on the results of air-based nuclear tests would actually give the most relevant data for how the different elements are dispersed (do the heightened levels of radioisotopes of oxygen/nitrogen disappear from the atmosphere according to their physical decay, or faster by taking part in other processes?).
Of course, your autosomal DNA may also be heavily representend in the descendants, but that will and must be at the cost of someone else. Naturally, on the other hand, 99.x % of both your genomes would have been identical, so the time before any base pair where you differ from any other germ line human today genome is eradicated might be quite a bit sooner.
Finally, I expect a lot of us /.ers to be in the "20 %" section anyway.
As another point of reference, although Europe (and the E.U.) as a whole are quite densely populated, Sweden has about 1/20 of the land area of the U.S., but a 1/30 of the population. Even if you would be able to go the most direct route, you could drive for almost 1000 miles (1600 km, equal to New York - Minneapolis) without leaving the borders. Yes, there are actual roads to drive on, as well, although the quality deteriorates if you leave the main ones in sparsely populated areas. And, as I noted, the border is nothing more than a sign along the road.
You can also easily find two sites with the parameters "significant city" and "major airport" with more than a 6 hour drive, in one direction, between them, within for example Germany and France.
SAS (maybe other airlines as well) provides the Connexion by Boeing service, even trademarked as such, on their trans-Atlantic (and other longhaul, AFAIK) flights, even though it's served by Airbus planes. I had a backlog of work to finish and it was a breeze to get 800 kbps in mid-air while passing over Greenland and switching to my third laptop battery. Ok, that last bit mentions part of the problem (as noted by others), but it was still a great service, "even" in economy class.
The 2200s called, they want their humpbacks back.
Yeah, that's what /. is all about. Or, to be precise, half of it.
Ask your friends (that's not Ask Slashdot).
In other news, Kerrigan announces his retirement from active operations, to focus his attention on the Kerrigan and Mrs. Kerrigan foundation, trying to improve his image through charity.
On the general hot/loud issues I agree with you, they are not reported as news for other manufacturers, but they are certainly mentioned in reviews of specific models. They are not blindly accepted.
Forget it, the CNet screenshot does look like a normal dialog box. Then I guess they are just lazy, or highly speculatively there's some signing of the macros involved that doesn't play well with older versions. I doubt that, though, the point of adding signing was rather to stop macros to autorun in new versions, not stop them in the old ones (like wide-open good old O97).
"Smart tags" were also introduced in Office XP, the most popular one being the one where you choose the paste settings after you've seen the results of pasting with default settings, but it wouldn't make even less sense to package this functionality as a tag.
On the other hand, one point with (some of) the CC licenses is continued editing; although another point is to maintain the distinction against public domain with "full edit/no attribution" rights. That is, a PDF version might not technically hinder you from integrating a CC work into your own document, but if you use MS Office (or even OO.org), a MS Office document might mean an easier way to do it. This means that we can't say that distribution in ONLY a highly presentation-centric format like PDF would be a good thing, despite it being open.
Lots of people use MS Office and won't convert to anything else if this "licensing wizard" download was missing. It might encourage a few to license works in a clear and less restrictive manner. I see nothing wrong in that.
Well, if you don't ever intend to use your rights, it's practically in the public domain. Adding a license makes it obvious, you can't go back later and say "hey, I DO want full rights to this". If, on the other hand, everything was free that wasn't explicitly tagged, I think we would run into even more draconian assertions of all material that should be protected: imagine that you see some rather long excerpt where the copyright note is NOT present, and imagine if that meant a practical carte blanche to copy it?
The change of the image will be a well planned and smooth transition until 2008. Maybe MS will hire Jeri Ryan as his replacement somewhere along the road, and then there won't be any disagreement about the picture.
Your parent is right. The user mode code can control what happens to data, without ever mapping it to its own memory. You are right in that it's not processed, but that's not what the original post said.
Well, C# has unsafe arrays, while VB.NET only exposes them quite indirectly through the marshalling API. Some other language implementations also uses some dose of reflection/late binding to implement certain features. You can sometimes avoid use features, but this will sometimes result in code that is "non-idiomatic" in that language. I like the .NET framework, but it's no panacea for a language-agnostic future.
Compared to the national average, I wouldn't at all be surprised if it is. Ok, that depends on what set the average is computed over, but wouldn't the average be something like cut'n'paste VB/PHP code with no abstraction or usability whatsoever?
Of course this varies for different parts of the Google Earth material, but quite a lot of it is from a very steep angle. You can't tell the true height of the buildings from those pictures (maybe indirectly from shadows, but unless you know the time of day, latitude and time of year, that's a guess based on some object you think you know the size for). This algorithm is similar in scope to what we do when we face a 2D image, deciding what structures indicates depth. It still needs depth cues, arguably more obvious ones than a reasonably skilled human; which in this case is just about any human with functioning eyesight and an age above five years.