Nonsense, there's always more than one way to skin a cat. For instance: skinning public officials who consistently value the rights of people who give them money over the rights of the public. Torrent the last season of game of thrones for instructions on that method.
I'm guessing it's one of those things where someone is getting a big fat government contract that they bribed the government into giving them. It's just insult to injury that not only are they taking tax dollars, but they're harming citizens to do so. If it were just wasteful spending, that would be bad enough, but wasteful spending taking away nudity is just rude.
This is my major beef with the Iraq war. Military industrial complex, next time just have the president and congress write you a big check and shake hands and then spend it. No need to actually start a war with real people dying. Plus then it would be all profit. Safer and more efficient, it's a win-win.
I feel the need to point out that "natural" does not mean "better." Natural defenses were evolved when an extra day lost to recovery might mean significantly higher chances of starving or being eaten by a predator, so the downsides of a fever and potential brain damage were worth it *. Today, longer more gradual recoveries, without fevers and as much discomfort, you're not going to die if it takes two days to recover rather than one.
* Disclaimer: this is just pure speculative armchair evolutionary theory, not backed up by any type of study or professional evolutionary biologist.
And that they don't systematically create files on their citizens, you know, what the Stasi job was by design.
I agree GP was engaging in ignorant hyperbole, but at what the NSA is doing seems worse: they just file EVERYTHING. So what if they might not categorize it into citizen files before they have a desire to do so?
They might not have a file on me ready to go, but I'm guessing with a few keystrokes, they could pull together all my texts, e-mails, facebook, and google searches, then with a few more keystrokes could pull up anything embarrassing on me in the event that they need to blackmail me.
Fortunately for me, my whole life is one big public embarrassment, so they got nothing, but still...
They could also be used to develop transparent displays for, say, a really cool looking cell phone or tablet! And then ten seconds after buying it, everyone would realize how hard it is to read on them.
It will be like glossy vs matte on your laptop screen: you will know that it looks cool until you need to use it, but idiots buying them will make it hard to find anything else.
I guess I probably shouldn't worry about minor annoyances in consumer electronics in the future based on undeveloped technology...
Only a few people are going to such extremes: the fault lies with them, not the game. I've heard suggestions that even heroin isn't universally addictive, you need to be predisposed to become addicted in order to end up selling yourself etc. I'm skeptical that one can become addicted to WOW, to the point that they wear diapers and play 300 hours straight, without some other problem. And I'm guessing that problem has other negative effects outside of "I play WOW too much."
My point is that the addicts need to change. Changing the games to try to be a nanny for the addicts seems futile: they'll just get addicted to something else.
I doubt that these extreme rehab clinics are the way to do it, I'm skeptical that they take a very scientific approach, but changing the world to cure an individuals addiction is a dumber approach.
I'm not sure why healthcare.gov needs drivers license numbers, but those others are true of private healthcare companies, who appear to have more leaks than the government at least on this graph.
I'm not saying government is more secure, I'm just saying the dangers aren't unique to healthcare.gov.
That's not a selective force though: bullets and bombs kill you no matter what your genetics. They don't provide an advantage to any genes, since no one has "bulletproof" genes or anything like that. It's fairly arbitrary in terms of genetics.
You could make the case that only the cowards who ran from battle survived, and so the french are now more surrender prone... but that would only be a joke.
The North Korea situation on the other hand, people DO survive famine and prolonged periods of malnutrition. Those genetically able to survive on little food could in theory survive and reproduce better.
"They might be able to help"? Pretty sure that does not describe this guy and North Korea's continued behavior, so he's in the clear as far as that goes.
I have, but since the question was "Why is this on slashdot" not "What potential ethical problems do people see with this," I just acknowledged that there are some issues and left it at that.
With the nazi human experiments, there was no informed consent. There was pretty clearly opposition on the part of the victims to the experiments. North koreans would be able to agree to the study, but some issues I'd immediately be concerned about:
-If the NK government agrees to it, how likely is it that they're forcing these people to say yes
-Education is so shitty from what we know of it, that would they actually be informed of anything relevant
1. North Korea is probably the most interesting bit of foreign policy, which does appeal to nerds.
2. Look at the picture, the guy is clearly a nerd.
3. More importantly, from TFA: “Most of my work has been on trying to identify natural experiments that mimic experimental conditions in a way that might help us to understand the genetics of normal human variation in health and disease." The article is focused on stuff that has a more general interest, but North Korean genetics are absolutely interesting to a bio nerd as a "natural" experiment in the sense that it's not setup specifically to be an experiment.
It would be very interesting, for example, if you could show rapid human "evolution" in response to the shit that's going on there. I've heard that north koreans are on average a foot shorter than South Koreans. They've only been separated by two or three generations. Presumably a lot of that is due to malnutrition, but it's not too hard to imagine that some of that is due to people who are genetically predisposed to being shorter would survive better. How fast is that happening? Are there genes which correlate to "speaking out against tyranny" that are being selected against?
There are definitely very interesting questions that can be answered by north korea. It goes without saying that I wish this experiment were not occurring, but since it is, may as well collect data from it (though there are issues with informed consent probably).
Speaking of WWII and Japan, we encouraged them to eat more dolphin and whale when we were rebuilding them. Custom? Please. It's a dying generation remembering what they ate in grade school because that was the cheapest meat available, and an industry which doesn't want to admit to it's shareholders that it's time to fold.
At least if that vegan restaurant's ads are to be believed. Which I'm kind of skeptical of, though that might just be me wanting to not feel bad about all the cheeseburgers I eat.
Euthanized is the preferred word for many people, even though it's not really euthanizing. Including me, I've said I was euthanizing lab animals when actually I was just slaughtering them.
Actually, slaughter is still probably sugar coating it, since I hope most slaughterhouses are more experienced and efficient at it than I was/am...
(note to any crazy animal rights activists, I'm not talking about dolphins or any other mammal here.)
You were surprised that the senator from California, the one who has been in office for the past two decades, represents California?
Oh wait, I see, you were trying to affirm your stereotype for the most populated state in the union as being all freedom hating cowards. Sorry, missed the joke there.
I'd caution against taking the media as representative of most americans. Look at radio: it's increasingly gone all the same pop music. That doesn't mean everyone is listening to miley cyrus, that just means that they're losing a significant number of people, so they're doubling down on those demographics that are still watching or listening.
That demographic is, of course, idiots.
In the case of radio, it's teens and pre-teens with nothing but disposable income to waste on whatever music they think everyone else is listening to, and no mature musical tastes to cause them to turn off the radio. With CNN, it's people who don't know how to read a newspaper or get their news from the internet. With reality TV, it's people who are tired and want to turn off their brains for a while.
(Disclaimer: I watched all of Jersey Shore while writing my dissertation, so maybe I'm just defensive.)
While I do think there's an unfortunate number of people in America who have decided that ignorance is a virtue and not a vice, I don't believe that's most people, and I don't believe it's in all subjects. Those CNN reporters who were nervous about not understanding physics might have really great insight into politics and economics. People who watch honey boo boo aren't emulating that behavior with their jobs.
"Hey, did you hear about that kid who interviewed at Xerox for the Client Manager position? They asked him why a tennis ball was fuzzy, and he said, I shit you not, 'Because they're too ornery to shear'! Yeah, that guys a ticking time bomb waiting to go off. I mean what type of asshole doesn't take our well thought out interview questions seriously! You better not hire him!"
I don't know if such a conversation is likely to take place, but if it does, seems like it would only close a lot of doors you wouldn't want to go through anyway.
Why in god's name did you link to a youtube video that wasn't even a video?
Anyway, I think the comparison is important. For one thing, it makes people realize that not everyone in saudi arabia, Iran, or the US is a crazy fundamentalist. Furthermore, the effects of fundamentalist religion are global. It is a global problem. Pretending it's our county of sane people vs their country of crazy people is missing the point. We need a global approach to the small minority of fundamentalists who have political power in certain powerful countries. The approach is the same.
1. Don't allow them to muddle criticism with religious intolerance, which is their first move.
2. Vote them out wherever they are. They will fuck up something.
3. Educate people. Without followers, they never get into power.
Mules can't reproduce*, yet are still clearly living. Meanwhile fire can reproduce but is clearly not living. That suggests that "able to reproduce" is not a strict requirement.
(* Well okay, there have been some extremely rare instances of mules reproducing, but as a general rule they're infertile)
It won't be long before that happens. It's been possible for a while now to make a mitotic spindle without a cell (mitotic spindle being the thing that splits DNA to put one in each cell.) It's also been possible for a while now to make micelles which are essentially the membrane around a cell which can behave much like cells. Recently the two have been combined, making artificial spindles inside such droplets.
The second part of mitosis (cell replication) is the cell itself splitting, cytokinesis. It seems that people are working on doing that artificially. I've never heard of anyone getting a micelle to undergo cytokinesis, but there are undoubtedly people working on that. And then immediately, someone will hire a postdoc to combine the two to get complete artificial mitosis going.
In vitro replication of DNA has been possible for quite a while too. Someone will get DNA in a micelle duplicating, then dividing by artificial mitosis and artificial cytokinesis. Probably only once at first, since making the artificial cell grow would be yet another complication, but it should meet your definition.
I'd guess it would take about a decade, mainly because a lot of the technical details and hard work will be driven by other goals. The reason people spent time making the spindles in bubbles wasn't to do it, but because they wanted to study how the spindle is sized. There are clear questions one can answer with making micelles divide. I'm not clear why the researchers in the current article did this, but they no doubt had a question to answer, not just "Hey, I bet we can make a cell from plastic." I'm not sure what questions one would be able to answer by doing the full artificial dividing cell I just described, but someone will probably eventually come up with a reason.
Fun fact: there is no clear definition of life that anyone can come up with. It's like Justice Potter's quote on porn: "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"]; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it..."
There are definitely RNA based viruses. It's debatable whether they qualify as "alive." Self-replicating RNA mollecules likely preceeded any DNA based life, whether you'd want to consider RNA replicating "life" is up to you.
Personally I'd agree that RNA based viruses are living.
I think the problem American politics has with regulating is a false dichotomy. Voters here are confused and scared by the economy. Believing that there is good side and an evil side, with free market freedom jesus on one side and the DMV devil on the other side is a lot more comforting than various shades of grey wrapped up in numbers and statistics. So we get overzealous with letting companies do what they want, with faith that it will somehow work out for the best.
It's stupid, but lets not move from that into another oversimplification: either way can go horribly wrong. And regulation gone wrong combined with corporate greed can sometimes worse than either individually. So lets not make statements implying that a public utility would be inherently better than a private corporation, lets focus on data. Are there any public utilities in DC which have a better safety record? If so, then maybe try making the gas lines a regulated public utility.
Here here! And it's even worse! This bullshit about the higgs boson at CERN last year! WE KNEW IT IN 1964!!! 40 YEARS OLD NEWS!!! (/s)
Hypotheses need to be tested, experiments need to be repeated, ideally with increasing certainty. You absolutely were not stuffing ibises into wind tunnels in science fairs. It would have been more interesting had they gotten a negative result, as was true with the higgs boson, but a positive result confirming your old hypotheses is still important science.
Slashdot Mirror
Nonsense, there's always more than one way to skin a cat. For instance: skinning public officials who consistently value the rights of people who give them money over the rights of the public. Torrent the last season of game of thrones for instructions on that method.
I'm guessing it's one of those things where someone is getting a big fat government contract that they bribed the government into giving them. It's just insult to injury that not only are they taking tax dollars, but they're harming citizens to do so. If it were just wasteful spending, that would be bad enough, but wasteful spending taking away nudity is just rude.
This is my major beef with the Iraq war. Military industrial complex, next time just have the president and congress write you a big check and shake hands and then spend it. No need to actually start a war with real people dying. Plus then it would be all profit. Safer and more efficient, it's a win-win.
I feel the need to point out that "natural" does not mean "better." Natural defenses were evolved when an extra day lost to recovery might mean significantly higher chances of starving or being eaten by a predator, so the downsides of a fever and potential brain damage were worth it *. Today, longer more gradual recoveries, without fevers and as much discomfort, you're not going to die if it takes two days to recover rather than one.
* Disclaimer: this is just pure speculative armchair evolutionary theory, not backed up by any type of study or professional evolutionary biologist.
And that they don't systematically create files on their citizens, you know, what the Stasi job was by design.
I agree GP was engaging in ignorant hyperbole, but at what the NSA is doing seems worse: they just file EVERYTHING. So what if they might not categorize it into citizen files before they have a desire to do so?
They might not have a file on me ready to go, but I'm guessing with a few keystrokes, they could pull together all my texts, e-mails, facebook, and google searches, then with a few more keystrokes could pull up anything embarrassing on me in the event that they need to blackmail me.
Fortunately for me, my whole life is one big public embarrassment, so they got nothing, but still...
They could also be used to develop transparent displays for, say, a really cool looking cell phone or tablet! And then ten seconds after buying it, everyone would realize how hard it is to read on them.
It will be like glossy vs matte on your laptop screen: you will know that it looks cool until you need to use it, but idiots buying them will make it hard to find anything else.
I guess I probably shouldn't worry about minor annoyances in consumer electronics in the future based on undeveloped technology...
Only a few people are going to such extremes: the fault lies with them, not the game. I've heard suggestions that even heroin isn't universally addictive, you need to be predisposed to become addicted in order to end up selling yourself etc. I'm skeptical that one can become addicted to WOW, to the point that they wear diapers and play 300 hours straight, without some other problem. And I'm guessing that problem has other negative effects outside of "I play WOW too much."
My point is that the addicts need to change. Changing the games to try to be a nanny for the addicts seems futile: they'll just get addicted to something else.
I doubt that these extreme rehab clinics are the way to do it, I'm skeptical that they take a very scientific approach, but changing the world to cure an individuals addiction is a dumber approach.
I'm not sure why healthcare.gov needs drivers license numbers, but those others are true of private healthcare companies, who appear to have more leaks than the government at least on this graph.
I'm not saying government is more secure, I'm just saying the dangers aren't unique to healthcare.gov.
That's not a selective force though: bullets and bombs kill you no matter what your genetics. They don't provide an advantage to any genes, since no one has "bulletproof" genes or anything like that. It's fairly arbitrary in terms of genetics.
You could make the case that only the cowards who ran from battle survived, and so the french are now more surrender prone... but that would only be a joke.
The North Korea situation on the other hand, people DO survive famine and prolonged periods of malnutrition. Those genetically able to survive on little food could in theory survive and reproduce better.
"They might be able to help"? Pretty sure that does not describe this guy and North Korea's continued behavior, so he's in the clear as far as that goes.
I have, but since the question was "Why is this on slashdot" not "What potential ethical problems do people see with this," I just acknowledged that there are some issues and left it at that.
With the nazi human experiments, there was no informed consent. There was pretty clearly opposition on the part of the victims to the experiments. North koreans would be able to agree to the study, but some issues I'd immediately be concerned about:
-If the NK government agrees to it, how likely is it that they're forcing these people to say yes
-Education is so shitty from what we know of it, that would they actually be informed of anything relevant
Explain to me how Japan would have fared better ruined after the war, under soviet rule. Draw examples from other Soviet countries please.
1. North Korea is probably the most interesting bit of foreign policy, which does appeal to nerds.
2. Look at the picture, the guy is clearly a nerd.
3. More importantly, from TFA: “Most of my work has been on trying to identify natural experiments that mimic experimental conditions in a way that might help us to understand the genetics of normal human variation in health and disease." The article is focused on stuff that has a more general interest, but North Korean genetics are absolutely interesting to a bio nerd as a "natural" experiment in the sense that it's not setup specifically to be an experiment.
It would be very interesting, for example, if you could show rapid human "evolution" in response to the shit that's going on there. I've heard that north koreans are on average a foot shorter than South Koreans. They've only been separated by two or three generations. Presumably a lot of that is due to malnutrition, but it's not too hard to imagine that some of that is due to people who are genetically predisposed to being shorter would survive better. How fast is that happening? Are there genes which correlate to "speaking out against tyranny" that are being selected against?
There are definitely very interesting questions that can be answered by north korea. It goes without saying that I wish this experiment were not occurring, but since it is, may as well collect data from it (though there are issues with informed consent probably).
Speaking of WWII and Japan, we encouraged them to eat more dolphin and whale when we were rebuilding them. Custom? Please. It's a dying generation remembering what they ate in grade school because that was the cheapest meat available, and an industry which doesn't want to admit to it's shareholders that it's time to fold.
In one hundred years we'll look back at the practice of eating meat with the same horror that we look upon slavery now.
If not because of the ethics at least because of the greenhouse effects which will still be around.
At least if that vegan restaurant's ads are to be believed. Which I'm kind of skeptical of, though that might just be me wanting to not feel bad about all the cheeseburgers I eat.
Euthanized is the preferred word for many people, even though it's not really euthanizing. Including me, I've said I was euthanizing lab animals when actually I was just slaughtering them.
Actually, slaughter is still probably sugar coating it, since I hope most slaughterhouses are more experienced and efficient at it than I was/am...
(note to any crazy animal rights activists, I'm not talking about dolphins or any other mammal here.)
You were surprised that the senator from California, the one who has been in office for the past two decades, represents California?
Oh wait, I see, you were trying to affirm your stereotype for the most populated state in the union as being all freedom hating cowards. Sorry, missed the joke there.
I'd caution against taking the media as representative of most americans. Look at radio: it's increasingly gone all the same pop music. That doesn't mean everyone is listening to miley cyrus, that just means that they're losing a significant number of people, so they're doubling down on those demographics that are still watching or listening.
That demographic is, of course, idiots.
In the case of radio, it's teens and pre-teens with nothing but disposable income to waste on whatever music they think everyone else is listening to, and no mature musical tastes to cause them to turn off the radio. With CNN, it's people who don't know how to read a newspaper or get their news from the internet. With reality TV, it's people who are tired and want to turn off their brains for a while.
(Disclaimer: I watched all of Jersey Shore while writing my dissertation, so maybe I'm just defensive.)
While I do think there's an unfortunate number of people in America who have decided that ignorance is a virtue and not a vice, I don't believe that's most people, and I don't believe it's in all subjects. Those CNN reporters who were nervous about not understanding physics might have really great insight into politics and economics. People who watch honey boo boo aren't emulating that behavior with their jobs.
"Hey, did you hear about that kid who interviewed at Xerox for the Client Manager position? They asked him why a tennis ball was fuzzy, and he said, I shit you not, 'Because they're too ornery to shear'! Yeah, that guys a ticking time bomb waiting to go off. I mean what type of asshole doesn't take our well thought out interview questions seriously! You better not hire him!"
I don't know if such a conversation is likely to take place, but if it does, seems like it would only close a lot of doors you wouldn't want to go through anyway.
Also, oblig XKCD.
Why in god's name did you link to a youtube video that wasn't even a video?
Anyway, I think the comparison is important. For one thing, it makes people realize that not everyone in saudi arabia, Iran, or the US is a crazy fundamentalist. Furthermore, the effects of fundamentalist religion are global. It is a global problem. Pretending it's our county of sane people vs their country of crazy people is missing the point. We need a global approach to the small minority of fundamentalists who have political power in certain powerful countries. The approach is the same.
1. Don't allow them to muddle criticism with religious intolerance, which is their first move.
2. Vote them out wherever they are. They will fuck up something.
3. Educate people. Without followers, they never get into power.
I don't believe that is exclusively an American problem.
Hate to break it to you, but when it comes to religious extremism the USA is right up there with Iran and Saudi Arabia.
Why would you hate to "break it" to him that he's correct?
Mules can't reproduce*, yet are still clearly living. Meanwhile fire can reproduce but is clearly not living. That suggests that "able to reproduce" is not a strict requirement.
(* Well okay, there have been some extremely rare instances of mules reproducing, but as a general rule they're infertile)
It won't be long before that happens. It's been possible for a while now to make a mitotic spindle without a cell (mitotic spindle being the thing that splits DNA to put one in each cell.) It's also been possible for a while now to make micelles which are essentially the membrane around a cell which can behave much like cells. Recently the two have been combined, making artificial spindles inside such droplets.
The second part of mitosis (cell replication) is the cell itself splitting, cytokinesis. It seems that people are working on doing that artificially. I've never heard of anyone getting a micelle to undergo cytokinesis, but there are undoubtedly people working on that. And then immediately, someone will hire a postdoc to combine the two to get complete artificial mitosis going.
In vitro replication of DNA has been possible for quite a while too. Someone will get DNA in a micelle duplicating, then dividing by artificial mitosis and artificial cytokinesis. Probably only once at first, since making the artificial cell grow would be yet another complication, but it should meet your definition.
I'd guess it would take about a decade, mainly because a lot of the technical details and hard work will be driven by other goals. The reason people spent time making the spindles in bubbles wasn't to do it, but because they wanted to study how the spindle is sized. There are clear questions one can answer with making micelles divide. I'm not clear why the researchers in the current article did this, but they no doubt had a question to answer, not just "Hey, I bet we can make a cell from plastic." I'm not sure what questions one would be able to answer by doing the full artificial dividing cell I just described, but someone will probably eventually come up with a reason.
Fun fact: there is no clear definition of life that anyone can come up with. It's like Justice Potter's quote on porn: "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"]; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it..."
There are definitely RNA based viruses. It's debatable whether they qualify as "alive." Self-replicating RNA mollecules likely preceeded any DNA based life, whether you'd want to consider RNA replicating "life" is up to you.
Personally I'd agree that RNA based viruses are living.
I think the problem American politics has with regulating is a false dichotomy. Voters here are confused and scared by the economy. Believing that there is good side and an evil side, with free market freedom jesus on one side and the DMV devil on the other side is a lot more comforting than various shades of grey wrapped up in numbers and statistics. So we get overzealous with letting companies do what they want, with faith that it will somehow work out for the best.
It's stupid, but lets not move from that into another oversimplification: either way can go horribly wrong. And regulation gone wrong combined with corporate greed can sometimes worse than either individually. So lets not make statements implying that a public utility would be inherently better than a private corporation, lets focus on data. Are there any public utilities in DC which have a better safety record? If so, then maybe try making the gas lines a regulated public utility.
Here here! And it's even worse! This bullshit about the higgs boson at CERN last year! WE KNEW IT IN 1964!!! 40 YEARS OLD NEWS!!! (/s)
Hypotheses need to be tested, experiments need to be repeated, ideally with increasing certainty. You absolutely were not stuffing ibises into wind tunnels in science fairs. It would have been more interesting had they gotten a negative result, as was true with the higgs boson, but a positive result confirming your old hypotheses is still important science.