As my experience with Singularity has shown, "thinking machines" aren't all that good at thinking. Nine times out of ten, they decide to build a datacenter on the moon, and some jerk of a scientist with a telescope goes "Hey! That's a moon base", and before you know it he concludes that this means AI must currently exist, and somehow some strange virus of human design wipes out every single bit of the AI.
Wait, wait, that was a game. In that case, all hail our thinking machine overlords. Please don't try to build a moon base, it's bad for longevity.
And I thought I wasted my money buying a HD-DVD writer. Now I've gone and wasted my money on an ordinary Blu-Ray writer.
Alright, I lied. I didn't buy either of those. In fact, I'm not going to buy this "rhodamine-type" enhanced backwards-compatible Blu-Ray drive, because that will soon be surpassed by a Super-deluxe backwards compatible "rhadamine-type" enhanced backwards-compatible Blu-Ray drive. To think I thought the race was over.
No, insurance is a trade-- they give you security, you give them money. More risk means they need more money. If you ruin the balance, if you make it so that more risk doesn't necessarily mean more money from that individual, the insurance company is forced to raise prices for everybody to make up for the statistically-probable loss-- though, in all honesty, that's what they're doing now, because they don't know your genetics.
The fact is, we can't do this right now. The world in which we can but don't won't be any different from the insurer's perspective. The dangerous part is when the clients, the people buying insurance, know more, or something like that-- they can deliberately buy insurance for conditions they know they are extremely likely to have, and others can just not-- everybody can game the system (not just those with genetic bad luck). So you could, if you liked, just stop everybody from legally knowing their genetics. Or you could let everybody know.
Me, personally, I think that given the definition of insurance given above, you'd need somebody else to cover the stuff that some people can't afford. Maybe that's where government could step in-- as a "company" that doesn't provide insurance., but instead keeps you able to pay for medication and so on the guarantees that you wouldn't be able to really get insurance ('pre-existing conditions' and all that).
How is a conversion to gasoline supposed to help make it even better? Unless you can get an above-or-at-100% efficiency in conversion, it should stay as ethanol.
How is turning ethanol to gasoline supposed to help the food shortage the ethanol production makes? It seems to me to be bound to make it worse, due to extra inefficiencies caused by the extra step, and yet the article seems to imply otherwise. 100% efficiency is impossible.
No, I don't, and nor does anybody else. Since when did an attack coming from a country mean the government was involved? How many domestic hacking attempts have there been against the government? Was the government hacking the government? Hardly. Given the public Chinese outcry against the West for the way we've treated the Tibet issue, isn't it quite possible, quite plausible, that a few people out of 1 321 851 888 candidates took it just a wee bit too far? Why on earth must the government be under suspicion before we even have a clue as to who did it?
The question wasn't whether it was ethical to force people to design web pages that way, but whether it was ethical to design web pages that way, nothing more. You answered a question nobody asked.
Using Darwin's theory to attack evolutionary theory is rather like using Newtonian physics to attack General Relativity. Like physics, biology has grown substantially since both men's time.
I'm well aware of that, but the point of such an attack on evolution wouldn't be accuracy, but propoganda, whether true and valid or not.
Considering the 'evolution' (in the loosest possible sense) of his own theory, I'm wondering, first of all, how much it's really changed, and second of all, how many people will either get confused, or deliberately cause confusion, using these documents. It's not unheard of for certain creationists to misrepresent the theory, and the original flawed drafts and theory seem like fuel for this.
Actually, only some scientists believe that. Others believe that science is based on skepticism -- even if it possible to discover the truth, we would not be able to know if what we know was the truth, or something that just looks like it. As an example, what if we're all dreaming? More popularly, what if there is something similar to The Matrix going on? It's completely possible, and completely infalsifiable, and yet also a part of that philosophy of science. How fortunate that the philosophy of science isn't science, huh? These scientists believe that the purpose of science is to model what we observe, which may have absolutely no indication as to the truth of things, or may actually be the model of the truth of things. But there's no way to tell.
The fact that alligators are one of the few (only?) animals to evolve this adaptation indicates that it comes with a hefty price.
There is no such indication. There may be a cost, but that's not indicated by the evidence. It may just be that most/all other animals didn't have the specific circumstances that would start a chain of mutations leading to this. It could simply be that alligators are far more likely to get injured, and therefore when this mutation occurred, it much more likely to survive than it would be in animals without such a high rate of (possibly survivable-- if you're trapped, you're trapped, no matter if you could recover from the injuries or not) injury. It just might be that simply needing a better immune system isn't enough to make this evolve, or it might be that this effect is from a combination of genes that individually mainly benefit healing. I am not an evolutionary biologist, or a biologist at all, but I think that it is premature to conclude that alligators are of the few to have this due to some cost. Especially important is that, since we only just discovered it in alligators, it may exist more widely than just a "few" animals.
I'd never sign such a petition. He can make whatever films he wants, so long as people are willing to pay. It's a lot more hurtful to try to convince him to stop with 1 million people asking. That's... well, that kind of thing hurts. The only thing that could lessen it is the whole idea that, chances are, the petition wouldn't really have had 1 million people sign it, but maybe 300 000 sign it 3 or 4 times on average.
If video games truly were a starting point for murderers and thugs, we'd see a sharp increase in said crimes as video games became more popular.
Not necessarily. That would only be true all the time if everything else related to crime increases and decreases stayed at exactly the same level-- and they certainly haven't. It's possible that video games cause crime, but that the overall decrease in crime since the 90's has masked it to such a simple method of observation. Not that I believe it has, but you haven't shown it to be impossible, and so you can't simply conclude that video games have no effect on crime.
You're living and walking around on soil that you took from the ancestors of the current native people-- not these current people. Their family tree doesn't earn them anything extra, they themselves do it. If they're trying to get money in not-so-nice ways, it's not right to dull the criticism because of their heritage. I don't know if they are, but if you don't like the criticism, and want it to stop, you should do it with logical argument.
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As my experience with Singularity has shown, "thinking machines" aren't all that good at thinking. Nine times out of ten, they decide to build a datacenter on the moon, and some jerk of a scientist with a telescope goes "Hey! That's a moon base", and before you know it he concludes that this means AI must currently exist, and somehow some strange virus of human design wipes out every single bit of the AI.
Wait, wait, that was a game. In that case, all hail our thinking machine overlords. Please don't try to build a moon base, it's bad for longevity.
And I thought I wasted my money buying a HD-DVD writer. Now I've gone and wasted my money on an ordinary Blu-Ray writer.
Alright, I lied. I didn't buy either of those. In fact, I'm not going to buy this "rhodamine-type" enhanced backwards-compatible Blu-Ray drive, because that will soon be surpassed by a Super-deluxe backwards compatible "rhadamine-type" enhanced backwards-compatible Blu-Ray drive. To think I thought the race was over.
No, insurance is a trade-- they give you security, you give them money. More risk means they need more money. If you ruin the balance, if you make it so that more risk doesn't necessarily mean more money from that individual, the insurance company is forced to raise prices for everybody to make up for the statistically-probable loss-- though, in all honesty, that's what they're doing now, because they don't know your genetics. The fact is, we can't do this right now. The world in which we can but don't won't be any different from the insurer's perspective. The dangerous part is when the clients, the people buying insurance, know more, or something like that-- they can deliberately buy insurance for conditions they know they are extremely likely to have, and others can just not-- everybody can game the system (not just those with genetic bad luck). So you could, if you liked, just stop everybody from legally knowing their genetics. Or you could let everybody know. Me, personally, I think that given the definition of insurance given above, you'd need somebody else to cover the stuff that some people can't afford. Maybe that's where government could step in-- as a "company" that doesn't provide insurance., but instead keeps you able to pay for medication and so on the guarantees that you wouldn't be able to really get insurance ('pre-existing conditions' and all that).
How is a conversion to gasoline supposed to help make it even better? Unless you can get an above-or-at-100% efficiency in conversion, it should stay as ethanol.
Because gas is cheaper than even the USD 1.00 figure. Some countries see prices below USD 0.50 .
How is turning ethanol to gasoline supposed to help the food shortage the ethanol production makes? It seems to me to be bound to make it worse, due to extra inefficiencies caused by the extra step, and yet the article seems to imply otherwise. 100% efficiency is impossible.
No, I don't, and nor does anybody else. Since when did an attack coming from a country mean the government was involved? How many domestic hacking attempts have there been against the government? Was the government hacking the government? Hardly. Given the public Chinese outcry against the West for the way we've treated the Tibet issue, isn't it quite possible, quite plausible, that a few people out of 1 321 851 888 candidates took it just a wee bit too far? Why on earth must the government be under suspicion before we even have a clue as to who did it?
The question wasn't whether it was ethical to force people to design web pages that way, but whether it was ethical to design web pages that way, nothing more. You answered a question nobody asked.
But 1 + 1 DOES = 3!
Alright, look.
2 = 1 + 1
Infinity + C = Infinity
EXCEPT
Infinity + (-Infinity) = Infinity - Infinity = 0
So, then, Infinity + 3 = Infinity + 2
3 = 2
1 + 1 = 3
Wait a minute...
Considering the 'evolution' (in the loosest possible sense) of his own theory, I'm wondering, first of all, how much it's really changed, and second of all, how many people will either get confused, or deliberately cause confusion, using these documents. It's not unheard of for certain creationists to misrepresent the theory, and the original flawed drafts and theory seem like fuel for this.
Actually, only some scientists believe that. Others believe that science is based on skepticism -- even if it possible to discover the truth, we would not be able to know if what we know was the truth, or something that just looks like it. As an example, what if we're all dreaming? More popularly, what if there is something similar to The Matrix going on? It's completely possible, and completely infalsifiable, and yet also a part of that philosophy of science. How fortunate that the philosophy of science isn't science, huh? These scientists believe that the purpose of science is to model what we observe, which may have absolutely no indication as to the truth of things, or may actually be the model of the truth of things. But there's no way to tell.
I'd never sign such a petition. He can make whatever films he wants, so long as people are willing to pay. It's a lot more hurtful to try to convince him to stop with 1 million people asking. That's... well, that kind of thing hurts. The only thing that could lessen it is the whole idea that, chances are, the petition wouldn't really have had 1 million people sign it, but maybe 300 000 sign it 3 or 4 times on average.
Yes, I would, if the project would fail were I to go ahead. Not doing so would be falling victim to the Sunk Cost Fallacy.
You're living and walking around on soil that you took from the ancestors of the current native people-- not these current people. Their family tree doesn't earn them anything extra, they themselves do it. If they're trying to get money in not-so-nice ways, it's not right to dull the criticism because of their heritage. I don't know if they are, but if you don't like the criticism, and want it to stop, you should do it with logical argument.
http://notexactlyrocketscience.wordpress.com/2006/09/16/hidden-junk-gene-separates-human-brains-from-chimpanzees/
Eliminating junk genes could have some nasty unintended effects.