I just took one of my remote controls into my room, turned off all of the lights, and pushed some buttons, and I *could* see it. It was very faint and distinctly red. My roommate can't see it, but I don't think he was looking hard enough.
I think you're pretty much correct with respects to the cause. The peak wavelength (as bright as your typical superbright LED) is probably in the correct 850-900nm spectrum with low-intensity light escaping at much lower (800nm and probably less) wavelengths, which we can see. It seems logical. Kinda nifty, regardless.
Ugly people (both of the mind and the body) are often very effective breeders. Often more so than their physically and emontionally attractive counterparts.
How so?
If a person is unhealthy and has a diminished learning capacity (how I interpret "ugly" in both of your terms), how can that lead to better offspring?
All I said was that people should put more faith into the signals their body is giving them.
Where is everyone coming up with all of this stuff they're saying in response? Why does following your instincts mean an increase in mental instability in our gene pool? Please elaborate.
Fair points. I guess we've each just read different biographies of Blake.
I'm biased in this. I am bipolar, and I have suffered enormously because of it. But I wouldn't change it if I was offered the chance--it is what I am, and I cannot imagine being better off without it. Happier, definately, but certainly no better.
If your parents had told you today that they knew you would turn out this way but chose to leave those genetic factors built in, would you resent them?
What if you had grown up perfectly normal, and today your parents mentioned to you that, as part of your conception, genetic flaws were discovered that created a likelyhood for the conditions you're experiencing today and that these genetic flaws were removed, making you the normal person you are. Would you resent them? If you had the opportunity to send a message back in time and ask them to leave your genes alone, would you send it?
It's a scary concept thinking that you personally could have come out differently than you are today. The other side of the coin is that, if you had developed differently, with doctored genes, you'd probably feel exactly the same way in favor of the way you turned out. Of course we fear change, but what if there *was* no change? What if that's simply the way we were brought into this world? Would that necessarily be a bad thing?
What does this have to do with my legal vs. illegal argument? Collecting information in this fashion is perfectly legal and I totally agree that this happens all the time. When a company installs sniffing equipment on data and voice communications lines as suggested, it becomes quite illegal and I can't imagine a company doing this. It seems like a hell of a lot of risk (major fines and prison terms) for such a trivial gain (some marketing information).
When you fill out one of those forms to enter to win a free car, the fine print tells us that they're planning on collecting and using that information for marketing. In fact, unless the fine print explicitely states otherwise, you can usually assume that the company you're giving your information to will or reserves the right to use your information for marketing reasons. Again, this is perfectly legal.
I understand and agree with that, but that has nothing to do with my post.
I think that it's more likely that the LEDs emit small amounts of higher-frequency light, that I see, rather than my having an extra-low frequency response.
Ahh, this could be. Something I hadn't thought of. The IR LED's are just as bright as normal super-bright LED's we see in the visible range. Like most light sources these LED's emit a range of light, so it's quite possible that while the peak IR wavelength is in the 850-900nm, light could be released at shorter wavelengths that one could see.
And this could quite possibly be attributed to very minor differences in a person's sensitivity to very red light...
Where in the world do you get the impression that I'm in any way advocating greed or prejudice? I'm totally lost as to how you made that leap.
All I'm saying is that people should put some faith into the things that draws one person to another. If you find somebody physically and emotionally attractive, there's a reason you find them that way: You have evolved to detect signs of health, fertility and stability in your mate. Today it's very "PC" to ignore these signs and settle for mates that are weak in many of these respects yet strong in other, less important respects.
I don't know how the hell you picked up anything sounding like Hitler from that. Please explain.
Firstly, you make the assumption that Blake's illnesses could have been corrected via genetic manipulation.
Secondly, you assume that all of his works were derived from his insanity. Blake's "insanity" was simply a period of depression near age 50 due to his work not being recognized.
Regardless, to have the technology to *better* somebody (either by removing genetic failures or in some of the extreme cases presented in this thread, to "improve") and not take advantage of that because of the rather silly notion that diseases, increased likelyhood of depression and other psychological problems, etc., might give us some cool literary products seems just horrible.
Do you think people in early 1800 kept telling themselves that Blake's depression was for his own good? That we'd all get to see some nifty things he'd produce as a result? If Blake's depression could have been avoided somehow, don't you think he might have wanted to do just that?
I wonder how many superior literary and artistic works would never come about because somebody chose not to remove some crippling hereditary disease from their child's genes.
Your argument easily works both ways, and as far as I'm concerned, both ways are equally valid. Given the choice, I'd much rather see a healthier human society.
There's a difference between a "scholar" and a "scientist". The whole earth/wind/fire/water bit wasn't based on anything remotely resembling scientific reasoning, whereas evolution is. The whole "theory" vs "law" debate is based on scientific descriptions and definitions, which has nothing at all to do with whatever scholarly observations made about the 4 elements.
Clear abuse issues (eg: SYN floods, ICMP attacks, port scanning, etc) can be audited internally.
This would require an internal audit trail. Destroying this trail in response to a subpoena would be illegal. In order to survive, any "anonymous" ISP MUST do some sort of logging and auditing. Think of this scenario:
ScriptKiddie signs up to AnonISP, begins smurfing FBI.gov.
While smurfs are on-going (ScriptKiddie still connected), FBI knocks on AnonISP's door and asks for all information about the person doing the smurfing.
AnonISP, having connection details available to them (even without logs), would be obligated to turn over that information.
ScriptKiddie smurfs CorpX.com.
CorpX.com complains, AnonISP cancels ScriptKiddie's account ("And don't come back!")
ScriptKiddie signs up again as PaketKiddie (you have no logs with which to prove he is the same person)
PaketKiddie smurfs CorpX.com.
CorpX.com instructs uplinks to block all traffic from AnonISP.
(repeat)
AnonISP, now blocked from the majority of conscientous ISP's, turns into a packet kiddie playground and goes out of business.
And mind you no sysadmin is going to let the feds anywhere near his hardware without making a big fuss over it - likely the whole 'net will know exactly which ISPs, routes, backbones, and servers are 'bugged'.
I think you would be surprised if you knew how inaccurate your assumption here is.
I think we are quite some way from BigBrother, but I hope people realize that the current government also is far from trustworthy.
If you believe you cannot in good faith trust the government that governs you, that your government is consistently acting against your wishes and the wishes of your community, out of malice or otherwise, it's high time you overthrew that government.
More likely, your mistrust might be easily corrected. There are several reasons a person might not trust his government. A) The government might be making decisions based on information the citizen does not understand or have at his disposal; B) The government might not be making decisions with as much information as they need, causing it to make poor decisions; C) A small number of people may have gotten a lot of bad publicity and have been ousted in the past for abusing their positions in government; D) The government might be hell-bent on ruining the lives of the citizens it's elected to govern.
I'm tempted to say A and B are the dominant factors here. (Perhaps a bit of C as well, but that can't be helped.)
I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader on how they might take a more active role in their government to resolve these deficiencies.
The difference is that information like this is collected legally.
Always read the fine print.
It would be illegal for a company to collect this type of information via any sort of Internet wiretap "backdoors". I imagine it'd be illegal to even attempt to use these backdoors at all, in fact (and detectable, to an extent). Before you pipe up and tell me that there are companies that break the law every day, I'd like you to name one that regularly performs the equivalent of wiretaps on normal people with the intent to hurt them or make a profit from the information they gleam.
Things like this only happen in conspiracy theories and the occasionally B-rated movie.
I believe that, technically, since the data passes through the US, the US has the ability ("right"?) to monitor in some fashion. I'm not sure if there are legal issues here, but you can bet that other countries are doing precisely the same thing.
The IETF is not yet another evil corporation here. They're an open INTERNATIONAL community devoted to keeping the Internet's infrastructure running smoothly and evolving.
That's their purpose.
You can bet that the members and coordinators are pretty intelligent folk. They're not going to adopt things unless they've given it a lot of thought.
Let's PLEASE not get worked up over any of this when the IETF is just starting its discussion. These people are not stupid people. Let's try and give them the benefit of the doubt that they are working in the Internet's best interests.
Jesus I wish Slashdot authors would stop feeding everyone's paranoia.
1-meter resolution is *hardly* anything to get worked up about. They *might* be able to tell if your car is parked in front of your house or not. 1-meter resolution is insufficient to detect the very *presence* of a person, much less that person's identity.
There are also few legal issues to worry about. It's generally held that anything out in the open/public is fair game as far as photography is concerned. If you wish privacy, take your activities in private.
These images are also *very* static. You aren't going to be able to track the movements of *anything*. Assuming the camera takes a picture of the same geographical reason a second time, the time between the first image and the second will be months if not years. There aren't evil people sitting in bunkers everywhere watching live video coverage of you getting up in the morning and driving to work. Who the fuck cares about your boring life? Get over it. There is no privacy concern and no conspiracies going on here.
It's well known that UV light is focused differently onto sensitive film than normal light, hence the need for UV filters to ensure a sharp photograph. I'm not sure which way this goes, though -- if UV light is focused more correctly by people with myopia or if it's focused much worse.
But then I was thinking: Contact lenses nowadays come with the same UV protective layers as eyeglasses. If this was UV-related, there should be virtually no difference between the UV blocking done by contact lenses and regular eyeglasses, so that must not be it.
Infrared? Doubtful as well. IR is mostly radiated at night, not reflected.
In all likelyhood, the eyeglasses are tinted very slightly (as most are) and that slight tint is enough to cause problems in extremely low-light situations, where every bit of illumination is helpful. Once a person's eyes adapt (assuming they've been eating their carrots), most people don't have much of a hard time moving about in starlight. You might be surprised how much light stars actually provide. Most people don't notice it because the glaring lights of nearby buildings and streetlights provide an unacceptable level of contrast that makes it very difficult for your eyes to sensitize themselves to the starlight.
Are you sure you're not seeing the little red "activity" LED light being bounced around inside the remote?
The typical eye sees from about 380nm to 750nm (with "red" centering around (I believe) 575nm), for a total wavelength range of about 370nm. Infrared remotes tend to use wavelengths near 850nm-900nm.
I guess it's certainly possible your eyes are sensitive to infrared light, but if you're truly sensitive to most (all?) typical IR remote controls, that means your eyes have a sensitivity about 40% greater than the average person.
That's quite a huge difference.:) The fact that several people you seem to know also exhibit this 40% increase in sensitivity is very odd as well. If the AVERAGE lower limit is 750nm, then for every person that exhibits this 40% increase, there must be an equal number that have a 40% loss, resulting in a visible range of up to only 600nm. If we apply this loss to both ends of the spectrum, a 40% loss on both ends would mean a visible range of about 530-600nm, which means they can see the color yellow. Maybe a bit of orange.
I don't know many people like that.
So the way I see it, either you're seeing the red LED flashing around inside the remote's body, the remote control you're using falls outside the typical specifications for IR devices (and emits IR much closer to the visible spectrum than the typical IR device limits), or you're an *exceptionally* rare person to have sensitivity that far out of the visible range. If the latter is the case, I'd be interested to know what your UV/blue light sensitivity is. If your *friends* say they see the IR light as well, then it's almost certainly an IR remote that's well outside the normal range. That, or your friends are lying to you (maybe they feel threatened by your IR sensitivity).
such as the huge risk of narrowing the gene pool, and generaly making the human race more uniform.
A thousand years ago, genetic mutations that made a person weaker, dumber or less fit always resulted in the termination of that genetic line (in some fashion). Only traits that contributed positively (or not at all) to a person's life or reproductive ability were allowed to be passed on (and, indeed, were encouraged).
This has hardly done anything to reduce the diversity or size of the gene pool in the past (and, in fact, this is arguably how all life evolved).
Today, similar negative genetic traits are, in many cases, allowed to survive. Technology (medical and otherwise) are allowing these faulty traits to find their way into offspring.
So, in a way, we've begun to *double* the amount of diversity in our gene pool (allowing both good *and* bad traits to survive). The only way we can get our species back "on track" is to find some way to re-create the evolutionary push towards positive genetic traits.
This push is in the form of genetic engineering and the ability of that to remove or nullify genetic mutations that cause diseases, problems or other complications. If we refuse to do this, our gene pool will eventually become so full of faulty genetic code that we will be forced to rely totally on technology to keep ourselves alive.
Now, I'm not necessarily advocating the use of genetic engineering for "vanity" purposes. Nevertheless, such engineering will eventually occur, and those that refuse to acknowledge it will soon find themselves drifting towards the "lesser" end of the gene pool yardstick.
There are reasons we find people attractive. It's about damn time people stopped buying into that "it's the personality that counts" crap and started following their instincts. The people that disregard these biological signals are doing themselves and their offspring a disservice.
I watched A&E's top 100 people of the millenium yesterday and I noticed a great deal of the people on the list exhibited strange and compulsive behavior, often at the expense of common sense.
What makes you think any amount of genetic engineering as discussed here would have had any effect on the behaviors and personalities of these folks?
You seem to be of the impression that genetic engineering implies the creation of "cookie-cutter people," when it doesn't at all. It will be necessary to use genetic engineering eventually to eliminate genetic/hereditary diseases and serious conditions. This should have virtually no effect on a person's learning abilities. It will be desirable to some to use genetics to eliminate things like myopia and heart problems detected early on. Again, these should have virtually no effect on other aspects of a person.
It's been demonstrated frequently that genetics plays a very very tiny role in the behavior and personality of the resulting person. You *never* know how your child is going to "turn out."
I too disagree with the idea of using genetic engineering for vanity purposes, but I think your reasoning is a bit flawed.
I absolutely agree that it would be great to use genetics to rid ourselves from genetic/hereditary diseases. In fact, I'd go one step further and say that we MUST do this to ensure our survival as a species. Increasingly, modern medicine has allowed people with genetic problems that would have, 1000 years ago, meant a quick death for the afflicted. Today, these traits are allowed to exist and *spread*, since afflicted are allowed to live relatively normal lives and reproduce, passing these traits on. As new mutations crop up, further contaminating our gene pool, new medical marvels are developed to allow these mutants to survive and reproduce. This is detrimental to our survival as a species. The only way to reverse this trend is through the use of genetic engineering to stamp out these flaws.
We might end up creating monsters that want to do away with all of those who aren't genetically superior.
Presumably, any genetic manipulations making offspring "superior" would implicitely include an impressive learning and retention ability. Assuming they were educated like we are today, they would be emotionally balanced, compassionate, model offspring and probably wouldn't exhibit many of these evil behaviors.
If you are Joe Average, and your kid is Jean Intelligent, can you really relate to him?
Genetics doesn't directly affect a person's intelligence. It can affect a person's learning and retention potential, but the kid still has to learn and experience things like the rest of us. I'm pretty sure any dumb-parent/smart-kid awkwardness would be about the same as it is today.
"In fact, he says, it will be so beneficial that governments may require children to be engineered genetically to prevent development of new socioeconomic gaps."
I think this would be very wrong. if this happens here, I'm moving to another planet.
Would you be opposed then to a community where people weren't allowed to have children on a whim? What if there were laws that stated only competant, emotionally and financially secure couples were allowed to have children? Would this be good or bad?
Personally, I wouldn't have a problem with this at all. Firstly, it nearly guarantees the child will have a decent start in life. Perhaps I'm being cold-hearted, but I do not feel that any family permanently on welfare with obviously no desire or capability of self-sustainance should be bringing children into this world. It adds unnecessary burdon on the rest of us and the children don't tend to have the best of childhoods.
In many ways, though, this is very similar to government-imposed genetic standards. By relegating the ability to reproduce to the people that are most stable and competant, over time, these children will begin to exhibit more positive genetic traits, thusly promoting the gene pool of the hosting country. Just some food for thought..
Download is a transmission to you, upload is a transmission from you.
Personally, I come from a satellite background just as much as I do Internet. The way I've always used the words: Uplinks/uploads are links/transfers to a central hub (BBS/satellite) where Downlinks/downloads are links/transfers to an end user/node (such as a PC or a person's brain). I won't argue with semantics, but it does make sense to me calling it a download too.:)
Genetics only affect the biological system and how it's built. This likely affects mental things like learning capacity, retention, probability of developing a mental deficiency, etc., but doesn't have nearly the effect on behavior as you seem to think.
In many ways, it's almost perfectly analogous to a computer hardware/software. The hardware is built from the same sets of instructions and is essentially identical from one PC in a batch to the next. Each PC has a nearly identical processor. If that processor has a bug in one of its instructions, all of the processors in the line have the same bug. Now, take one PC and install Windows on it. Take the other and install, say, Linux on it. Or BeOS. Or hell, install Windows on both and use different applications with each (or different versions of the same applications).
The only way you would get behavior out of your clone even *approximating* behavior of the original would be to raise the clone in *exactly* the same environment (OS), with the same people (applications), in the same place and time (versions of applications and updates). A person's behavior is directly related to the lessons they've learned and the things they've experienced. The only thing genetics affects at this point is perhaps how well the lesson is learned.
Even identical twins often times are completely different, regardless of whether they've been raised together or adopted into different families.
I once thought that an effective way of keeping parents from tinkering with the genes of their children is to not allow genetic engineering to be performed on people less than X years of age.
It doesn't quite work that way. The whole idea behind using genetic engineering like this is to do away with genetic deficiencies (like diseases) so that they *aren't* passed on to offspring. You cannot use genetics like this once the person is already fully grown. The changes must be made in the earliest stage of a person's development.
We've defeated almost every Naturally Selective process that has a chance to improve our genome
This is exactly correct.
A thousand years ago, any mutation that caused our bodies to be weak, unhealthy or unsightly would result in death or a lack of reproductive ability. The trait would disappear. The mutant would be "naturally selected" out of the gene pool. At the same time, any mutation that enhanced someone's strength or endurance would allow that person to be fit and strong. He would survive fights and be able to protect his mate and children. His genetic traits would be more likely to be passed on to future generations. Today, we have modern medicine. Nearly any biological deformity or other genetic problems can either be corrected or ignored via drugs and treatments. The person afflicted with these conditions can now lead relatively normal lives and REPRODUCE. Remember, all we can do is TREAT these genetic problems. The traits are STILL THERE and have a much greater chance of surviving to the next generation.
The result is that any mutation at all -- positive or negative -- that can be treated will survive in future generations. There is no longer any naturally selective push to keep positive traits and weed out negative ones. Without this push, our gene pool will become unviable.
The only solution is to somehow re-introduce this naturally selective push. The only way to ethically do this is to utilize genetic engineering and our knowledge of the human genome to detect and remove faulty genetic sequences that will cause problems later in life.
At that point, we have the means to control our evolution completely. People *will* be engineered to be stronger, faster and smarter, whether we want to or not. The people that refuse to acknowledge this or stubbornly refuse to adopt this practice will quickly find THEMSELVES as the lesser underclass.
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I just took one of my remote controls into my room, turned off all of the lights, and pushed some buttons, and I *could* see it. It was very faint and distinctly red. My roommate can't see it, but I don't think he was looking hard enough.
I think you're pretty much correct with respects to the cause. The peak wavelength (as bright as your typical superbright LED) is probably in the correct 850-900nm spectrum with low-intensity light escaping at much lower (800nm and probably less) wavelengths, which we can see. It seems logical. Kinda nifty, regardless.
Ugly people (both of the mind and the body) are often very effective breeders. Often more so than their physically and emontionally attractive counterparts.
How so?
If a person is unhealthy and has a diminished learning capacity (how I interpret "ugly" in both of your terms), how can that lead to better offspring?
What does this have to do with my post?
All I said was that people should put more faith into the signals their body is giving them.
Where is everyone coming up with all of this stuff they're saying in response? Why does following your instincts mean an increase in mental instability in our gene pool? Please elaborate.
Fair points. I guess we've each just read different biographies of Blake.
I'm biased in this. I am bipolar, and I have suffered enormously because of it. But I wouldn't change it if I was offered the chance--it is what I am, and I cannot imagine being better off without it. Happier, definately, but certainly no better.
If your parents had told you today that they knew you would turn out this way but chose to leave those genetic factors built in, would you resent them?
What if you had grown up perfectly normal, and today your parents mentioned to you that, as part of your conception, genetic flaws were discovered that created a likelyhood for the conditions you're experiencing today and that these genetic flaws were removed, making you the normal person you are. Would you resent them? If you had the opportunity to send a message back in time and ask them to leave your genes alone, would you send it?
It's a scary concept thinking that you personally could have come out differently than you are today. The other side of the coin is that, if you had developed differently, with doctored genes, you'd probably feel exactly the same way in favor of the way you turned out. Of course we fear change, but what if there *was* no change? What if that's simply the way we were brought into this world? Would that necessarily be a bad thing?
What does this have to do with my legal vs. illegal argument? Collecting information in this fashion is perfectly legal and I totally agree that this happens all the time. When a company installs sniffing equipment on data and voice communications lines as suggested, it becomes quite illegal and I can't imagine a company doing this. It seems like a hell of a lot of risk (major fines and prison terms) for such a trivial gain (some marketing information).
When you fill out one of those forms to enter to win a free car, the fine print tells us that they're planning on collecting and using that information for marketing. In fact, unless the fine print explicitely states otherwise, you can usually assume that the company you're giving your information to will or reserves the right to use your information for marketing reasons. Again, this is perfectly legal.
I understand and agree with that, but that has nothing to do with my post.
Please elaborate.
I think that it's more likely that the LEDs emit small amounts of higher-frequency light, that I see, rather than my having an extra-low frequency response.
Ahh, this could be. Something I hadn't thought of. The IR LED's are just as bright as normal super-bright LED's we see in the visible range. Like most light sources these LED's emit a range of light, so it's quite possible that while the peak IR wavelength is in the 850-900nm, light could be released at shorter wavelengths that one could see.
And this could quite possibly be attributed to very minor differences in a person's sensitivity to very red light...
Where in the world do you get the impression that I'm in any way advocating greed or prejudice? I'm totally lost as to how you made that leap.
All I'm saying is that people should put some faith into the things that draws one person to another. If you find somebody physically and emotionally attractive, there's a reason you find them that way: You have evolved to detect signs of health, fertility and stability in your mate. Today it's very "PC" to ignore these signs and settle for mates that are weak in many of these respects yet strong in other, less important respects.
I don't know how the hell you picked up anything sounding like Hitler from that. Please explain.
This logic is flawed.
Firstly, you make the assumption that Blake's illnesses could have been corrected via genetic manipulation.
Secondly, you assume that all of his works were derived from his insanity. Blake's "insanity" was simply a period of depression near age 50 due to his work not being recognized.
Regardless, to have the technology to *better* somebody (either by removing genetic failures or in some of the extreme cases presented in this thread, to "improve") and not take advantage of that because of the rather silly notion that diseases, increased likelyhood of depression and other psychological problems, etc., might give us some cool literary products seems just horrible.
Do you think people in early 1800 kept telling themselves that Blake's depression was for his own good? That we'd all get to see some nifty things he'd produce as a result? If Blake's depression could have been avoided somehow, don't you think he might have wanted to do just that?
I wonder how many superior literary and artistic works would never come about because somebody chose not to remove some crippling hereditary disease from their child's genes.
Your argument easily works both ways, and as far as I'm concerned, both ways are equally valid. Given the choice, I'd much rather see a healthier human society.
That's not science at all.
There's a difference between a "scholar" and a "scientist". The whole earth/wind/fire/water bit wasn't based on anything remotely resembling scientific reasoning, whereas evolution is. The whole "theory" vs "law" debate is based on scientific descriptions and definitions, which has nothing at all to do with whatever scholarly observations made about the 4 elements.
Thus your argument is flawed.
This would require an internal audit trail. Destroying this trail in response to a subpoena would be illegal. In order to survive, any "anonymous" ISP MUST do some sort of logging and auditing. Think of this scenario:
- ScriptKiddie signs up to AnonISP, begins smurfing FBI.gov.
- While smurfs are on-going (ScriptKiddie still connected), FBI knocks on AnonISP's door and asks for all information about the person doing the smurfing.
AnonISP, having connection details available to them (even without logs), would be obligated to turn over that information.- ScriptKiddie smurfs CorpX.com.
- CorpX.com complains, AnonISP cancels ScriptKiddie's account ("And don't come back!")
- ScriptKiddie signs up again as PaketKiddie (you have no logs with which to prove he is the same person)
- PaketKiddie smurfs CorpX.com.
- CorpX.com instructs uplinks to block all traffic from AnonISP.
- (repeat)
- AnonISP, now blocked from the majority of conscientous ISP's, turns into a packet kiddie playground and goes out of business.
Comments?And mind you no sysadmin is going to let the feds anywhere near his hardware without making a big fuss over it - likely the whole 'net will know exactly which ISPs, routes, backbones, and servers are 'bugged'.
I think you would be surprised if you knew how inaccurate your assumption here is.
I think we are quite some way from BigBrother, but I hope people realize that the current government also is far from trustworthy.
If you believe you cannot in good faith trust the government that governs you, that your government is consistently acting against your wishes and the wishes of your community, out of malice or otherwise, it's high time you overthrew that government.
More likely, your mistrust might be easily corrected. There are several reasons a person might not trust his government. A) The government might be making decisions based on information the citizen does not understand or have at his disposal; B) The government might not be making decisions with as much information as they need, causing it to make poor decisions; C) A small number of people may have gotten a lot of bad publicity and have been ousted in the past for abusing their positions in government; D) The government might be hell-bent on ruining the lives of the citizens it's elected to govern.
I'm tempted to say A and B are the dominant factors here. (Perhaps a bit of C as well, but that can't be helped.)
I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader on how they might take a more active role in their government to resolve these deficiencies.
The difference is that information like this is collected legally.
Always read the fine print.
It would be illegal for a company to collect this type of information via any sort of Internet wiretap "backdoors". I imagine it'd be illegal to even attempt to use these backdoors at all, in fact (and detectable, to an extent). Before you pipe up and tell me that there are companies that break the law every day, I'd like you to name one that regularly performs the equivalent of wiretaps on normal people with the intent to hurt them or make a profit from the information they gleam.
Things like this only happen in conspiracy theories and the occasionally B-rated movie.
I believe that, technically, since the data passes through the US, the US has the ability ("right"?) to monitor in some fashion. I'm not sure if there are legal issues here, but you can bet that other countries are doing precisely the same thing.
The IETF is not yet another evil corporation here. They're an open INTERNATIONAL community devoted to keeping the Internet's infrastructure running smoothly and evolving.
That's their purpose.
You can bet that the members and coordinators are pretty intelligent folk. They're not going to adopt things unless they've given it a lot of thought.
Let's PLEASE not get worked up over any of this when the IETF is just starting its discussion. These people are not stupid people. Let's try and give them the benefit of the doubt that they are working in the Internet's best interests.
Jesus I wish Slashdot authors would stop feeding everyone's paranoia.
1-meter resolution is *hardly* anything to get worked up about. They *might* be able to tell if your car is parked in front of your house or not. 1-meter resolution is insufficient to detect the very *presence* of a person, much less that person's identity.
There are also few legal issues to worry about. It's generally held that anything out in the open/public is fair game as far as photography is concerned. If you wish privacy, take your activities in private.
These images are also *very* static. You aren't going to be able to track the movements of *anything*. Assuming the camera takes a picture of the same geographical reason a second time, the time between the first image and the second will be months if not years. There aren't evil people sitting in bunkers everywhere watching live video coverage of you getting up in the morning and driving to work. Who the fuck cares about your boring life? Get over it. There is no privacy concern and no conspiracies going on here.
It's well known that UV light is focused differently onto sensitive film than normal light, hence the need for UV filters to ensure a sharp photograph. I'm not sure which way this goes, though -- if UV light is focused more correctly by people with myopia or if it's focused much worse.
But then I was thinking: Contact lenses nowadays come with the same UV protective layers as eyeglasses. If this was UV-related, there should be virtually no difference between the UV blocking done by contact lenses and regular eyeglasses, so that must not be it.
Infrared? Doubtful as well. IR is mostly radiated at night, not reflected.
In all likelyhood, the eyeglasses are tinted very slightly (as most are) and that slight tint is enough to cause problems in extremely low-light situations, where every bit of illumination is helpful. Once a person's eyes adapt (assuming they've been eating their carrots), most people don't have much of a hard time moving about in starlight. You might be surprised how much light stars actually provide. Most people don't notice it because the glaring lights of nearby buildings and streetlights provide an unacceptable level of contrast that makes it very difficult for your eyes to sensitize themselves to the starlight.
Are you sure you're not seeing the little red "activity" LED light being bounced around inside the remote?
:) The fact that several people you seem to know also exhibit this 40% increase in sensitivity is very odd as well. If the AVERAGE lower limit is 750nm, then for every person that exhibits this 40% increase, there must be an equal number that have a 40% loss, resulting in a visible range of up to only 600nm. If we apply this loss to both ends of the spectrum, a 40% loss on both ends would mean a visible range of about 530-600nm, which means they can see the color yellow. Maybe a bit of orange.
The typical eye sees from about 380nm to 750nm (with "red" centering around (I believe) 575nm), for a total wavelength range of about 370nm. Infrared remotes tend to use wavelengths near 850nm-900nm.
I guess it's certainly possible your eyes are sensitive to infrared light, but if you're truly sensitive to most (all?) typical IR remote controls, that means your eyes have a sensitivity about 40% greater than the average person.
That's quite a huge difference.
I don't know many people like that.
So the way I see it, either you're seeing the red LED flashing around inside the remote's body, the remote control you're using falls outside the typical specifications for IR devices (and emits IR much closer to the visible spectrum than the typical IR device limits), or you're an *exceptionally* rare person to have sensitivity that far out of the visible range. If the latter is the case, I'd be interested to know what your UV/blue light sensitivity is. If your *friends* say they see the IR light as well, then it's almost certainly an IR remote that's well outside the normal range. That, or your friends are lying to you (maybe they feel threatened by your IR sensitivity).
such as the huge risk of narrowing the gene pool, and generaly making the human race more uniform.
A thousand years ago, genetic mutations that made a person weaker, dumber or less fit always resulted in the termination of that genetic line (in some fashion). Only traits that contributed positively (or not at all) to a person's life or reproductive ability were allowed to be passed on (and, indeed, were encouraged).
This has hardly done anything to reduce the diversity or size of the gene pool in the past (and, in fact, this is arguably how all life evolved).
Today, similar negative genetic traits are, in many cases, allowed to survive. Technology (medical and otherwise) are allowing these faulty traits to find their way into offspring.
So, in a way, we've begun to *double* the amount of diversity in our gene pool (allowing both good *and* bad traits to survive). The only way we can get our species back "on track" is to find some way to re-create the evolutionary push towards positive genetic traits.
This push is in the form of genetic engineering and the ability of that to remove or nullify genetic mutations that cause diseases, problems or other complications. If we refuse to do this, our gene pool will eventually become so full of faulty genetic code that we will be forced to rely totally on technology to keep ourselves alive.
Now, I'm not necessarily advocating the use of genetic engineering for "vanity" purposes. Nevertheless, such engineering will eventually occur, and those that refuse to acknowledge it will soon find themselves drifting towards the "lesser" end of the gene pool yardstick.
It's called "being selective."
There are reasons we find people attractive. It's about damn time people stopped buying into that "it's the personality that counts" crap and started following their instincts. The people that disregard these biological signals are doing themselves and their offspring a disservice.
I watched A&E's top 100 people of the millenium yesterday and I noticed a great deal of the people on the list exhibited strange and compulsive behavior, often at the expense of common sense.
What makes you think any amount of genetic engineering as discussed here would have had any effect on the behaviors and personalities of these folks?
You seem to be of the impression that genetic engineering implies the creation of "cookie-cutter people," when it doesn't at all. It will be necessary to use genetic engineering eventually to eliminate genetic/hereditary diseases and serious conditions. This should have virtually no effect on a person's learning abilities. It will be desirable to some to use genetics to eliminate things like myopia and heart problems detected early on. Again, these should have virtually no effect on other aspects of a person.
It's been demonstrated frequently that genetics plays a very very tiny role in the behavior and personality of the resulting person. You *never* know how your child is going to "turn out."
I too disagree with the idea of using genetic engineering for vanity purposes, but I think your reasoning is a bit flawed.
I absolutely agree that it would be great to use genetics to rid ourselves from genetic/hereditary diseases. In fact, I'd go one step further and say that we MUST do this to ensure our survival as a species. Increasingly, modern medicine has allowed people with genetic problems that would have, 1000 years ago, meant a quick death for the afflicted. Today, these traits are allowed to exist and *spread*, since afflicted are allowed to live relatively normal lives and reproduce, passing these traits on. As new mutations crop up, further contaminating our gene pool, new medical marvels are developed to allow these mutants to survive and reproduce. This is detrimental to our survival as a species. The only way to reverse this trend is through the use of genetic engineering to stamp out these flaws.
:)
We might end up creating monsters that want to do away with all of those who aren't genetically superior.
Presumably, any genetic manipulations making offspring "superior" would implicitely include an impressive learning and retention ability. Assuming they were educated like we are today, they would be emotionally balanced, compassionate, model offspring and probably wouldn't exhibit many of these evil behaviors.
If you are Joe Average, and your kid is Jean Intelligent, can you really relate to him?
Genetics doesn't directly affect a person's intelligence. It can affect a person's learning and retention potential, but the kid still has to learn and experience things like the rest of us. I'm pretty sure any dumb-parent/smart-kid awkwardness would be about the same as it is today.
"In fact, he says, it will be so beneficial that governments may require children to be engineered genetically to prevent development of new socioeconomic gaps."
I think this would be very wrong. if this happens here, I'm moving to another planet.
Would you be opposed then to a community where people weren't allowed to have children on a whim? What if there were laws that stated only competant, emotionally and financially secure couples were allowed to have children? Would this be good or bad?
Personally, I wouldn't have a problem with this at all. Firstly, it nearly guarantees the child will have a decent start in life. Perhaps I'm being cold-hearted, but I do not feel that any family permanently on welfare with obviously no desire or capability of self-sustainance should be bringing children into this world. It adds unnecessary burdon on the rest of us and the children don't tend to have the best of childhoods.
In many ways, though, this is very similar to government-imposed genetic standards. By relegating the ability to reproduce to the people that are most stable and competant, over time, these children will begin to exhibit more positive genetic traits, thusly promoting the gene pool of the hosting country. Just some food for thought..
Download is a transmission to you, upload is a transmission from you.
Personally, I come from a satellite background just as much as I do Internet. The way I've always used the words: Uplinks/uploads are links/transfers to a central hub (BBS/satellite) where Downlinks/downloads are links/transfers to an end user/node (such as a PC or a person's brain). I won't argue with semantics, but it does make sense to me calling it a download too.
Genetics only affect the biological system and how it's built. This likely affects mental things like learning capacity, retention, probability of developing a mental deficiency, etc., but doesn't have nearly the effect on behavior as you seem to think.
In many ways, it's almost perfectly analogous to a computer hardware/software. The hardware is built from the same sets of instructions and is essentially identical from one PC in a batch to the next. Each PC has a nearly identical processor. If that processor has a bug in one of its instructions, all of the processors in the line have the same bug. Now, take one PC and install Windows on it. Take the other and install, say, Linux on it. Or BeOS. Or hell, install Windows on both and use different applications with each (or different versions of the same applications).
The only way you would get behavior out of your clone even *approximating* behavior of the original would be to raise the clone in *exactly* the same environment (OS), with the same people (applications), in the same place and time (versions of applications and updates). A person's behavior is directly related to the lessons they've learned and the things they've experienced. The only thing genetics affects at this point is perhaps how well the lesson is learned.
Even identical twins often times are completely different, regardless of whether they've been raised together or adopted into different families.
I once thought that an effective way of keeping parents from tinkering with the genes of their children is to not allow genetic engineering to be performed on people less than X years of age.
It doesn't quite work that way. The whole idea behind using genetic engineering like this is to do away with genetic deficiencies (like diseases) so that they *aren't* passed on to offspring. You cannot use genetics like this once the person is already fully grown. The changes must be made in the earliest stage of a person's development.
We've defeated almost every Naturally Selective process that has a chance to improve our genome
This is exactly correct.
A thousand years ago, any mutation that caused our bodies to be weak, unhealthy or unsightly would result in death or a lack of reproductive ability. The trait would disappear. The mutant would be "naturally selected" out of the gene pool. At the same time, any mutation that enhanced someone's strength or endurance would allow that person to be fit and strong. He would survive fights and be able to protect his mate and children. His genetic traits would be more likely to be passed on to future generations. Today, we have modern medicine. Nearly any biological deformity or other genetic problems can either be corrected or ignored via drugs and treatments. The person afflicted with these conditions can now lead relatively normal lives and REPRODUCE. Remember, all we can do is TREAT these genetic problems. The traits are STILL THERE and have a much greater chance of surviving to the next generation.
The result is that any mutation at all -- positive or negative -- that can be treated will survive in future generations. There is no longer any naturally selective push to keep positive traits and weed out negative ones. Without this push, our gene pool will become unviable.
The only solution is to somehow re-introduce this naturally selective push. The only way to ethically do this is to utilize genetic engineering and our knowledge of the human genome to detect and remove faulty genetic sequences that will cause problems later in life.
At that point, we have the means to control our evolution completely. People *will* be engineered to be stronger, faster and smarter, whether we want to or not. The people that refuse to acknowledge this or stubbornly refuse to adopt this practice will quickly find THEMSELVES as the lesser underclass.