TLDR: It will probably be about a year to replicate it in humans. Therapy will be several years even assuming it's perfectly safe and assuming no political interference.

It's not a complete departure from previous stuff, though it looks like it is a new technique, so it will need to be independently replicated. Induced pluripotent stem cells took over a year to be reproduced, so there's that.

The next steps are longer, making sure it's safe, and finding a way to harness it.

Clinical trials for stem cell therapies are underway, but I'm not aware of anything so far that is a stunning success, where you put in stem cells and get a regenerated heart, liver, whatever, so we're not quite ready to hit the ground running. Of course, a lot of that was held back by the lack of stem cells which the host's immune system wouldn't reject, so theyr'e a lot closer now. Work on ESC or IPSC advanced being able to harness it, but I don't think there are any clear-cut treatments we know of that were simply waiting on a good source of cells. Spinal cord injuries in mice, I know they're not there yet, you inject cells you've directed somewhat to differentiate into neurons and the recovery rates in mice are nothing miraculous yet. They're improved, but there's the added complication that mice tend to recover from spinal cord injuries better than humans: they're a lot younger than us and can naturally recover better than we can. So it doesn't look like this immediately opens doors to treatments in humans, though it definitely speeds it up a lot. (And I could be wrong about there not being treatments ready to go in humans right now).

On safety, cancer is always an issue with pluripotent cells. Injecting pluripotent stem cells, which can make anything, makes teratomas, which are tumors of mixed cell populations. That's actually a test of stem cells: inject it into a mouse, if you get tumors that have several types of cells in them, you know you've actually got pluripotent stem cells. Teratomas can be complicated to treat though, so injecting pluripotent stem cells into a patient is a terrible idea.

Induced pluripotent stem cells have the additional hazard that you're explicitly turning on cancer-causing genes in the cells to make them that way. They appear to be turned back off, but it's still a concern. Furthermore, there have been suggestions that reverting cells back to a pluripotent state increases the likelihood of mutations. Obviously if the rate of mutation during the process is too high, that can also cause cancer. I haven't been following that literature, so I don't know if that's been discarded with IPSC. And I don't think it's been done with this new technique, though I haven't read the paper.

So there's no clear timeline, which is disappointing, but whatever the timing was going to be, it's shorter now, so yay.

I don't see how that changes things. He was collecting discarded trash from his neighbors, so he didn't enter into agreements there. Monsantos patents on glyphosphate are expired, so using round-up to enrich the trash doesn't change anything. Sneaky, maybe, but seeds blowing off your property are no longer yours.

I could see how selling the seed would get him into trouble with patents, but that's only reasonable if you accept that patents on living things are reasonable.

Well, now the intelligence services work for him. You don't say you currently work as a servant even if you used to be a servant yourself and currently use servants.

I'm guessing because either 1. He sees cable news and thinks we're so stupid we believe anything, not realizing we only believe anything if it comes from "real americans" or something like that, or 2. He can.

Hypocrisy and propaganda? Try ignorance: most of the people calling him traitor are too stupid to remember what was actually going on at the time. They just hear someone say he hurt the US and are bleating for his blood without understanding what happened. Is that better? Well, no...

Remember that reputation isn't an on/off switch. He's gained a lot of reputation with the NSA revelations. How much of that does "this could be useful to putin" reduce it? 1%?

Perhaps he thought it would start a debate. Does it reduce his reputation if he honestly thought he could start another change in his host country?

Boredom and isolation often leads to deviant behavior. How many of us got into nerd stuff because we were bored and wanted to know if we could "hack" something we weren't supposed to? I started reading 2600 before I got my drivers license. It was, fortunately, far over my head, and thanks to dialup, even if it weren't, that would be almost as boring as homework, so I never actually did anything.

I wonder what the solution is. My kid isn't going to have those limitations, even comcast is vastly superior to dialup, and he's getting a head start on using computers.

Maybe I'll have to stick with apple products, make sure he stays in the walled garden and out of the CRA website.

I think that could be valuable: if we start allowing street cops to use this to delete evidence of their pointlessly aggressive tactics, that's a GREAT sign to leave the country ASAP.

If I'm up at 4AM, the TV guide channel is about the level of journalism I'm capable of appreciating.

Also, does the BBC website not work at 4AM? Because one could just browse that. What's so bad about the BBC world service? I'm asking honestly, I've never been a fan of video news, and never been a fan of anything that early in the morning.

The degree matters though. If it's worse than normal, it might be a good point. I doubt anyone has done a controlled study and quantified the effect, but just in theory it COULD be a reasonable statement.

No no no! You're totally selling it wrong! You've got to say it's building up! Lemme give you an example:

"Studies show that the CRACK BABIES OF THE 80'S are now having crack babies of their own who are EVEN WORSE and UNABLE TO PLAY WITH LEGOS AND INSTEAD HAVE EVIL HACKING SKILLS!!!"

See? Three offers of employment in my inbox from Huffington Post already!

I think it's pretty likely that people smart enough to make a space elevator will be smart enough to consider what happens when it goes wrong. Whether they will find it worthwhile to do anything about it is a different story, but it will be considered, that's for sure.

I'm always hearing about google being the target of Steve Jobs' ego-driven "thermonuclear war" with patents. What are some examples of google patent trolling as you've suggested? I'm not saying I think google is actually behaving unlike a corporation, just that I don't know of any examples of them doing what you're saying they're doing.

High profile murderers who make no attempt to conceal their crime usually do it more for attention. They might tell themselves it's for higher reasons, like they hate that politician or that race, but really it's that their egos aren't satisfied. Same with school shootings. They shoot up their schools because they want attention from their classmates. With columbine and other school shootings, we like to tell ourselves they're going rambo because they were bullied, and the shooters did too. We tell ourselves the lie because it's easier to think kids only do this when put under extreme pressure by bullying, we don't like to think that some kids are just psychopaths who are evil. They told themselves it was because of bullying because that sounds better than "We're bored and want attention."

wiki

Wait, how is the progressive income tax the "most regressive tax possible?" You're suggesting they indirectly do what sales taxes directly do. Wouldn't they be at least tied with sales taxes?