Along those same lines my second grader's report on the civil war was just fucking garbage. I mean, it barely mentioned the manifold reasons behind the civil war. It focused on slavery and BARELY hinted at federalism at all, or the cultural divide. It was only one page long too!

In seriousness, the point of a metaphor in politics is to dumb something down to a point where people who are ignorant on the issue can be motivated to act in a certain way. "Ignorant" here including myself, I don't really understand QoS (without looking it up on wiki that is). To expect a public discussion to be accurate on anything remotely technical is asking for dissapointment. Or is an attempt to confuse voters into apathy.

Sure, but what does that have to do with law enforcement? They're not the "car enthusiast revenge squad."

Are you suggesting the police pursuit DIDN'T cause him to drive over 100 mph? Because I think the police chase still motivated him to drive that fast. Even if they pulled off at the end, that still doesn't explain why they had to do it in the first place. There was no threat of violence here except for the reckless driving that predictably occurs during a high-speed chase.

I'm imagining the guy who designed the Ford Pinto reading this and getting very excited. "When I point that out, they're SURE to give me my job back! So long dry cat food for dinner, hellooo purina select!"

That's true for large clinical trials, but clinical trials aren't all or even most research. For basic research like what this journal seems to publish on, no. It's rare that you'd have an experiment which would take months, let alone 5 years, and it would only be at the very end that you'd get a yes or a no.

For example, a study in that journal is entitled "Predicting blast-induced ground vibration using general regression neural network." The abstract is

Emphasis mine: they're testing if they can predict how the ground will shake after an explosion.

They're not going to spend five years dreaming up a model for it completely on a dry-erase board, set off a stick of dynamite, realize they were wrong, and throw out five years of work. They get preliminary results that are positive and encourage the project to go forward. They make up a model based on data, then refine it with subsequent bombs. If one were completely unable to use the method they propose to figure out how the ground shakes during explosions, they'd likely find that out before months had gone by.

I don't know what the breakdown is between clinical trials and basic research. I'd bet there's more research money spent on clinical trials than basic research (necessary, given certain realities about clinical trials) but that there are more scientists in basic research. So I'd bet that most research out there is actually not really affected a whole lot by the negative results issue: if you get a negative result, you get it before you commit yourself to it, and you move your reserarch in a different direction.

I'd argue that a lot of scientists are actually paid to bring in grants, teach, and publish. It's just a lucky coinicidence that doing science is helpful to at least two of those goals.

The initial finding of "baby cured of HIV" was surprising for the reasons you just mentioned. You're suggesting the story shouldn't be updated because it's not surprising? Well, unfortunately, you'll get your wish. I'm pretty sure people will forget this "Nevermind, no miracle after all" and will use the initial story as a reason to go off their meds.

From this blog post it sounds like the mother taking her off the drugs was what prompted the initial finding: the doctors would have been unethical to tell someone to take their HIV + kid off antivirals because there's a chance they may have killed all the viruses.

As far as why, the cocktail isn't super convenient. It's a bunch of pills taken throughout the day. Getting a toddler to take multiple pills a day every day is probably a very frustrating thing. I'd imagine the mother (who didn't have any prenatal care and didn't realize she was HIV positive until after birth) doesn't have the best health insurance, so the out of pocket expenses probably really quickly added up.

I mean, that's obviously all small potatoes compared to developing drug-resistant HIV and full blown AIDS and dying. Not excusing her actions, just saying it's understandable.

While that's true, google seems to be fostering innovation by simply buying up any newcomer that does anything interesting and new. If patents were changed, google would obviously meddle quite a bit in how the laws were drafted, and we could see google start to copy innovative stuff people were doing in their garage rather than simply buying them.

I'm not convinced it's a reasonable enough worry to say "lets not overhaul patents" though.

I doubt it. Aside from the recent towelroot, samsung phones are locked down these days on verizon and AT&T, yet there doesn't seem to be an explosion of people buying unsubsidized phones.

At this point, it has very little to do with communism. Florida is a big primary state and a big electoral state. Florida has a lot of Cuban-americans who would prefer we invade the island. They have traditionally fiercely opposed lifting the sanctions. Evidently this isn't as true as it was. Still, outside of cuban americans, not many people care one way or the other.

Thus, politicians gain very little and risk quite a bit by opposing the sanctions.

And yes, it is fucking stupid on multiple levels: it was probably always counter-productive, political leaders should show some fucking backbone and end it, citizens shouldn't be so apathetic about keeping an entire nation impoverished, and why is florida even allowed to vote?

But, dumb as all that is, "we still hate communism" is not a big reason why we still have sanctions.

Again, nonsense. One can do quite a bit with a single stem cell or embryo. Furthermore, you can work in parallel: you don't need to do one cell at a time. You can do a bunch of cells in a dish, make a new organ, then implant it.

And, again, any method of introducing crispr to a large amount of cells in the body would still be harder than just injecting someone with poison. There's no need to make it self-replicating like a virus.

To add onto that (since I was reading up on this), the cell itself splices in the new DNA sequence very rapidly and efficiently, since it's a mechanism the cell uses to avoid cancer.

In the double helix, when one strand of the DNA is broken, the string of DNA is held together by the other strand, it's an easy fix. Both strands broken at the same place means the DNA has come completely apart, has sustained some serious damage. The cell detects that pretty rapidly. The cleaner way is to find the sequence on the other chromosome and use that to repair the broken chromosome. A simpler but more dangerous way is to just grab two broken ends of DNA and stick them together. It's possible the cell will grab the wrong broken strand of DNA though and the result will be cancer.

Either way can be used to insert DNA where you want it.

No. That's nonsense. Crispr needs to get into a cell in order to do anything. These things aren't self-replicating either.

Say a terrorist has a crispr combo that mutates several of your anti-cancer genes. He's got nothing: he'd need to get that into at least one of your cells in order to have any chance of giving you cancer. If he has a means to introduce it into one of your cells... he doesn't need crispr. He could just use a poison or some normal carcinogen.

Terrorists kill with pipe bombs and planes. Watching them try to do advanced biotech would in fact be quite hilarious.

I'm not so sure. They handled the nexus Q thing pretty honorably.