"an unmanned exploration mission by 2018"

It's too bad no one thought of that 40 years ago. We could have had an unmanned exploration mission on Mars back in 1976 or so.

Oh. Wait. Viking landed on Mars in 1976, didn't it.

40 F'ing years ago. Are we maybe kind of done with the exploratory crap, and ready to send people yet?

Let's see... we went from the first autogyro to landing on the moon in 40 years. Now it looks like we've moved from an unmanned landing on Mars ... to Yet Another Unmanned Landing On Mars(tm) over the last 40 years.

Good job, dudes.

The methylation inactivation is heritable. The issue, in this case, was erroneous activation or switching of cells to modify protein production.

I suspect that the mechanism involved (they don't say) in the repair of the genes which end up going back to normal is related to the production of O6-methyl-transferase via the MGMT complex sites on the long arm of c21 -- the same thing that results in chemo-resistance to cancers, such as pancreatic cancer or glioblastoma, when combined with the appropriate mutation of the p53 gene on c17.

I think as long as it doesn't involve a long term mutation of a cancer related gene, such that it effect the germ cells, it's not a problem. Since you tend to come pre-packed with all the germ cells you are ever going to have in your lifetime, then the issue will be smoking by pregnant women, and all other damage that results in disease will only be self-inflicted diseases, rather than heritable.

Which still means they've failed to answer the question of whether or not it's heritable, because they've failed to discuss whether or not it impacts germ cells (arguably unlikely, but it'd be nice to have an answer, particularly when making decisions on how and when to regulate smoking, or minimally, smoking in public).

We already prohibit general use of a number of medical interventions based on transplanting porcine cells into humans.

For example, it's possible to exploit the immune privilege of the brain in order to transplant fetal pig brain cells into humans to treat conditions such as Parkinson's, Huntington's and islet cells into the pancreas of people with Type I diabetes.

The big risk is Porcine endogenous retrovirus (PERV -- yes, it's actually called that), being transmitted, and becoming part of the human genome. Thus, people who have received these xenografts are prohibited from sexual reproduction post-graft (although it's possible to save germ cells prior, to permit in vitro fertilization techniques).

See also:

Porcine xenografts in Parkinson's disease and Huntington's disease patients: preliminary results.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...

So yes, numb-nuts: "pollute the human genome".

It's not Hitlerian, or in any way related to eugenics to prevent introduction of DNA errors or endogenous viruses into the general genome in a heritable way.

They don't answer the only question we care about.

Heritability.

If it doesn't damage your kids genes ...and by extension, pollute the human genome ...then I don't care if you are dumb enough to damage your own health.

Unless you are a close relative, or smoke around me, it's no skin off my nose, if you want to commit suicide by cigarette or a Kevorkian death machine.

Sorry, but the tests are supposed to be "representative of normal usage".

Even if they document the tests, if they can be gamed in a test representative of "normal usage", then the same gaming will kick in on actual "normal usage", and so the test will not have been gamed.

You can have them be shitty at designing tests, or you can have them being shitty at determining what constitutes "normal usage", but it's not possible to game something that doesn't have a variance between expected use and actual use.

The manufacturers are exploiting a variance that should not be there in a correctly designed testing scenario, because the variance would not be there in actual usage.

What's our take away on this supposed to be?

(A) These evil scoundrels are cheating on the government tests

(B) The people who are designing the government tests epically suck at their jobs, should be fired, and have competent people hired in their places

I'm going to have to vote "B" here, folks.

No.

My argument boils down to "legislating morality (rather than ethics) is about as useful as trying to legislate Pi to be 3 to make the math easier".

If you could make a law against murder that actually *precluded* murder, you might have something. The best you can do otherwise is make it so that people fear the punishment for violating the law (as opposed to fearing the actual law -- which they don't).

You are merely disincentivizing the behaviour, not eliminating it. The point being is that it'a impossible to effectively hold someone else to your own moral standards.

You're free to call this either "moral relativism" or you could be more honest, and admit that you can't control someone else's thoughts.

I hadn't realized the teen pregnancy problem had been resolved to everyone's satisfaction. Thank you for enlightening me on the effectiveness of those laws; I was under the mistaken impression that underage sex acts still occurred!

Yeah I did. And I unlike you realize the following -

1. stripping the email address was almost certainly at a minimum an attempt to hide the fact that she was using a private server for government emails. (Something which would have gotten a "normal" person fired if not charged with multiple felonies)

2. stripping/altering the email address would have allowed them to cherry pick items - e.g. "well this email is potentially a problem, good thing it doesn't have clinton's email address on it!"

3. Later actions by the IT consultant (destroying evidence which was under subpoena) indicate the above was not simply "oooh we want to protect her private email address" rather it indicates they were looking at hiding or destroying the information.....

I dislike Trump but seriously just because he's the Republican candidate should not mean you are willing to overlook this kind of crap.
If the DNC wasn't corrupt at the core you probably would have had Sanders instead....

Perhaps they could consider them for humans next.

Let's legislate morality for everyone, since that's always worked so well in the past...

You seriously would vote for someone to uphold the "rule of law" who it seems has no respect for the law???
Seriously amazing. So you are fine with one set of rules for the "elite" and one set for everyone else eh?

Trump may be slime, but at the moment I don't think there is any sort of definitive proof he's broken the law,. If there were it almost certainly would have come
out by now and be front page headlines for every news organization in the US....

Here's a thought how about the DNC replaces her with someone who has NOT attempted to break the law? Failing that how about someone who doesn't have a paper trail showing they tried??????

She's been playing by Animal Farm -

All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others....

I seem to remember when Americans were begin snooped on, the argument for doing so pretty much always devolved to -

"You have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide."

Seems to me politicians should be held to that standard BEFORE the average citizen is.....

Full transparency for politicians before we have our rights violated.

Whoop There it is!

They are just taking potshots at each other.

The Hatfields and the McCoys didn't actually have to *hit* each other, to feel good about *shooting* at each other. Like any feud, it kind of doesn't matter if the shots *hit*, only that there is continued shooting.

It's almost like you didn't read anything but my post and then proceeded to post without thinking...

I read the article. You apparently, have not.

It's almost like you think that the UI, including the one that would be brought up by a mechanical "Home" button to enter a passcode, doesn't require capacitive coupling to enter the passcode...

So you wear the capacitive gloves, you "press" the virtual button (which can't read a fingerprint through the glove anyway), and, just as if you were using an iPhone with a mechanical button with gloves on, you use your capacitive gloves to input the passcode.

They are bitching about having to have something *before* pressing the capacitive button, which they have to have anyway *after* pressing the mechanical button, just so they have something to bitch about the switch from a mechanical to a capacitive button.

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To be *crystal clear*, the only ones impacted are going to be Siri-only users who run around with their iPhones always unlocked.

This may somewhat impact blind users of iPhones, who might be in that small group, but it's no worse than the pre-Siri (or early Siri) days, where there really wasn't any accessibility for the things at all, or where you could use Siri, but then Siri would futz up on you, more often than not.

I suppose that we could also be concerned about people with artificial limbs, who, if they have not been retrofit with **technology I invented while at Google, and then gave away, rather than patenting**, can't capacitively couple at all, and so are utterly incapable of using touch-screen devices.

But then, this is a general problem of touch screen devices being disability unfriendly.

And I suppose we should also include people who are unable to utilize multitouch for gestures -- like those who have artificial limbs, but can't make more than 1-finger gestures, even if their artificial limbs *have* been retrofit to support capacitive coupling.

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I suppose which of the above applies depends on what you are actually whining about.