Err...are you a mormon? That is suspiciously similar to Mormon nonsense - you and your celestial brides (plural) will die and in your spirit incarnation, be a god (as a man, women need not apply for godhood), and have your own planet to incestuously populate with your many children.
I just finished the set: Medal of Honor: Allied Assault and Spearhead. If I had known this was going to happen I would have held off until the binary was available. As usual, too late. I am ready to move on to the next game.
The number of electrical devices one OWNS is irrelevant. It is how many of those devices you have running, typically, at once. I have many of the same electrical devices in my home as just about any American. More than 90% are off at any given time. Lights are only turned on as needed, turned off when not - and they are only of the wattage necessary to do the job (using fluorescents whenever possible). Air conditioning is only run as needed and only to bring the house to the upper limits of comfortable. The TV isn't left on as background noise all the time, nor is the radio or stereo. Clothes aren't washed in hot or even warm water unless it really is necessary. Showers are not extended for long periods of time (no water shortage here but the water heater...). This is the definition and essense of CONSERVATION. It is how you use the appliances, not how many you have.
You forget the key lynchpin to tie the WMD lie to swift action: Iraqi ties to Al Queda and, by extension, that Saddam would give WMD of whatever type to his "buds" in Al Queda. He did a double lie: imminent threat from use and dispersion of massive amounts of WMD including nukes (that mushroom cloud fear-raker statement) and ties to the much-hated Al Queda.
We Americans wanted payback, we wanted the bastards that did 9/11 and Bush flat-out LIED to make people believe that Saddam and the 9/11 perps were in bed together so attacking the former was tantamount to a continued attack on the latter. LIE! Not a mistake. Not a simple difference in how one interprets intel - there was NO valid intel to support either lie. There was no valid intel justifying the claim of an "imminent threat".
Off topic but...I LIKED Clinton. I was behind him all the way BUT it was nonetheless ethically wrong to try that crap. The correct action at that point was to give it up, take the lumps, and move on. It would have died (almost) right there. Instead, by doing the weasel thing and quibbling over the definition of the word "is" he made it worse and exacerbated the problem beyond what it deserved. This is quite apart from the FACT that the questioning that led to this crap response were entirely illegitimate and beyond the pale. At that point it was absolutely clear he was covering up the fact that he DID have "sexual relations with that woman" (big deal!) so his weasel wording his responses were pointless anyway.
The RESULT of Bush's dishonesty and lack of ethics have been FAR worse than anything from Clinton so on the level of outright consequence of ethical weakness, he is worse. Both were wrong and I see it as a form of cowardess. Whether something is unethical and cowardly is not predicated on whether or not someone died as a result. It stands as unethical and cowardly quite on its own.
You make a mistake, you freakin' own up to it lock, stock, and barrel. Take your lumps, learn from it, perhaps regain or improve the respect people feel for you (and regain your self respect), and move on. I am quite objective and fair in my expectations in this regard. If you are real man (or woman), you have the guts to NOT QUIBBLE. You have the guts to suck up your mistakes. This is something generally lacking in ALL politicians (no exceptions as far as I have ever seen), even those who may have served honorably in the military in the past and, perhaps, held such ideas and ideals close to their heart. I don't accept such moral weakness (totally unrelated to religion) and I consider it indefensible no matter what. I don't quibble, I don't try to weasel out of my mistakes with lawyer-like mush-mouthing and I don't accept it from anyone else.
Interesting. If I could have mod points after posting I would bump you up. I haven't looked at neutron weapons for quite some time (the 80's)...but I still don't like this weapon. It strikes me as ethically suspect to do everything possible to skirt the letter of the stricture against using nukes when it is clearly violating the spirit of such strictures.
Trying to argue over the definition of the word "is", or try to argue that what you said in a State of the Union speech about Iraq and Al Queda and WMD isn't what you really said or meant, is just as suspect and indefensible. I can't see the U.N. or other countries regardless of the U.N. saying, "Oh, yeah...OK. It's not REALLY a nuke and it's not REALLY a dirty bomb/WMD. You got us on a technicality. You get a pass THIS time." They would (rightly) raise holy hell and so too, I would hope, would our own citizenry. Weasel words about it not QUITE being a nuke or WMD so its perfectly OK might be cool with slimy lawyers but it isn't ethically correct. In any case, use of such a weapon WOULD pretty much open the gates for whomever you used it against to retaliate using REAL nukes.
and means of detonation, this isn't much different than neutron bombs. You could produce a small yield neutron bomb and do the same thing and be less dirty with the radioactive material.
As a military member myself, I cannot say that this weapon is "attractive" to me. As a commander, I wouldn't want to use it as a matter of course any more than I would want to use a nuke. I WOULD use a nuke or this weapon, however, in a dire emergency, which appears to be precisely what this weapon is NOT intended for. It is seen as something with general use potential...to some in DOD halls where everything is clean theory but not to me, a line guy.
As far as I am concerned, use of such a weapon would barely be a step up from use of a dirty bomb, which would rightly be seen as illegal and an act of terror. Not me, no thanks.
I certainly wasn't trying to say it would be simple. What I meant with my big "IF" was intended to take into account possible problems with full integration of avian mitochondria with the expressed genome from a human. It is one thing to get a functional mitochondrion from a human-avian chimeric cell, per se, and quite another to get fully stable (across cell generations) and functioning chimera. Thus, if there were a progressive loss of avian mitochondria from successive chimera cell generations inspite of the mitochondria all being functional in electron transport and ATP generation, then that would indicate problems with system integration.
As to the specific physiology and anatomy of birds...I am not certain on this point.
It has been demonstrated that avian mitochondria simply produce fewer oxygen radicals as a matter of course, so it isn't a secondary effect of more efficient or more numerous peroxisomes. The enzymes involved in the electron transport chain in birds is simply "better" than that of mammals (examined to date, at least).
First off, they had to remove virtually all the rabbit nuclear DNA because if you do not do this and simply fuse two cells (say a human cell and a rabbit cell) with intact DNA, almost invariably, the human DNA is lost. The cells dump extraneous DNA and it just happens that most often, it is the human chromosomes that get dumped.
Second, this is merely a gradation of "chimera" beyond that which is commonly called a "transgenic". The later is a long-used basic tool in molecular biology/developmental research. There are innumerable extant mouse-human "chimeras" out there, just as there are Drosophila-human, yeast-human, yeast-E. coli, E. coli-yeast, etc, etc, etc, transgenic (chimeras). Normally, what is transfered in these cases are individual genes, though short chromosomal segments can be transfered as well. This article refers to a chimera in which it is merely the shell that contains the DNA (the cell) that is changed from native to alien species. You could likely get by with a viable cell with a partial mix of rabbit genes in human cells and vice versa, so long as the proteins encoded by the genes are homologous enough to share the same functions and helper proteins.
What would be cool, in my opinion, would be to do a human-bird hybrid in which the bird cell contains only human genomic DNA but the cells retain avian mitochondria - with a little transgenic work done to replace the human mitochondrial genes in the nuclear chromosomes with their avian counterpart. Why? IF (a relatively big if) the mitochondria can properly function in concert with the rest of the human DNA, you might produce a long-lived cell line or, if you let it go to term, a longer lived human. Why? This is based on the oxidative damage/free radical theory of aging: bird mitochondria are much more efficient than human mitochondria on the level of producing energy (ATP) vs production of damaging oxygen radicals. Birds have a high metabolism and their lifespan, relative to metabolic rate (one of the supporting observations for the free radical theory of aging), is unusually long. In general, a higher metabolic rate equates to a correspondingly shorter lifespan. The predominant source of damaging radicals is mitochondria by far. So, if you replace the human mitochondria with super-efficient, low radical producing bird mitochondria, you could end up with a human with an extended lifespan (to unknown extent) if the free radical theory of aging is largely correct.
Such a person would be no less human than anyone else, their mitochondria would simply be that of a bird rather than a human. Big deal. Mitochondria are alien themselves, afterall. They are the remnant of the fusion, hundreds of millions of years ago, between an anaerobic-type cell and a cyanobacteria-like aerobic bacteria. Once upon a time, then, a chimera was formed based on a semi-parasitic melding of two separate species. Each gains benefit from the other and ultimately, you end up with aerobic eukaryotic cells that makes humans, dogs, birds, insects, reptiles, etc.
A lot of it IS simpler. It is just different than is done in windows or dos. There are weaknesses in useability vis a vis non-CLI tools for setting up virtually everything you see but it is getting there quickly. The CLI is simple and the way it was "originally intended" from the time life first evolved on earth. DOS is a bastardization of the beautiful simplicity of the *nix shell.
No. Intercepting ANY signal is totally legal. Once something is broadcast, it is legally interceptable as the airways are public and no one controls their signal once it is out of the antenna. What is illegal is decoding the signal using illegitimate cards.
A nit, yes, but nits need to be picked lest they grow into full-blown flies.
First, hyperbole. The term "immortality" shouldn't be taken at face value in this context. No one is going to be immortal, ever. The thinking should simply be in centuries. Perhaps 1, 2, or 3 centuries, give or take, MAX.
So you can count on a century or three in the near(ish) future, perhaps...I wont address the surveillance society stuff. That is already well on the way - it will be something similar to Vernor Vinge's "A Deepness in the Sky" without the Focused but with the all pervasive spying.
because it is an area of research I would like to ultimately get into. In any case, absolutely could not simply make life extension treatment available to the general populace without at least one very strong stipulation: if you accept this treatment, then you agree to forgoe having children for as long as the treatment lasts. If you elect to have children, then you give up access to treatment.
Right now we in the developed world have, on average, 4 generations living simultaneously. If you are suddenly able to extend life to be 100+, you suddenly get the possibility of having perhaps 6 or more simultaneous living generations alive at the same time without reproductive restristions. This is nearly an immediate doubling of the population in any developed nation within 40 years. Boom. If life extension technology is such that you can keep getting booster treatments to maintain some form of stasis, then it gets worse. As long as people freely reproduce you get a geometric increase in the population with each generation. This is patently unsustainable for any useful period of time. You MUST have reproductive restriction tied to life extension treatments.
On another level you have to eliminate the idea of mandatory retirement, perhaps eliminate the idea of retirement at all, since you could easily end up with an increasing number of over 65s who, under the current systems, would be expecting to retire and be supported in some way or other (social security, medicaid, medicare, etc). They would not even be the same type of 65 living today as you could easily be 65 and still be physically equivalent to someone in their 30s or even late 20s with true longevity treatments and all that would entail. Without population control, where are the jobs going to come from for the fresh young and the perpetual middle-aged individuals receiving treatment? Basically, the entire social fabric of every country on the planet gets screwed up by longevity treatments of any significant capability.
You can't say "no" to the treatment either. I assure you that once it is possible it WILL be used by more and more people. The rich will have access (unfairly) and others would have access via a pricey black market. I myself, as someone in the field (molecular biology, etc) would have access as a matter of course - and I assure you I would not permit anyone to prevent me from using such a treatment regimen, nor make it available to my family. Thus, once it is available (and it will be in one form or other) it is inevitable that its use will be widespread and unstoppable. Thus you would have to simply change society in some drastic ways to accomodate reality. At the basis of all the problems that this sort of thing would bring is population explosion unlike any envisioned before - requiring a drastic response to prevent it.
So what? The company might not exist in the near future but at least the heads of the company will have gotten a big, fat, "retirement" check from M$. Microsnot can come down on them as hard as they want, the company can simply declare bankruptcy and the CEOs walk away with fat money in their pocket.
Except...companies like IBM consider their patents, by and large, DEFENSIVE in nature. They don't load the guns unless they get stuck into a situation such as what SCO has done. THEN the guns are dusted off, loaded and fired.
If M$ were to subsequently start a patent fight against linux in court, this would directly affect IBM (and HP and other's) bottom lines. They would bring their patents to bear against M$. Amongst the giants, then, there is an unspoken MAD policy in place. The ones in real danger are small companies, not the big players, and linux doesn't count in this regard. Linux isn't a company but a number of large companies (with defensive patents) are using it. To fire on linux is to fire on these other guys (see the SCO-linux thing driving the biggest boy of them all, IBM, out with its big guns). M$ would get the same IBM treatment if they went after linux in any significant way...and IBM has way more patent ammunition than M$ ever will.
At this point, it is simply lucky for we linux users that IBM is on our side.
Doesn't this ruling, in effect, make it almost impossible to reverse engineer, which IS OK inspite of patents?
In a clean room setting you reverse engineer an application and, by necessity, in doing so duplicate (without explicitly knowing it) the process(es) that the original app uses. Would this not then be a violation of the original app's patent?
also be a loss for propriatory/closed source licenses too would it not? A loss in court couldn't simply be a loss for GPL and GPL alone, it would have to have broader implications.
Click-thru licenses also haven't been tested in court and, as I understand the situation, the software powers that be are quite happy about this as a court challenge may well invalidate (and rightly so) these licenses.
What would the wider implications be beyond GPL (for closed source) if the GPL loses in court?
Davis may be a jerk on a personal level, but he is most assuredly not directly responsible for California's woes, which is what his opponents (those who started this recall bullcrap) are doing. He doesn't have the control of the budget to cause the problem, the state legislature does. He didn't kill the state budget, the energy companies did with their ILLEGAL market manipulation. They aren't getting properly punished for this, and California isn't getting justly compensated for this, and the contracts (written under false pretense) aren't being tossed because Bush/Cheney are best buds with the energy criminals that screwed California.
Gray Davis is NOT the cause of California's problems, the legislator and more directly, the criminal Bush/Cheney energy companies are.
California's referendum bullshit law needs to be tossed. Through the manipulation of rich far-right Bush/Cheney buddies California's governing system has been turned into something equivalent to that of Italy's. I hope now that every single governor gets referendumed out of office every 2 years and the state goes totally bankrupt so that the law will finally be seen as the idiocy it truly is.
Sure. Objective, hard data, and empirical statistical experience proves that sampling is superior to person-to-person enumeration. This is simple fact. The reason the Republicans were against it was that it would lead to a more accurate count of minorities and underpriviledged individuals, not their natural constituency - people more likely to vote Democrat - so they wanted to squelch it.
Statisticians KNOW how to do accurate counting more than any politician. Leave it to adult experts rather than the wild-eyed, fanatical right-wing zealots.
Statistical sampling is the underpinning to virtually ALL valid, empirical science by the way. It is accurate and less prone to error than terribly inaccurate head counting.
No no no! This implies SAMPLING rather than a hard, vote-by-vote count when a recount is called for. Not acceptable to the Republicans, as has been made obvious by their opposition to sampling to provide accurate census data.
Well, the universe may have a few tens of billions of years left but WE don't. Not even close.
There is one postulate that "we" have somewhat less than a few 10s of millions of years - long before the sun expands into a red giant and consumes earth. The geochemical cycle that is REQUIRED to keep water on the surface will not work more than a few more million years. The oceans will be lost into the earth and water locked up in rocks. The surface a dead, dry husk. Long before it gets to this stage, we will be well and fully finished as it wouldn't be OK up to the point that the last drop of liquid water is lost, it would get quite inhospitable long before then.
The sun gets hotter with every passing year. Long before it enters its final stages of red giant followed by white dwarf, it will be too hot to allow life on earth.
No species lives more than a few thousand years and this must likely include modern humans. Though the dinosaurs ruled the earth for many 10s of millions of years, no single species of dinosaur lasted anywhere near that long. Every single one of them died out and was replaced with something else. I suppose the closest things to eternal species - those that are essentially the same as when they first evolved into their present form - would be bacteria, cockroaches, and a few other insects. Perhaps a few fungi could be included too but nothing else.
As far as I'm concerned, it doesn't count if some human ancestor that isn't really us comes along in the future - that doesn't do jack squat for US and it is US that wants to know the answers. I couldn't care less about the idea that a post-human species follow-on may have the answers we seek, that doesn't do me or you any good at all and it doesn't satisfy current curiosity and desire for knowledge. In practical terms, a hypothetical future descendent is irrelevant as it has no bearing on us today and has no effect on us. WE want the answers.
The argument is equally well illustrated if you posit that there is, somewhere in the galaxy, another species of technically advanced animal that has the answers to the questions we are seeking now. So what? What good does that do us? Let it slide and just be happy that someone, somewhere or when else has/will have the answers? Not good enough.
Sign the freakin NDA, get a good look at the code, take notes, and then release the information anonymously on Freenet so all this crap can come to an end sooner rather than later?
Slashdot Mirror
Err...are you a mormon? That is suspiciously similar to Mormon nonsense - you and your celestial brides (plural) will die and in your spirit incarnation, be a god (as a man, women need not apply for godhood), and have your own planet to incestuously populate with your many children.
I just finished the set: Medal of Honor: Allied Assault and Spearhead. If I had known this was going to happen I would have held off until the binary was available. As usual, too late. I am ready to move on to the next game.
The number of electrical devices one OWNS is irrelevant. It is how many of those devices you have running, typically, at once. I have many of the same electrical devices in my home as just about any American. More than 90% are off at any given time. Lights are only turned on as needed, turned off when not - and they are only of the wattage necessary to do the job (using fluorescents whenever possible). Air conditioning is only run as needed and only to bring the house to the upper limits of comfortable. The TV isn't left on as background noise all the time, nor is the radio or stereo. Clothes aren't washed in hot or even warm water unless it really is necessary. Showers are not extended for long periods of time (no water shortage here but the water heater...). This is the definition and essense of CONSERVATION. It is how you use the appliances, not how many you have.
You forget the key lynchpin to tie the WMD lie to swift action: Iraqi ties to Al Queda and, by extension, that Saddam would give WMD of whatever type to his "buds" in Al Queda. He did a double lie: imminent threat from use and dispersion of massive amounts of WMD including nukes (that mushroom cloud fear-raker statement) and ties to the much-hated Al Queda.
We Americans wanted payback, we wanted the bastards that did 9/11 and Bush flat-out LIED to make people believe that Saddam and the 9/11 perps were in bed together so attacking the former was tantamount to a continued attack on the latter. LIE! Not a mistake. Not a simple difference in how one interprets intel - there was NO valid intel to support either lie. There was no valid intel justifying the claim of an "imminent threat".
Off topic but...I LIKED Clinton. I was behind him all the way BUT it was nonetheless ethically wrong to try that crap. The correct action at that point was to give it up, take the lumps, and move on. It would have died (almost) right there. Instead, by doing the weasel thing and quibbling over the definition of the word "is" he made it worse and exacerbated the problem beyond what it deserved. This is quite apart from the FACT that the questioning that led to this crap response were entirely illegitimate and beyond the pale. At that point it was absolutely clear he was covering up the fact that he DID have "sexual relations with that woman" (big deal!) so his weasel wording his responses were pointless anyway.
The RESULT of Bush's dishonesty and lack of ethics have been FAR worse than anything from Clinton so on the level of outright consequence of ethical weakness, he is worse. Both were wrong and I see it as a form of cowardess. Whether something is unethical and cowardly is not predicated on whether or not someone died as a result. It stands as unethical and cowardly quite on its own.
You make a mistake, you freakin' own up to it lock, stock, and barrel. Take your lumps, learn from it, perhaps regain or improve the respect people feel for you (and regain your self respect), and move on. I am quite objective and fair in my expectations in this regard. If you are real man (or woman), you have the guts to NOT QUIBBLE. You have the guts to suck up your mistakes. This is something generally lacking in ALL politicians (no exceptions as far as I have ever seen), even those who may have served honorably in the military in the past and, perhaps, held such ideas and ideals close to their heart. I don't accept such moral weakness (totally unrelated to religion) and I consider it indefensible no matter what. I don't quibble, I don't try to weasel out of my mistakes with lawyer-like mush-mouthing and I don't accept it from anyone else.
Interesting. If I could have mod points after posting I would bump you up. I haven't looked at neutron weapons for quite some time (the 80's)...but I still don't like this weapon. It strikes me as ethically suspect to do everything possible to skirt the letter of the stricture against using nukes when it is clearly violating the spirit of such strictures.
Trying to argue over the definition of the word "is", or try to argue that what you said in a State of the Union speech about Iraq and Al Queda and WMD isn't what you really said or meant, is just as suspect and indefensible. I can't see the U.N. or other countries regardless of the U.N. saying, "Oh, yeah...OK. It's not REALLY a nuke and it's not REALLY a dirty bomb/WMD. You got us on a technicality. You get a pass THIS time." They would (rightly) raise holy hell and so too, I would hope, would our own citizenry. Weasel words about it not QUITE being a nuke or WMD so its perfectly OK might be cool with slimy lawyers but it isn't ethically correct. In any case, use of such a weapon WOULD pretty much open the gates for whomever you used it against to retaliate using REAL nukes.
and means of detonation, this isn't much different than neutron bombs. You could produce a small yield neutron bomb and do the same thing and be less dirty with the radioactive material.
As a military member myself, I cannot say that this weapon is "attractive" to me. As a commander, I wouldn't want to use it as a matter of course any more than I would want to use a nuke. I WOULD use a nuke or this weapon, however, in a dire emergency, which appears to be precisely what this weapon is NOT intended for. It is seen as something with general use potential...to some in DOD halls where everything is clean theory but not to me, a line guy.
As far as I am concerned, use of such a weapon would barely be a step up from use of a dirty bomb, which would rightly be seen as illegal and an act of terror. Not me, no thanks.
I certainly wasn't trying to say it would be simple. What I meant with my big "IF" was intended to take into account possible problems with full integration of avian mitochondria with the expressed genome from a human. It is one thing to get a functional mitochondrion from a human-avian chimeric cell, per se, and quite another to get fully stable (across cell generations) and functioning chimera. Thus, if there were a progressive loss of avian mitochondria from successive chimera cell generations inspite of the mitochondria all being functional in electron transport and ATP generation, then that would indicate problems with system integration.
As to the specific physiology and anatomy of birds...I am not certain on this point.
It has been demonstrated that avian mitochondria simply produce fewer oxygen radicals as a matter of course, so it isn't a secondary effect of more efficient or more numerous peroxisomes. The enzymes involved in the electron transport chain in birds is simply "better" than that of mammals (examined to date, at least).
First off, they had to remove virtually all the rabbit nuclear DNA because if you do not do this and simply fuse two cells (say a human cell and a rabbit cell) with intact DNA, almost invariably, the human DNA is lost. The cells dump extraneous DNA and it just happens that most often, it is the human chromosomes that get dumped.
Second, this is merely a gradation of "chimera" beyond that which is commonly called a "transgenic". The later is a long-used basic tool in molecular biology/developmental research. There are innumerable extant mouse-human "chimeras" out there, just as there are Drosophila-human, yeast-human, yeast-E. coli, E. coli-yeast, etc, etc, etc, transgenic (chimeras). Normally, what is transfered in these cases are individual genes, though short chromosomal segments can be transfered as well. This article refers to a chimera in which it is merely the shell that contains the DNA (the cell) that is changed from native to alien species. You could likely get by with a viable cell with a partial mix of rabbit genes in human cells and vice versa, so long as the proteins encoded by the genes are homologous enough to share the same functions and helper proteins.
What would be cool, in my opinion, would be to do a human-bird hybrid in which the bird cell contains only human genomic DNA but the cells retain avian mitochondria - with a little transgenic work done to replace the human mitochondrial genes in the nuclear chromosomes with their avian counterpart. Why? IF (a relatively big if) the mitochondria can properly function in concert with the rest of the human DNA, you might produce a long-lived cell line or, if you let it go to term, a longer lived human. Why? This is based on the oxidative damage/free radical theory of aging: bird mitochondria are much more efficient than human mitochondria on the level of producing energy (ATP) vs production of damaging oxygen radicals. Birds have a high metabolism and their lifespan, relative to metabolic rate (one of the supporting observations for the free radical theory of aging), is unusually long. In general, a higher metabolic rate equates to a correspondingly shorter lifespan. The predominant source of damaging radicals is mitochondria by far. So, if you replace the human mitochondria with super-efficient, low radical producing bird mitochondria, you could end up with a human with an extended lifespan (to unknown extent) if the free radical theory of aging is largely correct.
Such a person would be no less human than anyone else, their mitochondria would simply be that of a bird rather than a human. Big deal. Mitochondria are alien themselves, afterall. They are the remnant of the fusion, hundreds of millions of years ago, between an anaerobic-type cell and a cyanobacteria-like aerobic bacteria. Once upon a time, then, a chimera was formed based on a semi-parasitic melding of two separate species. Each gains benefit from the other and ultimately, you end up with aerobic eukaryotic cells that makes humans, dogs, birds, insects, reptiles, etc.
A lot of it IS simpler. It is just different than is done in windows or dos. There are weaknesses in useability vis a vis non-CLI tools for setting up virtually everything you see but it is getting there quickly. The CLI is simple and the way it was "originally intended" from the time life first evolved on earth. DOS is a bastardization of the beautiful simplicity of the *nix shell.
No. Intercepting ANY signal is totally legal. Once something is broadcast, it is legally interceptable as the airways are public and no one controls their signal once it is out of the antenna. What is illegal is decoding the signal using illegitimate cards.
A nit, yes, but nits need to be picked lest they grow into full-blown flies.
First, hyperbole. The term "immortality" shouldn't be taken at face value in this context. No one is going to be immortal, ever. The thinking should simply be in centuries. Perhaps 1, 2, or 3 centuries, give or take, MAX.
So you can count on a century or three in the near(ish) future, perhaps...I wont address the surveillance society stuff. That is already well on the way - it will be something similar to Vernor Vinge's "A Deepness in the Sky" without the Focused but with the all pervasive spying.
I'll still take a few hundred years, thank you.
because it is an area of research I would like to ultimately get into. In any case, absolutely could not simply make life extension treatment available to the general populace without at least one very strong stipulation: if you accept this treatment, then you agree to forgoe having children for as long as the treatment lasts. If you elect to have children, then you give up access to treatment.
Right now we in the developed world have, on average, 4 generations living simultaneously. If you are suddenly able to extend life to be 100+, you suddenly get the possibility of having perhaps 6 or more simultaneous living generations alive at the same time without reproductive restristions. This is nearly an immediate doubling of the population in any developed nation within 40 years. Boom. If life extension technology is such that you can keep getting booster treatments to maintain some form of stasis, then it gets worse. As long as people freely reproduce you get a geometric increase in the population with each generation. This is patently unsustainable for any useful period of time. You MUST have reproductive restriction tied to life extension treatments.
On another level you have to eliminate the idea of mandatory retirement, perhaps eliminate the idea of retirement at all, since you could easily end up with an increasing number of over 65s who, under the current systems, would be expecting to retire and be supported in some way or other (social security, medicaid, medicare, etc). They would not even be the same type of 65 living today as you could easily be 65 and still be physically equivalent to someone in their 30s or even late 20s with true longevity treatments and all that would entail. Without population control, where are the jobs going to come from for the fresh young and the perpetual middle-aged individuals receiving treatment? Basically, the entire social fabric of every country on the planet gets screwed up by longevity treatments of any significant capability.
You can't say "no" to the treatment either. I assure you that once it is possible it WILL be used by more and more people. The rich will have access (unfairly) and others would have access via a pricey black market. I myself, as someone in the field (molecular biology, etc) would have access as a matter of course - and I assure you I would not permit anyone to prevent me from using such a treatment regimen, nor make it available to my family. Thus, once it is available (and it will be in one form or other) it is inevitable that its use will be widespread and unstoppable. Thus you would have to simply change society in some drastic ways to accomodate reality. At the basis of all the problems that this sort of thing would bring is population explosion unlike any envisioned before - requiring a drastic response to prevent it.
So what? The company might not exist in the near future but at least the heads of the company will have gotten a big, fat, "retirement" check from M$. Microsnot can come down on them as hard as they want, the company can simply declare bankruptcy and the CEOs walk away with fat money in their pocket.
Except...companies like IBM consider their patents, by and large, DEFENSIVE in nature. They don't load the guns unless they get stuck into a situation such as what SCO has done. THEN the guns are dusted off, loaded and fired.
If M$ were to subsequently start a patent fight against linux in court, this would directly affect IBM (and HP and other's) bottom lines. They would bring their patents to bear against M$. Amongst the giants, then, there is an unspoken MAD policy in place. The ones in real danger are small companies, not the big players, and linux doesn't count in this regard. Linux isn't a company but a number of large companies (with defensive patents) are using it. To fire on linux is to fire on these other guys (see the SCO-linux thing driving the biggest boy of them all, IBM, out with its big guns). M$ would get the same IBM treatment if they went after linux in any significant way...and IBM has way more patent ammunition than M$ ever will.
At this point, it is simply lucky for we linux users that IBM is on our side.
Doesn't this ruling, in effect, make it almost impossible to reverse engineer, which IS OK inspite of patents?
In a clean room setting you reverse engineer an application and, by necessity, in doing so duplicate (without explicitly knowing it) the process(es) that the original app uses. Would this not then be a violation of the original app's patent?
also be a loss for propriatory/closed source licenses too would it not? A loss in court couldn't simply be a loss for GPL and GPL alone, it would have to have broader implications.
Click-thru licenses also haven't been tested in court and, as I understand the situation, the software powers that be are quite happy about this as a court challenge may well invalidate (and rightly so) these licenses.
What would the wider implications be beyond GPL (for closed source) if the GPL loses in court?
Davis may be a jerk on a personal level, but he is most assuredly not directly responsible for California's woes, which is what his opponents (those who started this recall bullcrap) are doing. He doesn't have the control of the budget to cause the problem, the state legislature does. He didn't kill the state budget, the energy companies did with their ILLEGAL market manipulation. They aren't getting properly punished for this, and California isn't getting justly compensated for this, and the contracts (written under false pretense) aren't being tossed because Bush/Cheney are best buds with the energy criminals that screwed California.
Gray Davis is NOT the cause of California's problems, the legislator and more directly, the criminal Bush/Cheney energy companies are.
California's referendum bullshit law needs to be tossed. Through the manipulation of rich far-right Bush/Cheney buddies California's governing system has been turned into something equivalent to that of Italy's. I hope now that every single governor gets referendumed out of office every 2 years and the state goes totally bankrupt so that the law will finally be seen as the idiocy it truly is.
Sure. Objective, hard data, and empirical statistical experience proves that sampling is superior to person-to-person enumeration. This is simple fact. The reason the Republicans were against it was that it would lead to a more accurate count of minorities and underpriviledged individuals, not their natural constituency - people more likely to vote Democrat - so they wanted to squelch it.
Statisticians KNOW how to do accurate counting more than any politician. Leave it to adult experts rather than the wild-eyed, fanatical right-wing zealots.
Statistical sampling is the underpinning to virtually ALL valid, empirical science by the way. It is accurate and less prone to error than terribly inaccurate head counting.
No no no! This implies SAMPLING rather than a hard, vote-by-vote count when a recount is called for. Not acceptable to the Republicans, as has been made obvious by their opposition to sampling to provide accurate census data.
He also said:
"Here's another $5. How about another lapdance?"
Nice. Using your analogy, I don't WANT to know the answer, I don't even wish to hear the question anymore.
And for god's sake, give the little shit a kleenex.
Well, the universe may have a few tens of billions of years left but WE don't. Not even close.
There is one postulate that "we" have somewhat less than a few 10s of millions of years - long before the sun expands into a red giant and consumes earth. The geochemical cycle that is REQUIRED to keep water on the surface will not work more than a few more million years. The oceans will be lost into the earth and water locked up in rocks. The surface a dead, dry husk. Long before it gets to this stage, we will be well and fully finished as it wouldn't be OK up to the point that the last drop of liquid water is lost, it would get quite inhospitable long before then.
The sun gets hotter with every passing year. Long before it enters its final stages of red giant followed by white dwarf, it will be too hot to allow life on earth.
No species lives more than a few thousand years and this must likely include modern humans. Though the dinosaurs ruled the earth for many 10s of millions of years, no single species of dinosaur lasted anywhere near that long. Every single one of them died out and was replaced with something else. I suppose the closest things to eternal species - those that are essentially the same as when they first evolved into their present form - would be bacteria, cockroaches, and a few other insects. Perhaps a few fungi could be included too but nothing else.
As far as I'm concerned, it doesn't count if some human ancestor that isn't really us comes along in the future - that doesn't do jack squat for US and it is US that wants to know the answers. I couldn't care less about the idea that a post-human species follow-on may have the answers we seek, that doesn't do me or you any good at all and it doesn't satisfy current curiosity and desire for knowledge. In practical terms, a hypothetical future descendent is irrelevant as it has no bearing on us today and has no effect on us. WE want the answers.
The argument is equally well illustrated if you posit that there is, somewhere in the galaxy, another species of technically advanced animal that has the answers to the questions we are seeking now. So what? What good does that do us? Let it slide and just be happy that someone, somewhere or when else has/will have the answers? Not good enough.
Sign the freakin NDA, get a good look at the code, take notes, and then release the information anonymously on Freenet so all this crap can come to an end sooner rather than later?