> How can we assume that the patient, who by definition has brain damage, is capable of understanding the question correctly and answering correctly?
That one seems rather easy, you ask them many questions and see how many of the answers make any sense. If a large part of them make sense, it is a reasonable to conclude the patient understood and was able to answer. Of course this would disqualify patients who are able to understand the question but unable to answer, and those who would be able to answer but cannot understand the question, and those who drift in and out of conciousness...
> It does raise many ethical issues - for example - it is lawful to allow patients in a permanent vegetative state to die by withdrawing all treatment, but if a patient showed they could respond it would not be, even if they made it clear that was what they wanted.
It seems kinda silly that you're only allowed to die when you're unable to make that decision. To me it seems cruel to keep someone alive in a vegetative state just because they have enough of their conciousness left to want to end it. Yay for legalized euthanasia in the Netherlands.
> At this rate there will be so many sex offenders gone through the system in 10 years that it will be viewed as a case of teenage shoplifting is! I don't see how that is good for anyone.
But you only need to do so once, right? Just use your read-only device, copy the complete disk to a disk image on another drive, and then go crazy on copies of that image. Heh, if you intend to use a year to analyze the disk image, you could even get an equivalent (new, empty) drive, write the image to it, and give it to the suspect, and keep the original disk as evidence. If illegal stuff is found, you have the original HD as evidence, and if the suspect was innocent he didn't lose all his data.
> A second argument against drugs is that the person will end up wasting precious health care resources after they ruin their health with drug use. Many people who I know who are for legalizing drug use make this a condition --- anyone who does drugs voluntarily gives up society's obligation to give him health care
How about people who have dangerous hobbies? Should people who engage in certain sports that have been determined to have a higher risk of injury (e.g. suppose datamining reveals one is three times as likely to break a leg while running compared to swimming) be denied health care? After all, once the 'injury statistics' get published you can say people made a concious choice to accept those risks, and thereby gave up society's obligation to give them health care.
How risky must an activity be before those practicing it don't get healthcare anymore? Where do you draw the line? I hear alcohol is more risky than some drugs. Maybe those drugs should be legalised and alcohol be banned? How about people who get an STD by practicing unsafe sex. Surely they knew what they were doing, and we have no obligation to cure them.
What restrictions on your behavior are you willing to accept in exchange for saving 'precious health care resources'?
A deterministic universe is interesting from the 'do we have free will?'-perspective, but the whole uncertainty principle ruins our attempts to simulate the universe even if we could build one 'outside' reality. Frustrating really, we are surrounded by very uncooperative hardware.
HIV fits your description. There are not, as far as I am aware, any viruses that bestow positive genes on those who are infected with them (with the exception of those engineered for gene therapy, your leukemi^Wmileage may vary).
> What about just the human behavior of kissing? Perhaps it's a way of smelling each other's breath to check for disease signals, or sharing of pheromones, but I'm more inclined to think it's about virus transfer. I'd also presume that breast feeding might provide lateral transfer of beneficial genes via viruses that haven't "gone germline" yet
As a rule, your body 'dislikes' viruses, and will not attempt to acquire them. As far as I know there are no viruses that have a positive effect on their hosts, and even if there were, your body would have no way to sort them from the bad viruses. I think your theory is extremely unlikely to be true, especially since AFAIK so far no evidence has been found that suggests it may be happening. Also even if there was an advantage to acquiring some viruses, it's probably easier to wait a generation for it to "go germline" than to evolve a very complex mechanism that allows for viruses to be shared between individuals (as if viruses need help with that...).
I know about retroviruses and how they are able to end up in your DNA (wikipedia suggests 5-8% of our DNA comes from such viruses), but that was not what GGP was suggesting. He was suggesting human cells can exchange DNA with other cells, which is not true. Cells trading DNA does happen, but that is limited to bacteria (wikipedia 'plasmid'). Humans cannot 'learn' to digest certain foods from the bacteria in their guts.
> The idea that some genetic material might actually be passed from ourselves to these bacteria, or the other way around, seemed to make sense. I'm not talking about large chunks of DNA, but rather a codon or two every dozen generations, or something to that effect. Given that mutations/variations are more likely to occur in two species, as opposed to one, that symbiotic relationship might have accelerated genetic changes in either, or both, species. Who knows, maybe our ability to digest some specific foodstuff (a foodstuff that we previously relied on a bacteria in our gut to help us digest/process) was derived from genetic material that originally came from a bacteria that had the ability but was passed on to us a codon at a time. Just an example.
You're crazy. Let's assume for the sake of argument that DNA from a bacterium will sometimes end up in a nearby human cell. Since the bacteria in your example live in your guts, they will share DNA with cells in your guts. These cells are not involved in procreation and therefore their 'mutations' will not be inherited and therefore they do not influence human evolution.
The only way to make this work (still assuming the DNA trading between human cells and bacteria is possible) would be if sperm or an egg somehow were to come in contact with bacteria from your guts. I don't think the whole 'ass-to-pussy' thing that I may or may not have accidentally stumbled upon at some point in my life while searching for, eeeeh, educative programming related articles is so widely practiced that it has a significant effect on human evolution ( except when you get a horrible infection and die:p ).
> The prisoner who brought the challenge should be bitchslapped by the court as punishment for wasting their time, ordered to pay restitution, and get additional years added to their sentence on that basis.
You think a person should be getting YEARS added to their sentence because he dared challenge a rule that you consider to be unimportant?
Sometimes it's just plain FUN FUN FUN to code in asm. You're right that most programmers will never have a need for it at all (with some exceptions, such as those messing with operating systems or embedded systems), although knowing some ASM can help a lot with debugging. I suppose one could (read: should) learn a little ASM to have a better idea of what the hardware is doing, this will allow you to optimize your code a little, or (more importantly) write it in such a way that makes it easier for the compiler to optimize.
> Some scientists suspect that masturbation is actually a method to help provide non-damaging trauma to the testes, which can help alter, over time, the DNA that is contained within the spermatozoa.
Huh? That doesn't even begin to make sense.
1) What is the use of changing the DNA? 2) How can changing your DNA be called 'non-damaging'? 3) What masturbatory techniques do you use that cause significant trauma to your balls?
If nature had wanted us to traumatize our balls it wouldn't hurt so damn much >
Please give a link to these 'some scientists' of yours.
Disclaimer: If by 'alter' you were referring to recombination rather than random mutation you may ignore point 1 and 2, although I would be suprised if a kick in the balls would improve this process.
> If we start out as females, and have to evolve to be males (hence why males have nipples), does that explain why males evolve faster then females? Maybe because we have to do so to become males?
No Furbymon. Stop watching pokemon. We don't 'evolve' into males, we grow into males. There is no fancy genetic changing required to become a guy.
> Then he narrows it further by requiring them to live in the exact same city (yeah, nice goal, but it doesn't always work out that way)
You realise that city has about 13% (his estimate) of the population of the UK (about 61 million people) which means he narrows it down to about 8 million people? That is more than some countries, and more than most states in the USA. The requirement might be unreasonable if you live in a little village on the north pole, but in this case it seems very reasonable and it is NOT a ridiculously high standard.
> Okay - so how do you POSSIBLY apply a statistical analysis on something as subjective as a womans physical attractiveness?
He assumes he finds 1 in 20 women attractive. Note that this number does not say anything about WHAT he finds attractive in a woman, since that information is irrelevant for the equation. I don't see why this wouldn't work and how the 'subjectiveness of a womans physical attractiveness' would interfere.
> not to mention that I personally find "gradual, unknowing descent into evil" a hell of a lot more compelling of a story than "generic coming of age tale"
I still think maddox did a good summary of this 'gradual' change http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/images/ep3_tot1.gif . I think the change could have been interesting, but they totally screwed it up. You'd think most people would think twice before slaying a whole bunch of children "in exchange for a vague promise about a cure for a potential ailment" for ones wife, but not anakin, nooooo. Gradual my ass.
Slightly more ontopic, why hasn't anyone mentioned X-wing alliance yet? It was pretty awesome.
> The US tried that before they established a federal system; but judging by how hard it was to get 13 newly independent states to agree back then makes me wonder if the EU, whose states have an even more complex history and longer independence will ever be able to move to a strong federal EU government.
> I don't care how technical you want to get about the definition of theft, depriving someone of money is wrong.
If I grow my own vegetables, I won't buy the vegetables I would have bought otherwise, thereby depriving the supermarket of money! Obviously growing vegetables is wrong.
> I'm much more concerned that they do checks to make sure the people operating the machines aren't pedophiles.
Why? If the person viewing the images thinks they're hot or not does not affect anyone. Besides, 'they' (pedophiles) could visit a nudist beach for a 'high-res' experience. They might even be thinking naughty thoughts! Won't someone think of the children?
Of course if the devices had a USB interface so you could save your favorite pics to your flash drive, you might have a point.
Slashdot Mirror
> How can we assume that the patient, who by definition has brain damage, is capable of understanding the question correctly and answering correctly?
That one seems rather easy, you ask them many questions and see how many of the answers make any sense. If a large part of them make sense, it is a reasonable to conclude the patient understood and was able to answer. Of course this would disqualify patients who are able to understand the question but unable to answer, and those who would be able to answer but cannot understand the question, and those who drift in and out of conciousness...
> It does raise many ethical issues - for example - it is lawful to allow patients in a permanent vegetative state to die by withdrawing all treatment, but if a patient showed they could respond it would not be, even if they made it clear that was what they wanted.
It seems kinda silly that you're only allowed to die when you're unable to make that decision. To me it seems cruel to keep someone alive in a vegetative state just because they have enough of their conciousness left to want to end it. Yay for legalized euthanasia in the Netherlands.
> At this rate there will be so many sex offenders gone through the system in 10 years that it will be viewed as a case of teenage shoplifting is! I don't see how that is good for anyone.
It's good for the sex offenders.
But you only need to do so once, right? Just use your read-only device, copy the complete disk to a disk image on another drive, and then go crazy on copies of that image. Heh, if you intend to use a year to analyze the disk image, you could even get an equivalent (new, empty) drive, write the image to it, and give it to the suspect, and keep the original disk as evidence. If illegal stuff is found, you have the original HD as evidence, and if the suspect was innocent he didn't lose all his data.
> A second argument against drugs is that the person will end up wasting precious health care resources after they ruin their health with drug use. Many people who I know who are for legalizing drug use make this a condition --- anyone who does drugs voluntarily gives up society's obligation to give him health care
How about people who have dangerous hobbies? Should people who engage in certain sports that have been determined to have a higher risk of injury (e.g. suppose datamining reveals one is three times as likely to break a leg while running compared to swimming) be denied health care? After all, once the 'injury statistics' get published you can say people made a concious choice to accept those risks, and thereby gave up society's obligation to give them health care.
How risky must an activity be before those practicing it don't get healthcare anymore? Where do you draw the line? I hear alcohol is more risky than some drugs. Maybe those drugs should be legalised and alcohol be banned? How about people who get an STD by practicing unsafe sex. Surely they knew what they were doing, and we have no obligation to cure them.
What restrictions on your behavior are you willing to accept in exchange for saving 'precious health care resources'?
A deterministic universe is interesting from the 'do we have free will?'-perspective, but the whole uncertainty principle ruins our attempts to simulate the universe even if we could build one 'outside' reality. Frustrating really, we are surrounded by very uncooperative hardware.
HIV fits your description. There are not, as far as I am aware, any viruses that bestow positive genes on those who are infected with them (with the exception of those engineered for gene therapy, your leukemi^Wmileage may vary).
Elaborate.
> What about just the human behavior of kissing? Perhaps it's a way of smelling each other's breath to check for disease signals, or sharing of pheromones, but I'm more inclined to think it's about virus transfer. I'd also presume that breast feeding might provide lateral transfer of beneficial genes via viruses that haven't "gone germline" yet
As a rule, your body 'dislikes' viruses, and will not attempt to acquire them. As far as I know there are no viruses that have a positive effect on their hosts, and even if there were, your body would have no way to sort them from the bad viruses. I think your theory is extremely unlikely to be true, especially since AFAIK so far no evidence has been found that suggests it may be happening. Also even if there was an advantage to acquiring some viruses, it's probably easier to wait a generation for it to "go germline" than to evolve a very complex mechanism that allows for viruses to be shared between individuals (as if viruses need help with that...).
I know about retroviruses and how they are able to end up in your DNA (wikipedia suggests 5-8% of our DNA comes from such viruses), but that was not what GGP was suggesting. He was suggesting human cells can exchange DNA with other cells, which is not true. Cells trading DNA does happen, but that is limited to bacteria (wikipedia 'plasmid'). Humans cannot 'learn' to digest certain foods from the bacteria in their guts.
> The idea that some genetic material might actually be passed from ourselves to these bacteria, or the other way around, seemed to make sense. I'm not talking about large chunks of DNA, but rather a codon or two every dozen generations, or something to that effect. Given that mutations/variations are more likely to occur in two species, as opposed to one, that symbiotic relationship might have accelerated genetic changes in either, or both, species. Who knows, maybe our ability to digest some specific foodstuff (a foodstuff that we previously relied on a bacteria in our gut to help us digest/process) was derived from genetic material that originally came from a bacteria that had the ability but was passed on to us a codon at a time. Just an example.
You're crazy. Let's assume for the sake of argument that DNA from a bacterium will sometimes end up in a nearby human cell. Since the bacteria in your example live in your guts, they will share DNA with cells in your guts. These cells are not involved in procreation and therefore their 'mutations' will not be inherited and therefore they do not influence human evolution.
The only way to make this work (still assuming the DNA trading between human cells and bacteria is possible) would be if sperm or an egg somehow were to come in contact with bacteria from your guts. I don't think the whole 'ass-to-pussy' thing that I may or may not have accidentally stumbled upon at some point in my life while searching for, eeeeh, educative programming related articles is so widely practiced that it has a significant effect on human evolution ( except when you get a horrible infection and die :p ).
My party prefers to kill the blacksmith BEFORE trying to "buy" his stuff. I'm so proud of them <3
> The prisoner who brought the challenge should be bitchslapped by the court as punishment for wasting their time, ordered to pay restitution, and get additional years added to their sentence on that basis.
You think a person should be getting YEARS added to their sentence because he dared challenge a rule that you consider to be unimportant?
Sometimes it's just plain FUN FUN FUN to code in asm. You're right that most programmers will never have a need for it at all (with some exceptions, such as those messing with operating systems or embedded systems), although knowing some ASM can help a lot with debugging. I suppose one could (read: should) learn a little ASM to have a better idea of what the hardware is doing, this will allow you to optimize your code a little, or (more importantly) write it in such a way that makes it easier for the compiler to optimize.
> Some scientists suspect that masturbation is actually a method to help provide non-damaging trauma to the testes, which can help alter, over time, the DNA that is contained within the spermatozoa.
Huh? That doesn't even begin to make sense.
1) What is the use of changing the DNA?
2) How can changing your DNA be called 'non-damaging'?
3) What masturbatory techniques do you use that cause significant trauma to your balls?
If nature had wanted us to traumatize our balls it wouldn't hurt so damn much >
Please give a link to these 'some scientists' of yours.
Disclaimer: If by 'alter' you were referring to recombination rather than random mutation you may ignore point 1 and 2, although I would be suprised if a kick in the balls would improve this process.
> If we start out as females, and have to evolve to be males (hence why males have nipples), does that explain why males evolve faster then females? Maybe because we have to do so to become males?
No Furbymon. Stop watching pokemon. We don't 'evolve' into males, we grow into males. There is no fancy genetic changing required to become a guy.
> Then he narrows it further by requiring them to live in the exact same city (yeah, nice goal, but it doesn't always work out that way)
You realise that city has about 13% (his estimate) of the population of the UK (about 61 million people) which means he narrows it down to about 8 million people? That is more than some countries, and more than most states in the USA. The requirement might be unreasonable if you live in a little village on the north pole, but in this case it seems very reasonable and it is NOT a ridiculously high standard.
> Okay - so how do you POSSIBLY apply a statistical analysis on something as subjective as a womans physical attractiveness?
He assumes he finds 1 in 20 women attractive. Note that this number does not say anything about WHAT he finds attractive in a woman, since that information is irrelevant for the equation. I don't see why this wouldn't work and how the 'subjectiveness of a womans physical attractiveness' would interfere.
Actually they appear to be quite reasonable. Go RTFA (or actually the pdf on the page that TFA links to).
Use your tongue to read your braille books instead. This should also stop people from buying used books...
> But yeah, being a superhuman could be fun :).
Humans are actually pretty awesome already. Funny you mentioned cheetahs overheating, they're not the only ones: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wI-9RJi0Qo
I don't have the endurance for it, but I think the whole 'persistence hunt' thingy is just plain badass.
> not to mention that I personally find "gradual, unknowing descent into evil" a hell of a lot more compelling of a story than "generic coming of age tale"
I still think maddox did a good summary of this 'gradual' change http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/images/ep3_tot1.gif . I think the change could have been interesting, but they totally screwed it up. You'd think most people would think twice before slaying a whole bunch of children "in exchange for a vague promise about a cure for a potential ailment" for ones wife, but not anakin, nooooo. Gradual my ass.
Slightly more ontopic, why hasn't anyone mentioned X-wing alliance yet? It was pretty awesome.
> The US tried that before they established a federal system; but judging by how hard it was to get 13 newly independent states to agree back then makes me wonder if the EU, whose states have an even more complex history and longer independence will ever be able to move to a strong federal EU government.
More importantly, why would we want such a thing?
> I don't care how technical you want to get about the definition of theft, depriving someone of money is wrong.
If I grow my own vegetables, I won't buy the vegetables I would have bought otherwise, thereby depriving the supermarket of money! Obviously growing vegetables is wrong.
> I'm much more concerned that they do checks to make sure the people operating the machines aren't pedophiles.
Why? If the person viewing the images thinks they're hot or not does not affect anyone. Besides, 'they' (pedophiles) could visit a nudist beach for a 'high-res' experience. They might even be thinking naughty thoughts! Won't someone think of the children?
Of course if the devices had a USB interface so you could save your favorite pics to your flash drive, you might have a point.