Well, there should by rights be a trace of the downtime itself, not just on the system compromised but on neighbouring systems. But yes, the ability to take it down also makes it easier to edit logs, beyond the fact that much less audit trial information will even be produced in single-user mode (or platform equivalent).
While I agree with your basic premise, the particular example you use causes me to vomit. That is one thing wrong with Windows, and PC keyboards - they're short one meta key. Just having Alt means the control key has to be overloaded for, well, control functions. You'd think that would make sense, but since control characters were enshrined in ASCII they lost their "meta" status, and lot of people need to type them into terminal windows (while also requiring quick key, non-strain-inducing shortcuts for copy and paste). That overloading of the control key is one of my pet peeves about Windows. Half of my use of the Mac is as a terminal to Unix command lines, whether local or remote.
Please consider joining SPOB, the Society for the Preservation Of Buckybits.
devotes a whole key to a sort of double-S shape that I will never press.
If you're using a Mac without using the command key, you're really not using the Mac. Unless you're running PPC Linux?
And my PC keyboards all waste plastic on a backwards-apostrophe
Ok, you're apparently not running Linux, or you're a Unix programmer who doesn't know how to use backquotes for command substitution in shell programming. Using familiar keys, try entering "man sh ".
while functions that you use all the time, such as switching between windows, cut/copy/paste, back/forwards, undo/redo etc, all have to double-up with other keys..
Yup, they double up with other keys - through the use of that command metakey you've never hit. If you have a way around this that doesn't involve doubling the size of the keyboard, please share. Try this, just for me - press the little funky "double-S" key (the technical term, btw, is "whee whee propeller!") and hold it, then press shift and hold it, then press the key with a slash and a question mark on it (phew!). Now read all about keyboard shortcuts.
There are umpteen things wrong with modern keyboards, though - you just mention none of them. In all seriousness, have you considered the possibility that you're just an idiot?
But the question remains, what the hell business does the RIAA or MPAA have telling me how I should administer *my* business. This isn't for your own good in the sense that it'll improve productivity (in fact, being able to listen to music at work and freely use the net often raises productivity). That's only a question of having good employees with interesting work to do anyway.
This is simply a veiled legal threat. It's "do this or we'll eventually get around to suing your ass off". Never mind that it's largely an empty threat - the intent is to invade another business and, through legal chill, affect the way they *do* business. And that's simply unacceptable.
I was going to mention that, but left it out for brevity. For that matter VoIP can work nearly as well over the PSTN with a regular modem as, well, POTS (for reasons that are probably obvious - the bandwidth available is only slightly less).
It's interesting to note that the post specifically limit itself to broadband VoIP, though broadband isn't technically required. It's really an attempt to end-run around existing telephony regulations.
There are pros and cons to telephone regulation, but if someone's going to oppose it they should just oppose it for all modes of communication, not try to sneak around like this. It's a functional question, not a specific technology issue. Should voice communication be regulated? The medium isn't the message, this time.
Ok, but then you have a system that can't self-reboot. I'm not necessarily opposed to that - in fact I think it's a big part of the reason reliability (inability to be made to crash) is necessary for security. If you can use software and hardware that are guaranteed rebootable on their own, you can even remove entirely the ability to boot from other media (needless to say this is easier said than done).
I don't think this is that far-fetched - I think that with the complexity systems will reach in the not-so-distant scifi future, the idea of booting a system will become quite alien - systems will be cloned already operating and shipped that way, never designed to be shut down. But we're a long way from that now and the reality is that auto-reboots are a complete necessity, so requiring a human-supplied passphrase is nonworkable in nearly every case.
Another point is that out-of-band (in fact, extramodal) passphrases introduce a whole new set of different insecurities in storage and redundancy requirements (what if the human is killed? Where do you write it down? etc). It'd probably be easier to invest in a padlock.;)
But do you really want VoIP telephony to remain unconnected to the POTS network? The existing telephone network is a tremendously useful infrastructure. People who dream about global networks seem to often miss the fact that we already have one. And I'm sorry, but a significant part of that tremendous public good comes from the fact that it's been regulated - particularly when you consider countries outside North America, and particularly poor ones.
Trying to keep Internet telephony away from POTS is like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Imagine if you were asking for cell phones or marine radio phones or satphones to remain unconnected from landlines. Is there then any real point in having them? Without regulation you end up with little fiefdoms, islands of communication. "Well I met my spouse because we both had Nokias, ya see". I actually think we've only barely avoided this in the cellphone standards wars to date.
I want communication to be ubiquitous, and I want less separation of modes, not more. The history of telephony deregulation in the US and Canada is not an inspiring one. Part of the reason Internet communication has so far eluded these calls is that it's been so damn useless no one really cared. As it becomes something that affects people's lives, you're damn right democratic representation will get involved. You see the same force at work in the increasing calls for spam legislation. What is that but email regulation?
It's not unlogged. There was a reboot and a suspicious period of downtime (while B. Employee was monkeying around booted from CD). B. Employee may be able to fabricate a believable explanation for that, but then it just came down to the same thing it always did - if you don't trust that B. Employee is actually G. Employee, why did you give them server room access?
Honestly, a company/government/whatever is just the people who make it up. If you can't trust them, you have much bigger problems than Windows (which is, um, really saying something).
At best you can slow someone down. You have to have the key somewhere in order to mount the filesystem. If I have access to the media, I can find it. If it's in flash ROM somewhere, I can still find it. If it's in the CPU itself, TCPA-style, with physical access I can still eventually find it. Unless the system's only access to its own key is some sort of quantum-encrypted optical fibre, I can eventually reproduce the same access required to actually use the data. And there's an important point here which pervades all of information security - the system cannot discern the difference between legitimate and illegimate uses, because the illegitimate user can imitate the legitimate one to any degree required (further because the difference between them is social, not technical). This is true of a buffer overflow as of breaking in to a hosting facility and removing a hard drive.
Physical access means complete access, particularly where the attacker has the ability to interrupt the system's operation (as here, where a reboot is implied). This is why information security necessarily comprises physical security (and lets not even get into social engineering attacks while the system is already running.
Encrypted filesystems are useful for archival storage and transport of data, though. The problem starts, as always, when you want to take them out of the vault in the concrete block at the bottom of the lake and actually use them.;)
Your conclusion is roughly correct as far as the stats goes. But what I think you've really done is illustrate why statistical and probabilistic models are basically worthless in the real world, and especially at (and between) extremes. It's kind of like asking whether it's worth spending one dollar on a 6/49 lottery when the jackpot is worth 7 million versus 14 million - how much is the "dollar" worth. It's an intensely reductionist phrasing of the question that ignores the surrounding reality (in this case, that winning the lottery is winning the lottery, period).
Losing the asteroid lottery is completely unlike losing the airplane lottery. The comparison is useless; it's really a type of argument by analogy, which is a fallacy. I realise it's someone's attempt to make things understandable to the lay media (or push an agenda there), but it does nothing besides muddy the issue.
The truth is that people can't wrap their heads around probablistic assessments anyway, so trying to make persuasive arguments to the masses that way is folly. And making a probabalistic comparison between two such different things borders on dishonest.
Sure, but so does the surface of an apple, and I can still check it for worms before I bite in (can't stand apples without worms, where's the protein?). It all depends on what you're looking for and what you're looking with. I can lie on my back and take in approximately half the sky all at once, so I guess the real problem is the considerably less than 4 pi steradians that an asteroid subtends.;)
Unless they completely disable our ability to record by the time this stuff is in use...
This is an incisive statement, because the kind of integration that will be required to provide the features you seek (roughly, the recorder knowing what programming material is being recorded and played back at all times) will not be put in place to save you missing show teasers or missing the end of a movie. It'll be incorporated to allow DRM that prevents you from recording what you're not supposed to, or avoiding recording/playing back commercials. Enjoy the wild pioneer days of your PVR, because they won't last.
As for your teaser-missing problem, I set my VCR clock 30-60 seconds fast to avoid that on shows I watch (without having to remember to manually program in a buffer each time). I assume it's impossible to manually set the clock on your recorder?
At Okinawa, Japanese citizens threw themselves off cliffs in the face of advancing American forces. The message was clear - this people, at this time, will not ever surrender unless faced with certain destruction.
But why would people do that? I never said the propaganda was on one side, and it was more effective on the Japanese because their society was more homogenous, xenophobic, and obedient to authority. They had been told the Americans would commit such atrocities that jumping off a cliff became preferable. Same with the low POW count. It's a nice example of how demonising propaganda on each side feeds the same thing on the other, until both sides are willing to do almost anything because they've lost all sight of what they were before the war began.
You really have to begin any analysis of these sorts of phenomena with the premise that people are pretty much all the same, and want reasonable things.
I agree with what you say about the atom bombings as demonstrations, except for one thing: they didn't need to be dropped on cities. Destroying a comparable unpopulated (or at least rural) area, within Japan or near it, would have outlined the hopelessness of their cause without actually having to kill a few hundred thousand people. They didn't need to be convinced that the US was serious, precisely because of the fear you outline. The warning shot show of force would have been enough - or at least worth a try.
As for the actions of the army, no argument - but there's a difference between how people act in an invading army and how they act in their own cities. And it's just the difference in perception I'd like to see evaporate. War is part of real life. It would be nice if people could fully realise that without actually having to experience it.
I guess I'm saying that demonisation is never founded; it is at its heart a dishonest coercion, and if it's necessary to engage in that manipulation to pursue the goal of war, what does that say about the actual rational decision to wage it?
Re:Telomeres and their relation to mitosis
on
Goodbye, Dolly
·
· Score: 1
It is when the two chromosomes of a pair cross over and are recombined at the spot where the crossed over. This does happen quite often, but under an ideal situation, it doesn't.
Well, what I'm saying is that under an ideal situation, it does happen. Mixing and matching alleles is really the entire purpose of sexual reproduction and meiosis. It's going to be hard to remove that characteristic from a system that's entirely designed around the pursuit of it. And you're correct, I did oversimplify in the initial post - it's not really random at all but actually selects genes and their alleles to swap. In other words it's not just complex but directed, and the direction is exactly away from cloning.
Then all we have to do is select the haploid chromosomes that are identical[...]
(laugh) I'm sorry but to me this reads sort of like "then all we have to do is construct a living sheep from spare parts found in any kitchen!". It's a pretty tall order to do what you suggest. Modern gene recombinative work is almost unbelievably crude, and we're decades away from being able to do what you suggest. For perspective, consider that there already modern attempts to harness meiosis, in the form of modern IVF - but it still has about a 10-20% chance of conceiving even a normal meiotic embryo, let alone one that's been monkeyed with. The natural mechanisms to do this stuff work sublimely well (though they also discard many failures) - our attempts aren't even at the stone-tools level yet by comparison.
This is also why I simultaneously fear GMO work and don't worry about it too much. On the one hand viable results are so rare that the chances of creating a monster are slim. On the other, if someone does manage to make some frankenzygote that takes off, it'll have been created without the checks and balances that have necessarily evolved into natural meiotic recombination, but might still take advantage of life's resilience and self propagation to spread far and wide. In many ways that scenario is the worst-case outcome of a success in the methods you describe.
Actually "lung infection" (or more generally pulmonary edema) would be the immediate cause of death for a lot of people in hospitals, whether they died of old age, cancer, AIDS and/or another disease, or even acute trauma. It's just one of those signs of systemic failure. I suspect a more detailed analysis of what would have killed Dolly will become available. I'd be surprised if her high effective cellular "age" (for a sheep) wasn't a part of it, but then I guess I'd also be surprised if the explanation was clear.
Re:Telomeres and their relation to mitosis
on
Goodbye, Dolly
·
· Score: 1
Meiosis yields entire unpaired chromosomes that are (semi-)randomly reassembled from the organism's pair of that chromosome. The input chromosomes are unzipped and chopped up into bits, floated around shuffled, then put back together. A LOT of the output chromosomes will be nonviable (but estimates vary, and there may be mechanisms that protect certain genes).
So no, you don't get the "original" chromosomes back. And this is really pretty much the point of sexual reproduction - remember that for this to have developed, asexual reproduction (cloning!) was already a solved problem. Considering the enormous cost (the movie tickets alone!) of sexual reproduction to organisms, the benefits have to be pretty incredible - and indeed they're all around you. It's sobering to note that this is the step cloning seeks to skip.
It's not quite so cruel as that, since older animals serve a support role and lend the value of experience. This is particularly true for humans, and it's probably why we live so long (for a mammal our size). Human (and prehuman) society and culture is very much a contributing factor in the evolution of the human organism - you really can't separate the one from the other. Heck, you can say the same to a different degree of chimpanzees, or wolves. Life is a continuous thread; generations don't war against each other.
Uh, well yes, I thought that obvious. Hydrogen in a power cell here on earth isn't useful except as a way to export it from a large central power plant to more portable stores. Energy has never been half as much of an issue as distribution of energy, and that's what I was talking about. I do think we should continue obeying the second law of thermodynamics when we get to Mars.;)
Actually I ultimately agree with much of what you say, because the division between military and civilian is entirely artificial anyway. Death is death, and it's one society. If they kill or die it's on my behalf, and in general I'm not willing to let someone do either of those things for me (though I freely admit I might do them for another).
It's true that Americans (and Canadians) had that view of the Japanese - not just in Japan but rather infamously within their own borders. That's the demonisation and racism I referred to. If we've gained one single thing in the intervening sixty years, it's that it's marginally less ok to do that now. But I don't know whether people before the intense propaganda of WW1 and WW2 had the same lack of undertanding that other people were just the same as themselves, or whether it was a construction.
In point of fact, I would prefer the rules of war and the supposed line between military and civilian to vanish, because I think it might make people realise the real consequences of war, and thus bring our era of war to an end - people can do it now because they view it as something distant, and because they somehow believe it can make sense in their system of values (which when rationally evaluated it simply cannot - hence all the propaganda on both sides). My fear is that exactly this will happen, but instead of civility finally triumphing over militarism, it'll be the other way around. And the triumph of militarism is ultimately the triumph of self-annihilation.
Good points, but one of the benefits of CO2 is that plants want it. Insects could turn O2 into CO2, but insects won't last long without plants...and that's not even getting into what it takes to grow chickens and eggs.;) You see the problem. Getting Life to survive is really no issue, because that's all life does. The tricky bit is getting reasonable precursors and conditions for life in place. If you can do that, your subsequent decisions won't even matter much, because you can be sure the thing will take off without you and before you know it it's calling you up on the spacephone talking about [mp]aternity.
To transplant an Earth-type ecology, you're going to need remarkably Earthlike conditions, and this is probably unfeasible. What people have looked at is importing something like (what they envision as) primordial Earthlike conditions and letting it stew for a few hundred (or thousand) years. The interesting thing to me is that this is still called "terraforming", when what comes out of it really won't really be Terran - it'll be novel. The starting factors would likely be genetically engineered, and if there's success it'll be through rapid adaptation. The life you get is pure Martian. Just as Ray Bradbury observed.:)
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Well, there should by rights be a trace of the downtime itself, not just on the system compromised but on neighbouring systems. But yes, the ability to take it down also makes it easier to edit logs, beyond the fact that much less audit trial information will even be produced in single-user mode (or platform equivalent).
While I agree with your basic premise, the particular example you use causes me to vomit. That is one thing wrong with Windows, and PC keyboards - they're short one meta key. Just having Alt means the control key has to be overloaded for, well, control functions. You'd think that would make sense, but since control characters were enshrined in ASCII they lost their "meta" status, and lot of people need to type them into terminal windows (while also requiring quick key, non-strain-inducing shortcuts for copy and paste). That overloading of the control key is one of my pet peeves about Windows. Half of my use of the Mac is as a terminal to Unix command lines, whether local or remote.
Please consider joining SPOB, the Society for the Preservation Of Buckybits.
This reads like a troll. For instance:
If you're using a Mac without using the command key, you're really not using the Mac. Unless you're running PPC Linux?
Ok, you're apparently not running Linux, or you're a Unix programmer who doesn't know how to use backquotes for command substitution in shell programming. Using familiar keys, try entering "man sh ".
Yup, they double up with other keys - through the use of that command metakey you've never hit. If you have a way around this that doesn't involve doubling the size of the keyboard, please share. Try this, just for me - press the little funky "double-S" key (the technical term, btw, is "whee whee propeller!") and hold it, then press shift and hold it, then press the key with a slash and a question mark on it (phew!). Now read all about keyboard shortcuts.
There are umpteen things wrong with modern keyboards, though - you just mention none of them. In all seriousness, have you considered the possibility that you're just an idiot?
But the question remains, what the hell business does the RIAA or MPAA have telling me how I should administer *my* business. This isn't for your own good in the sense that it'll improve productivity (in fact, being able to listen to music at work and freely use the net often raises productivity). That's only a question of having good employees with interesting work to do anyway.
This is simply a veiled legal threat. It's "do this or we'll eventually get around to suing your ass off". Never mind that it's largely an empty threat - the intent is to invade another business and, through legal chill, affect the way they *do* business. And that's simply unacceptable.
Does this mean the media campaign has failed?
I was going to mention that, but left it out for brevity. For that matter VoIP can work nearly as well over the PSTN with a regular modem as, well, POTS (for reasons that are probably obvious - the bandwidth available is only slightly less).
It's interesting to note that the post specifically limit itself to broadband VoIP, though broadband isn't technically required. It's really an attempt to end-run around existing telephony regulations.
There are pros and cons to telephone regulation, but if someone's going to oppose it they should just oppose it for all modes of communication, not try to sneak around like this. It's a functional question, not a specific technology issue. Should voice communication be regulated? The medium isn't the message, this time.
Ok, but then you have a system that can't self-reboot. I'm not necessarily opposed to that - in fact I think it's a big part of the reason reliability (inability to be made to crash) is necessary for security. If you can use software and hardware that are guaranteed rebootable on their own, you can even remove entirely the ability to boot from other media (needless to say this is easier said than done).
;)
I don't think this is that far-fetched - I think that with the complexity systems will reach in the not-so-distant scifi future, the idea of booting a system will become quite alien - systems will be cloned already operating and shipped that way, never designed to be shut down. But we're a long way from that now and the reality is that auto-reboots are a complete necessity, so requiring a human-supplied passphrase is nonworkable in nearly every case.
Another point is that out-of-band (in fact, extramodal) passphrases introduce a whole new set of different insecurities in storage and redundancy requirements (what if the human is killed? Where do you write it down? etc). It'd probably be easier to invest in a padlock.
But do you really want VoIP telephony to remain unconnected to the POTS network? The existing telephone network is a tremendously useful infrastructure. People who dream about global networks seem to often miss the fact that we already have one. And I'm sorry, but a significant part of that tremendous public good comes from the fact that it's been regulated - particularly when you consider countries outside North America, and particularly poor ones.
Trying to keep Internet telephony away from POTS is like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Imagine if you were asking for cell phones or marine radio phones or satphones to remain unconnected from landlines. Is there then any real point in having them? Without regulation you end up with little fiefdoms, islands of communication. "Well I met my spouse because we both had Nokias, ya see". I actually think we've only barely avoided this in the cellphone standards wars to date.
I want communication to be ubiquitous, and I want less separation of modes, not more. The history of telephony deregulation in the US and Canada is not an inspiring one. Part of the reason Internet communication has so far eluded these calls is that it's been so damn useless no one really cared. As it becomes something that affects people's lives, you're damn right democratic representation will get involved. You see the same force at work in the increasing calls for spam legislation. What is that but email regulation?
It's not unlogged. There was a reboot and a suspicious period of downtime (while B. Employee was monkeying around booted from CD). B. Employee may be able to fabricate a believable explanation for that, but then it just came down to the same thing it always did - if you don't trust that B. Employee is actually G. Employee, why did you give them server room access?
Honestly, a company/government/whatever is just the people who make it up. If you can't trust them, you have much bigger problems than Windows (which is, um, really saying something).
At best you can slow someone down. You have to have the key somewhere in order to mount the filesystem. If I have access to the media, I can find it. If it's in flash ROM somewhere, I can still find it. If it's in the CPU itself, TCPA-style, with physical access I can still eventually find it. Unless the system's only access to its own key is some sort of quantum-encrypted optical fibre, I can eventually reproduce the same access required to actually use the data. And there's an important point here which pervades all of information security - the system cannot discern the difference between legitimate and illegimate uses, because the illegitimate user can imitate the legitimate one to any degree required (further because the difference between them is social, not technical). This is true of a buffer overflow as of breaking in to a hosting facility and removing a hard drive.
;)
Physical access means complete access, particularly where the attacker has the ability to interrupt the system's operation (as here, where a reboot is implied). This is why information security necessarily comprises physical security (and lets not even get into social engineering attacks while the system is already running.
Encrypted filesystems are useful for archival storage and transport of data, though. The problem starts, as always, when you want to take them out of the vault in the concrete block at the bottom of the lake and actually use them.
Your conclusion is roughly correct as far as the stats goes. But what I think you've really done is illustrate why statistical and probabilistic models are basically worthless in the real world, and especially at (and between) extremes. It's kind of like asking whether it's worth spending one dollar on a 6/49 lottery when the jackpot is worth 7 million versus 14 million - how much is the "dollar" worth. It's an intensely reductionist phrasing of the question that ignores the surrounding reality (in this case, that winning the lottery is winning the lottery, period).
Losing the asteroid lottery is completely unlike losing the airplane lottery. The comparison is useless; it's really a type of argument by analogy, which is a fallacy. I realise it's someone's attempt to make things understandable to the lay media (or push an agenda there), but it does nothing besides muddy the issue.
The truth is that people can't wrap their heads around probablistic assessments anyway, so trying to make persuasive arguments to the masses that way is folly. And making a probabalistic comparison between two such different things borders on dishonest.
Sure, but so does the surface of an apple, and I can still check it for worms before I bite in (can't stand apples without worms, where's the protein?). It all depends on what you're looking for and what you're looking with. I can lie on my back and take in approximately half the sky all at once, so I guess the real problem is the considerably less than 4 pi steradians that an asteroid subtends. ;)
That and light pollution. Damn car lots.
Nah, because the last five minutes of any airing is credits and ads anyway. ;)
This is an incisive statement, because the kind of integration that will be required to provide the features you seek (roughly, the recorder knowing what programming material is being recorded and played back at all times) will not be put in place to save you missing show teasers or missing the end of a movie. It'll be incorporated to allow DRM that prevents you from recording what you're not supposed to, or avoiding recording/playing back commercials. Enjoy the wild pioneer days of your PVR, because they won't last.
As for your teaser-missing problem, I set my VCR clock 30-60 seconds fast to avoid that on shows I watch (without having to remember to manually program in a buffer each time). I assume it's impossible to manually set the clock on your recorder?
Interstitials on TV? There is just no way this will ever happen. People would never stand for it.
But why would people do that? I never said the propaganda was on one side, and it was more effective on the Japanese because their society was more homogenous, xenophobic, and obedient to authority. They had been told the Americans would commit such atrocities that jumping off a cliff became preferable. Same with the low POW count. It's a nice example of how demonising propaganda on each side feeds the same thing on the other, until both sides are willing to do almost anything because they've lost all sight of what they were before the war began.
You really have to begin any analysis of these sorts of phenomena with the premise that people are pretty much all the same, and want reasonable things.
I agree with what you say about the atom bombings as demonstrations, except for one thing: they didn't need to be dropped on cities. Destroying a comparable unpopulated (or at least rural) area, within Japan or near it, would have outlined the hopelessness of their cause without actually having to kill a few hundred thousand people. They didn't need to be convinced that the US was serious, precisely because of the fear you outline. The warning shot show of force would have been enough - or at least worth a try.
As for the actions of the army, no argument - but there's a difference between how people act in an invading army and how they act in their own cities. And it's just the difference in perception I'd like to see evaporate. War is part of real life. It would be nice if people could fully realise that without actually having to experience it.
I guess I'm saying that demonisation is never founded; it is at its heart a dishonest coercion, and if it's necessary to engage in that manipulation to pursue the goal of war, what does that say about the actual rational decision to wage it?
Well, what I'm saying is that under an ideal situation, it does happen. Mixing and matching alleles is really the entire purpose of sexual reproduction and meiosis. It's going to be hard to remove that characteristic from a system that's entirely designed around the pursuit of it. And you're correct, I did oversimplify in the initial post - it's not really random at all but actually selects genes and their alleles to swap. In other words it's not just complex but directed, and the direction is exactly away from cloning.
(laugh) I'm sorry but to me this reads sort of like "then all we have to do is construct a living sheep from spare parts found in any kitchen!". It's a pretty tall order to do what you suggest. Modern gene recombinative work is almost unbelievably crude, and we're decades away from being able to do what you suggest. For perspective, consider that there already modern attempts to harness meiosis, in the form of modern IVF - but it still has about a 10-20% chance of conceiving even a normal meiotic embryo, let alone one that's been monkeyed with. The natural mechanisms to do this stuff work sublimely well (though they also discard many failures) - our attempts aren't even at the stone-tools level yet by comparison.
This is also why I simultaneously fear GMO work and don't worry about it too much. On the one hand viable results are so rare that the chances of creating a monster are slim. On the other, if someone does manage to make some frankenzygote that takes off, it'll have been created without the checks and balances that have necessarily evolved into natural meiotic recombination, but might still take advantage of life's resilience and self propagation to spread far and wide. In many ways that scenario is the worst-case outcome of a success in the methods you describe.
I'm thinking it would be even more like the XML of TV. ;)
Nice first post attempt tho.
Actually "lung infection" (or more generally pulmonary edema) would be the immediate cause of death for a lot of people in hospitals, whether they died of old age, cancer, AIDS and/or another disease, or even acute trauma. It's just one of those signs of systemic failure. I suspect a more detailed analysis of what would have killed Dolly will become available. I'd be surprised if her high effective cellular "age" (for a sheep) wasn't a part of it, but then I guess I'd also be surprised if the explanation was clear.
Meiosis yields entire unpaired chromosomes that are (semi-)randomly reassembled from the organism's pair of that chromosome. The input chromosomes are unzipped and chopped up into bits, floated around shuffled, then put back together. A LOT of the output chromosomes will be nonviable (but estimates vary, and there may be mechanisms that protect certain genes).
So no, you don't get the "original" chromosomes back. And this is really pretty much the point of sexual reproduction - remember that for this to have developed, asexual reproduction (cloning!) was already a solved problem. Considering the enormous cost (the movie tickets alone!) of sexual reproduction to organisms, the benefits have to be pretty incredible - and indeed they're all around you. It's sobering to note that this is the step cloning seeks to skip.
It's not quite so cruel as that, since older animals serve a support role and lend the value of experience. This is particularly true for humans, and it's probably why we live so long (for a mammal our size). Human (and prehuman) society and culture is very much a contributing factor in the evolution of the human organism - you really can't separate the one from the other. Heck, you can say the same to a different degree of chimpanzees, or wolves. Life is a continuous thread; generations don't war against each other.
Or, become a psychologist, and reach the frontiers of knowledge in your field as the psych 100 syllabus is handed out. ;)
Uh, well yes, I thought that obvious. Hydrogen in a power cell here on earth isn't useful except as a way to export it from a large central power plant to more portable stores. Energy has never been half as much of an issue as distribution of energy, and that's what I was talking about. I do think we should continue obeying the second law of thermodynamics when we get to Mars. ;)
Actually I ultimately agree with much of what you say, because the division between military and civilian is entirely artificial anyway. Death is death, and it's one society. If they kill or die it's on my behalf, and in general I'm not willing to let someone do either of those things for me (though I freely admit I might do them for another).
It's true that Americans (and Canadians) had that view of the Japanese - not just in Japan but rather infamously within their own borders. That's the demonisation and racism I referred to. If we've gained one single thing in the intervening sixty years, it's that it's marginally less ok to do that now. But I don't know whether people before the intense propaganda of WW1 and WW2 had the same lack of undertanding that other people were just the same as themselves, or whether it was a construction.
In point of fact, I would prefer the rules of war and the supposed line between military and civilian to vanish, because I think it might make people realise the real consequences of war, and thus bring our era of war to an end - people can do it now because they view it as something distant, and because they somehow believe it can make sense in their system of values (which when rationally evaluated it simply cannot - hence all the propaganda on both sides). My fear is that exactly this will happen, but instead of civility finally triumphing over militarism, it'll be the other way around. And the triumph of militarism is ultimately the triumph of self-annihilation.
Good points, but one of the benefits of CO2 is that plants want it. Insects could turn O2 into CO2, but insects won't last long without plants...and that's not even getting into what it takes to grow chickens and eggs. ;) You see the problem. Getting Life to survive is really no issue, because that's all life does. The tricky bit is getting reasonable precursors and conditions for life in place. If you can do that, your subsequent decisions won't even matter much, because you can be sure the thing will take off without you and before you know it it's calling you up on the spacephone talking about [mp]aternity.
:)
To transplant an Earth-type ecology, you're going to need remarkably Earthlike conditions, and this is probably unfeasible. What people have looked at is importing something like (what they envision as) primordial Earthlike conditions and letting it stew for a few hundred (or thousand) years. The interesting thing to me is that this is still called "terraforming", when what comes out of it really won't really be Terran - it'll be novel. The starting factors would likely be genetically engineered, and if there's success it'll be through rapid adaptation. The life you get is pure Martian. Just as Ray Bradbury observed.