A similar story appeared in, IIRC, the Des Moines Register (the plastic in question was to be made from corn, and Des Moines is in corn country). It indicated that, while the biodegradability of the plant-derived plastic would make it a poor choice for some products (you don't want your vinyl siding to crumble and dissolve after a few seasons) it's an excellent choice for others.
The (U.S.) Navy, in particular, is interested in biodegradable food containers that can be safely tossed overboard rather than stored up (smelly, esp. on long voyages) and hauled ashore for disposal. Not that they do that now - they throw their waste overboard anyway. But biodegradable plastics would make it more acceptable.
No one (no I didn't read every last post - there were 377 of them ferchrissakes!) seems to have mentioned the ease of printing as one of the reasons the "paperless office" has been such a dismal failure. There's more paper - and more paper waste - now than there ever was before, and it's only getting worse.
It's an unintended consequence of making office life easier. Look into Why Things Bite Back for a bit of insight into how these unintended consequences strike. At the same time technology was enabling the paperless office, it enabled faster, easier, more perfect printing of office documents. What once required careful, time-consuming typing, and lots of carbon paper (remember that awful stuff?) now can be pounded out - and multiple high-quality copies made - in minutes. Correcting errors no longer requires retyping entire documents, but rather than reduce paperwork, this has only increased it. Miniscule errors that would have been tolerated (no sense in redoing that entire document because of one misspelling) in the past now require a complete reprint. And because the default settings on most word processors reprint the entire document, the whole thing gets reprinted for one typo on one page. It gets worse if the document gets photocopied before the typo is discovered. Suddenly hundreds of copies are wasted because of one barely-noticable (it didn't get noticed before it was photocopied) error.
Believe me - I know. I work for the gummint, and the amount of paper wasted where I work is obscene. Paperwork reduction act my ass!
If you're not arrogant, you politely show them how to add more paper. If they're not stupid, they won't have to ask you again.
Arrogance and stupidity feed off each other. A few arrogant tech-savvy people got the tech-impaired ones all worried that technology is utterly incomprehensible to mere mortals. So they begin to ask "stupid" questions rather than make even rudimentary attempts to find out the answers for themselves. They end up looking even more stupid, to the point that they'd try the patience of a saint. Soon even formerly helpful, patient geeks grumble at them to RTFM, and chuckle that they don't even know what that means.
...one of the big problems with society is that the physical age of puberty keeps getting younger while the time at which someone is considered a competent adult keeps getting older.
Actually that's only half true. The physical age of puberty isn't getting all that much younger. Even the small (but statistically significant) change in the age of onset of puberty is is most likely related to nutrition. It may not be that young people today have accelerated puberty, but that their grandparents experienced delayed puberty.
They (the proverbial "they") won't tell you this, but maybe kids today (the proverbial "kids today") aren't abnormal - maybe their parents and grandparents were!
Young adults may be growing up a little bit faster, but they're expected to behave like adults a lot faster. Youth has been sexualized, at the same time it's been (to use a far too politically-correct term) disempowered. Young people are permitted to act sexy like grown-ups, but not to act smart like grown-ups. And they're damn sure not respected like grown-ups. This combination of accelerated sexuality and lack of respect is a volatile one. Is it any wonder that Bad Things Happen in our warehouses of education?
Requiring students to wear ID badges (for their own protecion, of course!) is just another example of disrespecting young adults. It's going to make the situation worse instead of better.
...I made a email account, never used it, NEVER EVER signed up to anything with it, i let it set on a non-used server, and after 5 months, it had over 500 spam messages in it.
Just 'cause YOU never used the account, doesn't mean no one did. Someone else might have used the account name (just happened to pick that name?) specifically to misdirect all their spam to.
If I create (f'rinstance) the account "nospam@hotmail.com", and then never ever use it, should I be surprised that it fills up with spam?
Berners-Lee is already one of the century's most influential scientists. But reading "Weaving the Web," one senses that his scientific skills are way ahead of his political and cultural instincts.
...and that's a bad thing?
Re:Everything is gonna be allright,
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What about this book made Katz so sad?
What I gathered (from the review - alas I haven't read the book) is that it's not the book that made Katz sad. Life is making Katz sad. The fact that people who didn't build the web are getting rich from it, while the pioneers aren't, bothers him. Even if it people like TBL don't seem to care all that much (maybe they've got more important things to think about).
I don't see that sending a private email to someone in your family is something that should get you in trouble via the company access.
Yup. Using the company's hardware (and time) for these private conversations is no worse than using their phones to make a personal call. And should be treated the same way. If the company allows employees to occasionally use the phones for personal business, they should allow similar use of computer terminals. Abuse of the telephone or the network to the extent that it interferes with an employees work can be dealt with without surveilling (is that a word) the communication.
Porn sites and the like is not something you should be doing at work. Nor is chatting.
Well no, but I don't think spying on employees is justified even in these cases. If their use of porn or chat affects their work, or that of other employees, it gets noticed. No surveillance needed. If it doesn't get noticed, then can it really be said to interfere with work? And if it doesn't interfere with work, why should the company care that it's happening?
In short, I think it's okay for employers to have and enforce rules regulating employees' use of company communication equipment. I do not think it's okay to eavesdrop on those communications. The same rules should apply whether the communication is spoken over a telephone or typed into a terminal. The same rules should apply whether it consists of pornography, stock quotes, or a friendly call home to mom.
Katz wrote Politicians need to understand the particular characteristics of the young, educated, technologically-centered people...
Politicians understand one characteristic of such people all too well. They understand that they typically DON'T VOTE. The reason computers and the internet have attracted the interest of politicans as much as they have is that rich people (most of them old, white, and not particulary tech-savvy) use them. These people not only vote, but sometimes give generous campaign contributions. They're same people that politicians paid attention to before. That's why the net won't truly change politics any time soon.
Can't you just see it? Crack LEGO wizards from all over the world competing to design and program the very best LEGObots to compete in a variety of sports.
I suppose the medals would be made of LEGOs too... yellow (gold) white (silver) and red (bronze).
And no drug-test scandals! Except maybe for the designers (too much caffeine?) I suppose the bots might have to be searched for illegal EMP devices too, since that sure ain't good sportsbotship.
And why stop with the Olympics? What American city could stand to be without a national LEGO league team? Team colors would be limited to the standard LEGO color scheme, but so what? LEGO cheerleaders! LEGO halftime shows! Monday night LEGOball here I come!
Think the networks/ESPN will be interested? They should be!
a geek is somebody who bites the heads of chickens in a circus side show.
Yup. The name is somewhat appropriate for the rest of us geeks because, after you strip away the negative connotations, geeks are important because of what they DO instead of (as in the Dog Faced Boy, the World's Smallest Woman and the other circus freaks) what the ARE.
In the side-show, you don't have to have some genetic mutation to be a geek - you just have to be willing to do something that the straights will see as unusual and shocking.
Now maybe people with certain neurological traits will have a greater tendency to live life as a geek, but that doesn't mean regular ordinary people can't be geeks too. The freak-show kind OR the techie kind.
You don't have to be autistic to be a tech geek, and you don't have to have Prader-Wille(sp?) syndrome to be a circus geek. But it might help.
"Stupid newbies" This is exactly the kind of crap that is being addressed here. A newbie, by definition, is not stupid but rather unlearned.
Almost. A newbie is, by definition, unlearned. He/she may also be stupid. "Stupid newbies", then, is a subset of "newbies". "Smart newbies" is another subset of "newbies"; one which does not intersect with "stupid newbies".
This is not meant to imply that it's okay to haze the newbies. Rather, be nice to the newbies. Teach them stuff. That's how you tell the smart ones from the stupid ones - the smart ones learn.
Re:illegal drug tracking?
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It's a sad commentary on the current state of affairs that the first thoughts are of tracking users (presumably so that they can be rounded up for punishment) with nanites.
If these devices are to be recruited into the war on (some) drugs, why not use them to cure instead of punish the addict? If dust-sized nanites are snorted/injected/whatever along with illegal drugs, it seems so much more sensible to have them to bind to the drugs receptor site, so that the user could no longer get high from that particular drug.
Silly me. I thought hunter-killer nanites would seek out and destroy (the other guy's) nanites. Sort of a defensive or counter-surveillance weapon. But I suppose they might tackle bigger targets...
After all, do we really need something better than anthrax etc? I think it works pretty damned well as it is..;)
Anthrax works TOO well. That's why there's a push for "something better". You don't want your bioweapons to turn on you. Ideally, a bioweapon should infect only the enemy. Easily transmissible diseases are thus a rather poor choice, as they might well end up infecting ones own people. An effective bioweapon is also fast-acting and short-lived. You don't want the enemy to be able to fight for months or years before getting too sick, nor do you want to keep on slaughtering them after they surrender.
A disease agent transmissible only by injection seems an ideal biological payload for these "nanites". They'd have to have enough processing power to identify friend or foe, and then deploy the payload only in foes.
Better than a biological agent, though, would be some sort of concentrated toxin. No replication means fewer problems with containment. Then when the war is over, nanites with antitoxin payloads could be deployed.
And don't say there's no evedence that Jesus ever lived just because a 'teacher' told you so. There is more evedence that Jesus just lived then there is evedence that you lived if you dispeared.
So what? The argument isn't whether Jesus existed - the argument is whether that big book about him (the Bible) is divine and 100% true. No amount of archaeological digs are going to answer those questions, because archaeology is a science, and science doesn't deal with things like that. It can't prove anything; it can only disprove. Even if all the verifiable stuff (like who begat whom, and what things occurred during the reign of so-and-so) is supported by archaeological evidence, it says nothing about the moral and religious teachings of the Bible.
And isn't that the important part? The biblical literalists seem to be missing the point. In seeking to uphold the historical validity of their Holy Book, they lose sight of its purpose. It's not just a history, dammit!
No they're not (if they are they shouldn't be teaching science). They're saying evolution is a theory. Which it is. It happens to be the best theory (fits the observed world best, and makes the most accurate predictions) that we have right now, so that's what schools should teach in science classes. Creationism - indeed any aspect of any religion - is not a theory, because theories can be disproved. True Believers do not accept any observation that contradicts their beliefs, and would discard the observations rather than alter their beliefs. That's what faith is about. Science is not about faith. If the observations contradict the theories, then the theories must be adjusted or discarded.
Atomic theory is "just a theory" too. No one has ever seen an atom. A True Believer might argue that atomic theory should not be taught in schools, because it teaches that matter is made of amoral atoms, while a True Believer accepts that everything is made of and sustained by God's Love.
Some people might argue that atomic theory is not incompatible with belief in God or God's Love. Analogous arguments have been put forward by scientists who also hold religious beliefs and who want their children to get a complete education in biology (including evolution). But the loudest noises are made by those who want their religious views presented, to the exclusion of all else. Where is the outcry against the routine indoctrination of children (WON'T SOMEONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN?!?!) with godless communist atomic theory?
There is no facts provable about Evolution, and the sad thing is they tell you it's true and take an apes tooth and make a skull around it.
Yes, there have been frauds perpetrated in the name of science. But that's no reason to throw out the whole theory as fraudulent. Just throw out the parts that derived from fraud.
Fraud has been committed in the name of religion too (shroud of Turin anyone?). While it is the cause of much consternation in the church, I don't see a call to abandon the whole faith because of it. And that's as it should be. Just acknowledge the fraud, punish and/or forgive the perps (in science this is accomplished by professional rebuke, considered by some to be a fate worse than death) and get back to business.
True Belief is the cornerstone of religion, but it's very bad science. Treating (the biblical account of) Creation as a theory is an insult to both science and religion.
>>Is it ethical to assist in the prevention of certain 'crimes' if you don't believe they are crimes?
>Probably not, I would have a hard time doing that.
I dunno... to "assist in the prevention of certain 'crimes'" seems (to me) an ethical toss-up. A grey area. Something as innocuous as a warning - "you could get in serious trouble doing things like that" - might assist in the prevention of a 'crime'. Is that so wrong?
Certainly assisting in the rounding up for punishment of certain 'criminals' - and confiscation of their equipment - would be an ethical no-no if one didn't consider what they did to be criminal.
Somehow even the most poor in this country can afford a TV set. What's a TV set cost these days ? A used computer system is affordable for those who want it bad enough, even on low incomes.
I've noticed that too. Even if there's no food in the kitchen, everyone's got enough money for a TV set. Maybe even cable. I suspect this is because even poor people grew up with television, and are convinced that it's vital to have one. What is needed is not free computers, or even government-subsidized ones. The computers are already cheap. What is needed is for someone to convince the poor that they need computers at least as much as they need television. And no one "needs" television, right? But right now it's not happening. The poor grew up without computers. They know they can live without them. But they've never lived without television.
The computer can be more entertaining than television, and it damn sure will provide better marketable skills (who ever got a job because of their vast knowledge of TV trivia?). But someone - probably a poor and/or minority individual - has to communicate this to the poor and the minorities. They aren't too likely to listen to non-poor non-minorities, and why should they? What worked for one group won't neccesarily work for another. Though in this instance I suspect that it will.
I can imagine a future where different online news sources cater to different ethnic groups (the one popular among white Anglos will not be white-supremacist, of course, but just consider itself "mainstream")
Remove the word "online" in the above, and that future is already here. Most newspapers, magazines, and television already present the world of middle- to upper-class urban and suburban whites and call it "mainstream". To label it white-supremacist would be misleading, as it seldom if ever makes any such claims. Any more than BET, Ebony, Vibe, etc. are black-supremacist. But in both instances it's pretty clear who the target audience is. Who's "us" and who's "them".
While not immune, Net news sources are a little less subject to that kind of Balkanization, if only because feedback is so simple and immediate. If a television show offends, most people just change the channel, or tell a few friends why they didn't like it. If a website offends, it's usually very easy to write a scathing response to the author, explaining what it is that bothers you and what you think should be done about it.
...how many members of one group will peek at another group's favorite news source, to see a different perspective on the world? (How many Linux fans read the Mac-oriented magazines and Web sites? How many white people read Ebony, Jet, Essence, and other black-oriented magazines?)
Not everyone will look beyond their particular clique and its tailor-made news sources, but you might be surprised how many people do. For one thing, it's boring to just hear things you agree with. If preaching to the choir is unproductive, think how tiresome being in the choir is, when you're getting preached at.
Sorry, I have to take issue with that one. I make my living (such as it is) off of biology, and I'm not afraid of the computers.
And while they're certainly not Slashdotters, the other biologists I work with don't "hate computers like Dan Quayle" (having a tough time parsing this. Does it mean they hate computers in the same way that they hate Dan Quayle? Maybe they hate computers in the same way that Dan Quayle hates computers? Maybe they hate [computers like Dan Quayle], implying that DQ *is* a computer) Typically biologists hate computers when they (the computers) bluescreen, or when they (the biologists) have to learn a new way to do something because there's a new release of the spectrophotometer software, but most of the time they like computers just fine. Computers are just like any other piece of equipment in the lab.
Many reproduced mutations do nothing at all, and all the others do harm.
Sorry, that's just plain wrong. Corrected version follows.
Many reproduced mutations do harm, some might do nothing at all (that's subject to some debate) and some provide a benefit.
The ones that provide a benefit may be few and far between, but due to selection pressure, they will eventually become widespread.
That's how it works with living things, and, if the right selective pressures were applied (f'rinstance, wipe out the code that crashes, locks up, gives errors, etc.) I see no reason that it wouldn't work with digital "life" too.
It might not be the most efficient way (natural selection isn't either) but it doesn't have to be. It just has to work.
This would be great for all the people who's idea of IRC conversation is "Wanna cyber?"
Heh. I like it. A bot that engages in cybersex. Never gets bored with IRC losers and chat-room sex fiends. Up for anything. Available 24-7. Says everything with particular keywords is arousing, erotic, "makes me hot", etc. Everything without those keywords is charming, clever, witty, etc. I reckon this bot would get itself on a lot of "buddy lists".
Slashdot Mirror
A similar story appeared in, IIRC, the Des Moines Register (the plastic in question was to be made from corn, and Des Moines is in corn country). It indicated that, while the biodegradability of the plant-derived plastic would make it a poor choice for some products (you don't want your vinyl siding to crumble and dissolve after a few seasons) it's an excellent choice for others.
The (U.S.) Navy, in particular, is interested in biodegradable food containers that can be safely tossed overboard rather than stored up (smelly, esp. on long voyages) and hauled ashore for disposal. Not that they do that now - they throw their waste overboard anyway. But biodegradable plastics would make it more acceptable.
No one (no I didn't read every last post - there were 377 of them ferchrissakes!) seems to have mentioned the ease of printing as one of the reasons the "paperless office" has been such a dismal failure. There's more paper - and more paper waste - now than there ever was before, and it's only getting worse.
It's an unintended consequence of making office life easier. Look into Why Things Bite Back for a bit of insight into how these unintended consequences strike. At the same time technology was enabling the paperless office, it enabled faster, easier, more perfect printing of office documents. What once required careful, time-consuming typing, and lots of carbon paper (remember that awful stuff?) now can be pounded out - and multiple high-quality copies made - in minutes. Correcting errors no longer requires retyping entire documents, but rather than reduce paperwork, this has only increased it. Miniscule errors that would have been tolerated (no sense in redoing that entire document because of one misspelling) in the past now require a complete reprint. And because the default settings on most word processors reprint the entire document, the whole thing gets reprinted for one typo on one page. It gets worse if the document gets photocopied before the typo is discovered. Suddenly hundreds of copies are wasted because of one barely-noticable (it didn't get noticed before it was photocopied) error.
Believe me - I know. I work for the gummint, and the amount of paper wasted where I work is obscene. Paperwork reduction act my ass!
"The printer is out of paper, what do I do?"
If you're not arrogant, you politely show them how to add more paper. If they're not stupid, they won't have to ask you again.
Arrogance and stupidity feed off each other. A few arrogant tech-savvy people got the tech-impaired ones all worried that technology is utterly incomprehensible to mere mortals. So they begin to ask "stupid" questions rather than make even rudimentary attempts to find out the answers for themselves. They end up looking even more stupid, to the point that they'd try the patience of a saint. Soon even formerly helpful, patient geeks grumble at them to RTFM, and chuckle that they don't even know what that means.
...one of the big problems with society is that the physical age of puberty keeps getting younger while the time at which someone is considered a competent adult keeps getting older.
Actually that's only half true. The physical age of puberty isn't getting all that much younger. Even the small (but statistically significant) change in the age of onset of puberty is is most likely related to nutrition. It may not be that young people today have accelerated puberty, but that their grandparents experienced delayed puberty.
They (the proverbial "they") won't tell you this, but maybe kids today (the proverbial "kids today") aren't abnormal - maybe their parents and grandparents were!
Young adults may be growing up a little bit faster, but they're expected to behave like adults a lot faster. Youth has been sexualized, at the same time it's been (to use a far too politically-correct term) disempowered. Young people are permitted to act sexy like grown-ups, but not to act smart like grown-ups. And they're damn sure not respected like grown-ups. This combination of accelerated sexuality and lack of respect is a volatile one. Is it any wonder that Bad Things Happen in our warehouses of education?
Requiring students to wear ID badges (for their own protecion, of course!) is just another example of disrespecting young adults. It's going to make the situation worse instead of better.
...I made a email account, never used it, NEVER EVER signed up to anything with it, i let it set on a non-used server, and after 5 months, it had over 500 spam messages in it.
Just 'cause YOU never used the account, doesn't mean no one did. Someone else might have used the account name (just happened to pick that name?) specifically to misdirect all their spam to.
If I create (f'rinstance) the account "nospam@hotmail.com", and then never ever use it, should I be surprised that it fills up with spam?
...a company called LinuxOne, which apparently has been shipping its own distro since way back in September 1999...
Whoa, that long? Um... it's still September 1999.
Katz wrote:
Berners-Lee is already one of the century's most influential scientists. But reading "Weaving the Web," one senses that his scientific skills are way ahead of his political and cultural instincts.
...and that's a bad thing?
What about this book made Katz so sad?
What I gathered (from the review - alas I haven't read the book) is that it's not the book that made Katz sad. Life is making Katz sad. The fact that people who didn't build the web are getting rich from it, while the pioneers aren't, bothers him. Even if it people like TBL don't seem to care all that much (maybe they've got more important things to think about).
I feel that we won't know what consciousness is until after we create it.
If we don't know what consciousness is, how will we determine that we have in fact created it?
How can one test for something as poorly defined as consciousness?
I don't see that sending a private email to someone in your family is something that should get you in trouble via the company access.
Yup. Using the company's hardware (and time) for these private conversations is no worse than using their phones to make a personal call. And should be treated the same way. If the company allows employees to occasionally use the phones for personal business, they should allow similar use of computer terminals. Abuse of the telephone or the network to the extent that it interferes with an employees work can be dealt with without surveilling (is that a word) the communication.
Porn sites and the like is not something you should be doing at work. Nor is chatting.
Well no, but I don't think spying on employees is justified even in these cases. If their use of porn or chat affects their work, or that of other employees, it gets noticed. No surveillance needed. If it doesn't get noticed, then can it really be said to interfere with work? And if it doesn't interfere with work, why should the company care that it's happening?
In short, I think it's okay for employers to have and enforce rules regulating employees' use of company communication equipment. I do not think it's okay to eavesdrop on those communications. The same rules should apply whether the communication is spoken over a telephone or typed into a terminal. The same rules should apply whether it consists of pornography, stock quotes, or a friendly call home to mom.
Katz wrote Politicians need to understand the particular characteristics of the young, educated, technologically-centered people...
Politicians understand one characteristic of such people all too well. They understand that they typically DON'T VOTE. The reason computers and the internet have attracted the interest of politicans as much as they have is that rich people (most of them old, white, and not particulary tech-savvy) use them. These people not only vote, but sometimes give generous campaign contributions. They're same people that politicians paid attention to before. That's why the net won't truly change politics any time soon.
Can't you just see it? Crack LEGO wizards from all over the world competing to design and program the very best LEGObots to compete in a variety of sports.
I suppose the medals would be made of LEGOs too... yellow (gold) white (silver) and red (bronze).
And no drug-test scandals! Except maybe for the designers (too much caffeine?) I suppose the bots might have to be searched for illegal EMP devices too, since that sure ain't good sportsbotship.
And why stop with the Olympics? What American city could stand to be without a national LEGO league team? Team colors would be limited to the standard LEGO color scheme, but so what? LEGO cheerleaders! LEGO halftime shows! Monday night LEGOball here I come!
Think the networks/ESPN will be interested? They should be!
a geek is somebody who bites the heads of chickens in a circus side show.
Yup. The name is somewhat appropriate for the rest of us geeks because, after you strip away the negative connotations, geeks are important because of what they DO instead of (as in the Dog Faced Boy, the World's Smallest Woman and the other circus freaks) what the ARE.
In the side-show, you don't have to have some genetic mutation to be a geek - you just have to be willing to do something that the straights will see as unusual and shocking.
Now maybe people with certain neurological traits will have a greater tendency to live life as a geek, but that doesn't mean regular ordinary people can't be geeks too. The freak-show kind OR the techie kind.
You don't have to be autistic to be a tech geek, and you don't have to have Prader-Wille(sp?) syndrome to be a circus geek. But it might help.
"Stupid newbies"
This is exactly the kind of crap that is being addressed here.
A newbie, by definition, is not stupid but rather unlearned.
Almost. A newbie is, by definition, unlearned. He/she may also be stupid. "Stupid newbies", then, is a subset of "newbies". "Smart newbies" is another subset of "newbies"; one which does not intersect with "stupid newbies".
This is not meant to imply that it's okay to haze the newbies. Rather, be nice to the newbies. Teach them stuff. That's how you tell the smart ones from the stupid ones - the smart ones learn.
It's a sad commentary on the current state of affairs that the first thoughts are of tracking users (presumably so that they can be rounded up for punishment) with nanites.
If these devices are to be recruited into the war on (some) drugs, why not use them to cure instead of punish the addict? If dust-sized nanites are snorted/injected/whatever along with illegal drugs, it seems so much more sensible to have them to bind to the drugs receptor site, so that the user could no longer get high from that particular drug.
Silly me. I thought hunter-killer nanites would seek out and destroy (the other guy's) nanites. Sort of a defensive or counter-surveillance weapon. But I suppose they might tackle bigger targets...
After all, do we really need something better than anthrax etc? I think it works pretty damned well as it is.. ;)
Anthrax works TOO well. That's why there's a push for "something better". You don't want your bioweapons to turn on you. Ideally, a bioweapon should infect only the enemy. Easily transmissible diseases are thus a rather poor choice, as they might well end up infecting ones own people. An effective bioweapon is also fast-acting and short-lived. You don't want the enemy to be able to fight for months or years before getting too sick, nor do you want to keep on slaughtering them after they surrender.
A disease agent transmissible only by injection seems an ideal biological payload for these "nanites". They'd have to have enough processing power to identify friend or foe, and then deploy the payload only in foes.
Better than a biological agent, though, would be some sort of concentrated toxin. No replication means fewer problems with containment. Then when the war is over, nanites with antitoxin payloads could be deployed.
And don't say there's no evedence that Jesus ever lived just because a 'teacher' told you so. There is more evedence that Jesus just lived then there is evedence that you lived if you dispeared.
So what? The argument isn't whether Jesus existed - the argument is whether that big book about him (the Bible) is divine and 100% true. No amount of archaeological digs are going to answer those questions, because archaeology is a science, and science doesn't deal with things like that. It can't prove anything; it can only disprove. Even if all the verifiable stuff (like who begat whom, and what things occurred during the reign of so-and-so) is supported by archaeological evidence, it says nothing about the moral and religious teachings of the Bible.
And isn't that the important part? The biblical literalists seem to be missing the point. In seeking to uphold the historical validity of their Holy Book, they lose sight of its purpose. It's not just a history, dammit!
The schools are saying that Evolution is a fact.
No they're not (if they are they shouldn't be teaching science). They're saying evolution is a theory. Which it is. It happens to be the best theory (fits the observed world best, and makes the most accurate predictions) that we have right now, so that's what schools should teach in science classes. Creationism - indeed any aspect of any religion - is not a theory, because theories can be disproved. True Believers do not accept any observation that contradicts their beliefs, and would discard the observations rather than alter their beliefs. That's what faith is about. Science is not about faith. If the observations contradict the theories, then the theories must be adjusted or discarded.
Atomic theory is "just a theory" too. No one has ever seen an atom. A True Believer might argue that atomic theory should not be taught in schools, because it teaches that matter is made of amoral atoms, while a True Believer accepts that everything is made of and sustained by God's Love.
Some people might argue that atomic theory is not incompatible with belief in God or God's Love. Analogous arguments have been put forward by scientists who also hold religious beliefs and who want their children to get a complete education in biology (including evolution). But the loudest noises are made by those who want their religious views presented, to the exclusion of all else. Where is the outcry against the routine indoctrination of children (WON'T SOMEONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN?!?!) with godless communist atomic theory?
There is no facts provable about Evolution, and the sad thing is they tell you it's true and take an apes tooth and make a skull around it.
Yes, there have been frauds perpetrated in the name of science. But that's no reason to throw out the whole theory as fraudulent. Just throw out the parts that derived from fraud.
Fraud has been committed in the name of religion too (shroud of Turin anyone?). While it is the cause of much consternation in the church, I don't see a call to abandon the whole faith because of it. And that's as it should be. Just acknowledge the fraud, punish and/or forgive the perps (in science this is accomplished by professional rebuke, considered by some to be a fate worse than death) and get back to business.
True Belief is the cornerstone of religion, but it's very bad science. Treating (the biblical account of) Creation as a theory is an insult to both science and religion.
>>Is it ethical to assist in the prevention of certain 'crimes' if you don't believe they are crimes?
>Probably not, I would have a hard time doing that.
I dunno... to "assist in the prevention of certain 'crimes'" seems (to me) an ethical toss-up. A grey area. Something as innocuous as a warning - "you could get in serious trouble doing things like that" - might assist in the prevention of a 'crime'. Is that so wrong?
Certainly assisting in the rounding up for punishment of certain 'criminals' - and confiscation of their equipment - would be an ethical no-no if one didn't consider what they did to be criminal.
Somehow even the most poor in this country can afford a TV set. What's a TV set cost these days ? A used computer system is affordable for those who want it bad enough, even on low incomes.
I've noticed that too. Even if there's no food in the kitchen, everyone's got enough money for a TV set. Maybe even cable. I suspect this is because even poor people grew up with television, and are convinced that it's vital to have one. What is needed is not free computers, or even government-subsidized ones. The computers are already cheap. What is needed is for someone to convince the poor that they need computers at least as much as they need television. And no one "needs" television, right? But right now it's not happening. The poor grew up without computers. They know they can live without them. But they've never lived without television.
The computer can be more entertaining than television, and it damn sure will provide better marketable skills (who ever got a job because of their vast knowledge of TV trivia?). But someone - probably a poor and/or minority individual - has to communicate this to the poor and the minorities. They aren't too likely to listen to non-poor non-minorities, and why should they? What worked for one group won't neccesarily work for another. Though in this instance I suspect that it will.
I can imagine a future where different online news sources cater to different ethnic groups (the one popular among white Anglos will not be white-supremacist, of course, but just consider itself "mainstream")
...how many members of one group will peek at another group's favorite news source, to see a different perspective on the world? (How many Linux fans read the Mac-oriented magazines and Web sites? How many white people read Ebony, Jet, Essence, and other black-oriented magazines?)
Remove the word "online" in the above, and that future is already here. Most newspapers, magazines, and television already present the world of middle- to upper-class urban and suburban whites and call it "mainstream". To label it white-supremacist would be misleading, as it seldom if ever makes any such claims. Any more than BET, Ebony, Vibe, etc. are black-supremacist. But in both instances it's pretty clear who the target audience is. Who's "us" and who's "them".
While not immune, Net news sources are a little less subject to that kind of Balkanization, if only because feedback is so simple and immediate. If a television show offends, most people just change the channel, or tell a few friends why they didn't like it. If a website offends, it's usually very easy to write a scathing response to the author, explaining what it is that bothers you and what you think should be done about it.
Not everyone will look beyond their particular clique and its tailor-made news sources, but you might be surprised how many people do. For one thing, it's boring to just hear things you agree with. If preaching to the choir is unproductive, think how tiresome being in the choir is, when you're getting preached at.
Sorry, I have to take issue with that one. I make my living (such as it is) off of biology, and I'm not afraid of the computers.
And while they're certainly not Slashdotters, the other biologists I work with don't "hate computers like Dan Quayle" (having a tough time parsing this. Does it mean they hate computers in the same way that they hate Dan Quayle? Maybe they hate computers in the same way that Dan Quayle hates computers? Maybe they hate [computers like Dan Quayle], implying that DQ *is* a computer) Typically biologists hate computers when they (the computers) bluescreen, or when they (the biologists) have to learn a new way to do something because there's a new release of the spectrophotometer software, but most of the time they like computers just fine. Computers are just like any other piece of equipment in the lab.
Many reproduced mutations do nothing at all, and all the others do harm.
Sorry, that's just plain wrong. Corrected version follows.
Many reproduced mutations do harm, some might do nothing at all (that's subject to some debate) and some provide a benefit.
The ones that provide a benefit may be few and far between, but due to selection pressure, they will eventually become widespread.
That's how it works with living things, and, if the right selective pressures were applied (f'rinstance, wipe out the code that crashes, locks up, gives errors, etc.) I see no reason that it wouldn't work with digital "life" too.
It might not be the most efficient way (natural selection isn't either) but it doesn't have to be. It just has to work.
This would be great for all the people who's idea of IRC conversation is "Wanna cyber?"
Heh. I like it. A bot that engages in cybersex. Never gets bored with IRC losers and chat-room sex fiends. Up for anything. Available 24-7. Says everything with particular keywords is arousing, erotic, "makes me hot", etc. Everything without those keywords is charming, clever, witty, etc. I reckon this bot would get itself on a lot of "buddy lists".
Cyber-sluts get ready for some tough competition!