But are they sure that it wasn't the observers who were inadvertently soaked in red wine?

It remains to be shown how realistically close to human this mouse model can possibly be.

One remembers that a few years ago http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp068082 (New England Journal of Medicine), a candidate antibody-type medicament from TeGenero produced severe toxicity in the first (and only) volunteers who received it, though previous animal trials had seemed to give a green light to take it forward to humans. Although the initial test animals there were not altered as in the way now proposed, clearly limits exist for the degree of alteration that can be achieved.

-wb-

"eyelet transplantation" (ie, from a healthy donor, into a Type 1 Diabetes sufferer)

For the sake of helping any searchers not miss a load of references through searching on "eyelets" ....

These are "islets", not "eyelets", i.e. "Islets of Langerhans" (named for the scientist who first described them), they are little islands of special tissue in the pancreas gland, and they contain the beta-cells that normally make insulin, and in Type-1 diabetes they fail after attack by autoimmune processes. Their transplantation has been both promising and problematic, and as the parent post noted, tissue rejection problems have been met by immunosuppression.

-wb-

It's one thing to have a uniform set of conditions for a number of different services -- and potentially a good thing, if the conditions are fair and well-designed.

It's quite a different question whether that should also be associated with data aggregation or consolidation . Is this actually some kind of attempted cover for data aggregation, to distract attention from simultaneous data aggregation in the hope of reducing or de-fusing objections to an unpalatable plan? After all, there's no real need for uniform conditions to be associated with data aggregation at all.

-wb-

you need a guilty mind and a guilty act to constitute a crime.

The law might have been like that once, but it isn't now (strict criminal liability) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strict_liability_(criminal).

Strict liability is one of those things that seems to creep in when it seems to lawmakers like a good idea at the time. But once it's in place, the lawmakers find it rather easy to overextend it, and make it cover more and more matters that many people would say ought to be judged under the old standard of intent.

-wb-

Seeing UV after cataract surgery proabbly isn't a 'tetrachromic' effect. Human eye lenses are naturally yellow at birth, browner as we get older, browner still and they start being called 'cataracts'. They filter out the UV at any age. So the retina never usually gets a chance to try out its UV-seeing ability using its basic trichromatic receptor kit.

-wb-

We can have:
The tree-hugging hippie party
The financial, corporate, and industry party
The religious extremist (pardon me, I mean evangelical) party
The backwoods-montana survival-oriented libertarian party
The inner-city violence and drugs party
The suburbia party
The illuminati
Every one of those hates every other, and nothing would ever get done since any coalition would dissolve within days. From where I sit, that'd be a better situation than the one we're in now.

Yes but just think, as soon as two of them suss it out (like maybe the evangelicals and the suburbanites ....) then their coalition would be in power for ever .....

-wb-

Well, if you don't demand that somebody audits their code (for airplanes/airlines) you are pretty stupid.

Agreed in principle that it's desirable/vital to get that job done. But it's not so easy to achieve in practice, and I think it's not just stupidity (on the part of consumers/customers) that blocks it.

Some years ago I was a regular flier with a certain airline, and then they flew a couple of my work colleagues into the ground [ :( ]. The circumstances brought their operating procedures into question -- human code, if you will. I quizzed them about the relevant points. They told me to get lost. If it wasn't in the official accident report (which turned out to be a whitewash, btw) then I would not be permitted to know it.

Needless to say, I never flew with them again, but that's not much good, the other lines might misbehave in a similar way.

I suspect that maybe there is not as much external scrutiny of these things as some of the posters in this thread optimistically believe or expect.

-wb-

>They are just doing what the United States is telling them to do.
>Honestly, Why are the Citizens of the Netherlands allowing the USA To dictate their own laws? Why are you people not protesting in the streets over this stuff?

>>>You honestly think there would be no copyright laws abroad without American pressure? Really?

No, no, no, that's not the argument about US influence on copyright laws and other IP laws of other countries. They had their own laws before -- and even before the US joined the Berne Copyright Convention. Mostly they were better balanced too.

What the lobbying influence has done is to insinuate changes that skew the balance that used to be set, between the authors'/publishers' interests and the public interest.

Copyright terms have been drastically lengthened. New infringement offences have been created in the law. New procedural powers have been introduced that can lead to new claims, often enabling control of materials and works that are not even in copyright and would not be eligible for copyright at all (like the 'TPM's that can be used to padlock anything, copyright or not).

On the other hand, look what has become of the parts of the law that were intended to ensure public rights broadly equivalent to 'fair use': in some places they used to go farther, in others not so far, as in the US. They have been narrowed, whittled down, even taken away from some classes of user entirely, under the influence of this lobbying pressure.

And why or how has it been happening? It often isn't the 'citizens' or even their legislatures primarily doing this. These insidious cripplings of public rights often come in through the relatively new channel of international treaties or EU directives carved out in private conferences, not in legislative assemblies. 'Poison pills' of rights removal have been insinuated as part of larger packages: their design has been fixed so that for some larger and usually economic reason, the 'victim country' won't refuse the 'poison pill', so as not to lose whatever the unrelated material was.

Then, what happens in the local legislative assembly is that the mass of lawmakers are held by their bought-and-sold government executives as if at pistol-point, with a dilemma: they can either rubberstamp the whole thing or reject the whole thing. But the design has fixed it so that the latter will be practically infeasible.

The democratic legislative process is not primarily to blame here, it is the sharks who have bypassed it and subverted it that are to blame.

-wb-

according to the BBC, there was a lot of pushback against some of Newton's workings ... this may damage Newton's place in history...

There are plenty of nuts who are keen to get publicity by claiming to debunk Einstein, Newton, or almost anybody famous who will get them some attention.

'Never at Rest' by R S Westfall (http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=3ngEugMMa9YC) was widely reviewed as a good scientific biography. The biographer more or less admitted that he was somewhat hostile towards his subject but even so there's plenty of solid information there.

It seems weird that they chose to digitize a printed copy of the Principia that had many of its pages so badly burnt away that they can't be read. There are better copies around even in the same library that could have been scanned. Perhaps the best scanned image of Newton's Principia is one that was put online by the Bibliotheque nationale de France (http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k3363w.r=.langFR)!

Thanks for that idea -- I'll look into it.

-wb-

Thanks for that idea, I do in fact use Opera 9.something (Opera 10.something gives me compatibility problems with the needed older print functions). It might surprise you, but I get a lot of websites throwing brickbats at me for using Opera.

-wb-

Are you joking, or serious? Are you seriously suggesting that software written in 2011 should work perfectly on operating systems released when Bill Clinton was the President?

Sure I'm serious: and I don't understand why this should be treated like a joke: the suggestion, after all, is that backwards compatibility is important. Lack of it means all sorts of problems, ranging from general inaccessibility in practice of nearly all digital material archived on old media, to smaller scale problems like the ones that I face right now just getting my laserprinter to work properly with new software products written by people who forgot that it exists.

-wb-

a lean, fast browser with a stripped down UI

I just looked at the Chrome system requirements:
"100MB disk space, 128MB RAM, WinXP SP2+, Pentium 4 or later":
It won't even look at Win2000, so if I want to use it at all I have to change my hardware, expand my OS size by '00s of MB and lose backwards compatibility with stuff that I use all of the time. With the number of websites that demand updated web-browsers such as Chrome it begins to look as if I'm being squeezed off the internet. (I wish I could switch more to linux, for which I have a double-booting system, but I can't get it to do the printing work that I need, and even then, Chrome claims to be very picky about which linux distro it works with.)

-wb-