Was there an upgrade to humanity that I'm not aware of, because the last time I checked, humans were quite bad at these things, even when that is a large portion of their job description.
Theoretically, we should reach a point at which your car, the truck, and the minibus all know what is going on and can coordinate on a plan to minimize injury. Everyone brings up these ethics arguments from the perspective of individual vehicles because that's how we operate them, when I see no reason for the system to not work for mutual interest here. It'd be far more effective than trying to program ethics into your car, which would be the ethically superior option.
The economic damages of illegally destroying competition in those markets. I'm not on a tirade against rich guys, I'm on a tirade against convicted monopolists. Rupert Murdoch and News Corp should likely fit in the same boat, but don't think that Gates giving to charity makes him any different then any other robber baron. In fact, you'll find plenty of buildings and institutions named after robber barons.
They've engaged in anticompetitive behavior for a long time, and did a lot to break standards (you know that good ole embrace, extend, extinguish). Such behavior causes lots of harm, which is why we have antitrust law.
People will complain about anything, but it pisses me off to see people who likely give nothing at all to charity complaining that someone who does isn't doing it the way they would.
The biggest problem isn't that they are doing charity inefficiently. Even if Gates donated 100% of his money to the charities and research I felt most deserving, that wouldn't put his ledger in the black.
Because the economic damages caused by his actions are probably orders of magnitude greater than his philanthropic effort, which has been questioned regarding their efficacy, negative impact, and neutrality. Kind of mirrors Rockefeller.
The kinds of manipulations with GMO would never happen with selective breeding or other natural gene transfers.
There are insects with fungal and bacterial genes, as well as more mundane genes transfers that cross species. A lot of GMO genes are not even cross-species.
Small changes in the genes can have enormous effects, genes have many functions which are not known and with effects that can cascade throughout the organism. This makes GMOs unpredictable
It also makes selective breeding unpredictable. It makes anything other than asexual reproduction unpredictable. In fact, there are more random interactions with natural crossbreeding than GMO.
All you are hearing is the marketing propoganda paid for by agribusiness that is designed to cover up the danger and whitewash it just as they did with smoking and lung cancer.
You are acting as if there isn't a lot of money in the natural foods market. There is money on both sides, and neither one has a moral high ground. Again, I am 100% and I think Monsanto is evil (a term I do not throw around lightly), but I also believe that without GMO, we are going to face some kind of cataclysm in our food and industrial crops. I think it's also important that we don't allow GMO patents, which cuts a lot of perverse incentives for fudging research.
I don't know about you, but I don't consider my food to be perfect, as there are definitely differences I notice.. In fact, a big portion of modern economic practice were built on our desire to use spices to cover the bad taste of the food we had.
There's no logic behind your argument. Selective breeding is by definition not 'natural. Also, you might want to look up 'horizontal gene transfer.' Nature transplants genes too, and in a less controlled way. The technology is not inherently flawed, but there are issues with out usage, including biodiversity.
If you want to ban patents on GMO, I am 100% with you. That will be a blow to Monsanto but not get in the way of things like golden rice.
So, what you are saying is that we are more than advanced enough for robot senators? On a more serious note, haven't we more or less gotten to the point where machines are better than humans at CAPTCHAs, not to mention chess and Jeopardy!
You can keep someone alive and mostly functional with only slight variation, but optimum health differs quite a bit. There are all kinds of reactions going on that alter our body chemistry and all kinds of things that can alter that chemistry throughout a routine day, and even the same nutrition in the same food may differ depending upon how said food is prepared. It's a very complex matter, and looking for simple, one size-fits-all solutions are why we have such an issue in the first place. If we become inculcated with serving individual diet needs, we could not only be healthier, but also probably actually enjoy more of the food we eat.
The approach in this study is low carb vs. low fat. Two big fad diet trends, and apparently the low fat group was actually just eating normal levels of fat. They don't seem to be providing much by way of useful information.
A healthy diet can't be summarized in a sentence. The healthiest diet is what your body needs, and what your body needs depends on your individual body chemistry, your environment, your lifestyle, and probably a half a dozen other factors. That's why dietitians are not all unemployed (although they may not always be totally trustworthy, they can probably provide you with something better than low carb or low fat).
I don't know. I do know that governments have, in the past, only accepted MS formats, and that even MS doesn't have perfect compatibility, which means that if you don't want to deal with the complications of compatibility, you are forced to have at least one machine in the office with MS Office.
The majority of the sources I saw seemed to side with the Michael Brown, and other information suggests at least severe negligence on the part of the officer.
If the government using MSOffice and you have to send and receive documents from the government, the government effectively forces you to use proprietary software.
No, every number except for the world population and the final calculated number for mortality rate is from that WHO report. I used the numbers most favorable to producing a high mortality rate, and the number I got was far less than your 8-10% death rate (which would possibly be an accurate rate for severe cases). You can argue that the influenza is a big concern, but the numbers suggest that people with healthy immune systems don't die of influenza very often.
Another thing to keep in mind is the availability of effective options. The flu virus changes in ways that require us to update our vaccines practically every year. That makes a complete cure for the flu virtually impossible. The ways we could improve would be better immunization methods, better tracking of the spread of the flu, and adapting more quickly to new strains.
You need to read a bit more carefully because you cited the number of severe cases, not the total number of cases. That same report says that 5-10% of adults get it annually, and 20-30% of children. If we go with the lowest number of infected, 5%, and multiple it by the 7 billion on this planet, we have 350 million. With the high estimate of half a million deaths, that clocks in around 0.14% mortality. Take out the high risk groups and that number is even lower.
If I'm in a boxing match, and my opponent collapses, I win:)
It's quite unsettling that you take the relationship of hundreds of millions of people, with significant effects probably touching close to a billion, and try to boil it down to a sporting event.
Or is your assertion that the USSR, had it won the cold war, would've eventually collapsed on its own, then later on changed its mind and re-invaded and acquired its lost territories?:)
I'm not claiming to know what exactly would have happened with the USSR and it's people in a number of different scenarios, but I do think I can say that positive effects of our cold war actions would be dumb luck the overwhelming majority of the time. Worse yet, the era created an excess of world ending firepower and filled a generation or so with a dangerous breed of paranoia that is willing to give up their rights for nothing in the name of fear.
None of those options happened. The cold war didn't end because the US won, it ended because the USSR collapsed. I understand that it's a far less suitable material for writing songs to play while draped with flags, but that's the reality.
Slashdot Mirror
Was there an upgrade to humanity that I'm not aware of, because the last time I checked, humans were quite bad at these things, even when that is a large portion of their job description.
Theoretically, we should reach a point at which your car, the truck, and the minibus all know what is going on and can coordinate on a plan to minimize injury. Everyone brings up these ethics arguments from the perspective of individual vehicles because that's how we operate them, when I see no reason for the system to not work for mutual interest here. It'd be far more effective than trying to program ethics into your car, which would be the ethically superior option.
The economic damages of illegally destroying competition in those markets. I'm not on a tirade against rich guys, I'm on a tirade against convicted monopolists. Rupert Murdoch and News Corp should likely fit in the same boat, but don't think that Gates giving to charity makes him any different then any other robber baron. In fact, you'll find plenty of buildings and institutions named after robber barons.
That's my standard for 'a great man.' I make no claim to be a great man, or even a decent person.
The biggest problem isn't that they are doing charity inefficiently. Even if Gates donated 100% of his money to the charities and research I felt most deserving, that wouldn't put his ledger in the black.
Because the economic damages caused by his actions are probably orders of magnitude greater than his philanthropic effort, which has been questioned regarding their efficacy, negative impact, and neutrality. Kind of mirrors Rockefeller.
There are insects with fungal and bacterial genes, as well as more mundane genes transfers that cross species. A lot of GMO genes are not even cross-species.
It also makes selective breeding unpredictable. It makes anything other than asexual reproduction unpredictable. In fact, there are more random interactions with natural crossbreeding than GMO.
You are acting as if there isn't a lot of money in the natural foods market. There is money on both sides, and neither one has a moral high ground. Again, I am 100% and I think Monsanto is evil (a term I do not throw around lightly), but I also believe that without GMO, we are going to face some kind of cataclysm in our food and industrial crops. I think it's also important that we don't allow GMO patents, which cuts a lot of perverse incentives for fudging research.
I don't know about you, but I don't consider my food to be perfect, as there are definitely differences I notice.. In fact, a big portion of modern economic practice were built on our desire to use spices to cover the bad taste of the food we had.
We don't have perfect visibility, but it's not completely blind either.
There's no logic behind your argument. Selective breeding is by definition not 'natural. Also, you might want to look up 'horizontal gene transfer.' Nature transplants genes too, and in a less controlled way. The technology is not inherently flawed, but there are issues with out usage, including biodiversity.
If you want to ban patents on GMO, I am 100% with you. That will be a blow to Monsanto but not get in the way of things like golden rice.
So, what you are saying is that we are more than advanced enough for robot senators? On a more serious note, haven't we more or less gotten to the point where machines are better than humans at CAPTCHAs, not to mention chess and Jeopardy!
I would welcome Robocop dramas if we can get Peter Weller or at least someone who can fill his shoes.
So, I can get good old Google back by spoofing IE6?
You can keep someone alive and mostly functional with only slight variation, but optimum health differs quite a bit. There are all kinds of reactions going on that alter our body chemistry and all kinds of things that can alter that chemistry throughout a routine day, and even the same nutrition in the same food may differ depending upon how said food is prepared. It's a very complex matter, and looking for simple, one size-fits-all solutions are why we have such an issue in the first place. If we become inculcated with serving individual diet needs, we could not only be healthier, but also probably actually enjoy more of the food we eat.
The approach in this study is low carb vs. low fat. Two big fad diet trends, and apparently the low fat group was actually just eating normal levels of fat. They don't seem to be providing much by way of useful information.
A healthy diet can't be summarized in a sentence. The healthiest diet is what your body needs, and what your body needs depends on your individual body chemistry, your environment, your lifestyle, and probably a half a dozen other factors. That's why dietitians are not all unemployed (although they may not always be totally trustworthy, they can probably provide you with something better than low carb or low fat).
I don't know. I do know that governments have, in the past, only accepted MS formats, and that even MS doesn't have perfect compatibility, which means that if you don't want to deal with the complications of compatibility, you are forced to have at least one machine in the office with MS Office.
The majority of the sources I saw seemed to side with the Michael Brown, and other information suggests at least severe negligence on the part of the officer.
If the government using MSOffice and you have to send and receive documents from the government, the government effectively forces you to use proprietary software.
No, every number except for the world population and the final calculated number for mortality rate is from that WHO report. I used the numbers most favorable to producing a high mortality rate, and the number I got was far less than your 8-10% death rate (which would possibly be an accurate rate for severe cases). You can argue that the influenza is a big concern, but the numbers suggest that people with healthy immune systems don't die of influenza very often.
Another thing to keep in mind is the availability of effective options. The flu virus changes in ways that require us to update our vaccines practically every year. That makes a complete cure for the flu virtually impossible. The ways we could improve would be better immunization methods, better tracking of the spread of the flu, and adapting more quickly to new strains.
You need to read a bit more carefully because you cited the number of severe cases, not the total number of cases. That same report says that 5-10% of adults get it annually, and 20-30% of children. If we go with the lowest number of infected, 5%, and multiple it by the 7 billion on this planet, we have 350 million. With the high estimate of half a million deaths, that clocks in around 0.14% mortality. Take out the high risk groups and that number is even lower.
It's quite unsettling that you take the relationship of hundreds of millions of people, with significant effects probably touching close to a billion, and try to boil it down to a sporting event.
I'm not claiming to know what exactly would have happened with the USSR and it's people in a number of different scenarios, but I do think I can say that positive effects of our cold war actions would be dumb luck the overwhelming majority of the time. Worse yet, the era created an excess of world ending firepower and filled a generation or so with a dangerous breed of paranoia that is willing to give up their rights for nothing in the name of fear.
Japan has a shortage of young people, so there may not be enough interns to go around.
None of those options happened. The cold war didn't end because the US won, it ended because the USSR collapsed. I understand that it's a far less suitable material for writing songs to play while draped with flags, but that's the reality.
Tell Stalin's victims what? That they probably didn't care much for the cold war?