Some recent research showed that near zero-g conditions very much increased the virulence of salmonella in mice. If this effect turns out to be more widespread, then any astronauts we send up could be in for trouble, while moss should be controllable by better air filters etc. What fun.
No, I do not in any way support the actions of Slobadon Milosevic. I simply believe that NATO's bombing of Serbia was the wrong solution to the problem. Let's look at how it started - NATO and Serbia had come close to an agreement at Rembrouillet when NATO suddenly adds a list of new demands - demands which if met would have led to Serbia having withdrawn its claim on Kosovo further than it was actually forced to do by the military action fought in Kosovo. When Serbia refused, NATO left the talks and began to launch the bombing. Because the number one priority was not to put our troops in danger, Serbian and Kosovan civilian lives were put on the line instead (and often lost). The ethnic cleansing was not greatly impeded by the bombing but in fact was greatly accelerated as a direct result. An immense wealth of arms were expended without seriously diminishing Serbia's military capacity. The whole thing was a fiasco, which did not become immediately apparent to you or I simply because of the massive propaganda and wholesale control of the media exercised by NATO.
It wouldn't be a UN force, because China has a seat on the security council. It could well, however, be a NATO-led alliance - the multiple breaching of international law which NATO committed by their intervention in Kosovo set a precedent for just such an action.
Every group persecutes another sometime. I am an atheist. The Nazis were atheists. This does not make me a Nazi. In the same way, most Christians don't really deserve to be blamed for the acts of the Spanish Inquisition et al (although a disturbing number of living Christians do deserve to take the blame for some really crap TV clogging up the airways).
> If I'm wrong, we (by which I mean most of the > world) will probably end up at war with them
Have you never heard of MAD? China will probably not invade Taiwan (at least in the next 5 or 10 years) because it would be too costly to do so. Any military assault would have to mobilise first - Taiwan's military is really quite extensive - and the US could probably put its ships in the way again before China was in a position to mount a serious assault. China could then not invade without firing on the US military, which of course would be to flirt with nuclear war. Taiwan may not be officially recognised as a state by the US Govt, but it does have extensive trading links with them (which counts for a hell of a lot more) so I'm quite confident that their behaviour would be as I've described it here.
In fact, the only way that China is ever likely to get hold of Taiwan would be by peaceful amalgamation (a la Hong Kong). In fact, it could be argued that one of the reasons that China took such care not to mess things up in Hong Kong following the handover was to show Taiwan that such unifications could be managed well, and not develop into the tragic fate that befell Tibet. Personally I find it quite droll that Hong Kong only ended up being governed democratically because of an imminent handover to an autocratic state.
No reason why not, as it's probably much easier than producing a tame lynx. Also, most domestic cats will shy away from attacking a rat as it's just not worth it. Still, 'tameness' itself is an issue here. Domestic cats today often have a tendency to scratch and bite people, and those that do are also often the best hunters. They also kill desirable species, like wild birds and turn feral from time to time. Do we want to encourage a larger, hungrier predator?
That these benefits will only be available to a privileged minority. We will doubtless in (most of) our lifetimes see this start to come about, so that wealthy first world citizens gain superhuman ability in many fields while the poorer people are stuck with the genes they started with and therefore have an even tougher time playing catch-up than they did before. At least one person has already mentioned 'Gattaca' today, but it should be pointed out that when people with ordinary genes can no longer get the better jobs because their parents couldn't afford to have them altered, the world is going to start to be a very dark place. I believe in a free market, but I also would like to see equal opportunities from birth to a greater, not to a lesser, degree than we see today. Sadly, I just don't think that it's going to happen.
A more immediate scenario would be body-builders injecting an inhibitor to this protein or a virus programmed to knock out the gene into their muscle tissue. This is not really any stranger than what is already going on in the sporting world at the moment anyway, so I shouldn't think one more treatment of this kind would make all that much difference.
> Can you just imagine if your mother found one of these in your kitchen?
It shouldn't actually matter all that much, as they're still significantly smaller than the average rat, which I know from personal experience can have quite a surprising effect on normally sane people.
It's not mistaken, but rather incomplete. The problem lies in Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, which states that you cannot know the position and the velocity of a particle at the same time - looking at the position leaves you with a 'blur of possibilities' for the velocity and vice versa. That said, IANAP.
'The Fabric of Reality' by David Deutsch. It doesn't cover up-to-the-moment technology, naturally, but it provides an ample explanation of how they work and a great deal of food for thought on their potential. It's well written too, but because of the concepts it tackles it will take most readers quite a while (well, it took me quite a while anyway).
Hey, I sit on my Volvo without worrying about it. But then it is about 16 years old (A-reg, for British viewers). It's not all that fuel-inefficient either, despite being into 6-figure mileage.
True, although ironically the greenhouse effect has recently been suspected of contributing to the damage to the ozone layer. The insulating layer of greenhouse gasses in the lower reaches of the atmosphere make the upper reaches (containing the ozone layer) colder, and the reaction by which CFCs break down ozone works better at lower temperatures. Scary stuff.
A long time ago, in an Ocean not so far away, there was a privateer called Captain Kidd. Born around 1645, from 1690 onwards he sailed around looking for pirate ships or French vessels for a while, gave up and instead attacked some other ships and was surprised to find himself denounced as a pirate. He handed himself in to the Governor of New York to proclaim his innocence, was shipped to England and hanged there in 1701.
OK, so I know it's not a recent example. So what? The guy was my great-great-...-great uncle, ok?
I've been deliberately feeding him you see, which is to say I've given him an opportunity to enlarge at length upon why the point of view he claims to be espousing is stupid, which in my opinion is what trolls do. He did, however, show me one really scary thing in the process - go to http://www.jbs.org/un/ to find out what.
Oh, and btw, I'm European too - British in fact. I thought you might have worked that out by now.
> In the future you will see a trend of UN > policies designed to weaken national boundaries > and put more power in the hands of its own > structures and laws, again in the name of > global peace.
That's a very sweeping prediction. Most people don't pretend to know what the future holds, or even to have known before the event. And who is going to make policies to take power away from the nation state when that is what the UN consists of? Fundamentally, I think the UN is a way of levelling the playing field a little, so that imperialist policies on the part of big countries have a very slightly lower chance of being acted out and thus hurting weaker ones (kind of like prevention of monopolies). No, it doesn't work all that often, but the tendency has been to do more good than harm, so I say long may it continue. Anyway, I'm off out now and so won't have a chance to read and reply to your replies until at least tomorrow. See you around sometime.
I'm not sure why I'm bothering to carry on this argument, as you clearly aren't going to shift from your paranoid nationalist stance any time soon, but are you really so scared about dealings with the outside world damaging your country's values? It tends to be the weak party, far more than the strong one that that happens too - view entire history of imperialism. You seem to be making out that the US is the victim of the current global political situation. The truth is the reverse - you, as a country, are thriving on it. Going back to the isolationism of the 1920s is not going to help matters, nor is stepping up independent military action.
I still find it hard that you seriously view the UN as a force for oppression. Have you ever looked at the terms of its charter? It needs a unanimous decision of the security council for it to do anything of any consequence, and if you failed to notice, your country is a permanent member and so is in no danger of an adverse decision. Plus I see no reason for your dislike of the UN's court system. Every law which they police is one which your country is a signatory to. Take a look at the facts, not just at the internet postings of people of a like-minded political viewpoint to yourself.
Right, so, after the US has been given a position of power within the UN and has refused to pay its dues and regularly flouted regulations, it wants to quit because the UN isn't working as well as it might? Who precisely is screwing the UN, and hence the other nations of the world, over? This is a simple repeat of how Britain and the US fouled matters up before WW2 by making a private pact with Japan which contravened previous agreements and gave the Japanese military ample room for expansion, which they used cheerfully for their invasion of China.
And as for the US doing the dirty work, well yes, they do do the dirty on a lot of people but they never seem to actually put their own soldiers in danger, holding every one of them as worth more than any number of local citizens and hence resorting to more indiscriminate measures.
The action in Kosovo was not condoned by the UN, nor could it be under international law. It did horrific damage to the country while at the same time triggering a massive increase in Serb atrocities - they couldn't get at us, so they took it out on the Kosovans. It didn't help anybody or anything except the wilfully violent image of the USA and Milosevic's political strength (it gave him an excuse to crack down on his political opposition, almost all of whom were against NATO's actions anyway).
I had a feeling someone would ask that question, so I've just been trawling my hard disk for this little piece of data. Basically, these are the countries which the US have bombed, and it didn't help their political situation once (though it often did a lot for the American politicians of the time, who got to look like big strong leaders for a change).
China 1946-46 Korea 1950-53 China 1950-53 Guatemala 1954 Indonesia 1958 Cuba 1959-60 Guatemala 1960 Congo 1964 Peru 1965 Laos 1964-73 Vietnam 1961-73 Guatemala 1967-69 Cambodia 1969-70 Grenada 1983 Libya 1986 El Salvador 1880s Nicaragua 1980s Panama 1989 Iraq 1991-2000 Sudan 1998 Afghanistan 1998 Yugoslavia 1999
...rather than a nationalist fanatic. The government is representative of the public. Gung-ho displays of military might to frighten neighbours does not make a country well-liked, nor yet any kind of 'ideal'. Do you know just how many countries the US has bombed since WW2, and that not one country ended up as a freer and more democratic nation on account of the bombing? Thanks to poorly planned and executed acts of intervention, such as in Kosovo, the US has really screwed a lot of people over and spent mega-bucks doing so. Nobody looks to it as a beacon of anything but profitability these days, since it's hard to call people still dropping their load on Iraq after all these years 'decent'. (No, they're not alone - Britain are still there too - but without them the bombs would have stopped falling and sanctions would have been relaxed enough for better food, education and medical care by now).
Slashdot Mirror
Some recent research showed that near zero-g conditions very much increased the virulence of salmonella in mice. If this effect turns out to be more widespread, then any astronauts we send up could be in for trouble, while moss should be controllable by better air filters etc. What fun.
No, I do not in any way support the actions of Slobadon Milosevic. I simply believe that NATO's bombing of Serbia was the wrong solution to the problem. Let's look at how it started - NATO and Serbia had come close to an agreement at Rembrouillet when NATO suddenly adds a list of new demands - demands which if met would have led to Serbia having withdrawn its claim on Kosovo further than it was actually forced to do by the military action fought in Kosovo. When Serbia refused, NATO left the talks and began to launch the bombing. Because the number one priority was not to put our troops in danger, Serbian and Kosovan civilian lives were put on the line instead (and often lost). The ethnic cleansing was not greatly impeded by the bombing but in fact was greatly accelerated as a direct result. An immense wealth of arms were expended without seriously diminishing Serbia's military capacity. The whole thing was a fiasco, which did not become immediately apparent to you or I simply because of the massive propaganda and wholesale control of the media exercised by NATO.
It wouldn't be a UN force, because China has a seat on the security council. It could well, however, be a NATO-led alliance - the multiple breaching of international law which NATO committed by their intervention in Kosovo set a precedent for just such an action.
Every group persecutes another sometime. I am an atheist. The Nazis were atheists. This does not make me a Nazi. In the same way, most Christians don't really deserve to be blamed for the acts of the Spanish Inquisition et al (although a disturbing number of living Christians do deserve to take the blame for some really crap TV clogging up the airways).
> If I'm wrong, we (by which I mean most of the
> world) will probably end up at war with them
Have you never heard of MAD? China will probably not invade Taiwan (at least in the next 5 or 10 years) because it would be too costly to do so. Any military assault would have to mobilise first - Taiwan's military is really quite extensive - and the US could probably put its ships in the way again before China was in a position to mount a serious assault. China could then not invade without firing on the US military, which of course would be to flirt with nuclear war. Taiwan may not be officially recognised as a state by the US Govt, but it does have extensive trading links with them (which counts for a hell of a lot more) so I'm quite confident that their behaviour would be as I've described it here.
In fact, the only way that China is ever likely to get hold of Taiwan would be by peaceful amalgamation (a la Hong Kong). In fact, it could be argued that one of the reasons that China took such care not to mess things up in Hong Kong following the handover was to show Taiwan that such unifications could be managed well, and not develop into the tragic fate that befell Tibet. Personally I find it quite droll that Hong Kong only ended up being governed democratically because of an imminent handover to an autocratic state.
No reason why not, as it's probably much easier than producing a tame lynx. Also, most domestic cats will shy away from attacking a rat as it's just not worth it. Still, 'tameness' itself is an issue here. Domestic cats today often have a tendency to scratch and bite people, and those that do are also often the best hunters. They also kill desirable species, like wild birds and turn feral from time to time. Do we want to encourage a larger, hungrier predator?
That these benefits will only be available to a privileged minority. We will doubtless in (most of) our lifetimes see this start to come about, so that wealthy first world citizens gain superhuman ability in many fields while the poorer people are stuck with the genes they started with and therefore have an even tougher time playing catch-up than they did before. At least one person has already mentioned 'Gattaca' today, but it should be pointed out that when people with ordinary genes can no longer get the better jobs because their parents couldn't afford to have them altered, the world is going to start to be a very dark place. I believe in a free market, but I also would like to see equal opportunities from birth to a greater, not to a lesser, degree than we see today. Sadly, I just don't think that it's going to happen.
A more immediate scenario would be body-builders injecting an inhibitor to this protein or a virus programmed to knock out the gene into their muscle tissue. This is not really any stranger than what is already going on in the sporting world at the moment anyway, so I shouldn't think one more treatment of this kind would make all that much difference.
> Can you just imagine if your mother found one of these in your kitchen?
It shouldn't actually matter all that much, as they're still significantly smaller than the average rat, which I know from personal experience can have quite a surprising effect on normally sane people.
It goes something along the lines of 'Democracy is a deeply flawed system of government, but less so than all the alternatives'.
It's not mistaken, but rather incomplete. The problem lies in Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, which states that you cannot know the position and the velocity of a particle at the same time - looking at the position leaves you with a 'blur of possibilities' for the velocity and vice versa. That said, IANAP.
'The Fabric of Reality' by David Deutsch. It doesn't cover up-to-the-moment technology, naturally, but it provides an ample explanation of how they work and a great deal of food for thought on their potential. It's well written too, but because of the concepts it tackles it will take most readers quite a while (well, it took me quite a while anyway).
Hey, I sit on my Volvo without worrying about it. But then it is about 16 years old (A-reg, for British viewers). It's not all that fuel-inefficient either, despite being into 6-figure mileage.
True, although ironically the greenhouse effect has recently been suspected of contributing to the damage to the ozone layer. The insulating layer of greenhouse gasses in the lower reaches of the atmosphere make the upper reaches (containing the ozone layer) colder, and the reaction by which CFCs break down ozone works better at lower temperatures. Scary stuff.
'Nuff said.
Do you have to argue semantics?
A long time ago, in an Ocean not so far away, there was a privateer called Captain Kidd. Born around 1645, from 1690 onwards he sailed around looking for pirate ships or French vessels for a while, gave up and instead attacked some other ships and was surprised to find himself denounced as a pirate. He handed himself in to the Governor of New York to proclaim his innocence, was shipped to England and hanged there in 1701.
OK, so I know it's not a recent example. So what? The guy was my great-great-...-great uncle, ok?
I've been deliberately feeding him you see, which is to say I've given him an opportunity to enlarge at length upon why the point of view he claims to be espousing is stupid, which in my opinion is what trolls do. He did, however, show me one really scary thing in the process - go to http://www.jbs.org/un/ to find out what.
Oh, and btw, I'm European too - British in fact. I thought you might have worked that out by now.
Are we all Brits in this conversation, or is it just me?
> In the future you will see a trend of UN
> policies designed to weaken national boundaries
> and put more power in the hands of its own
> structures and laws, again in the name of
> global peace.
That's a very sweeping prediction. Most people don't pretend to know what the future holds, or even to have known before the event. And who is going to make policies to take power away from the nation state when that is what the UN consists of? Fundamentally, I think the UN is a way of levelling the playing field a little, so that imperialist policies on the part of big countries have a very slightly lower chance of being acted out and thus hurting weaker ones (kind of like prevention of monopolies). No, it doesn't work all that often, but the tendency has been to do more good than harm, so I say long may it continue. Anyway, I'm off out now and so won't have a chance to read and reply to your replies until at least tomorrow. See you around sometime.
I'm not sure why I'm bothering to carry on this argument, as you clearly aren't going to shift from your paranoid nationalist stance any time soon, but are you really so scared about dealings with the outside world damaging your country's values? It tends to be the weak party, far more than the strong one that that happens too - view entire history of imperialism. You seem to be making out that the US is the victim of the current global political situation. The truth is the reverse - you, as a country, are thriving on it. Going back to the isolationism of the 1920s is not going to help matters, nor is stepping up independent military action.
I still find it hard that you seriously view the UN as a force for oppression. Have you ever looked at the terms of its charter? It needs a unanimous decision of the security council for it to do anything of any consequence, and if you failed to notice, your country is a permanent member and so is in no danger of an adverse decision. Plus I see no reason for your dislike of the UN's court system. Every law which they police is one which your country is a signatory to. Take a look at the facts, not just at the internet postings of people of a like-minded political viewpoint to yourself.
Right, so, after the US has been given a position of power within the UN and has refused to pay its dues and regularly flouted regulations, it wants to quit because the UN isn't working as well as it might? Who precisely is screwing the UN, and hence the other nations of the world, over? This is a simple repeat of how Britain and the US fouled matters up before WW2 by making a private pact with Japan which contravened previous agreements and gave the Japanese military ample room for expansion, which they used cheerfully for their invasion of China.
And as for the US doing the dirty work, well yes, they do do the dirty on a lot of people but they never seem to actually put their own soldiers in danger, holding every one of them as worth more than any number of local citizens and hence resorting to more indiscriminate measures.
The action in Kosovo was not condoned by the UN, nor could it be under international law. It did horrific damage to the country while at the same time triggering a massive increase in Serb atrocities - they couldn't get at us, so they took it out on the Kosovans. It didn't help anybody or anything except the wilfully violent image of the USA and Milosevic's political strength (it gave him an excuse to crack down on his political opposition, almost all of whom were against NATO's actions anyway).
I had a feeling someone would ask that question, so I've just been trawling my hard disk for this little piece of data. Basically, these are the countries which the US have bombed, and it didn't help their political situation once (though it often did a lot for the American politicians of the time, who got to look like big strong leaders for a change).
China 1946-46
Korea 1950-53
China 1950-53
Guatemala 1954
Indonesia 1958
Cuba 1959-60
Guatemala 1960
Congo 1964
Peru 1965
Laos 1964-73
Vietnam 1961-73
Guatemala 1967-69
Cambodia 1969-70
Grenada 1983
Libya 1986
El Salvador 1880s
Nicaragua 1980s
Panama 1989
Iraq 1991-2000
Sudan 1998
Afghanistan 1998
Yugoslavia 1999
...rather than a nationalist fanatic. The government is representative of the public. Gung-ho displays of military might to frighten neighbours does not make a country well-liked, nor yet any kind of 'ideal'. Do you know just how many countries the US has bombed since WW2, and that not one country ended up as a freer and more democratic nation on account of the bombing? Thanks to poorly planned and executed acts of intervention, such as in Kosovo, the US has really screwed a lot of people over and spent mega-bucks doing so. Nobody looks to it as a beacon of anything but profitability these days, since it's hard to call people still dropping their load on Iraq after all these years 'decent'. (No, they're not alone - Britain are still there too - but without them the bombs would have stopped falling and sanctions would have been relaxed enough for better food, education and medical care by now).