I'm personally of the opinion that nothing science concludes will ever be able to prove or disprove the existence of (a) God(s), so I'm not sure why this discussion keeps coming up.
It keeps coming up because religious ideologues keep insisting that science is wrong because it contradicts their beliefs. And they want to base public policy and education on those beliefs. The beliefs themselves are a personal matter, of course, and they've got every right to believe that Rapture is imminent or that life was created in its current form 6000 years ago; the conflict occurs when they try to base things like environmental management or what's taught in high-school science classes on it.
Honestly, the religion bashing is completely pointless and is getting really, really old hat.
The science bashing isn't pointless at all -- it's a means of gaining political power -- but it's definitely old hat, which doesn't keep fanatics from doing it. Scientists who bash religion, e.g. Dawkins, do so out of disgust with religion's continual insistence on trying to replace knowledge with ignorance, and the consequences thereof.
"My fellow Americans, today we face many pressing issues: the war in Iraq, assaults on traditional liberties at home and abroad, a difficult economy, climate change, and the list goes on. There's another issue I'd like to address today, and it may seem like it's not quite on the scale of those others. But it's an important one, and it has implications for everything I just mentioned, because the way we're going to solve those problems isn't just to ignore them and hope they'll go away; it's to use our heads and figure out solutions. More than two hundred years ago, the Founders of this great nation decided that one of the best ways to do that was to make sure that smart people who came up with important ideas were rewarded for their work, and I'd like to thank the Copyright Alliance for bringing this issue up.
"Today, I am calling on Congress to fulfill their Constitutional duty to 'secure for a limited time' copyrights and patents. And limited time means limited time. It doesn't mean extending copyright every time Mickey Mouse might be due to enter the public domain. It doesn't mean sitting on patents for things that you didn't invent until someone else figures out how to make money off it, and then suing them out of the blue. When the Constitution was signed, it meant twenty years. If twenty years was good enough for James Madison, it's good enough for me. So I urge Congress to send me a bill restoring the terms of intellectual property law to their original forms, and making it clear that it's a civil matter, not a job for the FBI, because you know, Osama bin Laden is still out there and frankly I think the FBI has more important things to do."
"Thank you, good night, and God bless America."
But that's probably not the answer CA is looking for.;)
There's a very large difference between giving fingerprints and having your house or rectum searched.
The difference is only one of degree, not of kind.
There are two components to gathering fingerprints: The initial fingerprinting and the "match" found at an incriminating location.
Equivalently, there are two components to searching your house: the initial search and the "match" of something in your house that the cops think is illegal, or might be indicative of illegal activity -- e.g. "drug paraphernalia," even if the only thing you ever smoke in the pipe they turn up is tobacco. The point is that, without probable cause, they shouldn't be looking in the first place.
Your privacy only becomes violated by fingerprints when a crime is comitted AND it can additionally provide evidence you were NOT in said location if your status as a criminal is ever questioned.
Your privacy is violated the minute they search without probable cause, regardless of what they're searching is your house or your fingertips. Period. What part of "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, papers, and effects" don't you understand?
I think what's going on is an overzeaous application of carelessly written privacy laws. It's not that NJ (or any of the other states on the list) doesn't want you to see the map; it's that the states have laws preventing companies from doing certain kinds of data mining involving other people's genetic data necessary to give you meaningful results. (SNP maps in isolation are pretty useless.) Most likely the laws were written when having this kind of test done for an affordable price was impossible. There are good reasons for safeguarding medical data of all kinds, most certainly including genetic data, but the laws should keep pace with the technology.
What I thing about these costs is that they should relate to your personal history. DNA isn't part of your personal history (one could argue on that, I won't for now). You're not responsible in any way of what your DNA looks like.
You don't get any choice about when you were born, either -- but they'll still charge higher premiums for you when you're 70 than when you're 30.
Very true, which IMO is an object lesson in why we shouldn't allow gene patents. But that's beside the point. The type of SNP mapping these companies are offering is all based on work that's well in the public domain.
What they're offering isn't "full sequencing." It's looking at a very specific set of markers (SNPs) which are known to vary widely between individuals. SNP stands for single nucleotide polymorphism -- that means one base pair or bp. There are about three billion bps in the human genome, of which these companies identify about a million, or one out of every three thousand. Such markers are certainly sufficient for genealogy, and are often enough to locate the regions of the genome on which genes predictive for certain diseases may be found, but they're nowhere near the full sequence. By way of analogy (I'm sure someone will come along to punch holes in this, but I think it's a pretty good one) a million-SNP map of your genome is like the satellite view of your house you get from Google; a full sequence is like knowing the location of every blade of grass on your lawn.
Fortunately, the science behind this was almost all grant-funded research published in academic journals, rather than corporate R&D kept under lock and key as trade secrets or described in overbroad patents which prevent anyone from using the knowledge without paying an absurdly high price. The genomic revolution, of which this story is a very small part, is an object lesson in the usefulness of government-funded research and academic publication.
Bullshit. The Supreme Court, at least in its current incarnation*, is authoritarian above all. If a state is more authoritarian than the federal government, the Supremes are all about states' rights. If the federal government is more authoritarian than a state, then somehow it falls under interstate commerce. Either way, if there's some way to lock someone up, deprive them of property, stifle dissent, or do the bidding of big corporations under color of law, they're for it.
*To be fair, this is the way the Court has been throughout most of its history; those landmark decisions such as Miranda in which it actually moves to protect individual freedoms are remembered mostly for their rarity.
The legislation doesn't affect textbook companies, like McGraw-Hill, Houghton Mifflin, Holt, Prentice Hall, and Harcourt. It's the academic journals--small outfits, highly specialized, low margins.
That used to be true. It isn't any more. Major journal publishers like Elsevier, Springer, and Taylor & Francis are also major textbook companies. It's part of the wave of consolidation over the last couple of decades in the publishing world as a whole, and these days there's a lot of money in journal publishing.
The poor guy is unemployed and has seven (that we know about so far) children to support.
The "poor guy" was a top executive for one of the biggest corporations in the world. I can pretty much guarantee you that he and his litter o' puppies aren't going to be out on the street any time soon. They may have to scale down their lifestyle a bit... like, say, sell one of their yachts... but this isn't $JOE_DOWNSIZED_TECH_WORKER we're talking about.
911 calls were the first thing I thought of, too. Any business owner who jams a call about somebody having a heart attack would be sued into oblivion, and deserve it.
For restaurants, hair salons, etc., there's a simple solution -- just make it a policy, and have the guts to enforce it. Post little "No cell phone usage inside this establishment" signs. If people ignore the signs, politely remind them of the policy. If they continue to ignore it, throw them out, just like with any other customer who violates a policy of the business. Make common-sense exceptions for 911 calls. (They could even put that on their signs, if they wanted to.) Whatever business they'd lose in aggrieved cell-phone-addicted customers, they'd probably gain in others who appreciate the peace and quiet. The jamming thing is sneaky, cowardly, and dangerous.
Google is not a seach company, it's an advertising company. It's really weird that this fact doesn't stick in people minds.
That's like saying CBS is an advertising company, not a television company, or the the NYT is an advertising company, not a newspaper company. Yes, they make most (or in Google's case, nearly all) of their money off ads, but the reason people buy ads with them is because of the number of people who pay attention to their core product, which in Google's case is still search. There are a million crappy ad sites out there on the web, but none of them make the kind of money Google does, for the very simple reason that nobody has any reason other than the ads to go to those sites.
My suspicion is that they wouldn't do well in the wild. Aggression and strength in the natural world have to be balanced with food requirements, which is basically why not every living thing is super-strong, super-fast, and super-tough. Dire wolves are gone for a reason... These mice "eat twice as much and weigh half as much," which sounds great to people living in the modern industrialized world, but is a pretty serious liability for a wild animal.
Also, they may be amazingly tough for mice, but you know, they're still mice. No matter how big and strong they may be, there are still plenty of critters bigger and stronger than they. If their aggression translates into a lack of caution around predators, then they'd essentially be nothing but a nice lean snack for health-conscious cats.;)
Textbooks are citable; encyclopedias, whether wiki or dead-tree, are not. Any encyclopedia should be treated as a starting point for further research, not as an end. So if the guy at the desk next to you wrote the Wikipedia article you're reading, using it in your research is kind of like going up to the guy and asking him if he can help you figure out the subject and if he's found any good references. You wouldn't cite that kind of conversation either.
I just don't get the "groupthink" complaints. Yes, it's probably fair to say that majority of Slashdot readers are pro-F/OSS and anti-Microsoft, but I've seen plenty of good posts defending Windows (for example) modded up. The posts that get modded down tend to be the ones that repeat the same "most popular = best" arguments that anyone with half a brain and any experience knows are simply not true. If you make a well-written, well-thought-out, and factually correct post that points out why Windows does something in particular better than Linux does, people will recognize that and mod accordingly. If you post something that's just a slightly more sophisticated version of "open sores is teh suxorz," don't be surprised when you lose a little karma over it.
I've got news for you: just because you graduate from a college does not make you entitled to a job. You only get the job if the employer believes he can make more from you than he spends on you. Or do you "expect to get paid" just because you graduated with a 2.4 GPA and/or a transcript-full of blowoff courses and no experience?
I've got news for you: just because you run a business does not make you entitled to decent employees. You only get good, hard-working, talented employees if they believe they can make enough from you to compensate them for the effort they put into the job. Or do you "expect work to get done" just because you treat your employees like idiots and/or interchangeable parts?
And for the nitpickers: "meliorist" was the wrong word to use there; I should have looked it up first. I'm not sure what the word I'm looking for is, though. "Hegelian," maybe, for the belief that between any two antithetical points of view there must always be a reasonable synthesis. In this case, there really isn't.
I suppose I should have made it clear in my post that I'm not a creationist, and I think that AiG is bunk. What I was trying to do was counter the meliorist attitude of the OP -- there seem to be a lot of folks out there who aren't exactly creationists themselves, but who have convinced themselves that creationism (and other fundamentalist claptrap) "isn't really that bad," or "no one really believes that stuff anyway except a few fringe wackos," and "anyway, scientists can be fanatics too." My point in posting the AiG link was to show that:
- Yes, it really is that bad;
- There are a lot of people who believe that stuff, sincerely and absolutely, and many of them are -- if perhaps still wackos -- certainly very well-spoken and serious in their arguments;
- And there is no reasonable comparison between the scientific viewpoint, which has as its core tenet the understanding that our current state of knowledge is always incomplete and is subject to change as new evidence comes in, and the fundamentalist viewpoint, which insists that its chosen scriptures represent absolute, immutable, and irrefutable truth.
They did pass proper legislation. In the states. Then the EPA, a.k.a. a wholly owned and operated subsidiary of BigEnergyCo Inc.(r)(tm), overstepped its bounds and told them they couldn't. They're suing to enforce their rights.
This lawsuit has no legal ground to stand on.
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people."
That's interesting... to me it reads like a list of states that actually contribute more money to the federal coffers than they take in, unlike the red states which whine about Big Gub'mint while sucking up other people's tax dollars.
They are doing something real: imposing tighter emissions regulations. Or rather, they were going to, until the federal government told them they couldn't. Now they're suing so they can get back to, you know, doing something real again.
News flash: not every political conflict is just showboating.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm personally of the opinion that nothing science concludes will ever be able to prove or disprove the existence of (a) God(s), so I'm not sure why this discussion keeps coming up.
It keeps coming up because religious ideologues keep insisting that science is wrong because it contradicts their beliefs. And they want to base public policy and education on those beliefs. The beliefs themselves are a personal matter, of course, and they've got every right to believe that Rapture is imminent or that life was created in its current form 6000 years ago; the conflict occurs when they try to base things like environmental management or what's taught in high-school science classes on it.
Honestly, the religion bashing is completely pointless and is getting really, really old hat.
The science bashing isn't pointless at all -- it's a means of gaining political power -- but it's definitely old hat, which doesn't keep fanatics from doing it. Scientists who bash religion, e.g. Dawkins, do so out of disgust with religion's continual insistence on trying to replace knowledge with ignorance, and the consequences thereof.
"My fellow Americans, today we face many pressing issues: the war in Iraq, assaults on traditional liberties at home and abroad, a difficult economy, climate change, and the list goes on. There's another issue I'd like to address today, and it may seem like it's not quite on the scale of those others. But it's an important one, and it has implications for everything I just mentioned, because the way we're going to solve those problems isn't just to ignore them and hope they'll go away; it's to use our heads and figure out solutions. More than two hundred years ago, the Founders of this great nation decided that one of the best ways to do that was to make sure that smart people who came up with important ideas were rewarded for their work, and I'd like to thank the Copyright Alliance for bringing this issue up.
;)
"Today, I am calling on Congress to fulfill their Constitutional duty to 'secure for a limited time' copyrights and patents. And limited time means limited time. It doesn't mean extending copyright every time Mickey Mouse might be due to enter the public domain. It doesn't mean sitting on patents for things that you didn't invent until someone else figures out how to make money off it, and then suing them out of the blue. When the Constitution was signed, it meant twenty years. If twenty years was good enough for James Madison, it's good enough for me. So I urge Congress to send me a bill restoring the terms of intellectual property law to their original forms, and making it clear that it's a civil matter, not a job for the FBI, because you know, Osama bin Laden is still out there and frankly I think the FBI has more important things to do."
"Thank you, good night, and God bless America."
But that's probably not the answer CA is looking for.
So, how do they serve them?
There's a very large difference between giving fingerprints and having your house or rectum searched.
The difference is only one of degree, not of kind.
There are two components to gathering fingerprints: The initial fingerprinting and the "match" found at an incriminating location.
Equivalently, there are two components to searching your house: the initial search and the "match" of something in your house that the cops think is illegal, or might be indicative of illegal activity -- e.g. "drug paraphernalia," even if the only thing you ever smoke in the pipe they turn up is tobacco. The point is that, without probable cause, they shouldn't be looking in the first place.
Your privacy only becomes violated by fingerprints when a crime is comitted AND it can additionally provide evidence you were NOT in said location if your status as a criminal is ever questioned.
Your privacy is violated the minute they search without probable cause, regardless of what they're searching is your house or your fingertips. Period. What part of "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, papers, and effects" don't you understand?
I think what's going on is an overzeaous application of carelessly written privacy laws. It's not that NJ (or any of the other states on the list) doesn't want you to see the map; it's that the states have laws preventing companies from doing certain kinds of data mining involving other people's genetic data necessary to give you meaningful results. (SNP maps in isolation are pretty useless.) Most likely the laws were written when having this kind of test done for an affordable price was impossible. There are good reasons for safeguarding medical data of all kinds, most certainly including genetic data, but the laws should keep pace with the technology.
What I thing about these costs is that they should relate to your personal history. DNA isn't part of your personal history (one could argue on that, I won't for now). You're not responsible in any way of what your DNA looks like.
You don't get any choice about when you were born, either -- but they'll still charge higher premiums for you when you're 70 than when you're 30.
Very true, which IMO is an object lesson in why we shouldn't allow gene patents. But that's beside the point. The type of SNP mapping these companies are offering is all based on work that's well in the public domain.
What they're offering isn't "full sequencing." It's looking at a very specific set of markers (SNPs) which are known to vary widely between individuals. SNP stands for single nucleotide polymorphism -- that means one base pair or bp. There are about three billion bps in the human genome, of which these companies identify about a million, or one out of every three thousand. Such markers are certainly sufficient for genealogy, and are often enough to locate the regions of the genome on which genes predictive for certain diseases may be found, but they're nowhere near the full sequence. By way of analogy (I'm sure someone will come along to punch holes in this, but I think it's a pretty good one) a million-SNP map of your genome is like the satellite view of your house you get from Google; a full sequence is like knowing the location of every blade of grass on your lawn.
Fortunately, the science behind this was almost all grant-funded research published in academic journals, rather than corporate R&D kept under lock and key as trade secrets or described in overbroad patents which prevent anyone from using the knowledge without paying an absurdly high price. The genomic revolution, of which this story is a very small part, is an object lesson in the usefulness of government-funded research and academic publication.
Bullshit. The Supreme Court, at least in its current incarnation*, is authoritarian above all. If a state is more authoritarian than the federal government, the Supremes are all about states' rights. If the federal government is more authoritarian than a state, then somehow it falls under interstate commerce. Either way, if there's some way to lock someone up, deprive them of property, stifle dissent, or do the bidding of big corporations under color of law, they're for it.
*To be fair, this is the way the Court has been throughout most of its history; those landmark decisions such as Miranda in which it actually moves to protect individual freedoms are remembered mostly for their rarity.
The legislation doesn't affect textbook companies, like McGraw-Hill, Houghton Mifflin, Holt, Prentice Hall, and Harcourt. It's the academic journals--small outfits, highly specialized, low margins.
That used to be true. It isn't any more. Major journal publishers like Elsevier, Springer, and Taylor & Francis are also major textbook companies. It's part of the wave of consolidation over the last couple of decades in the publishing world as a whole, and these days there's a lot of money in journal publishing.
The poor guy is unemployed and has seven (that we know about so far) children to support.
... like, say, sell one of their yachts ... but this isn't $JOE_DOWNSIZED_TECH_WORKER we're talking about.
The "poor guy" was a top executive for one of the biggest corporations in the world. I can pretty much guarantee you that he and his litter o' puppies aren't going to be out on the street any time soon. They may have to scale down their lifestyle a bit
911 calls were the first thing I thought of, too. Any business owner who jams a call about somebody having a heart attack would be sued into oblivion, and deserve it.
For restaurants, hair salons, etc., there's a simple solution -- just make it a policy, and have the guts to enforce it. Post little "No cell phone usage inside this establishment" signs. If people ignore the signs, politely remind them of the policy. If they continue to ignore it, throw them out, just like with any other customer who violates a policy of the business. Make common-sense exceptions for 911 calls. (They could even put that on their signs, if they wanted to.) Whatever business they'd lose in aggrieved cell-phone-addicted customers, they'd probably gain in others who appreciate the peace and quiet. The jamming thing is sneaky, cowardly, and dangerous.
Google is not a seach company, it's an advertising company. It's really weird that this fact doesn't stick in people minds.
That's like saying CBS is an advertising company, not a television company, or the the NYT is an advertising company, not a newspaper company. Yes, they make most (or in Google's case, nearly all) of their money off ads, but the reason people buy ads with them is because of the number of people who pay attention to their core product, which in Google's case is still search. There are a million crappy ad sites out there on the web, but none of them make the kind of money Google does, for the very simple reason that nobody has any reason other than the ads to go to those sites.
My suspicion is that they wouldn't do well in the wild. Aggression and strength in the natural world have to be balanced with food requirements, which is basically why not every living thing is super-strong, super-fast, and super-tough. Dire wolves are gone for a reason ... These mice "eat twice as much and weigh half as much," which sounds great to people living in the modern industrialized world, but is a pretty serious liability for a wild animal.
;)
Also, they may be amazingly tough for mice, but you know, they're still mice. No matter how big and strong they may be, there are still plenty of critters bigger and stronger than they. If their aggression translates into a lack of caution around predators, then they'd essentially be nothing but a nice lean snack for health-conscious cats.
Textbooks are citable; encyclopedias, whether wiki or dead-tree, are not. Any encyclopedia should be treated as a starting point for further research, not as an end. So if the guy at the desk next to you wrote the Wikipedia article you're reading, using it in your research is kind of like going up to the guy and asking him if he can help you figure out the subject and if he's found any good references. You wouldn't cite that kind of conversation either.
I just don't get the "groupthink" complaints. Yes, it's probably fair to say that majority of Slashdot readers are pro-F/OSS and anti-Microsoft, but I've seen plenty of good posts defending Windows (for example) modded up. The posts that get modded down tend to be the ones that repeat the same "most popular = best" arguments that anyone with half a brain and any experience knows are simply not true. If you make a well-written, well-thought-out, and factually correct post that points out why Windows does something in particular better than Linux does, people will recognize that and mod accordingly. If you post something that's just a slightly more sophisticated version of "open sores is teh suxorz," don't be surprised when you lose a little karma over it.
I've got news for you: just because you graduate from a college does not make you entitled to a job. You only get the job if the employer believes he can make more from you than he spends on you. Or do you "expect to get paid" just because you graduated with a 2.4 GPA and/or a transcript-full of blowoff courses and no experience?
I've got news for you: just because you run a business does not make you entitled to decent employees. You only get good, hard-working, talented employees if they believe they can make enough from you to compensate them for the effort they put into the job. Or do you "expect work to get done" just because you treat your employees like idiots and/or interchangeable parts?
And for the nitpickers: "meliorist" was the wrong word to use there; I should have looked it up first. I'm not sure what the word I'm looking for is, though. "Hegelian," maybe, for the belief that between any two antithetical points of view there must always be a reasonable synthesis. In this case, there really isn't.
I suppose I should have made it clear in my post that I'm not a creationist, and I think that AiG is bunk. What I was trying to do was counter the meliorist attitude of the OP -- there seem to be a lot of folks out there who aren't exactly creationists themselves, but who have convinced themselves that creationism (and other fundamentalist claptrap) "isn't really that bad," or "no one really believes that stuff anyway except a few fringe wackos," and "anyway, scientists can be fanatics too." My point in posting the AiG link was to show that:
- Yes, it really is that bad;
- There are a lot of people who believe that stuff, sincerely and absolutely, and many of them are -- if perhaps still wackos -- certainly very well-spoken and serious in their arguments;
- And there is no reasonable comparison between the scientific viewpoint, which has as its core tenet the understanding that our current state of knowledge is always incomplete and is subject to change as new evidence comes in, and the fundamentalist viewpoint, which insists that its chosen scriptures represent absolute, immutable, and irrefutable truth.
Where in the bible does it state that the earth is 6000 years old? Can you please quote this?
This site should provide you with the answer to your question. In particular, this document lays out the argument quite nicely.
"Judge of Nations, spare us yet!"
They did pass proper legislation. In the states. Then the EPA, a.k.a. a wholly owned and operated subsidiary of BigEnergyCo Inc.(r)(tm), overstepped its bounds and told them they couldn't. They're suing to enforce their rights.
This lawsuit has no legal ground to stand on.
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people."
That's interesting ... to me it reads like a list of states that actually contribute more money to the federal coffers than they take in, unlike the red states which whine about Big Gub'mint while sucking up other people's tax dollars.
They are doing something real: imposing tighter emissions regulations. Or rather, they were going to, until the federal government told them they couldn't. Now they're suing so they can get back to, you know, doing something real again.
News flash: not every political conflict is just showboating.