After all the political posturing and debate over government funding for the use of embryonic stem cells for research, the private sector comes along and shows us where the action really is.
Kinda makes you wonder if some academics deliberately pick areas of study with the longest term payoff possible in order to extend the length of their grant funding. After all, once the discovery is made, the researcher has to find a new area of study.
In fact in the TOS Writer's Guide (I still have my copy!), Roddenberry established the "Wagon Train, Gunsmoke, Naked City" rule whereby the plot of any Star Trek episode had to make sense if it was transferred to any of those shows.
There was also a rule against stopping the action to explain how the technology worked. He likened it to a Western where the protagonist discusses revolver design. It's boring, and it doesn't advance the story.
You could argue how that is anti-technology, and I'm not sure you could translate "The Guardian of Forever" into an episode of Gunsmoke, but it does serve the primary need of any entertainment: first, tell an interesting story.
Remember Valerie Plame?
If it was so important to find and punish the leaker (Richard Armitage, who BTW was never charged with any crime) who outed her, then why aren't you defenders of law and freedom crying out for the prosecution of this leaker?
Oh, I forgot, it doesn't count if it makes a Republican look bad.
This is what the market needs -- a device that can integrate different sources of material so the user can decide how and when to experience it.
Back in the olden days of audio/video, everything hooked up to everything else with a phone jack or an RCA plug. Other than knowing whether a source was high level or low level output, you could do what you wanted -- record a radio broadcast on your reel-to-reel, make a cassette of your favorite LP to listen to in the car, dub a new soundtrack onto a video cassette, whatever. Is it any wonder that the music and entertainment business exploded when consumers had more ways of listening to good programming where and when they wanted?
Now we have "rights management" and, seemingly, a new interface every time we turn around -- coax, ega, vga, s-video, hdmi -- and devices are programmed to not work with each other. It's good to see something like the Neuros on the market, so that we can get back to enjoying our content without having to ask permission first.
This is nothing new in the "News" biz. Remember Bush's phony Iraq videoconference with the troops where the "questions" were rehearsed beforehand?
Lest we think only government officials do this, or only Republicans, remember:
. . . NBC's "expose" of exploding gas tanks on pickup trucks using footage supplied by an advocacy group (funded by trial lawyers, btw) where incendiary devices were used to create explosions on cue?
. . . Dan Rather's phony National Guard memos?
Ask yourself how an author gets interviewed on 60 Minutes. Is it because CBS' parent company also owns the publisher? Why do so many "investigative journalism" pieces about corporate malfeasance get broadcast just before jury selection begins in the civil case? Why do so many trade magazine articles read like press releases (because they are)?
There is no objective standard for what "news" is. It's up to us to pay attention to the source and timing of the information we are being fed, and decide its value.
Forget about arguing whether the internet will "crash." Forget the stories about all the "dark fiber" that's out there. When customers have a choice among copper, co-ax, fiber, and power line internet connections the free market will control the price through competition.
Customers and content providers alike will migrate to the choice that works best for their needs. Any ISP who tries to increase revenues through double dipping will be the loser.
Tell the regulators to get out of the way, and watch the best/cheapest/highest bandwidth service result!
Kessler is a former electrical engineer who now heads a hedge fund. Along the way he has written several books on technology and Wall Street. This book starts with Blaise Pascal and ends up in the modern electronic stock market, with stops along the way at the steam engine, cannon building, railroads, the transistor, and gigabit fiber. His writing style is conversational and he does an excellent job of relating innovation to market forces and military tech. Along the way he drops in some fascinating tidbits of information--for instance, did you know that Reuters started out as a service to investors that used carrier pigeons to relay stock prices between Aachen and Brussels? By beating messengers on horseback, traders could use information their competitors didn't have to increase profits.
This book is full of similar information and is an entertaing read to boot.
Leave out a key portion of the code on the distribution disk. Set up a registration server that will only download the code to a legitimate serial number. Then sell the disks for a reasonable price, say $10.00.
Being first to market counts for a lot these days, and by selling a the right price you will (a) move a ton of product before anyone can reverse-engineer your code (b) make it difficult if not impossible for a big company to compete -- they can't recoup their investment + overhead at that price and (c) become the de facto standard which will block other players until something better comes along
In the meantime, you'll make a few million dollars (you wanted to be a billionaire? sorry), after which you can license the code to Adobe, MS, SAS, Oracle, etc., like LZW compression is, sit back and spend some time with the wife and kids.
Imagine if Henry Ford could have patented the concept of a 4-wheeled vehicle powered by an internal combustion engine. How about if Sam Morse owned the rights to the concept of sending intelligible messages over a wire? GM wouldn't exist and we wouldn't have had telephones until the 1930s.
Patents exist for the protection of innovation. Putting two programs on the same machine is not an innovation.
The worst aspect of this decision is not just that five aging lawyers have taken it upon themselves to determine for every scientist and engineer in the country what causes global climate change, and what they should do about it.
No, the worst part is that they have given legal standing to state AGs and "non-profit" groups to stick their hands into the pockets of the federal government and big business and grab our money to use in furthering their own ends (world domination?).
With no proof of injury, and no clear proof that CO2 is responsible for any damage whatsoever, the court has given the green light to all sorts of nuisance lawsuits.
[sigh] . . . Oh well, at least the slip-and-fall lawyers will have something to do, now that the asbestos well is running dry and silicone breast implants are OK again.
The U.S. Constitution is the "Law of the Land" and applies to all U.S. citizens. No law passed by the Congress or the States can supercede the protections of the Constitution. Period. Hence a citizen's right of Habeus Corpus cannot be abrogated except in certain instances, spelled out in the Constitution.
The President does not determine who is an enemy combatant, nor does the FBI, rather a military tribunal does--as has been the case since World War II. Since the military does not have jurisdiction on U.S. soil (ever hear of non posse committatus?), the only way a U.S. citizen can be deemed an enemy combatant, without recourse to U.S. courts, is if they are captured outside the country, or on a battlefield.
According to you, what makes someone a journalist is their willingness to tell a secret to everybody rather than keep it to themselves. Does this mean that gossips are also journalists? In fact your defintion completely nullifies the concept of a secret, since anyone who decides to give out the secret has automatic permission to do so as long as they tell everybody.
I believe, and I'm sure you agree, that it is right and proper for the citizens of a democracy to debate what should and should not be kept secret. But the need for secrets does exist; when our elected representatives decide that some activity needs to be kept secret from potential enemies what gives unelected "journalists" the right to decide it shouldn't be?
Otherwise, why don't we just forget all this election stuff and let the New York Times run the country?
Most people assume that any discussion of stem cells refers to embryonic stem cells. The fact is that adult stem cells can be harvested from several parts of your body, such as your bone marrow and the nasal epithelium. These cells have the advantage of being a perfect genetic match to the recipient.
What's even less well known is that adult stem cells have already been used successfully to treat a number of conditions in humans, including spinal cord injuries! Meanwhile, embryonic stem cells have been used to treat exactly zero humans.
The big pharma and biotech companies already know this. That's why they are spending their research money on adult stem cell research and not the embryonic kind. The researchers complaining about the lack of government funds are all academics who rely on federal grants for their jobs. Embryonic stem cell research, like AIDS research, has such an incredibly far away success horizon that it is great for making a research career out of.
Sorry, pal, but you've only told half the story.
First of all, FISA only applies to the domestic activities of US citizens suspected of spying. It has never been held to apply to communications between citizens and non-citizens.
Secondly, while the FISA judges may be responsive, the FISA application is over one hundred pages long, and takes a normal human more than 72 hours to fill out!
Personally, I wish guys like you would stop simply regurgitating DNC talking points and do a little research on the facts. I hear this thing called the internet is good for that . . .
What Kos doesn't realize is that he is also shilling for big corporations. He just isn't getting paid for it! Microsoft, Google, et al have created a lucrative business model that is based on piggy-backing on the sweat equity of others. MS doesn't have to develop chips, assemble PCs, or worry about market share, yet they reap more profit than almost all the manufacturers combined. Same with Google; a bunch of guys had a nifty idea about using search technology to sell classified ads--by using a delivery system belonging to other companies and paid for by you and me.
If you look at the history of broadcast radio and TV you will realize that small players can definitely compete with the big guys. Cable proved the point by adding 500 more channels. Considering the current capacity of the internet plus all the dark fiber laying around, any service provider would be an idiot to deny access to content that is available for free. If some other companies want to pay for priority access to extra bandwidth, what's wrong with that?
On the other hand, without the pressure of market forces we face what is known as "the tragedy of the commons." Companies selling counterfeit Viagra, underage porn, and phony stock scams flood the internet, turning it into a swamp we all have to wade through to get to the useful stuff. Meanwhile, companies like Google reap huge profits off the infrastructure without contributing anything to its maintenance or development.
Not to start a flame war, but Joe Wilson lied about so many things (such as knowing about the forged Niger documents which didn't exist at the time he made his trip), that his "truthiness" is suspect in every way.
As for his wife, since when is it a bad thing to know when a government employee uses nepotism to send an unqualified relative on a sensitive mission?
Here's the thing: yes, the climate is changing but no, the cause is not necessarily human influence. Way back in the 1970s (remember them?) the flavor of the day was the impending ice age! TIME magazine(http://www.time.com/time/archive/preview/ 0,10987,910467,00.html) even ran a story about it. It seems that ". ..the earth has undergone at least eight periods of extreme cold and seven of torrid heat in the past 400,000 years."(emphasis mine) Now I know that there are a lot of paleoconservatives in the Republican party, but I'm pretty sure they weren't around 400,000 years ago!
The facts are:
climate change is far more influenced by water vapor than by CO2, and we can't do anything to change that
and
the geological record tells us that extreme climate changes are a natural occurrence
So we can spend trillions of dollars limiting CO2 emissions, which will probably have little or no effect on the climate, or we can put that money to better use by improving construction techniques and hardening our utility systems against violent weather. Change happens people, deal with it!
The model for the solution already exists: the postal service!
Seriously, you can approach the problem from two directions. Either set up a system whereby everybody pays a per e-mail charge, or create a charge-back model where mailers who aren't on your whitelist have to pay you to get their e-mail through your filter.
If there were a charge of , say, 1/10th of one cent per e-mail most users wouldn't even notice the charge. Most legitimate business would have no problem paying the cost. However, maniacal spammers and Nigerian hoaxers would find it a very expensive proposition.
The revenues from such charges could be used to fund maintenance and improvements to the network, or to pay for more security.
That thing was a hoot!! However I soon got tired of counting from 0 to 7 (and from 7 to zero, the famous "missile countdown"). Likewise, the addition and subtraction got boring, also.
After that, I didn't do much computing until high school and college. In 1982 I built a Sinclair ZX from a kit; still have that up in the attic somewhere. It was very tempermental, used to overheat all the time and if you pressed on the membrane keyboard too hard the heatsink would touch the metallized interior of the plastic housing and short out the whole thing.
Slashdot Mirror
After all the political posturing and debate over government funding for the use of embryonic stem cells for research, the private sector comes along and shows us where the action really is.
Kinda makes you wonder if some academics deliberately pick areas of study with the longest term payoff possible in order to extend the length of their grant funding. After all, once the discovery is made, the researcher has to find a new area of study.
In fact in the TOS Writer's Guide (I still have my copy!), Roddenberry established the "Wagon Train, Gunsmoke, Naked City" rule whereby the plot of any Star Trek episode had to make sense if it was transferred to any of those shows.
There was also a rule against stopping the action to explain how the technology worked. He likened it to a Western where the protagonist discusses revolver design. It's boring, and it doesn't advance the story.
You could argue how that is anti-technology, and I'm not sure you could translate "The Guardian of Forever" into an episode of Gunsmoke, but it does serve the primary need of any entertainment: first, tell an interesting story.
Remember Valerie Plame?
If it was so important to find and punish the leaker (Richard Armitage, who BTW was never charged with any crime) who outed her, then why aren't you defenders of law and freedom crying out for the prosecution of this leaker?
Oh, I forgot, it doesn't count if it makes a Republican look bad.
This is what the market needs -- a device that can integrate different sources of material so the user can decide how and when to experience it.
Back in the olden days of audio/video, everything hooked up to everything else with a phone jack or an RCA plug. Other than knowing whether a source was high level or low level output, you could do what you wanted -- record a radio broadcast on your reel-to-reel, make a cassette of your favorite LP to listen to in the car, dub a new soundtrack onto a video cassette, whatever. Is it any wonder that the music and entertainment business exploded when consumers had more ways of listening to good programming where and when they wanted?
Now we have "rights management" and, seemingly, a new interface every time we turn around -- coax, ega, vga, s-video, hdmi -- and devices are programmed to not work with each other. It's good to see something like the Neuros on the market, so that we can get back to enjoying our content without having to ask permission first.
. . . and only half of what you see.
This is nothing new in the "News" biz. Remember Bush's phony Iraq videoconference with the troops where the "questions" were rehearsed beforehand?
Lest we think only government officials do this, or only Republicans, remember:
. . . NBC's "expose" of exploding gas tanks on pickup trucks using footage supplied by an advocacy group (funded by trial lawyers, btw) where incendiary devices were used to create explosions on cue?
. . . Dan Rather's phony National Guard memos?
Ask yourself how an author gets interviewed on 60 Minutes. Is it because CBS' parent company also owns the publisher? Why do so many "investigative journalism" pieces about corporate malfeasance get broadcast just before jury selection begins in the civil case? Why do so many trade magazine articles read like press releases (because they are)?
There is no objective standard for what "news" is. It's up to us to pay attention to the source and timing of the information we are being fed, and decide its value.
Forget about arguing whether the internet will "crash." Forget the stories about all the "dark fiber" that's out there. When customers have a choice among copper, co-ax, fiber, and power line internet connections the free market will control the price through competition.
Customers and content providers alike will migrate to the choice that works best for their needs. Any ISP who tries to increase revenues through double dipping will be the loser.
Tell the regulators to get out of the way, and watch the best/cheapest/highest bandwidth service result!
For a good, readable, non-boring history of technology, read Andy Kessler's "How We Got Here." It's available as a free PDF download at http://akessler.blogs.com/andy_kessler/2005/04/hwg h.html.
Kessler is a former electrical engineer who now heads a hedge fund. Along the way he has written several books on technology and Wall Street. This book starts with Blaise Pascal and ends up in the modern electronic stock market, with stops along the way at the steam engine, cannon building, railroads, the transistor, and gigabit fiber. His writing style is conversational and he does an excellent job of relating innovation to market forces and military tech. Along the way he drops in some fascinating tidbits of information--for instance, did you know that Reuters started out as a service to investors that used carrier pigeons to relay stock prices between Aachen and Brussels? By beating messengers on horseback, traders could use information their competitors didn't have to increase profits.
This book is full of similar information and is an entertaing read to boot.
Leave out a key portion of the code on the distribution disk. Set up a registration server that will only download the code to a legitimate serial number. Then sell the disks for a reasonable price, say $10.00.
Being first to market counts for a lot these days, and by selling a the right price you will
(a) move a ton of product before anyone can reverse-engineer your code
(b) make it difficult if not impossible for a big company to compete -- they can't recoup their investment + overhead at that price
and (c) become the de facto standard which will block other players until something better comes along
In the meantime, you'll make a few million dollars (you wanted to be a billionaire? sorry), after which you can license the code to Adobe, MS, SAS, Oracle, etc., like LZW compression is, sit back and spend some time with the wife and kids.
Imagine if Henry Ford could have patented the concept of a 4-wheeled vehicle powered by an internal combustion engine. How about if Sam Morse owned the rights to the concept of sending intelligible messages over a wire? GM wouldn't exist and we wouldn't have had telephones until the 1930s.
Patents exist for the protection of innovation. Putting two programs on the same machine is not an innovation.
The worst aspect of this decision is not just that five aging lawyers have taken it upon themselves to determine for every scientist and engineer in the country what causes global climate change, and what they should do about it.
No, the worst part is that they have given legal standing to state AGs and "non-profit" groups to stick their hands into the pockets of the federal government and big business and grab our money to use in furthering their own ends (world domination?).
With no proof of injury, and no clear proof that CO2 is responsible for any damage whatsoever, the court has given the green light to all sorts of nuisance lawsuits.
[sigh] . . . Oh well, at least the slip-and-fall lawyers will have something to do, now that the asbestos well is running dry and silicone breast implants are OK again.
The U.S. Constitution is the "Law of the Land" and applies to all U.S. citizens. No law passed by the Congress or the States can supercede the protections of the Constitution. Period. Hence a citizen's right of Habeus Corpus cannot be abrogated except in certain instances, spelled out in the Constitution.
The President does not determine who is an enemy combatant, nor does the FBI, rather a military tribunal does--as has been the case since World War II. Since the military does not have jurisdiction on U.S. soil (ever hear of non posse committatus?), the only way a U.S. citizen can be deemed an enemy combatant, without recourse to U.S. courts, is if they are captured outside the country, or on a battlefield.
According to you, what makes someone a journalist is their willingness to tell a secret to everybody rather than keep it to themselves. Does this mean that gossips are also journalists? In fact your defintion completely nullifies the concept of a secret, since anyone who decides to give out the secret has automatic permission to do so as long as they tell everybody.
I believe, and I'm sure you agree, that it is right and proper for the citizens of a democracy to debate what should and should not be kept secret. But the need for secrets does exist; when our elected representatives decide that some activity needs to be kept secret from potential enemies what gives unelected "journalists" the right to decide it shouldn't be?
Otherwise, why don't we just forget all this election stuff and let the New York Times run the country?
Most people assume that any discussion of stem cells refers to embryonic stem cells. The fact is that adult stem cells can be harvested from several parts of your body, such as your bone marrow and the nasal epithelium. These cells have the advantage of being a perfect genetic match to the recipient.
What's even less well known is that adult stem cells have already been used successfully to treat a number of conditions in humans, including spinal cord injuries! Meanwhile, embryonic stem cells have been used to treat exactly zero humans.
The big pharma and biotech companies already know this. That's why they are spending their research money on adult stem cell research and not the embryonic kind. The researchers complaining about the lack of government funds are all academics who rely on federal grants for their jobs. Embryonic stem cell research, like AIDS research, has such an incredibly far away success horizon that it is great for making a research career out of.
Sorry, pal, but you've only told half the story.
First of all, FISA only applies to the domestic activities of US citizens suspected of spying. It has never been held to apply to communications between citizens and non-citizens.
Secondly, while the FISA judges may be responsive, the FISA application is over one hundred pages long, and takes a normal human more than 72 hours to fill out!
Personally, I wish guys like you would stop simply regurgitating DNC talking points and do a little research on the facts. I hear this thing called the internet is good for that . . .
What Kos doesn't realize is that he is also shilling for big corporations. He just isn't getting paid for it! Microsoft, Google, et al have created a lucrative business model that is based on piggy-backing on the sweat equity of others. MS doesn't have to develop chips, assemble PCs, or worry about market share, yet they reap more profit than almost all the manufacturers combined. Same with Google; a bunch of guys had a nifty idea about using search technology to sell classified ads--by using a delivery system belonging to other companies and paid for by you and me.
If you look at the history of broadcast radio and TV you will realize that small players can definitely compete with the big guys. Cable proved the point by adding 500 more channels. Considering the current capacity of the internet plus all the dark fiber laying around, any service provider would be an idiot to deny access to content that is available for free. If some other companies want to pay for priority access to extra bandwidth, what's wrong with that?
On the other hand, without the pressure of market forces we face what is known as "the tragedy of the commons." Companies selling counterfeit Viagra, underage porn, and phony stock scams flood the internet, turning it into a swamp we all have to wade through to get to the useful stuff. Meanwhile, companies like Google reap huge profits off the infrastructure without contributing anything to its maintenance or development.
Not to start a flame war, but Joe Wilson lied about so many things (such as knowing about the forged Niger documents which didn't exist at the time he made his trip), that his "truthiness" is suspect in every way.
As for his wife, since when is it a bad thing to know when a government employee uses nepotism to send an unqualified relative on a sensitive mission?
Resistance is futile.
Way back in the 1970s (remember them?) the flavor of the day was the impending ice age! TIME magazine(http://www.time.com/time/archive/preview
Now I know that there are a lot of paleoconservatives in the Republican party, but I'm pretty sure they weren't around 400,000 years ago! The facts are:
and
So we can spend trillions of dollars limiting CO2 emissions, which will probably have little or no effect on the climate, or we can put that money to better use by improving construction techniques and hardening our utility systems against violent weather.
Change happens people, deal with it!
"Everything that can be invented has been invented."
- Charles H. Duell, U.S. Commissioner of Patents, 1897
"There's no such thing as the next big thing."
- Nicholas Donofrio, Executive VP, IBM, 2006
The model for the solution already exists: the postal service! Seriously, you can approach the problem from two directions. Either set up a system whereby everybody pays a per e-mail charge, or create a charge-back model where mailers who aren't on your whitelist have to pay you to get their e-mail through your filter. If there were a charge of , say, 1/10th of one cent per e-mail most users wouldn't even notice the charge. Most legitimate business would have no problem paying the cost. However, maniacal spammers and Nigerian hoaxers would find it a very expensive proposition. The revenues from such charges could be used to fund maintenance and improvements to the network, or to pay for more security.
That thing was a hoot!! However I soon got tired of counting from 0 to 7 (and from 7 to zero, the famous "missile countdown"). Likewise, the addition and subtraction got boring, also. After that, I didn't do much computing until high school and college. In 1982 I built a Sinclair ZX from a kit; still have that up in the attic somewhere. It was very tempermental, used to overheat all the time and if you pressed on the membrane keyboard too hard the heatsink would touch the metallized interior of the plastic housing and short out the whole thing.