The importance of his work is still largely unrecognized, as suggested by the fact that he still hasn't received the Nobel prize (and I firmly believe he deserves it)
Deserves it for what? The metagenomics research was pretty cool (but not really revolutionary), and the synthetic biology work is also very neat, but it hasn't really changed the field. His contribution to genome sequencing was far less than many of his fans would like to think; the biggest impact was forcing the public project to reorganize along more industrial lines.
who 'discovered' the Higgs Boson? It was thousands of people all over the world, wasn't it?
Correct. All of the projects mentioned by the GP are similar in this respect, in that they required large investments of capital and manpower, and were the collective contribution of many very smart people. There is certainly plenty of groundbreaking science left to be done, but the idea of a lone patent clerk coming up with a huge breakthrough seems laughable now. Perhaps some genius will manage to invent cold fusion in his garage, but I doubt it.
I recommend reading "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" for a good overview of how the field of physics changed in the 20th century. At the start, the experiments being done were almost simple enough for a present-day undergraduate lab course, but many led to enormous advances. By 1940, the field had advanced to the point where massive government investment was required to perform the experiments, and that's where it stayed.
My understanding was that folding at home was brute force taking these sequences, testing all possible conformations, and seeing what was the lowest energy conformation.
Incorrect. Folding@Home uses proteins whose structure (and usually function) is already exceptionally well characterized. That's how they can tell if their simulation actually worked. The point of the project isn't to predict the structure, because that's still extraordinarily difficult to do by purely physical simulation (as opposed to more "knowledge-based" methods like Rosetta), but to explain the physical process.
Also note that although there is an immense number of uncharacterized proteins, there are many fewer actual folds. What will eventually happen is that we experimentally determine the structure of representatives of every family of proteins, and the rest can be guessed (within some reasonable margin of error) by homology modeling, which is quite a bit simpler than predicting a truly unknown structure.
Code can be the matter of a paper - and by releasing it, you may break the "novelty" aspect and never publish anything.
This has not been my experience - we release new features almost as soon as the code is written, sometimes years in advance of publishing anything, and we have never had a problem getting the eventual articles accepted. If anything it is beneficial to release early and often, because then we get credit for having come up with the idea first. Many of our competitors do the same. Again, it may depend on the field, but putting source code online is generally not counted as prior publication by journals.
And there is just as much that is either closed-source, or not redistributable. It depends on the institution and the researchers involved - ultimately the professors have the most say in this; grad students and postdocs will do whatever they're told.
And Bayh-Dole doesn't apply outside the US.
Most other nations which can afford to fund basic research have similar provisions - I know this because all of our competitors outside the US have licenses which are equally restrictive (sometimes more so).
I should clarify that my comments primarily refer to what I'd call "computational scientists", where developing software really is a primary goal. I'm not talking about some statistics professor and his collection of godawful MATLAB scripts; in some cases these are large software packages with worldwide user bases. In my field it is very tempting to try to extract money from pharmaceutical companies, and some people do very well this way.
Submission of biochemical structures too early, prior to publication, can also result in similar things.
I can also confirm that this happens occasionally. Biologists are also reluctant to describe unpublished results at meetings unless the article is already accepted and scheduled for publication - it's a real shame, but I understand why they're reluctant. However, there is no requirement that they reveal any data before publishing; it's not like every crystal structure automatically goes into the PDB before they even get a chance to write (which really would be catastrophic).
You're doing it wrong then. Just because you release source doesn't mean you have to maintain it.
When I say "users", I do not mean "other programmers", I mean scientists who generally don't know a fucking thing about programming, except maybe rudimentary FORTRAN (which is not what I use), and are busy with their own research which does not leave them any time to fix other peoples' software. They are utterly incompetent to maintain our code for us, and the only people besides us who are qualified are our competitors, who are either too busy with their own projects, or wouldn't pour water on us if we were on fire. Who else are the users going to send email to when something breaks, if not us?
In fact much of our code really is open-source and available on the web, so anyone who wanted to fix it would be welcome to. In practice we have a few external developers whom we work with, who have been very valuable - but the bulk of user support has to be done by us. Your response indicates that you've never had to support a non-technical user, because if you did, you'd realize what a clusterfuck it is.
I've had people ask to use software I've made and I've regretted giving it to them because I then am obligated to explain to them how to use it.
As someone who writes academic software specifically for distribution, I can confirm that this is a gigantic time suck, and one which the funding agencies generally do not support. We are judged both on scientific innovation and publication record, and on whether our tools are adopted by the community - but the latter frequently interferes with the former. I basically wake up to an inbox full of bug reports and feature requests every morning, and I have to find time to deal with these in addition to all of the actual science I'm supposed to be working on. Despite being an obvious sign of success (people actually use our software!), it's become so discouraging that it helped drive out one of my (very competent) ex-coworkers.
Most academics are under tremendous pressure to keep anything of potential commercial value closed; releasing code as open-source generally requires permission from above. (In fact, I know of one professor of biology who had to fight to get a line in his contract explicitly allowing him to open-source everything.) And it's not like most of them need encouragement; none of us are getting rich off NIH grants (well, most of us aren't) and we effectively hit a salary ceiling early in our careers, so the prospect of a few thousand dollars extra in licensing revenue is more than most can resist. In several cases that I'm aware of, the licensing money is used to support research activities - sometimes enough to pay for an entire employee, or pay for meetings that wouldn't happen otherwise. Note that in many cases the code itself is still available, just not under a license that allows distribution, which usually makes it difficult or impossible for anyone who wants to build on your work to do so.
Of course it's not always this simple - junior researchers have very little control, so many of us end up releasing code under proprietary licenses when we'd much rather open-source everything. I also know of many cases where paranoia and competitiveness, rather than avarice, are at fault - in these cases, the code itself is hidden and the software released as binary-only (which as far as I'm concerned should be unacceptable for anything published in a peer-reviewed journal, regardless of the license used). Regardless, there are simply too many incentives to retain full control.
This is a completely idiotic situation, of course, and it has been holding back science for years - I know of multiple cases where university researchers were effectively doing R&D for private companies (not always willingly!) with very little in return. I've also seen researchers prevent widespread adoption of their work (and hamper their career advancement) because of tight-fisted behavior. One asshole even charges other academics to obtain his software, with the result that some people avoid using it altogether. Frankly, since I have to deal with this bullshit on a near-daily basis, as far as I'm concerned a repeal of the Bayh-Dole act (and its equivalents in Europe), at least where software is concerned, would be a huge leap forward for academic computational research. The bonus I get from licensing fees is simply not worth the trouble and missed opportunities.
The real question is should Superintellignece be developed first by the private sector (Google) or by the public sector (Government)? Who should get it first and why?
The one without guns and nukes, of course. I'm not a reflexive defender of the private sector versus the government (hell, I'm employed by the government), but I'm hardly so naive as to think that just because the government creates something, it's "mine", any more than it would be if Google created it. If the US government invents superintelligence it will probably just use it to spy on American citizens.
both Christianity and Judaism stipulate the killing of an apostate. It just isn't practiced any more
What the formal doctrines of other religions say is irrelevant, unless there are laws against conversion in majority-Christian nations. The only person in this discussion advocating the killing of apostates is you.
The way you're looking at this is that people change their religion regularly.
I said nothing of the sort; as an atheist I simply don't care whether people change their religion or not. It is their choice, and should remain so, and nobody else should have any say in the matter. And again, if you want to convince the rest of us that Islam isn't a backwards, medieval, totalitarian philosophy, your views on apostates will not help your case.
You can disagree with apostasy from Islam being strictly prohibited under an Islamic state, and it may even be contrary to some "universal freedoms" formulated by people, but it's hardly murder.
I call it murder - it's no different if the state does it than if an individual does it. The punishment should fit the crime, and victimless crimes shouldn't be punished at all (although the Western world is still figuring this out). What about this concept is so difficult for the Islamic world to grasp?
By the same token, if I disagree with the killing of Osama bin Laden, I could call the soldiers who did it murderers.
I don't approve of the death penalty even for people like Osama. But he at least was responsible for many deaths (forget 9/11 for a moment - what about the 200-odd innocent Africans killed in the US embassy attacks in 1998?), and so his fate wasn't disproportionate to his actions. Killing someone for making a personal religious decision that you disagree with is fucking sick.
The wars that aren't religious killed more people, so non-religious wars are worse, so religion is better than atheism?
Nowhere did I say that. I was simply agreeing with the GP that the Enlightenment, and accompanying moves towards more secular (or rational) government and society, did not bring an end to irrational slaughter. Obviously the improved technology increased the scale, but the point was that religion isn't the only (or most common, or most destructive) excuse for mass murder. The medieval Islamic states started many holy wars, and were on the defense against another set of holy wars (the Crusades), but what ultimately destroyed the caliphate was the Mongol invasion, and the Mongols were famously tolerant of other religions. (Just not other governments.)
Oh, and by the way, putting someone to death for apostasy - regardless of their intentions, religious background, etc. - is completely incompatible with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It's no defense to plead that such a penalty is hardly ever applied (although I can recall multiple cases of apostates being threatened with death just in the last few years), since such laws will by their very existence prevent the free exercise of religion.
Yeah, see, if you wanted to defend Islam on this thread, you could start by not making psychopathic statements like this. People like you have no business in a modern, liberal society, and it's silly to expect everyone else to respect your beliefs (or your person, for that matter) when you actively advocate murder in their name.
People may believe anything under an Islamic state, there's just an issue with people converting to Islam with the intention of fighting it from the inside. And the simplest way to deter people from doing so is such a law.
The assumption this makes is that anyone who converts out of Islam had started out with the intention of fighting from the inside, whatever that means. What about someone who was born and raised as a Muslim, then converts to Christianity? And regardless of whether this assumption is unfair, the activities which you claim the law proscribes are also well within the modern (or at least Western) conception of religious freedom. The papacy can certainly excommunicate the nuns calling for female priests, but it certainly cannot have them prosecuted for doing so - not in any country worth living in, anyway.
First, history shows you that lots of bad things happened after the Enlightenment. Remember the Reign of Terror, Napoleon, and several iterations of French republics.
If we're not just limiting ourselves to France, we can also add World War I, World War II, and Communist revolutions. At least the latter two resulted in more slaughter than any single religiously-motivated conflict that I'm aware of.
OT, but I've always wondered about the use of that spelling among the more, um, fevered anti-Islamists. Is it some conscious attempt to revert to old-fashioned paternalistic, snobbish Orientalist viewpoints, as a deliberate slap in the face? Or have they simply not read any books or articles published more recently than 1950? It's a very peculiar affectation.
Close and remove the mosques, deport any thecrate who states anything countary to our laws. Simply get aggressive.
Speaking as a non-religious US citizen, I'd prefer to deport you first.
We would not tolerate priests or the pope stating in a thecratic context what is said by these islamics.
We do tolerate this, all the time. You can find Christians in the US who are every bit as nutty and prone to violent revenge fantasies as the Islamists - try googling "Christian reconstructionists". They rarely carry out their violent revenge fantasies, fortunately, but you're talking about deporting people for their views and public statements, not violent actions. I'd be pretty happy if we didn't have any religious nutters in this country, actually, but I'm even happier not having to worry about being locked up or thrown out because I express a viewpoint someone else disagrees with.
This is quite a bit different from the most evangelical Christian sect where it is the job of evangelicals to preach the "word of God" so the non-believers can choose to accept it. If they don't accept it, well, they are damned but that isn't the job of the evangelicals - it is left up to God.
While this may be true in modern, more-or-less secular liberal democracies, it is not even universally the case in the present day - the most egregious example that comes to mind is Uganda's attempt to legislate the death penalty for homosexuality (led by fundamentalist Christians). And as my fellow whiny atheists never tire of pointing out, most of European history was consumed by religious intolerance and outright violence. (Which doesn't excuse majority-Muslim nations from being several hundred years behind the curve, of course.)
Does that mean we will see stonings and beheadings on the streets of the USA? No, but there will be a lot of not-so-subtle pressure for communities to become 100% Muslim or 100% non-Muslim. Then we will have a lot of self-reinforcement of these kinds of beliefs.
Many parts of the US still have such attitudes but from the Christian perspective, and if you go back in time a few decades or more, you would have found the pressure to conform even more pervasive. Again, this doesn't excuse such behavior or make it compatible with our laws, but it's hardly unique to Muslims (or the religious, for that matter).
We need people like that medicated or even committed, not protected because of the particular brand of vitriol they spew.
Why stop with the religious? There are plenty of other belief systems that seem kooky or outright insane to many of our compatriots. I for one would start with Marxism and Objectivism, but even more mainstream views get plenty of vitriol - I'm pretty sure there's a bumper sticker that says "Liberalism is a mental disorder". Considering all of the gridlock and bad policy that results from having such a diverse range of views, our species clearly needs to medicate or commit anyone whose views do not mesh well with the "majority" viewpoint, however that's defined.
I think I'll stick to our current anarchic system, thank you. A state that declares the overtly religious to be mentally ill and deprives them of basic civil rights can do the same to me or anyone else who gets in the way. Not unlike most Islamist regimes, ironically.
But in the real world, companies focus on what makes business sense. Why should the NIH grants/Medical R&D focus on ALS when there are a lot more deaths due to other causes?
Actually, a lot of the basic biomedical and technological groundwork that would be required to treat a condition like ALS using the science-fiction fantasies of the GP would be immensely profitable. If we could really understand how stimuli get in and out of the brain, and come up with neural-computer interfaces that not only restore full mobility to the patients, but allow direct control of computers, the potential applications far exceed treatment of ALS. Most psychiatric disorders would start to become treatable at their root causes (instead of the incredibly crude symptom-based treatment we use today), along with other neurodegenerative disorders, which are already a huge market and will only become more so as we accumulate elderly Western patients. But that's just a start; if we could wire human brains directly to computers, we could vastly increase our productivity, decrease our communications latency, and start to re-define what it means to become human. (It would also have military applications, which is why DARPA is now interested too.) The fact that we haven't done so yet isn't an indication that we're lazy, or that our priorities are misplaced - it just means that human neurobiology is an extraordinarily difficult subject. It really doesn't help when your primary research organism is sentient and has a 20-year-plus reproductive cycle.
Seriously, the entire field of neurobiology is essentially dedicated to figuring out the answers to these kind of questions, and there are thousands of researchers trying to understand neurodegenerative disorders. Everyone would be thrilled if it were as easy as the AC suggests.
Seriously man, quit making excuses. Biomedical technology for the disabled is at least 30 years behind CONSUMER technology and at least 50 years behind where it should be.
Designing general-purpose silicon-based microelectronics technology from the ground up is vastly easier (and currently, vastly more profitable) than deducing the function of an organic, naturally evolved, and vastly more sophisticated neural system. The fact that you would make such a comparison proves that you don't know a fucking thing about either. Try spending a decade doing biomedical research and then let us know how easy you think thought-controlled electronics should be.
A given layout is mandated by the journal, and putting the paper into that layout is done by the authors, not the publisher.
This is not usually the case in biomedical sciences - the layout is created by the (paid) journal editorial staff. However, it's totally unclear to me why this is even necessary, for several reasons:
1) The pretty layout adds nothing to the scientific content of the paper - all it does is make it look pretty and cram it into as few printed pages as possible.
2) The fancy layout adds content restrictions, like limit on number of pages or figures, that are detrimental to clear scientific writing.
3) For high-profile journals, the majority of the content is actually in the online supplemental material anyway, and not much work goes into preparing that, since it will never be printed (by the journal).
4) Many journals publish accepted manuscripts online as soon as they're ready for the actual publication process, which usually means just posting a PDF of the Word (or whatever) document that the authors prepared. So why even bother with the typesetting?
Slashdot Mirror
The importance of his work is still largely unrecognized, as suggested by the fact that he still hasn't received the Nobel prize (and I firmly believe he deserves it)
Deserves it for what? The metagenomics research was pretty cool (but not really revolutionary), and the synthetic biology work is also very neat, but it hasn't really changed the field. His contribution to genome sequencing was far less than many of his fans would like to think; the biggest impact was forcing the public project to reorganize along more industrial lines.
who 'discovered' the Higgs Boson? It was thousands of people all over the world, wasn't it?
Correct. All of the projects mentioned by the GP are similar in this respect, in that they required large investments of capital and manpower, and were the collective contribution of many very smart people. There is certainly plenty of groundbreaking science left to be done, but the idea of a lone patent clerk coming up with a huge breakthrough seems laughable now. Perhaps some genius will manage to invent cold fusion in his garage, but I doubt it.
I recommend reading "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" for a good overview of how the field of physics changed in the 20th century. At the start, the experiments being done were almost simple enough for a present-day undergraduate lab course, but many led to enormous advances. By 1940, the field had advanced to the point where massive government investment was required to perform the experiments, and that's where it stayed.
My understanding was that folding at home was brute force taking these sequences, testing all possible conformations, and seeing what was the lowest energy conformation.
Incorrect. Folding@Home uses proteins whose structure (and usually function) is already exceptionally well characterized. That's how they can tell if their simulation actually worked. The point of the project isn't to predict the structure, because that's still extraordinarily difficult to do by purely physical simulation (as opposed to more "knowledge-based" methods like Rosetta), but to explain the physical process.
Also note that although there is an immense number of uncharacterized proteins, there are many fewer actual folds. What will eventually happen is that we experimentally determine the structure of representatives of every family of proteins, and the rest can be guessed (within some reasonable margin of error) by homology modeling, which is quite a bit simpler than predicting a truly unknown structure.
Code can be the matter of a paper - and by releasing it, you may break the "novelty" aspect and never publish anything.
This has not been my experience - we release new features almost as soon as the code is written, sometimes years in advance of publishing anything, and we have never had a problem getting the eventual articles accepted. If anything it is beneficial to release early and often, because then we get credit for having come up with the idea first. Many of our competitors do the same. Again, it may depend on the field, but putting source code online is generally not counted as prior publication by journals.
There is tons of academic open source.
And there is just as much that is either closed-source, or not redistributable. It depends on the institution and the researchers involved - ultimately the professors have the most say in this; grad students and postdocs will do whatever they're told.
And Bayh-Dole doesn't apply outside the US.
Most other nations which can afford to fund basic research have similar provisions - I know this because all of our competitors outside the US have licenses which are equally restrictive (sometimes more so).
I should clarify that my comments primarily refer to what I'd call "computational scientists", where developing software really is a primary goal. I'm not talking about some statistics professor and his collection of godawful MATLAB scripts; in some cases these are large software packages with worldwide user bases. In my field it is very tempting to try to extract money from pharmaceutical companies, and some people do very well this way.
Submission of biochemical structures too early, prior to publication, can also result in similar things.
I can also confirm that this happens occasionally. Biologists are also reluctant to describe unpublished results at meetings unless the article is already accepted and scheduled for publication - it's a real shame, but I understand why they're reluctant. However, there is no requirement that they reveal any data before publishing; it's not like every crystal structure automatically goes into the PDB before they even get a chance to write (which really would be catastrophic).
You're doing it wrong then. Just because you release source doesn't mean you have to maintain it.
When I say "users", I do not mean "other programmers", I mean scientists who generally don't know a fucking thing about programming, except maybe rudimentary FORTRAN (which is not what I use), and are busy with their own research which does not leave them any time to fix other peoples' software. They are utterly incompetent to maintain our code for us, and the only people besides us who are qualified are our competitors, who are either too busy with their own projects, or wouldn't pour water on us if we were on fire. Who else are the users going to send email to when something breaks, if not us?
In fact much of our code really is open-source and available on the web, so anyone who wanted to fix it would be welcome to. In practice we have a few external developers whom we work with, who have been very valuable - but the bulk of user support has to be done by us. Your response indicates that you've never had to support a non-technical user, because if you did, you'd realize what a clusterfuck it is.
I've had people ask to use software I've made and I've regretted giving it to them because I then am obligated to explain to them how to use it.
As someone who writes academic software specifically for distribution, I can confirm that this is a gigantic time suck, and one which the funding agencies generally do not support. We are judged both on scientific innovation and publication record, and on whether our tools are adopted by the community - but the latter frequently interferes with the former. I basically wake up to an inbox full of bug reports and feature requests every morning, and I have to find time to deal with these in addition to all of the actual science I'm supposed to be working on. Despite being an obvious sign of success (people actually use our software!), it's become so discouraging that it helped drive out one of my (very competent) ex-coworkers.
Most academics are under tremendous pressure to keep anything of potential commercial value closed; releasing code as open-source generally requires permission from above. (In fact, I know of one professor of biology who had to fight to get a line in his contract explicitly allowing him to open-source everything.) And it's not like most of them need encouragement; none of us are getting rich off NIH grants (well, most of us aren't) and we effectively hit a salary ceiling early in our careers, so the prospect of a few thousand dollars extra in licensing revenue is more than most can resist. In several cases that I'm aware of, the licensing money is used to support research activities - sometimes enough to pay for an entire employee, or pay for meetings that wouldn't happen otherwise. Note that in many cases the code itself is still available, just not under a license that allows distribution, which usually makes it difficult or impossible for anyone who wants to build on your work to do so.
Of course it's not always this simple - junior researchers have very little control, so many of us end up releasing code under proprietary licenses when we'd much rather open-source everything. I also know of many cases where paranoia and competitiveness, rather than avarice, are at fault - in these cases, the code itself is hidden and the software released as binary-only (which as far as I'm concerned should be unacceptable for anything published in a peer-reviewed journal, regardless of the license used). Regardless, there are simply too many incentives to retain full control.
This is a completely idiotic situation, of course, and it has been holding back science for years - I know of multiple cases where university researchers were effectively doing R&D for private companies (not always willingly!) with very little in return. I've also seen researchers prevent widespread adoption of their work (and hamper their career advancement) because of tight-fisted behavior. One asshole even charges other academics to obtain his software, with the result that some people avoid using it altogether. Frankly, since I have to deal with this bullshit on a near-daily basis, as far as I'm concerned a repeal of the Bayh-Dole act (and its equivalents in Europe), at least where software is concerned, would be a huge leap forward for academic computational research. The bonus I get from licensing fees is simply not worth the trouble and missed opportunities.
The real question is should Superintellignece be developed first by the private sector (Google) or by the public sector (Government)? Who should get it first and why?
The one without guns and nukes, of course. I'm not a reflexive defender of the private sector versus the government (hell, I'm employed by the government), but I'm hardly so naive as to think that just because the government creates something, it's "mine", any more than it would be if Google created it. If the US government invents superintelligence it will probably just use it to spy on American citizens.
both Christianity and Judaism stipulate the killing of an apostate. It just isn't practiced any more
What the formal doctrines of other religions say is irrelevant, unless there are laws against conversion in majority-Christian nations. The only person in this discussion advocating the killing of apostates is you.
The way you're looking at this is that people change their religion regularly.
I said nothing of the sort; as an atheist I simply don't care whether people change their religion or not. It is their choice, and should remain so, and nobody else should have any say in the matter. And again, if you want to convince the rest of us that Islam isn't a backwards, medieval, totalitarian philosophy, your views on apostates will not help your case.
You can disagree with apostasy from Islam being strictly prohibited under an Islamic state, and it may even be contrary to some "universal freedoms" formulated by people, but it's hardly murder.
I call it murder - it's no different if the state does it than if an individual does it. The punishment should fit the crime, and victimless crimes shouldn't be punished at all (although the Western world is still figuring this out). What about this concept is so difficult for the Islamic world to grasp?
By the same token, if I disagree with the killing of Osama bin Laden, I could call the soldiers who did it murderers.
I don't approve of the death penalty even for people like Osama. But he at least was responsible for many deaths (forget 9/11 for a moment - what about the 200-odd innocent Africans killed in the US embassy attacks in 1998?), and so his fate wasn't disproportionate to his actions. Killing someone for making a personal religious decision that you disagree with is fucking sick.
The wars that aren't religious killed more people, so non-religious wars are worse, so religion is better than atheism?
Nowhere did I say that. I was simply agreeing with the GP that the Enlightenment, and accompanying moves towards more secular (or rational) government and society, did not bring an end to irrational slaughter. Obviously the improved technology increased the scale, but the point was that religion isn't the only (or most common, or most destructive) excuse for mass murder. The medieval Islamic states started many holy wars, and were on the defense against another set of holy wars (the Crusades), but what ultimately destroyed the caliphate was the Mongol invasion, and the Mongols were famously tolerant of other religions. (Just not other governments.)
Oh, and by the way, putting someone to death for apostasy - regardless of their intentions, religious background, etc. - is completely incompatible with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It's no defense to plead that such a penalty is hardly ever applied (although I can recall multiple cases of apostates being threatened with death just in the last few years), since such laws will by their very existence prevent the free exercise of religion.
if he still refuses, he needs to be put to death.
Yeah, see, if you wanted to defend Islam on this thread, you could start by not making psychopathic statements like this. People like you have no business in a modern, liberal society, and it's silly to expect everyone else to respect your beliefs (or your person, for that matter) when you actively advocate murder in their name.
People may believe anything under an Islamic state, there's just an issue with people converting to Islam with the intention of fighting it from the inside. And the simplest way to deter people from doing so is such a law.
The assumption this makes is that anyone who converts out of Islam had started out with the intention of fighting from the inside, whatever that means. What about someone who was born and raised as a Muslim, then converts to Christianity? And regardless of whether this assumption is unfair, the activities which you claim the law proscribes are also well within the modern (or at least Western) conception of religious freedom. The papacy can certainly excommunicate the nuns calling for female priests, but it certainly cannot have them prosecuted for doing so - not in any country worth living in, anyway.
First, history shows you that lots of bad things happened after the Enlightenment. Remember the Reign of Terror, Napoleon, and several iterations of French republics.
If we're not just limiting ourselves to France, we can also add World War I, World War II, and Communist revolutions. At least the latter two resulted in more slaughter than any single religiously-motivated conflict that I'm aware of.
'Moslems' as he likes to spell it
OT, but I've always wondered about the use of that spelling among the more, um, fevered anti-Islamists. Is it some conscious attempt to revert to old-fashioned paternalistic, snobbish Orientalist viewpoints, as a deliberate slap in the face? Or have they simply not read any books or articles published more recently than 1950? It's a very peculiar affectation.
Close and remove the mosques, deport any thecrate who states anything countary to our laws. Simply get aggressive.
Speaking as a non-religious US citizen, I'd prefer to deport you first.
We would not tolerate priests or the pope stating in a thecratic context what is said by these islamics.
We do tolerate this, all the time. You can find Christians in the US who are every bit as nutty and prone to violent revenge fantasies as the Islamists - try googling "Christian reconstructionists". They rarely carry out their violent revenge fantasies, fortunately, but you're talking about deporting people for their views and public statements, not violent actions. I'd be pretty happy if we didn't have any religious nutters in this country, actually, but I'm even happier not having to worry about being locked up or thrown out because I express a viewpoint someone else disagrees with.
This is quite a bit different from the most evangelical Christian sect where it is the job of evangelicals to preach the "word of God" so the non-believers can choose to accept it. If they don't accept it, well, they are damned but that isn't the job of the evangelicals - it is left up to God.
While this may be true in modern, more-or-less secular liberal democracies, it is not even universally the case in the present day - the most egregious example that comes to mind is Uganda's attempt to legislate the death penalty for homosexuality (led by fundamentalist Christians). And as my fellow whiny atheists never tire of pointing out, most of European history was consumed by religious intolerance and outright violence. (Which doesn't excuse majority-Muslim nations from being several hundred years behind the curve, of course.)
Does that mean we will see stonings and beheadings on the streets of the USA? No, but there will be a lot of not-so-subtle pressure for communities to become 100% Muslim or 100% non-Muslim. Then we will have a lot of self-reinforcement of these kinds of beliefs.
Many parts of the US still have such attitudes but from the Christian perspective, and if you go back in time a few decades or more, you would have found the pressure to conform even more pervasive. Again, this doesn't excuse such behavior or make it compatible with our laws, but it's hardly unique to Muslims (or the religious, for that matter).
You could argue that this is harsh
Not only is it harsh, it is fundamentally incompatible with the modern conception of human rights, in particular "freedom of conscience".
We need people like that medicated or even committed, not protected because of the particular brand of vitriol they spew.
Why stop with the religious? There are plenty of other belief systems that seem kooky or outright insane to many of our compatriots. I for one would start with Marxism and Objectivism, but even more mainstream views get plenty of vitriol - I'm pretty sure there's a bumper sticker that says "Liberalism is a mental disorder". Considering all of the gridlock and bad policy that results from having such a diverse range of views, our species clearly needs to medicate or commit anyone whose views do not mesh well with the "majority" viewpoint, however that's defined.
I think I'll stick to our current anarchic system, thank you. A state that declares the overtly religious to be mentally ill and deprives them of basic civil rights can do the same to me or anyone else who gets in the way. Not unlike most Islamist regimes, ironically.
But in the real world, companies focus on what makes business sense. Why should the NIH grants/Medical R&D focus on ALS when there are a lot more deaths due to other causes?
Actually, a lot of the basic biomedical and technological groundwork that would be required to treat a condition like ALS using the science-fiction fantasies of the GP would be immensely profitable. If we could really understand how stimuli get in and out of the brain, and come up with neural-computer interfaces that not only restore full mobility to the patients, but allow direct control of computers, the potential applications far exceed treatment of ALS. Most psychiatric disorders would start to become treatable at their root causes (instead of the incredibly crude symptom-based treatment we use today), along with other neurodegenerative disorders, which are already a huge market and will only become more so as we accumulate elderly Western patients. But that's just a start; if we could wire human brains directly to computers, we could vastly increase our productivity, decrease our communications latency, and start to re-define what it means to become human. (It would also have military applications, which is why DARPA is now interested too.) The fact that we haven't done so yet isn't an indication that we're lazy, or that our priorities are misplaced - it just means that human neurobiology is an extraordinarily difficult subject. It really doesn't help when your primary research organism is sentient and has a 20-year-plus reproductive cycle.
Seriously, the entire field of neurobiology is essentially dedicated to figuring out the answers to these kind of questions, and there are thousands of researchers trying to understand neurodegenerative disorders. Everyone would be thrilled if it were as easy as the AC suggests.
Seriously man, quit making excuses. Biomedical technology for the disabled is at least 30 years behind CONSUMER technology and at least 50 years behind where it should be.
Designing general-purpose silicon-based microelectronics technology from the ground up is vastly easier (and currently, vastly more profitable) than deducing the function of an organic, naturally evolved, and vastly more sophisticated neural system. The fact that you would make such a comparison proves that you don't know a fucking thing about either. Try spending a decade doing biomedical research and then let us know how easy you think thought-controlled electronics should be.
A given layout is mandated by the journal, and putting the paper into that layout is done by the authors, not the publisher.
This is not usually the case in biomedical sciences - the layout is created by the (paid) journal editorial staff. However, it's totally unclear to me why this is even necessary, for several reasons:
1) The pretty layout adds nothing to the scientific content of the paper - all it does is make it look pretty and cram it into as few printed pages as possible.
2) The fancy layout adds content restrictions, like limit on number of pages or figures, that are detrimental to clear scientific writing.
3) For high-profile journals, the majority of the content is actually in the online supplemental material anyway, and not much work goes into preparing that, since it will never be printed (by the journal).
4) Many journals publish accepted manuscripts online as soon as they're ready for the actual publication process, which usually means just posting a PDF of the Word (or whatever) document that the authors prepared. So why even bother with the typesetting?