Do remember that genes often do the same thing in different species.
Genes yes, proteins, not necessarily. Genes encode proteins, so an identical gene in a human as found in a mouse will encode the same protein. What a protein does in a mouse and what it does in a person or a fish may be quite different. Not so much in its specific action so much as in the cascade of events that lead to its use or more importantly, the cascade of events that follow. This is precisely why humans frequently don't respond the same to treatments that work for mice or fish or even primates.
340,282,366,920,938,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,00 0 new web addresses created by internet chiefs . . . so we won't run out of space soon, then...
I for one welcome our new internet chiefs. I'll just be a good injun and step into line...
BTW, can someone please let me know who the internet chiefs are? I just want to know who to complain to when I want to bitch about the internet. Thanks.
It's far too soon to draw any conclusions about this. Yes, removing it appears to have a positive effect on mice. Mice, as some people have to be reminded, are not people. Others have mentioned this protein may have a positive effect. It may. It may have a crucial effect in people. We've cured just about every type of known cancer in mice in about a few dozen different ways and yet the cures for these cancers in people continue to elude us.
Now that said, it doesn't mean that more research isn't in order. At some point, they'll want to create a drug that binds to or otherwise inhibits this protein and then probably test it on primates. Who knows, it may turn out to be a wonder cure for asthma and obesity and other things. But it's FAR too soon to draw that conclusion. There's a lot of amazing research going on out there, but this is simply one of many pieces of research that come up witht these kinds of positive results every week. Most don't pan out and until they have a drug for people, it's hardly worth mentioning on Slashdot. If Slashdot mentioned every one of these, that'd be all it did.
How long before one of these things mistakes a passenger jet for a rocket? Who's going to man the thing? I mean, Aegis Combat System is more or less the same thing and it shot down a passenger jet and there's relatively few Aegis systems. Imagine having these things at every major airport. I dunno, I don't think I'd be very comfortable flying with these things up and running.
Look, this crap keeps coming up about Wikipedia, but it's not Wikipedia. It's just the internet. It's like all those stupid e-mails people pass around about how those mops with the cleaner built in are poisonous and will kill your pets, or the other stupid urban legends that go around. Some people know the internet well enough not to trust every single thing they read on it to necessarily be fact and others just haven't figured it out yet.
I use Wikipedia all the time and find it to be exceptionally accurate, but I use it for stuff I know it will tend to be accurate about. Stuff that isn't controversial. Stuff that's generally science-based. If I want to know about something that's more controversial, I might read Wikipedia, but I know the internet well enough to take what I read with a grain of salt. It's just like those stupid urban legend e-mails. Some people understand this and others simply haven't figured it out yet.
Why Slashdot has to run this and similar stories about Wikipedia over and over is beyond me. I suspect most people on Slashdot are in the crowd that have figured this out. If this is news for nerds, this is old news for nerds. But really, this is news for non-nerds.
What's the solution for Wikipedia? There isn't one. It's publicly editable, the way that it was designed to be and should be. It works exceptionally well 99% of the time. So what? They should change the way it works because of the 1% (or probably far lower than that) of articles that are controversial enough that people are putting crap into them? That's just ridiculous.
It's not the e-mail client metaphor that's a problem, as others have pointed out. If there's a single problem with e-mail, I think we can all agree that it's SPAM. I mean, hey, that's great that people are trying out some new ideas for clients, but I think the current client metaphor works for 99% of the people out there. I find that Outlook combined with Google Desktop works great for my ability to organize my e-mails. I don't need anything beyond that.
What I do need is FAR better SPAM control. I use SpamBayes, and it works fairly well, but it would be really nice if SPAM were handled at the server level (and I suppose, to some degree, it probably is by my ISP, but not nearly enough to take the entire load off of me).
I look forward to the day Slashdot posts the article titled: "Solution to SPAM problem found." I'm not holding my breath, though.
I feel sorry for anyone within a thousand miles of their borders after such a thing.
You're probably right. See, one terrorist uses a small nuclear device, and an entire country gets wiped out in return. Doesn't take that many small nuclear devices before a significant population is affected.
I am sick and tired of people bringing out that hiorse instead of looking at the issues.
What was the word you meant to use? hiorse is not a word in the English language that I'm aware of.
It's "cat" and not "kat" because it comes from the Latin, "cattus", and if they bothered to make kids learn foreign languages (and I mean learn as in how say, Scandanavians, or Western Europeans learn other languages) in this country, these kinds of things might make more sense. They would see that cat is similar to "chat" in French, or "gato" in Spanish, or "gatto" in Italian and hopefully, using some basic deduction, determine that cat is Latin derived.
Unfortunately, etymology is not something they teach much these days. It's a good thing to know, particularly combined with knowledge of foreign languages, as it makes the actual meanings, as well as subtle connotations of the words, clearer.
English is, for the most part, not a particularly hard language. There are other languages that are far more difficult. Japanese, Chinese, and Arabic are obvious examples, but there are many other languages that are far more difficult, if not in spelling, simply in the complexity of the grammar.
It's ridiculous to consider changing the way we spell to make it easier simply because a part of the population is too lazy to bother to learn it. Because by doing so, you suddenly make everything more difficult for the much vaster percentage of people who already speak it that weren't too lazy to learn it.
It's unlikely our population will continue to rise as it has in the past. I strongly suspect that either war or disease will greatly thin our numbers at some point. By disease, I don't just mean a naturally occurring one, but more likely, a man-made or man-released one. As far as war, look at what's beginning to happen with nuclear weapons. North Korea has them, Iran will soon have them (if it doesn't already). It won't be too long before terrorists get their hands on one (perhaps decades down the road, but I suspect it's inevitable).
Mass starvation is also a likely possibility. Combine our current unchecked population growth with global warming, and mass starvation is certainly inevitable if war or disease don't come first. By mass starvation, I'm thinkng somewhere in the vicinity of 80%+ of the population in some poorer countries.
Call me pessimistic, but I actually see this as an optimistic (albeit, not for the people during the bad times) outcome. We will survive and some lessons will be learned. It is unlikely that any single disaster, no matter how bad, will wipe out every single person on the planet. Some will survive and we will continue on, even if it has to set us back a century or more.
We've created an unsustainable way of life on this planet and eventually it's going to catch up with us. We are clever and adaptable, but there comes a point where that won't be enough and when it does happen, it won't be on a small scale. It will be on a grand scale.
This is all okay, I think. I mean, it's not happy-happy, joy-joy okay, but it's simply how nature works. Look at animals that overpopulate their local ecosystems. They die in large numbers, but they continue on. It's even happened in geographically isolated human cultures in the past. I suspect we'll learn the lesson of moderate, sustainable population growth after this has happened on a global scale. Tough lesson to learn, no doubt, but we're stubborn animals.
What is it with people in this country? Is it too damn difficult to use your brain anymore?
My cousin was diagnosed with dyslexia in his senior year of high school. He got his B.S. degree in English. ANYONE can learn to spell and read. As others have pointed out, the problem, like so many other problems in our society, is that parents don't want to be involved in raising and educating their kids. It's like as soon as their kids can walk and talk, they feel like they've done their share and the rest is the society's responsibility.
This attitude really needs to change around. People need to start reading to their kids more and help teach their kids to read early on. My mother got her degree in English and my father got his in Journalism, so the standards of "functional literacy" in our house, growing up, was a bit higher than average. To some degree, I probably don't really understand how people can grow up not learning to read. Most of my friends growing up didn't seem to have problems learning English either. So, unless children today simply have less brainpower for some reason, there's no reason they can't learn English as well. They just need their parents to get a bit more involved in teaching them English.
I lived in Mexico for 3 years. Spanish is SIMPLE in terms of spelling, but you'd be surprised how poorly people write, in general. My Mexican girlfriend had a degree journalism and I still had to correct her spelling from time to time. I suspect the difference is, her parents didn't teach her to read as a child because they couldn't read, a problem many Mexicans of that generation face. So, parents, take your kids to the bookstore, buy them some books, and spend the evening reading with them. It shouldn't be a chore. It's your child. You should enjoy spending the time with them.
I've contributed a lot of computing time to Seti@home, but I'm not doing it anymore. I did some for climate prediction, but now I'm pretty much just doing protein folding. Protein folding, to me, seems to be the best use of time.
I'm more or less convinced SETI@Home will come up dry and have been so convinced since it began. That doesn't mean it's not worthy of computer cycles. It doesn't hurt to rule out possibilities. After doing some basic statistical analysis, though, it simply doesn't make sense for there to be other intelligent life in this galaxy. In others, sure, but in this one, unless they're absolutely uninterested in leaving their own planet (and this makes no sense since you kind of need to, to ensure survival of the species at some point), statistics say the first intelligent, space faring species will colonize the entire galaxy before any other species will have a chance to. So the odds say they're either everywhere in our galaxy or they're not there at all. I suspect the latter.
So at some point, I simply decided that a more practical use of my computer time would be better, so I went to protein folding. It's something we really, really need to figure out. It will be a huge contribution to medicine. So, that's where I'm putting my cycles.
Well see, that's the thing. I read the Windows XP Home Edition EULA and I didn't find a thing in there about agreeing to an audit or being in compliance. Can you provide me with an example of a license that does show this?
Okay, I'm curious, and I'm sure this has come up before, but I'd appreciate it if someone could explain how the BSA has the right to spot-audit a company. Yes, they can take you to court and sue you based on the words of a disgruntled employee, but what if you're in compliance and you simply don't want the BSA coming into your office. Suppose the disgruntled employee is lying. I simply can't see how the words of a disgruntled employee could even be enough to make a court compel a company to comply.
Police need a warrant to search a business. How is the BSA endowed with more rights than the police? Many companies have sensitive documents and information and generally restrict access, as they have a right to. And yet the BSA can push right through? None of this makes much sense to me.
I look at my parent's generation, and yes, in general, they were probably a bit more mature at my age than I and the family members and friends of my generation. On the other hand, our parents got married and had kids on average, a decade or more earlier than people of my generation. As people in my generation have begun getting married and, more importantly, having children, they seem to mature quite quickly to handle it (though this is far from being an absolute. Obviously some don't).
But the definition of maturity is really hard to objectify properly. I am 37, unmarried, and have no children. In some ways, I'll admit, I'm less mature than some of my married with kids family and friends my age. I'm freer. I've been able to travel more, change jobs more, live outside of the country, etc. Not that I'm unstable. I've worked almost without pause since I was 15. I have good jobs that entail responsibilities, but I'm pretty free to leave a job when I've had enough. Does that make me less mature? Maybe by some standards, but it also means I'm not as tied down. Maturity, in some ways, results from losing freedom. You have kids and you can't do some of the things you did before. You're not always as free to quit jobs and relocate, at least not without negatively impacting your family.
So we get to have our childhood a little longer than our parents. We're also going to live a good bit longer, on average, than our parents. So it stands to reason, to some degree, that we'll take advantage of that by stretching out some of the stages of aging. I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with that. Personally, I've enjoyed the freedom not being tied down has brought me. Not that I don't want to have kids, but honestly, I'm not entirely sure I personally want to make the sacrifice, despite the obvious rewards. So go ahead and call me immature. At least I'm happy.
Newtonian gravity came about because Newton had an idea and then used math to express it. Relativity came about because Einstein had an idea and then used math to express it. Quantum physics came about in a similar fashion. An idea (or ideas) and then math to express it (them).
The problem with string theory is that some equations came along that fit the data in an intriguing way and so physicists pursued and continue to pursue the math. The problem is, it's not based on some sort of idea that someone had. The idea is the thing that's missing. Math is great at expressing ideas, but it's not particularly good at creating them.
It could be that at some point, someone will come up with an underlying conceptual idea that the math can then be used to express, but until that happens, I don't think string theory is really going to become a practical theory.
We called up T-mobile twice and claim the possibility of phone cloning.
Not that I think Slashdot should become the point where people ask for advice on consumer complaints, but as long as you're asking, why don't you claim the far more likely possibility which is that T-Mobile simply screwed up on the billing. This kind of stuff happens a lot more than cloning. Or even better, don't claim the possibility of anything. Let them figure it out. Simply contest the calls. Talk to a supervisor. Get peoples names. If they're hanging up on you, there's a serious problem going on and you might need to write letters. But this is hardly News for Nerds. And it's only "Stuff that Matters" to you.
Robotics, AI, molecular manufacturing (nanotech), and performance per $, is accelerating...
This is all well and good, and I'm not saying the market won't advance. What I'm saying is, there are NO products of substantial value on the market now and there's close to ZERO consumer demand for robotic products. I suspect it's highly unlikely that that will happen in the next 5-10 years. We are capable of building robots to do all kinds of things and have been for a while. The prices will have to drop a lot, which I certainly believe is possible, but we also need products that will meet some sort of need and you haven't shown any potential needs being filled, simply a technical problem being solved. I don't doubt we're capable of solving technical problems, I simply don't see a need that can drive it to a multi-billion dollar industry.
He cited estimates predicting that consumer robotics alone will grow into a multibillion-dollar industry in five to 10 years.
The guy who cited these statistics probably agreed that 640K was more memory than anyone would ever need.
First of all, there's simply nothing to base this on. How many households currently have consumer robotics? Percentage-wise, it may as well be 0%, because it's pretty damn close to that. So how can you possibly predict that consumers are going to buy billions of dollars worth of something that doesn't even exist in anything other than a manufacturing, hobbiest, or neat but useless gadget category?
Before you can make a prediction like this, we really ought to see one or two robots that look like they might do something consumers would want. And don't even tell me about the robotic lawn mowers. Show me one that doesn't involve border wires (most people don't want to be bothered) and doesn't have to be monitored so it doesn't run over the dog/cat/baby. Robotic vaccuum cleaners, maybe, but show me one that has enough power to really vaccuum, isn't bound by a cable, and can navigate a staircase.
Sorry, but I simply don't believe we're 5 to 10 years away from robotics being a "multibillion dollar industry". 15, maybe 20, but not 5-10. I just don't see it happening. Robotics simply hasn't progressed all that far in the past 10 years compared to a lot of other consumer electronics (DVRs, computers, iPods, etc)
There are other hurdles of course that need to be figured out. The moon's gravity is one sixth that on Earth. New research, however, may lead to a solution to this problem as well.
Good, I'm glad they have a solution to the moon's gravity problem. Now if they can just fix that no atmosphere problem too, they'll be in great shape.
please tell me of the superior product in the open source realm that does what Lotus Notes does.
Just about any e-mail package that actually DELIVERS the e-mail. Not in a few hours, a few days, or a few weeks, but actually when you send it. Some of my co-workers are still stuck with it and every once in a while, I receive an e-mail someone sent weeks ago. Notes just kinda "forgot" about the e-mail and suddenly, digging around or something, it comes across it and says, "Oh yeah! I forgot about this one. Maybe I ought to send this out, huh?"
I don't know, if I were the person responsible for Lotus Notes, I might want to omit that from my resume. If you haven't had Lotus Notes inflicted upon you, count yourself lucky.
That's the point. It's not up to Genentech. Within reason, doctors can choose the drug they give their patients. If retinal specialists determine or clinical trials show that Avantis is better than Lucentis, then the retinal specialists are going to use it. I suspect the price difference between the two will actually be far less than than the numbers you're clearly pulling out of your ass. (Avantis is about $300 per shot.) Not as much research had to go into the development of Lucentis because they already had a basic design for the molecule. It is not an "antibody", however. An antibody is a protein created by white blood cells that attach to and neutralize antigens.
The FDA approves drugs for a use, not Genentech. Doctors can use drugs for other conditions if they think that it will be effective for those uses. This is called "off label" usage, which is what Avantis is in the treatment of anything other than colon cancer.
As for the cost of drugs, new drugs tend to be very expensive, but this isn't entirely the fault of the drug companies. It's incredibly expensive to create a new drug. Generally a bunch of drugs are created to target a specific action. All those drugs are then tested in animals to see which ones actually do what they're supposed to and which ones don't. Then of the ones that do what they're supposed to, they have to test to see which ones are most effective and which ones are safest. After a number of rounds of tests in animals, the drugs then have to go into human trials to test for safety. They they have to go into human trials for efficacy. Every step requires tons of documentation that the FDA reviews. If the FDA doesn't approve the drug, then the drug company has to pretty much start over from scratch, with all that research and development lost. This is common and it's simply part of the drug development process.
Smaller drug companies can be financially ruined by betting everything on a single drug or group of drugs that in the end don't get approved. So why do drug companies charge so much? Well, beyond the fact that they're obligated to make a profit for their stockholders, they also need money to use for further research and development into new drugs.
A few years back, Genentech was just about betting the farm on Endostatin and Agiostatin which turned out to have less than glorious results. It damn near put them out of business. The fact that they've had a few winners has helped to strengthen them, but companies are always at risk of having bad luck with their new drugs and it could knock them back a few years in earnings.
I'm not trying ot say drug companies can't do better, can't make some drugs available for less money, and can't be a little more humanitarian in their approach, but how does this make drug companies different from any other company? With few exceptions, most businesses are out there trying to make as much money as they can.
On the other hand, what we really could use is a government that helps pay for these medications for the people that need them. Unviersal health care would be a damn good start. Then this kind of shit wouldn't have to be a problem for individuals. The government would be able to negotiate prices on behalf of all the people. Instead, we're left with a government that's more concerned about helping big businesses make a buck than helping Joe Average pay his bills.
"But Genentech does not want to license the drug for this use as it is. No sir, they will only sell a 'repackaged' version for 100X the original price. A real 'eye opener'."
Actually, that's not really it at all, but thanks for playing. Avastin has been used by retinal specialists to treat wet macular degeneration (and presumed ocular hisoplasmosis syndrome, but that affects far fewer people so there aren't any real studies done with it as yet.) When retinal specialists got the idea to use an angiogenesis inhibitor to treat MD, the real problem was the size of the Avastin molecule. They were concerned that it was too large to penetrate the retinal membrane and thus wouldn't be effective against MD. Genentech immediately went back to the drawing board and developed Lucentis which is a smaller molecule that can more easily penetrate the retinal membrane.
In the meantime, retinal specialists have been using Avastin with some success, but it's believed that Lucentis will be more successful because of the smaller molecule size. Genentech doesn't license the drug for a purpose, the FDA approves it for a purpose. The fact is that there have been no large scale trials with Avastin. The largest I know of is this one by Avery et.al. which had only 79 participants. But now that Lucentis is out, there are official trials being done with it and assuming it passes (which it appears all but certain that it will), it will probably be significantly better at treating MD than Avastin.
I know that our pharmacological community is more concerned with making a buck and keeping us sick then actually curing diseases.
That's a pretty ridiculous thing to say. Yes, pharmaceutical companies want to make a buck, but scientists are human beings and many of them are doing their best to create the best drugs they can to help people. To think that they're intentionally withholding drugs or not trying to cure diseases to keep making money is simply ridiculous and paranoid.
There are tons of people working to cure cancers, Parkinson's, AIDS, Alzheimer's, and other diseases. If you think otherwise, you don't know anything about medical research. The fact that these things aren't yet cured is not from a lack of trying. There's still a great deal about the human body we don't know. There's tons about stem cells we don't understand. The human body is so amazingly comlpex, it's incredible that we can do the things we can do already.
Remember, drug companies and researchers came up with a number of vaccines for diseases that no longer plague us. Bacterial infections are fatal about 1/1000th as often as they used to be, thanks to the work of drug companies.
Don't get me wrong, they're not charity organizations and I'm not trying to make them out to be that. They're trying to make money for their stockholders, and that's their job. The people who work for them are trying to cure diseases, though. That's their job.
Slashdot Mirror
Do remember that genes often do the same thing in different species.
Genes yes, proteins, not necessarily. Genes encode proteins, so an identical gene in a human as found in a mouse will encode the same protein. What a protein does in a mouse and what it does in a person or a fish may be quite different. Not so much in its specific action so much as in the cascade of events that lead to its use or more importantly, the cascade of events that follow. This is precisely why humans frequently don't respond the same to treatments that work for mice or fish or even primates.
340,282,366,920,938,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,00 0 new web addresses created by internet chiefs . . . so we won't run out of space soon, then...
I for one welcome our new internet chiefs. I'll just be a good injun and step into line...
BTW, can someone please let me know who the internet chiefs are? I just want to know who to complain to when I want to bitch about the internet. Thanks.
It's far too soon to draw any conclusions about this. Yes, removing it appears to have a positive effect on mice. Mice, as some people have to be reminded, are not people. Others have mentioned this protein may have a positive effect. It may. It may have a crucial effect in people. We've cured just about every type of known cancer in mice in about a few dozen different ways and yet the cures for these cancers in people continue to elude us.
Now that said, it doesn't mean that more research isn't in order. At some point, they'll want to create a drug that binds to or otherwise inhibits this protein and then probably test it on primates. Who knows, it may turn out to be a wonder cure for asthma and obesity and other things. But it's FAR too soon to draw that conclusion. There's a lot of amazing research going on out there, but this is simply one of many pieces of research that come up witht these kinds of positive results every week. Most don't pan out and until they have a drug for people, it's hardly worth mentioning on Slashdot. If Slashdot mentioned every one of these, that'd be all it did.
How long before one of these things mistakes a passenger jet for a rocket? Who's going to man the thing? I mean, Aegis Combat System is more or less the same thing and it shot down a passenger jet and there's relatively few Aegis systems. Imagine having these things at every major airport. I dunno, I don't think I'd be very comfortable flying with these things up and running.
Look, this crap keeps coming up about Wikipedia, but it's not Wikipedia. It's just the internet. It's like all those stupid e-mails people pass around about how those mops with the cleaner built in are poisonous and will kill your pets, or the other stupid urban legends that go around. Some people know the internet well enough not to trust every single thing they read on it to necessarily be fact and others just haven't figured it out yet.
I use Wikipedia all the time and find it to be exceptionally accurate, but I use it for stuff I know it will tend to be accurate about. Stuff that isn't controversial. Stuff that's generally science-based. If I want to know about something that's more controversial, I might read Wikipedia, but I know the internet well enough to take what I read with a grain of salt. It's just like those stupid urban legend e-mails. Some people understand this and others simply haven't figured it out yet.
Why Slashdot has to run this and similar stories about Wikipedia over and over is beyond me. I suspect most people on Slashdot are in the crowd that have figured this out. If this is news for nerds, this is old news for nerds. But really, this is news for non-nerds.
What's the solution for Wikipedia? There isn't one. It's publicly editable, the way that it was designed to be and should be. It works exceptionally well 99% of the time. So what? They should change the way it works because of the 1% (or probably far lower than that) of articles that are controversial enough that people are putting crap into them? That's just ridiculous.
It's not the e-mail client metaphor that's a problem, as others have pointed out. If there's a single problem with e-mail, I think we can all agree that it's SPAM. I mean, hey, that's great that people are trying out some new ideas for clients, but I think the current client metaphor works for 99% of the people out there. I find that Outlook combined with Google Desktop works great for my ability to organize my e-mails. I don't need anything beyond that.
What I do need is FAR better SPAM control. I use SpamBayes, and it works fairly well, but it would be really nice if SPAM were handled at the server level (and I suppose, to some degree, it probably is by my ISP, but not nearly enough to take the entire load off of me).
I look forward to the day Slashdot posts the article titled: "Solution to SPAM problem found." I'm not holding my breath, though.
I feel sorry for anyone within a thousand miles of their borders after such a thing.
You're probably right. See, one terrorist uses a small nuclear device, and an entire country gets wiped out in return. Doesn't take that many small nuclear devices before a significant population is affected.
I am sick and tired of people bringing out that hiorse instead of looking at the issues.
What was the word you meant to use? hiorse is not a word in the English language that I'm aware of.
It's "cat" and not "kat" because it comes from the Latin, "cattus", and if they bothered to make kids learn foreign languages (and I mean learn as in how say, Scandanavians, or Western Europeans learn other languages) in this country, these kinds of things might make more sense. They would see that cat is similar to "chat" in French, or "gato" in Spanish, or "gatto" in Italian and hopefully, using some basic deduction, determine that cat is Latin derived.
Unfortunately, etymology is not something they teach much these days. It's a good thing to know, particularly combined with knowledge of foreign languages, as it makes the actual meanings, as well as subtle connotations of the words, clearer.
English is, for the most part, not a particularly hard language. There are other languages that are far more difficult. Japanese, Chinese, and Arabic are obvious examples, but there are many other languages that are far more difficult, if not in spelling, simply in the complexity of the grammar.
It's ridiculous to consider changing the way we spell to make it easier simply because a part of the population is too lazy to bother to learn it. Because by doing so, you suddenly make everything more difficult for the much vaster percentage of people who already speak it that weren't too lazy to learn it.
It's unlikely our population will continue to rise as it has in the past. I strongly suspect that either war or disease will greatly thin our numbers at some point. By disease, I don't just mean a naturally occurring one, but more likely, a man-made or man-released one. As far as war, look at what's beginning to happen with nuclear weapons. North Korea has them, Iran will soon have them (if it doesn't already). It won't be too long before terrorists get their hands on one (perhaps decades down the road, but I suspect it's inevitable).
Mass starvation is also a likely possibility. Combine our current unchecked population growth with global warming, and mass starvation is certainly inevitable if war or disease don't come first. By mass starvation, I'm thinkng somewhere in the vicinity of 80%+ of the population in some poorer countries.
Call me pessimistic, but I actually see this as an optimistic (albeit, not for the people during the bad times) outcome. We will survive and some lessons will be learned. It is unlikely that any single disaster, no matter how bad, will wipe out every single person on the planet. Some will survive and we will continue on, even if it has to set us back a century or more.
We've created an unsustainable way of life on this planet and eventually it's going to catch up with us. We are clever and adaptable, but there comes a point where that won't be enough and when it does happen, it won't be on a small scale. It will be on a grand scale.
This is all okay, I think. I mean, it's not happy-happy, joy-joy okay, but it's simply how nature works. Look at animals that overpopulate their local ecosystems. They die in large numbers, but they continue on. It's even happened in geographically isolated human cultures in the past. I suspect we'll learn the lesson of moderate, sustainable population growth after this has happened on a global scale. Tough lesson to learn, no doubt, but we're stubborn animals.
What is it with people in this country? Is it too damn difficult to use your brain anymore?
My cousin was diagnosed with dyslexia in his senior year of high school. He got his B.S. degree in English. ANYONE can learn to spell and read. As others have pointed out, the problem, like so many other problems in our society, is that parents don't want to be involved in raising and educating their kids. It's like as soon as their kids can walk and talk, they feel like they've done their share and the rest is the society's responsibility.
This attitude really needs to change around. People need to start reading to their kids more and help teach their kids to read early on. My mother got her degree in English and my father got his in Journalism, so the standards of "functional literacy" in our house, growing up, was a bit higher than average. To some degree, I probably don't really understand how people can grow up not learning to read. Most of my friends growing up didn't seem to have problems learning English either. So, unless children today simply have less brainpower for some reason, there's no reason they can't learn English as well. They just need their parents to get a bit more involved in teaching them English.
I lived in Mexico for 3 years. Spanish is SIMPLE in terms of spelling, but you'd be surprised how poorly people write, in general. My Mexican girlfriend had a degree journalism and I still had to correct her spelling from time to time. I suspect the difference is, her parents didn't teach her to read as a child because they couldn't read, a problem many Mexicans of that generation face. So, parents, take your kids to the bookstore, buy them some books, and spend the evening reading with them. It shouldn't be a chore. It's your child. You should enjoy spending the time with them.
Keep watching this number: 58
When it reaches 0, you're in for a big surprise. Just keep watching....
I've contributed a lot of computing time to Seti@home, but I'm not doing it anymore. I did some for climate prediction, but now I'm pretty much just doing protein folding. Protein folding, to me, seems to be the best use of time.
I'm more or less convinced SETI@Home will come up dry and have been so convinced since it began. That doesn't mean it's not worthy of computer cycles. It doesn't hurt to rule out possibilities. After doing some basic statistical analysis, though, it simply doesn't make sense for there to be other intelligent life in this galaxy. In others, sure, but in this one, unless they're absolutely uninterested in leaving their own planet (and this makes no sense since you kind of need to, to ensure survival of the species at some point), statistics say the first intelligent, space faring species will colonize the entire galaxy before any other species will have a chance to. So the odds say they're either everywhere in our galaxy or they're not there at all. I suspect the latter.
So at some point, I simply decided that a more practical use of my computer time would be better, so I went to protein folding. It's something we really, really need to figure out. It will be a huge contribution to medicine. So, that's where I'm putting my cycles.
Read the software license
Well see, that's the thing. I read the Windows XP Home Edition EULA and I didn't find a thing in there about agreeing to an audit or being in compliance. Can you provide me with an example of a license that does show this?
Okay, I'm curious, and I'm sure this has come up before, but I'd appreciate it if someone could explain how the BSA has the right to spot-audit a company. Yes, they can take you to court and sue you based on the words of a disgruntled employee, but what if you're in compliance and you simply don't want the BSA coming into your office. Suppose the disgruntled employee is lying. I simply can't see how the words of a disgruntled employee could even be enough to make a court compel a company to comply.
Police need a warrant to search a business. How is the BSA endowed with more rights than the police? Many companies have sensitive documents and information and generally restrict access, as they have a right to. And yet the BSA can push right through? None of this makes much sense to me.
I look at my parent's generation, and yes, in general, they were probably a bit more mature at my age than I and the family members and friends of my generation. On the other hand, our parents got married and had kids on average, a decade or more earlier than people of my generation. As people in my generation have begun getting married and, more importantly, having children, they seem to mature quite quickly to handle it (though this is far from being an absolute. Obviously some don't).
But the definition of maturity is really hard to objectify properly. I am 37, unmarried, and have no children. In some ways, I'll admit, I'm less mature than some of my married with kids family and friends my age. I'm freer. I've been able to travel more, change jobs more, live outside of the country, etc. Not that I'm unstable. I've worked almost without pause since I was 15. I have good jobs that entail responsibilities, but I'm pretty free to leave a job when I've had enough. Does that make me less mature? Maybe by some standards, but it also means I'm not as tied down. Maturity, in some ways, results from losing freedom. You have kids and you can't do some of the things you did before. You're not always as free to quit jobs and relocate, at least not without negatively impacting your family.
So we get to have our childhood a little longer than our parents. We're also going to live a good bit longer, on average, than our parents. So it stands to reason, to some degree, that we'll take advantage of that by stretching out some of the stages of aging. I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with that. Personally, I've enjoyed the freedom not being tied down has brought me. Not that I don't want to have kids, but honestly, I'm not entirely sure I personally want to make the sacrifice, despite the obvious rewards. So go ahead and call me immature. At least I'm happy.
Newtonian gravity came about because Newton had an idea and then used math to express it. Relativity came about because Einstein had an idea and then used math to express it. Quantum physics came about in a similar fashion. An idea (or ideas) and then math to express it (them).
The problem with string theory is that some equations came along that fit the data in an intriguing way and so physicists pursued and continue to pursue the math. The problem is, it's not based on some sort of idea that someone had. The idea is the thing that's missing. Math is great at expressing ideas, but it's not particularly good at creating them.
It could be that at some point, someone will come up with an underlying conceptual idea that the math can then be used to express, but until that happens, I don't think string theory is really going to become a practical theory.
We called up T-mobile twice and claim the possibility of phone cloning.
Not that I think Slashdot should become the point where people ask for advice on consumer complaints, but as long as you're asking, why don't you claim the far more likely possibility which is that T-Mobile simply screwed up on the billing. This kind of stuff happens a lot more than cloning. Or even better, don't claim the possibility of anything. Let them figure it out. Simply contest the calls. Talk to a supervisor. Get peoples names. If they're hanging up on you, there's a serious problem going on and you might need to write letters. But this is hardly News for Nerds. And it's only "Stuff that Matters" to you.
Robotics, AI, molecular manufacturing (nanotech), and performance per $, is accelerating...
This is all well and good, and I'm not saying the market won't advance. What I'm saying is, there are NO products of substantial value on the market now and there's close to ZERO consumer demand for robotic products. I suspect it's highly unlikely that that will happen in the next 5-10 years. We are capable of building robots to do all kinds of things and have been for a while. The prices will have to drop a lot, which I certainly believe is possible, but we also need products that will meet some sort of need and you haven't shown any potential needs being filled, simply a technical problem being solved. I don't doubt we're capable of solving technical problems, I simply don't see a need that can drive it to a multi-billion dollar industry.
He cited estimates predicting that consumer robotics alone will grow into a multibillion-dollar industry in five to 10 years.
The guy who cited these statistics probably agreed that 640K was more memory than anyone would ever need.
First of all, there's simply nothing to base this on. How many households currently have consumer robotics? Percentage-wise, it may as well be 0%, because it's pretty damn close to that. So how can you possibly predict that consumers are going to buy billions of dollars worth of something that doesn't even exist in anything other than a manufacturing, hobbiest, or neat but useless gadget category?
Before you can make a prediction like this, we really ought to see one or two robots that look like they might do something consumers would want. And don't even tell me about the robotic lawn mowers. Show me one that doesn't involve border wires (most people don't want to be bothered) and doesn't have to be monitored so it doesn't run over the dog/cat/baby. Robotic vaccuum cleaners, maybe, but show me one that has enough power to really vaccuum, isn't bound by a cable, and can navigate a staircase.
Sorry, but I simply don't believe we're 5 to 10 years away from robotics being a "multibillion dollar industry". 15, maybe 20, but not 5-10. I just don't see it happening. Robotics simply hasn't progressed all that far in the past 10 years compared to a lot of other consumer electronics (DVRs, computers, iPods, etc)
There are other hurdles of course that need to be figured out. The moon's gravity is one sixth that on Earth. New research, however, may lead to a solution to this problem as well.
Good, I'm glad they have a solution to the moon's gravity problem. Now if they can just fix that no atmosphere problem too, they'll be in great shape.
please tell me of the superior product in the open source realm that does what Lotus Notes does.
Just about any e-mail package that actually DELIVERS the e-mail. Not in a few hours, a few days, or a few weeks, but actually when you send it. Some of my co-workers are still stuck with it and every once in a while, I receive an e-mail someone sent weeks ago. Notes just kinda "forgot" about the e-mail and suddenly, digging around or something, it comes across it and says, "Oh yeah! I forgot about this one. Maybe I ought to send this out, huh?"
I don't know, if I were the person responsible for Lotus Notes, I might want to omit that from my resume. If you haven't had Lotus Notes inflicted upon you, count yourself lucky.
"But will Genentech offer this option?"
That's the point. It's not up to Genentech. Within reason, doctors can choose the drug they give their patients. If retinal specialists determine or clinical trials show that Avantis is better than Lucentis, then the retinal specialists are going to use it. I suspect the price difference between the two will actually be far less than than the numbers you're clearly pulling out of your ass. (Avantis is about $300 per shot.) Not as much research had to go into the development of Lucentis because they already had a basic design for the molecule. It is not an "antibody", however. An antibody is a protein created by white blood cells that attach to and neutralize antigens.
The FDA approves drugs for a use, not Genentech. Doctors can use drugs for other conditions if they think that it will be effective for those uses. This is called "off label" usage, which is what Avantis is in the treatment of anything other than colon cancer.
As for the cost of drugs, new drugs tend to be very expensive, but this isn't entirely the fault of the drug companies. It's incredibly expensive to create a new drug. Generally a bunch of drugs are created to target a specific action. All those drugs are then tested in animals to see which ones actually do what they're supposed to and which ones don't. Then of the ones that do what they're supposed to, they have to test to see which ones are most effective and which ones are safest. After a number of rounds of tests in animals, the drugs then have to go into human trials to test for safety. They they have to go into human trials for efficacy. Every step requires tons of documentation that the FDA reviews. If the FDA doesn't approve the drug, then the drug company has to pretty much start over from scratch, with all that research and development lost. This is common and it's simply part of the drug development process.
Smaller drug companies can be financially ruined by betting everything on a single drug or group of drugs that in the end don't get approved. So why do drug companies charge so much? Well, beyond the fact that they're obligated to make a profit for their stockholders, they also need money to use for further research and development into new drugs.
A few years back, Genentech was just about betting the farm on Endostatin and Agiostatin which turned out to have less than glorious results. It damn near put them out of business. The fact that they've had a few winners has helped to strengthen them, but companies are always at risk of having bad luck with their new drugs and it could knock them back a few years in earnings.
I'm not trying ot say drug companies can't do better, can't make some drugs available for less money, and can't be a little more humanitarian in their approach, but how does this make drug companies different from any other company? With few exceptions, most businesses are out there trying to make as much money as they can.
On the other hand, what we really could use is a government that helps pay for these medications for the people that need them. Unviersal health care would be a damn good start. Then this kind of shit wouldn't have to be a problem for individuals. The government would be able to negotiate prices on behalf of all the people. Instead, we're left with a government that's more concerned about helping big businesses make a buck than helping Joe Average pay his bills.
"But Genentech does not want to license the drug for this use as it is. No sir, they will only sell a 'repackaged' version for 100X the original price. A real 'eye opener'."
Actually, that's not really it at all, but thanks for playing. Avastin has been used by retinal specialists to treat wet macular degeneration (and presumed ocular hisoplasmosis syndrome, but that affects far fewer people so there aren't any real studies done with it as yet.) When retinal specialists got the idea to use an angiogenesis inhibitor to treat MD, the real problem was the size of the Avastin molecule. They were concerned that it was too large to penetrate the retinal membrane and thus wouldn't be effective against MD. Genentech immediately went back to the drawing board and developed Lucentis which is a smaller molecule that can more easily penetrate the retinal membrane.
In the meantime, retinal specialists have been using Avastin with some success, but it's believed that Lucentis will be more successful because of the smaller molecule size. Genentech doesn't license the drug for a purpose, the FDA approves it for a purpose. The fact is that there have been no large scale trials with Avastin. The largest I know of is this one by Avery et.al. which had only 79 participants. But now that Lucentis is out, there are official trials being done with it and assuming it passes (which it appears all but certain that it will), it will probably be significantly better at treating MD than Avastin.
I know that our pharmacological community is more concerned with making a buck and keeping us sick then actually curing diseases.
That's a pretty ridiculous thing to say. Yes, pharmaceutical companies want to make a buck, but scientists are human beings and many of them are doing their best to create the best drugs they can to help people. To think that they're intentionally withholding drugs or not trying to cure diseases to keep making money is simply ridiculous and paranoid.
There are tons of people working to cure cancers, Parkinson's, AIDS, Alzheimer's, and other diseases. If you think otherwise, you don't know anything about medical research. The fact that these things aren't yet cured is not from a lack of trying. There's still a great deal about the human body we don't know. There's tons about stem cells we don't understand. The human body is so amazingly comlpex, it's incredible that we can do the things we can do already.
Remember, drug companies and researchers came up with a number of vaccines for diseases that no longer plague us. Bacterial infections are fatal about 1/1000th as often as they used to be, thanks to the work of drug companies.
Don't get me wrong, they're not charity organizations and I'm not trying to make them out to be that. They're trying to make money for their stockholders, and that's their job. The people who work for them are trying to cure diseases, though. That's their job.