"Innocence" and "guilt" don't really enter into it at the takedown-notice stage; at that point it's just one private individual or organization sending a letter to another private individual or organization. Due process, the presumption of innocence, etc. only become an issue when the matter goes to court. If I think you stole something from me, and I say, "Give it back or I'll press charges," I'm not obligated to consider your due process rights -- that's for the cops to worry about if I call them after you don't give back the item.
Please note: I'm not equating copyright infringement with theft, and I'm not happy about the MAFIAA propaganda that does. But given that the law increasingly equates the two, we should at least fight for those protections which this view of copyright disputes offers.
The takedown spam is indeed a problem, but it's not the problem in this particular case. I'll say it again: the DMCA sucks, but one of the few ways it mitigates the suckage is by providing a method for content hosting sites to immunize themselves (even if the method itself is pretty crappy.) The problem here is that the MAFIAA wants to take even that measure of protection away.
As TFA points out, the DMCA -- as unlikely as this seems -- is actually on the side of the angels in this one. It's a bad law, but one of the few good things it does is provide a measure of immunity to content-hosting sites, as long as those sites comply immediately with takedown requests. Viacom et al., having managed to get pretty much everything they wanted written into the DMCA a while back, are now arguing against the immunity provisions therein. These bastards just never quit.
Well, perhaps some of those rich immortals might, after a few centuries, have the opportunity to learn the difference between "begs the question" and "raises the question." But that's probably too much to hope for.
Given that so many well understood treatable and cureable diseases TODAY are not treated or cured, isn't it putting the cart before the horse to concentrate one life extension?
With the exception of infectious disease, most serious diseases are closely linked with the aging process. Healthy young people rarely get cancer, and they hardly ever have heart attacks or strokes.
Given our overpopulation, limited natural resources, and great resistance to any sort of population control, throttling, etc, isn't age extension an irresponsible idea?
People will, as a rule, have more children faster if they themselves don't expect to live as long. If you know you're going to be around for a thousand years, you could, say, have one child at age two hundred and another at age five hundred, and call it good; you have in fat contributed less to overpopulation than someone who expects to live fifty years and has five kids between the ages of fifteen and forty (about the norm in many third-world countries.)
Logically, if you believe that long life is the worst problem we face, then you should support some kind of Logan's Run policy where people are killed off at a relatively young age. You should also oppose any kind of medical research, or even treatment, whatsoever -- the more people die, the better! But of course you don't, and neither does any sane person.
Couldn't the effort be on making sure the earth is still habitable for at least another 1000 years?
Aargh, I really hate the "how can you be so concerned about X when Y is such a problem" argument. Look: smart, dedicated people work on the problems that interest them. De Grey may be brilliant, or he may be a kook -- the jury is still out. If the latter, then what he does isn't going to matter one way or another. If the former, then sorry, you can't just tell him or any other genius to switch gears and start focusing on (say) environmental research instead of the biology of aging. You may not consider his line of research especially worthwhile, but that's his choice.
And even if he doesn't end up finding a way for us to live a millennium or more, his work will undoubtedly produce knowledge that will be useful to other researchers working on more immediate concerns. Medical science, like all science, does not take place in a vacuum. Pretty much every treatment your doctor can give you if you get sick today is the result of centuries of work by people who were motivated by simple curiosity. Practical applications come later.
Dude, what's with the beard?
Maybe he wants to make sure that any F/OSS that comes out of his project will be successful?
If you went to Cambridge, and you can convince that institution that the work you've done in your twenty years since deserves a PhD, then you can have one too.
Well, air travel used to be restricted to the very well-off, too. Remember the phrase "jet set"? For that matter, there was a time when cars were basically toys for rich eccentrics. If rich people are willing to pay a bunch of money for a few minutes of thrill ride, that's great; they're essentially funding the R&D that will eventually bring the cost down to where the rest of us can afford it.
So, if you're diagnosed with cancer tomorrow, will you restrict yourself to treatments that were available twenty years ago, then? Somehow I kind of doubt that.
Oops. My reply was supposed to be to GPP. It is entirely true, of course, that religious objections slow scientific progress in this and many other medical and biological fields. But demand is high enough that in the long run, the research will get done and the medicines will be made available. No way of knowing how much unnecessary suffering and death people will endure in the meantime, of course, because some idiot priest or politician values their own chosen mythology over human life.
If you are diagnosed with cancer today -- any kind of cancer, and remember the word "cancer" covers an enormous range of disease -- your chances of long-term survival are much, much better than they were five years ago. Five years ago, your chances were much better than ten years ago. Etc. The general public loses interest when a promising new treatment turns out not to be The! Cure! For! Cancer!, but yes, research does make its way from the lab to the bedside. Probably no new medicine or treatment technique will ever cure all cancer, but there's a good chance it will take care of a significant portion of a certain type of cancers -- which is, of course, of infinite interest to those diagnosed with that particular disease.
Agreed, but the problem is getting enough of the gun owners to agree that things are Bad Enough. As I wrote in a friend's LJ entry (talking about state-by-state differences in gun laws, and how the "Red" areas of the country generally have much more liberal gun laws than the "Blue" areas) not long ago:
The problem, and it's a big one, is that most of the Deep Red gun owners show no motivation to defend themselves against the current most likely form of tyranny in America. UN black helicopters? They're locked, cocked, and ready to rock. But US green helicopters? Peachy keen. Go USA! Get them eeevil terrists!
These are the people who elected Bush. Twice. If you think they're going to stand up for traditional American liberties when freaks like us are being dragged off to Gitmo, you're not paying attention.
Also, while an armed populace that's sufficiently pissed off to rebel may indeed be the final option in the case of governmental tyranny, it's not a solution anyone should hope for. Civil wars are ugly, ugly things, and we should try every possible legal solution before resorting to blood in the streets.
Indeed. We will also hear those for whom the Second is the only Amendment that matters telling us that torture, wiretapping, and disregard of habeas corpus telling us that it's okay as long as we get to keep our guns. IOW, there's plenty of hypocrisy to go around here, spread across the political spectrum.
Again, not using Google. Their one foray into academic search is so far not useful for people who have funding and thus access to much more advanced and complete tools
That's not quite fair; Google Scholar does return a lot of crap, but mixed in with the crap is some useful stuff. A big part of its usefulness is that it doesn't restrict itself to a specific field -- if you know you're looking for a paper in a particular field, you're right that there is probably a domain-specific database that will give better results, but surprisingly useful results often turn up outside the field.
Furthermore, his breathless proclamations of "everything we thought we knew was wrong" betray his total lack of knowledge about genetics. The simple Mendelian, dominant/recessive model is a useful pedagogical tool, but we've known perfectly well that it was much more complex than that for a very long time... like, since before we had any idea that DNA was the carrier of genetic information. Statistical genetics is a century-old field.
This is a fairly common phenomenon, and I think it represents a kind of (usually unintentional) collusion between scientists and journalists. The scientist says something that contradicts some simple science lesson the journalist half-remembers from elementary school. The journalist thinks it's brand-new, paradigm-breaking stuff, and the scientist, having an ego like everyone else, plays along. Journalists need to remember that by the time they hear about any scientific advance, it's probably been discussed in the academic community for at least a decade, perhaps much longer; and scientists need to be honest and acknowledge this, not play to the look of wide-eyed wonder.
Brenner, like a lot of older wet-lab scientists, makes some good points but goes way too far in his criticisms. High-throughput biology is increasing our understanding of basic cellular processes at an exponential rate. The key point he misses, I think, is that high-throughput techniques are certainly low-output on a per-experiment basis compared to traditional tecnhiques -- but "low" is not the same as "no", and if you do a very large number of experiments in parallel, there's a good chance that one or two of them will yield useful data. Furthermore, with large public repositories like GEO, there's a good possibility that the hundreds or thousands of experiments that don't yield useful results for your work can still be useful to someone else.
Exactly. The "deluge of data" is a useful tool, no doubt about it. But Google doesn't make the job of collecting and analyzing data irrelevant any more than the advent of the telescope made the skills and knowledge of astronomers obsolete.
I particularly love this line from TFA:
For instance, Google conquered the advertising world with nothing more than applied mathematics. It didn't pretend to know anything about the culture and conventions of advertising -- it just assumed that better data, with better analytical tools, would win the day. And Google was right.
(Applied) science at its best! "The culture and conventions of advertising" are basically folk wisdom, and folk wisdom is often right but more often wrong. Google took a scientific, unbiased view of how to move bits around and make money with them: start with as few preconceptions as possible, analyze the data, see what happens.
Indeed they do -- and circumference scales as the square of length.
Consider a cylinder twice as tall as it is wide. (Which is pretty close to the proportions of the human body, excluding arms and shoulders.) If you increase the height of the cylinder by a factor of x, then the width of the cylinder will also increase by a factor of x -- but the circumference of the cylinder, which corresponds here to waist circumference, will increase by a factor of x^2.
You should take the square of the proportion; if the average American is $x$ times the height of the average Japanese, then in proportion the American waist circumference would be $x$^2 the Japanese.
Is that why Opera, a proprietary browser, far outshines Firefox,
Matter of taste, Personally, I think the various flavors of Moz brwosers are better right now than Opera, although there have certainly been times when Opera was ahead. Quantifying "far outshines" would be pretty difficult in this domain.
and why Mozilla corporation is recording record profits?
There may be a few ideologues who believe it's morally wrong for any F/OSS company to make a profit, but they're in a distinct minority. Most of us "FOSSheads" as you put it are glad to see F/OSS companies making money, because it shows that there's a sustainable business model there. Make no mistake, F/OSS isn't going away any time soon whether there's money to be made in it or not. But there will undoubtedly be more of it if some of it is profitable.
Your 13375P33X-ing "FOSShead" is a strawman. Most F/OSS users don't use it because it's morally superior. They use it because it's good at a partcular task, because it's available for a wide variety of platforms, and because the price is right.
That's why I said "since the Middle Ages." Rome at its best was a high point of liberalism; as another poster pointed out, its memory was an inspiration and example for more recent liberal thinkers. But it was in the Rennaisance -- well before the early 1800's -- that modern ideas of liberty began their long upward climb.
I agree with everything you say about the modern corporate media, etc. I maintain that historically, it's still just a downturn on a rising line. Granted, it's a big downturn -- to carry on with the economic analogy, we may well be living currently in the midst of the Great Depression. But just as the average Depression-era American, poor as they may have been, was immeasurably richer than any medieval peasant, so are we even now living in a far more liberal world than our ancestors did even at the height of Rome or Athens or Tyre.
Big picture, on a global scale, that's true: politics have been getting steadily more liberal ever since the Middle Ages, and so those who hold to political views acquired in their youth always seem more conservative as they age. The interesting thing is that in American politics over the last couple of generations or so, the opposite is true. Eisenhower would be considered a mainstream Democrat these days, while Nixon, seen at the time as representing the hard right, would today be a "Blue Dog" Democrat or maybe a "RINO" Republican. Conversely, both Clintons, and Obama, support policies largely in accord with the Republican party of Eisenhower's day. Carter is remembered today as an extreme leftist, but by the standards of the day, he was actually seen as a solidly conservative Democrat. Even Saint Reagan, no matter how much today's Republicans venerate him, would be considered suspiciously leftish by modern Republicans if he were a new candidate running for office today.
It's a blip, of course, kind of like in the stock market. In the very long term, stocks always go up. But they do so on a jagged line, and those downward dips sure can make a lot of people's lives miserable.
Slashdot Mirror
Your trust in the leaders selected by the Glorious People is noted and appreciated, tovarisch.
"Innocence" and "guilt" don't really enter into it at the takedown-notice stage; at that point it's just one private individual or organization sending a letter to another private individual or organization. Due process, the presumption of innocence, etc. only become an issue when the matter goes to court. If I think you stole something from me, and I say, "Give it back or I'll press charges," I'm not obligated to consider your due process rights -- that's for the cops to worry about if I call them after you don't give back the item.
Please note: I'm not equating copyright infringement with theft, and I'm not happy about the MAFIAA propaganda that does. But given that the law increasingly equates the two, we should at least fight for those protections which this view of copyright disputes offers.
The takedown spam is indeed a problem, but it's not the problem in this particular case. I'll say it again: the DMCA sucks, but one of the few ways it mitigates the suckage is by providing a method for content hosting sites to immunize themselves (even if the method itself is pretty crappy.) The problem here is that the MAFIAA wants to take even that measure of protection away.
As TFA points out, the DMCA -- as unlikely as this seems -- is actually on the side of the angels in this one. It's a bad law, but one of the few good things it does is provide a measure of immunity to content-hosting sites, as long as those sites comply immediately with takedown requests. Viacom et al., having managed to get pretty much everything they wanted written into the DMCA a while back, are now arguing against the immunity provisions therein. These bastards just never quit.
And people wonder where the stereotype of Democrats being spineless cunts comes from.
Some points to consider:
* Every Senator who voted against the bill was either a Democrat or an Independent who caucuses with the Democrats (Sanders.)
* A majority of Democratic Senators voted against the bill.
* All the Republicans present voted for the bill.
The Democratic House and Senate leadership is spineless, no doubt about it, but please don't confuse that with the entire party.
Presumably, de Grey is smart enough to prefer the observable reality of life in the here-and-now to the fairy tale of an afterlife.
Well, perhaps some of those rich immortals might, after a few centuries, have the opportunity to learn the difference between "begs the question" and "raises the question." But that's probably too much to hope for.
Given that so many well understood treatable and cureable diseases TODAY are not treated or cured, isn't it putting the cart before the horse to concentrate one life extension?
With the exception of infectious disease, most serious diseases are closely linked with the aging process. Healthy young people rarely get cancer, and they hardly ever have heart attacks or strokes.
Given our overpopulation, limited natural resources, and great resistance to any sort of population control, throttling, etc, isn't age extension an irresponsible idea?
People will, as a rule, have more children faster if they themselves don't expect to live as long. If you know you're going to be around for a thousand years, you could, say, have one child at age two hundred and another at age five hundred, and call it good; you have in fat contributed less to overpopulation than someone who expects to live fifty years and has five kids between the ages of fifteen and forty (about the norm in many third-world countries.)
Logically, if you believe that long life is the worst problem we face, then you should support some kind of Logan's Run policy where people are killed off at a relatively young age. You should also oppose any kind of medical research, or even treatment, whatsoever -- the more people die, the better! But of course you don't, and neither does any sane person.
Couldn't the effort be on making sure the earth is still habitable for at least another 1000 years?
Aargh, I really hate the "how can you be so concerned about X when Y is such a problem" argument. Look: smart, dedicated people work on the problems that interest them. De Grey may be brilliant, or he may be a kook -- the jury is still out. If the latter, then what he does isn't going to matter one way or another. If the former, then sorry, you can't just tell him or any other genius to switch gears and start focusing on (say) environmental research instead of the biology of aging. You may not consider his line of research especially worthwhile, but that's his choice.
And even if he doesn't end up finding a way for us to live a millennium or more, his work will undoubtedly produce knowledge that will be useful to other researchers working on more immediate concerns. Medical science, like all science, does not take place in a vacuum. Pretty much every treatment your doctor can give you if you get sick today is the result of centuries of work by people who were motivated by simple curiosity. Practical applications come later.
Dude, what's with the beard?
Maybe he wants to make sure that any F/OSS that comes out of his project will be successful?
If you went to Cambridge, and you can convince that institution that the work you've done in your twenty years since deserves a PhD, then you can have one too.
Well, air travel used to be restricted to the very well-off, too. Remember the phrase "jet set"? For that matter, there was a time when cars were basically toys for rich eccentrics. If rich people are willing to pay a bunch of money for a few minutes of thrill ride, that's great; they're essentially funding the R&D that will eventually bring the cost down to where the rest of us can afford it.
So, if you're diagnosed with cancer tomorrow, will you restrict yourself to treatments that were available twenty years ago, then? Somehow I kind of doubt that.
Oops. My reply was supposed to be to GPP. It is entirely true, of course, that religious objections slow scientific progress in this and many other medical and biological fields. But demand is high enough that in the long run, the research will get done and the medicines will be made available. No way of knowing how much unnecessary suffering and death people will endure in the meantime, of course, because some idiot priest or politician values their own chosen mythology over human life.
If you are diagnosed with cancer today -- any kind of cancer, and remember the word "cancer" covers an enormous range of disease -- your chances of long-term survival are much, much better than they were five years ago. Five years ago, your chances were much better than ten years ago. Etc. The general public loses interest when a promising new treatment turns out not to be The! Cure! For! Cancer!, but yes, research does make its way from the lab to the bedside. Probably no new medicine or treatment technique will ever cure all cancer, but there's a good chance it will take care of a significant portion of a certain type of cancers -- which is, of course, of infinite interest to those diagnosed with that particular disease.
Agreed, but the problem is getting enough of the gun owners to agree that things are Bad Enough. As I wrote in a friend's LJ entry (talking about state-by-state differences in gun laws, and how the "Red" areas of the country generally have much more liberal gun laws than the "Blue" areas) not long ago:
The problem, and it's a big one, is that most of the Deep Red gun owners show no motivation to defend themselves against the current most likely form of tyranny in America. UN black helicopters? They're locked, cocked, and ready to rock. But US green helicopters? Peachy keen. Go USA! Get them eeevil terrists!
These are the people who elected Bush. Twice. If you think they're going to stand up for traditional American liberties when freaks like us are being dragged off to Gitmo, you're not paying attention.
Also, while an armed populace that's sufficiently pissed off to rebel may indeed be the final option in the case of governmental tyranny, it's not a solution anyone should hope for. Civil wars are ugly, ugly things, and we should try every possible legal solution before resorting to blood in the streets.
Indeed. We will also hear those for whom the Second is the only Amendment that matters telling us that torture, wiretapping, and disregard of habeas corpus telling us that it's okay as long as we get to keep our guns. IOW, there's plenty of hypocrisy to go around here, spread across the political spectrum.
Again, not using Google. Their one foray into academic search is so far not useful for people who have funding and thus access to much more advanced and complete tools
That's not quite fair; Google Scholar does return a lot of crap, but mixed in with the crap is some useful stuff. A big part of its usefulness is that it doesn't restrict itself to a specific field -- if you know you're looking for a paper in a particular field, you're right that there is probably a domain-specific database that will give better results, but surprisingly useful results often turn up outside the field.
Furthermore, his breathless proclamations of "everything we thought we knew was wrong" betray his total lack of knowledge about genetics. The simple Mendelian, dominant/recessive model is a useful pedagogical tool, but we've known perfectly well that it was much more complex than that for a very long time ... like, since before we had any idea that DNA was the carrier of genetic information. Statistical genetics is a century-old field.
This is a fairly common phenomenon, and I think it represents a kind of (usually unintentional) collusion between scientists and journalists. The scientist says something that contradicts some simple science lesson the journalist half-remembers from elementary school. The journalist thinks it's brand-new, paradigm-breaking stuff, and the scientist, having an ego like everyone else, plays along. Journalists need to remember that by the time they hear about any scientific advance, it's probably been discussed in the academic community for at least a decade, perhaps much longer; and scientists need to be honest and acknowledge this, not play to the look of wide-eyed wonder.
Brenner, like a lot of older wet-lab scientists, makes some good points but goes way too far in his criticisms. High-throughput biology is increasing our understanding of basic cellular processes at an exponential rate. The key point he misses, I think, is that high-throughput techniques are certainly low-output on a per-experiment basis compared to traditional tecnhiques -- but "low" is not the same as "no", and if you do a very large number of experiments in parallel, there's a good chance that one or two of them will yield useful data. Furthermore, with large public repositories like GEO, there's a good possibility that the hundreds or thousands of experiments that don't yield useful results for your work can still be useful to someone else.
Exactly. The "deluge of data" is a useful tool, no doubt about it. But Google doesn't make the job of collecting and analyzing data irrelevant any more than the advent of the telescope made the skills and knowledge of astronomers obsolete.
I particularly love this line from TFA:
For instance, Google conquered the advertising world with nothing more than applied mathematics. It didn't pretend to know anything about the culture and conventions of advertising -- it just assumed that better data, with better analytical tools, would win the day. And Google was right.
(Applied) science at its best! "The culture and conventions of advertising" are basically folk wisdom, and folk wisdom is often right but more often wrong. Google took a scientific, unbiased view of how to move bits around and make money with them: start with as few preconceptions as possible, analyze the data, see what happens.
[palm to forehead]
Aargh. Right.
Okay, I'm just going to shut up now.
I'm afraid not. Lengths scale linearly.
Indeed they do -- and circumference scales as the square of length.
Consider a cylinder twice as tall as it is wide. (Which is pretty close to the proportions of the human body, excluding arms and shoulders.) If you increase the height of the cylinder by a factor of x, then the width of the cylinder will also increase by a factor of x -- but the circumference of the cylinder, which corresponds here to waist circumference, will increase by a factor of x^2.
Come on, this is not that hard to figure out.
You should take the square of the proportion; if the average American is $x$ times the height of the average Japanese, then in proportion the American waist circumference would be $x$^2 the Japanese.
Is that why Opera, a proprietary browser, far outshines Firefox,
Matter of taste, Personally, I think the various flavors of Moz brwosers are better right now than Opera, although there have certainly been times when Opera was ahead. Quantifying "far outshines" would be pretty difficult in this domain.
and why Mozilla corporation is recording record profits?
There may be a few ideologues who believe it's morally wrong for any F/OSS company to make a profit, but they're in a distinct minority. Most of us "FOSSheads" as you put it are glad to see F/OSS companies making money, because it shows that there's a sustainable business model there. Make no mistake, F/OSS isn't going away any time soon whether there's money to be made in it or not. But there will undoubtedly be more of it if some of it is profitable.
Your 13375P33X-ing "FOSShead" is a strawman. Most F/OSS users don't use it because it's morally superior. They use it because it's good at a partcular task, because it's available for a wide variety of platforms, and because the price is right.
That's why I said "since the Middle Ages." Rome at its best was a high point of liberalism; as another poster pointed out, its memory was an inspiration and example for more recent liberal thinkers. But it was in the Rennaisance -- well before the early 1800's -- that modern ideas of liberty began their long upward climb.
I agree with everything you say about the modern corporate media, etc. I maintain that historically, it's still just a downturn on a rising line. Granted, it's a big downturn -- to carry on with the economic analogy, we may well be living currently in the midst of the Great Depression. But just as the average Depression-era American, poor as they may have been, was immeasurably richer than any medieval peasant, so are we even now living in a far more liberal world than our ancestors did even at the height of Rome or Athens or Tyre.
Big picture, on a global scale, that's true: politics have been getting steadily more liberal ever since the Middle Ages, and so those who hold to political views acquired in their youth always seem more conservative as they age. The interesting thing is that in American politics over the last couple of generations or so, the opposite is true. Eisenhower would be considered a mainstream Democrat these days, while Nixon, seen at the time as representing the hard right, would today be a "Blue Dog" Democrat or maybe a "RINO" Republican. Conversely, both Clintons, and Obama, support policies largely in accord with the Republican party of Eisenhower's day. Carter is remembered today as an extreme leftist, but by the standards of the day, he was actually seen as a solidly conservative Democrat. Even Saint Reagan, no matter how much today's Republicans venerate him, would be considered suspiciously leftish by modern Republicans if he were a new candidate running for office today.
It's a blip, of course, kind of like in the stock market. In the very long term, stocks always go up. But they do so on a jagged line, and those downward dips sure can make a lot of people's lives miserable.