> Color blind men are just descendants of more predatory strains, that didn't need to see colors, because they hunted, they didn't gather fruit, they let the women do that.
That doesn't even begin to make sense. The gene for colourblindness lies on the X-chromosome, which means that if all men in a tribe are colourblind, all the women will be too. If half of the men are colourblind, one quarter of the women will be as well. If seeing colours is an useful quality for your fruit-collecting women, then colourblindness among them will be rare, and as a consequence there won't be many colourblind men either.
But please, point us to an article that claims that there were prehistoric people where most women could see colour and most men were colourblind.
There really is no selective pressure for humans to get a fuller range of vision. The chance of such a mutation appearing and spreading is probably (extremely close to) 0.
> Cosmetic surgery allows people who should be less successful reproductively to fake their way in.
"Should"? Survival of the fittest is not some law that we must follow. Besides, who are you to say that people who strive to improve themselves are inferior to those who do not (or don't feel the need to)?
> More importantly, if we permanently alter the genetic makeup of these individuals, are we irrevocably sacrificing our species' genetic resilience in favor of quick answers to avoiding the inherent differences we all posess?
Should we force people to live with a genetic disability because we *might* at some point in the future find that the disability has some advantage (that may or may not turn out to outweigh being handicapped) for the rest of us?
Besides, maybe the technology can be applied locally (so that only the cells in the eyes are affected). I'd RTFA to find out but it doesn't seem to link to a story:/
Yeah, the 'moral dilemma' is kinda silly. But why stop at curing colourblindness? When can I get my IR and UV vision?
What's interesting is that some women can see 4 colours instead of the 3 (or less...) the rest of us are stuck with. So there is definitely evidence that the brain can handle more input than it's currently receiving.
But it's not 'bad' censorship since it is voluntary. All posts are still available and by browsing at something higher than -1 you choose to trust the moderators to hilight anything of interest. Censorship is only bad when it is not optional.
> I know a number of immigrants who hail from, shall we say, less-enlightened countries (one described the country of his birth as a "typical Communist hellhole") and there's no way you would ever get them to go back. America is still the Land of Opportunity to them: it's all relative you know.
Sampling bias much? Perhaps you'd like to consider my hypothesis that most people voluntarily moving from one country to another do so because they like the latter better than the former. Concluding their countries of origin are 'less-enlightened' on basis of their testimonies seems a bit unfair.
> With.xxx, expect it to become opt-in. And then people know you watch porn. They have it in written form. This would be even worse if you had to apply for accessing specific.xxx pages.
Well someone would simply start proxxxy.com... I think there is a fortune to be made there.
Assuming for the sake of argument that the statement is true, how is "men would have raped without porn" not a good reason to have porn? What are the downsides of porn that are so severe that they outweigh the advantage of less rape?
Bruce Schneier has written something interesting that kinda counters your post. Here we go:
One of the consequences of the second law of thermodynamics is that a certain amount of energy is necessary to represent information. To record a single bit by changing the state of a system requires an amount of energy no less than kT, where T is the absolute temperature of the system and k is the Boltzman constant. (Stick with me; the physics lesson is almost over.)
Given that k = 1.38×10^-16 erg/Kelvin, and that the ambient temperature of the universe is 3.2Kelvin, an ideal computer running at 3.2K would consume 4.4×10^-16 ergs every time it set or cleared a bit. To run a computer any colder than the cosmic background radiation would require extra energy to run a heat pump.
Now, the annual energy output of our sun is about 1.21×10^41 ergs. This is enough to power about 2.7×10^56 single bit changes on our ideal computer; enough state changes to put a 187-bit counter through all its values. If we built a Dyson sphere around the sun and captured all its energy for 32 years, without any loss, we could power a computer to count up to 2^192. Of course, it wouldn't have the energy left over to perform any useful calculations with this counter.
But that's just one star, and a measly one at that. A typical supernova releases something like 10^51 ergs. (About a hundred times as much energy would be released in the form of neutrinos, but let them go for now.) If all of this energy could be channeled into a single orgy of computation, a 219-bit counter could be cycled through all of its states.
These numbers have nothing to do with the technology of the devices; they are the maximums that thermodynamics will allow. And they strongly imply that brute-force attacks against 256-bit keys will be infeasible until computers are built from something other than matter and occupy something other than space.
The above text applies to symetric-key cryto, such as AES, and it's slightly different for asymetric-key algorithms (they are less secure than their keysize would suggest compared to most symetric-key algorithms) such as RSA. With quantum computers, public key will be pretty much screwed, but symetric-key should be safe for the forseeable future (and that is more than enough for almost every situation).
Why one would want to use the same RSA key for years and years is beyond me. Want something encrypted for the next 100 years? Don't bother with public key, go block cypher. Why not stick to AES or something similar?
> Do you really think you could understand the motives of a being who can create a universe? Churches (whether Wiccan, Hindu, or whatever) don't question their gods or the motives of their gods, nor should they. A being powerful enough to create a universe would be far beyond our puny comprehension, and to think any human could comprehend is pure hubris of the worst sort.
Then why worship them? Maybe they invented religion to deceive us and like to see us suffer. Maybe they punish the devout for all eternity in hell, and reward atheism. Maybe it's all a joke and they created the universe just to see how long it would take for us to invent peanut butter, and now that we have, they went to the pub and will be back in 3 billion years. Maybe people are miraculously healed so that they may suffer another day.
If we can't know the motives of gods, then there is no reason at all to trust any religion. Whatever gods do might as well be completely random since it is impossible for us to know why they act the way they do, and since we can never understand their motives, we can't trust any pattern in their actions. Worshipping them is useless because they are as likely to be insulted by it as they are to appreciate it.
Surely the behavior of a rational person who believes that the motives of gods are unknoweable will act as if gods do not exist?
> Firstly, just because somebody is taught something doesn't mean that they will end up any good at it. My daughter was taught German in school, but still can't buy a postage stamp using German. Teach all the logic you like, many -- I suspect most -- still won't be much good at it.
That doesn't really matter. While in an ideal world, everybody would be able to come up with logical arguments of arbitrary complexity, it would be 'good enough' if the majority of people were able to recognize and understand other peoples logic (like your daughter might be able to understand some german when others speak it, even though she can't come up with a sentence of her own). Kinda like mathematical proofs (I'm awful at those, but at least I can usually tell when they're wrong).
> Even though they are just program code, 0's and 1's at their base.
Well you're just atoms at your base, aren't you? If we had a computer powerful enough to completely simulate every atom of your body, would that simulation of you be 'alive'? Maybe not according to biology, but I'm sure your simulation would disagree.
Hmmn, that's interesting. By simulating your body in a computer we'd prove that you can be conscious without being alive.
> In fact, some of the examples given, a for loop would had been much more appropriate since it used a counter inside of the while loop to control its exit e.g., while ( x > 1 ).... if ( y == foobar ) x = 0; else// do something
Why not simply
while (x > 1 && y == foobar) or
if (y == foobar) break; ?
> Then it was the ozone hole that would fry anyone not wearing SPF1000 sunblock. Where did that go?
We stopped using the CFCs that were identified as a major contributor to the problem and it appears that is working. Oh sorry, I don't think that supports your argument.
> It would be nice is Slashdot had an "undo mod" option, so one could remod. Make it cost something, so people don't change their mods willy-nilly, like the mod point you set incorrectly in the first place.
Maybe if the undo would have to be done within 5 minutes and you would still lose the modpoint? That sounds reasonable.
> Clutter? About as much as "MOD THIS UP!" I suppose, which isn't exactly worthless.
Actually, I always slap those with '-1 offtopic', which means the chance that I'll have modpoints left for the post they responded to goes down. Of course the exact same thing will happen to this post (but the knowledge that this one contains more content than "MOD THIS UP!" will help me sleep tonight;)).
Well, if you insist on an answer: only an 'idiot' wouldn't know that a virus is much, much smaller than a human cell, and since the device from TFA identifies viruses by size (among other things) they wouldn't identify humans (or any other animal) as a virus.
Slashdot Mirror
> Color blind men are just descendants of more predatory strains, that didn't need to see colors, because they hunted, they didn't gather fruit, they let the women do that.
That doesn't even begin to make sense. The gene for colourblindness lies on the X-chromosome, which means that if all men in a tribe are colourblind, all the women will be too. If half of the men are colourblind, one quarter of the women will be as well. If seeing colours is an useful quality for your fruit-collecting women, then colourblindness among them will be rare, and as a consequence there won't be many colourblind men either.
But please, point us to an article that claims that there were prehistoric people where most women could see colour and most men were colourblind.
There really is no selective pressure for humans to get a fuller range of vision. The chance of such a mutation appearing and spreading is probably (extremely close to) 0.
> Cosmetic surgery allows people who should be less successful reproductively to fake their way in.
"Should"? Survival of the fittest is not some law that we must follow. Besides, who are you to say that people who strive to improve themselves are inferior to those who do not (or don't feel the need to)?
> More importantly, if we permanently alter the genetic makeup of these individuals, are we irrevocably sacrificing our species' genetic resilience in favor of quick answers to avoiding the inherent differences we all posess?
Should we force people to live with a genetic disability because we *might* at some point in the future find that the disability has some advantage (that may or may not turn out to outweigh being handicapped) for the rest of us?
Besides, maybe the technology can be applied locally (so that only the cells in the eyes are affected). I'd RTFA to find out but it doesn't seem to link to a story :/
Yeah, the 'moral dilemma' is kinda silly. But why stop at curing colourblindness? When can I get my IR and UV vision?
What's interesting is that some women can see 4 colours instead of the 3 (or less...) the rest of us are stuck with. So there is definitely evidence that the brain can handle more input than it's currently receiving.
And lynx. And all adblockers.
But it's not 'bad' censorship since it is voluntary. All posts are still available and by browsing at something higher than -1 you choose to trust the moderators to hilight anything of interest. Censorship is only bad when it is not optional.
> I know a number of immigrants who hail from, shall we say, less-enlightened countries (one described the country of his birth as a "typical Communist hellhole") and there's no way you would ever get them to go back. America is still the Land of Opportunity to them: it's all relative you know.
Sampling bias much? Perhaps you'd like to consider my hypothesis that most people voluntarily moving from one country to another do so because they like the latter better than the former. Concluding their countries of origin are 'less-enlightened' on basis of their testimonies seems a bit unfair.
Now I finally understand why they like the whole gun ownership thing :p
You could stumble on that stuff on the 'regular' intertubes too. Although in some places it is more likely than others (e.g. 4chan).
They're way ahead of us.
> With .xxx, expect it to become opt-in. And then people know you watch porn. They have it in written form. This would be even worse if you had to apply for accessing specific .xxx pages.
Well someone would simply start proxxxy.com... I think there is a fortune to be made there.
Assuming for the sake of argument that the statement is true, how is "men would have raped without porn" not a good reason to have porn? What are the downsides of porn that are so severe that they outweigh the advantage of less rape?
Source: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/09/the_doghouse_cr.html
The above text applies to symetric-key cryto, such as AES, and it's slightly different for asymetric-key algorithms (they are less secure than their keysize would suggest compared to most symetric-key algorithms) such as RSA. With quantum computers, public key will be pretty much screwed, but symetric-key should be safe for the forseeable future (and that is more than enough for almost every situation).
Why one would want to use the same RSA key for years and years is beyond me. Want something encrypted for the next 100 years? Don't bother with public key, go block cypher. Why not stick to AES or something similar?
> Do you really think you could understand the motives of a being who can create a universe? Churches (whether Wiccan, Hindu, or whatever) don't question their gods or the motives of their gods, nor should they. A being powerful enough to create a universe would be far beyond our puny comprehension, and to think any human could comprehend is pure hubris of the worst sort.
Then why worship them? Maybe they invented religion to deceive us and like to see us suffer. Maybe they punish the devout for all eternity in hell, and reward atheism. Maybe it's all a joke and they created the universe just to see how long it would take for us to invent peanut butter, and now that we have, they went to the pub and will be back in 3 billion years. Maybe people are miraculously healed so that they may suffer another day.
If we can't know the motives of gods, then there is no reason at all to trust any religion. Whatever gods do might as well be completely random since it is impossible for us to know why they act the way they do, and since we can never understand their motives, we can't trust any pattern in their actions. Worshipping them is useless because they are as likely to be insulted by it as they are to appreciate it.
Surely the behavior of a rational person who believes that the motives of gods are unknoweable will act as if gods do not exist?
But it is at least as satisfying!
Now, to find my mace...
> Firstly, just because somebody is taught something doesn't mean that they will end up any good at it. My daughter was taught German in school, but still can't buy a postage stamp using German. Teach all the logic you like, many -- I suspect most -- still won't be much good at it.
That doesn't really matter. While in an ideal world, everybody would be able to come up with logical arguments of arbitrary complexity, it would be 'good enough' if the majority of people were able to recognize and understand other peoples logic (like your daughter might be able to understand some german when others speak it, even though she can't come up with a sentence of her own). Kinda like mathematical proofs (I'm awful at those, but at least I can usually tell when they're wrong).
> Even though they are just program code, 0's and 1's at their base.
Well you're just atoms at your base, aren't you? If we had a computer powerful enough to completely simulate every atom of your body, would that simulation of you be 'alive'? Maybe not according to biology, but I'm sure your simulation would disagree.
Hmmn, that's interesting. By simulating your body in a computer we'd prove that you can be conscious without being alive.
Oh they do, they just don't appear on your browser because China MITM'ed your http session and changed the website.
> How can you compare these incidents to the murder of 30 million?
In their defense, they have over 4 times the population of the USA, so you should round it down to 7 million for a fair comparison. :p
> In fact, some of the examples given, a for loop would had been much more appropriate since it used a counter inside of the while loop to control its exit e.g., while ( x > 1 ) .... if ( y == foobar ) x = 0; else // do something
Why not simply
while (x > 1 && y == foobar)
or
if (y == foobar) break;
?
Break is nice...
> Then it was the ozone hole that would fry anyone not wearing SPF1000 sunblock. Where did that go?
We stopped using the CFCs that were identified as a major contributor to the problem and it appears that is working. Oh sorry, I don't think that supports your argument.
> It would be nice is Slashdot had an "undo mod" option, so one could remod. Make it cost something, so people don't change their mods willy-nilly, like the mod point you set incorrectly in the first place.
Maybe if the undo would have to be done within 5 minutes and you would still lose the modpoint? That sounds reasonable.
> Clutter? About as much as "MOD THIS UP!" I suppose, which isn't exactly worthless.
Actually, I always slap those with '-1 offtopic', which means the chance that I'll have modpoints left for the post they responded to goes down. Of course the exact same thing will happen to this post (but the knowledge that this one contains more content than "MOD THIS UP!" will help me sleep tonight ;)).
Well, if you insist on an answer: only an 'idiot' wouldn't know that a virus is much, much smaller than a human cell, and since the device from TFA identifies viruses by size (among other things) they wouldn't identify humans (or any other animal) as a virus.
> thanks for being dumb.
I fail to see how you could come to that conclusion based on the contents of GPs post. Please substantiate your accusation.