Slashdot Mirror
SARS Researcher Files Preemptive Patent Application
ocean-navigator writes " CP Press is reporting that the B.C. Cancer institute has filed a defensive patent application to ensure the information remains in the public domain. The lead scientist asked specifically for his name to NOT be on the application, as he feels that he made a discovery, not an invention. Nice to see a few people with principles, in my own backyard too!"
Right on.
You know your civilization is in an unstable equilibrium when: rich people can buy laws that help them get richer, which allow them to buy more laws...
Alcoholism does not necessarily equate to frequency. You can drink a lot and not be an alcoholic and you can not drink very often and be an alcoholic. My grandmother was an alcoholic and she drank probably once every few months. It's really all about drinking in spite of the serious consequences your drinking has on others and on your own life (such as while hurting loved ones, while ignoring committments, etc.).
Is this not way off topic, though?
given : i do think too many people these days are utterly incapable of surviving on their own. I myself have taken prairie-landscape survival training from cadets and elsewhere, and am confident in my skills that even though life would thereafter suck a lot more, i could if i desired to survive.
read this if you have time... while i havn't seen the movie in question["the network"] it outlines a possibility that perhaps even though induvidually we are all worthless, we in doing so are *replacable*. western civilization has thrived because a lesser, and lesser amount of people actually mattered...at first the kings, barons, clergy, knights...then kings, and higher nobles, then kings and kings alone, then finally to democracy, where no one really matters, and all we are is replacable parts, akin to 1 Byte portions of a hard disk. sure we could store data or use them, but often we just let them sit idle and spin around.
in the meanwhlie, this approach has been really successful because as a society we can do many things, at one time, whereas induviduals can do very little, comparitively. i wouldn't pretend to know everything in the university of regina's library : but if you add all the students, profs and past students & profs, you'd probly get a pretty good percentage going.
most importantly, perhaps i'd like to point out something that really stuck out to me. All knowledge, to me relies on communication and interaction. without it our braincells would not pass data in the form of chemical-electric energy...knowing, to me, isn't a static process - it happens because things change. it happens because people are communicating. Last night, me and one of my coworker, lets call her vert, were moving in directions towards eachother, being very close to the same size[her a little smaller]... we both stopped, and our stopping got our minds going and she said something, something stupid and bickering...and i replied[she can be such a troll sometimes], and this turned into a 20-30 second discourse...stopped by which the cook local, 'boss', stepped in an said 'quit flirting you two'. [while i think she's more or less a descent human being, she'sjust...well..not my type] we both, at the same moment, stopped talking, turned around 180 degrees, and started moving away from eachother in perfect unison, saying nothing until we were out of sight. there was potential energy stored within us, in the form of underlying assumptions, which was reacted on, which produced predictable results. i think what happened, is momentarily, a consiousness of sorts was formed. The machine did understand chinese...i mean, the set of people known as me_and_vert understood that we were flirting. this is much more important than any induviduals "knowing" of anything, or at least different from it. it is through this "knowing" that i believe western civilization thrives on.
i used to think western civilization would fall apart as we know it...but what i did not ask myself was, if i know it, then what *is* exactly western civilization? a collective of capitalist-democracies with fair laws built so that all men are equal in the eyes of the government, and that no one is above the law, and that people have an intrinsic worth, and have rights because of this?
only when i realized that western civilization is a feudal state of people who allow power to be distributed... do you think the internet, in all its giving-us-the-people-a-voice will cause more freedom, change, or whatnot in the world? for every second we spend online the energy, in the form of cashmoney, is released back into the system, usually by ISPs but also by hardware manufacturers, Credit card companies, and making our workplaces a profit[or making our workplaces work]. you may gain energy by working, but by working you lose more than you gain. in effect the more you do online, the more powerful the regieme becomes. the more you work to pay for your ISP the more stronger the regeime b
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.