Imagine a Gattaca-like future 100 years from now, when everybody's DNA is vigorously scrubbed free of defective genes. Maybe people have different skin, hair, or eye color, just for fashion's sake, but internally we all look pretty much the same. Wouldn't this drastically increase the risk of some killer pathogen taking advantage of such a uniform field of hosts?
Yes, probably, if it was done commercially.
Because if done commercially, it would likely be short-term and mainly cosmetic interests that were addressed. For the money, of course. If it costs extra to toss in some random genetic variability, for the purpose of protection of the entire species, who the fuck is going to pay an extra 5 grand for that?
As a result, yes, this could quite likely happen.
However, if it's done non-commercially (like, if some strange totalitarian regime takes over the whole planet, and mandates that this be done for whatever ideological reason) - it could be that the government scientists working on the project will go; hey, waitaminnit, this could be dangerous, hey boss, can we throw in a little random variability into the gene pool here, because to not do so would be dangerous for us all - and as long as it isn't something like, the emporer believes himself to be genetically superior, and therefore all humanity must posess a copy of his genes, then the leader would hopefully listen to his scientists and have it done right.
By the way, who's gonna vote for me for emporer of the world.
My in-laws live in Phoenix, where it is against the law to have a lawn.
Rocks, cacti, that's about it.
Also, there is an ordinance against streetlights, so it's really fucking dark out at night, which is bad if you're driving or walking, but good if you're sitting out in your back yard looking at the night sky.
All the building that's going on out there is just fucking crazy, when you think about the fact that they live in a desert. But then again, they do try to do some things right.
yeah, the whole Golf Course thing is whacked. THAT has got to stop. Golf produces nothing. Except maybe a few stupid movies. (now, Caddyshack was pretty funny though. ..)
There's also the argument that though some humans are infertile "by nature" (and a totally separate argument that some infertile people are infertile due to side effects of industrialization; chemicals, stress, frigidity. ..)
Even if some humans are infertile "by nature", does that mean that we should not use science to reproduce them? Yes, with present technology, it does somewhat limit all of their progeny to technologically assisted reproduction, but we're only violating the rules of nature here. We've been doing that for thousands of years now. Why not continue? If that infertile person technologically bears a child that invents the faster-than-light drive, or even a child who grows up and works flipping burgers at McDonalds, they become an integral and necessary part of our society.
Overpopulation is a separate problem, and needs to be dealt with separately, either by expanding our territory (again, with the faster-than-light drive-), or culling the population (counterproductive to technological reproduction, I know). In culling, do we do this randomly? Or do we cull with an operational plan - cull the weak? cull the poor? cull the infertile? cull the tasty? (soylent green). All of those raise separate questions, and are quite different than the topic of technologically assisted reproduction, and the reasons why it may be a good thing.
At some point, humanity is going to have to start answering these questions. That may be several mass starvations down the road.
Mitochondria?
Don't you mean, Midichlorians? The tiny single-celled organisms living in our bodies that channel the force and give a jedi his power?
(Scientists don't believe that Mitochondria "moved into" OUR cells, they believe they moved into the cells of other single-celled organisms billions of years ago, since nearly all living things share them, and they're currently THE critical chain in the chemical cycle that converts chemical energy into actual heat and work in all living things).
Correction:
Strictly speaking, it is not what the oil *companies* are doing, it is what the Organisation of Oil Producing and Exporting *COUNTRIES* are doing (aka OPEC).
And if you want to hear MY opinion, it is the #1 reason for the current economic slowdown. It started with OPEC agreeing to constrain supply, with comments from members like Venezuela saying things like "America's economy is booming, and ours is sagging, it's time for us to get a piece of the pie."
And nobody in America, the World Bank, Federal Reserve, or Newsmedia, said or did one fucking thing about it.
The internet "economy" and ecommerce rely on one crucial non-computer factor: transportation and shipping. Raise the costs of oil, and the costs of shipping go up, and profit margins slump.
The California Energy Crisis (TM) (coming to a town near you) is largely due to OPEC's cutbacks as well. This also will have an impact on the success or failure of the "new economy".
I've said this since Reagan was in office presiding over "the longest economic expansion in history" (TM), it had NOTHING to do with tax cuts, liberalization of trade laws, the environment, God, or anything else, other than CHEAP OIL. George Bush (#41) understood it, and beat Iraq over it. It's all about CHEAP OIL. Nothing else.
Dear Mr. Gates.
Please place my address on your "do not send junk mail to:" list. I run Linux on the computer I built myself, and I do not own any MSFT stock. Your constant letters are a waste of time and paper.
I am also certain that Judge Jackson will not be sent to Extreme Northern District of Alaska, as that would likely interfere in George W.'s plan to hand off that district to the oil companies for exploitation. He needs a judge in his pocket up there.
Re:As with anything....
on
Cracking OSX
·
· Score: 3
the intelligence of the people running OS X is going to be a big factor.
Of course, you've mischaracterized it as "intelligence", when what it really is, is the dedication, attention to detail, and desire to fiddle with the inner workings of what is essentially supposed to be just a tool. None of these are traits of your average Mac user. Lots of Mac users are very intelligent, even if they aren't kernel hackers, so you needn't go around characterizing them as "unintelligent".
that said, read the Mac message boards lately, and you'll see a HUGE gap between people who used to be comfortable with a userless system, that gave them the rights and capabilities to delete the System folder if they wanted to - to the present state, where root is not enabled on the machine by default because "the user is not to be trusted with such a powerful tool, lest they delete something they don't understand".
The number one complaint you see is someone who gets into a situation where they have to use the terminal and sudo to get out of it. The implication is that these people messed with things that they didn't understand, but that's not the case. The vast majority of these people are just trying to install software, or move an application to a place they feel is more convenient for them to access. but without root privileges, the system won't let them, so they're being forced to learn these things they previously didn't need to know to use "the computer for the rest of us".
These are the people that will be in charge of tens of thousands of OS X Unix systems a year from now. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
They aren't necessarily less intelligent, but you're right when you say they don't have a clue about the first thing in security. They never needed to before.
just experienced at buying and owning American, Japanese, and European cars.
In every case, with regards to maintenance and reliability, the American cars (Dodge Dart, Chevy Camaro, Impala, Malibu, Ford Escort) I've owned were not even close to that of my Japanese (Acura Integra, Isuzu Trooper) and European (Volvo 240, 740 GLE Turbo, VW, Porsche 944) cars I've owned.
American cars are empirically garbage, plain and simple.
Here is the problem. They were "obligated" by what? A sense of honesty and fair play? If they were truly OBLIGATED as members of JDEC, then they should now be open to lawsuits, pummelling, boiling in oil, and forced anal sex with large livestock for what they did.
UNFORTUNATELY, none of those things can happen. Does anybody have any idea whether the JDEC agreement has any teeth? And if not, what good is it, and what freaking moron agreed to that? It's pretty obvious by now that these standards bodies and joint efforts MUST have strong legal bindings, because the stakes are way too high to allow any one player to take advantage of the market like this. With Microsoft and Netscape running roughshod over W3 (and pretty much every other standards body that made the mistake of getting involved), you'd think that people would have had a clue before entering into partnerships like that.
I've talked to customers who made WAY more than 2 times my salary, who couldn't work their way out of a wet paper bag, I've talked with dyslexic IT admins who could not tell the difference between / and \ (I told them to use an unshifted ? and |, that worked).
And I've also helped IT admins who were grossly underpaid. One extreme example, was a Novell admin back in the early 90's, who should have been making $50k considering the work he was doing, and competency, and he was making about $16k. He needed a dental plan more than anything else (more than anyone else I'd ever met! yeesh!). I guess he was just too much of a wuss to figure out what he was worth and get it. ..
This is the one thing that really gets me. When a customer demands to talk to a manager - as if it's going to help them. It's not. My manager doesn't know much more than you do about the technical end of computers. Escalating calls to this point only slows down the whole process for every other customer, and gets in the way of the operation of the process and resolution of the case.
Of course, with some organizations, there's no choice, because the support organization is set up to dead-end issues that need development attention, and in that case, going through the manager is the only recourse the customer has. Organizations that don't set up clear and honest escalation policies (and train their senior staff properly to avoid needless escalations), are doing themselves a disservice, because the customer has nowhere else to go but to bark up the wrong tree.
" don't have to do that with my car today. Yes I change the oil, yes I put air in the tires. But in 28 months of ownership I have not yet had it break down, stop working or otherwise require maintenance outside of oil changes. "
Sounds like when tech support at my company started making quotas and bounties for support people writing tech bulletins. Support guys were cutting and pasting stuff from the manuals and turning them into tech bulletins. Or documenting trivial features and processes.
If cops got paid by the collar, you can bet that the speeders would be pulled over at a much higher rate than the.001% they do now.
not just physical build-out of the wires themselves, also the manpower buildout, maintenance, etc.
Without this field force of hundreds of ex-postal workers in little vans driving around after every thunderstorm, you don't have a network. That, in of itself is an additional "build-out" issue.
Slashdot Mirror
Imagine a Gattaca-like future 100 years from now, when everybody's DNA is vigorously scrubbed free of defective genes. Maybe people have different skin, hair, or eye color, just for fashion's sake, but internally we all look pretty much the same. Wouldn't this drastically increase the risk of some killer pathogen taking advantage of such a uniform field of hosts?
Yes, probably, if it was done commercially.
Because if done commercially, it would likely be short-term and mainly cosmetic interests that were addressed. For the money, of course. If it costs extra to toss in some random genetic variability, for the purpose of protection of the entire species, who the fuck is going to pay an extra 5 grand for that?
As a result, yes, this could quite likely happen.
However, if it's done non-commercially (like, if some strange totalitarian regime takes over the whole planet, and mandates that this be done for whatever ideological reason) - it could be that the government scientists working on the project will go; hey, waitaminnit, this could be dangerous, hey boss, can we throw in a little random variability into the gene pool here, because to not do so would be dangerous for us all - and as long as it isn't something like, the emporer believes himself to be genetically superior, and therefore all humanity must posess a copy of his genes, then the leader would hopefully listen to his scientists and have it done right.
By the way, who's gonna vote for me for emporer of the world.
My in-laws live in Phoenix, where it is against the law to have a lawn.
Rocks, cacti, that's about it.
Also, there is an ordinance against streetlights, so it's really fucking dark out at night, which is bad if you're driving or walking, but good if you're sitting out in your back yard looking at the night sky.
All the building that's going on out there is just fucking crazy, when you think about the fact that they live in a desert. But then again, they do try to do some things right.
yeah, the whole Golf Course thing is whacked. THAT has got to stop. Golf produces nothing. Except maybe a few stupid movies. (now, Caddyshack was pretty funny though. . .)
There's also the argument that though some humans are infertile "by nature" (and a totally separate argument that some infertile people are infertile due to side effects of industrialization; chemicals, stress, frigidity. . .)
Even if some humans are infertile "by nature", does that mean that we should not use science to reproduce them? Yes, with present technology, it does somewhat limit all of their progeny to technologically assisted reproduction, but we're only violating the rules of nature here. We've been doing that for thousands of years now. Why not continue? If that infertile person technologically bears a child that invents the faster-than-light drive, or even a child who grows up and works flipping burgers at McDonalds, they become an integral and necessary part of our society.
Overpopulation is a separate problem, and needs to be dealt with separately, either by expanding our territory (again, with the faster-than-light drive-), or culling the population (counterproductive to technological reproduction, I know). In culling, do we do this randomly? Or do we cull with an operational plan - cull the weak? cull the poor? cull the infertile? cull the tasty? (soylent green). All of those raise separate questions, and are quite different than the topic of technologically assisted reproduction, and the reasons why it may be a good thing.
At some point, humanity is going to have to start answering these questions. That may be several mass starvations down the road.
Mitochondria?
Don't you mean, Midichlorians? The tiny single-celled organisms living in our bodies that channel the force and give a jedi his power?
(Scientists don't believe that Mitochondria "moved into" OUR cells, they believe they moved into the cells of other single-celled organisms billions of years ago, since nearly all living things share them, and they're currently THE critical chain in the chemical cycle that converts chemical energy into actual heat and work in all living things).
Another point is, many many of the scientists of the classic age WERE aristocrats.
Today's aristocrats are busy buying the next big SUV, snorting coke off of a stripper's tits, or getting that nose job.
GO Linus, GO!
. . . as if it wasn't already bad enough having to live in Canada.
does a prostitute get paid for mastrubating?
Correction:
Strictly speaking, it is not what the oil *companies* are doing, it is what the Organisation of Oil Producing and Exporting *COUNTRIES* are doing (aka OPEC).
And if you want to hear MY opinion, it is the #1 reason for the current economic slowdown. It started with OPEC agreeing to constrain supply, with comments from members like Venezuela saying things like "America's economy is booming, and ours is sagging, it's time for us to get a piece of the pie."
And nobody in America, the World Bank, Federal Reserve, or Newsmedia, said or did one fucking thing about it.
The internet "economy" and ecommerce rely on one crucial non-computer factor: transportation and shipping. Raise the costs of oil, and the costs of shipping go up, and profit margins slump.
The California Energy Crisis (TM) (coming to a town near you) is largely due to OPEC's cutbacks as well. This also will have an impact on the success or failure of the "new economy".
I've said this since Reagan was in office presiding over "the longest economic expansion in history" (TM), it had NOTHING to do with tax cuts, liberalization of trade laws, the environment, God, or anything else, other than CHEAP OIL. George Bush (#41) understood it, and beat Iraq over it. It's all about CHEAP OIL. Nothing else.
Dear Mr. Gates.
Please place my address on your "do not send junk mail to:" list. I run Linux on the computer I built myself, and I do not own any MSFT stock. Your constant letters are a waste of time and paper.
I am also certain that Judge Jackson will not be sent to Extreme Northern District of Alaska, as that would likely interfere in George W.'s plan to hand off that district to the oil companies for exploitation. He needs a judge in his pocket up there.
Sincerely *not* yours,
a free thinker.
FreeUser, you have my permission to replicate my car anytime you want.
You must, however, agree to "look cool" driving it. No picking your nose or talking on your cellphone. 'k?
once again, all together now;
infringement!=theft
come now, come now, you don't have to be so dumb now (this was infringement, not theft).
Consumer Reports agrees with me, by the way.
the intelligence of the people running OS X is going to be a big factor.
Of course, you've mischaracterized it as "intelligence", when what it really is, is the dedication, attention to detail, and desire to fiddle with the inner workings of what is essentially supposed to be just a tool. None of these are traits of your average Mac user. Lots of Mac users are very intelligent, even if they aren't kernel hackers, so you needn't go around characterizing them as "unintelligent".
that said, read the Mac message boards lately, and you'll see a HUGE gap between people who used to be comfortable with a userless system, that gave them the rights and capabilities to delete the System folder if they wanted to - to the present state, where root is not enabled on the machine by default because "the user is not to be trusted with such a powerful tool, lest they delete something they don't understand".
The number one complaint you see is someone who gets into a situation where they have to use the terminal and sudo to get out of it. The implication is that these people messed with things that they didn't understand, but that's not the case. The vast majority of these people are just trying to install software, or move an application to a place they feel is more convenient for them to access. but without root privileges, the system won't let them, so they're being forced to learn these things they previously didn't need to know to use "the computer for the rest of us".
These are the people that will be in charge of tens of thousands of OS X Unix systems a year from now. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
They aren't necessarily less intelligent, but you're right when you say they don't have a clue about the first thing in security. They never needed to before.
nope.
just experienced at buying and owning American, Japanese, and European cars.
In every case, with regards to maintenance and reliability, the American cars (Dodge Dart, Chevy Camaro, Impala, Malibu, Ford Escort) I've owned were not even close to that of my Japanese (Acura Integra, Isuzu Trooper) and European (Volvo 240, 740 GLE Turbo, VW, Porsche 944) cars I've owned.
American cars are empirically garbage, plain and simple.
Here is the problem. They were "obligated" by what? A sense of honesty and fair play? If they were truly OBLIGATED as members of JDEC, then they should now be open to lawsuits, pummelling, boiling in oil, and forced anal sex with large livestock for what they did.
UNFORTUNATELY, none of those things can happen. Does anybody have any idea whether the JDEC agreement has any teeth? And if not, what good is it, and what freaking moron agreed to that? It's pretty obvious by now that these standards bodies and joint efforts MUST have strong legal bindings, because the stakes are way too high to allow any one player to take advantage of the market like this. With Microsoft and Netscape running roughshod over W3 (and pretty much every other standards body that made the mistake of getting involved), you'd think that people would have had a clue before entering into partnerships like that.
I've seen both extremes.
.
I've talked to customers who made WAY more than 2 times my salary, who couldn't work their way out of a wet paper bag, I've talked with dyslexic IT admins who could not tell the difference between / and \ (I told them to use an unshifted ? and |, that worked).
And I've also helped IT admins who were grossly underpaid. One extreme example, was a Novell admin back in the early 90's, who should have been making $50k considering the work he was doing, and competency, and he was making about $16k. He needed a dental plan more than anything else (more than anyone else I'd ever met! yeesh!). I guess he was just too much of a wuss to figure out what he was worth and get it. .
This is the one thing that really gets me. When a customer demands to talk to a manager - as if it's going to help them. It's not. My manager doesn't know much more than you do about the technical end of computers. Escalating calls to this point only slows down the whole process for every other customer, and gets in the way of the operation of the process and resolution of the case.
Of course, with some organizations, there's no choice, because the support organization is set up to dead-end issues that need development attention, and in that case, going through the manager is the only recourse the customer has. Organizations that don't set up clear and honest escalation policies (and train their senior staff properly to avoid needless escalations), are doing themselves a disservice, because the customer has nowhere else to go but to bark up the wrong tree.
" don't have to do that with my car today. Yes I change the oil, yes I put air in the tires. But in 28 months of ownership I have not yet had it break down, stop working or otherwise require maintenance outside of oil changes. "
You must not buy American cars. . .
Sounds like when tech support at my company started making quotas and bounties for support people writing tech bulletins. Support guys were cutting and pasting stuff from the manuals and turning them into tech bulletins. Or documenting trivial features and processes.
.001% they do now.
If cops got paid by the collar, you can bet that the speeders would be pulled over at a much higher rate than the
I need a replacement ear, so a headless clone would not work for me.
repeat after me, again and again until you get it right.
Infringement != Theft
Doesn't Washington State have that nifty anti-spam law with TEETH?
Get all the spammers to sign up!
not just physical build-out of the wires themselves, also the manpower buildout, maintenance, etc.
Without this field force of hundreds of ex-postal workers in little vans driving around after every thunderstorm, you don't have a network. That, in of itself is an additional "build-out" issue.