Several thousand years of human history demonstrate that the general answer is a resounding "No!".
Many of us can get along with at least some of the others out there some of the time, but thinking that we all have nothing but peace love and singing Kumbaya in our hearts is wishfull thinking.
Oh, we might become that way at some point in the future. But, I think it would take some massive genetic/social engineering or eugenic breeding.
And I'm not sure what you'd end up with would be what you really wanted, or could really be called human.
So, until you come up with the right kind of magic pixie dust that makes us all like the angelic ones in My Little Pony you'll just have to deal with an imperfect world.
Back in the 90s, it became obvious that there was a market for digitally distributed music.
Those with clue said that the music industry could deal with it by using the tremendous savings to provide cheap easy to get portable music. And in the process get the micropayments system to have enough volume to function.
Instead, they opted to try to continue their old business model and pricing for digital music, but with the nuance that all of the distribution, inventory and production costs were massively less. Thus, they thought they'd reap massive profits.
As discussed many times here on slashdot and other places, since they were unwilling to release the music until they had DRM and controls so they could have this old business model pricing with new model costs, others fielded much of the digital distribution system before the industry did.
Not surprisingly, it was done to provide free content and fast distribution.
By delaying until they could have it on their terms, the music industry effectively trained their customers to expect free music.
Before that, a volume based pricing model without DRM would have been IMHO quite successful. But, instead they created and released a genie that won't go back in the bottle.
Now that so many people have been trained that they can get free music (and now video), (much of the time as easily and with just as good a quality as the pay content) I don't see much the music/motion picture industry can do about it.
They can try to enact draconian laws by lobbying, but the same lawmakers voting on the bills have kids that are downloading torrents (if the lawmakers themselves aren't).
I suppose they could resort to a model with government collected fees or a tax on everyone to pay for it. But that invites the very type of regulation they don't want. i.e. The government telling the iindustry what to do rather than the government telling the people the industry doesn't like that they can't use and provide free content.
They know government intervention in some form is their only hope, thus they hire high priced former legislators like Chris Dodds to lobby for them.
One key is to remember what the slant of the site you're reading is and adjust accordingly.
Example: Xinhua (Chinese news agency) does a lot of reporting on economic development in southeast asia that doesn't get picked up by most western sources and it's usually fairly good info. However, I take what they say about the Dalai Lama or Falun Gong, for example, with a rather large grain of salt.;)
None of that is really suprising. Its an area where most of the general populace don't have a lot of existing knowledge or experience to link it to. Angry Birds is very well known and kind of a seeming irony to be written in the same language.
My point is largely that with all of the things Fox can be criticized for, this is pretty small beer.
It worked out fine. He gathered his ministers at the shore and then ordered the sea to turn back so it would not wet his feet. It didn't listen. Then, he castigated his ministers for continually appealing to him to order things that also weren't within his power.
Canute was a brighter man than you give him credit for.
All that oxygen you're greedily sucking down when you go jogging just to make yourself look thinner and trimmer could be use by someone in the third world or animals. Ditto the food calories you burn up. And you exploited thir world labor for those running shorts to be made.
How can you bear to keep existing and keeping others under the thumbs of your use of resources. Your existence prevents other more worthy beings like microbes from existing.
Commit suicide today in an environmentally friendly way, but make sure you put your body somewhere it can be reused. Like a compost heap. Or, at least sit around and do nothing so you use less.
(The rest of us will follow along right after you. We promise!)
I'm all for improving worldwide quality of life, increasing efficiency and righting wrongs, but IMHO, much of the motivation for this sort of silliness is not making it better, but assuaging guilt. Instead, you buy the same bloody thing from a company that greenwashes it. That way you can go right along with your life but get to think "I'm better than those people who didn't get a fair trade coltan sticker (or whatnot) for their cellphone.
There has been some preliminary work done by someone at NMSU with microbes (D Radiodurans) grown in an ultralow radiation level environment. D. radiodurans is incredibly resistant to radiation, so it's an interesting organism to work with for radiation related work.
There was also some work done in Europe by Planel in the 80s.
Neither of these appear to agree with LNT at very low levels of exposure.
It's still ongoing as of the last I could find.
More of this research needs to be done in good controlled fashion. Sadly, it's not a subject I suspect will generate a stampede of funding.
As you say, extremely low level effects and or work on more complex organisms is going to be challenging. Just the food and atmosphere for ultra low exposure would be quite a challenge given the normal background levels.
Truth or responsibility has nothing to do with it. Many journalists and newspapers will sing this song as long as it sells papers or gets rating/views.
Those who know/care are too few in number to change the readership significantly.
They already have them there. Just like we have listening posts and ships off their coasts near their naval bases and other strategically important locations.
Russia seems to be more concerned that the US would be putting a strategic asset in part of the "near abroad". That implies a certain level of military backing for Poland. Current opinion in some of the more nationalist factions in Russia is that allowing basing of that type (rather than just some ground troops to do training, etc) would limit Russia's ability to project influence in Eastern Europe.
I'm a bit surprised that Russia did this after Obama indicated he would have more manuevering room to negotiate on it after the election. This puts pressure on him in a way that's not likely to lead to him backing down since he's in a campaign. Maybe they see him as vulnerable in some way.
No, but it might devolve into a thread about Drudge. Most US web sites took down the story after they were contacted by the WhiteHouse. Drudge didn't take it down.
But unplanned things can happen. That sort of superpandemic is a first time thing, not something that's had evolution working on it to sort out the problems as a strategy.
Imagine you get something that kills all but %10, but leaves the rest in such a weakened state that most of the rest die off of other opportunistic infections.
Also, dropping the population rapidly by that drastic amount has a lot of knock on effects. The food production and distribution system breaks down. Yes, you have far less people, but not all of them will be in places that have access to enough food without the transport system. That will create more casualties just as we see in any other disaster that can't get outside aid.
What's needed to grow normal adult organs is different from what a fetus needs in order to grow to only the stage ready for birth. By the time you assemble a whole complex of organs, it's probably easier just to have the whole fetus.
The womb environment is complex and there is a lot of interplay between the mother and the embryo/fetus. But given that the embryo is made to be somewhat more independent, it's likely to be less complex than the whole hoard of different environments and chemical cues needed to mature the whole gamut of tissues. The placental barrier blocks a lot of things that cells in general tissue would need. The fetus is made to supply itself with those.
Also, the organs created by bio-printing and the like have never fully operated. That's why they're finding they have to do mechanical stimulation and provide a whole witches brew of properly timed chemical cues to them to get them to fully develop once printed. A developing fetus and then a child provide all of those environments just as a matter of course.
That's the line of thinking on the part of those looking at artificial wombs.
Really? So you fully understand the vagaries of the body's influence on organ development or even just have solid ideas of the limits on the complexity of it? You're ahead of the people where I work. Maybe you should apply here as a med researcher.
I agree that the barrier to developing a working artificial womb is high, but I suspect it may be less than what is needed for full development to adulthood of ALL organs that we could transplant.
Yes, we've got people printing bladders that have been implanted in dogs and become functional, but that's just one case in a vastly complex reality that stands in the way of general organ culturing.
There already is some work going on toward developing artificial wombs specifically for the fertility treatment possibilities (as well as a lot of purely scientific ones in nonhuman animals).
The creation of embryos from somatic cells has already been demonstrated. (dolly the sheep, etc.) It's just got a lot of difficulties and most of the trials fail. Even the ones that progress to term have problems.
I wouldn't want to predict absolutely which tech happens first.
Slashdot Mirror
Rodney King asked: "Can't we all just get along?"
Several thousand years of human history demonstrate that the general answer is a resounding "No!".
Many of us can get along with at least some of the others out there some of the time, but thinking that we all have nothing but peace love and singing Kumbaya in our hearts is wishfull thinking.
Oh, we might become that way at some point in the future. But, I think it would take some massive genetic/social engineering or eugenic breeding.
And I'm not sure what you'd end up with would be what you really wanted, or could really be called human.
So, until you come up with the right kind of magic pixie dust that makes us all like the angelic ones in My Little Pony you'll just have to deal with an imperfect world.
There are a lot of hackers who've had that fantasy about Halle Berry.
(Actually, it's from a webcomic, DMFA at http://missmab.com/ . It became a minor meme among its fans.)
Back in the 90s, it became obvious that there was a market for digitally distributed music.
Those with clue said that the music industry could deal with it by using the tremendous savings to provide cheap easy to get portable music. And in the process get the micropayments system to have enough volume to function.
Instead, they opted to try to continue their old business model and pricing for digital music, but with the nuance that all of the distribution, inventory and production costs were massively less. Thus, they thought they'd reap massive profits.
As discussed many times here on slashdot and other places, since they were unwilling to release the music until they had DRM and controls so they could have this old business model pricing with new model costs, others fielded much of the digital distribution system before the industry did.
Not surprisingly, it was done to provide free content and fast distribution.
By delaying until they could have it on their terms, the music industry effectively trained their customers to expect free music.
Before that, a volume based pricing model without DRM would have been IMHO quite successful. But, instead they created and released a genie that won't go back in the bottle.
Now that so many people have been trained that they can get free music (and now video), (much of the time as easily and with just as good a quality as the pay content) I don't see much the music/motion picture industry can do about it.
They can try to enact draconian laws by lobbying, but the same lawmakers voting on the bills have kids that are downloading torrents (if the lawmakers themselves aren't).
I suppose they could resort to a model with government collected fees or a tax on everyone to pay for it. But that invites the very type of regulation they don't want. i.e. The government telling the iindustry what to do rather than the government telling the people the industry doesn't like that they can't use and provide free content.
They know government intervention in some form is their only hope, thus they hire high priced former legislators like Chris Dodds to lobby for them.
No, 2+2 equals swordfish.
We just have to all agree on the value of swordfish.
I tend to follow a pretty broad array of sources.
One key is to remember what the slant of the site you're reading is and adjust accordingly.
Example: Xinhua (Chinese news agency) does a lot of reporting on economic development in southeast asia that doesn't get picked up by most western sources and it's usually fairly good info. However, I take what they say about the Dalai Lama or Falun Gong, for example, with a rather large grain of salt. ;)
The AC who replied before you linked to it. http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/flame-cyberweapon-written-using-gamer-code-report-says/2012/05/31/gJQAkIB83U_story.html
Mea culpa, I missed the "Fox reported" in it, but still.
When I first heard Angry Birds linked to it was on The Register well before the MSM even had it on radar. This was on Tuesday. Here's the URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/05/29/flame_cyberweapon_analysis/
Note that their subtitle on it is: "But it shares same scripting tech as Angry Birds"
As linked in another of the comments, the lua and gaming link was done by MSNBC as well. http://redtape.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/05/30/11962850-was-flame-virus-written-by-cyberwarriors-or-gamers?lite
None of that is really suprising. Its an area where most of the general populace don't have a lot of existing knowledge or experience to link it to. Angry Birds is very well known and kind of a seeming irony to be written in the same language.
My point is largely that with all of the things Fox can be criticized for, this is pretty small beer.
The Washington Post wrote a similar piece yesterday that I read. Headline was less direct but linked it in the first paragraph.
As did a number of other sources.
So, how does this apply only to Fox?
You misrepresented the story:
It worked out fine. He gathered his ministers at the shore and then ordered the sea to turn back so it would not wet his feet. It didn't listen. Then, he castigated his ministers for continually appealing to him to order things that also weren't within his power.
Canute was a brighter man than you give him credit for.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cnut_the_Great#Ruler_of_the_waves
Yes. But more for the higher payload an equitorial launch allows than legal reasons.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Launch
"And dogs are sent to Washington, DC."
I don't think that's what they meant when they said "All dogs go to heaven."
Reduce Atmospheric Use!
All that oxygen you're greedily sucking down when you go jogging just to make yourself look thinner and trimmer could be use by someone in the third world or animals. Ditto the food calories you burn up. And you exploited thir world labor for those
running shorts to be made.
How can you bear to keep existing and keeping others under the thumbs of your use of resources. Your existence prevents other more worthy beings like microbes from existing.
Commit suicide today in an environmentally friendly way, but make sure you put your body somewhere it can be reused. Like a compost heap. Or, at least sit around and do nothing so you use less.
(The rest of us will follow along right after you. We promise!)
I'm all for improving worldwide quality of life, increasing efficiency and righting wrongs, but IMHO, much of the motivation for this sort of silliness is not making it better, but assuaging guilt. Instead, you buy the same bloody thing from a company that greenwashes it. That way you can go right along with your life but get to think "I'm better than those people who didn't get a fair trade coltan sticker (or whatnot) for their cellphone.
Put all of the more than half of computer users that admit to using pirated software in jail forever where they can never buy software again.
By the BSA/MPAA/RIAA 's logic that will more than double the amount of software they sell, right?
If that's right, won't it also double the amount of taxes the government will collect from them?
It was just a tiny bit more expensive than this one, too.
There has been some preliminary work done by someone at NMSU with microbes (D Radiodurans) grown in an ultralow radiation level environment. D. radiodurans is incredibly resistant to radiation, so it's an interesting organism to work with for radiation related work.
There was also some work done in Europe by Planel in the 80s.
Neither of these appear to agree with LNT at very low levels of exposure.
It's still ongoing as of the last I could find.
More of this research needs to be done in good controlled fashion. Sadly, it's not a subject I suspect will generate a stampede of funding.
As you say, extremely low level effects and or work on more complex organisms is going to be challenging. Just the food and atmosphere for ultra low exposure would be quite a challenge given the normal background levels.
That may just be trying to teach a pig to sing.
Truth or responsibility has nothing to do with it. Many journalists and newspapers will sing this song as long as it sells papers or gets rating/views.
Those who know/care are too few in number to change the readership significantly.
They already have them there. Just like we have listening posts and ships off their coasts near their naval bases and other strategically important locations.
Russia seems to be more concerned that the US would be putting a strategic asset in part of the "near abroad". That implies a certain level of military backing for Poland. Current opinion in some of the more nationalist factions in Russia is that allowing basing of that type (rather than just some ground troops to do training, etc) would limit Russia's ability to project influence in Eastern Europe.
I'm a bit surprised that Russia did this after Obama indicated he would have more manuevering room to negotiate on it after the election. This puts pressure on him in a way that's not likely to lead to him backing down since he's in a campaign. Maybe they see him as vulnerable in some way.
No, but it might devolve into a thread about Drudge. Most US web sites took down the story after they were contacted by the WhiteHouse. Drudge didn't take it down.
See:
http://edition.cnn.com/2012/05/02/politics/obama-media-afghanistan/
But unplanned things can happen. That sort of superpandemic is a first time thing, not something that's had evolution working on it to sort out the problems as a strategy.
Imagine you get something that kills all but %10, but leaves the rest in such a weakened state that most of the rest die off of other opportunistic infections.
Also, dropping the population rapidly by that drastic amount has a lot of knock on effects. The food production and distribution system breaks down. Yes, you have far less people, but not all of them will be in places that have access to enough food without the transport system. That will create more casualties just as we see in any other disaster that can't get outside aid.
Just think of all the possible children that were so callously destroyed when some of the gals I asked out wouldn't give me the time of day.
Stand up for the rights of the unconceived!
Yeah, there are a few problems with the whole idea.
Not surprisingly, I've not had very good luck in convincing those who hold that view by pointing them out.
What's needed to grow normal adult organs is different from what a fetus needs in order to grow to only the stage ready for birth. By the time you assemble a whole complex of organs, it's probably easier just to have the whole fetus.
The womb environment is complex and there is a lot of interplay between the mother and the embryo/fetus. But given that the embryo is made to be somewhat more independent, it's likely to be less complex than the whole hoard of different environments and chemical cues needed to mature the whole gamut of tissues. The placental barrier blocks a lot of things that cells in general tissue would need. The fetus is made to supply itself with those.
Also, the organs created by bio-printing and the like have never fully operated. That's why they're finding they have to do mechanical stimulation and provide a whole witches brew of properly timed chemical cues to them to get them to fully develop once printed. A developing fetus and then a child provide all of those environments just as a matter of course.
That's the line of thinking on the part of those looking at artificial wombs.
"Whatever happened to doing things because we could, before we decided whether we should?"
It got eaten by a dinosaur in the first Jurassic Park movie. ;)
Really? So you fully understand the vagaries of the body's influence on organ development or even just have solid ideas of the limits on the complexity of it? You're ahead of the people where I work. Maybe you should apply here as a med researcher.
I agree that the barrier to developing a working artificial womb is high, but I suspect it may be less than what is needed for full development to adulthood of ALL organs that we could transplant.
Yes, we've got people printing bladders that have been implanted in dogs and become functional, but that's just one case in a vastly complex reality that stands in the way of general organ culturing.
There already is some work going on toward developing artificial wombs specifically for the fertility treatment possibilities (as well as a lot of purely scientific ones in nonhuman animals).
The creation of embryos from somatic cells has already been demonstrated. (dolly the sheep, etc.) It's just got a lot of difficulties and most of the trials fail. Even the ones that progress to term have problems.
I wouldn't want to predict absolutely which tech happens first.
"1) human behaviour modification"
You mean like school?
Very dangerous (see Orwell), but it already exists.