So it can't read PDFs. Big negative IMHO - I wouldn't mind having something like this (at $150 max) to stash dozens of technical references and white papers on. But I'm not going to go through the hassle of converting every PDF I'd want to store.
Brilliant. So as long as we all destroy the ecological balance of the planet equally, it's fine. Who cares if we sicken and kill off all the animals at the top of the food chain, leading to a massive overpopulation of grazers and further destruction of nature, as long as it reduced the incidence of half a dozen diseases.
Yeah, what's half a dozen diseases causing millions of human deaths every year when we need to worry about destroying some mythical "ecological balance"? Let's ban DDT worldwide.
People in the West can afford this kind of arrogance because they aren't the ones threatened by those half a dozen diseases. If your mother, wife or daughter were to die of malaria, I'm sure you and your smugness would both be fine knowing that your ecological concerns were being catered to. Meanwhile, enjoy the return of the American bedbug.
The solution was only found after both sides found that it's better for peace to accept the mutual right to exist.
The solution was found after Germany was utterly defeated, occupied and dismembered, and the cost was millions of lives. And what led to WW2 was exactly Hitler's insistence on invading and annexing foreign territory - given the lengths to which Stalin and Chamberlain went to avoid conflict with Germany, it's simply naive to state that WW2 would have happened whether Hitler existed or not.
It's not hard to see parallels in the CIA and US military's use of interrogation techniques in Bush's War on Terror, the effects of labeling one race as 'the enemy,' the crackdown on free speech, or the use of suicide bombers in Iraq.
What crackdown on free speech? When did this happen, and how has it affected anyone's ability to say, record, broadcast or publish whatever they want? And when did one race get labeled "the enemy"? Which race was it? And what exactly were the effects of this labeling which didn't happen?
What nonsense. But no worse than many reviews on TV shows, movies, gardening, or cooking which never fail to throw in some gratuitous, mindless slam at Bush.
Ah yes, so as Christians we were supposed to have policed the following:
- fundamentalists who go around shooting abortion doctors (murder)
- the protestant catholic fighting in Ireland (terrorism)
If your local minister or priest is preaching the shooting of abortion doctors to young men in your congregation or seeking donations to fund violence in Ireland, the answer is a resounding YES - you are supposed to police it or notify authorities if you can't.
And that's what too many Muslims aren't doing. Mosques in the UK and elsewhere are filled with radical imams preaching hate and violent jihad - documented by TV exposes, by transcripts of the speeches, by books sold at the mosques, and by the imams themselves, who are not shy about their beliefs. Why aren't mainstream Muslims doing something about this besides listening and nodding? Why aren't extremist imams being replaced?
Er, how? The moderates usually have no authority over the extremists, so how should they police them? In what sense are the extremists the moderates' "own"?
The extremists aren't a separate species or something. They attend the same mosques as the moderates, hear the same speeches from the same imams, and in many cases walk with the moderates afterward back to the family home.
The moderates have the authority of group pressure. They also have the religious authority to pick and choose the imams who preach religion to their children. So why don't they? Instead, you have the British Pakistani community producing radicalized young men at a regular pace now, carrying out terrorist attacks around the globe after listening to speeches at British mosques filled with hate and incitements to violence while the community at large - their parents, grandparents and siblings - either does nothing or actively condones their actions.
I'd rather see a visionary like Kurzweil than a pessimist like Joy in that position. Not that I'm any expert on Joy's positions, but I seem to remember he'd taken a decidedly negative view on possible technological breakthroughs of late, with an emphasis on curbing research into "dangerous" areas.
We Muslims consider the mixing of music and words from our Holy Quran deeply offending.
Then I'd say that Muslims should definitely refrain from doing this. However, we aren't all Muslims - why would the rest of us be expected to follow their beliefs?
Slashdot readers and posters are very big on privacy.
...unless the privacy being violated is that of some politician they don't like. The ability to download and install Linux doesn't imply the existence of any consistent ethical system.
Births, mutation, and death are all critical to a species survival. If people don't die & get replaced by offspring, the human-species will be endangering its ability to adapt.
A species which has become static and forgoes any new genetic variation is somehow not going to get wiped out by a pandemic at some point? Yeah right.
If we can modify our bodies enough to end aging, what makes you think we can't and won't modify our bodies in a variety of other ways? Instead of random mutations tested and mostly discarded over immense periods of time, human beings will be able to design and implement the changes most beneficial to them.
And all the talk here about how the body is just machine, and we can repair it to perfection seem to have forgotten that there are plenty of toxins out there, natural & anthropogenic, which don't leave the body once they get in. This is the entire basis behind biomagnification/bioaccumulation. How would "immortal" people avoid the accumulation of heavy-metals over long periods of time? How many years of trace-amounts of mercury do you think it takes to damage your brain?
These are technical problems to be solved, not arguments against ending aging.
From my humble point of view, the desire for immortality comes off as an amazingly selfish quest which would certainly enhance the risks for the survival of the species. It can be argued that by the act of dying, humans behave as team players and increase the speed of progress (biological & intellectual).
Value judgements and moralisms like "amazingly selfish" are going to be the major impediments to considering and treating aging as the disease it is. The ability to adapt our own bodies as we choose and as the need arises will give us far more power to avoid extinction, if that's your concern. As for the "selfishness" you mention, most people call it the will to live.
Biomedical advances will never increase at the same rate as computer technology, simply because experimenting with silicon (or whatever) doesn't have any health and safety issues tied to it, more less any potential moral backlash (barring real AI, which I think is farther away as well).
It takes 15 years, sometimes, for a useful drug with no proven side effects to make it to market. Even if we made theoretical breakthroughs today, it'd be a decade or more before they could be put into practice on a meaningful scale, assuming that they were magically perfect and without flaws/side-effects/whatever. These points are valid for the US, because of strict FDA requirements for approval of drugs and medical procedures. They don't hold in nations such as Russia, China, or India, where substantial medical research is also taking place.
It's very dangerous to look at our advances in computer technology and try to apply those curves to other disciplines. It's equally ridiculous to assume that the rate of increase will remain the same with no compelling evidence to support the assertion. In terms of computers and biotech, we're still taking baby steps, and while they seem like a big deal, we still have a long way to go. This I agree with. I'm under the impression that Ray Kurzweil believes that Moore's Law has some relevance to biotech research, and I've yet to see any evidence of this.
"Do not buy it. Just quit polluting and forcing your shit on me and mine."
News flash - other people minding their own business and living their lives are not required to cater to your whims, whether you think they're polluting or not. A boundless desire to control the lives of others seems to underly a lot of environmentalist demands.
"How about we make a deal - if global warming turns out not to cause widespread famine and damage, I'll give you $100 for being right. If it does turn out to be a problem, you commit suicide to spare resources for those of us who saw the problem coming."
The economic impact of the kind of changes global warming devotees are demanding far exceeds $100 per devotee. At minimum, the negative impact on developing economies and the resulting harm to the poor of the world should require that you kill yourself as well if you're wrong.
Not that I know much about this, but my understanding is that large areas of the ocean floor are basically water-covered desert. Giving coral a durable base to form a reef on seems like a terrific idea to me - creates an oasis in that desert and allows thousands of fish and shellfish to thrive. Until the underlying steel rusts through and collapses under the weight of all that coral, of course - but natural reefs erode over time as well.
Apparently the idea of mining Helium 3, an isotope found on the Moon but not on the Earth (at least in nature) disturbs Mr. Smith from an environmentalist standpoint.
There is no legitimate environmentalist standpoint worth discussing about the Moon. There is no life on the Moon. There is no environment for environmentalists to worry about. If they're worried about the faint possibility that human mining will somehow create some crater on the moon visible from the Earth, they can just pretend an asteroid made it, same as the millions of other craters littering the moon's surface. Or just perform the mining on the horribly scarred side of the Moon facing away from the Earth and dare anyone to claim that man's activities make it look worse.
Yes, I am dancing a cha-cha with itsy-bitsy little facts such as who actually run over Berlin and which front the 80-90% (depending on historian) of the German losses occured on.
Ponder that for a minute: up to 90%. Every 9 out of 10 German soldiers killed: Eastern front. The USA was at best a little side-kick to the Soviets in that affair called WWII in Europe.
If you're not able to understand that a Europe controlled by Stalin would have been in just as much trouble as a Europe controlled by Hitler, you're not qualified to tell anyone to ponder anything. If you're not able to understand that the US is the reason that neither of these alternatives occurred, you're certainly not entitled to the snooty attitude you're packing.
I would be more concerned if this was found in China, they'd probably inject it with melamine, lead and diethylene glycol then ship it the U.S labeled as beef jerky.
I'd also be concerned if Chinese traditional medicine found a use for it - a lot of endangered animals (tigers, rhinos, bears) have been killed so Chinese men can have a love life.
I'm not really sure how you can say that objectively, I'm a non-republican/non-democrat who regularly watches fox news just because I find the way that they present things somewhat genius, it's kind of like watching Goebbels in action.
Uh-huh. And how would you compare Fox's reporting and analysis to that of CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, etc? I find that those who want to criticize Fox for it's slant on the news are typically blind to the slant used in other news organizations - indeed, Fox News wouldn't even exist if so many people didn't find an equally obvious bias in the other direction in the alternatives. I'm not a republican or democrat either - about as important as Coke vs. Pepsi in terms of real differences - but it's obvious that every news organization has it's own orientation in terms of politics and uses it's coverage to flog it's own point of view. Anyone singling out Fox without mentioning CNN, ABC, CBS, etc., isn't credible on this issue.
India and China also happen to be home to billions of poor people who finally have some hope of achieving a better life, and neither nation is likely to throw that hope away to cater to the whims of environmentalists and their latest scare theories.
What do Crichton's past biased comments on global warming have to do with the fact that he's now opining about something else? He shot his credibility, and now he's taking a stance on an important issue which will now suffer for his participation.
I don't pretend to know much about the issue, but I don't see how dissenting views and questions in science are a bad thing. How did Crichton's credibility (whatever that is) get "shot"? Were all or even most of Crichton's views on global warming proven wrong?
I love how people like to talk about controversial, yet widely accepted scientific truths as "religions". See, when a scientist who has tons of documentation and has spent his whole life working on the case that people are causing climate change gets pissed off because a fiction writer "disproves" it all
A fiction writer can't disprove science without doing or relying on science - if Crichton has a point, it's based on the work of other scientists who've spend their lives working on the same subject and have tons of documentation to back up their views. Real science can take rigorous examination and questioning - religion can't.
, putting the smack down on years of attempts to educate the public about the danger, it's because it's a "religion", not because someone is just shoveling a load of inaccurate crap.
If it's inaccurate crap, it should and will be disproven or shown to be unprovable, like the Intelligent Design nonsense. Attempting to shout down someone whose scientific views don't agree with yours is bad for science and has a proven track record of failure throughout history.
On the other hand, when an actual religion gets slapped down for trying to get a load of inaccurate crap taught in schools, it's because science is "biased" and "unfair".
I'm not even sure what you're talking about here - if you're referring to the Intelligent Design thing, obviously that's an attempt to introduce the concept of an unprovable and unverifiable Intelligent Designer into the science of evolution. If there are legitimate counter-claims to the global warming claims, they will be based on verifiable, repeatable research. Denying reality because you don't like it is not good science, no matter what side of the issue you currently find most persuasive.
I'm not sure I'm too keen on Michael Crichton after his comments about global warming. I don't think gene patents are a swell idea, but I'm not sure I'd hold up Crichton as an authority on scientific matters.
What do Crichton's comments on global warming have to do with the views he stated in this article, and how do they in any way affect the merits of his argument? Being "keen" on someone doesn't help or hurt their credibility - if anything, this helps make Crichton's point about global-warming-as-religion - don't trust the infidel!
Even if Ken Mehlman is gay, and even he's being a hypocrite, I don't see what business Bill Maher has attempting to out Mehlman or anyone else. Any individual should have the right to some basic privacy concerning his/her private life, regardless of whatever position they hold. IMHO CNN and YouTube did exactly the right thing - enabling gross violations of privacy can't be considered OK.
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So it can't read PDFs. Big negative IMHO - I wouldn't mind having something like this (at $150 max) to stash dozens of technical references and white papers on. But I'm not going to go through the hassle of converting every PDF I'd want to store.
Doesn't the Kindle have a USB port? Can't this be used to load PDFs and files in other formats? If not, what is the USB port for?
Brilliant. So as long as we all destroy the ecological balance of the planet equally, it's fine. Who cares if we sicken and kill off all the animals at the top of the food chain, leading to a massive overpopulation of grazers and further destruction of nature, as long as it reduced the incidence of half a dozen diseases.
Yeah, what's half a dozen diseases causing millions of human deaths every year when we need to worry about destroying some mythical "ecological balance"? Let's ban DDT worldwide.
People in the West can afford this kind of arrogance because they aren't the ones threatened by those half a dozen diseases. If your mother, wife or daughter were to die of malaria, I'm sure you and your smugness would both be fine knowing that your ecological concerns were being catered to. Meanwhile, enjoy the return of the American bedbug.
The solution was only found after both sides found that it's better for peace to accept the mutual right to exist.
The solution was found after Germany was utterly defeated, occupied and dismembered, and the cost was millions of lives. And what led to WW2 was exactly Hitler's insistence on invading and annexing foreign territory - given the lengths to which Stalin and Chamberlain went to avoid conflict with Germany, it's simply naive to state that WW2 would have happened whether Hitler existed or not.
It's not hard to see parallels in the CIA and US military's use of interrogation techniques in Bush's War on Terror, the effects of labeling one race as 'the enemy,' the crackdown on free speech, or the use of suicide bombers in Iraq.
What crackdown on free speech? When did this happen, and how has it affected anyone's ability to say, record, broadcast or publish whatever they want? And when did one race get labeled "the enemy"? Which race was it? And what exactly were the effects of this labeling which didn't happen?
What nonsense. But no worse than many reviews on TV shows, movies, gardening, or cooking which never fail to throw in some gratuitous, mindless slam at Bush.
Ah yes, so as Christians we were supposed to have policed the following:
- fundamentalists who go around shooting abortion doctors (murder)
- the protestant catholic fighting in Ireland (terrorism)
If your local minister or priest is preaching the shooting of abortion doctors to young men in your congregation or seeking donations to fund violence in Ireland, the answer is a resounding YES - you are supposed to police it or notify authorities if you can't.
And that's what too many Muslims aren't doing. Mosques in the UK and elsewhere are filled with radical imams preaching hate and violent jihad - documented by TV exposes, by transcripts of the speeches, by books sold at the mosques, and by the imams themselves, who are not shy about their beliefs. Why aren't mainstream Muslims doing something about this besides listening and nodding? Why aren't extremist imams being replaced?
Er, how? The moderates usually have no authority over the extremists, so how should they police them? In what sense are the extremists the moderates' "own"?
The extremists aren't a separate species or something. They attend the same mosques as the moderates, hear the same speeches from the same imams, and in many cases walk with the moderates afterward back to the family home.
The moderates have the authority of group pressure. They also have the religious authority to pick and choose the imams who preach religion to their children. So why don't they? Instead, you have the British Pakistani community producing radicalized young men at a regular pace now, carrying out terrorist attacks around the globe after listening to speeches at British mosques filled with hate and incitements to violence while the community at large - their parents, grandparents and siblings - either does nothing or actively condones their actions.
I'd rather see a visionary like Kurzweil than a pessimist like Joy in that position. Not that I'm any expert on Joy's positions, but I seem to remember he'd taken a decidedly negative view on possible technological breakthroughs of late, with an emphasis on curbing research into "dangerous" areas.
We Muslims consider the mixing of music and words from our Holy Quran deeply offending.
Then I'd say that Muslims should definitely refrain from doing this. However, we aren't all Muslims - why would the rest of us be expected to follow their beliefs?
Slashdot readers and posters are very big on privacy.
...unless the privacy being violated is that of some politician they don't like. The ability to download and install Linux doesn't imply the existence of any consistent ethical system.
Births, mutation, and death are all critical to a species survival. If people don't die & get replaced by offspring, the human-species will be endangering its ability to adapt.
A species which has become static and forgoes any new genetic variation is somehow not going to get wiped out by a pandemic at some point? Yeah right.
If we can modify our bodies enough to end aging, what makes you think we can't and won't modify our bodies in a variety of other ways? Instead of random mutations tested and mostly discarded over immense periods of time, human beings will be able to design and implement the changes most beneficial to them.
And all the talk here about how the body is just machine, and we can repair it to perfection seem to have forgotten that there are plenty of toxins out there, natural & anthropogenic, which don't leave the body once they get in. This is the entire basis behind biomagnification/bioaccumulation. How would "immortal" people avoid the accumulation of heavy-metals over long periods of time? How many years of trace-amounts of mercury do you think it takes to damage your brain?
These are technical problems to be solved, not arguments against ending aging.
From my humble point of view, the desire for immortality comes off as an amazingly selfish quest which would certainly enhance the risks for the survival of the species. It can be argued that by the act of dying, humans behave as team players and increase the speed of progress (biological & intellectual).
Value judgements and moralisms like "amazingly selfish" are going to be the major impediments to considering and treating aging as the disease it is. The ability to adapt our own bodies as we choose and as the need arises will give us far more power to avoid extinction, if that's your concern. As for the "selfishness" you mention, most people call it the will to live.
"Do not buy it. Just quit polluting and forcing your shit on me and mine."
News flash - other people minding their own business and living their lives are not required to cater to your whims, whether you think they're polluting or not. A boundless desire to control the lives of others seems to underly a lot of environmentalist demands.
"How about we make a deal - if global warming turns out not to cause widespread famine and damage, I'll give you $100 for being right. If it does turn out to be a problem, you commit suicide to spare resources for those of us who saw the problem coming."
The economic impact of the kind of changes global warming devotees are demanding far exceeds $100 per devotee. At minimum, the negative impact on developing economies and the resulting harm to the poor of the world should require that you kill yourself as well if you're wrong.
Not that I know much about this, but my understanding is that large areas of the ocean floor are basically water-covered desert. Giving coral a durable base to form a reef on seems like a terrific idea to me - creates an oasis in that desert and allows thousands of fish and shellfish to thrive. Until the underlying steel rusts through and collapses under the weight of all that coral, of course - but natural reefs erode over time as well.
Apparently the idea of mining Helium 3, an isotope found on the Moon but not on the Earth (at least in nature) disturbs Mr. Smith from an environmentalist standpoint.
There is no legitimate environmentalist standpoint worth discussing about the Moon. There is no life on the Moon. There is no environment for environmentalists to worry about. If they're worried about the faint possibility that human mining will somehow create some crater on the moon visible from the Earth, they can just pretend an asteroid made it, same as the millions of other craters littering the moon's surface. Or just perform the mining on the horribly scarred side of the Moon facing away from the Earth and dare anyone to claim that man's activities make it look worse.
Yes, I am dancing a cha-cha with itsy-bitsy little facts such as who actually run over Berlin and which front the 80-90% (depending on historian) of the German losses occured on.
Ponder that for a minute: up to 90%. Every 9 out of 10 German soldiers killed: Eastern front. The USA was at best a little side-kick to the Soviets in that affair called WWII in Europe.
If you're not able to understand that a Europe controlled by Stalin would have been in just as much trouble as a Europe controlled by Hitler, you're not qualified to tell anyone to ponder anything. If you're not able to understand that the US is the reason that neither of these alternatives occurred, you're certainly not entitled to the snooty attitude you're packing.
I would be more concerned if this was found in China, they'd probably inject it with melamine, lead and diethylene glycol then ship it the U.S labeled as beef jerky.
I'd also be concerned if Chinese traditional medicine found a use for it - a lot of endangered animals (tigers, rhinos, bears) have been killed so Chinese men can have a love life.
I'm not really sure how you can say that objectively, I'm a non-republican/non-democrat who regularly watches fox news just because I find the way that they present things somewhat genius, it's kind of like watching Goebbels in action.
Uh-huh. And how would you compare Fox's reporting and analysis to that of CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, etc? I find that those who want to criticize Fox for it's slant on the news are typically blind to the slant used in other news organizations - indeed, Fox News wouldn't even exist if so many people didn't find an equally obvious bias in the other direction in the alternatives. I'm not a republican or democrat either - about as important as Coke vs. Pepsi in terms of real differences - but it's obvious that every news organization has it's own orientation in terms of politics and uses it's coverage to flog it's own point of view. Anyone singling out Fox without mentioning CNN, ABC, CBS, etc., isn't credible on this issue.
India and China also happen to be home to billions of poor people who finally have some hope of achieving a better life, and neither nation is likely to throw that hope away to cater to the whims of environmentalists and their latest scare theories.
What do Crichton's past biased comments on global warming have to do with the fact that he's now opining about something else? He shot his credibility, and now he's taking a stance on an important issue which will now suffer for his participation.
I don't pretend to know much about the issue, but I don't see how dissenting views and questions in science are a bad thing. How did Crichton's credibility (whatever that is) get "shot"? Were all or even most of Crichton's views on global warming proven wrong?
I love how people like to talk about controversial, yet widely accepted scientific truths as "religions". See, when a scientist who has tons of documentation and has spent his whole life working on the case that people are causing climate change gets pissed off because a fiction writer "disproves" it all
A fiction writer can't disprove science without doing or relying on science - if Crichton has a point, it's based on the work of other scientists who've spend their lives working on the same subject and have tons of documentation to back up their views. Real science can take rigorous examination and questioning - religion can't.
, putting the smack down on years of attempts to educate the public about the danger, it's because it's a "religion", not because someone is just shoveling a load of inaccurate crap.
If it's inaccurate crap, it should and will be disproven or shown to be unprovable, like the Intelligent Design nonsense. Attempting to shout down someone whose scientific views don't agree with yours is bad for science and has a proven track record of failure throughout history.
On the other hand, when an actual religion gets slapped down for trying to get a load of inaccurate crap taught in schools, it's because science is "biased" and "unfair".
I'm not even sure what you're talking about here - if you're referring to the Intelligent Design thing, obviously that's an attempt to introduce the concept of an unprovable and unverifiable Intelligent Designer into the science of evolution. If there are legitimate counter-claims to the global warming claims, they will be based on verifiable, repeatable research. Denying reality because you don't like it is not good science, no matter what side of the issue you currently find most persuasive.
I'm not sure I'm too keen on Michael Crichton after his comments about global warming. I don't think gene patents are a swell idea, but I'm not sure I'd hold up Crichton as an authority on scientific matters.
What do Crichton's comments on global warming have to do with the views he stated in this article, and how do they in any way affect the merits of his argument? Being "keen" on someone doesn't help or hurt their credibility - if anything, this helps make Crichton's point about global-warming-as-religion - don't trust the infidel!
Even if Ken Mehlman is gay, and even he's being a hypocrite, I don't see what business Bill Maher has attempting to out Mehlman or anyone else. Any individual should have the right to some basic privacy concerning his/her private life, regardless of whatever position they hold. IMHO CNN and YouTube did exactly the right thing - enabling gross violations of privacy can't be considered OK.