Growing an entirely new adult leg is probably a bigger job than growing a baby
Indeed, if a leg is about 35-40 pounds and it grows at a rate comparable to a newborn child (pretty darn fast, but not as fast as an agressive tumor), it could take anywhere from 3-8 years, and for most of that time it would probably be too short to be useful.
It would be very important to have superior nutrition during regrowth. You'd have to eat like a serious bodybuilder. The average American's crappy diet would probably take a decade to rebuild the necessary tissue.
On the bright side, you'd get to park in the handicap spaces for a few years.
As an aside, most lizards that regrow tails don't actually regenerate a complete tail. The spine that forms the tail has a fracture plane near the base of the tail that allows it to seperate easily. Once lost the new tail is regrown without bones, its mostly fat.
This is a good point. An arm or leg is a lot of complex tissue to build. I'm not sure how much an average leg weighs, but I'd guess it could be 20% of the mass of an average (not fat) person. Lets say thats 35 pounds. It takes a newborn child anywhere from 3-8 years to put on 35 lean pounds, and they are in a heavy growth phase.
Of course thats an extreme example. I would imagine that most regeneration uses would be much smaller (fingers, hands, organs, skin for burn patients, etc), but any use is likely to be pretty long-term treatment.
Mammals have an adaptive immune system, it takes time for it to identify infections and generate antibodies. A slowly healing open wound might allow infections faster than the immune system can respond.
Simpler animals often have a different type of immune system (sorry, I've forgotten what its called, see the crocodile story) that is less flexible, but much faster to kill off infections since it doesn't have to generate new antibodies for each new invader.
I would expect that a good short term solution for humanity is to leave healing alone and allow the fast scar tissue generation scheme to proceed. Then in the event of injuries that require regeneration the procedure can be initated in a clinical environment where infection can be controlled.
Normal cuts and scrapes would heal naturally, but lost limbs would be regenerated by application of the necessary drugs/suppliments in a clinical environment. (although if regeneration effects stick around for months as in the mice in the article one might have to be careful with cuts and scrapes for a while after a regeneration event.
In the far future it might be possible to redesign our immune systems to be effective with full-time regeneration (this would also probably eliminate almost all of the diseases we currently suffer from).
If things go well, those of us alive today may be able to live several hundred years. Thats great, we'll have the oppertunity to see the result of global climate change!
What I don't understand is that (supposedly) high educated people like can be so incredibly biased, [...] sick and tired of this uncomprehensible juvenile attitude
The tech community does tend to have a lot of smart people, but smart doesn't mean 'mature', 'reasonable' or 'consistant'. Smart people can be just as dumb as everybody else.
The community is made up of lots of very young people (say, under 25) who voice their opinions loudly and frequently. Many of us with more moderate opinions just don't say much about the topic.
I have to agree, as much as I'd like to see original stuff, or more good adaptions of good books, I don't have a problem with a quality remake of a classic. Its fun to see what a new director can do with the story.
I think it would be interesting to film a few hundred hours of footage of some actors doing different scenes, with some related themes, then give the footage to a number of filmmakers and see how they can cut it together to make a movie out of it. Everybody gets the same material, the only factor is their skill and creativity.
One of the major differences is the balance of fats and protien to carbs that we get now. Evidence suggests that for most of human history we ate foods with much less carbohydrates and more fats and protiens.
I'm currently trying out the diet detailed in the book 'Natural Hormonal Enhancement'. It is similar to the Atkins diet in that most of the time it is low carb (20g or less per meal, 5-6 small meals a day), but it also provides for a carb-load meal every few days (as many carbs as you feel like eating, but low fat). About the only difficult restriction is that you should try to stay away from sugary carbs.
Whats kind of cool about it is that after a week or so I mostly stopped wanting sugary carbs. I've got ice cream and candy bars and soda around the house, and they just aren't appealing any more.
One of the basic ideas from the book is that the body should be using fat as a fuel most of the time rather than sugars. We've got this myth that body needs carbs all the time to operate efficently, but the research presented in the book suggests that this is not how our ancestors (human-like and earlier) ate.
The problem with processed and packaged foods is that they are usually high in carbs. Of course carbs are very cheap to manufacture and have a good shelf-life, so they work well with the maufacturing industry. Unsaturated fats, which are actually good food, don't have long shelf lives, and are more expensive, so people who are uninformed about good nutrition or who choose food based on price will tend to choose the wrong foods.
It's an interesting view on eating. The author has backed it up with references to numerous research papers and layman explainations of how the hormonal system works. Not being an expert I can't see any obvious flaws in the work, but it does seem to get results.
they technology they used to build the air frame could not possibly withstand the heat or mechanical stress of reentry at orbital speeds. It'd disintegrate on impact with the upper atmosphere.
I often hear that complaint, but I always wonder about it. The atmosphere gradually thins as altitude increases right? Is it necessary to reenter as fast as the shuttle? Can you slowly decrease the altitude and use the thin atmosphere to slowly loose velocity? Perhaps use the geometry of the vehicle to generate lift to avoid using fuel to maintain altitude while slowing?
I'm assuming that schemes like this either can't work or are simply not economical, or somebody would have tried it on Earth. But I've never seen a good explanination of why they don't work.
IIRC there were some russian flights with both male and female members long before the US did it. As far as I know, nobody has openly claimed the honor though.
The initial test was done by reading the output of one of SUVs on-board computers to determine how much air the engine was using. This test was done at 55MPH with windows up and AC on, and with windows down and AC off. The data indicated that the vehicle used slighly less air, and therefore less fuel, with the windows up and the AC on.
The next test was to be a 55MPH run around the race track to determine which of the test vehicles would run out a full tank of fuel first. Safety officials did not allow this because of concern over tire failure (and possible subsequent vehicle rollover) and possible driver fatigue (maintaining the concentration required to handle the vehicle for the 6-8 hours required for the test would be difficult). Instead the test was run at 45MPH with 5 gallons of fuel.
The power required by the AC on full is constant regardless of the engine speed. The effect of drag on the vehicle is dependent on the speed, and the nearly 20% reduction in speed may have eliminated the slight difference seen in the first test.
Also, the fuel was removed from the vehicles using a hand pump, and it was not shown that any effort was made to clear the fuel from the in-tank pump all the way to the fuel rail in the engine. It is possible that the two vehicles did not have the same amount of fuel.
They did not show that other conditions where checked, such as identical engine parameters (the computers in modern vehicles tune themselves depending on how they are driven, if the two SUVs were driven before the test they might have had different computer parameters, resulting in different fuel consumption rates).
In short, the experiment was very rough, and had little in the way of controls. It is likely that at low speeds it is better to have the windows down, and at high speeds it is better to have them up. Also, it is unlikely that the AC would be run at MAX the entire time, so there would be fuel savings there as well.
The episode was entertaining, and did mostly answer the question "Would a big SUV use more fuel driving at 45mph with the windows open and AC off, or with windows closed and driver shivering under continious MAX AC?"
To test more accurately would have required several trials of the same vehicle at several different speeds with an accurate flow meter on the fuel lines (both delivery and return lines). Throttle position at all times would have to be carefully controlled to avoid any serious variations in computer tuning. Trials would ideally be run in two opposite directions, similar to how land speed records are controlled.
In the demo, right or middle click cancels the drag operation. Occasionally it will get 'stuck' and you won't be able to let go of a document, but its just a demo.
It is good to be able to cancel the drag operation from the mouse, but I wouldn't want to loose the option to use the escape key. It seems pretty natural to me to use both hands (such as for control, alt or shift drag operations, as well as for esc).
Overall though, I'm happy with the hover-over-the-taskbar option windows provides, or with simply having the foresight to make sure my drag target is accessable before I start dragging. I mean, its an event that is all of 4 seconds in the future, surely most users can plan that far ahead?
The obvious answer of course is to combine iron manufacturing and ethanol distillation.
Seriously though, its a shame that some industries have vast amounts of waste heat, while others spend lots of money to buy heat, and there isn't a good way to get 'em together.
The other non-meat parts of cattle are used in a vast number of industries as well. If cattle production were reduced so that the grain they consume could be used for fuel purposes we'd have to find other cheap sources for a huge array of products. It could be done, but it probably would have a noticable impact on prices for a while.
Putting a part that's subject to significant wear and tear into the printer itself suggests to me that their goal is making the printer a disposable device that's consumed and replaced just like printer cartridges are
Depending on your needs, thats already happened. Its cheaper to replace a low-end inkjet with a new low-end inkjet than it is to buy new ink. And if you don't print very often, so the printer lasts a year before you replace it, you get a better quality printer anyway.
I junk them out and pull the motors and encoders and other useful mechanical parts. Saves me money and keeps my parts box full.
Of course these aren't high quality photo printers like what the article is talking about, but it does sound like the day is coming. But only while they are charging $3000 a gallon for the ink.
In the open ocean, they talk about using it on diesel submarines. Sounds great, unless you consider that if they can get oxygen out of the water, they may well try and power the engines underwater as well instead of running on batteries. That would strip huge amounts of oxygen from the water; it's more than a bit concerning.
Don't worry, its already taken care of. The fishing industry has netted out most of the critters that would've used the oxygen anyway.
Personally, I think they should research more into completely bypassing lungs in the system. Folks could elect for bypass surgery that installed a machine in their chests, and blood would undergo the CO2/O2 exchange in the internal machine. The machine would expose plugs to the skin, and rechargeable devices could feed the required gasses. Why not go all the way? Install a device that extracts C02 and other metabolic waste products from the blood and then, using an external power source, converts them back into O2 and simple sugars, essentally reversing the cellular consumption of oxygen.
This would make people electric powered for extended periods (how long would depend on how completely one could reclaim metabolic waste products and how long consumables in the process lasted). I'd imagine such a system would be useful anywhere it was expensive to carry food and oxygen (any extreme terrestrial travel or space travel).
Since average human power usage is limited to around a few hundred watts (with peaks somewhere upwards of a kilowatt) the battery pack required isn't too large for extended times. Not that much larger than a powerful laptop.
In some environments a nuclear source would be feasable. Standard RTGs can deliver nearly a kilowatt for decades. Scale it down to deliver around 2 kilo-calories to meet normal nutritional intake for a few months of operation and you'd probably have a fully internal power source that lasted for months, eliminating the need to breath and eat (at least in appreciable quantities).
Course, the biotech will need a few decades to do the research, but if we as a species can survive our own agressive and environmentally destructive tendancies, I wouldn't be surprised at all if technologies of this nature were developed.
Anyway, it makes for good features in a sci-fi story.
The U.S. ghettos have terrible infant mortality rates because of poor personal sanitation (they have public sanitation, sewers and clean water, just like the rest of us) and low life expectancy because of high crime and drug abuse rates.
The result of this is that population in the ghettos turns over at a rate slight faster than that of the US as a whole. It doesn't take a genious to see the obvious here; the US ghettos are a darwinian breeding ground for genetically superiour poor people! Yes, thats right, the populations in those areas are becoming better and better adapted to substandard conditions, and they are just waiting for the next great depression for their chance to explode out of ghettos all across America, a great unwashed wave of greasy, grimey genetically poor naked apes bent on the destruction of the rich!
My fellow yuppies, I think it is clear what our next step must be. Yes, as distasteful as it sounds, we must breed them out! With our unquestionably superior rich-people genetics we will wash away their apalling ghetto optimizations! It is your responsibility, your duty to your social status. Many of our number will inevitably fall to the pimps and crack-hos, to the pushers and unclean whores, but it is our right, nay, our destiny! Go forth, men, and breed those subversive ghetto rats out of existance!...
Ones Fifth Amendment right to avoid self-incrimination does not apply to the password for encrypted files. This is analogous to not providing the key or combination to a safe that may contain evidence. If the court demands to see what is in your safe or encrypted files, you must comply. Failure to do so will result in contempt of court charges and possible jail time.
If you want more information, you can find articles on the 'net written by real lawyers.
This is why a deniable encryption system like what RubberHose is/was supposed to be is so important. One should be able to give a password to an encrypted system that reveals only the information one choses to reveal, and the system should give no indication of if there is more encrypted information. This is like hiding a safe. If the court doesn't know its there, they can't penalize you for hiding its existance.
I don't think it could be said, with confidence, that your subjective feelings are 100% material processes, unless you define everything that exists as "material".
I'm not the author of the GP, but I found this point interesting. As it happens, it is my position that everything that exists is material, or physical in its nature.
I haven't yet found an example of something that could not be viewed as existing as 'material'. I would be pleased if you could offer an example of something that could be reasonably shown to not have any physical nature.
Since this belief was reached partially as an extension of some of my other beliefs (rationalist, atheist), a strong counterexample or alternate view would provide a good tool for further examination of my current belief system.
Examples such as 'love', 'roundness', 'algebra' and 'blue' are poor examples. Since they are concepts held in the mind, and the 'mind' is an aspect of the brain, these things are material in that they are represented by some arrangment of the physical stuff that makes up the brain (precisely how these things are represented is not know, nor is it important in the scope of the discussion. It is enough that it can be shown that they are (see my recent post on the mind-body problem for more on that)).
Examples that cannot be show to exist, such as 'the human sole', 'angles' and 'gods' are also rejected because there is no evidence that plausably suggests their actual existance. At best the concepts of them exist in minds.
This position doesn't feel quite right to me, I think because its more an outgrowth of some other beliefs rather than something foundational. I reject things like 'the human sole' not because I believe that everything must be material in nature, but because I have no strong evidence for its existance. Since the only things I have good evidence for are physical things, it seems natural to predict that all things must be physical.
There is no mind-body problem any more than there is a program-computer or software-hardware problem. The original mind-body problem was that of early philosophers inability to reconcile the apparent immaterial nature of the mind with the physical nature of the body.
Now we 'know' that, like computer software, there are different ways to view the same thing. Software running on a computer can be though of either the way we programmers usually think of it, just as a running program 'in' the computer, or as electrons running around transistor gates on a chip.
For evidence of this nature consider the various methods of brain scanning that indicate that different specific areas of the physical brain are active during specific kinds of activities. This indicates that particular activities by the so-called nonphysical mind have a predictable (to a degree) and repeatable effects on the brain.
In the reverse direction, there are many methods of brain stimulation (ranging from transcrainial magnetic to direct, open-skull electrical and chemical stimulation) that have repeatble and (somewhat) predictable effects on both the body and the mind of the subject.
One could postulate that there is some unknown mechanism that forms a link between the substance of the brain and the 'nonphysical' mind, and that this mechanism translates causes between the two seperate entities, however, there isn't any experimental evidence that leads us to that conclusion. Our experiments pretty clearly point to the brain being, in part, the physical substrait of the mind, in the same sense that a computer chip can be the physical substrait of a computer program.
This is not to say that we understand in detail how what we call the 'self' arises from the activity of the brain, or even that we know most of the details about how the physical processes in the brain function. Just that there is evidence that the 'mind' is one aspect of the functions the brain provides.
If you do find Cuban cigars in the US the only advise I can give you is to stay clear. It's not so much the legal side, but your chances are in the 90-95% range that you just bought a fake Cohiba for 40 bucks
Mostly true, but its really not difficult at all to find people in other countries to ship you the real thing. Customs doesn't search/every/ package coming into the US, so bringing in embargoed goods or even illegal drugs via the mail system is fairly easy to do. A package will dissappear or arrive empty or mutilated every once in a while, but generally speaking the loss rate is acceptable.
Slashdot Mirror
Growing an entirely new adult leg is probably a bigger job than growing a baby
Indeed, if a leg is about 35-40 pounds and it grows at a rate comparable to a newborn child (pretty darn fast, but not as fast as an agressive tumor), it could take anywhere from 3-8 years, and for most of that time it would probably be too short to be useful.
It would be very important to have superior nutrition during regrowth. You'd have to eat like a serious bodybuilder. The average American's crappy diet would probably take a decade to rebuild the necessary tissue.
On the bright side, you'd get to park in the handicap spaces for a few years.
As an aside, most lizards that regrow tails don't actually regenerate a complete tail. The spine that forms the tail has a fracture plane near the base of the tail that allows it to seperate easily. Once lost the new tail is regrown without bones, its mostly fat.
This is a good point. An arm or leg is a lot of complex tissue to build. I'm not sure how much an average leg weighs, but I'd guess it could be 20% of the mass of an average (not fat) person. Lets say thats 35 pounds. It takes a newborn child anywhere from 3-8 years to put on 35 lean pounds, and they are in a heavy growth phase.
Of course thats an extreme example. I would imagine that most regeneration uses would be much smaller (fingers, hands, organs, skin for burn patients, etc), but any use is likely to be pretty long-term treatment.
Mammals have an adaptive immune system, it takes time for it to identify infections and generate antibodies. A slowly healing open wound might allow infections faster than the immune system can respond.
Simpler animals often have a different type of immune system (sorry, I've forgotten what its called, see the crocodile story) that is less flexible, but much faster to kill off infections since it doesn't have to generate new antibodies for each new invader.
I would expect that a good short term solution for humanity is to leave healing alone and allow the fast scar tissue generation scheme to proceed. Then in the event of injuries that require regeneration the procedure can be initated in a clinical environment where infection can be controlled.
Normal cuts and scrapes would heal naturally, but lost limbs would be regenerated by application of the necessary drugs/suppliments in a clinical environment. (although if regeneration effects stick around for months as in the mice in the article one might have to be careful with cuts and scrapes for a while after a regeneration event.
In the far future it might be possible to redesign our immune systems to be effective with full-time regeneration (this would also probably eliminate almost all of the diseases we currently suffer from).
If things go well, those of us alive today may be able to live several hundred years. Thats great, we'll have the oppertunity to see the result of global climate change!
What I don't understand is that (supposedly) high educated people like can be so incredibly biased, [...] sick and tired of this uncomprehensible juvenile attitude
The tech community does tend to have a lot of smart people, but smart doesn't mean 'mature', 'reasonable' or 'consistant'. Smart people can be just as dumb as everybody else.
The community is made up of lots of very young people (say, under 25) who voice their opinions loudly and frequently. Many of us with more moderate opinions just don't say much about the topic.
I have to agree, as much as I'd like to see original stuff, or more good adaptions of good books, I don't have a problem with a quality remake of a classic. Its fun to see what a new director can do with the story.
I think it would be interesting to film a few hundred hours of footage of some actors doing different scenes, with some related themes, then give the footage to a number of filmmakers and see how they can cut it together to make a movie out of it. Everybody gets the same material, the only factor is their skill and creativity.
Re 'caveman diet'.
One of the major differences is the balance of fats and protien to carbs that we get now. Evidence suggests that for most of human history we ate foods with much less carbohydrates and more fats and protiens.
I'm currently trying out the diet detailed in the book 'Natural Hormonal Enhancement'. It is similar to the Atkins diet in that most of the time it is low carb (20g or less per meal, 5-6 small meals a day), but it also provides for a carb-load meal every few days (as many carbs as you feel like eating, but low fat). About the only difficult restriction is that you should try to stay away from sugary carbs.
Whats kind of cool about it is that after a week or so I mostly stopped wanting sugary carbs. I've got ice cream and candy bars and soda around the house, and they just aren't appealing any more.
One of the basic ideas from the book is that the body should be using fat as a fuel most of the time rather than sugars. We've got this myth that body needs carbs all the time to operate efficently, but the research presented in the book suggests that this is not how our ancestors (human-like and earlier) ate.
The problem with processed and packaged foods is that they are usually high in carbs. Of course carbs are very cheap to manufacture and have a good shelf-life, so they work well with the maufacturing industry. Unsaturated fats, which are actually good food, don't have long shelf lives, and are more expensive, so people who are uninformed about good nutrition or who choose food based on price will tend to choose the wrong foods.
It's an interesting view on eating. The author has backed it up with references to numerous research papers and layman explainations of how the hormonal system works. Not being an expert I can't see any obvious flaws in the work, but it does seem to get results.
they technology they used to build the air frame could not possibly withstand the heat or mechanical stress of reentry at orbital speeds. It'd disintegrate on impact with the upper atmosphere.
I often hear that complaint, but I always wonder about it. The atmosphere gradually thins as altitude increases right? Is it necessary to reenter as fast as the shuttle? Can you slowly decrease the altitude and use the thin atmosphere to slowly loose velocity? Perhaps use the geometry of the vehicle to generate lift to avoid using fuel to maintain altitude while slowing?
I'm assuming that schemes like this either can't work or are simply not economical, or somebody would have tried it on Earth. But I've never seen a good explanination of why they don't work.
IIRC there were some russian flights with both male and female members long before the US did it. As far as I know, nobody has openly claimed the honor though.
I am not even going to discuss the frequent phenominon of nets and repeaters going dead the moment a person with a 6 checks in.
Hmm, perhaps a nice social-eng based denial of service technique?
Only if the old firemen remember the books.
The initial test was done by reading the output of one of SUVs on-board computers to determine how much air the engine was using. This test was done at 55MPH with windows up and AC on, and with windows down and AC off. The data indicated that the vehicle used slighly less air, and therefore less fuel, with the windows up and the AC on.
The next test was to be a 55MPH run around the race track to determine which of the test vehicles would run out a full tank of fuel first. Safety officials did not allow this because of concern over tire failure (and possible subsequent vehicle rollover) and possible driver fatigue (maintaining the concentration required to handle the vehicle for the 6-8 hours required for the test would be difficult). Instead the test was run at 45MPH with 5 gallons of fuel.
The power required by the AC on full is constant regardless of the engine speed. The effect of drag on the vehicle is dependent on the speed, and the nearly 20% reduction in speed may have eliminated the slight difference seen in the first test.
Also, the fuel was removed from the vehicles using a hand pump, and it was not shown that any effort was made to clear the fuel from the in-tank pump all the way to the fuel rail in the engine. It is possible that the two vehicles did not have the same amount of fuel.
They did not show that other conditions where checked, such as identical engine parameters (the computers in modern vehicles tune themselves depending on how they are driven, if the two SUVs were driven before the test they might have had different computer parameters, resulting in different fuel consumption rates).
In short, the experiment was very rough, and had little in the way of controls. It is likely that at low speeds it is better to have the windows down, and at high speeds it is better to have them up. Also, it is unlikely that the AC would be run at MAX the entire time, so there would be fuel savings there as well.
The episode was entertaining, and did mostly answer the question "Would a big SUV use more fuel driving at 45mph with the windows open and AC off, or with windows closed and driver shivering under continious MAX AC?"
To test more accurately would have required several trials of the same vehicle at several different speeds with an accurate flow meter on the fuel lines (both delivery and return lines). Throttle position at all times would have to be carefully controlled to avoid any serious variations in computer tuning. Trials would ideally be run in two opposite directions, similar to how land speed records are controlled.
In the demo, right or middle click cancels the drag operation. Occasionally it will get 'stuck' and you won't be able to let go of a document, but its just a demo.
It is good to be able to cancel the drag operation from the mouse, but I wouldn't want to loose the option to use the escape key. It seems pretty natural to me to use both hands (such as for control, alt or shift drag operations, as well as for esc).
Overall though, I'm happy with the hover-over-the-taskbar option windows provides, or with simply having the foresight to make sure my drag target is accessable before I start dragging. I mean, its an event that is all of 4 seconds in the future, surely most users can plan that far ahead?
Hey, I just thought of a great way to use all that nuclear waste we have just sitting around boiling water in cooling pools...
Anybody for an 'Atomic Heat' brand spiced rum?
The obvious answer of course is to combine iron manufacturing and ethanol distillation.
Seriously though, its a shame that some industries have vast amounts of waste heat, while others spend lots of money to buy heat, and there isn't a good way to get 'em together.
The other non-meat parts of cattle are used in a vast number of industries as well. If cattle production were reduced so that the grain they consume could be used for fuel purposes we'd have to find other cheap sources for a huge array of products. It could be done, but it probably would have a noticable impact on prices for a while.
Putting a part that's subject to significant wear and tear into the printer itself suggests to me that their goal is making the printer a disposable device that's consumed and replaced just like printer cartridges are
Depending on your needs, thats already happened. Its cheaper to replace a low-end inkjet with a new low-end inkjet than it is to buy new ink. And if you don't print very often, so the printer lasts a year before you replace it, you get a better quality printer anyway.
I junk them out and pull the motors and encoders and other useful mechanical parts. Saves me money and keeps my parts box full.
Of course these aren't high quality photo printers like what the article is talking about, but it does sound like the day is coming. But only while they are charging $3000 a gallon for the ink.
In the open ocean, they talk about using it on diesel submarines. Sounds great, unless you consider that if they can get oxygen out of the water, they may well try and power the engines underwater as well instead of running on batteries. That would strip huge amounts of oxygen from the water; it's more than a bit concerning.
Don't worry, its already taken care of. The fishing industry has netted out most of the critters that would've used the oxygen anyway.
Personally, I think they should research more into completely bypassing lungs in the system. Folks could elect for bypass surgery that installed a machine in their chests, and blood would undergo the CO2/O2 exchange in the internal machine. The machine would expose plugs to the skin, and rechargeable devices could feed the required gasses.
Why not go all the way? Install a device that extracts C02 and other metabolic waste products from the blood and then, using an external power source, converts them back into O2 and simple sugars, essentally reversing the cellular consumption of oxygen.
This would make people electric powered for extended periods (how long would depend on how completely one could reclaim metabolic waste products and how long consumables in the process lasted). I'd imagine such a system would be useful anywhere it was expensive to carry food and oxygen (any extreme terrestrial travel or space travel).
Since average human power usage is limited to around a few hundred watts (with peaks somewhere upwards of a kilowatt) the battery pack required isn't too large for extended times. Not that much larger than a powerful laptop.
In some environments a nuclear source would be feasable. Standard RTGs can deliver nearly a kilowatt for decades. Scale it down to deliver around 2 kilo-calories to meet normal nutritional intake for a few months of operation and you'd probably have a fully internal power source that lasted for months, eliminating the need to breath and eat (at least in appreciable quantities).
Course, the biotech will need a few decades to do the research, but if we as a species can survive our own agressive and environmentally destructive tendancies, I wouldn't be surprised at all if technologies of this nature were developed.
Anyway, it makes for good features in a sci-fi story.
Great, everybody wins that way.
The U.S. ghettos have terrible infant mortality rates because of poor personal sanitation (they have public sanitation, sewers and clean water, just like the rest of us) and low life expectancy because of high crime and drug abuse rates.
...
The result of this is that population in the ghettos turns over at a rate slight faster than that of the US as a whole. It doesn't take a genious to see the obvious here; the US ghettos are a darwinian breeding ground for genetically superiour poor people! Yes, thats right, the populations in those areas are becoming better and better adapted to substandard conditions, and they are just waiting for the next great depression for their chance to explode out of ghettos all across America, a great unwashed wave of greasy, grimey genetically poor naked apes bent on the destruction of the rich!
My fellow yuppies, I think it is clear what our next step must be. Yes, as distasteful as it sounds, we must breed them out! With our unquestionably superior rich-people genetics we will wash away their apalling ghetto optimizations! It is your responsibility, your duty to your social status. Many of our number will inevitably fall to the pimps and crack-hos, to the pushers and unclean whores, but it is our right, nay, our destiny! Go forth, men, and breed those subversive ghetto rats out of existance!
Ahem. What were we talking about again?
Ones Fifth Amendment right to avoid self-incrimination does not apply to the password for encrypted files. This is analogous to not providing the key or combination to a safe that may contain evidence. If the court demands to see what is in your safe or encrypted files, you must comply. Failure to do so will result in contempt of court charges and possible jail time.
If you want more information, you can find articles on the 'net written by real lawyers.
This is why a deniable encryption system like what RubberHose is/was supposed to be is so important. One should be able to give a password to an encrypted system that reveals only the information one choses to reveal, and the system should give no indication of if there is more encrypted information. This is like hiding a safe. If the court doesn't know its there, they can't penalize you for hiding its existance.
I don't think it could be said, with confidence, that your subjective feelings are 100% material processes, unless you define everything that exists as "material".
I'm not the author of the GP, but I found this point interesting. As it happens, it is my position that everything that exists is material, or physical in its nature.
I haven't yet found an example of something that could not be viewed as existing as 'material'. I would be pleased if you could offer an example of something that could be reasonably shown to not have any physical nature.
Since this belief was reached partially as an extension of some of my other beliefs (rationalist, atheist), a strong counterexample or alternate view would provide a good tool for further examination of my current belief system.
Examples such as 'love', 'roundness', 'algebra' and 'blue' are poor examples. Since they are concepts held in the mind, and the 'mind' is an aspect of the brain, these things are material in that they are represented by some arrangment of the physical stuff that makes up the brain (precisely how these things are represented is not know, nor is it important in the scope of the discussion. It is enough that it can be shown that they are (see my recent post on the mind-body problem for more on that)).
Examples that cannot be show to exist, such as 'the human sole', 'angles' and 'gods' are also rejected because there is no evidence that plausably suggests their actual existance. At best the concepts of them exist in minds.
This position doesn't feel quite right to me, I think because its more an outgrowth of some other beliefs rather than something foundational. I reject things like 'the human sole' not because I believe that everything must be material in nature, but because I have no strong evidence for its existance. Since the only things I have good evidence for are physical things, it seems natural to predict that all things must be physical.
There is no mind-body problem any more than there is a program-computer or software-hardware problem. The original mind-body problem was that of early philosophers inability to reconcile the apparent immaterial nature of the mind with the physical nature of the body.
Now we 'know' that, like computer software, there are different ways to view the same thing. Software running on a computer can be though of either the way we programmers usually think of it, just as a running program 'in' the computer, or as electrons running around transistor gates on a chip.
For evidence of this nature consider the various methods of brain scanning that indicate that different specific areas of the physical brain are active during specific kinds of activities. This indicates that particular activities by the so-called nonphysical mind have a predictable (to a degree) and repeatable effects on the brain.
In the reverse direction, there are many methods of brain stimulation (ranging from transcrainial magnetic to direct, open-skull electrical and chemical stimulation) that have repeatble and (somewhat) predictable effects on both the body and the mind of the subject.
One could postulate that there is some unknown mechanism that forms a link between the substance of the brain and the 'nonphysical' mind, and that this mechanism translates causes between the two seperate entities, however, there isn't any experimental evidence that leads us to that conclusion. Our experiments pretty clearly point to the brain being, in part, the physical substrait of the mind, in the same sense that a computer chip can be the physical substrait of a computer program.
This is not to say that we understand in detail how what we call the 'self' arises from the activity of the brain, or even that we know most of the details about how the physical processes in the brain function. Just that there is evidence that the 'mind' is one aspect of the functions the brain provides.
If you do find Cuban cigars in the US the only advise I can give you is to stay clear. It's not so much the legal side, but your chances are in the 90-95% range that you just bought a fake Cohiba for 40 bucks
/every/ package coming into the US, so bringing in embargoed goods or even illegal drugs via the mail system is fairly easy to do. A package will dissappear or arrive empty or mutilated every once in a while, but generally speaking the loss rate is acceptable.
Mostly true, but its really not difficult at all to find people in other countries to ship you the real thing. Customs doesn't search