He asked an international but mostly american bunch of nerds why they seemed to like a japanese comic book style of drawing. Several key differences.
To the GP, since when did "nerd" move from an umbrella term covering anyone who has an unusual personal interest in something obscure/technical? Speaking as a biology nerd, I don't run into much manga.
What, so adding more taxes to dying industries is such a hot idea?
They may have been thinking along the lines of "don't cause another dot com crash, leave the internet alone, it's a miracle it hasn't gone down with everything else."
On the other hand, I think a twitter tax would be the nail in the coffin for twitter. If it shuts people up about twitter, that might be one of my favorite taxes of all time.
These guys actually finished though and gave an interview.
Join the Mordeth team if you're not on it, finish it, release it, and give an interview about it, THEN that will top this.
But you're right, that is interesting. Is it still being actively worked on or is it more likely a mod that is dead? I could say I've had a marathon mod in development for about that long, but really all I did was open the map editor up once about 12 years ago.
As a longtime fan of the "First post" universe, I'm extremely disappointed with this version. All my favorite characters, specifically "post" got cut. Totally butchered it.
There's someone who's implanting a camera to replace a glass eye. With the singularity and associated transhumanism, this will get more complicated.
There's someone else who is making a camera that can be fit into a lapel pin for much cheaper than that guy, who is laughing at the cyclopses who waste their money with that guy.
It is not widely promoted since it can't be patented. This is not a conspiracy theory (even if it sounds like this), see it here: [link]
Uh... that article talks about how lithium was not widely used because it couldn't be patented, but it was talking about the turn of last century. The next part talks about it's "rediscovery," in 1949. Presumably it's used more now.
Also it said not widely promoted by the industry. Which makes sense, they're not going to advertise for something they can't profit off of. The real problem, which is scarier than pharmaceutical conspiracy to keep lithium down, is that our health professionals are so susceptible to their promoting efforts that they won't prescribe a drug if it works but they don't have a pen with it's name on it.
There are also some side effects and public PR problems that go along with lithium which could be limiting it's use.
Homeopathic medicine humor, eh? I would have said something like it can tell american beer from water, but I guess that's a little low brow compared to yours.
I don't get why anyone would object to "swine flu".
International bodies of doctors and biologists do seem oddly concerned about names rather than disease prevention. Example: Drosophila biologists often give quirky names to the genes they discover that in some way reflect the phenotype of the mutant. One famous gene is Hedgehog, because mutants have spines all over them. Mammalian homologues were found, and someone named one version Sonic Hedgehog after the Sega character. Another one got named Indian Hedgehog.
Apparently these genes are mutated in a few human diseases. The Human Genome Organization (HUGO) recently decided the name had to be changed, because it sounds unprofessional. You know, because if you're told you have a rare inherited disease, what you're going to be concerned about primarily is the specific gene name and how professional it is. I would think if you or your child is sick and you go see a doctor, you're not going to care what it's called. I'd also think that HUGO has better things to do with their time than argue about names.
Heck, if anything, I think the humorous situations that this could lead to would lessen the blow.
Doctor: I'm sorry sir, you have a mutation in your indian hedgehog gene Patient: Impossible! Prashant is as prickly as ever!
(I totally stole that joke and don't remember where I first heard it)
I guess the WHO just doesn't have enough to do. They're probably just bored. You know, maybe this is just a sign that we should give them something to do. But what? I hear they're into medicine, do you think we should maybe have them work on reducing/preventing some disease instead of coming up with new politically correct names for diseases? I know it's a bit out there...
And the world has not been driven to dysfunctionalty by the freewheeling Internet, so censors and critics may as well get a life
You just have different standards from them. Sure, yours appear to be rational, wheras theirs are based on circular reasoning, but they see justification. What they're censoring is itself often taken as evidence that we need censorship: "People are looking at naked people online?!? We're in a state of moral decay!"
If they were going to be rational about it, they'd realize that censorship doesn't have a great track record of doing much but annoying the victims.
Especially when it comes to one's own product. It usually just encourages people to find ways to prove you wrong...........
Or corporations. Gamestop in this case. Although they were probably more motivated from a hissy fit at stardock daring to release it online, cutting out them as a middleman, when gamestop has faithfully treated PC games like garbage.
If embryos are morally & ethically equivalent to humans at more advanced stages of development--which is the premise of most opposition to ESCR--then your comments make no sense. Anyone who accepts that premise will (or should) treat the ESC issue the same way as harvesting homeless peole for organs.
The key difference is that there is a general consensus that harvesting the organs of the homeless is evil. That's not true for ESC, and it never will be for reasons we discussed previously.
There are some religions out there that have beliefs about society that most people in the west do not share. Some believe that women should be covered from head to toe. The fact that they believe this, when the rest of us don't is pretty weak justification for putting a law like that into effect. They're free to work towards that, but it's not good justification.
Much the same, you believe it's murder, fine, you -can- try to outlaw it, but that's no type of justification since we don't feel the same way. Laws ideally should be reflections of values held by all of society, not a minority imposing their values. Naturally, that's not what always happens, and sometimes that has been good, civil rights comes to mind. But in this case, the fact that you feel that way doesn't make me any more sympathetic to the laws that you're trying to pass.
But it's a distinction without an ethical difference--unless you think that implantation is a threshold that affects the ethics of the situation.
Except that many people object to ESC because they think it will lead to more abortions. It won't. And many people argue along the lines of "potential life." This is dubious reasoning when talking about leftover embryos from IVF: 99.9999% of the leftovers will never be carried to term.
What do we do with medical treatments that are based on past unethical acts?...There are lots of details to work out. Not easy.
They're not unethical just because they follow a different set of ethics. If you disagree with what's being done, don't accept the treatment. If you do, there is nothing unethical about it.
And details to work out, that's fine, except on this and pretty much every other controversial moral question I can think of, there's no "working it out." The controversey is not leading anwhere. It never does, people scream till they're blue in the face at each other, but it's just noise, neither side is being convinced by the other.
There are a lot of details to decide for yourself, that much can be said, but we're never going to reach consensus as to whether ESC are ethical or not.
So here's what's going to happen: if we come up with treatments based off of ESC, those people who have no objection to the ethics and who need the treatment are going to take it. Those who disagree with the ethics, some are going to take it anyway and are going to rationalize their hypocrisy. Some are going to stay true and not take the treatment. The debate will rage on, since there can be no resolution through dialogue. Eventually the debate will cease if and when ESC becomes obsolete.
Not the best outcome for anyone, but it's what's going to happen since people are talking about deeply held beliefs, not things they're willing to challenge or be convinced of an opposing viewpoint.
Doctors trying to get more embryonic stem cells may convince or withhold treatments from those with the not-yet-waste fetus in order to turn a potential child into waste
Not really. As I understand it, the embryos come from in vitro fertilizations, where they take hundreds of eggs, add sperm, and results in hundreds of embryos. Maybe a dozen are implanted into the mother, the rest are not going to make it into a uterus. Well, I'm told that you can "adopt" some of the unused embryos, voulonteer to carry them to term. But unsuprisingly, few people are doing that, which is reasonable, considering there are children who HAVE been born who need adopting.
Bottom line: the embryos in question aren't "potential" lives.
And, from your post it's not clear whether or not you understand this, so I'm just going to reiterate that embryos which can yeild ESC can't come from pregnant women. 5 day old embryos give ESC, five days after conception even a blood test can't tell you you're pregnant. By the time you know you're pregnant and can get an abortion for it, the embryo is not useful for ESC. So ESC is absolutely not going to increase the number of abortions.
If true, this might, trigger a reaction in USA, like the launch of Sputnik by USSR did back in 1957. Suddenly science will be "in" again and it will shake America from its lethargy, self absorption and provide some kind of common unifying goals.
The vast sums of money people would be willing to spend on cures only stem cell treatments can offer have already shaken many awake. Don't know what you've been paying attention to, but there is already fierce competition in that field. Lethargy? Maybe most of america is only starting to realize that stem cells are "kind of a thing" but biologists, biotech industry, politicians, doctors, and numerous other people have been focused on it for years. The rate of research on it is actually very fast. It happens to be tough, so it's taking some time, and we could always use more money and more resources, but that's true of every scientific problem.
Namely: It's about legalized organlegging [wikipedia.org]. As treatments emerge, we'll find out whether they're willing to sacrifice other human beings for their own health & longevity.
Let's be clear on three things:
1. You get ESC from 5 day old blastocysts. Not embryos from pregnant women. These embryos have to come from in vitro fertilization, by the time you can tell you're pregnant, even with a blood test, you can't extract ESC from that embryo: they've already turned used up their ESC. This will not lead to abortions, because if you know you have an embryo, it's useless as far as ESC goes.
2. ESC lines have been established. You won't need to destroy an embryo each time you need ESC, just use from the existing lines.
3. Induced pluripotent stem cells and adult stem cells will probably make the debate over ESC much ado about nothing as far as treatments go, but ESC have been invaluable to research already.
So... no, fortunately I think we will be able to leave this annoying debate unresolved.
Back when the web was in its early infancy there was not a lot of descent content on it. AOL had things like online encyclopedias and other "premium" content. Also, in the early years AOL allowed you to chat with other users. A web user only had relatively unreliable IRC servers.
You're forgetting the most important point: the relaxation.
"You've got mail!" That friendly voice started the whole experience right, after the sound of my modem dialing up. Then you had a leisurely bathroom break while you waited for anything to load. Then you could read your first e-mail, then go and get a snack while you waited for the second e-mail to load.
Slashdot Mirror
If you spend 20,000 pounds on a bottle of whiskey, you're going to taste the difference, even if there isn't one.
Does it taste like hubris?
He asked an international but mostly american bunch of nerds why they seemed to like a japanese comic book style of drawing. Several key differences.
To the GP, since when did "nerd" move from an umbrella term covering anyone who has an unusual personal interest in something obscure/technical? Speaking as a biology nerd, I don't run into much manga.
I wonder what would happen if the entire island was unable to access any search engines.
My guess is that our (American) conservatives would find some way of blaming the entire Iraq/Afghanistan mess on Blair.
What, so adding more taxes to dying industries is such a hot idea?
They may have been thinking along the lines of "don't cause another dot com crash, leave the internet alone, it's a miracle it hasn't gone down with everything else."
On the other hand, I think a twitter tax would be the nail in the coffin for twitter. If it shuts people up about twitter, that might be one of my favorite taxes of all time.
Is there nothing they WON'T go after?
Actual problems.
These guys actually finished though and gave an interview.
Join the Mordeth team if you're not on it, finish it, release it, and give an interview about it, THEN that will top this.
But you're right, that is interesting. Is it still being actively worked on or is it more likely a mod that is dead? I could say I've had a marathon mod in development for about that long, but really all I did was open the map editor up once about 12 years ago.
Only in slashdot-land does a first post get modded as "Redundant"
Honest question: how many other places can someone be modded redundant for anything? I don't browse a lot of forums, but it doesn't seem too common.
I'm the worst person to try to please
That's what she said. That and "It happens to a lot of guys."
As a longtime fan of the "First post" universe, I'm extremely disappointed with this version. All my favorite characters, specifically "post" got cut. Totally butchered it.
Has any company ever gotten away with stuff like this in recent times?
Yes, I established an advertisement disguised as a medical journal for my company that hasn't yet been outed as a shill. It's called...
Wait... you clever bastard, you almost had me with that one.
There's someone who's implanting a camera to replace a glass eye. With the singularity and associated transhumanism, this will get more complicated.
There's someone else who is making a camera that can be fit into a lapel pin for much cheaper than that guy, who is laughing at the cyclopses who waste their money with that guy.
It is not widely promoted since it can't be patented. This is not a conspiracy theory (even if it sounds like this), see it here: [link]
Uh... that article talks about how lithium was not widely used because it couldn't be patented, but it was talking about the turn of last century. The next part talks about it's "rediscovery," in 1949. Presumably it's used more now.
Also it said not widely promoted by the industry. Which makes sense, they're not going to advertise for something they can't profit off of. The real problem, which is scarier than pharmaceutical conspiracy to keep lithium down, is that our health professionals are so susceptible to their promoting efforts that they won't prescribe a drug if it works but they don't have a pen with it's name on it.
There are also some side effects and public PR problems that go along with lithium which could be limiting it's use.
Just imagine the anti-floridation crowd going ballistic if anyone suggested adding Lithium to municipal water supplies.
I did, and it was a scary sight. All those rotten teeth...
Homeopathic medicine humor, eh? I would have said something like it can tell american beer from water, but I guess that's a little low brow compared to yours.
I don't get why anyone would object to "swine flu".
International bodies of doctors and biologists do seem oddly concerned about names rather than disease prevention. Example: Drosophila biologists often give quirky names to the genes they discover that in some way reflect the phenotype of the mutant. One famous gene is Hedgehog, because mutants have spines all over them. Mammalian homologues were found, and someone named one version Sonic Hedgehog after the Sega character. Another one got named Indian Hedgehog.
Apparently these genes are mutated in a few human diseases. The Human Genome Organization (HUGO) recently decided the name had to be changed, because it sounds unprofessional. You know, because if you're told you have a rare inherited disease, what you're going to be concerned about primarily is the specific gene name and how professional it is. I would think if you or your child is sick and you go see a doctor, you're not going to care what it's called. I'd also think that HUGO has better things to do with their time than argue about names.
Heck, if anything, I think the humorous situations that this could lead to would lessen the blow.
Doctor: I'm sorry sir, you have a mutation in your indian hedgehog gene
Patient: Impossible! Prashant is as prickly as ever!
(I totally stole that joke and don't remember where I first heard it)
I guess the WHO just doesn't have enough to do. They're probably just bored. You know, maybe this is just a sign that we should give them something to do. But what? I hear they're into medicine, do you think we should maybe have them work on reducing/preventing some disease instead of coming up with new politically correct names for diseases? I know it's a bit out there...
And the world has not been driven to dysfunctionalty by the freewheeling Internet, so censors and critics may as well get a life
You just have different standards from them. Sure, yours appear to be rational, wheras theirs are based on circular reasoning, but they see justification. What they're censoring is itself often taken as evidence that we need censorship: "People are looking at naked people online?!? We're in a state of moral decay!"
If they were going to be rational about it, they'd realize that censorship doesn't have a great track record of doing much but annoying the victims.
Especially when it comes to one's own product. It usually just encourages people to find ways to prove you wrong...........
Or corporations. Gamestop in this case. Although they were probably more motivated from a hissy fit at stardock daring to release it online, cutting out them as a middleman, when gamestop has faithfully treated PC games like garbage.
Newer isn't always better.
I disagree, think of how much better those machines would be running if they used vista!
If embryos are morally & ethically equivalent to humans at more advanced stages of development--which is the premise of most opposition to ESCR--then your comments make no sense. Anyone who accepts that premise will (or should) treat the ESC issue the same way as harvesting homeless peole for organs.
The key difference is that there is a general consensus that harvesting the organs of the homeless is evil. That's not true for ESC, and it never will be for reasons we discussed previously.
There are some religions out there that have beliefs about society that most people in the west do not share. Some believe that women should be covered from head to toe. The fact that they believe this, when the rest of us don't is pretty weak justification for putting a law like that into effect. They're free to work towards that, but it's not good justification.
Much the same, you believe it's murder, fine, you -can- try to outlaw it, but that's no type of justification since we don't feel the same way. Laws ideally should be reflections of values held by all of society, not a minority imposing their values. Naturally, that's not what always happens, and sometimes that has been good, civil rights comes to mind. But in this case, the fact that you feel that way doesn't make me any more sympathetic to the laws that you're trying to pass.
But it's a distinction without an ethical difference--unless you think that implantation is a threshold that affects the ethics of the situation.
Except that many people object to ESC because they think it will lead to more abortions. It won't. And many people argue along the lines of "potential life." This is dubious reasoning when talking about leftover embryos from IVF: 99.9999% of the leftovers will never be carried to term.
What do we do with medical treatments that are based on past unethical acts?...There are lots of details to work out. Not easy.
They're not unethical just because they follow a different set of ethics. If you disagree with what's being done, don't accept the treatment. If you do, there is nothing unethical about it.
And details to work out, that's fine, except on this and pretty much every other controversial moral question I can think of, there's no "working it out." The controversey is not leading anwhere. It never does, people scream till they're blue in the face at each other, but it's just noise, neither side is being convinced by the other.
There are a lot of details to decide for yourself, that much can be said, but we're never going to reach consensus as to whether ESC are ethical or not.
So here's what's going to happen: if we come up with treatments based off of ESC, those people who have no objection to the ethics and who need the treatment are going to take it. Those who disagree with the ethics, some are going to take it anyway and are going to rationalize their hypocrisy. Some are going to stay true and not take the treatment. The debate will rage on, since there can be no resolution through dialogue. Eventually the debate will cease if and when ESC becomes obsolete.
Not the best outcome for anyone, but it's what's going to happen since people are talking about deeply held beliefs, not things they're willing to challenge or be convinced of an opposing viewpoint.
Doctors trying to get more embryonic stem cells may convince or withhold treatments from those with the not-yet-waste fetus in order to turn a potential child into waste
Not really. As I understand it, the embryos come from in vitro fertilizations, where they take hundreds of eggs, add sperm, and results in hundreds of embryos. Maybe a dozen are implanted into the mother, the rest are not going to make it into a uterus. Well, I'm told that you can "adopt" some of the unused embryos, voulonteer to carry them to term. But unsuprisingly, few people are doing that, which is reasonable, considering there are children who HAVE been born who need adopting.
Bottom line: the embryos in question aren't "potential" lives.
And, from your post it's not clear whether or not you understand this, so I'm just going to reiterate that embryos which can yeild ESC can't come from pregnant women. 5 day old embryos give ESC, five days after conception even a blood test can't tell you you're pregnant. By the time you know you're pregnant and can get an abortion for it, the embryo is not useful for ESC. So ESC is absolutely not going to increase the number of abortions.
If true, this might, trigger a reaction in USA, like the launch of Sputnik by USSR did back in 1957. Suddenly science will be "in" again and it will shake America from its lethargy, self absorption and provide some kind of common unifying goals.
The vast sums of money people would be willing to spend on cures only stem cell treatments can offer have already shaken many awake. Don't know what you've been paying attention to, but there is already fierce competition in that field. Lethargy? Maybe most of america is only starting to realize that stem cells are "kind of a thing" but biologists, biotech industry, politicians, doctors, and numerous other people have been focused on it for years. The rate of research on it is actually very fast. It happens to be tough, so it's taking some time, and we could always use more money and more resources, but that's true of every scientific problem.
Namely: It's about legalized organlegging [wikipedia.org]. As treatments emerge, we'll find out whether they're willing to sacrifice other human beings for their own health & longevity.
Let's be clear on three things:
1. You get ESC from 5 day old blastocysts. Not embryos from pregnant women. These embryos have to come from in vitro fertilization, by the time you can tell you're pregnant, even with a blood test, you can't extract ESC from that embryo: they've already turned used up their ESC. This will not lead to abortions, because if you know you have an embryo, it's useless as far as ESC goes.
2. ESC lines have been established. You won't need to destroy an embryo each time you need ESC, just use from the existing lines.
3. Induced pluripotent stem cells and adult stem cells will probably make the debate over ESC much ado about nothing as far as treatments go, but ESC have been invaluable to research already.
So... no, fortunately I think we will be able to leave this annoying debate unresolved.
Back when the web was in its early infancy there was not a lot of descent content on it. AOL had things like online encyclopedias and other "premium" content. Also, in the early years AOL allowed you to chat with other users. A web user only had relatively unreliable IRC servers.
You're forgetting the most important point: the relaxation.
"You've got mail!" That friendly voice started the whole experience right, after the sound of my modem dialing up. Then you had a leisurely bathroom break while you waited for anything to load. Then you could read your first e-mail, then go and get a snack while you waited for the second e-mail to load.
AOL on dialup was like a wonderful vacation.