As opposed to bullets, which have been known to cause death. Seems fair enough. Cataracts vs. death?
Non-lethal weapons are enticing to law enforcement and military mostly because then they can use them for almost any reason at all, whereas bullets need to be used only with restraint. And that's a problem even when they -don't- cause permanent injury.
You go to a protest for whatever you believe in, law enforcement agents who have dressed up like the group you're protesting with throw a few rocks through the window, and then they have an excuse to sweep you with the heat ray. They've already denied you the right to assembly and free speech. On top of that, you also have cataracts now. Were it not for the heat ray, they'd have to have a little bit more to start firing.
I'd like to see a setting on it that can knock them out, then set the heat sensation to very low and target their hands so an entire crowd of protesters falls asleep and then wets themselves.
To be fair, we can't be sure he didn't just get beaten to death by the police or corporate hitmen for saying that, so he may have proven himself right.
It's not so much that I'm afraid of GMOs in themselves, I'm much more afraid of Monsanto owning the rights to my food.
I'm personally more concerned about things like unforseen health effects of consuming GMO, GMOs becoming invasive species, gene transfer from crops to pests creating super invasive species, and becoming dependent on monocultured food stocks leading to blights and starvation.
Monsanto being monsanto does make some of those things more of an issue. They're a lot more cavalier with risks than many organizations would be, and they certainly are doing all they can to press the monoculture, but there are plenty of big risks that don't have anything to do with patents.
Don't put words in my mouth. I share their concerns. Raving lunatic extremists of any movement are stupid. My point was that they shouldn't reflect poorly on the movement as a whole.
From my perspective the most visible people opposed to genetically modified organisms are the least informed. The people who dress up and scream about "frankenfoods" often are doing so out of uninformed ignorance.
Other people (like me) are concerned about this too, but don't parade around screaming government conspiracy about it. Maybe we tend to be a little more open minded about it too, making us reserve judgement until we get some indication as to whether it's going to have major ecological disadvantages that would outweigh the advantages such as making healthy food cheaper or eradicating malaria.
I mean, I personally make transgenic bacteria most weeks, so not everyone who is cautious about GMOs are raving anti-science zealots.
Alternatively, maybe we're hypocrites. I'm guessing we'll get called that and more by extremists on both sides.
And how would you make this variant of mosquito out-compete the normal, already established ones?
I'd hazard a guess that the simple, but probably more dangerous way would be to make these already transgenic malaria proof mosquitoes immune to some type of pesticide, so they'd have a selective advantage.
A somewhat safer, but far more expensive way would be to breed large amounts of the malaria proof mosquitoes and release them to just crowd out the normal ones.
Expensive because in addition to the raising a lot of them, you'd have to convince people to let you release large amount of blood sucking parasites near them. Other blood sucking parasites would get rich suing the pants off of that. And it's going to be an uphill battle releasing -any- transgenic organism into the wild. I think concern is entirely justified there as we have a poor track record managing the environment, but I could be convinced it's worth testing if we are reasonably sure it will just prevent malaria transmission. Artificially evolving mosquitoes to be immune to pesticides though would be extremely dangerous and seems like it has a good chance of backfiring if the genes for malaria immunity could be dropped but the pesticide immunity were retained.
You can guess which approach I suspect is going to be taken.
And there's no way that the people running BP would have allowed themselves to continue pumping unthinkable amounts of oil into the ocean without putting up a real effort to stop it, bad press and huge fines or none.
Kind of reminds me of what I told myself about Pfizer when I was working for them: no way would they do unethical things like test their drugs in 3rd world countries without properly informing the test subjects. No way would they have done this just to save a buck or two, or get around stricter regulations in the US. After all, you'd have to be a monster to be okay with that, and additionally to be absolutely horrible at managing PR to risk the parallels to the Tuskegee experiments. And, I told myself, you go into medicine to help people, not hurt them.
I guess I could still tell myself those things, it's not as if anything conclusive has come out about it. Still, I think it's pretty clear that pfizer is not our friend, corporations are in general not our friends, and those individuals who work for large corporations are able to justify, ignore, or rationalize almost anything their company does. After all, I did it, and I was just a lab grunt who had no real stake in the company.
You should not be optimistic about good people being in places of power, since power tends to corrupt. That isn't just true for politicians or religious leaders, it's definitely true for corporations.
I guess I could have made up some names if you think that would be less pretentious sounding. Geez, way to make a guy feel bad for providing concrete examples...
I'm beginning this document isn't meant to be as secretive as Geist makes it sound. I'm beginning this document isn't meant to be as secretive as Geist makes it sound.
The fact that they've failed to keep it secret doesn't change their goals of keeping it secret, nor does it change the fact that there should be no pretense of secrecy. There's no valid reason for the attempt at secrecy. The meetings should be available streaming online.
No, seriously, they should if they were smart. The fact that this is being drafted in secret is what will make more people pay attention to this even if there weren't leaks this big. I think far fewer people would be paying attention if the meetings were open.
Quick! Everyone put on Larry King masks so all the billboards turn into adult diaper ads!
No, everyone put on "interkin3tic" masks, so we can get all the billboards to turn into weird hentai ads!
Just, let's please come to a consensus, all one or the other, because if we half do Larry King and half do me, we're going to get wierd hentai ads featuring adult diapers. And there are some lines even I don't want to see crossed.
Automatic recognition, on a wide scale / network, of young females, in Japan?
Uh, no. It's not automatic recognition on an individual level beyond age and gender. It won't say "Hey! Yoshiko! You there! Buy some Pocari Sweat!" It might say "Hey! Big group of mostly 20 something guys heading to the business district! How about some Evangelion-themed pachinko after work!"
It's not going to be a wide scale network, at least I see nothing suggesting it's going to be networked. Which, getting back to the previous point, would be pointless anyway. "Hey! You might be one of the 10 million 15 year old males we saw in Osaka last week! Drink Coke Zero!"
The "looking at the billboard" is a clue. I think it's just going to try to measure which demographics are looking at which ads, so they can target them better. "This particular location near the line to Akihibara 'electric town' saw a whole lot of 20 to 30 year old males, so that's where the ad for the next Dragon Quest would be most effective. Meanwhile, the exit from the Keio line had mostly elderly people, so lets not pay as much for those locations."
It has indeed always struck me as odd that there are so many people here convinced "I am legend" is going to become true, but none of them seem to be concerned about the "Terminator" movies coming true. Is it familiarity breeds comfort, they're more familiar with computers than biology research so they're not as worried, or are they convinced we're doomed to a terminator apocalypse so they're working on their plan to side with the machines and are worried zombies will interfere with that plan?
Alternatively, industry says "Hey, you know what is bad for everyone (aside from vile politicians, idiotic talking heads on the radio and TV, holier than thou hypocrites, Jack Thompson, spiteful people who don't like games or gamers, people who hate free expression, sheep who would give up freedom based on the nonexistent threat of violent gamers, and other worthless individuals)? Government enforced censorship on an evolving media form. How can we prevent that?"
For God's sake, you say "too cheap to pay off politicians" as if that's a bad thing. YOU SHOULDN'T HAVE TO PAY OFF THE POLITICIANS, THAT SHOULDN'T BE NORMAL. The industry may be doing it for mostly selfish reasons, but preventing regulation in the first place when "regulation" is code for censorship is not a bad thing. Don't put this in the same terms that we describe telecoms and BP.
And these people went complaining to the ESRB about privacy?
They obviously didn't know who they were really dealing with, which is not surprising considering the ESRB has an interest in not making the facts you just stated well known.
Or maybe they did and thought "This is a concern for me, so this might be a concern for the industry. Plus there's no way they're dumb enough to reveal my e-mail address, so it's safe to e-mail them about my privacy concerns, what harm could it do?"
Even if they knew the ESRB was a whore for the game industry, it's not like saying "Hey, I have privacy concerns" is something you'd expect retribution or stupidity for.
When was the last time a nuclear physicist ever said "The science is settled"?
They'd say it often were there some people who, for religious or business reasons, continually denied the existence of the atom. Moreso if, rather than publish their own results calling into question the atom, they used ad homenim attacks, e-mail conversations taken out of context, and misquoted evidence.
Don't hold scientists up to a saintly standard, because we're not. I get annoyed with my labmates doubting me in lab meeting, and they know what they're talking about. If I were dealing with the oil and gas industry funding people to question my research, I'd be tempted to answer them with a gun.
And at this point in time, it is far more doable to create synthetic hydrocarbons to replace our dependence on petroleum than it is to figure out alternatives for every single product manufactured from hydrocarbons.
Oil dependence is an incremental problem, we eliminate or greatly reduce our use of oil for transportation, and that's a big chunk of oil demand right there gone. If we still use it for plastic but not driving, that's really the major step forward.
1.45billion to power 70,000 homes. That's $20,000 per home?
Could you put that in terms of military hardware? A tank costs 65 million, a B2 bomber costs 2 billion... I'm having a hard time finding out what we would have spent that money on instead of clean power for one home. Would that have purchased 20 rifles?
Wouldn't solar replace coal for our electricity needs rather than oil for our transportation energy needs? And don't we get most of our coal from not the middle east?
Not to imply that this is not a good move, I think this will likely do much more than another B2 bomber.
Tell me, can you apply some of your good old common-sense reasoning to the search for the Higgs boson?
Well, I think Higg should retrace his steps, maybe look in some lost and found. That's what I do when I'm searching for something. Does it have anything to do with Boston the town? Maybe he should search there? I don't know. Maybe put up a "Lost: my boson" flyer?
How about helping out with the search for the proof of the Riemann Hypothesis?
Same advice as before. Oh yeah, it's usually in the last place you look. Unless you continue looking after you found it, for some reason. So Riemann should just have some patience and keep looking around for it. I often find stuff I lost wedged in the couch cushions. Should look there.
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As opposed to bullets, which have been known to cause death. Seems fair enough. Cataracts vs. death?
Non-lethal weapons are enticing to law enforcement and military mostly because then they can use them for almost any reason at all, whereas bullets need to be used only with restraint. And that's a problem even when they -don't- cause permanent injury.
You go to a protest for whatever you believe in, law enforcement agents who have dressed up like the group you're protesting with throw a few rocks through the window, and then they have an excuse to sweep you with the heat ray. They've already denied you the right to assembly and free speech. On top of that, you also have cataracts now. Were it not for the heat ray, they'd have to have a little bit more to start firing.
I'd like to see a setting on it that can knock them out, then set the heat sensation to very low and target their hands so an entire crowd of protesters falls asleep and then wets themselves.
To be fair, we can't be sure he didn't just get beaten to death by the police or corporate hitmen for saying that, so he may have proven himself right.
It's not so much that I'm afraid of GMOs in themselves, I'm much more afraid of Monsanto owning the rights to my food.
I'm personally more concerned about things like unforseen health effects of consuming GMO, GMOs becoming invasive species, gene transfer from crops to pests creating super invasive species, and becoming dependent on monocultured food stocks leading to blights and starvation.
Monsanto being monsanto does make some of those things more of an issue. They're a lot more cavalier with risks than many organizations would be, and they certainly are doing all they can to press the monoculture, but there are plenty of big risks that don't have anything to do with patents.
Don't put words in my mouth. I share their concerns. Raving lunatic extremists of any movement are stupid. My point was that they shouldn't reflect poorly on the movement as a whole.
SOME people do.
From my perspective the most visible people opposed to genetically modified organisms are the least informed. The people who dress up and scream about "frankenfoods" often are doing so out of uninformed ignorance.
Other people (like me) are concerned about this too, but don't parade around screaming government conspiracy about it. Maybe we tend to be a little more open minded about it too, making us reserve judgement until we get some indication as to whether it's going to have major ecological disadvantages that would outweigh the advantages such as making healthy food cheaper or eradicating malaria.
I mean, I personally make transgenic bacteria most weeks, so not everyone who is cautious about GMOs are raving anti-science zealots.
Alternatively, maybe we're hypocrites. I'm guessing we'll get called that and more by extremists on both sides.
And how would you make this variant of mosquito out-compete the normal, already established ones?
I'd hazard a guess that the simple, but probably more dangerous way would be to make these already transgenic malaria proof mosquitoes immune to some type of pesticide, so they'd have a selective advantage.
A somewhat safer, but far more expensive way would be to breed large amounts of the malaria proof mosquitoes and release them to just crowd out the normal ones.
Expensive because in addition to the raising a lot of them, you'd have to convince people to let you release large amount of blood sucking parasites near them. Other blood sucking parasites would get rich suing the pants off of that. And it's going to be an uphill battle releasing -any- transgenic organism into the wild. I think concern is entirely justified there as we have a poor track record managing the environment, but I could be convinced it's worth testing if we are reasonably sure it will just prevent malaria transmission. Artificially evolving mosquitoes to be immune to pesticides though would be extremely dangerous and seems like it has a good chance of backfiring if the genes for malaria immunity could be dropped but the pesticide immunity were retained.
You can guess which approach I suspect is going to be taken.
And there's no way that the people running BP would have allowed themselves to continue pumping unthinkable amounts of oil into the ocean without putting up a real effort to stop it, bad press and huge fines or none.
Kind of reminds me of what I told myself about Pfizer when I was working for them: no way would they do unethical things like test their drugs in 3rd world countries without properly informing the test subjects. No way would they have done this just to save a buck or two, or get around stricter regulations in the US. After all, you'd have to be a monster to be okay with that, and additionally to be absolutely horrible at managing PR to risk the parallels to the Tuskegee experiments. And, I told myself, you go into medicine to help people, not hurt them.
I guess I could still tell myself those things, it's not as if anything conclusive has come out about it. Still, I think it's pretty clear that pfizer is not our friend, corporations are in general not our friends, and those individuals who work for large corporations are able to justify, ignore, or rationalize almost anything their company does. After all, I did it, and I was just a lab grunt who had no real stake in the company.
You should not be optimistic about good people being in places of power, since power tends to corrupt. That isn't just true for politicians or religious leaders, it's definitely true for corporations.
I guess I could have made up some names if you think that would be less pretentious sounding. Geez, way to make a guy feel bad for providing concrete examples...
I'm beginning this document isn't meant to be as secretive as Geist makes it sound. I'm beginning this document isn't meant to be as secretive as Geist makes it sound.
The fact that they've failed to keep it secret doesn't change their goals of keeping it secret, nor does it change the fact that there should be no pretense of secrecy. There's no valid reason for the attempt at secrecy. The meetings should be available streaming online.
No, seriously, they should if they were smart. The fact that this is being drafted in secret is what will make more people pay attention to this even if there weren't leaks this big. I think far fewer people would be paying attention if the meetings were open.
Quick! Everyone put on Larry King masks so all the billboards turn into adult diaper ads!
No, everyone put on "interkin3tic" masks, so we can get all the billboards to turn into weird hentai ads!
Just, let's please come to a consensus, all one or the other, because if we half do Larry King and half do me, we're going to get wierd hentai ads featuring adult diapers. And there are some lines even I don't want to see crossed.
Automatic recognition, on a wide scale / network, of young females, in Japan?
Uh, no. It's not automatic recognition on an individual level beyond age and gender. It won't say "Hey! Yoshiko! You there! Buy some Pocari Sweat!" It might say "Hey! Big group of mostly 20 something guys heading to the business district! How about some Evangelion-themed pachinko after work!"
It's not going to be a wide scale network, at least I see nothing suggesting it's going to be networked. Which, getting back to the previous point, would be pointless anyway. "Hey! You might be one of the 10 million 15 year old males we saw in Osaka last week! Drink Coke Zero!"
The "looking at the billboard" is a clue. I think it's just going to try to measure which demographics are looking at which ads, so they can target them better. "This particular location near the line to Akihibara 'electric town' saw a whole lot of 20 to 30 year old males, so that's where the ad for the next Dragon Quest would be most effective. Meanwhile, the exit from the Keio line had mostly elderly people, so lets not pay as much for those locations."
I have no idea what you're talking about, but I'm praying it's the canine testicles one.
honestly, this is 20 years overdue.
Maybe nuclear power just needed time to reach critical mass...
It has indeed always struck me as odd that there are so many people here convinced "I am legend" is going to become true, but none of them seem to be concerned about the "Terminator" movies coming true. Is it familiarity breeds comfort, they're more familiar with computers than biology research so they're not as worried, or are they convinced we're doomed to a terminator apocalypse so they're working on their plan to side with the machines and are worried zombies will interfere with that plan?
Counterpoint: this is a really good idea.
This has been "point counterpoint slashdot style." After all, justifying one's opinion is not for nerds.
What could go wrong?
Jenny McCarthy could open her trap and say it causes autism for one thing.
Alternatively, industry says "Hey, you know what is bad for everyone (aside from vile politicians, idiotic talking heads on the radio and TV, holier than thou hypocrites, Jack Thompson, spiteful people who don't like games or gamers, people who hate free expression, sheep who would give up freedom based on the nonexistent threat of violent gamers, and other worthless individuals)? Government enforced censorship on an evolving media form. How can we prevent that?"
For God's sake, you say "too cheap to pay off politicians" as if that's a bad thing. YOU SHOULDN'T HAVE TO PAY OFF THE POLITICIANS, THAT SHOULDN'T BE NORMAL. The industry may be doing it for mostly selfish reasons, but preventing regulation in the first place when "regulation" is code for censorship is not a bad thing. Don't put this in the same terms that we describe telecoms and BP.
And these people went complaining to the ESRB about privacy?
They obviously didn't know who they were really dealing with, which is not surprising considering the ESRB has an interest in not making the facts you just stated well known.
Or maybe they did and thought "This is a concern for me, so this might be a concern for the industry. Plus there's no way they're dumb enough to reveal my e-mail address, so it's safe to e-mail them about my privacy concerns, what harm could it do?"
Even if they knew the ESRB was a whore for the game industry, it's not like saying "Hey, I have privacy concerns" is something you'd expect retribution or stupidity for.
When was the last time a nuclear physicist ever said "The science is settled"?
They'd say it often were there some people who, for religious or business reasons, continually denied the existence of the atom. Moreso if, rather than publish their own results calling into question the atom, they used ad homenim attacks, e-mail conversations taken out of context, and misquoted evidence.
Don't hold scientists up to a saintly standard, because we're not. I get annoyed with my labmates doubting me in lab meeting, and they know what they're talking about. If I were dealing with the oil and gas industry funding people to question my research, I'd be tempted to answer them with a gun.
And at this point in time, it is far more doable to create synthetic hydrocarbons to replace our dependence on petroleum than it is to figure out alternatives for every single product manufactured from hydrocarbons.
Oil dependence is an incremental problem, we eliminate or greatly reduce our use of oil for transportation, and that's a big chunk of oil demand right there gone. If we still use it for plastic but not driving, that's really the major step forward.
1.45billion to power 70,000 homes.
That's $20,000 per home?
Could you put that in terms of military hardware? A tank costs 65 million, a B2 bomber costs 2 billion... I'm having a hard time finding out what we would have spent that money on instead of clean power for one home. Would that have purchased 20 rifles?
Why did we not invade that country?
Oh, wait, that nation was the USA.
So then we did, just very very very pre-emptively.
Wouldn't solar replace coal for our electricity needs rather than oil for our transportation energy needs? And don't we get most of our coal from not the middle east?
Not to imply that this is not a good move, I think this will likely do much more than another B2 bomber.
Tell me, can you apply some of your good old common-sense reasoning to the search for the Higgs boson?
Well, I think Higg should retrace his steps, maybe look in some lost and found. That's what I do when I'm searching for something. Does it have anything to do with Boston the town? Maybe he should search there? I don't know. Maybe put up a "Lost: my boson" flyer?
How about helping out with the search for the proof of the Riemann Hypothesis?
Same advice as before. Oh yeah, it's usually in the last place you look. Unless you continue looking after you found it, for some reason. So Riemann should just have some patience and keep looking around for it. I often find stuff I lost wedged in the couch cushions. Should look there.