> In other words, is the creation of this "green" paper from wombat poo actually any better than using renewable tree resources?
I think you are totally missing the point of green. A green program is a success when the green's self esteem is raised. It's all about them proving they care more than we do. Whether it works is a side question with an unusual twist. If it actually works, i.e. some filthy capitalist can make money at it, then it has to be bad. Won't be six months until it is deemed not green any more and thus evil.
Think I'm being overly cynical? Nah. If we really cared about reducing carbon we would be on a crash building program for nuke plants. There are protesters railing against nuke, solar, wind, geothermal (yes they even hate geothermal!), hydroelectric, biofuels, tidal you name it and there is a green organization already against it. Let an alternative get practical and they all turn on it. See hydroelecric.
> There was apparently a narrow window of opportunity..
But it is a stupid point. Yes when a new ooporunity is opening up it will usually be dominated by the 'young turks' of the time. But if you missed the opening days of the PC there were a lot of other places to get in. And a lot of people did. You don't have to succeed to household word status to be a success. Even people who 'lost' made sacks of cash. How many.bomb billionaires are still walking around looking for the next big thing to invest in?
I can agree with the notion that success on the scale of Gates or Joy requires a fair amount of luck. But luck alone was not enough back then, although it appears that the.bomb was a totally different case. It is apparent that luck along pushed some of those guys to billionaire status because the VC and IPO people had gone mad, throwing insane amounts of cash at projects any rational person could see would never perform to their valuations.
>..it sounds a lot to me like a way to excuse not trying at all.
Welcome to the Age of Obama. We are now in the final act of a drama that played out over the 20th Century. Before the evil rich can be truly soaked they have to be deconstructed. They aren't rich because of talent, they aren't rich by virtue of working harder or smarter. They are rich because they were lucky or wicked. Thus it is moral to redistribute their ill gotten gains to the noble downdrodden poor.
> No one places DRM type restrictions on my purchase of an automobile, house, or TV set.
Bad example. They do indeed put DRM type restrictions on buying a house in many places. They are called Homeowners Associations and Restrictive Covenants in some deeds. Until the courts and legislatures rewrote them (a dangerous flirtation with ex post facto lawmaking itself, probably the best of many bad options here) some properties had permanent restrictions saying you couldn't sell the property to [fill in oppressed minority some previous owner a hundred years ago hated].
The problem with DRM is that it makes all sorts of stupid restrictions too easy to implement and the DMCA then makes it illegal to remove restrictions on uses of copyrighted works that no law forbids. DRM that makes copying hard can at least be justified somewhat by noting that making copies is illegal in the first place. But locking a copy of a work to one reader can't even claim that figleaf of moral cover.
> I've not yet had a chance to check one of these out. As I understand it, the look and feel of > reading the eink display is just like reading bright white paper fresh from the laser printer.
I haven't actually seen a Kindle in the wild but the Kindle 1 used the same display as the Sony ebook product and I did look at one of those. Maybe the Kindle 2 is a lot better but probably just a incremental improvement. Anyway, the Sony I looked at was more like reading a good 24pin dot matrix printer on low quality newsprint. And the updates times were horrid. If that sort of retro computing turns your crank then epaper is for you, otherwise wait for it to rev a few more times. Like everything else tech it will either get good eventually or something even better will supplant it.
> Could they get the readers down to a more reasonable cost?
They will. Amazon probably won't because their business model requires they hide the cellular network charges in an upfront lumpsum payment instead of a monthly fee. A pure ebook reader sans the cell phone will eventually be a $50 disposable toy, especially if they keep the DRM alive because everytime you toss the reader ya get to buy all new books! But DRM on books won't fly longterm any better than it has for music.
Re:This too was foreseen
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
>...democracy may be a stable political system only among a genetically improved electorate.
No, not unless all the genetic engineered supermen are clones and thus completely equal. The problem is democracy. There is a reason that if a Founding Father had called you a "Democrat" you would have been expected to punch him in the face for making such a horrible insult. Which is why we were given a Republic... if we could keep it. We failed.
Re:This too was foreseen
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
> Expecting somebody to disregard their own values and morals in decision-making isn't just unrealistic, it's immoral:)
I totally forgot to hit on that issue while making my reply. Thanks.
The post we both replied to is a perfect example of the tolerance of the heathen left. Their 'diversity' is a thousand people of every race, color, nationality, gender identity and sexual deviation all coming together to think in perfect lockstep, marching around with signs depicting Bush == Hitler.
Re:This too was foreseen
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· Score: 2, Insightful
> imagine people were saying similar things when racial discrimination laws were passed.
They happened to be wrong. Not saying there aren't actually some variation between the races but any differences in the averages appear to be safely inside the deviation bars.
> Do you think we ought to throw those laws out as they'll never work and blacks will always be discriminated against?
Actually..... yes we should dump those laws because they can't work. Racial discrimination isn't much of a problem anymore because people changed, not because some asshole in Washington passed a law.
Racial discrimination ended because it was a false outdated notion we are quickly discarding that was totally incompatible with "All men are created equal..." Progress doesn't happen all at once, it just took a little while after those words were set down for society to catch up to all of the implications. And while everyone isn't exactly 'equal' we are close enough that the concept of equality before the law makes so sense it could form the basis of the most successful nation in human history. Throw in a bunch of genetic supermen and some custom designed semi sentient drones into the population and those ideas are null and void. Discrimination DOES make sense because people won't even be close to equal anymore. When the dumbest superman is smarter than Hawking, wiser than Mark Twain and will likely still have the body of a Greek God when he is a hundred years old the question of whether us mundanes should even be allowed to vote is a valid one. We probably won't like their answer.
My argument is that we really should think through the consequences of genetic engineering before we do it instead of rushing into it and having to figure it out after a few bloody wars. What guiding principle replaces "All men are created equal" is something we should have worked though before we make everyone unequal. What rights do created beings have? Does it depend on whether their mental functions have been altered? How?
> You seem so sure that it will end with complete dehumanization.
Because tech is always changing. Human nature doesn't. At least not yet.
Re:Parents choose their baby's name
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· Score: 4, Interesting
> I guess if a culture wants to go that way, then it is their own fault when they don't > have enough chicks for all the guys to marry....and they slowly go extinct...
That is one option. But what if they decide to wage The War For Poontang? Think about it. You get a bunch of your excess male population killed off along with a good proportion of the male population of the victim country leaving it with an excess of females to carry off as prizes. And there is that nice territorial expansion bit for essentially free.
It is a related problem to the Muslim problem. Muslims are permitted up to four wives. Wealthy ones max out leaving lots of poor horny males with almost no prospect of getting any poon. And we wonder why they sign up as suicide bombers on the promise of those heavenly virgins? Those mating practices are a win if you are losing lots of your male population to war or other things, a recipe for disaster otherwise.
> But seriously, are you stating a position against assisted suicide?
Against DOCTOR assisted suicide? 100% against. Automatic lifetime revocation of license to practice medicine should be the minimum punishment for violation. Doctors may do no harm. If they break the Oath no rational should ever trust them again.
Same goes for anyone working directly or indirectly for a Dr. In theory the Dr. is in charge and allowing a subordinate to do it is equally taboo.
If a relative or friend smuggles in a lethal dose of pills, hey I got no problem with that. Or accidentally unplugs the most expensive machine that goes Ping! on request from someone who can no longer reach the damned power cord? Again, I wouldn't vote to convict if I were on the jury.
But I really think we should avoid officially sanctioning the practice too much lest we end up sliding into promoting it. Because from there it really is a small jump to expecting the sick to "go ahead and just f%&#ing die already." And that is somewhere I'm not willing to go.
Our science has ran far ahead of our ethical development and it wouldn't be a bad thing if we just slowed the hell down a bit and allowed the two a chance to equalize a bit. Philosophers aren't getting faster according to Moore's Law.
Re:This too was foreseen
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· Score: 3, Interesting
> In the beginning of gattaca, the narrator even mentions that "genoism" laws were > passed, but in the movie we see blatant discrimination.
Because the idea that laws from a legislature will overrule laws of physics is dumb. It's the sort of thing Democrats do.
> The message that I got out of that movie is less about genetic engineering, > and more about discrimination in general.
Wrong. Discriminating against people because they are of African descent is just dumb. Discriminating against someone because they are physically weaker, less intelligent, less emotionally stable, more likely to contract diseases and will generally die younger is a totally different thing. And that is where genetic engineering leads. I am not opposed to Eugenics because I don't think it will work, I oppose it because I know it WILL work.
Our whole civilization can be summed up by these immortal words:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
Genetic engineering tosses ALL of that in the trash. All men are created by the Company with whatever inequalities the customer orders. Their ass is the property of the customer who commissioned them but the copyrights and patents on their design belongs to the Company. If it's defective just kill it and try again, hopefully we catch the defects before initial customer delivery.
And as for Happiness? We commissioned a miner and mine it damned well better do, who cares if it enjoys it. We can just breed the 2.0 version to be too stupid to care if too many revolt or commit suicide. So what if it causes a few more losses because they won't be able to understand some of the safety rules, we will adjust the design until the cost benefit is right.
> Eugenics MUST involve the control of sexual conduct.
You are an idiot. Eugenics must control breeding. Period, full stop. Since sexual conduct isn't involved in IFV your illogic would 'prove' that under no conditions could Eugenics and IFV be related. Which is of course bunk. By your logic if the State outlawed natural childbirth and even sex and forced all children to be grown in artificial wombs after being carefully designed for genetic perfection your definition would say that no Eugenics were involved.
If you want to argue that the State must be doing the controlling for it to be Eugenics you would be closer to a point but still wrong. Margeret Sanger's Planned Parenthood was founded to practice Eugenics and does so to this day by (by design) killing off babies in 'racially inferior populations'. While the darlings of 'Progressives' and recepients of a fair amount of government pork they aren't agents of the State. Go read up on that nasty bunch of bigots sometime. Prepare to be disillusioned.
> If anyone (fundies included) has a good argument against genetic manipulation,
If I wanted to just be a jerk I'd suggest you watch ST:TOS - Space Seed or Gattaca again. But I'll assume you really can't see any of the potential problems.
First off, if you believe this train STOPS at the current stage of making a bunch of embryos, testing them and picking which one(s) to implant you are zarking mad. Once we start we will end at full designer babies, only a matter of when.
So what happens when those who can afford them are spawning Homo Superior while the rabble are just having humans? At what point along the super being track do these new beings get to rule over us lesser creatures? Or is it moral and just to have stupid pathetic Homo Sapiens equally able to vote and thus by their numerical superiority rule over beings which are in every way better? So do they get their own nation? Which one? Will the current inhabitants get a say in the matter?
What happens to sports when people start breeding up designer baseball players? You thought 'roids was a problem...
What happens when the carefully designed super basketball player is defective? Who gets to sue who? The parents because the kid wasn't as specified? The kid when the only job he was built to be good at is now closed to him? The basketball franchise who paid part of the design fees in exchange for a preconception contract?
What happens when the mutant monster somebody thought it would be cute to create decides it got the shaft and wants justice? Can it sue the 'parents'? The company that designed/grew it? What happens when the mutant monster fulfils its destiny and tramples half the city? It's fault or the creators? It was BUILT to be a monster after all. The nature/nurture argument does not apply, it was BUILT to destroy.
What happens when a normal born with a defect sues because its parents DIDN'T test and discard it?
Can the government, because of Universal Health Insurance, demand that all children be screened for defects likely to cost the State a boatload of money? Can it actually ORDER a termination or the purchase of some private security that will provide for the defective child's medical costs?
Right now we tell our kids that if they work hard and apply themselves they can be pretty much what they want. Well welcome to "You were DESIGNED to be a rocket scientist. Too bad you want to be in a rock band, but you weren't built with music skills so get off the Harley, get over it and get on over to physics class." "Nope, you were designed and financed by the Army to be a killing machine so put down the paintbrush, you were inducted before you were conceived."
And if those aren't enough to have you decide there is at least grounds for a discussion on the potential for a downside, then read the rest of this thread there are lots of other arguments being made.
> You can't confuse that with assisted suicide either as euthanasia exclusively involves unwilling victims.
Oh no, you don't get off so quickly. It's another perfect example of how things can spiral out of control and lead to things nobody thought possible when it started.
Somebody wants to die, I don't have a problem with that and apparently you don't either. But I assert that allowing DOCTORS or anything connected to the medical world in the loop is a fatal flaw, you don't. So follow along.
"Assisted suicide" becomes mainstream. Generally accepted custom in society, when you are goin' down for the count most people go ahead and stop the game. Still not a big problem, right? If you think it is a good idea it can't be bad even most people start agreeing with ya, right? Ok, once MOST people are doing it social pressure begins to mount on the diehards who refuse to self terminate. After all, those last months are EXPENSIVE and with Universal Health Care it is a big burden on society. PSAs are put on TV by old celebutards right before they themselves punched off the clock for good, network news magazines are doing reports on how much better offing yourself is for everyone around you and society in general. Still don't see any 'unwilling victims yet? Ok, now the economy is bad again, like now, and the government (who pays for Universal Health Care? Yup.) is offering cash bonuses paid to next of kin (or even directly to the patient if they are currently healthy enough to go out in a major league last hurrah) if those thought to be near the end and likely to run up a lot of health care costs go ahead and shuffle off the mortal coil and save the medical costs. And finally, to save the failing Government boondoggle the medical industry has become they just refuse expensive treatments to cases when they decide the 'quality/length of life gained is too low compared to the cost' and give the choice of suffering and dying with no treatment or letting em go ahead and put ya down painlessly.
See a point down that slippery slope where we would be likely to draw a line and hold it for more than a decade or two? I don't. Once you accept each point along the line the next one, previously unthinkable, becomes thinkable then logical and finally inevitable.
Exactly. If Star Trek taught anything it is that Eugenics and AI are bad ideas.
And yes I do have an "All I need to know about life I learned from Star Trek" poster on my bedroom wall. What was your question again?
Seriously, almost every SciFi story ever written says this will end badly. They have a point. At least enough of one we should have a long national (world?) discussion about this before we go ahead with it. And I'm a free market, government is dangerous, Libertarian.
> Since jmorris42 doesn't come off as someone religious I'd say the latter is more likely.
Yup. In my case the calls for caution are because we are tinkering with stuff we don't have a clue about. It would be like if we discovered that Uranium can get hot, people get wierd diseases around the stuff, etc. under certain circumstances before discovering atomic theory, E=MC^2 etc. And then some idiot wanted to build a really BIG reactor from really pure uranium to 'see what would happen.' I'd be saying "I don't know what will happen but I bet the odds we won't like it are pretty darned good."
That's about the situation with genetics and genetic engineering. We have discovered some of the bits and could actually cause changes in our evolutionary developnent and haven't much of a clue HOW this stuff really works. If we had decoded the entire genome, could create life from scratch (not the more limited creation Venter is up to, but he is asking good questions) reliably manipulate the genetics of lesser primates to dictate their traits, etc. I'd say we were ready to meddle with our own genome in these ways. That level of understanding is in the Mysterious Future.
Re:This too was foreseen
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
> We could just kill everyone suffering from those diseases and would we would have the same result.
Oh we are far too enlightened for that. Nah, we can just sterilize em the second a defect is detected. That way they can't pass on their defect and if he/she is really a loser the Democrats still get a voter for life! Same effect really, we are about to start saying people with genes we don't like shouldn't have been born and surely shouldn't reproduce. I'm sure it will really boost the self esteem of at least half the population when they learn they have a gene that indicates they never should have been born. Certain to increase productivity, lower rates of depression and crime!
> The fact that parents can get together and decide on the characteristics of their offspring is > not a slippery slope towards state laws regarding who can have the rights to breed.
The question is NOT whether the State will insert itself into the traits that can/can't be selected for, the question is when and how?
Don't believe me? Then riddle me this?
Both parents have gay relatives but are morally opposed to homosexuality. They fear they might be carriers of 'the gay gene' and ask the clenic to screen out the gay. It hits the newspapers. How many days until Congress passes a law?
Mixed race couple decides they want their child to appear as caucasian as possible, It hits the newspapers. How many days until Congress passes a law?
Couple with one who was deaf due to genetic defect. Wants to screen it out. It hits the newspapers. How many days until Congress passes a law? (Yes, being deaf isn't a defect according to current politically correct dogma, it is an alternate culture and must be protected.)
And so on. The same politically correct morally neutral types who insist we can't even discuss regulating this tech will almost certainly be the first to pass a law regulating it. I'm just asking for this to be admitted up front so we can move from "should we regulate" to "what regulations" and do it BEFORE we wander too far into this brave new eugenic world.
> What people said was that for traits that people are most interested in doing this for...
I dunno about that. We could do a LOT now and once there is a profit in refining the list of traits expect rapid progress. But now we could do a lot to improve the odds on intelligence, just by culling all the known genes that tend to lower intelligence a company could offer a better shaped intelligence distribution. Physical ability will probably be the first one to get targeted. Attractiveness will be all but impossible since it is so subjective and it is more a pleasing combination of traits any one of which would be 'ugly' if combined with different ones. But I bet they get cracking on locating genes that tend towards better skin (no acne, etc) and any other quick to spot traits that tend towards physical attractiveness. And how much will "high probablility of hung like a horse" be worth?
What bothers me is that our best tend to be outliers. If we eliminate those in favor of safe squarely in the middle of the bell curve types, even if the average point on the curve gets moved up a bit, we are going to pay a price in lower innovation, creative output, etc. Hawking would have never made it into the womb in the brave new world we are about to enter.
Re:This too was foreseen
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· Score: 0, Troll
> This is NOT FUCKING EUGENICS
Yes it is. Hitler used the tools at his disposal in an attempt to use science to 'improve the breed.' We have better tools now, that is all. And we have exactly the same problem HItler had, who decides what is an improvement? He thought making everyone super pure 'Aryans' would be an improvement since he believed they had the atributes he valued. Now we will have asshole yuppies making the decision as to what genetic traits are valuable; maybe that is an improvement but is it verboten to even ask the question?
> Please don't use the word "eugenics" since the only accepted definition of the word > references a truly abhorrent behavior that should never be approved of,
You might want to read some non-government school approved history. All 'right thinking people' were all for Eugenics, not just the Nazis. Margaret Sanger founded Planned Parenthood on Eugenic theory, specifically that if she could reduce reproduction among/abort the children of the inferior races that it would improve humanity by removing useless people. And to this day you will find PP operating mostly in 'inner cities' which is code for 'we abort niggers.' Something I'd expect David Duke to be in favor of, kinda suprising to see the whole Progressive movement praising em though.
Hitler did the world a backhanded favor by making the word Eugenics and anything associated with it taboo for several generations. Doesn't appear we used the time to reconsider though, now the Nazis are safely in the past and we again speed headlong into the Progressive Future!
> I'm gonna build a coal plant and drive my Hummer.
Oh I am so totally going to remember that one. Love it!
Re:This too was foreseen
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· Score: 1, Flamebait
> Freedom means putting up with shit you don't like.
You MIGHT be a hard core Libertarian and none of your recent posts brings that out well... but you are probably either a lying bastard or self deluded. Odds are you are perfectly willing to 'put up with' things you agree with or don't care about' but quite willing to invoke the power of social sanction or outright government force to enforce things YOU care about on others.
Or are you for allowing school choice... even when it means fundies can skip teaching evolution and condoms?
Or are you against using the power of the State to seize the resources of the successful to give to those who couldn't give enough of a shit to get an education? And just tell em to get a job (and that getting married before having the litter of sprogs is a good idea) and thus take care of themselves and their own without suckling the government's teat?
And you are of course against crap like the Fairness Doctrine, right?
And are you against all gun control. at least anything less than crew served weapons or WMD, right?
Hate Speech? That doesn't exist in your "Freedom is flying yer freak flag" world, right?
And so on and so on. Hope you get my point by now. Just because YOU don't care one way or the other about designer babies doesn't mean as a society we might not need to make a decision that this is such a bad idea we just might want to at least go on the record that this is a BAD IDEA and perhaps discourage it a little? Is bringing up the subject of societal disapproval too much for the everything is grey moral relativists? Once we get that much moral clarity we can consider the question of opening up the bigger can of worms as to whether we can or should regulate it legally.
This too was foreseen
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I remember people predicting this, mostly the fundies. They were laughed at. The gist of the flameage was "That won't ever happen, you guys need to STFU and let us scientists get on with the science."
Ok, now it's happened. And as a society we lack the moral fiber to even say it is a bad idea. Forget making an actual judgemental moral decision and declaring it "immoral" or "wrong". We can't even agree it is a bad idea and will almost certainly have bad consequences.
> Although in this case MS did eventually lose but Stac went under.
Hey, I remember DOS 6.21. Of course Microsoft lies, cheats and steals. Always have and probably always will because it is just so ingrained in their corporate culture. Doesn't matter, we have all known this patent throwdown was coming and as the laws are currently written they have a legal leg to stand on, a lot better chance of winning than their sock puppet/trial balloon SCO ever had.
But Stac also died because full disc compression died. It was a very temporary situation where apps were bigger than affordable drives. Now apps get lost on a drive and it is the media files taking up the space and they are already compressed. Netware did the best compression back in the day, it compressed files that hadn't been accessed in a while and transparently uncompressed them again when they were accessed. Best of both worlds, more space without taking much of a CPU hit.
Slashdot Mirror
> In other words, is the creation of this "green" paper from wombat poo actually any better than using renewable tree resources?
I think you are totally missing the point of green. A green program is a success when the green's self esteem is raised. It's all about them proving they care more than we do. Whether it works is a side question with an unusual twist. If it actually works, i.e. some filthy capitalist can make money at it, then it has to be bad. Won't be six months until it is deemed not green any more and thus evil.
Think I'm being overly cynical? Nah. If we really cared about reducing carbon we would be on a crash building program for nuke plants. There are protesters railing against nuke, solar, wind, geothermal (yes they even hate geothermal!), hydroelectric, biofuels, tidal you name it and there is a green organization already against it. Let an alternative get practical and they all turn on it. See hydroelecric.
> There was apparently a narrow window of opportunity..
But it is a stupid point. Yes when a new ooporunity is opening up it will usually be dominated by the 'young turks' of the time. But if you missed the opening days of the PC there were a lot of other places to get in. And a lot of people did. You don't have to succeed to household word status to be a success. Even people who 'lost' made sacks of cash. How many .bomb billionaires are still walking around looking for the next big thing to invest in?
I can agree with the notion that success on the scale of Gates or Joy requires a fair amount of luck. But luck alone was not enough back then, although it appears that the .bomb was a totally different case. It is apparent that luck along pushed some of those guys to billionaire status because the VC and IPO people had gone mad, throwing insane amounts of cash at projects any rational person could see would never perform to their valuations.
> ..it sounds a lot to me like a way to excuse not trying at all.
Welcome to the Age of Obama. We are now in the final act of a drama that played out over the 20th Century. Before the evil rich can be truly soaked they have to be deconstructed. They aren't rich because of talent, they aren't rich by virtue of working harder or smarter. They are rich because they were lucky or wicked. Thus it is moral to redistribute their ill gotten gains to the noble downdrodden poor.
> No one places DRM type restrictions on my purchase of an automobile, house, or TV set.
Bad example. They do indeed put DRM type restrictions on buying a house in many places. They are called Homeowners Associations and Restrictive Covenants in some deeds. Until the courts and legislatures rewrote them (a dangerous flirtation with ex post facto lawmaking itself, probably the best of many bad options here) some properties had permanent restrictions saying you couldn't sell the property to [fill in oppressed minority some previous owner a hundred years ago hated].
The problem with DRM is that it makes all sorts of stupid restrictions too easy to implement and the DMCA then makes it illegal to remove restrictions on uses of copyrighted works that no law forbids. DRM that makes copying hard can at least be justified somewhat by noting that making copies is illegal in the first place. But locking a copy of a work to one reader can't even claim that figleaf of moral cover.
> I've not yet had a chance to check one of these out. As I understand it, the look and feel of
> reading the eink display is just like reading bright white paper fresh from the laser printer.
I haven't actually seen a Kindle in the wild but the Kindle 1 used the same display as the Sony ebook product and I did look at one of those. Maybe the Kindle 2 is a lot better but probably just a incremental improvement. Anyway, the Sony I looked at was more like reading a good 24pin dot matrix printer on low quality newsprint. And the updates times were horrid. If that sort of retro computing turns your crank then epaper is for you, otherwise wait for it to rev a few more times. Like everything else tech it will either get good eventually or something even better will supplant it.
> Could they get the readers down to a more reasonable cost?
They will. Amazon probably won't because their business model requires they hide the cellular network charges in an upfront lumpsum payment instead of a monthly fee. A pure ebook reader sans the cell phone will eventually be a $50 disposable toy, especially if they keep the DRM alive because everytime you toss the reader ya get to buy all new books! But DRM on books won't fly longterm any better than it has for music.
> ...democracy may be a stable political system only among a genetically improved electorate.
No, not unless all the genetic engineered supermen are clones and thus completely equal. The problem is democracy. There is a reason that if a Founding Father had called you a "Democrat" you would have been expected to punch him in the face for making such a horrible insult. Which is why we were given a Republic... if we could keep it. We failed.
> Expecting somebody to disregard their own values and morals in decision-making isn't just unrealistic, it's immoral :)
I totally forgot to hit on that issue while making my reply. Thanks.
The post we both replied to is a perfect example of the tolerance of the heathen left. Their 'diversity' is a thousand people of every race, color, nationality, gender identity and sexual deviation all coming together to think in perfect lockstep, marching around with signs depicting Bush == Hitler.
> imagine people were saying similar things when racial discrimination laws were passed.
They happened to be wrong. Not saying there aren't actually some variation between the races but any differences in the averages appear to be safely inside the deviation bars.
> Do you think we ought to throw those laws out as they'll never work and blacks will always be discriminated against?
Actually..... yes we should dump those laws because they can't work. Racial discrimination isn't much of a problem anymore because people changed, not because some asshole in Washington passed a law.
Racial discrimination ended because it was a false outdated notion we are quickly discarding that was totally incompatible with "All men are created equal..." Progress doesn't happen all at once, it just took a little while after those words were set down for society to catch up to all of the implications. And while everyone isn't exactly 'equal' we are close enough that the concept of equality before the law makes so sense it could form the basis of the most successful nation in human history. Throw in a bunch of genetic supermen and some custom designed semi sentient drones into the population and those ideas are null and void. Discrimination DOES make sense because people won't even be close to equal anymore. When the dumbest superman is smarter than Hawking, wiser than Mark Twain and will likely still have the body of a Greek God when he is a hundred years old the question of whether us mundanes should even be allowed to vote is a valid one. We probably won't like their answer.
My argument is that we really should think through the consequences of genetic engineering before we do it instead of rushing into it and having to figure it out after a few bloody wars. What guiding principle replaces "All men are created equal" is something we should have worked though before we make everyone unequal. What rights do created beings have? Does it depend on whether their mental functions have been altered? How?
> You seem so sure that it will end with complete dehumanization.
Because tech is always changing. Human nature doesn't. At least not yet.
> I guess if a culture wants to go that way, then it is their own fault when they don't
> have enough chicks for all the guys to marry....and they slowly go extinct...
That is one option. But what if they decide to wage The War For Poontang? Think about it. You get a bunch of your excess male population killed off along with a good proportion of the male population of the victim country leaving it with an excess of females to carry off as prizes. And there is that nice territorial expansion bit for essentially free.
It is a related problem to the Muslim problem. Muslims are permitted up to four wives. Wealthy ones max out leaving lots of poor horny males with almost no prospect of getting any poon. And we wonder why they sign up as suicide bombers on the promise of those heavenly virgins? Those mating practices are a win if you are losing lots of your male population to war or other things, a recipe for disaster otherwise.
> But seriously, are you stating a position against assisted suicide?
Against DOCTOR assisted suicide? 100% against. Automatic lifetime revocation of license to practice medicine should be the minimum punishment for violation. Doctors may do no harm. If they break the Oath no rational should ever trust them again.
Same goes for anyone working directly or indirectly for a Dr. In theory the Dr. is in charge and allowing a subordinate to do it is equally taboo.
If a relative or friend smuggles in a lethal dose of pills, hey I got no problem with that. Or accidentally unplugs the most expensive machine that goes Ping! on request from someone who can no longer reach the damned power cord? Again, I wouldn't vote to convict if I were on the jury.
But I really think we should avoid officially sanctioning the practice too much lest we end up sliding into promoting it. Because from there it really is a small jump to expecting the sick to "go ahead and just f%&#ing die already." And that is somewhere I'm not willing to go.
Our science has ran far ahead of our ethical development and it wouldn't be a bad thing if we just slowed the hell down a bit and allowed the two a chance to equalize a bit. Philosophers aren't getting faster according to Moore's Law.
> In the beginning of gattaca, the narrator even mentions that "genoism" laws were
> passed, but in the movie we see blatant discrimination.
Because the idea that laws from a legislature will overrule laws of physics is dumb. It's the sort of thing Democrats do.
> The message that I got out of that movie is less about genetic engineering,
> and more about discrimination in general.
Wrong. Discriminating against people because they are of African descent is just dumb. Discriminating against someone because they are physically weaker, less intelligent, less emotionally stable, more likely to contract diseases and will generally die younger is a totally different thing. And that is where genetic engineering leads. I am not opposed to Eugenics because I don't think it will work, I oppose it because I know it WILL work.
Our whole civilization can be summed up by these immortal words:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
Genetic engineering tosses ALL of that in the trash. All men are created by the Company with whatever inequalities the customer orders. Their ass is the property of the customer who commissioned them but the copyrights and patents on their design belongs to the Company. If it's defective just kill it and try again, hopefully we catch the defects before initial customer delivery.
And as for Happiness? We commissioned a miner and mine it damned well better do, who cares if it enjoys it. We can just breed the 2.0 version to be too stupid to care if too many revolt or commit suicide. So what if it causes a few more losses because they won't be able to understand some of the safety rules, we will adjust the design until the cost benefit is right.
> Eugenics MUST involve the control of sexual conduct.
You are an idiot. Eugenics must control breeding. Period, full stop. Since sexual conduct isn't involved in IFV your illogic would 'prove' that under no conditions could Eugenics and IFV be related. Which is of course bunk. By your logic if the State outlawed natural childbirth and even sex and forced all children to be grown in artificial wombs after being carefully designed for genetic perfection your definition would say that no Eugenics were involved.
If you want to argue that the State must be doing the controlling for it to be Eugenics you would be closer to a point but still wrong. Margeret Sanger's Planned Parenthood was founded to practice Eugenics and does so to this day by (by design) killing off babies in 'racially inferior populations'. While the darlings of 'Progressives' and recepients of a fair amount of government pork they aren't agents of the State. Go read up on that nasty bunch of bigots sometime. Prepare to be disillusioned.
> If anyone (fundies included) has a good argument against genetic manipulation,
If I wanted to just be a jerk I'd suggest you watch ST:TOS - Space Seed or Gattaca again. But I'll assume you really can't see any of the potential problems.
First off, if you believe this train STOPS at the current stage of making a bunch of embryos, testing them and picking which one(s) to implant you are zarking mad. Once we start we will end at full designer babies, only a matter of when.
So what happens when those who can afford them are spawning Homo Superior while the rabble are just having humans? At what point along the super being track do these new beings get to rule over us lesser creatures? Or is it moral and just to have stupid pathetic Homo Sapiens equally able to vote and thus by their numerical superiority rule over beings which are in every way better? So do they get their own nation? Which one? Will the current inhabitants get a say in the matter?
What happens to sports when people start breeding up designer baseball players? You thought 'roids was a problem...
What happens when the carefully designed super basketball player is defective? Who gets to sue who? The parents because the kid wasn't as specified? The kid when the only job he was built to be good at is now closed to him? The basketball franchise who paid part of the design fees in exchange for a preconception contract?
What happens when the mutant monster somebody thought it would be cute to create decides it got the shaft and wants justice? Can it sue the 'parents'? The company that designed/grew it? What happens when the mutant monster fulfils its destiny and tramples half the city? It's fault or the creators? It was BUILT to be a monster after all. The nature/nurture argument does not apply, it was BUILT to destroy.
What happens when a normal born with a defect sues because its parents DIDN'T test and discard it?
Can the government, because of Universal Health Insurance, demand that all children be screened for defects likely to cost the State a boatload of money? Can it actually ORDER a termination or the purchase of some private security that will provide for the defective child's medical costs?
Right now we tell our kids that if they work hard and apply themselves they can be pretty much what they want. Well welcome to "You were DESIGNED to be a rocket scientist. Too bad you want to be in a rock band, but you weren't built with music skills so get off the Harley, get over it and get on over to physics class." "Nope, you were designed and financed by the Army to be a killing machine so put down the paintbrush, you were inducted before you were conceived."
And if those aren't enough to have you decide there is at least grounds for a discussion on the potential for a downside, then read the rest of this thread there are lots of other arguments being made.
> You can't confuse that with assisted suicide either as euthanasia exclusively involves unwilling victims.
Oh no, you don't get off so quickly. It's another perfect example of how things can spiral out of control and lead to things nobody thought possible when it started.
Somebody wants to die, I don't have a problem with that and apparently you don't either. But I assert that allowing DOCTORS or anything connected to the medical world in the loop is a fatal flaw, you don't. So follow along.
"Assisted suicide" becomes mainstream. Generally accepted custom in society, when you are goin' down for the count most people go ahead and stop the game. Still not a big problem, right? If you think it is a good idea it can't be bad even most people start agreeing with ya, right? Ok, once MOST people are doing it social pressure begins to mount on the diehards who refuse to self terminate. After all, those last months are EXPENSIVE and with Universal Health Care it is a big burden on society. PSAs are put on TV by old celebutards right before they themselves punched off the clock for good, network news magazines are doing reports on how much better offing yourself is for everyone around you and society in general. Still don't see any 'unwilling victims yet? Ok, now the economy is bad again, like now, and the government (who pays for Universal Health Care? Yup.) is offering cash bonuses paid to next of kin (or even directly to the patient if they are currently healthy enough to go out in a major league last hurrah) if those thought to be near the end and likely to run up a lot of health care costs go ahead and shuffle off the mortal coil and save the medical costs. And finally, to save the failing Government boondoggle the medical industry has become they just refuse expensive treatments to cases when they decide the 'quality/length of life gained is too low compared to the cost' and give the choice of suffering and dying with no treatment or letting em go ahead and put ya down painlessly.
See a point down that slippery slope where we would be likely to draw a line and hold it for more than a decade or two? I don't. Once you accept each point along the line the next one, previously unthinkable, becomes thinkable then logical and finally inevitable.
> Well, there's always the Star Trek option...
Exactly. If Star Trek taught anything it is that Eugenics and AI are bad ideas.
And yes I do have an "All I need to know about life I learned from Star Trek" poster on my bedroom wall. What was your question again?
Seriously, almost every SciFi story ever written says this will end badly. They have a point. At least enough of one we should have a long national (world?) discussion about this before we go ahead with it. And I'm a free market, government is dangerous, Libertarian.
> My problem (well, one of my problems) is the general healthiness of a society that decides what class of person is allowed to exist.
Which is why I said we are doomed. Because not only are we such a society, we are one where even asking the question is off limits in polite society.
> Since jmorris42 doesn't come off as someone religious I'd say the latter is more likely.
Yup. In my case the calls for caution are because we are tinkering with stuff we don't have a clue about. It would be like if we discovered that Uranium can get hot, people get wierd diseases around the stuff, etc. under certain circumstances before discovering atomic theory, E=MC^2 etc. And then some idiot wanted to build a really BIG reactor from really pure uranium to 'see what would happen.' I'd be saying "I don't know what will happen but I bet the odds we won't like it are pretty darned good."
That's about the situation with genetics and genetic engineering. We have discovered some of the bits and could actually cause changes in our evolutionary developnent and haven't much of a clue HOW this stuff really works. If we had decoded the entire genome, could create life from scratch (not the more limited creation Venter is up to, but he is asking good questions) reliably manipulate the genetics of lesser primates to dictate their traits, etc. I'd say we were ready to meddle with our own genome in these ways. That level of understanding is in the Mysterious Future.
> We could just kill everyone suffering from those diseases and would we would have the same result.
Oh we are far too enlightened for that. Nah, we can just sterilize em the second a defect is detected. That way they can't pass on their defect and if he/she is really a loser the Democrats still get a voter for life! Same effect really, we are about to start saying people with genes we don't like shouldn't have been born and surely shouldn't reproduce. I'm sure it will really boost the self esteem of at least half the population when they learn they have a gene that indicates they never should have been born. Certain to increase productivity, lower rates of depression and crime!
> The fact that parents can get together and decide on the characteristics of their offspring is
> not a slippery slope towards state laws regarding who can have the rights to breed.
The question is NOT whether the State will insert itself into the traits that can/can't be selected for, the question is when and how?
Don't believe me? Then riddle me this?
Both parents have gay relatives but are morally opposed to homosexuality. They fear they might be carriers of 'the gay gene' and ask the clenic to screen out the gay. It hits the newspapers. How many days until Congress passes a law?
Mixed race couple decides they want their child to appear as caucasian as possible, It hits the newspapers. How many days until Congress passes a law?
Couple with one who was deaf due to genetic defect. Wants to screen it out. It hits the newspapers. How many days until Congress passes a law? (Yes, being deaf isn't a defect according to current politically correct dogma, it is an alternate culture and must be protected.)
And so on. The same politically correct morally neutral types who insist we can't even discuss regulating this tech will almost certainly be the first to pass a law regulating it. I'm just asking for this to be admitted up front so we can move from "should we regulate" to "what regulations" and do it BEFORE we wander too far into this brave new eugenic world.
> What people said was that for traits that people are most interested in doing this for...
I dunno about that. We could do a LOT now and once there is a profit in refining the list of traits expect rapid progress. But now we could do a lot to improve the odds on intelligence, just by culling all the known genes that tend to lower intelligence a company could offer a better shaped intelligence distribution. Physical ability will probably be the first one to get targeted. Attractiveness will be all but impossible since it is so subjective and it is more a pleasing combination of traits any one of which would be 'ugly' if combined with different ones. But I bet they get cracking on locating genes that tend towards better skin (no acne, etc) and any other quick to spot traits that tend towards physical attractiveness. And how much will "high probablility of hung like a horse" be worth?
What bothers me is that our best tend to be outliers. If we eliminate those in favor of safe squarely in the middle of the bell curve types, even if the average point on the curve gets moved up a bit, we are going to pay a price in lower innovation, creative output, etc. Hawking would have never made it into the womb in the brave new world we are about to enter.
> This is NOT FUCKING EUGENICS
Yes it is. Hitler used the tools at his disposal in an attempt to use science to 'improve the breed.' We have better tools now, that is all. And we have exactly the same problem HItler had, who decides what is an improvement? He thought making everyone super pure 'Aryans' would be an improvement since he believed they had the atributes he valued. Now we will have asshole yuppies making the decision as to what genetic traits are valuable; maybe that is an improvement but is it verboten to even ask the question?
> Please don't use the word "eugenics" since the only accepted definition of the word
> references a truly abhorrent behavior that should never be approved of,
You might want to read some non-government school approved history. All 'right thinking people' were all for Eugenics, not just the Nazis. Margaret Sanger founded Planned Parenthood on Eugenic theory, specifically that if she could reduce reproduction among/abort the children of the inferior races that it would improve humanity by removing useless people. And to this day you will find PP operating mostly in 'inner cities' which is code for 'we abort niggers.' Something I'd expect David Duke to be in favor of, kinda suprising to see the whole Progressive movement praising em though.
Hitler did the world a backhanded favor by making the word Eugenics and anything associated with it taboo for several generations. Doesn't appear we used the time to reconsider though, now the Nazis are safely in the past and we again speed headlong into the Progressive Future!
> I'm gonna build a coal plant and drive my Hummer.
Oh I am so totally going to remember that one. Love it!
> Freedom means putting up with shit you don't like.
You MIGHT be a hard core Libertarian and none of your recent posts brings that out well... but you are probably either a lying bastard or self deluded. Odds are you are perfectly willing to 'put up with' things you agree with or don't care about' but quite willing to invoke the power of social sanction or outright government force to enforce things YOU care about on others.
Or are you for allowing school choice... even when it means fundies can skip teaching evolution and condoms?
Or are you against using the power of the State to seize the resources of the successful to give to those who couldn't give enough of a shit to get an education? And just tell em to get a job (and that getting married before having the litter of sprogs is a good idea) and thus take care of themselves and their own without suckling the government's teat?
And you are of course against crap like the Fairness Doctrine, right?
And are you against all gun control. at least anything less than crew served weapons or WMD, right?
Hate Speech? That doesn't exist in your "Freedom is flying yer freak flag" world, right?
And so on and so on. Hope you get my point by now. Just because YOU don't care one way or the other about designer babies doesn't mean as a society we might not need to make a decision that this is such a bad idea we just might want to at least go on the record that this is a BAD IDEA and perhaps discourage it a little? Is bringing up the subject of societal disapproval too much for the everything is grey moral relativists? Once we get that much moral clarity we can consider the question of opening up the bigger can of worms as to whether we can or should regulate it legally.
I remember people predicting this, mostly the fundies. They were laughed at. The gist of the flameage was "That won't ever happen, you guys need to STFU and let us scientists get on with the science."
Ok, now it's happened. And as a society we lack the moral fiber to even say it is a bad idea. Forget making an actual judgemental moral decision and declaring it "immoral" or "wrong". We can't even agree it is a bad idea and will almost certainly have bad consequences.
We are so doomed.
> Although in this case MS did eventually lose but Stac went under.
Hey, I remember DOS 6.21. Of course Microsoft lies, cheats and steals. Always have and probably always will because it is just so ingrained in their corporate culture. Doesn't matter, we have all known this patent throwdown was coming and as the laws are currently written they have a legal leg to stand on, a lot better chance of winning than their sock puppet/trial balloon SCO ever had.
But Stac also died because full disc compression died. It was a very temporary situation where apps were bigger than affordable drives. Now apps get lost on a drive and it is the media files taking up the space and they are already compressed. Netware did the best compression back in the day, it compressed files that hadn't been accessed in a while and transparently uncompressed them again when they were accessed. Best of both worlds, more space without taking much of a CPU hit.