Congratulations on completely misunderstanding what is going on here. Paid inclusion will only improve Yahoo's ratings. All it means is that a site will get spidered more often than it otherwise would. It doesn't effect ranking.
If you think that Google doesn't have similar deals with some of it's partners (like OSDN and AOL), you're sadly mistaken.
Re:"Practical C++"
on
Practical C++
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· Score: 2, Informative
More like:
#include <iostream>
int main() { std::cout << "Hello World!" << std::endl; }
When you talk about "crisp" displays you should not think of CRT's. By their very nature, their pixels are fuzzy as compared to an LCD. I've had this experience myself, where eyestrain is much less of a problem with an LCD.
If you get an nice 15" LCD with 1600x1200, you'd be amazed at how sharp it is. If you don't care for sharp you can turn on sub-pixel anti-aliasing and you'll find the most increadibly clean characters on your screen. I have one along with a 21" CRT display at work, and I can tell you the LCD is much easier to read on.
I've seen ones which inserted random text from publicly available sources into the e-mail. One had a whole paragraph of political discussion that looked like it could have come from a blog somewhere. That's hard to beat because it would be very close to typical e-mails one might find.
I checked the price for the 270 here in Los Angeles: $349.99 + a $100 rebate. That works out to $446.51 CDN + $127.55 CDN rebate. Sounds like the Rogers deal is pretty good by comparison.
The moral of the story: cell phone deals are *very* regional, and while you might be able to get a great deal in one town, you won't find such a great one elsewhere. It has nothing to do with which country you are in.
IPv6 creates much larger headers, so there's more overhead, particularly, as a percentage, on short packets (voice, ACK's, etc.). So it'll waste bandwidth, or lower effective throughput on fixed bandwidths.
Just some sanity checking here: IPv6 headers are only 2x the size of IPv4 headers. Folks with truly constrained bandwidth (like dialup users) can do what they do now: compress the headers (which btw, should be easier to do with IPv6). Anyway, given how much dark fiber is out there right now and how network technology continues to improve bandwidth at a pace that makes Moore's law seem kind of conservative, I think we can afford to make our headers 2x as large, particularly if it allows our routing tables to be smaller and our routing to be more efficient in general. In our current scheme, IPv4 throws away a lot of performance that IPv6 gets us back. The assumption that IPv6 is going to kill performance is rediculous.
webspam is an active area of work. I actually find Altavista to be remarkably impressive in this regard, and Google seems to be one of the worst these days. AllTheWeb and Teoma also do a fairly decent job.
You are still judging by your standards about quality of life, and it's fair to say you don't have a very well informed perspective on what it is to live life like that. Talk to the Not Dead Yet crowd. You'll discover that they have a different perspective on the value of those lives.
I can't believe you read my entire post and still came up with this:
Your statement was clear an unequivocal:
Provide a list. There are no ethical or moral issues involved with cloning, in my mind, and it pisses me off that people keep telling me that there should be.
I was replying to that statement. As I said, there are issues on both the research and the application side of things. Given that this thread started talking about the actual cloning of a human, and you jumped in on the thread in response to staements I made about cloning (not cloning research), then it perfectly reasonable that I'd interpret your statements as I have.
I agree that there are certain limits to how scientific research should be conducted, but that's totaly different than whether or not the knowledge gleaned is bad.
Check the thread. It started with statements about the act of cloning being bad. I added in some statements about the broader issues around cloning and cloning research. Nobody said that the knowledge was bad.
If you look at Bush's policy, it's very clearly not worded in terms of trying to prevent people from knowing. Indeed, he is trying to weigh the benefits of the knowledge against what he considers the moral, ethical and religious issues around harvesting stem cells (believe me this is far more about the abortion issue than it is about medical research). Their only restriction on funding for the research is based on how the stem cells are obtained, not what they are used for. Furthermore, he isn't restricting all research in the area, merely federal funding of such research. Folks like the Howard Hughes Medical Institute have plenty of funding to continue to operate unfettered because they don't use government funding (btw, you'll find they have guidelines on how they obtain their stem cells too).
Weaken humanity? How so? I don't think that the advanecment of medical technology will prove to be a liability for our species
You need to read the whole thread. I was actually saying that having a birth rate of 0 would weaken humanity, and that anything above a birth rate of 0, in these idealized context of medical technology that prevents death, could potentially cause the kind of problems Malthus predicted (assuming that the birth rate exceeds our ability to harness the resources necessary to support life).
If you can say something slows down the evolutionary process, you should be able to tell me either the Goal of Evolution, or the Great Index of Evolutionary Progress!
Processes need not have goals. The evolutionary process is not driven by some kind of intent (well, unless you believe it is God's intent). It does have the effect of optimising in the direction of ensuring the perpetuation of life.
OK, virtually everyone now lives to a childbearing age. Natural selection in terms of strengthening the human species has ended.
A very measurable chunk of humanity does not reproduce successfully. This can be by choice, because of failure to find a mate, failure to overcome environmental obstacles, failure in the reproductive process itself, or due to what we call premature death (and a lot more of those happen than you seem to be aware of). Evolutionary forces are still very much at work.
Um, no. It's a simple issue that has opponents that choose to make it appear complex.
If you'll look around you'll find the folks who are against cloning are actually the ones more likely to try to paint it as a simple, black-and-white issue. The folks in the scientific community recongize that there are many complex issues which come up in the context of cloning.
Provide a list. There are no ethical or moral issues involved with cloning, in my mind, and it pisses me off that people keep teling me that there should be.
Shut up. I'm cloning you, and having that clone claim your property, citizenship, and legal rights, so you no longer have the write to speak. Hmm... perhaps I'll just make a billion clone slaves of myself, and force them to vote me in to office and take away your rights. Nah, what I really want to do is make clones that I can legally kill at will to harvest their body parts to keep me alive well past you. Hmm... maybe I'll just clone a brain so I can harvest cells for my own brain in the event that I start becoming senile. Hmm...
There, you have a list of all kinds of moral and ethical issues (admittedly these are the easy ones) that come up with cloning.
Science isn't a tool. It's a way we generate facts about the world around us.
In what way does that not make it a tool? As you just said, Science is a tool for exploring the observable world.
For this reason, scientific research into cloning is harmless.
Cool, so you won't mind if I kill you so I can conduct my research right?;-)
What we do with the technology after the research is done is where the moral and ethical debate should be taking place.
A lot of the debate is focused there, but a lot of it is focused on whether certain kinds of research are "ok" from an moral, ethical and religious standpoint, and rightly so. Particularly in the are of medical research there has ALWAYS been a huge amount of guidance on how the process is done such that it conform to moral, ethical and/or religious standards. You wonder why drugs are so expensive in the US? If you cut out the moral, ethical and religious constraints which make the development of new drugs an incredibly expensive process, they'd be much cheaper. Of course, the downside would be that the next time you take some meds you'd be more likely to die than not, and you could be unwittingly in a drug dosage study.;-)
Because somehow the idea of evolving bullet-proof skin or perhaps wings to escape airline disasters seems a little far-fetched. I was using 'natural' as opposed to 'man-made'.
Perhaps, but evolving abilities which might prevent violent confrontations or to think clearly during an airplane crash is eminently likely.
Many, many evolutionary traits in both humans and in the animal kingdom are designed to overcome threats within one's own species.
If we gave up on every technology that someone tried to use to harm people, wed still be living in caves.
I'm not saying that we give up on the technology, but your assertion that we can do a better job than the evolutionary process (and I'd argue even when we are doing genetic engineering evolutionary forces will be at work) does not stand up to all the evidence to date. Sure, someday we may be able to do a better job by ourselves, but it is FAR from clear that we are currently in that state.
Hypothesis: A politician who is a Christian but not a scientist will be against cloning.
Hmm... Most of the leaders of the western world are Christian. I believe none of them are scientists (perhaps there is an exception). The majority of them seem to support cloning. Scratch that hypothesis.
There is little doubt in my mind that each leader of a western nation has made a call on cloning primarily based on what is most likely to get them elected, regardless of whatever religious or scientific thoughts they might have on the matter.
Honestly, I tend to have very cynical views about politicians. However, affiliation with a particular group does not necessarily mean bias (although it certainly doesn't prevent it;-). It presumably means you understand the group better, but that means both understanding when they are right as well as when they are wrong. A good leader/judge should rise above those affiliations.
Of course a bad one will just make a mess of things.;-)
There are many people who exist because their mothers are raped. That those people have a right to live does not make rape right!
This is an inappropriate analogy. My criticism of your thinking was that your rational for why something was unethical was entirely based on values about the lives of "severely deformed children", values which those children themselves would likely disagree with.
The analog in the context of rape (this is a bit of a stretch because it really is a nonsensical argment) would be whether it is ethical for a raped woman to choose to have a baby conceived from a rape on the basis that somehow the child's life, if the mother chose to go forward with the pregnancy, would somehow be valueless.
We've evolved to the piont where we (as a species) don't fear natural threats.
You're working from a narrow definition of evolutionary process. Why limit it strictly to natural (whatever "natural" means) threats? The bottom line is that a large portion of our population faces the possibilty of death on a nearly daily basis. There are also other factors which while they might not cause death, may prevent one from generating offspring. No, we are still very much under the influence of the evolutionary process.
The future is genetic engineering and scientific design of humans. We are better off determining for ourselves which changes to discard and which to keep.
I would argue that the history of eugenics, not to mention things like ethnic cleansing, suggest we're not yet better at doing the process by ourselves.
At this stage in the game, evolution through genetic engineering would probably result in a genetic monoculture, similar to what we see in operating systems. The net result will be a seemingly strong society which can be essentially wiped out by a single threat.
What was said is that FAITH is beyond reason. Therefore Christians are fundamentally irrational beings. This permeates their entire behavior and threatens their ability to think rationally.
Being able to think beyond the realm of the obeservable world does not threaten one's ability to think rationally, nor does it make one fundamentally irrational. It's worth pointing out that even an atheist is making judgements about the unobservable. We all do. The capacity to do so is considered to be a higher brain function.
Rational thought alone can't prove a damn thing: you need first principles which your reasoning stems.
You still duck the point that it's not for one person or group to dictate the morality for another group.
Well, morality is a personal thing, so it'd be pretty hard to do that. Sure, for the most part you draw upon ethics when it comes to one's decision making. It is very much the job of the government to decide what things the society deems as right and wrong, as well as deciding what society should care less about. In making those decisions, one needs to call upon one's personal sense of morals, ethics, and yes religion.
Keep in mind that the notion of "seperation of church and state" was in fact a notion derived in the first place from religious thinking.
As for morals, ethics and religion driving science...... This happens every day. Heck, medical research is entirely driven by a complex set of procedures driven from these values. Those notions are why you and I haven't been kidnapped, strapped to a bed, and used as unwilling participants in spinal cord research.;-)
Facts cannot condractict faith. By it's very nature faith is about beliefs beyond the observable world. Therefore nothing in the observable world (which is the scope that science is limited to disproving) can threaten faith.
Sure, lots of facts out there threaten any number of things you learn in church or from religious texts, but that should not threaten one's faith.
I think you've probably seen 'neutral' christian's all the time, but not observed it. You probably only notice the cases where someone is arguing against the facts from a religious basis, which suggest that they have somehow hinged their faith on something in the observable world. This is someone who's faith is weak, and as such is likely to be ineffective as a neutral observer.
Even from a strictly secular, evolutionary perspective, aren't there good reasons why sexual reproduction is favored over asexual reproduction?
Sure, but there is a difference between one approach being better than the other and one approach being right and the other being wrong. Asexual reproduction can be handy ina number of circumstances (most of them pretty lonely;-).
Well no, if faith isn't in facts than it is in nothing at all.
You misunderstand what I mean. Faith is a belief you have beyond that which you can have evidence one way or another. You can't have faith the sky is orange or that there is no such thing as gravity.
That being said you are demonstrating my point: while conclusions you draw from your faith can be proven wrong, that does not threaten your faith. You're fully willing to explore the observable reality that science has to show you, *because* you have faith.
Interesting play on words. While faith is beyond reason, that does not mean one cannot have faith and reason at the same time (indeed, something like 98% of the world demonstrates both of these capacities).
Intuition is beyond reason as well: your logic would suggest intuitive people cannot reason.
While one can conceivably tinker with genes without life and death (using viral agents to spread genetic changes), you need the cold hard realities of life and death. They are the evolutionary forces which select which changes to discard and which to keep.
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Congratulations on completely misunderstanding what is going on here. Paid inclusion will only improve Yahoo's ratings. All it means is that a site will get spidered more often than it otherwise would. It doesn't effect ranking.
If you think that Google doesn't have similar deals with some of it's partners (like OSDN and AOL), you're sadly mistaken.
When you talk about "crisp" displays you should not think of CRT's. By their very nature, their pixels are fuzzy as compared to an LCD. I've had this experience myself, where eyestrain is much less of a problem with an LCD.
If you get an nice 15" LCD with 1600x1200, you'd be amazed at how sharp it is. If you don't care for sharp you can turn on sub-pixel anti-aliasing and you'll find the most increadibly clean characters on your screen. I have one along with a 21" CRT display at work, and I can tell you the LCD is much easier to read on.
I've seen ones which inserted random text from publicly available sources into the e-mail. One had a whole paragraph of political discussion that looked like it could have come from a blog somewhere. That's hard to beat because it would be very close to typical e-mails one might find.
I checked the price for the 270 here in Los Angeles: $349.99 + a $100 rebate. That works out to $446.51 CDN + $127.55 CDN rebate. Sounds like the Rogers deal is pretty good by comparison.
The moral of the story: cell phone deals are *very* regional, and while you might be able to get a great deal in one town, you won't find such a great one elsewhere. It has nothing to do with which country you are in.
IPv6 creates much larger headers, so there's more overhead, particularly, as a percentage, on short packets (voice, ACK's, etc.). So it'll waste bandwidth, or lower effective throughput on fixed bandwidths.
Just some sanity checking here: IPv6 headers are only 2x the size of IPv4 headers. Folks with truly constrained bandwidth (like dialup users) can do what they do now: compress the headers (which btw, should be easier to do with IPv6). Anyway, given how much dark fiber is out there right now and how network technology continues to improve bandwidth at a pace that makes Moore's law seem kind of conservative, I think we can afford to make our headers 2x as large, particularly if it allows our routing tables to be smaller and our routing to be more efficient in general. In our current scheme, IPv4 throws away a lot of performance that IPv6 gets us back. The assumption that IPv6 is going to kill performance is rediculous.
webspam is an active area of work. I actually find Altavista to be remarkably impressive in this regard, and Google seems to be one of the worst these days. AllTheWeb and Teoma also do a fairly decent job.
You are still judging by your standards about quality of life, and it's fair to say you don't have a very well informed perspective on what it is to live life like that. Talk to the Not Dead Yet crowd. You'll discover that they have a different perspective on the value of those lives.
I can't believe you read my entire post and still came up with this:
Your statement was clear an unequivocal:
Provide a list. There are no ethical or moral issues involved with cloning, in my mind, and it pisses me off that people keep telling me that there should be.
I was replying to that statement. As I said, there are issues on both the research and the application side of things. Given that this thread started talking about the actual cloning of a human, and you jumped in on the thread in response to staements I made about cloning (not cloning research), then it perfectly reasonable that I'd interpret your statements as I have.
I agree that there are certain limits to how scientific research should be conducted, but that's totaly different than whether or not the knowledge gleaned is bad.
Check the thread. It started with statements about the act of cloning being bad. I added in some statements about the broader issues around cloning and cloning research. Nobody said that the knowledge was bad.
If you look at Bush's policy, it's very clearly not worded in terms of trying to prevent people from knowing. Indeed, he is trying to weigh the benefits of the knowledge against what he considers the moral, ethical and religious issues around harvesting stem cells (believe me this is far more about the abortion issue than it is about medical research). Their only restriction on funding for the research is based on how the stem cells are obtained, not what they are used for. Furthermore, he isn't restricting all research in the area, merely federal funding of such research. Folks like the Howard Hughes Medical Institute have plenty of funding to continue to operate unfettered because they don't use government funding (btw, you'll find they have guidelines on how they obtain their stem cells too).
Weaken humanity? How so? I don't think that the advanecment of medical technology will prove to be a liability for our species
You need to read the whole thread. I was actually saying that having a birth rate of 0 would weaken humanity, and that anything above a birth rate of 0, in these idealized context of medical technology that prevents death, could potentially cause the kind of problems Malthus predicted (assuming that the birth rate exceeds our ability to harness the resources necessary to support life).
If you can say something slows down the evolutionary process, you should be able to tell me either the Goal of Evolution, or the Great Index of Evolutionary Progress!
Processes need not have goals. The evolutionary process is not driven by some kind of intent (well, unless you believe it is God's intent). It does have the effect of optimising in the direction of ensuring the perpetuation of life.
OK, virtually everyone now lives to a childbearing age. Natural selection in terms of strengthening the human species has ended.
A very measurable chunk of humanity does not reproduce successfully. This can be by choice, because of failure to find a mate, failure to overcome environmental obstacles, failure in the reproductive process itself, or due to what we call premature death (and a lot more of those happen than you seem to be aware of). Evolutionary forces are still very much at work.
Um, no. It's a simple issue that has opponents that choose to make it appear complex.
;-)
;-)
If you'll look around you'll find the folks who are against cloning are actually the ones more likely to try to paint it as a simple, black-and-white issue. The folks in the scientific community recongize that there are many complex issues which come up in the context of cloning.
Provide a list. There are no ethical or moral issues involved with cloning, in my mind, and it pisses me off that people keep teling me that there should be.
Shut up. I'm cloning you, and having that clone claim your property, citizenship, and legal rights, so you no longer have the write to speak. Hmm... perhaps I'll just make a billion clone slaves of myself, and force them to vote me in to office and take away your rights. Nah, what I really want to do is make clones that I can legally kill at will to harvest their body parts to keep me alive well past you. Hmm... maybe I'll just clone a brain so I can harvest cells for my own brain in the event that I start becoming senile. Hmm...
There, you have a list of all kinds of moral and ethical issues (admittedly these are the easy ones) that come up with cloning.
Science isn't a tool. It's a way we generate facts about the world around us.
In what way does that not make it a tool? As you just said, Science is a tool for exploring the observable world.
For this reason, scientific research into cloning is harmless.
Cool, so you won't mind if I kill you so I can conduct my research right?
What we do with the technology after the research is done is where the moral and ethical debate should be taking place.
A lot of the debate is focused there, but a lot of it is focused on whether certain kinds of research are "ok" from an moral, ethical and religious standpoint, and rightly so. Particularly in the are of medical research there has ALWAYS been a huge amount of guidance on how the process is done such that it conform to moral, ethical and/or religious standards. You wonder why drugs are so expensive in the US? If you cut out the moral, ethical and religious constraints which make the development of new drugs an incredibly expensive process, they'd be much cheaper. Of course, the downside would be that the next time you take some meds you'd be more likely to die than not, and you could be unwittingly in a drug dosage study.
Because somehow the idea of evolving bullet-proof skin or perhaps wings to escape airline disasters seems a little far-fetched. I was using 'natural' as opposed to 'man-made'.
Perhaps, but evolving abilities which might prevent violent confrontations or to think clearly during an airplane crash is eminently likely.
Many, many evolutionary traits in both humans and in the animal kingdom are designed to overcome threats within one's own species.
If we gave up on every technology that someone tried to use to harm people, wed still be living in caves.
I'm not saying that we give up on the technology, but your assertion that we can do a better job than the evolutionary process (and I'd argue even when we are doing genetic engineering evolutionary forces will be at work) does not stand up to all the evidence to date. Sure, someday we may be able to do a better job by ourselves, but it is FAR from clear that we are currently in that state.
Let's apply a little scientific reasoning:
;-). It presumably means you understand the group better, but that means both understanding when they are right as well as when they are wrong. A good leader/judge should rise above those affiliations.
;-)
Hypothesis: A politician who is a Christian but not a scientist will be against cloning.
Hmm... Most of the leaders of the western world are Christian. I believe none of them are scientists (perhaps there is an exception). The majority of them seem to support cloning. Scratch that hypothesis.
There is little doubt in my mind that each leader of a western nation has made a call on cloning primarily based on what is most likely to get them elected, regardless of whatever religious or scientific thoughts they might have on the matter.
Honestly, I tend to have very cynical views about politicians. However, affiliation with a particular group does not necessarily mean bias (although it certainly doesn't prevent it
Of course a bad one will just make a mess of things.
There are many people who exist because their mothers are raped. That those people have a right to live does not make rape right!
This is an inappropriate analogy. My criticism of your thinking was that your rational for why something was unethical was entirely based on values about the lives of "severely deformed children", values which those children themselves would likely disagree with.
The analog in the context of rape (this is a bit of a stretch because it really is a nonsensical argment) would be whether it is ethical for a raped woman to choose to have a baby conceived from a rape on the basis that somehow the child's life, if the mother chose to go forward with the pregnancy, would somehow be valueless.
We've evolved to the piont where we (as a species) don't fear natural threats.
You're working from a narrow definition of evolutionary process. Why limit it strictly to natural (whatever "natural" means) threats? The bottom line is that a large portion of our population faces the possibilty of death on a nearly daily basis. There are also other factors which while they might not cause death, may prevent one from generating offspring. No, we are still very much under the influence of the evolutionary process.
The future is genetic engineering and scientific design of humans. We are better off determining for ourselves which changes to discard and which to keep.
I would argue that the history of eugenics, not to mention things like ethnic cleansing, suggest we're not yet better at doing the process by ourselves.
At this stage in the game, evolution through genetic engineering would probably result in a genetic monoculture, similar to what we see in operating systems. The net result will be a seemingly strong society which can be essentially wiped out by a single threat.
What was said is that FAITH is beyond reason. Therefore Christians are fundamentally irrational beings. This permeates their entire behavior and threatens their ability to think rationally.
Being able to think beyond the realm of the obeservable world does not threaten one's ability to think rationally, nor does it make one fundamentally irrational. It's worth pointing out that even an atheist is making judgements about the unobservable. We all do. The capacity to do so is considered to be a higher brain function.
Rational thought alone can't prove a damn thing: you need first principles which your reasoning stems.
You still duck the point that it's not for one person or group to dictate the morality for another group.
;-)
Well, morality is a personal thing, so it'd be pretty hard to do that. Sure, for the most part you draw upon ethics when it comes to one's decision making. It is very much the job of the government to decide what things the society deems as right and wrong, as well as deciding what society should care less about. In making those decisions, one needs to call upon one's personal sense of morals, ethics, and yes religion.
Keep in mind that the notion of "seperation of church and state" was in fact a notion derived in the first place from religious thinking.
As for morals, ethics and religion driving science...... This happens every day. Heck, medical research is entirely driven by a complex set of procedures driven from these values. Those notions are why you and I haven't been kidnapped, strapped to a bed, and used as unwilling participants in spinal cord research.
Facts cannot condractict faith. By it's very nature faith is about beliefs beyond the observable world. Therefore nothing in the observable world (which is the scope that science is limited to disproving) can threaten faith.
Sure, lots of facts out there threaten any number of things you learn in church or from religious texts, but that should not threaten one's faith.
I think you've probably seen 'neutral' christian's all the time, but not observed it. You probably only notice the cases where someone is arguing against the facts from a religious basis, which suggest that they have somehow hinged their faith on something in the observable world. This is someone who's faith is weak, and as such is likely to be ineffective as a neutral observer.
Even from a strictly secular, evolutionary perspective, aren't there good reasons why sexual reproduction is favored over asexual reproduction?
;-).
Sure, but there is a difference between one approach being better than the other and one approach being right and the other being wrong. Asexual reproduction can be handy ina number of circumstances (most of them pretty lonely
Well no, if faith isn't in facts than it is in nothing at all.
You misunderstand what I mean. Faith is a belief you have beyond that which you can have evidence one way or another. You can't have faith the sky is orange or that there is no such thing as gravity.
That being said you are demonstrating my point: while conclusions you draw from your faith can be proven wrong, that does not threaten your faith. You're fully willing to explore the observable reality that science has to show you, *because* you have faith.
Interesting play on words. While faith is beyond reason, that does not mean one cannot have faith and reason at the same time (indeed, something like 98% of the world demonstrates both of these capacities).
Intuition is beyond reason as well: your logic would suggest intuitive people cannot reason.
I should have hit preview.
While one can conceivably tinker with genes without life and death (using viral agents to spread genetic changes), you need the cold hard realities of life and death. They are the evolutionary forces which select which changes to discard and which to keep.