Ok, so this is just a bit of devil's avocate, but what happens if you just *happen* to have a writing style similar to someone else who was printed before... what if you read something, and unknowingly wrote something in a similar vein in your essay?
An accusation of plagiarism is a serious matter in academia. You need multiple lines of word-for-word identity before anybody is likely to raise a flag. There is essentially zero chance that you'll be accused of plagiarism on the basis of an accidental resemblance. A greater risk is that you might have read something with a particularly unusual and striking turn of phrase somewhere and forgotten it, and wrote it down genuinely believing that it was original. That might raise suspicions, but even here it is unlikely that the passage would be long enough for anybody to actually accuse you.
As far as plagiarists "tweaking" their papers, you can't really prevent this, but doing a decent job of tweaking starts to become as much work as writing something original, and indeed, at some point the work becomes merely derivative rather than plagiarized. You may get a C for a paper that is unoriginal, but you won't be flunked or hauled up before an academic review board.
As for fulltext articles, try JSTOR if you want to see how to do it wrong. Page by page in gif format, and some huge pdfs with all pictures and no ability to process text. Useless!! Yes you can print it out but then I'd just as soon get the hardcopy in the first place.
I'd certainly rather have searchable text. But a lot of this stuff is not always easy to find even if you are at a university. Due to limited space, many university libraries have moved older journals to offsite storage, and there are significant delays in accessing these materials. Simply being able to rapidly access full text and view/print it is a big improvement.
If we are able to detect and monitor energy waves that are emitted from our brains merely by thinking about things, how much more difficult is it to believe that there are people who are physically tuned to be able to "pick up" those brain waves?
A lot more. Keep in mind that this method uses highly sensitive modern electronics to amplify tiny electromagnetic signals, and even then it doesn't work unless they are right in contact with the scalp, and distributed all over it so that they can detect which areas of the brain are active.
No study has ever shown that humans can perceive such low level electromagnetic signals. Neurons certainly are not sensitive to such signals. Indeed, if we could perceive them, we'd probably have to come up with some other method of transmitting information--the din from the enormously stronger radio, television, and cell phone signals would be driving us nuts!
Not really. But even if you found some funding (probably from a corp) to do some research in a 'forbidden' direction, try getting your conclusions published in a peer reviewed journal. Won't happen. And of course after that you will be blacklisted so you can change careers because you will never be accepted as a 'real scientist' again, because all 'real scientists' believe in Global Warming about like Christians believe in the Virgin Birth of Jesus.
Critics of global warming would like us to believe that global warming is some sort of scientific orthodoxy that stifles opposing views. They are able to sell this notion because most people don't follow the scientific literature, and are unaware of how the current consensus on the topic has gradually evolved over many years based upon many lines of evidence.
In reality, there is no single theory that dictates that global warming must occur, nor is there some dominant scientific authority who is heavily invested in the theory, like some of the notorious scientific orthodoxies of the past.
Scientists did not set out to prove global warming. Global warming arose out of climate simulations combined with historical data suggesting that there has been a general warming trend over recent decades. Initially, the simulations were pretty rough, with highly variable results from lab to lab, and the climate data was spotty, and a lot of scientists were very skeptical. Note that there is no single climate simulation that everybody uses. Simulators typically don't trust anybody else's model. All make slightly different assumptions. But as the simulations have been refined to take account of possible confounding effects, and as researchers have come up with a variety of clever ways to obtain additional data over past climate trends, the data and the different simulations have gradually converged, and the skeptics have been mostly won over
So at the present time, there is indeed a rather strong scientific consensus among independent researchers that global warming is real, and that CO2 emissions by man are a significant factor. These days, the critics are pretty much all associated with groups that stand to lose financially from the kinds of measures that would need to be taken to reduce global warming.
There is of course, still room for debate as to the correct action, and there are those who accept global warming but are critical of Kyoto. But any sensible debate must start by accepting the fact that there is a reasonable and rational scientific consensus that human CO2 emissions are contributing to global warming.
An actor (as opposed to a 'star') can create subtleties of expression that may be beyond CGI. Think about it - intelligence, experience and talent, directly controlling facial muscles. As opposed to a CGI-jockey with a mouse shifting polygons around.
I expect that simulation of facial expression will progress from hand animation and attempts at facial motion capture (e.g. Polar Express) to facial electromyograms being used to control simulated muscles.
However, as Polar Express and Final Fantasy the Movie show us, the closer a simulated human gets to looking real, the more critical the mind gets. If your brain buys it as real, then any deviation from perfections comes off as pathological, which is why the beautiful humanoids of PE and FF were frequently described as "creepy".
We live here on earth a maximum of about 120 years. That is asymptotically zero time compared to eternity. Even a lifetime of excruciating torture from birth to death at 120 is zero compared to eternity. (Same with the opposite: a full lifetime of pure bliss is zero compared to eternity)
However, once again we run into the problem of the limitations of God. Even if one buys the notion that the way God set up the Universe is somehow in our best interests, the notion that we have an asymptotically short time to "get it right," or somehow fail for all eternity strains credulity. A God who can't come up with a better way than that to manage things is very limited indeed. If we are going to postulate God, it makes more sense to presume that He did, and the "one chance" notion is mistaken, just as the "Hell is a bad place of eternal physical torment" notion has to be mistaken if God is both powerful and beneficent.
In addition to the logical paradoxes inherent in omnipotence, there is the problem that God cannot be both omnipotent and beneficent. If God is omnipotent, then it is within his capability to create a world without suffering (and without sacrificing free will, which is the usual religious excuse for bad stuff). God chooses not to do so, therefore God is not beneficent.
The notion of omnipotence seems to reflect a wish to make God "infinite in all directions." A God with limitations may be less impressive, but it at least opens up the possibility of God being good.
Is that it requires highly sophisticated nanotechnology. Holography actually recreates the original wavefront of the light reflected from an image. To be able to diffract light in the way a hologram does, a holographic videoscreen would have to have pixels smaller than the wavelength of light.
I don't view Hell primarily as punishment. I view it as respect for choices made. If you wish to deny God then He has enough respect and love for you to honor that choice.
That really depends upon your view of Heaven and Hell. If Hell is really a generally unpleasant place, as many Christians believe (e.g. Dante), then God comes off as a vindictive SOB, since if he is in charge, then he defines the parameters of Hell. The only way this view makes sense is if Hell is basically just as nice as Heaven, except that you don't get to hang out with God (which, presumably, you didn't want to do, anyway).
I'm sure that China would be happy to work with the US in developing measures to prevent undesirable elements from exploiting the Internet. They have a lot of experience in that area. I imagine that they could also provide valuable. They could probably also provide us with valuable suggestions as to how to revise the Bill of Rights to further improve our security.
People are inherently condemned to hell already because all people sin. That's the beauty of it: God doesn't send anyone to hell (because we're already heading that way)
This is a surprise. I thought that God was supposed to be in charge. Now you seem to be saying that God has no control over the rules of an inflexible system that automatically sends us to hell for "sins" (which are apparently unavoidable, since "all people sin"). The best he can do to fight the system is to save a few of us.
Poor God. Just another victim of an inflexible Universe that is beyond his control.
I doubt if it is fraud to simply click on a link repeatedly, even if your sole purpose is to cost somebody you don't like money. But it may be fraud to employ somebody else, or a bot for that purpose. And it certainly is extortion to demand money not to do it.
But like spam, this is not a problem that will be cured by legal action. For their service to be commercially viable, Google needs to develop filters that will detect and compensate for "non-customer" clicks.
I guess it's very hard to get continued funding for a study that says "Everything's fine, situation normal" That must be why, no matter what the scientific endeavor, there's always some cataclysmic disaster looming on the horizon.
The astronomers who report, "No, that asteroid is not going to hit us" still get funding. Since there are a lot of countries and businesses that will be incurring big costs from the measures that will be required to control global warming, I'm sure that there is plenty of funding for scientists who want to challenge the prevailing scientific opinion on the matter. And climate forecasting would be important enough to attract funding even if global warming were not a concern.
My old VCR used to handle this somewhat more gracefully. If I had a weekly program, say from 7:00 to 8:00, and I had another program that recorded from 7:00 to 7:30, it would record the first program (if it had a higer priority) and then switch channels to record the last half of the other program.
Yes, this is the most elegant and TiVo-like way to handle it. TiVo already has a priority system. So in the event of unavoidable conflicts, it should switch to the higher-priority show when it comes on, even if it overlaps a lower-priority show. Similarly, it should switch to a lower-priority show as soon as the higher-priority one ends. Alerts regarding anticipated partial overlap could be placed in the "To Do" screen, giving the user a chance to rearrange show priorities or cancel one of them.
This would also largely obviate the need for "soft" padding, which is needed to handle shows that run later than scheduled (which is a even more annoying than shows scheduled to run long). Currently, I'm reluctant to routinely add padding at the end of shows, because it may create a conflict and cause me to fail to record something else.
Blogs aren't journalism. They aren't about reporting the news, they're about commenting on it. I realize that a lot of people these days have real trouble understanding the difference between news and commentary, but there is a fairly significant divide between the two.
However, many blogs do report news, and provide references to primary sources. True, most of the factual material about current events comes from the news wires. But that is also true of most stories on print or broadcast medial This makes it possible for the reader to actually check the validity of the blogger's characterization. The ability of a blog entry to serve as an instant entry point for independent research is what makes the blogs qualitatively different from the traditional media. With the forged memo stories, the "old" media were making vague references to opinions of experts. The blogs provided the documents themselves and links to the detailed arguments and analyses of the supposed experts. As a result, the conclusion was evident while the old media was still equivocating.
Journalists are accountable to the general public through their credibility. Random bloggers saying something means nothing because they have no credibility. Thus, they have essentially zero accountability.
I don't see much difference. "Random bloggers" don't get much traffic. The bloggers who have an impact are precisely those who have established credibility with a sizable fraction of the general public. If they lose that credibility, they lose traffic. The most popular blogs support themselves based on advertising, which they get as a reflection of their traffic.
What is upsetting to traditional journalists is that the old adage, "Freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one" has broken down. With the internet, the cost of publication has become negligible. Bloggers stand or fall not on their ability to meet a newspaper or broadcaster's political or economic agenda, but solely on their ability to attract an audience.
They are the future of unaccountable editorializing.
Since when are newspaper columnists "accountable" to anybody other than their editors? Was Novak been brought to account for outing a CIA operative? And Dan Rather and CBS were actually brought to account primarily by bloggers.
If anything, bloggers are probably more accountable, simply because there are not (yet) the extensive legal precedents that protect "official" reporters against liability.
Obviously, this suggests an application as a lie detector that actually works (as opposed to the existing ones, which pretty much don't). Only problem is that MRI machines are too expensive for almost everybody (although I expect some government agencies will be using them).
Currently, companies that make MRI scanners have a business model that involves selling large, expensive devices to hospitals and clinics. They have no great motivation to make them cheap, because the market is not all that large. On the other hand, a lie detector has to be much less expensive.
So if it is possible to make cheap functional MRI scanners, we'll be seeing them, and that technology will feed back to make medical scanners cheaper as well.
In any case, you have to tank the arguments against embreyonic stem cells *and* support that they actually have the potential to surpass adult stem cells in some sort of properly based assertion to actually win this argument; it's not enough to gain just a little ground on me.
Embryonic and adult stem cells are different. Laboratory evidence supports the view that both are likely to be useful, but for different purposes. Only experimentation will tell which are useful for which indications in practice. Unfortunately, the "approved" (NIH-fundable) lines of stem cells are only suitable for laboratory studies because they are contaminated with nonhuman cells. Most people in the field believe, based on those laboratory studies, that embryonic stem cells have the greatest promise.
Clinical studies are so expensive that they are very hard to establish without NIH funding. As a result, adult stem cells are ahead of embryonic stem cells when it comes to clinical studies. When people point to the greater progress of adult stem cells in clinical studies, they are confusing effect with cause. Adult stem cells are not ahead because there is any real evidence that they are better, but rather because the current administration has created roadblocks to clinical progress in embryonic stem cell research.
The option should just be removed from the menu altogether.
I find grayed out commands to be useful, because they let me know that the command does exist. But I agree that it would be nice to have a mechanism to find out why it is grayed.
I searched for "embreyonic stem cell" and indeed got hundreds of results. . . about "bone marrow stem cells," "umbilical cord stem cells," etc. These are adult stem cells. Just glancing over the first 20 of the 131000. . . well, hang on *shows more results* First 50 then, I see nothing about embreyonic stem cells....
Now can I accuse you of lying and shoveling propaganda?
Searching on PubMed is pretty easy, but you do have to know how to spell "embryonic" correctly...
I'm not lying, I'm relaying information I found in researching the topic.
Really? Then why is it that 10 seconds of research on PubMed (a reliable source for information on peer-reviewed laboratory studies, unlike Wikipedia) yields a long list of laboratory studies in which embryonic stem cells have been found to be useful?
Unfortunately, the "authorized" embryonic stem cell lines are unsuitable for human studies (which are so expensive that they are hard to conduct without NIH funding), so while laboratory studies strongly support their value, there have been limited clinical studies.
There's something wrong with a bunch of blood thirsty, power hungry mongrals who are willing to draw attention to something that has so far been proven in 100% of laboratory tests to be totally useless
Do you really feel that your argument is so weak that it is necessary to lie? If you go to PubMed and type in "embryonic stem cells," you will see a long list of laboratory studies supporting their value.
Actually, a corpse may yet contain human life, in the form of millions of living human cells and even functional organs. This is what makes organ donation possible. We call it a corpse, rather than a person, because it does not have a functioning brain.
Embryos used for stem cells of course lack a brain--indeed, at that stage they are just a ball of undifferentiated cells, lacking even neurons. So while they are certainly human and alive, like the cells in a recently-dead human corpse, they are not people.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, so this is just a bit of devil's avocate, but what happens if you just *happen* to have a writing style similar to someone else who was printed before... what if you read something, and unknowingly wrote something in a similar vein in your essay?
An accusation of plagiarism is a serious matter in academia. You need multiple lines of word-for-word identity before anybody is likely to raise a flag. There is essentially zero chance that you'll be accused of plagiarism on the basis of an accidental resemblance. A greater risk is that you might have read something with a particularly unusual and striking turn of phrase somewhere and forgotten it, and wrote it down genuinely believing that it was original. That might raise suspicions, but even here it is unlikely that the passage would be long enough for anybody to actually accuse you.
As far as plagiarists "tweaking" their papers, you can't really prevent this, but doing a decent job of tweaking starts to become as much work as writing something original, and indeed, at some point the work becomes merely derivative rather than plagiarized. You may get a C for a paper that is unoriginal, but you won't be flunked or hauled up before an academic review board.
As for fulltext articles, try JSTOR if you want to see how to do it wrong. Page by page in gif format, and some huge pdfs with all pictures and no ability to process text. Useless!! Yes you can print it out but then I'd just as soon get the hardcopy in the first place.
I'd certainly rather have searchable text. But a lot of this stuff is not always easy to find even if you are at a university. Due to limited space, many university libraries have moved older journals to offsite storage, and there are significant delays in accessing these materials. Simply being able to rapidly access full text and view/print it is a big improvement.
If we are able to detect and monitor energy waves that are emitted from our brains merely by thinking about things, how much more difficult is it to believe that there are people who are physically tuned to be able to "pick up" those brain waves?
A lot more. Keep in mind that this method uses highly sensitive modern electronics to amplify tiny electromagnetic signals, and even then it doesn't work unless they are right in contact with the scalp, and distributed all over it so that they can detect which areas of the brain are active.
No study has ever shown that humans can perceive such low level electromagnetic signals. Neurons certainly are not sensitive to such signals. Indeed, if we could perceive them, we'd probably have to come up with some other method of transmitting information--the din from the enormously stronger radio, television, and cell phone signals would be driving us nuts!
Not really. But even if you found some funding (probably from a corp) to do some research in a 'forbidden' direction, try getting your conclusions published in a peer reviewed journal. Won't happen. And of course after that you will be blacklisted so you can change careers because you will never be accepted as a 'real scientist' again, because all 'real scientists' believe in Global Warming about like Christians believe in the Virgin Birth of Jesus.
Critics of global warming would like us to believe that global warming is some sort of scientific orthodoxy that stifles opposing views. They are able to sell this notion because most people don't follow the scientific literature, and are unaware of how the current consensus on the topic has gradually evolved over many years based upon many lines of evidence.
In reality, there is no single theory that dictates that global warming must occur, nor is there some dominant scientific authority who is heavily invested in the theory, like some of the notorious scientific orthodoxies of the past.
Scientists did not set out to prove global warming. Global warming arose out of climate simulations combined with historical data suggesting that there has been a general warming trend over recent decades. Initially, the simulations were pretty rough, with highly variable results from lab to lab, and the climate data was spotty, and a lot of scientists were very skeptical. Note that there is no single climate simulation that everybody uses. Simulators typically don't trust anybody else's model. All make slightly different assumptions. But as the simulations have been refined to take account of possible confounding effects, and as researchers have come up with a variety of clever ways to obtain additional data over past climate trends, the data and the different simulations have gradually converged, and the skeptics have been mostly won over
So at the present time, there is indeed a rather strong scientific consensus among independent researchers that global warming is real, and that CO2 emissions by man are a significant factor. These days, the critics are pretty much all associated with groups that stand to lose financially from the kinds of measures that would need to be taken to reduce global warming.
There is of course, still room for debate as to the correct action, and there are those who accept global warming but are critical of Kyoto. But any sensible debate must start by accepting the fact that there is a reasonable and rational scientific consensus that human CO2 emissions are contributing to global warming.
Melting of the polar ice caps is just part of the expected sea rise from global warming. Thermal expansion of water is also a big factor.
An actor (as opposed to a 'star') can create subtleties of expression that may be beyond CGI. Think about it - intelligence, experience and talent, directly controlling facial muscles. As opposed to a CGI-jockey with a mouse shifting polygons around.
I expect that simulation of facial expression will progress from hand animation and attempts at facial motion capture (e.g. Polar Express) to facial electromyograms being used to control simulated muscles.
However, as Polar Express and Final Fantasy the Movie show us, the closer a simulated human gets to looking real, the more critical the mind gets. If your brain buys it as real, then any deviation from perfections comes off as pathological, which is why the beautiful humanoids of PE and FF were frequently described as "creepy".
We live here on earth a maximum of about 120 years. That is asymptotically zero time compared to eternity. Even a lifetime of excruciating torture from birth to death at 120 is zero compared to eternity. (Same with the opposite: a full lifetime of pure bliss is zero compared to eternity)
However, once again we run into the problem of the limitations of God. Even if one buys the notion that the way God set up the Universe is somehow in our best interests, the notion that we have an asymptotically short time to "get it right," or somehow fail for all eternity strains credulity. A God who can't come up with a better way than that to manage things is very limited indeed. If we are going to postulate God, it makes more sense to presume that He did, and the "one chance" notion is mistaken, just as the "Hell is a bad place of eternal physical torment" notion has to be mistaken if God is both powerful and beneficent.
In addition to the logical paradoxes inherent in omnipotence, there is the problem that God cannot be both omnipotent and beneficent. If God is omnipotent, then it is within his capability to create a world without suffering (and without sacrificing free will, which is the usual religious excuse for bad stuff). God chooses not to do so, therefore God is not beneficent.
The notion of omnipotence seems to reflect a wish to make God "infinite in all directions." A God with limitations may be less impressive, but it at least opens up the possibility of God being good.
Is that it requires highly sophisticated nanotechnology. Holography actually recreates the original wavefront of the light reflected from an image. To be able to diffract light in the way a hologram does, a holographic videoscreen would have to have pixels smaller than the wavelength of light.
I don't view Hell primarily as punishment. I view it as respect for choices made. If you wish to deny God then He has enough respect and love for you to honor that choice.
That really depends upon your view of Heaven and Hell. If Hell is really a generally unpleasant place, as many Christians believe (e.g. Dante), then God comes off as a vindictive SOB, since if he is in charge, then he defines the parameters of Hell. The only way this view makes sense is if Hell is basically just as nice as Heaven, except that you don't get to hang out with God (which, presumably, you didn't want to do, anyway).
I'm sure that China would be happy to work with the US in developing measures to prevent undesirable elements from exploiting the Internet. They have a lot of experience in that area. I imagine that they could also provide valuable. They could probably also provide us with valuable suggestions as to how to revise the Bill of Rights to further improve our security.
People are inherently condemned to hell already because all people sin. That's the beauty of it: God doesn't send anyone to hell (because we're already heading that way)
This is a surprise. I thought that God was supposed to be in charge. Now you seem to be saying that God has no control over the rules of an inflexible system that automatically sends us to hell for "sins" (which are apparently unavoidable, since "all people sin"). The best he can do to fight the system is to save a few of us.
Poor God. Just another victim of an inflexible Universe that is beyond his control.
I doubt if it is fraud to simply click on a link repeatedly, even if your sole purpose is to cost somebody you don't like money. But it may be fraud to employ somebody else, or a bot for that purpose. And it certainly is extortion to demand money not to do it.
But like spam, this is not a problem that will be cured by legal action. For their service to be commercially viable, Google needs to develop filters that will detect and compensate for "non-customer" clicks.
I guess it's very hard to get continued funding for a study that says "Everything's fine, situation normal" That must be why, no matter what the scientific endeavor, there's always some cataclysmic disaster looming on the horizon.
The astronomers who report, "No, that asteroid is not going to hit us" still get funding. Since there are a lot of countries and businesses that will be incurring big costs from the measures that will be required to control global warming, I'm sure that there is plenty of funding for scientists who want to challenge the prevailing scientific opinion on the matter. And climate forecasting would be important enough to attract funding even if global warming were not a concern.
My old VCR used to handle this somewhat more gracefully. If I had a weekly program, say from 7:00 to 8:00, and I had another program that recorded from 7:00 to 7:30, it would record the first program (if it had a higer priority) and then switch channels to record the last half of the other program.
Yes, this is the most elegant and TiVo-like way to handle it. TiVo already has a priority system. So in the event of unavoidable conflicts, it should switch to the higher-priority show when it comes on, even if it overlaps a lower-priority show. Similarly, it should switch to a lower-priority show as soon as the higher-priority one ends. Alerts regarding anticipated partial overlap could be placed in the "To Do" screen, giving the user a chance to rearrange show priorities or cancel one of them.
This would also largely obviate the need for "soft" padding, which is needed to handle shows that run later than scheduled (which is a even more annoying than shows scheduled to run long). Currently, I'm reluctant to routinely add padding at the end of shows, because it may create a conflict and cause me to fail to record something else.
Blogs aren't journalism. They aren't about reporting the news, they're about commenting on it. I realize that a lot of people these days have real trouble understanding the difference between news and commentary, but there is a fairly significant divide between the two.
However, many blogs do report news, and provide references to primary sources. True, most of the factual material about current events comes from the news wires. But that is also true of most stories on print or broadcast medial This makes it possible for the reader to actually check the validity of the blogger's characterization. The ability of a blog entry to serve as an instant entry point for independent research is what makes the blogs qualitatively different from the traditional media. With the forged memo stories, the "old" media were making vague references to opinions of experts. The blogs provided the documents themselves and links to the detailed arguments and analyses of the supposed experts. As a result, the conclusion was evident while the old media was still equivocating.
Journalists are accountable to the general public through their credibility. Random bloggers saying something means nothing because they have no credibility. Thus, they have essentially zero accountability.
I don't see much difference. "Random bloggers" don't get much traffic. The bloggers who have an impact are precisely those who have established credibility with a sizable fraction of the general public. If they lose that credibility, they lose traffic. The most popular blogs support themselves based on advertising, which they get as a reflection of their traffic.
What is upsetting to traditional journalists is that the old adage, "Freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one" has broken down. With the internet, the cost of publication has become negligible. Bloggers stand or fall not on their ability to meet a newspaper or broadcaster's political or economic agenda, but solely on their ability to attract an audience.
They are the future of unaccountable editorializing.
Since when are newspaper columnists "accountable" to anybody other than their editors? Was Novak been brought to account for outing a CIA operative? And Dan Rather and CBS were actually brought to account primarily by bloggers.
If anything, bloggers are probably more accountable, simply because there are not (yet) the extensive legal precedents that protect "official" reporters against liability.
Obviously, this suggests an application as a lie detector that actually works (as opposed to the existing ones, which pretty much don't). Only problem is that MRI machines are too expensive for almost everybody (although I expect some government agencies will be using them).
Currently, companies that make MRI scanners have a business model that involves selling large, expensive devices to hospitals and clinics. They have no great motivation to make them cheap, because the market is not all that large. On the other hand, a lie detector has to be much less expensive.
So if it is possible to make cheap functional MRI scanners, we'll be seeing them, and that technology will feed back to make medical scanners cheaper as well.
In any case, you have to tank the arguments against embreyonic stem cells *and* support that they actually have the potential to surpass adult stem cells in some sort of properly based assertion to actually win this argument; it's not enough to gain just a little ground on me.
Embryonic and adult stem cells are different. Laboratory evidence supports the view that both are likely to be useful, but for different purposes. Only experimentation will tell which are useful for which indications in practice. Unfortunately, the "approved" (NIH-fundable) lines of stem cells are only suitable for laboratory studies because they are contaminated with nonhuman cells. Most people in the field believe, based on those laboratory studies, that embryonic stem cells have the greatest promise.
Clinical studies are so expensive that they are very hard to establish without NIH funding. As a result, adult stem cells are ahead of embryonic stem cells when it comes to clinical studies. When people point to the greater progress of adult stem cells in clinical studies, they are confusing effect with cause. Adult stem cells are not ahead because there is any real evidence that they are better, but rather because the current administration has created roadblocks to clinical progress in embryonic stem cell research.
The option should just be removed from the menu altogether.
I find grayed out commands to be useful, because they let me know that the command does exist. But I agree that it would be nice to have a mechanism to find out why it is grayed.
I searched for "embreyonic stem cell" and indeed got hundreds of results. . . about "bone marrow stem cells," "umbilical cord stem cells," etc. These are adult stem cells. Just glancing over the first 20 of the 131000. . . well, hang on *shows more results* First 50 then, I see nothing about embreyonic stem cells....
Now can I accuse you of lying and shoveling propaganda?
Searching on PubMed is pretty easy, but you do have to know how to spell "embryonic" correctly...
I'm not lying, I'm relaying information I found in researching the topic.
Really? Then why is it that 10 seconds of research on PubMed (a reliable source for information on peer-reviewed laboratory studies, unlike Wikipedia) yields a long list of laboratory studies in which embryonic stem cells have been found to be useful?
Unfortunately, the "authorized" embryonic stem cell lines are unsuitable for human studies (which are so expensive that they are hard to conduct without NIH funding), so while laboratory studies strongly support their value, there have been limited clinical studies.
There's something wrong with a bunch of blood thirsty, power hungry mongrals who are willing to draw attention to something that has so far been proven in 100% of laboratory tests to be totally useless
Do you really feel that your argument is so weak that it is necessary to lie? If you go to PubMed and type in "embryonic stem cells," you will see a long list of laboratory studies supporting their value.
Oh, please. A corpse is dead. An embryo is not.
Actually, a corpse may yet contain human life, in the form of millions of living human cells and even functional organs. This is what makes organ donation possible. We call it a corpse, rather than a person, because it does not have a functioning brain.
Embryos used for stem cells of course lack a brain--indeed, at that stage they are just a ball of undifferentiated cells, lacking even neurons. So while they are certainly human and alive, like the cells in a recently-dead human corpse, they are not people.