I guess the question is how do you tell the ones that need treatment from the ones that don't before it it too late to treat the ones that do
Histology at the moment. What a trained pathologist can tell from a slide of stained cells is incredible. In the near future, genomic sequencing is what experts seem to be saying. You find a tumor, you get a biopsy, look at it under the microscope and also sequence the DNA of the cancer. Between what the cells look like and the DNA sequence, they'll be able to tell how likely it is to kill you.
There are a number of well-characterized things a cancer cell must do to be really bad, and genomic sequencing will allow a good diagnosis as to what a cancer is doing exactly. If it's just that the cells are growing more than they should, but are otherwise playing by the rules (IE, unlikely to metastasize or start increasing the bloodflow to the tumor, and not in a critical location) keep an eye on it but it may not become a problem ever. If it is expressing several genes that will allow the cells to get into the bloodstream and take root elsewhere, chemotherapy now. Chances are much better that it will spread to critical areas like your lungs or brain and kill you.
Apple is going after Samsung using design patents [wikimedia.org] this is a slightly different concept that the 'standard' patent for an 'invention'.
See, I didn't BEAT the victim up for owing me money. I tasered him. Beating for owed money implies I hit him with blunt objects to hurt him because he didn't give me money. Not the case at all. I used electricity to coax him to pay me what I was owed.
There wasn't any apple-bashing going on there. Apple, like most other tech companies, is using lawyers to stifle competition. With samsung, the most logical weapon were the design patents. That doesn't mean they're going to say "Okay, ubuntu mobile doesn't have rounded corners or a home button, so we're just going to try to compete by making a better product rather than trying to shut them down with lawyers."
Apple's lawyers are just using the laws as intended: to protect inventors investments. Apple put a lot of money into such technological breakthroughs as rounded edges, and the color black.
Our environment may be changing, but that's not driving genetic changes in the human population.
Myopia may be increasing, but it's not correlated with nearsightedness no longer being selected against. It's been thousands of years since people with poor eyesight were allowed to die, whereas myopia is increasing in the last few decades. Were it some genetic de-evolution, you'd expect it to happen when we stopped letting nearsighted people starve. Obesity too clearly correlates with dietary changes, not food suddenly being available. Countries like Japan where McDonalds and other junk food are making inroads, they're experiencing weight gains as well. Diabetes too follows dietary changes.
As I said, genetic change doesn't just suddenly happen in large populations, because it gets diluted out. Getting back to the original topic, this fast breeders business would be dilluted out as well. Even in Mormon populations, it's clearly a social thing. If you've ever met an ex-mormon, you'd know that having a large family is not genetic, it's social.
That reckless abandon in thought is the new diabetes, the new extremely near sightedness. And this will soon grow out of control, not in 1000 years, but more like 50.
Now that is pretty clearly one of those 90% of statistics that were made up on the spot. What, if anything, do you base that on? Gut feeling?
Of all the possible things to point to and say the sky is falling, I think you've chosen one of the more ridiculous. Worry about the economy and climate change before you worry about people with an uncontrollable urge to have ten babies overtaking the earth since, again, the economy and climate change have the potential to affect you during your natural life. Population growth is slowing in developed countries.
But reproduction rate is the point of genetics! It doesn't matter what the disincentives to having a child are, if the parent is driven by an uncontrollable instinctual drive to reproduce.
The problem is that human beings change over time, just as any species does.
No. According to the widely held theory of punctuated equilibrium, most species change very little after a comparatively short period of transition. A new species of fish might spend 1,000 years changing, then will be set for the next 100,000 years. There are few conditions under which a species will evolve. Most evolution occurs with speciation events: one small group of fish is separated from the parent group for several generations, that small group evolves to slightly different conditions, and eventually is it's own species.
With humans, there is little gradual evolution. If you have a baby that is smarter than average, odds are good he or she is going to breed with someone of average intelligence, and produce average intelligence babies. If not that generation, the next generation, and so on. It will all mix out.
Applying this to frequent vs infrequent breeders, it could be the case that frequent breeders will pair up, that's a theory, but in practice you see that those trends don't hold. People coming from big families often hated it and vow to have smaller families, whereas people from smaller families often want bigger families. And, as GP pointed out, the evidence shows that economics play a much bigger role in family size than you assume.
At the very least, realize it will be generations before evolution will affect the breeding rate much. While change happens rapidly in terms of the "lifespan" of a species, it's still very long on a human timescale. People who are genetically driven to breed like rabbits will not suddenly overwhelm the normal population and change the projected population growth in your lifetime, so stop worrying about it.
The rate of reproduction in the first world would not be falling if "family size" were dictated that much by genetics. You'd expect it to continue to increase. Unless you separate the frequent and infrequent breeders out for a few generations, the genetic push would be a wash if it were. Social trends impact that much more. Careers for women are pushing back when families start having children. Not genetics.
Since when did "thinking" become a part of environmental policy? You talk about populist answers like they're worse than "Alright, what part of this world can I sell and will I be dead before selling it causes any problems."
You were not being trolled. That was just my standard distrust of politicians, assuming his motivation was corruption rather than benign. I wasn't aware he had spoken out against ACTA before, thank you for enlightening me.
Going to stop you right there. That's not an example of anything other than how technology destroying the earth is a common THEME IN SCI FI.
The cockroach is one example of such an experiment.
What.
Who is to say that in time, we will not create an example capable of out-competing us for some natural resource? So it is not without risk to experiment in self-replication.
You can't assume all possibilities to be likely just because of how dire they would be. Who is to say that by getting out of bed, you will not be exposed to a flu, and it will recombine with some bits of your genes, and create a world-ending superflu? No one, because it's possible. Extremely unlikely, but possible. With replicators, how about we wait until there is some technology which has a reasonable chance of causing grey goo? You know, take the rational approach that has worked with ALL OTHER TECHNOLOGY UP TO THIS POINT.
Indeed. The denial makes me wonder if there really IS a problem with iPads failing to turn on. Wait, could it be that the iOS5 "cool permanent black screen" I'm getting is actually... no, it's definitely a feature, not a bug. Preserves the battery life.
What do people think of using Opera Unite as an alternative to Facebook?
All the people that I want to keep in contact via facebook to switch to Opera and I'll gladly embrace it. Thing is, I think convincing them to switch to google plus would be simpler, since they wouldn't have to start using a new browser, and I've been unable to get them to switch even to that. So opera unite is worthless to me until then.
Not the junk mail at his new house. That was from the US postal service which is now 75% junk mail. He "opted into" that by buying a house in the US.
OP also probably meant opt-in as in by actual choice, not "You agree to be spammed terms or you go without the internet, e-mail, facebook, phone service, etc." I'd agree that it's probably wishing for pie in the sky, but blaming him for it is just rationalizing big corporate overlords annoying us mere mortals.
And you getting a better computer is just one more step toward skynet.
Or big nations making artificial intelligence as weapons, and ultimately... those creations at risk of being turned against their creator through malfunction, hackers, or worse.
Slashdot: news for technophobes. Lay off the LSD. Every technology can be abused. You're suggesting we shouldn't look into self-replicating structures because one day far down the road, some evil government agency MIGHT use it to unleash a horde of nanobots which will destroy the world? That's absurd.
It's too bad that his objection seems to be over the procedure and not the content (can't read the letter, seems to be slashdotted). Too much to hope for that the senate would be anything other than a rubber stamp on the copyright cartel's legislation. I'm guessing that the senate is mad they don't actually get credit and the associated campaign contributions that signing off on it would get them.
It's not specific to apple. Any technology news these days seems to be gossip based. The nexus prime, a few weeks ago everything that came up in a google search was "Nexus prime: Verizon exclusive!!!" This seems to have been based entirely off the fact that the FCC cleared the verizon version first. The galaxy S2 on AT&T, the release date on every page mentioning it said September 18th. September 18th came and went without the phone. No one at samsung or AT&T had ever mentioned a release date, it was entirely rumors taken as fact.
I suppose it might have something to do with the quality of journalists in tech news. I guess if you're not good enough to get hired at a popular science or CNN, phone blog.com might be hiring.
There doesn't even need to be another side actively opposing it, it's intrinsic. Rational thought doesn't come easily to us humans. We get scientific facts that challenge our deeply held beliefs, and we typically respond in a very unscientific manner, by attacking it.
As a scientist, it's extremely distressing when I realize that I am doing it in science. I had a nice little hypothesis my first year of grad school, was very proud of it. My first result shot it right to hell. I wasted the next half a year trying to show that my hypothesis was still true, that the result was a fluke. Eventually I realized that I was being an idiot, and that opened the door to a much much more interesting model. I wish I could say that was the first lesson I learned and have never made that mistake again. The more accurate statement would be "And I still make that same mistake every damn time."
So my glovebox if locked requires a warrant but my phone doesn't?
Yeah, well, I'll put my phone IN MY GLOVEBOX! How you like THEM apples, police state!!!
(I'm kidding, this is terrible, they of course can already invent a reason to search your glove box (looks like we got a lot of dust on the dashboard, could be cocaine, that's probable cause!) and I'm sure they're going to eventually fully declare the glove box searcheable even without some flimsy excuse for probable cause)
Depends, who is he going to be running against? I think it's naive to assume that whoever is running against him would have signed this. I also think it's naive to assume that many people will actually care about something like the constitution.
(sigh) Which is WHY you vote in the fucking primaries! There were 26 people running for the governorship, there were oodles of choices. No, they were not all on the final ballot, but how would that have been any better? As it was, people didn't educate themselves much about the two main choices in the general election. Presenting them with even more options would not have made this any different.
Slashdot Mirror
The movie Gas Land has been discredited
Kinda like how people arguing for the existence of climate change, evolution, and the link between tobacco and cancer have been "discredited?"
I guess the question is how do you tell the ones that need treatment from the ones that don't before it it too late to treat the ones that do
Histology at the moment. What a trained pathologist can tell from a slide of stained cells is incredible. In the near future, genomic sequencing is what experts seem to be saying. You find a tumor, you get a biopsy, look at it under the microscope and also sequence the DNA of the cancer. Between what the cells look like and the DNA sequence, they'll be able to tell how likely it is to kill you.
There are a number of well-characterized things a cancer cell must do to be really bad, and genomic sequencing will allow a good diagnosis as to what a cancer is doing exactly. If it's just that the cells are growing more than they should, but are otherwise playing by the rules (IE, unlikely to metastasize or start increasing the bloodflow to the tumor, and not in a critical location) keep an eye on it but it may not become a problem ever. If it is expressing several genes that will allow the cells to get into the bloodstream and take root elsewhere, chemotherapy now. Chances are much better that it will spread to critical areas like your lungs or brain and kill you.
Apple is going after Samsung using design patents [wikimedia.org] this is a slightly different concept that the 'standard' patent for an 'invention'.
See, I didn't BEAT the victim up for owing me money. I tasered him. Beating for owed money implies I hit him with blunt objects to hurt him because he didn't give me money. Not the case at all. I used electricity to coax him to pay me what I was owed.
There wasn't any apple-bashing going on there. Apple, like most other tech companies, is using lawyers to stifle competition. With samsung, the most logical weapon were the design patents. That doesn't mean they're going to say "Okay, ubuntu mobile doesn't have rounded corners or a home button, so we're just going to try to compete by making a better product rather than trying to shut them down with lawyers."
Apple's lawyers are just using the laws as intended: to protect inventors investments. Apple put a lot of money into such technological breakthroughs as rounded edges, and the color black.
[/s]
Myopia may be increasing, but it's not correlated with nearsightedness no longer being selected against. It's been thousands of years since people with poor eyesight were allowed to die, whereas myopia is increasing in the last few decades. Were it some genetic de-evolution, you'd expect it to happen when we stopped letting nearsighted people starve. Obesity too clearly correlates with dietary changes, not food suddenly being available. Countries like Japan where McDonalds and other junk food are making inroads, they're experiencing weight gains as well. Diabetes too follows dietary changes.
As I said, genetic change doesn't just suddenly happen in large populations, because it gets diluted out. Getting back to the original topic, this fast breeders business would be dilluted out as well. Even in Mormon populations, it's clearly a social thing. If you've ever met an ex-mormon, you'd know that having a large family is not genetic, it's social.
That reckless abandon in thought is the new diabetes, the new extremely near sightedness. And this will soon grow out of control, not in 1000 years, but more like 50.
Now that is pretty clearly one of those 90% of statistics that were made up on the spot. What, if anything, do you base that on? Gut feeling?
Of all the possible things to point to and say the sky is falling, I think you've chosen one of the more ridiculous. Worry about the economy and climate change before you worry about people with an uncontrollable urge to have ten babies overtaking the earth since, again, the economy and climate change have the potential to affect you during your natural life. Population growth is slowing in developed countries.
But reproduction rate is the point of genetics! It doesn't matter what the disincentives to having a child are, if the parent is driven by an uncontrollable instinctual drive to reproduce.
The problem is that human beings change over time, just as any species does.
No. According to the widely held theory of punctuated equilibrium, most species change very little after a comparatively short period of transition. A new species of fish might spend 1,000 years changing, then will be set for the next 100,000 years. There are few conditions under which a species will evolve. Most evolution occurs with speciation events: one small group of fish is separated from the parent group for several generations, that small group evolves to slightly different conditions, and eventually is it's own species.
With humans, there is little gradual evolution. If you have a baby that is smarter than average, odds are good he or she is going to breed with someone of average intelligence, and produce average intelligence babies. If not that generation, the next generation, and so on. It will all mix out.
Applying this to frequent vs infrequent breeders, it could be the case that frequent breeders will pair up, that's a theory, but in practice you see that those trends don't hold. People coming from big families often hated it and vow to have smaller families, whereas people from smaller families often want bigger families. And, as GP pointed out, the evidence shows that economics play a much bigger role in family size than you assume.
At the very least, realize it will be generations before evolution will affect the breeding rate much. While change happens rapidly in terms of the "lifespan" of a species, it's still very long on a human timescale. People who are genetically driven to breed like rabbits will not suddenly overwhelm the normal population and change the projected population growth in your lifetime, so stop worrying about it.
The rate of reproduction in the first world would not be falling if "family size" were dictated that much by genetics. You'd expect it to continue to increase. Unless you separate the frequent and infrequent breeders out for a few generations, the genetic push would be a wash if it were. Social trends impact that much more. Careers for women are pushing back when families start having children. Not genetics.
If we had developed more than 1% of the available land, I might start to get worried
Everytime I see this argument, I question the educational background of the person posing it.
You shouldn't. Not everyone got a degree in environmental engineering. The importance of biodiversity isn't exactly one of the three R's.
Since when did "thinking" become a part of environmental policy? You talk about populist answers like they're worse than "Alright, what part of this world can I sell and will I be dead before selling it causes any problems."
You were not being trolled. That was just my standard distrust of politicians, assuming his motivation was corruption rather than benign. I wasn't aware he had spoken out against ACTA before, thank you for enlightening me.
The Replicators in Stargate, for example
Going to stop you right there. That's not an example of anything other than how technology destroying the earth is a common THEME IN SCI FI.
The cockroach is one example of such an experiment.
What.
Who is to say that in time, we will not create an example capable of out-competing us for some natural resource? So it is not without risk to experiment in self-replication.
You can't assume all possibilities to be likely just because of how dire they would be. Who is to say that by getting out of bed, you will not be exposed to a flu, and it will recombine with some bits of your genes, and create a world-ending superflu? No one, because it's possible. Extremely unlikely, but possible. With replicators, how about we wait until there is some technology which has a reasonable chance of causing grey goo? You know, take the rational approach that has worked with ALL OTHER TECHNOLOGY UP TO THIS POINT.
In a dark comedy type of way. You want a hot new electronic device? Joke's on you: some of the price tag goes right into this legal trench warfare.
Either that or move to a less stupid country.
"Shoot the messenger" transcends national boundaries. You really want to find a less stupid PLANET to live on.
Indeed. The denial makes me wonder if there really IS a problem with iPads failing to turn on. Wait, could it be that the iOS5 "cool permanent black screen" I'm getting is actually... no, it's definitely a feature, not a bug. Preserves the battery life.
What do people think of using Opera Unite as an alternative to Facebook?
All the people that I want to keep in contact via facebook to switch to Opera and I'll gladly embrace it. Thing is, I think convincing them to switch to google plus would be simpler, since they wouldn't have to start using a new browser, and I've been unable to get them to switch even to that. So opera unite is worthless to me until then.
Presumably he wouldn't bring up the procedural objection if he didn't care about the content.
What makes you think that's the case rather than what I proposed, that he just wants his reward?
Not the junk mail at his new house. That was from the US postal service which is now 75% junk mail. He "opted into" that by buying a house in the US.
OP also probably meant opt-in as in by actual choice, not "You agree to be spammed terms or you go without the internet, e-mail, facebook, phone service, etc." I'd agree that it's probably wishing for pie in the sky, but blaming him for it is just rationalizing big corporate overlords annoying us mere mortals.
And you getting a better computer is just one more step toward skynet.
Or big nations making artificial intelligence as weapons, and ultimately... those creations at risk of being turned against their creator through malfunction, hackers, or worse.
Slashdot: news for technophobes. Lay off the LSD. Every technology can be abused. You're suggesting we shouldn't look into self-replicating structures because one day far down the road, some evil government agency MIGHT use it to unleash a horde of nanobots which will destroy the world? That's absurd.
It's too bad that his objection seems to be over the procedure and not the content (can't read the letter, seems to be slashdotted). Too much to hope for that the senate would be anything other than a rubber stamp on the copyright cartel's legislation. I'm guessing that the senate is mad they don't actually get credit and the associated campaign contributions that signing off on it would get them.
Too busy making Half Life: Episode three maybe?
...
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!! (cries)
It's not specific to apple. Any technology news these days seems to be gossip based. The nexus prime, a few weeks ago everything that came up in a google search was "Nexus prime: Verizon exclusive!!!" This seems to have been based entirely off the fact that the FCC cleared the verizon version first. The galaxy S2 on AT&T, the release date on every page mentioning it said September 18th. September 18th came and went without the phone. No one at samsung or AT&T had ever mentioned a release date, it was entirely rumors taken as fact.
I suppose it might have something to do with the quality of journalists in tech news. I guess if you're not good enough to get hired at a popular science or CNN, phone blog.com might be hiring.
There doesn't even need to be another side actively opposing it, it's intrinsic. Rational thought doesn't come easily to us humans. We get scientific facts that challenge our deeply held beliefs, and we typically respond in a very unscientific manner, by attacking it.
As a scientist, it's extremely distressing when I realize that I am doing it in science. I had a nice little hypothesis my first year of grad school, was very proud of it. My first result shot it right to hell. I wasted the next half a year trying to show that my hypothesis was still true, that the result was a fluke. Eventually I realized that I was being an idiot, and that opened the door to a much much more interesting model. I wish I could say that was the first lesson I learned and have never made that mistake again. The more accurate statement would be "And I still make that same mistake every damn time."
So my glovebox if locked requires a warrant but my phone doesn't?
Yeah, well, I'll put my phone IN MY GLOVEBOX! How you like THEM apples, police state!!!
(I'm kidding, this is terrible, they of course can already invent a reason to search your glove box (looks like we got a lot of dust on the dashboard, could be cocaine, that's probable cause!) and I'm sure they're going to eventually fully declare the glove box searcheable even without some flimsy excuse for probable cause)
Depends, who is he going to be running against? I think it's naive to assume that whoever is running against him would have signed this. I also think it's naive to assume that many people will actually care about something like the constitution.
(sigh) Which is WHY you vote in the fucking primaries! There were 26 people running for the governorship, there were oodles of choices. No, they were not all on the final ballot, but how would that have been any better? As it was, people didn't educate themselves much about the two main choices in the general election. Presenting them with even more options would not have made this any different.