the gene that produces vitamin C in mammals is broken in primates and other species that if corrected could prevent scurvy in malnourished nations. it is good to test and try to understand the effects of genetic engineering but to blindly fear it because of things like this is irresponsible
You're not just talking about genetically engineering foods, but now humans? On a massive, global scale?
1) Vitamin C is an essential nutrient for higher primates for a reason: our ancestors ate a lot of it, and thus no longer needed to produce it. These genes for synthesizing it that you want to "reactivate" haven't been expressed for millions of years, which means they haven't been selected on (to the same degree). For a programming analogy, how quickly does commented-out code become obsolete?
It's not at all clear that we're still capable of synthesizing Vitamin-C, that it's just a matter of "turning on" a gene somewhere: it might require extensive implantation of non-primate mammalian DNA into our genomes. And this is not a small change.
2) Who would research and administer this genetic re-engineering system? Big Pharmaceutical, that's who. You're naive if you think there's any good side to letting go about re-engineering the genes of any person, let alone impoverished people who are in less of a position to speak up about abuses.
3) I frequently hear pitches like this, for certain types of technological solutions which could save the lives of the desperate poor. In addition to your suggestion, we could, for example:
- i) genetically engineer a number of crops with higher yields, providing more food,
- ii) blanket Africa with DDT, killing mosquitoes (and therefore preventing malaria transmission),
- iii) actively destroy swampland in rural Africa and other tropical regions, to reduce the size of mosquito breeding grounds. The argument for these technologies (saved human lives) is easy to advance. There are various specific counterarguments to be used for specific cases, but there are two general counterarguments:
A straightforward swap of human lives in exchange for some consequence we haven't defined or investigated is never a great idea. What if we replace all crops with engineered ones, but those are all wiped out ten years later by a plague that preys on the new genetic homogenity of these crops? What if there's something else that grows in swamps that, it turns out, we really need? The appeal to lives saved is always an emotional appeal, but there's no point to the trade if we don't know the price.
The reasons for Third World poverty are not technological, but social and political. We could give more food to hungry people now; we don't need to wait till we get higher-yield crops. (To relate to your example, we could send Vitamin-C pills to malnurished nations now: surely this would be cheaper that a widespread program of genetic re-engineering!) And if we aren't giving it away now, aren't we fooling ourselves by thinking that we will when we have more to give away?
I'm not quite getting it. Leaving aside the difficulties of shooting, who would stand in for the evil Nazis? I suppose they could have the Taliban in scuba gear.
Well, why not the Nazis? They had U-boats after all. Maybe it could be a secret undersea Nazi base in the North Sea which survived the downfall of the Third Reich by remaining undetected, but which is located close enough to the shipwreck that its existence is jeopardized. Indiana Jones V: Indiana Jones und Das Boot!
So you're saying that if I want to roommate with someone in America, I'm legally not allowed to ask their sexual orientation? Wow. Lucky for me I'm openminded, but that would suck for a lot of people.
No, I'm not saying anything of the kind: it seems odd to me to fail to distinguish between landlords and roommates. I'm merely arguing that in legal terms, there may be no distinction between optional and mandatory fields.
I'm not sure it would make a legal difference whether they were optional or not. Prospective employers are legally prohibited from asking for photographs from job applicants, presumably to avoid problems discrimination.
Imagine if this were weakened to "employers cannot demand but may request photographs from job applicants". It wouldn't be too long until anyone needing a job who isn't a member of Suppressed Minority X is sticking photographs on their résumés. Then the lack of a photograph can be correlated tightly with membership in Suppressed Minority X, and the discriminating employer wins.
I did not RTFA, but I did read the summary. I did not hear his argument, I heard his conclusion repeated with more words.
Exactly my thought. This isn't a shot at Grimes, and the people explaining his argument in great detail to you are missing the point. The submitter claimed to be summarizing Grimes' argument, but did not.
Re:Obligatory Planet of the Apes
on
The Human Mutation
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
It is the recognition of God, the concept of God. No matter if you accept it or deny it, or say "I do not know". If you capable to answer the question "Is there God?" in any way: positive, negative or agnostic way, once you have been presented with it, then you are a human.
This isn't any sort of counterargument — I think your claim is wildly speculative, and not currently provable or falsifiabl — but I thought I'd mention it as it also concerns human evolution and the capacity for religious thought.
In The Naked Ape, Desmond Morris suggests that religious impulses are a residual remnant from a more hierarchical social structure earlier in our primate ancestry. We moved from a model where we spent most of our time munching fruit in trees and an alpha male led the monkey troop to a model where we supplemented our diet with small game (as chimps to now) which required greater collaboration and necessitated a more egalitarian social structure. There might still be an alpha male, but one with less power. I quote:
This change in the order of things, vital as it was to the new social system, neverthless left a gap. From our ancient background there remained a need for an all-powerful figure who could keep the group under control, and the vacancy was filled by the invention of a god. The influence of the invented god-figure could then operate as a force additional to the now more restricted influence of the group leader.
At first sight, it is surprising that religion has been so successful, but its extreme potency is simply a measure of the strength of our fundamental biological tendency, inherited directly from our monkey and ape ancestors, to submit ourselves to an all-powerful, dominant member of the group.
Now, this claim isn't provable either, and I think that since The Naked Ape there has been a lot of rethinking about how much of a role collaborative hunting really played in hominid social structure. But it's some food for thought.
It's more reasonable to demand from other people that they fix your problem, self inflicted or not? And damn them to hell if they don't do it in the exact way you figured? It's not like MERCK is infecting Brasilians with HIV...
No, they're not. But whether or not the infected people's HIV is self-inflicted, it's still there.
They're not going to cough up the dough to pay First-World Merck prices for the ARV drugs, so it's either a question of giving them cheaper generic drugs and preserving Merck's profit potential (without actually getting profit) or watching them die of AIDS and possibly compromising some profit for Merck (i.e. the risk that the cheap drugs will find their way into the hands of someone who could have paid for the expensive ones).
For a lot of people, including myself, the negative of the dying far outweighs the negative of the possible loss in profit potential for Merck.
I'm not being stupid here: I do realize that if Big Pharmaceuticals can't make profits on their investments, there'll be less R&D. It's just that even considering that, giving cheap generic drugs out is the better thing to do.
Right, anything to deny people's responsibility for their actions. It sure is nice to live in a world where just because your life sucks you have superior rights to everyone else.
No, I find moral relativism as disgusting as you claim to. People ought to answer for what they do.
The point, however, is that the ease of avoiding HIV exposure is not evenly spread across the globe. In many cases people actually do not have a choice about being exposed. Or if they do, the choice requires so many lifestyle changes (abstinence, going out of your way to procure condoms and insist on their use) that it is not reasonable to expect large numbers of people to undertake it.
Finally, as an example of my lack of moral relativism, observe the repugnance with which I greet your sermons on personal responsibility for avoiding HIV exposure. What is that if not moralizing as well?
If you think every fistfight is voluntary: on CBC radio a couple of weeks ago, they had an example (from Tanzania I believe) where a guy had gotten beat up while defending his elderly neighbour's house from burglars, and contracted HIV in the process.
You have to physically perform an action which every semi-intelligent person knows carries the risk of AIDS (unprotected sex, sex with a stranger, sharing needles, etc) to get AIDS.
Oh goody, the moralistic argument.
First, it needn't surprise you that there are all kinds of ways one person can compel another to engage in sexual intercourse. And I'm not just talking about rape and prostitution either.
Second, there are all kinds of ways one person can come into contact with another's blood. In a country with a sufficiently high HIV prevalence, any car accident, mugging, or fistfight might result in infection. And while the First World now has pretty good testing regimes for blood transfusions, are you sure that's the case everywhere?
If you think every fistfight is voluntary: on CBC radio a couple of weeks ago, they had an example (from Tanzania I believe) where a guy had gotten beat up while defending his elderly neighbour's house from burglars, and contracted HIV in the process.
So cut the moralizing "they all made their choices" crap.
Yet by the time the third debate came round the much of media had managed to portray Bush's lack of awareness and knowledge as a good thing(tm) because he was 'trying'
Good lord, yes. 2000 was my first time watching an American presidential election, and it was incredible. I remember at the time of the second debate hearing commentators from multiple networks (none of them Fox, we don't get that on Canadian cable) talking about how much he had improved because he could pronounce foreign names better! It was... just incredible to hear that.
The whole thing was very well satirized in the Saturday Night Live sketches of the day, where Bush (played by Will Ferrell) spontaneously recites the entire cabinet of Nigeria.
I'm the submitter of this article. In an effort to bend over backwards to be fair to Valenti, I included a link to the MPAA's own obit of him, as well as an interview where he talked about working to implement Lyndon Johnson's civil rights program.
I see both these links were removed. Did that really need to happen? Yes, we all hate Valenti, etc., etc., etc. Does this article really need to be nothing other than a collective bitchfest? The man was a big fat jerk, but do we really need to talk about nothing more than that?
Wow. I didn't realize it'd gotten that bad. Sorry about that, and please realise that not all of us are like the chimp in office.
Oh, we do. The public consciousness of American politics in Canada is quite high (there is why Tucker Carlson called us "a stalker nation", because we pay so much more attention to the U.S. than we receive) and many up here we pleased to see the results of the fall congressional elections.
I should say I was being a bit doom-and-gloom in my post: the type of language I talked about was real, but it's nothing new for Harper. This is the guy who in March 2003 as opposition leader came on Fox News to personally apologise for Canada not entering the Iraq War! But he played the centrist card to get elected, so it remains to be seen how the resurrection of this sort of rhetoric. And my mentioning annexationism was over the top.
On the "if XXXXX happens, I'm moving to Canada" thing: I can't say I'm too sympathetic towards that kind of disappointment by that. Painting Canada as a Socialist Heaven is as false as painting it Socialist Hell (or "Soviet Canuckistan", if you're Pat Buchanan). If people truly knows so little about Canada as to believe either myth, then they deserve to have their bubble burst.
That way maybe they'll change their tune before canada ends up with a bunch of monkeys like Bush and Co.
I think we're a little late for that. A couple of weeks ago, addressing the Afghan prisoner abuse scandal, our prime minister said (I'm paraphrasing) that it was good that the leader of the Opposition was more concerned about Taliban terrorists then our soldiers. The whole thing could have been lifted verbatim from a White House press briefing.
Yesterday our public safety minister said we shouldn't be concerned about the prisoners because "these people have no compunction about machine-gunning, mowing down little children; they have no compunction about decapitating or hanging elderly women; they have no compunction about the most vicious types of torture you can imagine."
The transformation is complete; the dialogue is identical. Some random ranter on the Globe and Mail messageboard is fond of referring to the Conservatives as "the Conservative-Republican Annexationist Party". Until recently I thought this was a little overblown.
At least our business leaders aren't talking about dollarization anymore.
I mean seriously, the entire Idea behind using Biofuels instead of fossil fuels is because the carbon on biofuels are already on the earths surface and there is no net gain. Wouldn't this be the same? placing Co2 back underground were is came from?
Yeah, that's pretty much the idea. After a century of intense oil extraction at great expense and effort, we end up putting it back. The crowning irony would be if the most efficient manner of underground storage was as oil.
It would make things a lot easier in the end if we just, you know, stopped pulling it out of the ground already...
Depends where you prune the timeline. All that underground carbon started up here, you know. You did call it a fossil fuel, so I think you get that.
Sure. But I think that the last time most that carbon was on the surface was when it was part of the Carboniferous swamps.
It might have been "natural" to have those levels of CO2 back then, but it was also natural to have salamanders the size of crocodiles and dragonflies with the wingspan of eagles. It's stretching the definition a little...
I think we're going to look back on the halcyon days of the Cold War with nostalgia, when we had an enemy who was basically rational and we could sit down over a negotiating table and talk to, or pull out a map and point at.
I think you're generally being pretty reasonable in your post, but I think with this last bit, particularly "basically rational", you're just buying into the conventional propaganda line.
Sure, there are no shortage of religious zealots who are raving lunatics. But people like this have always been created by a larger political context of rational political opposition — even the original Zealot, from which we get our term for hysterical and unreasoning devotion to a cause, lived at a time when there were a lot of reasons why Jews might not like Romans so much.
I think the thing that makes the Cold War distinct from the current situation is the level of mutual understanding, at least at the level of leadership. Both sides in the Cold War more or less understood how its opponents' power structures worked and could be manipulated. In the current conflict, partly through willing ignorance that understanding just isn't there to the same degree: I just don't get the sense that most of the American authorities in Iraq could tell you about what distinguishes Shia from Sunni, for instance, or the historical context of the dispute over the Shatt al-Arab.
The consequence is that the other side acts in "unexpected" ways, which are then described as "irrational".
How does converting your purchased DVDs to XVID make them any more "on-demand" than just watching the DVDs themselves?
Well, I suppose if you have a gigantic hard drive (or several of them), then you could have all your movies accessible without swapping discs in and out.
Though I'm happy to boast that my own laziness threshold, while low, is still well above swapping a DVD.
So, does that mean that one day getting driving directions from New York to Paris will be more than just an April Fools' joke?
I'll grant you it's not exactly the most efficient way. I don't have high confidence in the state of Siberian highways (where by "state" I include "existence").
At some point the human gene set allowed us to change our environment to help us survive. This would logically mean that our genes would have less impetus to change. The Chimps genes have not had that sheltered environment so have been forced to continue adapting.
This might explain it, except that our ability to change our environment only really started with the discovery of fire about a million years ago. Given that our most recent common ancestor with chimps lived about six million years ago, that still leaves about five million years during which we were both subject to good ol' about "nature red in tooth and claw".
I'm more inclined to think the issue is the compatively low population sizes of human ancestors. If your breeding population is small, so is the genetic raw material from which you'd hope to draw beneficial mutations.
Oh, and Fax over Voice over IP is a bad idea anyway. As anybody with a minimum of technical insight would be able to tell you. If you want prioritized fax packets, buy a dedicated line (see! we already have tiered services!).
At the risk of grossly being immodest, I will suggest that I have a minimal level of technical insight. Whether or not fax over VOIP is a good idea, the point is that lots of people will want to use it, and many hidebound stuck-in-the-eighties services still require it.
There's no way prioritization is the problem here. I simply don't believe faxes consume enough bandwidth to make this an issue. The problem being discussed, which you seem not to have picked up on, was that the lossy compression used in VOIP filters out much of the encoded data used by faxes. My point was merely that it suffices to use another encoding format to make faxes usable over VOIP.
However, you'll see a lot more leniency when the comments are being made about someone in the democrat/leftist/liberal camp.
I see essentially the same level of leniency applied whenever the political allegiance of the person speaking lies with the particular party being discussed. I detect no particular variation on party lines on this.
If I had to guess, though, I would say that the "left" has a greater number of disaffected types who will hold their noses and vote Democrat but refuse to self-identify as such. These sorts would probably not have too much of a problem with calling a spade a spade in the situation described in TFA.
Slashdot Mirror
the gene that produces vitamin C in mammals is broken in primates and other species that if corrected could prevent scurvy in malnourished nations. it is good to test and try to understand the effects of genetic engineering but to blindly fear it because of things like this is irresponsible
You're not just talking about genetically engineering foods, but now humans? On a massive, global scale?
1) Vitamin C is an essential nutrient for higher primates for a reason: our ancestors ate a lot of it, and thus no longer needed to produce it. These genes for synthesizing it that you want to "reactivate" haven't been expressed for millions of years, which means they haven't been selected on (to the same degree). For a programming analogy, how quickly does commented-out code become obsolete?
It's not at all clear that we're still capable of synthesizing Vitamin-C, that it's just a matter of "turning on" a gene somewhere: it might require extensive implantation of non-primate mammalian DNA into our genomes. And this is not a small change.
2) Who would research and administer this genetic re-engineering system? Big Pharmaceutical, that's who. You're naive if you think there's any good side to letting go about re-engineering the genes of any person, let alone impoverished people who are in less of a position to speak up about abuses.
3) I frequently hear pitches like this, for certain types of technological solutions which could save the lives of the desperate poor. In addition to your suggestion, we could, for example:
- i) genetically engineer a number of crops with higher yields, providing more food,
- ii) blanket Africa with DDT, killing mosquitoes (and therefore preventing malaria transmission),
- iii) actively destroy swampland in rural Africa and other tropical regions, to reduce the size of mosquito breeding grounds.
The argument for these technologies (saved human lives) is easy to advance. There are various specific counterarguments to be used for specific cases, but there are two general counterarguments:
A straightforward swap of human lives in exchange for some consequence we haven't defined or investigated is never a great idea. What if we replace all crops with engineered ones, but those are all wiped out ten years later by a plague that preys on the new genetic homogenity of these crops? What if there's something else that grows in swamps that, it turns out, we really need? The appeal to lives saved is always an emotional appeal, but there's no point to the trade if we don't know the price.
The reasons for Third World poverty are not technological, but social and political. We could give more food to hungry people now; we don't need to wait till we get higher-yield crops. (To relate to your example, we could send Vitamin-C pills to malnurished nations now: surely this would be cheaper that a widespread program of genetic re-engineering!) And if we aren't giving it away now, aren't we fooling ourselves by thinking that we will when we have more to give away?
A talk show host was talking last night about how today's politically correct society...
What! A talk show host? Spreading vapid FUD about political correctness? Never!
I'm not quite getting it. Leaving aside the difficulties of shooting, who would stand in for the evil Nazis? I suppose they could have the Taliban in scuba gear.
Well, why not the Nazis? They had U-boats after all. Maybe it could be a secret undersea Nazi base in the North Sea which survived the downfall of the Third Reich by remaining undetected, but which is located close enough to the shipwreck that its existence is jeopardized. Indiana Jones V: Indiana Jones und Das Boot!
So you're saying that if I want to roommate with someone in America, I'm legally not allowed to ask their sexual orientation? Wow. Lucky for me I'm openminded, but that would suck for a lot of people.
No, I'm not saying anything of the kind: it seems odd to me to fail to distinguish between landlords and roommates. I'm merely arguing that in legal terms, there may be no distinction between optional and mandatory fields.
Were these fields optional?
I'm not sure it would make a legal difference whether they were optional or not. Prospective employers are legally prohibited from asking for photographs from job applicants, presumably to avoid problems discrimination.
Imagine if this were weakened to "employers cannot demand but may request photographs from job applicants". It wouldn't be too long until anyone needing a job who isn't a member of Suppressed Minority X is sticking photographs on their résumés. Then the lack of a photograph can be correlated tightly with membership in Suppressed Minority X, and the discriminating employer wins.
I did not RTFA, but I did read the summary. I did not hear his argument, I heard his conclusion repeated with more words.
Exactly my thought. This isn't a shot at Grimes, and the people explaining his argument in great detail to you are missing the point. The submitter claimed to be summarizing Grimes' argument, but did not.
This isn't any sort of counterargument — I think your claim is wildly speculative, and not currently provable or falsifiabl — but I thought I'd mention it as it also concerns human evolution and the capacity for religious thought.
In The Naked Ape, Desmond Morris suggests that religious impulses are a residual remnant from a more hierarchical social structure earlier in our primate ancestry. We moved from a model where we spent most of our time munching fruit in trees and an alpha male led the monkey troop to a model where we supplemented our diet with small game (as chimps to now) which required greater collaboration and necessitated a more egalitarian social structure. There might still be an alpha male, but one with less power. I quote:
Now, this claim isn't provable either, and I think that since The Naked Ape there has been a lot of rethinking about how much of a role collaborative hunting really played in hominid social structure. But it's some food for thought.
It's more reasonable to demand from other people that they fix your problem, self inflicted or not? And damn them to hell if they don't do it in the exact way you figured? It's not like MERCK is infecting Brasilians with HIV ...
No, they're not. But whether or not the infected people's HIV is self-inflicted, it's still there.
They're not going to cough up the dough to pay First-World Merck prices for the ARV drugs, so it's either a question of giving them cheaper generic drugs and preserving Merck's profit potential (without actually getting profit) or watching them die of AIDS and possibly compromising some profit for Merck (i.e. the risk that the cheap drugs will find their way into the hands of someone who could have paid for the expensive ones).
For a lot of people, including myself, the negative of the dying far outweighs the negative of the possible loss in profit potential for Merck.
I'm not being stupid here: I do realize that if Big Pharmaceuticals can't make profits on their investments, there'll be less R&D. It's just that even considering that, giving cheap generic drugs out is the better thing to do.
Right, anything to deny people's responsibility for their actions. It sure is nice to live in a world where just because your life sucks you have superior rights to everyone else.
No, I find moral relativism as disgusting as you claim to. People ought to answer for what they do.
The point, however, is that the ease of avoiding HIV exposure is not evenly spread across the globe. In many cases people actually do not have a choice about being exposed. Or if they do, the choice requires so many lifestyle changes (abstinence, going out of your way to procure condoms and insist on their use) that it is not reasonable to expect large numbers of people to undertake it.
Finally, as an example of my lack of moral relativism, observe the repugnance with which I greet your sermons on personal responsibility for avoiding HIV exposure. What is that if not moralizing as well?
If you think every fistfight is voluntary: on CBC radio a couple of weeks ago, they had an example (from Tanzania I believe) where a guy had gotten beat up while defending his elderly neighbour's house from burglars, and contracted HIV in the process.
Sorry, I was wrong: it was the Globe and Mail, not CBC radio; and it was South Africa, not Tanzania: Excerpt One: 'My body just went cold'.
Stephanie Nolen kicks ass.
You have to physically perform an action which every semi-intelligent person knows carries the risk of AIDS (unprotected sex, sex with a stranger, sharing needles, etc) to get AIDS.
Oh goody, the moralistic argument.
First, it needn't surprise you that there are all kinds of ways one person can compel another to engage in sexual intercourse. And I'm not just talking about rape and prostitution either.
Second, there are all kinds of ways one person can come into contact with another's blood. In a country with a sufficiently high HIV prevalence, any car accident, mugging, or fistfight might result in infection. And while the First World now has pretty good testing regimes for blood transfusions, are you sure that's the case everywhere?
If you think every fistfight is voluntary: on CBC radio a couple of weeks ago, they had an example (from Tanzania I believe) where a guy had gotten beat up while defending his elderly neighbour's house from burglars, and contracted HIV in the process.
So cut the moralizing "they all made their choices" crap.
Yet by the time the third debate came round the much of media had managed to portray Bush's lack of awareness and knowledge as a good thing(tm) because he was 'trying'
Good lord, yes. 2000 was my first time watching an American presidential election, and it was incredible. I remember at the time of the second debate hearing commentators from multiple networks (none of them Fox, we don't get that on Canadian cable) talking about how much he had improved because he could pronounce foreign names better! It was... just incredible to hear that.
The whole thing was very well satirized in the Saturday Night Live sketches of the day, where Bush (played by Will Ferrell) spontaneously recites the entire cabinet of Nigeria.
I see both these links were removed. Did that really need to happen? Yes, we all hate Valenti, etc., etc., etc. Does this article really need to be nothing other than a collective bitchfest? The man was a big fat jerk, but do we really need to talk about nothing more than that?
In that case, here is Lord Byron's poem on Lord Castlereagh:
Wow. I didn't realize it'd gotten that bad. Sorry about that, and please realise that not all of us are like the chimp in office.
Oh, we do. The public consciousness of American politics in Canada is quite high (there is why Tucker Carlson called us "a stalker nation", because we pay so much more attention to the U.S. than we receive) and many up here we pleased to see the results of the fall congressional elections.
I should say I was being a bit doom-and-gloom in my post: the type of language I talked about was real, but it's nothing new for Harper. This is the guy who in March 2003 as opposition leader came on Fox News to personally apologise for Canada not entering the Iraq War! But he played the centrist card to get elected, so it remains to be seen how the resurrection of this sort of rhetoric. And my mentioning annexationism was over the top.
On the "if XXXXX happens, I'm moving to Canada" thing: I can't say I'm too sympathetic towards that kind of disappointment by that. Painting Canada as a Socialist Heaven is as false as painting it Socialist Hell (or "Soviet Canuckistan", if you're Pat Buchanan). If people truly knows so little about Canada as to believe either myth, then they deserve to have their bubble burst.
That way maybe they'll change their tune before canada ends up with a bunch of monkeys like Bush and Co.
I think we're a little late for that. A couple of weeks ago, addressing the Afghan prisoner abuse scandal, our prime minister said (I'm paraphrasing) that it was good that the leader of the Opposition was more concerned about Taliban terrorists then our soldiers. The whole thing could have been lifted verbatim from a White House press briefing.
Yesterday our public safety minister said we shouldn't be concerned about the prisoners because "these people have no compunction about machine-gunning, mowing down little children; they have no compunction about decapitating or hanging elderly women; they have no compunction about the most vicious types of torture you can imagine."
The transformation is complete; the dialogue is identical. Some random ranter on the Globe and Mail messageboard is fond of referring to the Conservatives as "the Conservative-Republican Annexationist Party". Until recently I thought this was a little overblown.
At least our business leaders aren't talking about dollarization anymore.
I mean seriously, the entire Idea behind using Biofuels instead of fossil fuels is because the carbon on biofuels are already on the earths surface and there is no net gain. Wouldn't this be the same? placing Co2 back underground were is came from?
Yeah, that's pretty much the idea. After a century of intense oil extraction at great expense and effort, we end up putting it back. The crowning irony would be if the most efficient manner of underground storage was as oil.
It would make things a lot easier in the end if we just, you know, stopped pulling it out of the ground already...
Depends where you prune the timeline. All that underground carbon started up here, you know. You did call it a fossil fuel, so I think you get that.
Sure. But I think that the last time most that carbon was on the surface was when it was part of the Carboniferous swamps.
It might have been "natural" to have those levels of CO2 back then, but it was also natural to have salamanders the size of crocodiles and dragonflies with the wingspan of eagles. It's stretching the definition a little...
It's pretty easy, and no amount of PBS specials is going to tell you this. Sunni are Arabs, Shiites are not.
I really hope you're joking, because you're completely wrong.
I think we're going to look back on the halcyon days of the Cold War with nostalgia, when we had an enemy who was basically rational and we could sit down over a negotiating table and talk to, or pull out a map and point at.
I think you're generally being pretty reasonable in your post, but I think with this last bit, particularly "basically rational", you're just buying into the conventional propaganda line.
Sure, there are no shortage of religious zealots who are raving lunatics. But people like this have always been created by a larger political context of rational political opposition — even the original Zealot, from which we get our term for hysterical and unreasoning devotion to a cause, lived at a time when there were a lot of reasons why Jews might not like Romans so much.
I think the thing that makes the Cold War distinct from the current situation is the level of mutual understanding, at least at the level of leadership. Both sides in the Cold War more or less understood how its opponents' power structures worked and could be manipulated. In the current conflict, partly through willing ignorance that understanding just isn't there to the same degree: I just don't get the sense that most of the American authorities in Iraq could tell you about what distinguishes Shia from Sunni, for instance, or the historical context of the dispute over the Shatt al-Arab.
The consequence is that the other side acts in "unexpected" ways, which are then described as "irrational".
How does converting your purchased DVDs to XVID make them any more "on-demand" than just watching the DVDs themselves?
Well, I suppose if you have a gigantic hard drive (or several of them), then you could have all your movies accessible without swapping discs in and out.
Though I'm happy to boast that my own laziness threshold, while low, is still well above swapping a DVD.
seriously. My favorite anachronism is Sony also plans to put the technology in the PlayStation 3 when the game console is released in the spring
Well, that's not an anachronism. That statement was entirely accurate when the IHT article was written — in October 2005.
So, does that mean that one day getting driving directions from New York to Paris will be more than just an April Fools' joke?
I'll grant you it's not exactly the most efficient way. I don't have high confidence in the state of Siberian highways (where by "state" I include "existence").
At some point the human gene set allowed us to change our environment to help us survive. This would logically mean that our genes would have less impetus to change. The Chimps genes have not had that sheltered environment so have been forced to continue adapting.
This might explain it, except that our ability to change our environment only really started with the discovery of fire about a million years ago. Given that our most recent common ancestor with chimps lived about six million years ago, that still leaves about five million years during which we were both subject to good ol' about "nature red in tooth and claw".
I'm more inclined to think the issue is the compatively low population sizes of human ancestors. If your breeding population is small, so is the genetic raw material from which you'd hope to draw beneficial mutations.
Oh, and Fax over Voice over IP is a bad idea anyway. As anybody with a minimum of technical insight would be able to tell you. If you want prioritized fax packets, buy a dedicated line (see! we already have tiered services!).
At the risk of grossly being immodest, I will suggest that I have a minimal level of technical insight. Whether or not fax over VOIP is a good idea, the point is that lots of people will want to use it, and many hidebound stuck-in-the-eighties services still require it.
There's no way prioritization is the problem here. I simply don't believe faxes consume enough bandwidth to make this an issue. The problem being discussed, which you seem not to have picked up on, was that the lossy compression used in VOIP filters out much of the encoded data used by faxes. My point was merely that it suffices to use another encoding format to make faxes usable over VOIP.
However, you'll see a lot more leniency when the comments are being made about someone in the democrat/leftist/liberal camp.
I see essentially the same level of leniency applied whenever the political allegiance of the person speaking lies with the particular party being discussed. I detect no particular variation on party lines on this.
If I had to guess, though, I would say that the "left" has a greater number of disaffected types who will hold their noses and vote Democrat but refuse to self-identify as such. These sorts would probably not have too much of a problem with calling a spade a spade in the situation described in TFA.