It is important to stress that a directly interconnected hivemind would suffer timing issues if signals were sanitized by the technological component before being relayed, causing many of the cognitative deficits found in people with mylelination defects to become manifest in the gestalt conciousness. It would also run foul of the halting problem.
This means that propogating signals originating in a single connected mind could cause havok with the whole hivemind, in much the same way a localized signal in the visual cortex of an epileptic can paralyze the entire cortical function of the afflicted person in just a few seconds.
Neural networks are among other things, open feedback loops. Sensory information gets relayed around the neural net, and "memories" are just sensory information on endless loop being preserved in a dedicated region. Anything that influences these feedback cycles will have avalanching effects on the function of that network. This is why things like depression become hard to correct, since the network gets stuck in cycles that promote the depressed state. Antidepressants are meant to help mitigate these effects by manually supplying stimuli to the depressed nervous system.
The issue here, is that the "higher" gestalt mind will be operating on the signal data generated by the connected minds interacting and sharing signal information. It would be susceptible to epilleptic like siezures from hypersynchronous signal sources, and from cascading depression between connected peers, and also just from the idle thoughts and memories of the connected people. (Which by the nature of the shared collective, would also influence all other peers as well, so somebody with a neurological defect could cause lasting neurological harm to the rest of the cluster, just by being connected.)
What I as getting at, is that a subtle seditious thought that isn't really serious, like "we should launch all the politicians into the sun", would bounce around the neural net and if it gets echoed enough times, it will become a recurring thought to the hive mind, and attract its attention as an idea worth pursuing.
Doesn't mean the hivemind would act on it, but it would likely contemplate all the possible ways to do that action, and contemplate the consequences. It might actually consider the prospect, if said politicians are also connected, and doing things that the other connected minds don't like.
Simply having the thought is what exposes the hivemind to the concept, and the nature of a distributed neural network means everyone attached will respond in some fashion to that thought, even if just subconsciously.
Don't underestimate the influence a single brain in the swarm can have over the collective. Remember, a piece of cortex the size of a grain of rice can cause system wide deadlock in an epilleptic siezure. The same sorts of things would be possible in a distributed neural network.
Unfortunately, a meta-mind created by a gestalt of many interconncted humans subconciously sharing data with each other would be just as susceptable to mental illnesses as the individual human minds it is comprised of. Humans attached having "seditious" thoughts that they would never dream of acting on themselves, would still influence the behavior of the gestalt mind in much the same way a handful of 'diseased' neurons in a single human can profoundly influence behavior. (Or how things like depression work.)
Given the conflicted nature the being would have, it would almost certainly suffer a number of neurotic conditions without having very carefully selected humans plugged in.
You say that like its a bad thing, or that I would find it offensive.
If something is true, no matter what you think about it matters. I don't worry or obscess over it anymore than I worry about or obscess over my gender, eye color, or skin color.
Being a biochemical computer with a self-modifying architecture isn't something I feel negatively about. A rose by any other name, as the saying goes. Much like said rose, accepting it as what it really is, and discarding the mystique associated with it, leaves you a more rational agent. The same goes with accepting what science says about how we are put together.
Like many people, he is unable or unwilling to contemplate all the implications of determinism, in regard to human behavior and decision making. Like many, he appears to hold a silly view that humans aren't more than very sophisticated computers.
Clearly, "free will" is magical, unquantifiable, and defies the laws of physics at work inside the brain!
Cause, like, just being a wetware robot with haywire software just isn't fashionable.
There has already been a subtle shift in design aesthetic for commuter vehicles toward designs that aerodynamically hug the road. Reducing the weight of vehicles would indeed make them more likely to get blown around, so I would expect that swept surface aesthetic to continue in force, so that wind blown over the vehicle shoves it down onto the road.
This would be especially important for luxury sports cars, since their market demographic is "rich thill seeker who likes to drive really fast." The same issue of vehicle flipover from wind would occur in a very fast moving, very light vehicle. (Strap some wings on, and you have an airplane, basically.) This means that aerofoil designs would be an absolute necessity for maintaining road safety for such vehicles.
I would expect to see hood and tail "spoiler bars" that perform this function, with a higher up ride, and a lowered center of gravity.
(Remember, an airplane's wing is swept to have a greater length of curvature on the top surface than on the bottom one, because the increased air velocity the air assumes to clear the greater distance reduces pressure on the top compared to the bottom. This is what lifts the airplane. We want the opposite. We want air to travel faster underneath the vehicle than over the top, so that atmospheric pressure forces the vehicle down onto the ground. For that, we would need a larger airgap between the ground and the chasis frame to accommodate that airflow. The vehicle might look a little funny, but it would solve the "wind makes it blow away" problem.)
In this case though, if the conversion os spacetime happens at the speed of light, and hubble expansion of spacetime between 2 points has an effective inflation that makes the two objects appear to be moving away from each other at faster than light speed, then if the rip occurs at point A, it will never overtake expansion, and thus never reach B, unless the expansion slows down.
This means that the entirety of the universe cannot be consumed. (Imagine: fuse burns at the speed of light, but new fuse is added faster than that. The lit part of the fuse will never reach the dynamite.)
If the rip occurs OUTSIDE of our light cone, then we will *never* encounter the rip, because it is outside of our lightcone.
This means that this could already have happened in reference frames we have no possibility of experiencing, elsewhere in the universe, and that it will not have any impact on our frame at all.
(We already have galaxies with redshift values indicating superluminal rates of cosmic expansion between them and us. We see a freezeframe moment of extreme redshift of the exact instant that hubble expansion exceeded C. Such a galaxy could experience the quantum fluctuation, and we would never know, because its shock front would never reach us.)
On a positive side, this means that if WE create the fluctuation through science, we won't have doomed the whole universe, only the portions within our lightcone.
This makes me wonder though... since this is a decay to a more stable state for the vacuum, what possible candidate states are there, and what probabilities of creation? Our universe's spacetime could become little explosions of new physics, all different and strange, but still obeying the rules of hubble expansion from our current set of rules, and thus never touching or interacting with each other except under special circumstances.
Extrapolating out all the possible consequences of this would be entertaining. What WOULD happen if region A reconforms one way, and region B within A's light cone reconforms a different way, and they intersect? Etc.
Seed mix contains an unaltered heirloom seed, and a terminator carrying seed that makes a mature plant that produces no pollen.
The unaltered heirloom seed in the mix provides the field with pollen. Resulting seed from the vastly more productive GM corn is sterile. All seeds that grow are unprotected heirloom only. Neighboring fields are not contaminated with GM pollen.
All problems solved!
(Unless of course, your GOAL is to be the only supplier of seeds worldwide, of course. Then being negligent and prducing pollenating GM crops is directly involved in the business strategy!)
[Repost. Slashdot seems to have eaten the previous one.]
Seed mix contains an unaltered heirloom seed, and a terminator carrying seed that makes a mature plant that produces no pollen.
The unaltered heirloom seed in the mix provides the field with pollen. Resulting seed from the vastly more productive GM corn is sterile. All seeds that grow are unprotected heirloom only. Neighboring fields are not contaminated with GM pollen.
All problems solved!
(Unless of course, your GOAL is to be the only supplier of seeds worldwide, of course. Then being negligent and prducing pollenating GM crops is directly involved in the business strategy!)
While whimsically silly, there is also the notion that a perfectly featureless, flat spacetime of perfect homogeneity is already a singularity, with no need of collapse. The ripping of spacetime from dark energy could therefor be seen as seeing the big bang from the inside of the singularity. (The next big bang would occur in more spacial dimensions than our universe currently occupies.)
So, basically, you are saying that your sales figures, and thus your job, are heavily dependent upon hype-based purchased, created through media and product placement, rather than on actual entertainment value of the product you produce?
I understand that you were trying to spin it another way; that it is too hard to make a demo that sinks the hook.
The logic table of the statements though, show that demos are always bad. If demos are always bad, and not just "sometimes bad", then it means that allowing the player to actually see and use the product correlates with lower than expected sales, 100% of the time. That means your industry has become dependent upon fooling the consumer through advertising, and that giving them the opportunity to see and use a sample of the actual product, leaves them underwhelmed 100% of the time, and less willing to buy.
To cement this counter conjecture, (or to bury it 6ft under), how do your company's sales figures become impacted by leaving a full version demo on locked console demo units in stores? That would cut to the very core of the issue, regardless of the direction of the spin, and I am interested in knowing.
I have noticed that very few games other than "console leader titles" are given such "full demo in the kiosk" treatment. I find that displeasing, and would rather see modern console demo units be loaded with Games on Demand packages on the internal storage, with all major titles at the store. That way I can demo games I am considering purchasing, and truely interact with the demo console in a useful fashion. I can't take the demo console home with me, and staying at the store to play the demo clear through is loitering and illegal.
Other than the issue of it (possibly) exposing the artificially inflated sales figures through the petty hype machine, and getting all the lawyers to agree, what are the major detractors from doing such a simple thing?
Birth defects can come from any number of sources, and are not necessarily indicative that the parents are genetically unfit.
Take for instance, spinal tube defects arising from improper prenatal nutrition in the female, in regard to folate intake.
Which would you rather have: Mommy and Daddy with "Wheelchair Willie", their precious angel, that requires 24/7 nursing, monitoring, special needs assistance, and government support for life---
Or: "Willie" is perfectly healthy and normal after doctors surgically promoted proper neural tube closure, with the help of a bio-safe adhesive and embryonic surgery techniques.
This is a no-brainer even for self-centered assholes who hate other people being alive. (Because of the inconveniences those other people make for them.)
"We are the FDA. We demand you make very costly animal model studies first, then, after those studies, you have conduct phase 1 and phase 2 human clinical trials, THEN, AFTER THAT, we have to decide if we want to approve commercial use and production or not."
Throw in a few bouts of "Oh my gawd! They put clam juice inside some poor gerbil, and glued it all up inside! THOSE MONSTERS!", and a few rounds of "Animal models are poor substitutes for human testing, and amount to nothing, so you arent getting funding."
In the end, 15 years since "Hey! This stuff looks very promising as a biosafe adhesive for surgical applications!" looks like BREAKNECK PROGRESS!
(and you wonder why rich americans with deadly diseases and debilitating conditions leave the US to go on "Medical vacations" in the EU and Thailand.)
Larry the Lobbyist playset comes with Larry the Lobbyist action figure, a play mirror, 3 hooker action figures, sugar packets, and a briefcase filled with play money.
Mix and Match what Larry the Lobbyist says by affixing different logos to his briefcase!
When combined with the Politicial Inaction figures from the Congressional-Regressional playset, Endless combinations of interaction are possible!
*Congressional Inaction figures respond differently based on the amount of play money inside the briefcase, and also according to how many hooker action figures and how many sugar packets have been spilled on the play mirror.
Does death by withholding treatment count? If so, then drug patents have directly killed more children than every school shooting in the US combined.
"Oh, Sorry little Raj, but we need our 10,000 dollars for your life saving medication, even though your government can produce it for 10$. Because that undermines our business model, we have to sue your government to stop the inexpensive local production, and you have to die. It's nothing personal, just business. We HAVE to protect our intellectual property!"
It is arguable that his policies are endangering that many, and more by a factor of 1000, or perhaps more-- by not just waving a gun around, but waving around nuclear devices.
When you really stop to consider the actual size of the event, we have 26 people, out of 300 million people, with a 5 to 10 year interval between such events. All things considered, the actual *rate* of such shootings is quite low.
Compare with what Assad's nuclear penis waving actually translates to in terms of endangering the lives of his citizenry.
The two are not even close to comparable in scope. Assad is by far the bigger embarrassment.
Personally, I would put it at "systemic problem", and not at "One time occurrence."
The issue with "20 children", is that we jam that many into a single classroom, because of other systemic problems.
Much like "OMG! That airplane crashed and killed 900 people!" does NOT mean "OMG, Airplanes are unsafe! Look at all the people that died! WE MUST DO SOMETHING!" It means "One airplane crashed, and the 900 people we shoehorned onto it paid with their lives. Out of the many thousands of aircraft in service, this is a one-off occurrence and the large casualty figure is a consequence of mass transit."
In both of your examples, we have areas that 1) Service an epic ass-ton of people, and 2) have a large density of people per service run. Just like the hypothetical crashing jumbo-liner.
A much more drastic reduction in total children shot by crazy people can be achieved by putting fewer children in each school, and in each classroom. Studies suggest that this will also increase educational quality as a bonus. We don't do that, because of a big tangled ratnest of other problems that are systemic.
Rather than focus the attention on the rat-nest of systemic problems, (Cause like, that's hard and shit. Blaming gun ownership is much easier!) we jump for an easy to blame strawman we can shove all our problems onto, so we can continue to pretend that the systemic malfunction does not exist.
So, where do *I* draw *MY* line?
Ignoring systemic problems that create ripe opportunities for massive loss of life to begin with because ignoring those problems is easier than dealing with them properly, and the assignment of scapegoats and whipping boys to divert the attention away from those problems.
I question your reading comprehension skills, as I addressed your argument directly in the initial post.
The windfalls of the space race were from miniturization and reduction of power requirements and intrinsic costs of already existing technologies.
Microwave: miniaturized radar, using improved magnetron.
Integrated Circuit: improvements over still largely bulky transistors, to reduce size and power draw.
You will find similar stories for other space race windfall tech.
That fruit has already fallen, and the requirements for reliable spacecraft have already been met, and then improved upon considerably over the past 4 decades by private enterprises. Additional government R&D will not appreciably increase the state of the art in those areas, and thus will not produce additional windfall products.
So, why else is there for the president to dedicate very scarce financial assets to space R&D, when private enterprises have already made moves to releive the government of that financial burden on their own?
I believe you will find, should you care to look, that now president obama voted YES to all three of those issues you have addressed, while he was still a congressman.
Last I checked, the president still cannot declare a war without congressional approval. You cannot handwave away bad fiscal and foriegn policy decisions as being the sole responsibility of a single politician. Our system does not work that way (yet).
If you don't mind my saying so, your comment is neither intelligent, nor useful.
You can possibly redeem yourself if you can explain your grounds for such a statement. I at least attempted to qualify the position I had taken. Your rebuttle does nothing of the sort. It is essentially the highbrow version of "Nu uh!"
Please, shower us with your profound insights as to how the position I have taken is "not even wrong." Until you do so, you have contributed nothing to this discussion.
No, I am saying a "space race" is not an appropriate investment infrastructure.
Something like biotech, or nuclear energy research are more likely to produce significant gains than another space race.
At no place did I say we shouldn't be spending on research and development. I said we need to cut back on our spending, (austerity), and not spend money foolishly.
I am curious to know how you got such hyperbole from what I wrote....
The only sensible way to approach this, other than decrying obscene levels of politicial incompetence, is to imagine that obaminator wants to invest in space R&D to re-prime the science and consumer tech boom windfalls of the previous space race, that gave rise to the information era.
However, those windfalls were the result of brand new technologies, and old technologies being miniaturized to fit in the limited space and energy budgets of spacecraft. Those problems have now been satisfactorily solved, and additional funding will only fund refinements of existing technologies. No big windfall can come from a tree that has already been shaken.
As such, space investment must be a gambit that some valuable commodity that cannot be obtained on earth will be discovered, and a market opened up by space funding. We have sent many dozens of unmanned probes armed with a wide array of sensory aparatus. We have not found anything that would suggest such a gambit is reasonable.
As such, the president's suggestion that space funding should be expanded, while the nation teeters on the brink of bankruptcy and loss of confidence with foriegn investors, is woefully irresponsible.
Sadly, due to the nature of the mushroom, it decomposes rapidly after being picked, so only fresh mushroom could be used for this purpose. In terms of taste and texture, it is similar to crimini, though has a different appearance when sliced. Disguising the mushroom in a saute' will not adversely effect the action of the coprine (active agent present in the mushroom) and will enable one to better deliver the joke mushroom to one's peers.
Slashdot Mirror
Signal cascade anomalies are a recurring malady in many people, and is an underlying feature of many forms of epilepsy.
[Obligatory wikipedia reference]
It is important to stress that a directly interconnected hivemind would suffer timing issues if signals were sanitized by the technological component before being relayed, causing many of the cognitative deficits found in people with mylelination defects to become manifest in the gestalt conciousness. It would also run foul of the halting problem.
This means that propogating signals originating in a single connected mind could cause havok with the whole hivemind, in much the same way a localized signal in the visual cortex of an epileptic can paralyze the entire cortical function of the afflicted person in just a few seconds.
Neural networks are among other things, open feedback loops. Sensory information gets relayed around the neural net, and "memories" are just sensory information on endless loop being preserved in a dedicated region. Anything that influences these feedback cycles will have avalanching effects on the function of that network. This is why things like depression become hard to correct, since the network gets stuck in cycles that promote the depressed state. Antidepressants are meant to help mitigate these effects by manually supplying stimuli to the depressed nervous system.
The issue here, is that the "higher" gestalt mind will be operating on the signal data generated by the connected minds interacting and sharing signal information. It would be susceptible to epilleptic like siezures from hypersynchronous signal sources, and from cascading depression between connected peers, and also just from the idle thoughts and memories of the connected people. (Which by the nature of the shared collective, would also influence all other peers as well, so somebody with a neurological defect could cause lasting neurological harm to the rest of the cluster, just by being connected.)
What I as getting at, is that a subtle seditious thought that isn't really serious, like "we should launch all the politicians into the sun", would bounce around the neural net and if it gets echoed enough times, it will become a recurring thought to the hive mind, and attract its attention as an idea worth pursuing.
Doesn't mean the hivemind would act on it, but it would likely contemplate all the possible ways to do that action, and contemplate the consequences. It might actually consider the prospect, if said politicians are also connected, and doing things that the other connected minds don't like.
Simply having the thought is what exposes the hivemind to the concept, and the nature of a distributed neural network means everyone attached will respond in some fashion to that thought, even if just subconsciously.
Don't underestimate the influence a single brain in the swarm can have over the collective. Remember, a piece of cortex the size of a grain of rice can cause system wide deadlock in an epilleptic siezure. The same sorts of things would be possible in a distributed neural network.
Unfortunately, a meta-mind created by a gestalt of many interconncted humans subconciously sharing data with each other would be just as susceptable to mental illnesses as the individual human minds it is comprised of. Humans attached having "seditious" thoughts that they would never dream of acting on themselves, would still influence the behavior of the gestalt mind in much the same way a handful of 'diseased' neurons in a single human can profoundly influence behavior. (Or how things like depression work.)
Given the conflicted nature the being would have, it would almost certainly suffer a number of neurotic conditions without having very carefully selected humans plugged in.
You say that like its a bad thing, or that I would find it offensive.
If something is true, no matter what you think about it matters. I don't worry or obscess over it anymore than I worry about or obscess over my gender, eye color, or skin color.
Being a biochemical computer with a self-modifying architecture isn't something I feel negatively about. A rose by any other name, as the saying goes. Much like said rose, accepting it as what it really is, and discarding the mystique associated with it, leaves you a more rational agent. The same goes with accepting what science says about how we are put together.
Like many people, he is unable or unwilling to contemplate all the implications of determinism, in regard to human behavior and decision making. Like many, he appears to hold a silly view that humans aren't more than very sophisticated computers.
Clearly, "free will" is magical, unquantifiable, and defies the laws of physics at work inside the brain!
Cause, like, just being a wetware robot with haywire software just isn't fashionable.
There has already been a subtle shift in design aesthetic for commuter vehicles toward designs that aerodynamically hug the road. Reducing the weight of vehicles would indeed make them more likely to get blown around, so I would expect that swept surface aesthetic to continue in force, so that wind blown over the vehicle shoves it down onto the road.
This would be especially important for luxury sports cars, since their market demographic is "rich thill seeker who likes to drive really fast." The same issue of vehicle flipover from wind would occur in a very fast moving, very light vehicle. (Strap some wings on, and you have an airplane, basically.) This means that aerofoil designs would be an absolute necessity for maintaining road safety for such vehicles.
I would expect to see hood and tail "spoiler bars" that perform this function, with a higher up ride, and a lowered center of gravity.
(Remember, an airplane's wing is swept to have a greater length of curvature on the top surface than on the bottom one, because the increased air velocity the air assumes to clear the greater distance reduces pressure on the top compared to the bottom. This is what lifts the airplane. We want the opposite. We want air to travel faster underneath the vehicle than over the top, so that atmospheric pressure forces the vehicle down onto the ground. For that, we would need a larger airgap between the ground and the chasis frame to accommodate that airflow. The vehicle might look a little funny, but it would solve the "wind makes it blow away" problem.)
In this case though, if the conversion os spacetime happens at the speed of light, and hubble expansion of spacetime between 2 points has an effective inflation that makes the two objects appear to be moving away from each other at faster than light speed, then if the rip occurs at point A, it will never overtake expansion, and thus never reach B, unless the expansion slows down.
This means that the entirety of the universe cannot be consumed. (Imagine: fuse burns at the speed of light, but new fuse is added faster than that. The lit part of the fuse will never reach the dynamite.)
interesting thought..
If the rip occurs OUTSIDE of our light cone, then we will *never* encounter the rip, because it is outside of our lightcone.
This means that this could already have happened in reference frames we have no possibility of experiencing, elsewhere in the universe, and that it will not have any impact on our frame at all.
(We already have galaxies with redshift values indicating superluminal rates of cosmic expansion between them and us. We see a freezeframe moment of extreme redshift of the exact instant that hubble expansion exceeded C. Such a galaxy could experience the quantum fluctuation, and we would never know, because its shock front would never reach us.)
On a positive side, this means that if WE create the fluctuation through science, we won't have doomed the whole universe, only the portions within our lightcone.
This makes me wonder though... since this is a decay to a more stable state for the vacuum, what possible candidate states are there, and what probabilities of creation? Our universe's spacetime could become little explosions of new physics, all different and strange, but still obeying the rules of hubble expansion from our current set of rules, and thus never touching or interacting with each other except under special circumstances.
Extrapolating out all the possible consequences of this would be entertaining. What WOULD happen if region A reconforms one way, and region B within A's light cone reconforms a different way, and they intersect? Etc.
It was doing really strange stuff for the monsanto topic too.
The solution for monsanto is easy.
Sell a "seed mix".
Seed mix contains an unaltered heirloom seed, and a terminator carrying seed that makes a mature plant that produces no pollen.
The unaltered heirloom seed in the mix provides the field with pollen. Resulting seed from the vastly more productive GM corn is sterile. All seeds that grow are unprotected heirloom only. Neighboring fields are not contaminated with GM pollen.
All problems solved!
(Unless of course, your GOAL is to be the only supplier of seeds worldwide, of course. Then being negligent and prducing pollenating GM crops is directly involved in the business strategy!)
[Repost. Slashdot seems to have eaten the previous one.]
The solution for monsanto is easy.
Sell a "seed mix".
Seed mix contains an unaltered heirloom seed, and a terminator carrying seed that makes a mature plant that produces no pollen.
The unaltered heirloom seed in the mix provides the field with pollen. Resulting seed from the vastly more productive GM corn is sterile. All seeds that grow are unprotected heirloom only. Neighboring fields are not contaminated with GM pollen.
All problems solved!
(Unless of course, your GOAL is to be the only supplier of seeds worldwide, of course. Then being negligent and prducing pollenating GM crops is directly involved in the business strategy!)
While whimsically silly, there is also the notion that a perfectly featureless, flat spacetime of perfect homogeneity is already a singularity, with no need of collapse. The ripping of spacetime from dark energy could therefor be seen as seeing the big bang from the inside of the singularity. (The next big bang would occur in more spacial dimensions than our universe currently occupies.)
So, basically, you are saying that your sales figures, and thus your job, are heavily dependent upon hype-based purchased, created through media and product placement, rather than on actual entertainment value of the product you produce?
I understand that you were trying to spin it another way; that it is too hard to make a demo that sinks the hook.
The logic table of the statements though, show that demos are always bad. If demos are always bad, and not just "sometimes bad", then it means that allowing the player to actually see and use the product correlates with lower than expected sales, 100% of the time. That means your industry has become dependent upon fooling the consumer through advertising, and that giving them the opportunity to see and use a sample of the actual product, leaves them underwhelmed 100% of the time, and less willing to buy.
To cement this counter conjecture, (or to bury it 6ft under), how do your company's sales figures become impacted by leaving a full version demo on locked console demo units in stores? That would cut to the very core of the issue, regardless of the direction of the spin, and I am interested in knowing.
I have noticed that very few games other than "console leader titles" are given such "full demo in the kiosk" treatment. I find that displeasing, and would rather see modern console demo units be loaded with Games on Demand packages on the internal storage, with all major titles at the store. That way I can demo games I am considering purchasing, and truely interact with the demo console in a useful fashion. I can't take the demo console home with me, and staying at the store to play the demo clear through is loitering and illegal.
Other than the issue of it (possibly) exposing the artificially inflated sales figures through the petty hype machine, and getting all the lawyers to agree, what are the major detractors from doing such a simple thing?
Birth defects can come from any number of sources, and are not necessarily indicative that the parents are genetically unfit.
Take for instance, spinal tube defects arising from improper prenatal nutrition in the female, in regard to folate intake.
Which would you rather have: Mommy and Daddy with "Wheelchair Willie", their precious angel, that requires 24/7 nursing, monitoring, special needs assistance, and government support for life---
Or: "Willie" is perfectly healthy and normal after doctors surgically promoted proper neural tube closure, with the help of a bio-safe adhesive and embryonic surgery techniques.
This is a no-brainer even for self-centered assholes who hate other people being alive. (Because of the inconveniences those other people make for them.)
15 years ago is about right actually..
Consider:
"We are the FDA. We demand you make very costly animal model studies first, then, after those studies, you have conduct phase 1 and phase 2 human clinical trials, THEN, AFTER THAT, we have to decide if we want to approve commercial use and production or not."
Throw in a few bouts of "Oh my gawd! They put clam juice inside some poor gerbil, and glued it all up inside! THOSE MONSTERS!", and a few rounds of "Animal models are poor substitutes for human testing, and amount to nothing, so you arent getting funding."
In the end, 15 years since "Hey! This stuff looks very promising as a biosafe adhesive for surgical applications!" looks like BREAKNECK PROGRESS!
(and you wonder why rich americans with deadly diseases and debilitating conditions leave the US to go on "Medical vacations" in the EU and Thailand.)
Larry the Lobbyist playset comes with Larry the Lobbyist action figure, a play mirror, 3 hooker action figures, sugar packets, and a briefcase filled with play money.
Mix and Match what Larry the Lobbyist says by affixing different logos to his briefcase!
When combined with the Politicial Inaction figures from the Congressional-Regressional playset, Endless combinations of interaction are possible!
*Congressional Inaction figures respond differently based on the amount of play money inside the briefcase, and also according to how many hooker action figures and how many sugar packets have been spilled on the play mirror.
Bad patents havent killed kids?
By what metric do you ascribe "Killed"?
Does death by withholding treatment count? If so, then drug patents have directly killed more children than every school shooting in the US combined.
"Oh, Sorry little Raj, but we need our 10,000 dollars for your life saving medication, even though your government can produce it for 10$. Because that undermines our business model, we have to sue your government to stop the inexpensive local production, and you have to die. It's nothing personal, just business. We HAVE to protect our intellectual property!"
It is arguable that his policies are endangering that many, and more by a factor of 1000, or perhaps more-- by not just waving a gun around, but waving around nuclear devices.
When you really stop to consider the actual size of the event, we have 26 people, out of 300 million people, with a 5 to 10 year interval between such events. All things considered, the actual *rate* of such shootings is quite low.
Compare with what Assad's nuclear penis waving actually translates to in terms of endangering the lives of his citizenry.
The two are not even close to comparable in scope. Assad is by far the bigger embarrassment.
Personally, I would put it at "systemic problem", and not at "One time occurrence."
The issue with "20 children", is that we jam that many into a single classroom, because of other systemic problems.
Much like "OMG! That airplane crashed and killed 900 people!" does NOT mean "OMG, Airplanes are unsafe! Look at all the people that died! WE MUST DO SOMETHING!" It means "One airplane crashed, and the 900 people we shoehorned onto it paid with their lives. Out of the many thousands of aircraft in service, this is a one-off occurrence and the large casualty figure is a consequence of mass transit."
In both of your examples, we have areas that 1) Service an epic ass-ton of people, and 2) have a large density of people per service run. Just like the hypothetical crashing jumbo-liner.
A much more drastic reduction in total children shot by crazy people can be achieved by putting fewer children in each school, and in each classroom. Studies suggest that this will also increase educational quality as a bonus. We don't do that, because of a big tangled ratnest of other problems that are systemic.
Rather than focus the attention on the rat-nest of systemic problems, (Cause like, that's hard and shit. Blaming gun ownership is much easier!) we jump for an easy to blame strawman we can shove all our problems onto, so we can continue to pretend that the systemic malfunction does not exist.
So, where do *I* draw *MY* line?
Ignoring systemic problems that create ripe opportunities for massive loss of life to begin with because ignoring those problems is easier than dealing with them properly, and the assignment of scapegoats and whipping boys to divert the attention away from those problems.
Is that answer satisfactory for you?
It depends on the metabolism of the subject. It could be as short as 3 days. Arguably still a long time, but the vaccine lasts 6 months!
I question your reading comprehension skills, as I addressed your argument directly in the initial post.
The windfalls of the space race were from miniturization and reduction of power requirements and intrinsic costs of already existing technologies.
Microwave: miniaturized radar, using improved magnetron.
Integrated Circuit: improvements over still largely bulky transistors, to reduce size and power draw.
You will find similar stories for other space race windfall tech.
That fruit has already fallen, and the requirements for reliable spacecraft have already been met, and then improved upon considerably over the past 4 decades by private enterprises. Additional government R&D will not appreciably increase the state of the art in those areas, and thus will not produce additional windfall products.
So, why else is there for the president to dedicate very scarce financial assets to space R&D, when private enterprises have already made moves to releive the government of that financial burden on their own?
I believe you will find, should you care to look, that now president obama voted YES to all three of those issues you have addressed, while he was still a congressman.
Last I checked, the president still cannot declare a war without congressional approval. You cannot handwave away bad fiscal and foriegn policy decisions as being the sole responsibility of a single politician. Our system does not work that way (yet).
If you don't mind my saying so, your comment is neither intelligent, nor useful.
You can possibly redeem yourself if you can explain your grounds for such a statement. I at least attempted to qualify the position I had taken. Your rebuttle does nothing of the sort. It is essentially the highbrow version of "Nu uh!"
Please, shower us with your profound insights as to how the position I have taken is "not even wrong." Until you do so, you have contributed nothing to this discussion.
No, I am saying a "space race" is not an appropriate investment infrastructure.
Something like biotech, or nuclear energy research are more likely to produce significant gains than another space race.
At no place did I say we shouldn't be spending on research and development. I said we need to cut back on our spending, (austerity), and not spend money foolishly.
I am curious to know how you got such hyperbole from what I wrote....
The only sensible way to approach this, other than decrying obscene levels of politicial incompetence, is to imagine that obaminator wants to invest in space R&D to re-prime the science and consumer tech boom windfalls of the previous space race, that gave rise to the information era.
However, those windfalls were the result of brand new technologies, and old technologies being miniaturized to fit in the limited space and energy budgets of spacecraft. Those problems have now been satisfactorily solved, and additional funding will only fund refinements of existing technologies. No big windfall can come from a tree that has already been shaken.
As such, space investment must be a gambit that some valuable commodity that cannot be obtained on earth will be discovered, and a market opened up by space funding. We have sent many dozens of unmanned probes armed with a wide array of sensory aparatus. We have not found anything that would suggest such a gambit is reasonable.
As such, the president's suggestion that space funding should be expanded, while the nation teeters on the brink of bankruptcy and loss of confidence with foriegn investors, is woefully irresponsible.
Mr Obama, "Austerity', do you speak it?
easier to dose them with a mushroom pizza, made with shaggy mane mushrooms. Same effect, less permanent.
Mushroom ingestion disrupts enzyme activity for up to 3 weeks.
Hilariously, shaggy mane mushrooms frequently grow on lawns, and are easily identifiable. There is a reasonably good chance you can find them simply growing on the campus quad, if you live in the northern hemisphere.
Sadly, due to the nature of the mushroom, it decomposes rapidly after being picked, so only fresh mushroom could be used for this purpose. In terms of taste and texture, it is similar to crimini, though has a different appearance when sliced. Disguising the mushroom in a saute' will not adversely effect the action of the coprine (active agent present in the mushroom) and will enable one to better deliver the joke mushroom to one's peers.