Does anybody else get the sense that George Lucas has become a walking billboard against intellectual property rights?
Star Wars has become an integral part of our culture, one of our few shared mythical stories in a society of a thousand religions. Yes Lucas insists of f*ing around with it. So long as he is alive, Star Wars will probably never be seen again as we boomers and Gen X'ers remember it. The enhancements that were done for the re-release added nothing to the film, and cheapened a classic.
As if this was not enough, he chose to take Obi Wan's beuatiful description of the spiritual power known as "the force", and turn it into nothing more than the behavior of intelligent, parasitic nano-creatures. It's like he went out of his way to destroy the deep sense of wonder his original movies evoked.
Yes, if you own the building where The Last Supper was painted, you technically have the right to knock a door through that wall... but that does not meant you should.
Han shot first! Damn you! Han shot first!!!! [gasp] [gasp]
No, but an F18 that is mostly used for Air Shows or training is going to be a lot more shiney than one that was rebuilt several times in the middle of an attrition war.
Remember, the saga begins in a time of relative peace. Any Naboo fighters are bound to be some kind of Royal Honor Guard... looking shiney was expected to be thier main function.
The X-Wings in Star Wars are salvaged surplus military gear aquired from the-force-knows-where by a rag-tag band of rebels, and the empirial crafts have seen extended wartime use, probably rebuilt several times.
Take a look at the Apache helicopters that came back from the Gulf War. They look quite a bit different from the ones the Air Force displays on their recruiting posters, don't they?
Give Lucas a little credit. He had intended to do an all-CGI Yoda in Ep.1, but upon seeing the dailies he immediately went back to the puppet. It looked good, but not "Yoda" enough.
I'm sure he will do the same thing if VirtualR2D2 1.0 does not measure up to what he wants.
That's the thing everybody forgets about Jar Jar. I hated him as much as anybody, but not because the CGI was bad... it was because the script and voice acting was beyond redemption. (That, and the insistence of the RogerRabit-esque moment when Qui Gon pinched Jar Jar's tongue... how sadly pedestrian to think modern viewers would be impressed with that.)
1. Apple engineers believe in using the right tool for the job. 2. Apple is not the xenophobic island everybody says it is. 3. Apple is not in the business of selling large database servers (yet).
A wealthy Mexico is in everybody's best interest, except for the party that has now been removed from power.
I don't know what the hell a "poverty industry" is, but as for agriculture, we are a net exporter of food. A rich Mexico == more customers. Who cares if you gotta find somebody else to pick lettuce... John Deere will probably be selling an automated lettuce harvester by then anyway.
You will find more than often, that the alpha animal will eat that carcass provided by the animal of lower rank.
Yes, but it's not for their own nourishment; that's my point. They are feeding the alpha to curry favor. Anyone who owns a house-cat that is a "good mouser" knows what I am talking about.
A very normal occurrence when cultures deal with each other. Many "English" words we use today are really French.
IIRC, the "zhe" sound is not native to English, and words that use it (garage, corsage, massage, etc.) are actually of French origin.
Also, sometimes words from other languages are used to apply more precision... "Boredom" does not describe the weary unhappiness of a dull life as well as "ennui".
Other times, the original word and language fits the concept so well that there is no point in translating it. No language that I know of quite has the equivalent of the German word "schadenfreude".
In the case of technology, the English words are used just about everywhere, (except France, where they insist on making up new "french" words for everything that gets invented, just so they don't let any of that vulgar English creep into their language).
Asimov wrote the original three Foundation books (way back in the 50's, IIRC). Then in the 80's he wrote a 4th book, "Foundation's Edge", followed by several progressively crappier sequels, and an utterly horrible prequil that tied his Foundation universe to his robot stories.
Since his death, his estate has licensed a few writers to publish a few more books as Foundation stories.
The mathematic model suggested in the beginning of Foundation was that you could not predict individual behavior, or even the behavior of a few thousand people, but once you are dealing with hundreds of billions of people (as you would be in a vast, interplanetary civilization), your deviation from statistical probability becomes less important, and you can start to make predictions. The theory fell apart midway through the second book, when a single individual (an unanticipated thought-control mutant known as "the mule") changed civilization in a way that could not have been expected... and f*ed the whole thing up. The next book and a half deals with the fallout.
I have purged the memory of all the books beyond the first three from my memory.
It seems to me that what we need is a new boiler-plate agreement for stuff like this... just like the GPL and BSD licenses are set up to easilly protect free software.
An Open Database Contract would clearly what uses are allowed to the company or individual that maintains it, and protect the rights of those who contribute to it.
We should perhaps get an FSF lawyer or somebody to help us draft such a document, and then refuse to contribute our efforts to anybody who does not use it (or something very much like it).
If we don't come up with something like this, future publicly-contributed content will suffer, because nobody will be able to be sure that the product of their labor will not suddenly become unavailable to them.
"Take a look at what the most common *second* language is for all those Mandarin, Hindi, and Spanish speakers."
Cantonese, Malayalam, and Portuguese?
No. It's English. Nearly all educated Mandarin and Hindi speakers also know English, and the don't always know Cantonese or Malayalam.
Jackie Chan once made a movie where he played a man from mainland China, so he insisted on doing it in Cantonese, with subtitles for the Hong Kong audiences. His cantonese was so bad that no Cantonese speaking people could understand a word he said. His English, by contrast, is very good. This is typical of Mandarin speakers, because Hong Kong was part of the English commonwealth for a long time, and a great deal of Chinese speakers use English to bridge the Mandarin-Cantonese language gap.
Also, Portuguese only matters in two countries: Portugal and Brazil.
Looks a lot like spanish is on the way to become in 20, 30 years the official US language anyway.
When English was first instituted as the official language of the USA, the majority of Americans spoke German. So while you are right about the spanish-speaking population growing here, this won't be the first time that an immigrant population speaking another language became a large segment of the population.
America has always been a nation of immigrants, and for almost as long has been committed to establishing a common culture. When I hear about Quebeckers that want to split off from Canada, it underscores the reason why a single, shared language is important.
A large culture that never learns English would not only fail to join the American mainstream, it would also fail to influence that mainstream, becoming a niche of its own. (The french-speaking cajun population in New Orleans and the dutch Hamish in PA are good examples... we like their cooking and furnature, respectively, but little else of their culture has integrated with ours.)
By the way, my impression of the new leader of Mexico is that he is really cool. Mexico is a resource-rich country which has only remained poor so long because of government corruption. I got a feeling that they will be a very rich country in a couple decades, so taking Spanish classes may be a good idea for most Americans anyway.
Some people might assume he is just ranting, but this guy has a very good point. IIRC, Hindi speakers from different regions can't understand each other's Hindi very well, due to regional dialects, but almost everybody speaks English fairly well, because it is emphasized in their schools. You can't even do business within India without being able to speak English.
In addition to being the language of business for most of the globe, it is also well-suited to electronic transmission, because of the relatively small alphabet. English is easilly done with good ol' one-byte-per-character ASCII text.
ho-kay. You think the printing press will eventually lead to our extinction. This puts you on the opposite side of the fence from me. I say industrialization has been a net good for mankind, and will continue to be. If you really disagree, there are still a few corners of the world where you can live as an aboriginal tribesman. Even if you lack such courage of your convictions, you have every right to feel the way you do, so long as you don't start mailing bombs to scientists.
Personally, I want all the knowledge I can get, even if it does kill me, because if I stop learning I might as well stop living anyway.
Re:OT: Grizzlies != Black Bears
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Your question about bears reminds me of an old joke from my cross-country running days:
Two guys (we'll call them Linus and Eric) were walking through the woods when they came across an angry, rabid-looking bear. Eric freezes in place. Linus, who is a jogger, immediately kicks off his hiking boots, pulls his running shoes out of his pack, and slips them on.
"You idiot," said Eric, "don't you know you can't possibly outrun a bear? That thing is as fast as a horse!"
"I don't need to outrun the bear," said Linus, "I just need to outrun you."
As for your food-bag technique: that works fairly well. If a branch like that is not available, another good way is to tie a rope between two trees, and then suspend the bag from the rope. Make sure it is at least 12" off the ground. Even higher is better if you can manage it.
I have heard of the rare occation when a bear was smart enough to figure out that cutting the rope will bring the food down, but most of them will just give up and look for something easier. (i.e. the camp down the shore who didn't know to hang their food bag at night, or the half-eaten candy bar next to your sleeping bag... this is why you don't take food into the tent!)
Re:If you can clone an extinct animal...
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One would assume that they would use the broadest sample available, not simply make several thousand clones from the same batch of genes.
Same != diversity
Cute, but that's not what I meant and you know it. Obviously you don't get diversity if you make a thousand animals off the same sample, but cloning one sample once, another sample once, etc... you end up with a DIVERSE population, each one a genetic replica of the LONG DEAD sample that it was taken from.
Re:OT: Grizzlies != Black Bears
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By the way, playing dead is one of your best defenses against any bear that takes an interest in you, so you were pretty smart to do so. If they are starving, they might decide to eat you, but otherwise they will probably either ignore you or drag you off somewhere to eat later. In any case, your chances are much better if they think you are already dead.
If a bear is interested in your campsite, but not you specifically, you can sometimes scare them off just by making a lot of noise. Most species of bear prefer to avoid confrontaion with something that sounds dangerous, and banging on your pots and pans makes you sound pretty fierce to them.
Better still is to not get them interested in the first place. Don't keep food in your tent in bear country. Hang your food pack in the air (but not close to a tree, some types of bears are good climbers), and don't leave greasy or dirty pans lying around.
I know of a chef in Babbit, Minnesota who lost half his shed because he was storing a vat of cooking fat in it. A bear came into town during the night and ripped the wall off the shed to get at it. Even with no wind, they can smell stuff like that from miles off.
Re:OT: Grizzlies != Black Bears
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most bears in general prefer vegetation and fish to eating meat
This is true of Black Bears, many of which I have seen close-up in the North Woods of Minnesota. Beautiful creatures. Of course, they are still wild canine animals and every couple of years a human is attacked by one, but aggression by most types of bear is a very rare occurrence.
Gizzlies are different. They LOVE meat. Ask Bert Guthrie, who lost over a dozen sheep to ONE BEAR over the course of a few short nights (until it was finally captured). Some were eaten, some were just playfully swatted to death and left bleeding on the ground... not even killed for the food, just for the hell of it.
Ask the family of Craig Dahl, and experieced woodsman who was killed an eaten by a grizzly two years ago.
Grizzlies are fast, huge, strong, with powerful jaws, claws that can get up to six inches long, and can be just plain mean. They prefer scavenging flesh that is dead already (they are drawn to the smell of rotting fat faster than anything), but they must eat about 60-70 pounds of food a day prior to hibernation. You can't get that kind of food intake from blueberries and rock bass.
Defending against an angry grizzly is almost futile. Shoot one with anything less than a deer slug to the brain, and you will most likely die before it does, because a grizzly that is shot in the body will continue to try to kill you until the flow of oxygen to the brain finally stops.
You obviously know a fair ammount about bears, but you do not appear to be aware of the traits that makes the grizzly much more dangerous than her genetic cousins.
Re:If you can clone an extinct animal...
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You can make a bunch and release them in the wild, but their genetic diversity will be destroyed,
No, the genetic diversity is the only thing you are preserving. Whatever their behavior, the clones would be geneticly the same as the creatures they are replicated from.
and their learned hunting skills and social structure will be gone
That might be a good thing. I don't know how often they attacked humans before, but I would prefer Tasmanian tigers that don't kill people, all things being equal.
Man is the only creature that kills for resons other than survival.
Sorry, but that is not even a little bit true. Many animals kill to win a mate (or eliminate competition for breeding).
Many others kill to please the Alpha leader of their pack (like the house-cat who kills mice & birds and then presents them to you hoping you will thankful).
Some animals hunt and kill when they are not really hungry, because it helps them stay fit and their instincts demand that they go after prey when the opportunity arises.
Anyone who has ever seen film of a school of bottle-nose dolphins bludgeon a shark to death know that sometimes animals kill predators to protect thier extended family.
Some kill in order to maintain a comfortable habitat.
And some animals kill just for the plain old damned fun of it.
Sorry if that bursts your bubble and ruins your mythological notion of nature's inherent nobility, but the facts can't really be avoided.
Re:Cuteness, the almighty weapon
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The Atlantic Monthly has a very interesting article this month (same issue that has the Napster story) about how there are people trying to reintroduce parts of Idaho and Montana with more grizzly bears!
These are 500-pound animals that crave flesh, can break a moose's neck with one punch, can run 35 MPH, and can bite a half-foot-thick pine tree in half. Governor Kempthorne has said this plan may well be "the first federal land-management action likely to result in injury or death of members of the public."
A popular bumper sticker slogan in the region right now is "Cage your Children. The bears are loose".
What sort of kinks will be throwning into the evolutionary process?
People used to be concerned that genetic scientists might be trying to play God. Your objection seems to be that the scientists are trying to play Nature.
If you go back to the old myths of Pandora and Icarus, and compare that with the Unabomber Manifesto and Bill Joy's open letter in Wired, you can see how mankind has always been a little scared of the consequences of going "too far". However, it has now been over 50 years since we discovered a technology that can wipe out mankind, and civilization continues.
It seems to me that this is an irrational, inborn fear, a phobia against Too Much Knowledge. It also seems to me that this is an instict which we should resist, becuase knowing more has always proven to be a Good Thing in the long run. Nuclear bombs are scary, but nuclear fusion generators may be the answer to all of our energy problems someday. Genetic research raises a lot of questions, but it might also allow us to live longer, happier lives.
For my own part, I'm going to stick with the "let's learn everything we can about the universe" camp. Doing so might harm us, but there is no doubt that not doing so will.
Yes, the lies, the obstructions of justice, and the cover-ups were news. They, however, did not get much ink in the press.
If we were to take a poll, how many Americans do you think are aware that Clinton was found guilty of "contempt of court" for lying in his sexual harrassment testimony, and fined $90,000? Or that several people have been arrested for illegal fund-raising for the Clinton-Gore '96 campeign? Or that Ken Starr's investigation resulted in the conviction and imprisonment of over two dozen close business partners and political allies of the Clintons (for crimes that they could not possibly have committed without the knowing aid of our current sitting president)?
What we did get from TV and the press was day after day after day of talk about the juicy sex bits from the back pages of Ken Starr's report. Stories about fellated Presidents sells more papers than serious obstructions of justice.
The problem shows no signs of stopping either. Are the press getting into the meaty details of Bush and Gore's differing Social Security reform proposals? Or are the just bringing in "consultants" like George Stephenopolis to talk about whether Gore can match Bush's charisma, and what the Gender Gap statistics look like this month?
Like I said, journalism is dead. The age of Infotainment is here.
Slashdot Mirror
You say potato...
Probably not unless you have upgraded the graphics card in it, Ms. Onymous... although I suppose you could start a rumor that requires a G5. :)
Star Wars has become an integral part of our culture, one of our few shared mythical stories in a society of a thousand religions. Yes Lucas insists of f*ing around with it. So long as he is alive, Star Wars will probably never be seen again as we boomers and Gen X'ers remember it. The enhancements that were done for the re-release added nothing to the film, and cheapened a classic.
As if this was not enough, he chose to take Obi Wan's beuatiful description of the spiritual power known as "the force", and turn it into nothing more than the behavior of intelligent, parasitic nano-creatures. It's like he went out of his way to destroy the deep sense of wonder his original movies evoked.
Yes, if you own the building where The Last Supper was painted, you technically have the right to knock a door through that wall... but that does not meant you should.
Han shot first! Damn you! Han shot first!!!! [gasp] [gasp]
Pardon me while I pull myself together.
Remember, the saga begins in a time of relative peace. Any Naboo fighters are bound to be some kind of Royal Honor Guard... looking shiney was expected to be thier main function.
The X-Wings in Star Wars are salvaged surplus military gear aquired from the-force-knows-where by a rag-tag band of rebels, and the empirial crafts have seen extended wartime use, probably rebuilt several times.
Take a look at the Apache helicopters that came back from the Gulf War. They look quite a bit different from the ones the Air Force displays on their recruiting posters, don't they?
I'm sure he will do the same thing if VirtualR2D2 1.0 does not measure up to what he wants.
That's the thing everybody forgets about Jar Jar. I hated him as much as anybody, but not because the CGI was bad... it was because the script and voice acting was beyond redemption. (That, and the insistence of the RogerRabit-esque moment when Qui Gon pinched Jar Jar's tongue... how sadly pedestrian to think modern viewers would be impressed with that.)
1. Apple engineers believe in using the right tool for the job.
2. Apple is not the xenophobic island everybody says it is.
3. Apple is not in the business of selling large database servers (yet).
I don't know what the hell a "poverty industry" is, but as for agriculture, we are a net exporter of food. A rich Mexico == more customers. Who cares if you gotta find somebody else to pick lettuce... John Deere will probably be selling an automated lettuce harvester by then anyway.
My bad! You are right, of course.
Yes, but it's not for their own nourishment; that's my point. They are feeding the alpha to curry favor. Anyone who owns a house-cat that is a "good mouser" knows what I am talking about.
IIRC, the "zhe" sound is not native to English, and words that use it (garage, corsage, massage, etc.) are actually of French origin.
Also, sometimes words from other languages are used to apply more precision... "Boredom" does not describe the weary unhappiness of a dull life as well as "ennui".
Other times, the original word and language fits the concept so well that there is no point in translating it. No language that I know of quite has the equivalent of the German word "schadenfreude".
In the case of technology, the English words are used just about everywhere, (except France, where they insist on making up new "french" words for everything that gets invented, just so they don't let any of that vulgar English creep into their language).
Since his death, his estate has licensed a few writers to publish a few more books as Foundation stories.
The mathematic model suggested in the beginning of Foundation was that you could not predict individual behavior, or even the behavior of a few thousand people, but once you are dealing with hundreds of billions of people (as you would be in a vast, interplanetary civilization), your deviation from statistical probability becomes less important, and you can start to make predictions. The theory fell apart midway through the second book, when a single individual (an unanticipated thought-control mutant known as "the mule") changed civilization in a way that could not have been expected... and f*ed the whole thing up. The next book and a half deals with the fallout.
I have purged the memory of all the books beyond the first three from my memory.
An Open Database Contract would clearly what uses are allowed to the company or individual that maintains it, and protect the rights of those who contribute to it.
We should perhaps get an FSF lawyer or somebody to help us draft such a document, and then refuse to contribute our efforts to anybody who does not use it (or something very much like it).
If we don't come up with something like this, future publicly-contributed content will suffer, because nobody will be able to be sure that the product of their labor will not suddenly become unavailable to them.
Cantonese, Malayalam, and Portuguese?
No. It's English. Nearly all educated Mandarin and Hindi speakers also know English, and the don't always know Cantonese or Malayalam.
Jackie Chan once made a movie where he played a man from mainland China, so he insisted on doing it in Cantonese, with subtitles for the Hong Kong audiences. His cantonese was so bad that no Cantonese speaking people could understand a word he said. His English, by contrast, is very good. This is typical of Mandarin speakers, because Hong Kong was part of the English commonwealth for a long time, and a great deal of Chinese speakers use English to bridge the Mandarin-Cantonese language gap.
Also, Portuguese only matters in two countries: Portugal and Brazil.
When English was first instituted as the official language of the USA, the majority of Americans spoke German. So while you are right about the spanish-speaking population growing here, this won't be the first time that an immigrant population speaking another language became a large segment of the population.
America has always been a nation of immigrants, and for almost as long has been committed to establishing a common culture. When I hear about Quebeckers that want to split off from Canada, it underscores the reason why a single, shared language is important.
A large culture that never learns English would not only fail to join the American mainstream, it would also fail to influence that mainstream, becoming a niche of its own. (The french-speaking cajun population in New Orleans and the dutch Hamish in PA are good examples... we like their cooking and furnature, respectively, but little else of their culture has integrated with ours.)
By the way, my impression of the new leader of Mexico is that he is really cool. Mexico is a resource-rich country which has only remained poor so long because of government corruption. I got a feeling that they will be a very rich country in a couple decades, so taking Spanish classes may be a good idea for most Americans anyway.
In addition to being the language of business for most of the globe, it is also well-suited to electronic transmission, because of the relatively small alphabet. English is easilly done with good ol' one-byte-per-character ASCII text.
Personally, I want all the knowledge I can get, even if it does kill me, because if I stop learning I might as well stop living anyway.
Two guys (we'll call them Linus and Eric) were walking through the woods when they came across an angry, rabid-looking bear. Eric freezes in place. Linus, who is a jogger, immediately kicks off his hiking boots, pulls his running shoes out of his pack, and slips them on.
"You idiot," said Eric, "don't you know you can't possibly outrun a bear? That thing is as fast as a horse!"
"I don't need to outrun the bear," said Linus, "I just need to outrun you."
As for your food-bag technique: that works fairly well. If a branch like that is not available, another good way is to tie a rope between two trees, and then suspend the bag from the rope. Make sure it is at least 12" off the ground. Even higher is better if you can manage it.
I have heard of the rare occation when a bear was smart enough to figure out that cutting the rope will bring the food down, but most of them will just give up and look for something easier. (i.e. the camp down the shore who didn't know to hang their food bag at night, or the half-eaten candy bar next to your sleeping bag... this is why you don't take food into the tent!)
Same != diversity
Cute, but that's not what I meant and you know it. Obviously you don't get diversity if you make a thousand animals off the same sample, but cloning one sample once, another sample once, etc... you end up with a DIVERSE population, each one a genetic replica of the LONG DEAD sample that it was taken from.
If a bear is interested in your campsite, but not you specifically, you can sometimes scare them off just by making a lot of noise. Most species of bear prefer to avoid confrontaion with something that sounds dangerous, and banging on your pots and pans makes you sound pretty fierce to them.
Better still is to not get them interested in the first place. Don't keep food in your tent in bear country. Hang your food pack in the air (but not close to a tree, some types of bears are good climbers), and don't leave greasy or dirty pans lying around.
I know of a chef in Babbit, Minnesota who lost half his shed because he was storing a vat of cooking fat in it. A bear came into town during the night and ripped the wall off the shed to get at it. Even with no wind, they can smell stuff like that from miles off.
This is true of Black Bears, many of which I have seen close-up in the North Woods of Minnesota. Beautiful creatures. Of course, they are still wild canine animals and every couple of years a human is attacked by one, but aggression by most types of bear is a very rare occurrence.
Gizzlies are different. They LOVE meat. Ask Bert Guthrie, who lost over a dozen sheep to ONE BEAR over the course of a few short nights (until it was finally captured). Some were eaten, some were just playfully swatted to death and left bleeding on the ground... not even killed for the food, just for the hell of it.
Ask the family of Craig Dahl, and experieced woodsman who was killed an eaten by a grizzly two years ago.
Grizzlies are fast, huge, strong, with powerful jaws, claws that can get up to six inches long, and can be just plain mean. They prefer scavenging flesh that is dead already (they are drawn to the smell of rotting fat faster than anything), but they must eat about 60-70 pounds of food a day prior to hibernation. You can't get that kind of food intake from blueberries and rock bass.
Defending against an angry grizzly is almost futile. Shoot one with anything less than a deer slug to the brain, and you will most likely die before it does, because a grizzly that is shot in the body will continue to try to kill you until the flow of oxygen to the brain finally stops.
You obviously know a fair ammount about bears, but you do not appear to be aware of the traits that makes the grizzly much more dangerous than her genetic cousins.
No, the genetic diversity is the only thing you are preserving. Whatever their behavior, the clones would be geneticly the same as the creatures they are replicated from.
and their learned hunting skills and social structure will be gone
That might be a good thing. I don't know how often they attacked humans before, but I would prefer Tasmanian tigers that don't kill people, all things being equal.
Sorry, but that is not even a little bit true. Many animals kill to win a mate (or eliminate competition for breeding).
Many others kill to please the Alpha leader of their pack (like the house-cat who kills mice & birds and then presents them to you hoping you will thankful).
Some animals hunt and kill when they are not really hungry, because it helps them stay fit and their instincts demand that they go after prey when the opportunity arises.
Anyone who has ever seen film of a school of bottle-nose dolphins bludgeon a shark to death know that sometimes animals kill predators to protect thier extended family.
Some kill in order to maintain a comfortable habitat.
And some animals kill just for the plain old damned fun of it.
Sorry if that bursts your bubble and ruins your mythological notion of nature's inherent nobility, but the facts can't really be avoided.
These are 500-pound animals that crave flesh, can break a moose's neck with one punch, can run 35 MPH, and can bite a half-foot-thick pine tree in half. Governor Kempthorne has said this plan may well be "the first federal land-management action likely to result in injury or death of members of the public."
A popular bumper sticker slogan in the region right now is "Cage your Children. The bears are loose".
People used to be concerned that genetic scientists might be trying to play God. Your objection seems to be that the scientists are trying to play Nature.
If you go back to the old myths of Pandora and Icarus, and compare that with the Unabomber Manifesto and Bill Joy's open letter in Wired, you can see how mankind has always been a little scared of the consequences of going "too far". However, it has now been over 50 years since we discovered a technology that can wipe out mankind, and civilization continues.
It seems to me that this is an irrational, inborn fear, a phobia against Too Much Knowledge. It also seems to me that this is an instict which we should resist, becuase knowing more has always proven to be a Good Thing in the long run. Nuclear bombs are scary, but nuclear fusion generators may be the answer to all of our energy problems someday. Genetic research raises a lot of questions, but it might also allow us to live longer, happier lives.
For my own part, I'm going to stick with the "let's learn everything we can about the universe" camp. Doing so might harm us, but there is no doubt that not doing so will.
If we were to take a poll, how many Americans do you think are aware that Clinton was found guilty of "contempt of court" for lying in his sexual harrassment testimony, and fined $90,000? Or that several people have been arrested for illegal fund-raising for the Clinton-Gore '96 campeign? Or that Ken Starr's investigation resulted in the conviction and imprisonment of over two dozen close business partners and political allies of the Clintons (for crimes that they could not possibly have committed without the knowing aid of our current sitting president)?
What we did get from TV and the press was day after day after day of talk about the juicy sex bits from the back pages of Ken Starr's report. Stories about fellated Presidents sells more papers than serious obstructions of justice.
The problem shows no signs of stopping either. Are the press getting into the meaty details of Bush and Gore's differing Social Security reform proposals? Or are the just bringing in "consultants" like George Stephenopolis to talk about whether Gore can match Bush's charisma, and what the Gender Gap statistics look like this month?
Like I said, journalism is dead. The age of Infotainment is here.