It's even less clear than that. Some genetic conditions can be corrected, but we aren't yet willing to do it. We will be, and then any trait that people don't like will be "edited out" at the gene level rather than at the individual level. And genetic change is SLOW!!! Social change is much faster. But social tastes change quickly, so we're going to end up with an artificially maintained pseudo-Lamarkian evolution.
I estimate 10 years before this is in full swing, which is a lot less than one generation.
You proposal is also something that would be a bad idea. Better than the current patent system is faint praise indeed.
Patents should not be grants of monopoly. There should be compulsory licensing as "reasonable" rates. And they last too long. The cost of licensing should be based on the cost of preliminary research, and decrease to nominal once twice the initial investment has been recovered. Or perhaps three times. Certainly no more than ten times. And, of course, both expenses and repayment need to be figured on an after tax basis. And false starts count as part of the expenses of development.
Additionally, certain kinds of patents should just never be issued. I'm thinking of: 1) Software patents. (Use copyrights instead.) 2) Business method patents 3) Patents on things found in nature (e.g., genes or molecules, but also animals & trees). N.B.: This doesn't prevent patents on artificially created animals with custom genes.
N.B.: Saying that patent law is badly broken doesn't imply that, e.g., copyright law isn't. But that's a separate discussion.
FWIW, I'm on record as saying that the current patent system is so bad that we would be best served by repealing all existing patents laws and starting from scratch. This doesn't mean I consider that a good approach, just better than what we've got.
That there is a real concern doesn't justify this step. If a country ignores patents, then they will ignore patents whether issued or not. So just ban importation of those items. You can't do anything more anyway. This one has too many bones in it.
It's not a all clear that once you have moved off a climate pattern, you will ever move back into it, even if the original cause is removed. Climate patterns tend to be unstable equilibria, and as such if you move from one to another, the most probable retro-trajectory may well not be back to where you started. Think of it as similar to billiards played on a table with LOTS of shallow indentations...on the tops of shallow hills with gradual sides. That's a much oversimplified model, of course... for one thing it's wrong to depict a climate pattern as even semi-stable, but it does tend to oscillate around the same set of attractors. Move it slightly away from where it is, and it may be more attracted to a different set of attractors.
CAUTION: I am not a climate scientist. Don't take these models too seriously.
OTOH, climates are built out of an accumulation of local weather patterns over both time an space. So lots of wind farms over lots of area can, indeed, be expected to change both the weather and the climate. But note that this is true for ALL forms of energy generation. You can only pick what seems the best choice. Wind farms convert motion to heat within the system without adding additional energy. This may well have LESS effect, but it will still have effect. Slowing the winds for on thing. (But you need LOTS of wind farms to slow the winds very much, and skyscrapers may be just as effective at that. Or planting a forest. Both cause added friction of wind against surfaces, converting motion into heat.)
Anyone who is surprised that enough windfarms might affect the climate is just not thinking. Even paving roads affects the climate, and how it affects the climate depends on what color the pavement is.
No. You are missing the point. It has evolved just as much as anyone else, just in a different direction.
The importance is that this split off a long time ago, so any conserved commonalities will be very significant.
FWIW, the ancestral organism can't have been an oxygen breather. Didn't check whether this was or not. But just being anaerobic doesn't mean you haven't been evolving. And this one's even a eukaryote, so it's not as far divergent as, say, a blue-green algae.
OTOH, the headline appears to drasticly oversell. This is just a protozoa that they've sequenced the genome of (according to the link). Apparently they've had problems getting enough DNA before now. And I suspect the reporter didn't really understand what she was being told. Either that, or she just likes to write down to her audience.
Believe it if you will. Based on past history I'm not at all willing to accept that Obama's honest about *this* veto. And even if he, technically, is, the promise was wrapped in enough weasel words that he can sign it, and claim to be honest, because it's changed since he made the promise.
FWIW, knowledge of small integers seems to be innate. Arithmetic much less so. The number line would appear to fall in the category of arithmetic.
Please note that many languages, including English, used to use different counting systems for different kinds of things. (Just where the separation occurs appears to be a cultural variable.) So even though small integers are innate, counting "things" as opposed to "the same kind of thing"s doesn't appear to be innate.
Well, actually we know that most dark matter doesn't strongly interact even with other dark matter. This makes dark matter life quite unlikely. Unless, of course, there's lots of different kinds of dark matter, and SOME KINDS of it interacts strongly with others kinds which are a part of the same set of kinds of dark matter. This possibility can't be eliminated with currently available data.
Actually, thinking about it, perhaps there are several different disjoint sets of kinds of dark matter, each set of which interacts strongly with other members of the same set, and not with other sets...and we could be in one of those sets, as far as members of other sets are concerned. I don't know enough to know whether this is consistent with existing data or not. Though I do know that it's not one of the currently accepted theories.
It is, indeed, quite likely that we are unique. This isn't an argument that life doesn't exist elsewhere, just that it will be different. And we can't readily put bounds around how different. (Though I believe that carbon based life will be overwhelmingly dominant. But I'm less certain about liquid water. We really need to take a better look at Titan before I commit myself. It seems quite plausible that low gravity worlds with ammonia or methane based chemistries would be more common than earthlike worlds.)
FWIW, I expect that there *IS* life on Venus. Quite likely it originated on Earth. It's true I'm talking about microbes that live in the atmosphere, rather than down at the surface, but that doesn't keep it from being life.
Various chemistry teachers have said that. Carbon atoms have an unusual ability at linking together in various ways to form large, complex, molecules. Silicon, e.g., just isn't in it. (Not that silicon is an impossibility at considerably higher temperatures, but it would also require a considerably stronger gravity, as it needs to work through silicones rather than via Si-Si linkages.)
IOW, Carbon based life has lots of advantages, and it more likely in more environments than other possibilities. It is true, however, that our current chemistry is tuned to the temperatures and pressures of our current planetary home. Colder planets would need a more reactive chemistry, and hotter planets would need a less reactive one. Also that hotter planets need to have a higher gravity, so that they don't lose elements essential to making the things that we have been able to construct. If it can't hold onto Hydrogen, then a totally different chemistry is needed. For low gravity planets that means being able to at least hold onto water.
So the most likely silicon based life that I can think of is based around integrated circuits.
If "he" were "real", he'd have more problems than that. Just imagine what would cause an omnipotent intelligence to have that kind of raving paranoia.
FWIW, I'm quite convinced that gods are real, but also that their reality is as a kind of mental sublayer roughly analogous to Jungian archetypes. Think of them as the microcoding of the minds, not only of humans, but of at least all mammals. Occasionally we externalize these mental processes, and they can be *extremely* impressive. But don't expect them to "think", merely to make assertions which are directly experienced with *very* strong emotional charge. Some of them assert that they are omnipotent, but asserting something doesn't make it true.
P.S.: Various mystical traditions contain exercises which increase the probability that you will experience such an encounter, but it can also happen by "accident". If you do, the encounter that you experience will be in harmony with your model of the world (though it may drastically reorient it). Thus I experienced, at one time, an "entity" telling me that it would protect me, and to prove it, I should remove my hands from the steering wheel. (I was driving down the freeway at the time.) The emotional charge was such that I would have been quite willing to do so. My ingrained skepticism was such that I didn't put matters to the test. But then I had already discovered, in earlier "training", that "The gods make mistakes!". (This was quite a painful realization, so much so that even a couple of decades later recalling it brings my eyes to the edge of tears.) N.B.: Simple intellectualization will not prepare you for a direct encounter with a god. The encounter _WILL_ overwhelm your emotions.
Unh...what percentage of cattle do you think are tested? It was far lower than the medical opinions consider safe before the number of meat inspectors was cut.
OTOH, I'm not really sure that this is a serious problem. The transmission rate is too near the rate of spontaneous generation (via protein misfolding). But...
The problem is that the disease that it causes, if it causes it, has no effective cure. And it destroys the brain slowly.
Given the uncertainty, I *do* consider it a health problem. Also a business problem, of course. And the proper solution is to increase the number of food inspectors AND to insulate them from contact with the food processor company management. This would not only address Mad Cow Disease, but would address many other less publicized problems.
If the US were a democracy, then you would have a valid point. It isn't. Having two parties instead of one doesn't make it one, certainly not on any issue in which the two are in agreement.
Perhaps you are from a smaller place, so perhaps I should add that just about nobody knows anything about those candidates that hasn't been made public.
I will agree that if more people paid more attention to the publicly available information, they would be less surprised when the candidate they voted for "betrays" them. E.g., Obama voted for FISA while he was running for president. So I wasn't surprised that he's been an authoritarian president. He may still have been better than McCain would have been. He probably is, but there's no way to know for certain. But the SYSTEM DESIGN is corrupt. It's designed to foster corruption, and it is quite successful, most of the time. It does ensure that only the two wealthiest (in backing) candidates have a reasonable chance of being elected over any sizable area.
Y...One can hardly be held morally responsible for the acts of others over whom one does not exercise agency or coercive influence.
Sorry. That statement is historically incorrect. The accurate statement would be: "One should hardly be held morally responsible for the acts of others over whom one does not exercise agency or coercive influence"
You've got a point, unfortunately, it isn't a good one.
I'll agree that there isn't anyone who deserved to be trusted in this way, but it's for damn sure that you can't trust nobody, which is what we've currently got.
Please note that what was proposed was a rating, not a permission. And this, too, I agree with. The FDA shouldn't have the right to prohibit the sale of things. They have repeatedly abused this against many different kinds of things. I don't even believe that they should be allowed to prohibit the sale of drugs. What they should be able to do is to publish ratings, and require that those ratings be displayed when the product is sold or advertised. It's proper that people be informed of what the official view of a product is, even though I don't believe that the government should have the right to prohibit sales. Advertising, OTOH, should be more strictly regulated, with it being forbidden to advertise some things. (Not to sell, purchase, transport across state lines, or any of that other foofarah, Just paid advertising.)
There's this problem that we think we know the number of baryons that existed in the first few nano-seconds, because of the cosmic abundance of Helium and Lithium. Black holes aren't particular about not swallowing baryons (in fact, they rather prefer to), so this causes problems. If Dark Matter is matter, it must be non-baryonic matter, or we need to redo LOTS of calculations...which is going to mean a major theoretical shift, and nobody has come up with a reasonable theory to shift to. It's much easier if it's not matter at all, but some other effect. (Maybe gravity interacts with gravitational fields at long distances?) Otherwise Dark Matter needs to be non-baryonic matter, and then you've still got Dark Energy to explain.
Slashdot Mirror
It's even less clear than that. Some genetic conditions can be corrected, but we aren't yet willing to do it. We will be, and then any trait that people don't like will be "edited out" at the gene level rather than at the individual level. And genetic change is SLOW!!! Social change is much faster. But social tastes change quickly, so we're going to end up with an artificially maintained pseudo-Lamarkian evolution.
I estimate 10 years before this is in full swing, which is a lot less than one generation.
You proposal is also something that would be a bad idea. Better than the current patent system is faint praise indeed.
Patents should not be grants of monopoly. There should be compulsory licensing as "reasonable" rates. And they last too long. The cost of licensing should be based on the cost of preliminary research, and decrease to nominal once twice the initial investment has been recovered. Or perhaps three times. Certainly no more than ten times. And, of course, both expenses and repayment need to be figured on an after tax basis. And false starts count as part of the expenses of development.
Additionally, certain kinds of patents should just never be issued. I'm thinking of:
1) Software patents. (Use copyrights instead.)
2) Business method patents
3) Patents on things found in nature (e.g., genes or molecules, but also animals & trees). N.B.: This doesn't prevent patents on artificially created animals with custom genes.
N.B.: Saying that patent law is badly broken doesn't imply that, e.g., copyright law isn't. But that's a separate discussion.
FWIW, I'm on record as saying that the current patent system is so bad that we would be best served by repealing all existing patents laws and starting from scratch. This doesn't mean I consider that a good approach, just better than what we've got.
No. This "solution" is worse than the problem it attempts to solve. (And it wouldn't solve the problem it claims to anyway.)
The legal system is, indeed, broken, but that doesn't mean the patent system isn't broken.
OTOH, this proposed fix is worse than the current problems.
That there is a real concern doesn't justify this step. If a country ignores patents, then they will ignore patents whether issued or not. So just ban importation of those items. You can't do anything more anyway. This one has too many bones in it.
And while that is clearly unconstitutional, that is dealt with by making it impossible to challenge in court, so you can't appeal.
Not that with our current supreme court that would offer much hope. But you can't even try.
Sir John Harington:
"Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason?
Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason."
It's not a all clear that once you have moved off a climate pattern, you will ever move back into it, even if the original cause is removed. Climate patterns tend to be unstable equilibria, and as such if you move from one to another, the most probable retro-trajectory may well not be back to where you started. Think of it as similar to billiards played on a table with LOTS of shallow indentations...on the tops of shallow hills with gradual sides. That's a much oversimplified model, of course ... for one thing it's wrong to depict a climate pattern as even semi-stable, but it does tend to oscillate around the same set of attractors. Move it slightly away from where it is, and it may be more attracted to a different set of attractors.
CAUTION: I am not a climate scientist. Don't take these models too seriously.
OTOH, climates are built out of an accumulation of local weather patterns over both time an space. So lots of wind farms over lots of area can, indeed, be expected to change both the weather and the climate. But note that this is true for ALL forms of energy generation. You can only pick what seems the best choice. Wind farms convert motion to heat within the system without adding additional energy. This may well have LESS effect, but it will still have effect. Slowing the winds for on thing. (But you need LOTS of wind farms to slow the winds very much, and skyscrapers may be just as effective at that. Or planting a forest. Both cause added friction of wind against surfaces, converting motion into heat.)
Anyone who is surprised that enough windfarms might affect the climate is just not thinking. Even paving roads affects the climate, and how it affects the climate depends on what color the pavement is.
No. You are missing the point. It has evolved just as much as anyone else, just in a different direction.
The importance is that this split off a long time ago, so any conserved commonalities will be very significant.
FWIW, the ancestral organism can't have been an oxygen breather. Didn't check whether this was or not. But just being anaerobic doesn't mean you haven't been evolving. And this one's even a eukaryote, so it's not as far divergent as, say, a blue-green algae.
OTOH, the headline appears to drasticly oversell. This is just a protozoa that they've sequenced the genome of (according to the link). Apparently they've had problems getting enough DNA before now. And I suspect the reporter didn't really understand what she was being told. Either that, or she just likes to write down to her audience.
Believe it if you will. Based on past history I'm not at all willing to accept that Obama's honest about *this* veto. And even if he, technically, is, the promise was wrapped in enough weasel words that he can sign it, and claim to be honest, because it's changed since he made the promise.
FWIW, I believe that any system strong enough to prove it's consistency can also prove it's inconsistency. (I believe that's one of Gödel’s theorems.)
FWIW, knowledge of small integers seems to be innate. Arithmetic much less so. The number line would appear to fall in the category of arithmetic.
Please note that many languages, including English, used to use different counting systems for different kinds of things. (Just where the separation occurs appears to be a cultural variable.) So even though small integers are innate, counting "things" as opposed to "the same kind of thing"s doesn't appear to be innate.
Well, actually we know that most dark matter doesn't strongly interact even with other dark matter. This makes dark matter life quite unlikely. Unless, of course, there's lots of different kinds of dark matter, and SOME KINDS of it interacts strongly with others kinds which are a part of the same set of kinds of dark matter. This possibility can't be eliminated with currently available data.
Actually, thinking about it, perhaps there are several different disjoint sets of kinds of dark matter, each set of which interacts strongly with other members of the same set, and not with other sets...and we could be in one of those sets, as far as members of other sets are concerned. I don't know enough to know whether this is consistent with existing data or not. Though I do know that it's not one of the currently accepted theories.
It is, indeed, quite likely that we are unique. This isn't an argument that life doesn't exist elsewhere, just that it will be different. And we can't readily put bounds around how different. (Though I believe that carbon based life will be overwhelmingly dominant. But I'm less certain about liquid water. We really need to take a better look at Titan before I commit myself. It seems quite plausible that low gravity worlds with ammonia or methane based chemistries would be more common than earthlike worlds.)
FWIW, I expect that there *IS* life on Venus. Quite likely it originated on Earth. It's true I'm talking about microbes that live in the atmosphere, rather than down at the surface, but that doesn't keep it from being life.
We don't know that communication is impossible. But the latency would surely be severe...unless we're really wrong about how things work.
I'd say more lack of imagination than conceit (though I could be wrong). See Clarke's first law.
Various chemistry teachers have said that. Carbon atoms have an unusual ability at linking together in various ways to form large, complex, molecules. Silicon, e.g., just isn't in it. (Not that silicon is an impossibility at considerably higher temperatures, but it would also require a considerably stronger gravity, as it needs to work through silicones rather than via Si-Si linkages.)
IOW, Carbon based life has lots of advantages, and it more likely in more environments than other possibilities. It is true, however, that our current chemistry is tuned to the temperatures and pressures of our current planetary home. Colder planets would need a more reactive chemistry, and hotter planets would need a less reactive one. Also that hotter planets need to have a higher gravity, so that they don't lose elements essential to making the things that we have been able to construct. If it can't hold onto Hydrogen, then a totally different chemistry is needed. For low gravity planets that means being able to at least hold onto water.
So the most likely silicon based life that I can think of is based around integrated circuits.
If "he" were "real", he'd have more problems than that. Just imagine what would cause an omnipotent intelligence to have that kind of raving paranoia.
FWIW, I'm quite convinced that gods are real, but also that their reality is as a kind of mental sublayer roughly analogous to Jungian archetypes. Think of them as the microcoding of the minds, not only of humans, but of at least all mammals. Occasionally we externalize these mental processes, and they can be *extremely* impressive. But don't expect them to "think", merely to make assertions which are directly experienced with *very* strong emotional charge. Some of them assert that they are omnipotent, but asserting something doesn't make it true.
P.S.: Various mystical traditions contain exercises which increase the probability that you will experience such an encounter, but it can also happen by "accident". If you do, the encounter that you experience will be in harmony with your model of the world (though it may drastically reorient it). Thus I experienced, at one time, an "entity" telling me that it would protect me, and to prove it, I should remove my hands from the steering wheel. (I was driving down the freeway at the time.) The emotional charge was such that I would have been quite willing to do so. My ingrained skepticism was such that I didn't put matters to the test. But then I had already discovered, in earlier "training", that "The gods make mistakes!". (This was quite a painful realization, so much so that even a couple of decades later recalling it brings my eyes to the edge of tears.)
N.B.: Simple intellectualization will not prepare you for a direct encounter with a god. The encounter _WILL_ overwhelm your emotions.
Unh...what percentage of cattle do you think are tested? It was far lower than the medical opinions consider safe before the number of meat inspectors was cut.
OTOH, I'm not really sure that this is a serious problem. The transmission rate is too near the rate of spontaneous generation (via protein misfolding). But...
The problem is that the disease that it causes, if it causes it, has no effective cure. And it destroys the brain slowly.
Given the uncertainty, I *do* consider it a health problem. Also a business problem, of course. And the proper solution is to increase the number of food inspectors AND to insulate them from contact with the food processor company management. This would not only address Mad Cow Disease, but would address many other less publicized problems.
If the US were a democracy, then you would have a valid point. It isn't. Having two parties instead of one doesn't make it one, certainly not on any issue in which the two are in agreement.
Perhaps you are from a smaller place, so perhaps I should add that just about nobody knows anything about those candidates that hasn't been made public.
I will agree that if more people paid more attention to the publicly available information, they would be less surprised when the candidate they voted for "betrays" them. E.g., Obama voted for FISA while he was running for president. So I wasn't surprised that he's been an authoritarian president. He may still have been better than McCain would have been. He probably is, but there's no way to know for certain. But the SYSTEM DESIGN is corrupt. It's designed to foster corruption, and it is quite successful, most of the time. It does ensure that only the two wealthiest (in backing) candidates have a reasonable chance of being elected over any sizable area.
So if there are two candidates, and you vote for the one who promises to end an injustice, then you are responsible when he doesn't end it?
That statement is itself an act of injustice.
Y...One can hardly be held morally responsible for the acts of others over whom one does not exercise agency or coercive influence.
Sorry. That statement is historically incorrect. The accurate statement would be: "One should hardly be held morally responsible for the acts of others over whom one does not exercise agency or coercive influence"
You've got a point, unfortunately, it isn't a good one.
I'll agree that there isn't anyone who deserved to be trusted in this way, but it's for damn sure that you can't trust nobody, which is what we've currently got.
Please note that what was proposed was a rating, not a permission. And this, too, I agree with. The FDA shouldn't have the right to prohibit the sale of things. They have repeatedly abused this against many different kinds of things. I don't even believe that they should be allowed to prohibit the sale of drugs. What they should be able to do is to publish ratings, and require that those ratings be displayed when the product is sold or advertised. It's proper that people be informed of what the official view of a product is, even though I don't believe that the government should have the right to prohibit sales. Advertising, OTOH, should be more strictly regulated, with it being forbidden to advertise some things. (Not to sell, purchase, transport across state lines, or any of that other foofarah, Just paid advertising.)
There's this problem that we think we know the number of baryons that existed in the first few nano-seconds, because of the cosmic abundance of Helium and Lithium. Black holes aren't particular about not swallowing baryons (in fact, they rather prefer to), so this causes problems. If Dark Matter is matter, it must be non-baryonic matter, or we need to redo LOTS of calculations...which is going to mean a major theoretical shift, and nobody has come up with a reasonable theory to shift to. It's much easier if it's not matter at all, but some other effect. (Maybe gravity interacts with gravitational fields at long distances?) Otherwise Dark Matter needs to be non-baryonic matter, and then you've still got Dark Energy to explain.