Why is it so difficult to believe that the universe just always was in existance?
Well, there's Obler's Paradox for one.
Saying the universe was always in existence implies an actual infinity, and the problems this brings up are, well, practically infinite! Like for example, if the universe has always been here, and it's increasing in entropy, how come it hasn't completely run down already?
There's lots more. All it takes is a little reading and thinking to find lots more problems with a universe that's always been here.
So, which scenario do you think is more likely to come to pass under the Democratic Party:
Curiously, I wasn't suggesting anything be done by either the Democratic or the Republican parties. I was thinking of ways to change things so that the cost of health care could be reduced in general. Granted, some of my suggestions would have a cost, like targeting research into health issues with large economic impact. But such research already takes place, and I don't care if it's done by the private or public sector. Limiting malpractice awards (granted, I don't think that's the driving factor in determing premiums, a bigger factor is the return of the insurance company's investments) and limiting insurance company profits, don't have any cost to the public in taxes. Neither do environmental regulations, at least not directly, and everyone gets to share equally in the benefits of a more healthful environment.
Having the FDA do their own independent testing of drugs would require taxes to function, just like the military does. Everyone should benefit from that, as drug prices should no longer cost ten times in the US than what they cost in Canada, since the manufacture is no longer burdened with that expense, nor with setting aside funds for future potential liability. Otherwise, the suggestions were pretty much tax neutral.
Nowhere was it suggested that the government pay everyone's expensive medical bills. the idea was to make medical bills reasonable so that people could afford to pay them. See the difference?
And as long as these issues are seen in the framework of "us" vs "them", progress will be difficult or impossible. The issues should be addressed in terms of what's best for the people, not what's best for the party. Last time I checked, in America, at least in theory, power is vested in the people and the elected Republicans or Democrats only represent that power on our behalf.
I also question the assumption that profits of manufacturers shouldn't be limited because the free market will take care of that. In theory, maybe eventually, but in practice, no. Any institution that has much power concentrated into the hands of a few, especially where the development of competing institutions requires a comperable amount of power before a challenge can be mounted, are very resistent to competition. What works for the corner newspaper stand doesn't scale up linearly to large pharmaceutical companies. The notion that the invisible hand always works to the benefit of the masses is a supernatural belief, and strikes me as no more reasonable than to believe that YHWH and/or Allah and/or Shiva cares about all people.
The unfortunate truth is that health care is extremely expensive. If it becomes more affordable for you, then it becomes more expensive for someone else. Somewhere, someone has to pay for it.
Or it could simply be made less expensive overall. Here's a few quick suggestions on how to accomplish that, in no particular order:
1) Limit the the maximum awards given out in malpractice case. 2) Limit the profit insurance companies can made on their malpractice insurance policies. 3) Limit the profit insurance companies can make on their general health insurance policies. 4) Make public information on doctor's malpractice history. 5) Carry forward the history of a doctor's performance if they move to another state, especially if that doctor had their lisence removed in their prior state. 6) Establish reasonable and proper guidelines for testing based on symptoms and conditions (ie - no expensive MRI for an asymptomatic kid who fell off his bicycle). 7) Allow doctors to practice medicine and insurance companies to manage their own business finances, not the other way around. 8) Indemnify drug manufactures from liability for federally approved drugs prescribed as approved. The FDA should do their own independent testing of new drugs, instead of relying on (and burdening) the manufactures with proving safety and efficacy of their next miracle cure. 9) Tighten environmental and workplace regulations which have negative impact on the public health. Fines from violations of those regulations are to go into a health care fund, not the general coffers. 10) Taxes for the greatest threats to the public health, especially tobacco and alcohol, should be placed in a health care fund, not the general coffers. 11) Aggressively target for research the diseases which have the largest impact on public health as a cost avoidance measure. These decisions should be based on economics, not politics. 12) Allow for death with dignity, instead of keeping patients on indefinite life support. 13) Revise the drug laws to improve pain management (revising drug laws as it applies to recreational use could eliminate the obscene profit potential which creates criminal cartels and impossible but obscenely expensive enforcement, the savings from which could easilly pay for national health care, but that's another issue.)
I'm sure there are dozens of other lines of attack on this problem, but those are justa few ideas off the top. Bottom line is, there's no real reason why decent medical care has to be so expensive.
I would say that I would be very surprised if any propulsion of the sort noted here will be put into production in my life time. But I also have no doubt that we will at some point, discover a way to permit us to distant stars.
Yes, I have two doubts. They are the conservation of energy and the conservation of momentum.
There's the geometric center, and then there's the center of mass/center of rotation. If the first case defines the center, you would be correct, and you could simply adjust the center to equalize the elevation in the two hemispheres. In the latter case, that's not an option.
While I was shocked how little nuclear power would reduce emission and the fact apparently intelligent people thought this would be a silver bullet deal, it should not surprise anyone that
There is no quick fix. A lot of things have to change, like our automobile usage, suburban lifestyle, and the excessive packaging of one time use products.
In and of itself, nuclear power won't make a huge impact. But combined with other advances, it can. Automobile usage is a major greenhouse gas contributer. Plug in hybrid vehicles will help a little, but not that much as long as you have to burn fossil fuels to make the electricity. but plug in hybrids plus nuclear power has a synergistic effect that can make a difference.
It's a complex problem, so simplistic single solutions won't solve it. That doesn't mean a solution isn't possible, just that it will have to be multifaceted.
At the time it was conceived, we were engaged in a great struggle over the future direction of civilization. The Cold War. While munitions (which I think we can all agree are legitimate government expenditure) were used in this struggle, the ultimate weapon of the struggles was national prestige. 132 billion in 2006 dollars spent over the course of a decade is not an unreasonable to get a decisive advantage in this area. By contrast the Vietnam war cost four times as much, not counting the downstream costs of dealing with maimed soldiers; it was a much worse investment.
Subsequently, one can argue that the resources put into the program were only sufficient to maintain our decisive advantage in this area. Since our lead was insurmountable, there was not much competition, and the coherency of the effort suffered accordingly.
While there is some validity to this point of view, it's also the kind of thinking that will keep us in schackles. It's past time for this country and the world to get beyond tribal rivalries and perceptions of relative advantage and invest in the future of our world. Not just environmentally, but as a civilization. As it is, we seem to be still suffering from the Tower of Babble syndrone. The story implies that working together, mankind could do miraculous things, but divided we were "kept in our place." Even without the religious baggage, the principle still applies. Why not make the world a better place, instead of making "us" beat "them"?
In the cold war, the US and the USSR embarked on a mutually suicidal pattern of military overspending behavior. Fortunately for us, the Soviets bankrupted themselves before we did. I suspect it was a close race. But both countries were diminshed by the foolish effort. Imagine where we could have been had all that money and effort been spent productively.
The NASA Mission to Earth concept has been one of it's most beneficial programs. Yet even at the time, it was perormed on a shoestring, competing with the manned shuttle program (IAARS of sorts, or at least I was at the time, working on Landsat algorithms). The economic benefit of those programs is staggering, but NASA and the politicians haven't made that clear to the public. Nor is the vast majority of the public informed enough or educated enough to appreciate such acheivements, which is another area of universal benefit we need to work on. Nowadays we have NASA Public Relations people telling the public the Big Bang is a "theory" and not telling them about benefits of remote sensing. Why not? Because such information doesn't make people want to fight the Soviets or the Iraqis or the Iranians.
Until that attitude changes, I'm not optimistic about our future.
Do you honestly think Comcast gives a flying turd about getting sued by its customers? The amount of money they can make by destroying the competition is much larger than anything they'd have to pay to settle a lawsuit, and the risk of a finding against them in a court of law is remote (as most people will bankrupt themselves long before a suit sees a courtroom, and a class action could take years, and will eventually be settled for an amount far less than the profit they will have realized by then.) As far as Comcast is concerned, their network, their rules; they'll continue to filter their network as they see fit (restricting general bandwidth for power users, filtering torrent traffic, fucking up VoIP etc.) until someone forces them to act otherwise. AFAIK the only entity that could do that would be the federal government, and Comcast and its executives donate far more to politicians' campaigns than you or I do.
Not saying it's right, but that's the way it is. -- Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
Your summary paragraph seems to be contradicted by your signature.
The most general fix is to get corporations out of the politician's pockets. Ban corporate contributions to political campaigns. Then the politicians will have to listen to the people who elect them and not to the special interests that fund them. And corporations will only be subject t the law when they can't buy it outright.
I always thought programming was more art than science, and a dark art at that. This proves that at it's best computers are magic. Soon they'll have computers that give their answers even if it hasn't been programmed, or better yet even if it hasn't been built yet. Those answers will be the most accurate of all!
When does stuff like this make people start to lose credibility? Are we there yet? IANAQM, but on a simple gut level I can't buy any of this.
"Even if CDs do become damaged, replacements are readily available at affordable prices."
In this statement, are the manufacturers accepting legal responsibility to continue to have such copies available in perpetuity? If my copy of Gryphon's good but never hugely popular album "Red Queen to Gryphon Three" becomes damaged is there a guarantee that a replacement will always be readily available and reasonably priced? Somehow, I don't think so.
Maybe we should be allowed to bombard the manufactures with making replacements for us on demand, even if it's only a run of a single copy, and even if their costs far exceed the "reasonable price" they've promised us. I bet if they were faced with such expenses, they wouldn't tolerate it nearly so much as they expect us to tolerate it.
Absolute skepticism is arrogance, or at least an utter lack of trust in the experiences and knowledge of others.
You hear something from a friend, but you're skeptical, so you go look it up. You find ten other people that agree with what your friend said, but you're skeptical of them. Where does it end?
When people say absolute skepticism is impossible to maintain, they're not lying; it is impossible. Eventually you have to give in to trust.
I don't know. While I find your reasoning perfectly sound, I'm still skeptical of your conclusion.
4. Motivations. Placing limits on science by appointing sycophantic toadies who are carrying out a politically and/or religiously motivated agenda is becoming a recurring theme in this administration which leads one to suspect potentially other agendas.
I nominate this post for the Understanement Of The Week award.
I may well be an idiot. Dog-Cow isn't the first to call me that, nor is he likely to be the last. But it's more constructive to justify the accusation. Unfortunately, claiming the Judeo-Christian God is believed to have created the machine falls somewhat short, since the world is not such a simple machine in Judeo-Christian belief. In that view, God intervenes, hence restoring the Will of God term to my original equation. Claiming that at some times the Will of God term equals 0 doesn't change the principle of the equation if at other times the Will of God term is nonzero. Unless you mean to imply that the Will of God is only nonzero at the instant of creation, which is a decidedly un-Judeo-Christian notion that not long ago would have gotten you burnt at the stake as a heretic. Personally, I find the Deistic notion of a God that creates the universe and then withdraws rather unsatisfying, and adds no understandin to the system overall. The Deistic notion strikes me as a trivial solution, in the mathematical sense of the term.
Thank to Fiacha06 for his more reasoned response. Note that the OP which I quoted specifically referred to the "hard core religious." My reply specifically referred to "the more fundamentalist." Certainly there are moderates in belief and nonbelief, even though the topic does tend towards the extremes.
Science and religion are not mutaully exclusive. People can keep their religious belief and their science seprate but some of the worlds greatest scientists have had god to fill the gaps science couldn't without any ethical or moral dilema.
The human mind excels at holding contradictory and mutually exclusive notions at the same time. It's one of our greatest strengths as a species. Compartmentaliztion is a necessary comfort to people, and not just about religion. Some resolve this particular conundrum by relegating the sphere of religion as distinct from the world of science. The mind as machine as influenced by psychopharmacology muddies this view for those who care to think about it, but that's a whole different debate. Ethics and moraslits is another such area, since a formal scientific approach to these issues is so roundabout as to be meaningless. But in the domain of science, especially int he hard, physical sciences, the intrusion of religious belief is antithetical. We no longer have to believe that angels move the planets in their orbits. Not only is such a belief unnecessary, it is unscientific, or anti-scientific if you will.
Those who belive science disolves the need for religion and spirituality in the world are as misguided and the people this article gives out about.
There is a struggle to find the right way to partition spiritual feelings and scientific knowledge. Certainly one can see the rainbow both as a thing of sublime beauty and as the optical result of double reflection and refraction. There's no contradiction there at all. But to believe that there actually is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is antiscientific, and so is the notion that God can intervene to flood the entire planet.
One can redefine religion and redefine science to accomodate the flood as a scientific fact, but in principle it requires an acceptance of contradiction. It's possible to avoid thinking about that contradiction, or not to feel disturbed by the contradiction, but that doesn't mean the contradiction isn't there.
You don't have to believe in anything but that doesn't mean all those with faith in something are as cole minded as the extreamists.
Presuming you meant cold minded, I find the opposite is true. People at the farther extremes tend to be the most heated and most passionate about their beliefs, as if strong conviction and intensity of feeling provide an alternative to truth. More often than not it's an impediment.
When will the hardcore religious faithful who try to influence these things realise that science poses no danger to their beliefs.
But science does pose a danger to their beliefs. The scientific attitude is that the world operates as a simple machine following deterministic laws. The basic equation is F = ma, not F = ma + the will of God. And the more fundamentalist of the religious rather see this as F = the will of God, with the mass and acceleration bit at best being so much inconsequential flippancy, and at worst the very presence of the Great Deciever.
Is the world understandable as a machine? Is the human body understandable as a machine? Does the mind also operate under such mechanistic principles? The God of the Gaps is not acceptable to the faithful unless the Gaps are all of existence. As this is antithetical to the scientific view, science is antithetical to religious belief.
Maybe you guys disagree with Bush's proposal. But HOW would you change it? What would you remove? Is it valid to sell or buy a human embryo? To clone embryos? To make human-animal hybrids? As with all controversial issues, it's not possible to please everybody. So I'd like to ask slashdot what parts they agree and disagree with, and why.
The debate is premature unless we have a clear and reliable definition of what human life and personhood is. That's not as easy as it sounds, as it has to include everything that should be included and exclude everything that should be excluded. Is it legal for a parent to allow a child to starve to death or is it murder (easy one there)? But is it legal to remove the feeding tube from an anechpalitic baby, or not to provide the tube in the first place? What about cases like Terry Schiavo? At the point they removed her feeding tube, did she have all the legal rights and privilidges and obligations of a human person? What about charging for IVF? What about destroying fertilized ovums? How damaged does the ovum have to be before this is considered murder? What about bone marrow transplants if the stem cells it contains could be manipulated into becomming a person?
Want to declare all abortion illegal from the moment of conception? Then how can you avoid charging a pregnant woman who miscarries with (at least) involuntary manslaughter?
What's a human animal hybrid? Pigs chanting "Are we not men?" (Does anyone else find it ironic that Bush takes his cues from Animal Farm but not 1984?) How about goats with human genes to produce immune hormones in their milk? Where's the line? Want to make a law about it, and the line has to be drawn clearly and not in the sand.
Unless we decide, not just philosophically but legally, what it means to be a human, to think and feel and live as a human being does, there's no way to decide these issues.
Personally, I suggest that humanity resides in the brain. Life isn't defined just by a beating heart, or just by breathing. Those old methods of deciding when someone was alive and when they were dead didn't work well, and can't always be applied to featuses or people undergoing cardiac surgery. Id like to see some definitive evaluation of brain function based on remote fMRI studies. Before that point, a fetus isn't a real human being and so abortion isn't taking a human life. After that point, maybe restrictions on abortion would be defensible. If a patient is brain damaged and can't maintain that level of organized neural activity, then that person is brain dead, or more simply dead. Where exactly to set that point, unambiguously and as an absolute dividing line? I don't know, but then, I Am Not A Doctor.
Research on human tissue lacking that intrinsic humanity is acceptable, but manipulating people for research isn't. Find a way to direct a blastocyte to develop mature liver cells without developing the neurological capacity or humanity, and I don't have a problem with it. Why should I? It doesn't bother me if fibroid tumors are excised and treated as trash. Any other hunk of meat without the capacity to think and feel as a human doesn't get any more consideration.
What's remarkable is that the religious right and the policicians who cater to them take such an unbiblical view of these issues. According to the Holy Word of God, personhod is established by breath. The Bible explicitely excludes causing the death of a fetus from the "life for life" punishment system. A man who assaults a pregnant woman and destroys the fetus, as long as no other injury to the woman ensues, at most pays a fine. Therefore the fetus is not a human life. But what the Bible says God wants has nothing to do with how the religious pursue political power.
I can't believe most everyone here is up in arms because the term "earthlike" was used. That basically refers to mass, and is technically correct in it's field. Remember, astronomers refer to anything above helium as "metals." But it leads so many to say "Nothing to see here, there's no giant trees or sea monsters on that planet." How jaded do you have to be to have ridiculous expectations like that?
That astronomers can detect that planet at all is a phenomenal acheivement. Before this, the only extrasolar planets that could be detected had large masses in close orbits, a rather extreme situation. But here's something quite outside that class. So its parameters aren't inside the "habitable zone." It's the first discovery of its kind. The attitude I'm seeing here is like someone claiming poker is no fun because they haven't been dealt a royal flush on their first hand. It's the process, more than this particular result, that should inspire amazement.
And it was seen at 20,000 light years away. That really, really far, a galactic distance! That means there are a lot of stars potentially obnservable using this technique. Even if the alignment is relatively rare, with billions of stars to try, perhaps sooner or later one or two will prove themselves to be more interesting to this unreasonably demanding crowd. But then I'm sure the discovery will be discounted if the alien civilization hasn't developed Linux.
In hard science/math we do not yet have that problem since we still try to be stringent and keep the science in good health by completely discarding and disallowing anything that can not be formally proven true.
One thing I've learned from history is that freedom and liberties are often the hardest things to find once you've lost them.
Which is why it's so important to do more than just discuss it here. Any politician who supports this slaughter of justice and liberties should be voted out of office. Votes can make a difference. The next opportunity comes up in just a few months, and the effort needs to be repeated and reinforced in 2008, and never slacked off. Get involved as much as you can. Write to those who represent you and let them know what you think. Attend town hall meetings if you can. Volunteer for those you support. And if there isn't anyone worthwhile in office, consider running for it yourself. Do whatever you can, but do something.
Slavery is easy to obtain, and liberty is hard to maintain. And both are more available to us than you might think.
Could this be used also to better apply physics to videogames? Perhaps enhancing weather simulations for RTS games or physics properties for FPS games?
Yes, but if the algotithm is used, it will require that your character, once dead, stay dead.
Slashdot Mirror
So the universe decides to expand massively and abnormally right after it begins to exist. Why?
It was depressed and binge-eating?
I prefer to think it just couldn't contain it's enthusiasm.
Why is it so difficult to believe that the universe just always was in existance?
Well, there's Obler's Paradox for one.
Saying the universe was always in existence implies an actual infinity, and the problems this brings up are, well, practically infinite! Like for example, if the universe has always been here, and it's increasing in entropy, how come it hasn't completely run down already?
There's lots more. All it takes is a little reading and thinking to find lots more problems with a universe that's always been here.
So, which scenario do you think is more likely to come to pass under the Democratic Party:
Curiously, I wasn't suggesting anything be done by either the Democratic or the Republican parties. I was thinking of ways to change things so that the cost of health care could be reduced in general. Granted, some of my suggestions would have a cost, like targeting research into health issues with large economic impact. But such research already takes place, and I don't care if it's done by the private or public sector. Limiting malpractice awards (granted, I don't think that's the driving factor in determing premiums, a bigger factor is the return of the insurance company's investments) and limiting insurance company profits, don't have any cost to the public in taxes. Neither do environmental regulations, at least not directly, and everyone gets to share equally in the benefits of a more healthful environment.
Having the FDA do their own independent testing of drugs would require taxes to function, just like the military does. Everyone should benefit from that, as drug prices should no longer cost ten times in the US than what they cost in Canada, since the manufacture is no longer burdened with that expense, nor with setting aside funds for future potential liability. Otherwise, the suggestions were pretty much tax neutral.
Nowhere was it suggested that the government pay everyone's expensive medical bills. the idea was to make medical bills reasonable so that people could afford to pay them. See the difference?
And as long as these issues are seen in the framework of "us" vs "them", progress will be difficult or impossible. The issues should be addressed in terms of what's best for the people, not what's best for the party. Last time I checked, in America, at least in theory, power is vested in the people and the elected Republicans or Democrats only represent that power on our behalf.
I also question the assumption that profits of manufacturers shouldn't be limited because the free market will take care of that. In theory, maybe eventually, but in practice, no. Any institution that has much power concentrated into the hands of a few, especially where the development of competing institutions requires a comperable amount of power before a challenge can be mounted, are very resistent to competition. What works for the corner newspaper stand doesn't scale up linearly to large pharmaceutical companies. The notion that the invisible hand always works to the benefit of the masses is a supernatural belief, and strikes me as no more reasonable than to believe that YHWH and/or Allah and/or Shiva cares about all people.
The unfortunate truth is that health care is extremely expensive. If it becomes more affordable for you, then it becomes more expensive for someone else. Somewhere, someone has to pay for it.
Or it could simply be made less expensive overall. Here's a few quick suggestions on how to accomplish that, in no particular order:
1) Limit the the maximum awards given out in malpractice case.
2) Limit the profit insurance companies can made on their malpractice insurance policies.
3) Limit the profit insurance companies can make on their general health insurance policies.
4) Make public information on doctor's malpractice history.
5) Carry forward the history of a doctor's performance if they move to another state, especially if that doctor had their lisence removed in their prior state.
6) Establish reasonable and proper guidelines for testing based on symptoms and conditions (ie - no expensive MRI for an asymptomatic kid who fell off his bicycle).
7) Allow doctors to practice medicine and insurance companies to manage their own business finances, not the other way around.
8) Indemnify drug manufactures from liability for federally approved drugs prescribed as approved. The FDA should do their own independent testing of new drugs, instead of relying on (and burdening) the manufactures with proving safety and efficacy of their next miracle cure.
9) Tighten environmental and workplace regulations which have negative impact on the public health. Fines from violations of those regulations are to go into a health care fund, not the general coffers.
10) Taxes for the greatest threats to the public health, especially tobacco and alcohol, should be placed in a health care fund, not the general coffers.
11) Aggressively target for research the diseases which have the largest impact on public health as a cost avoidance measure. These decisions should be based on economics, not politics.
12) Allow for death with dignity, instead of keeping patients on indefinite life support.
13) Revise the drug laws to improve pain management (revising drug laws as it applies to recreational use could eliminate the obscene profit potential which creates criminal cartels and impossible but obscenely expensive enforcement, the savings from which could easilly pay for national health care, but that's another issue.)
I'm sure there are dozens of other lines of attack on this problem, but those are justa few ideas off the top. Bottom line is, there's no real reason why decent medical care has to be so expensive.
I would say that I would be very surprised if any propulsion of the sort noted here will be put into production in my life time. But I also have no doubt that we will at some point, discover a way to permit us to distant stars.
Yes, I have two doubts. They are the conservation of energy and the conservation of momentum.
There's the geometric center, and then there's the center of mass/center of rotation. If the first case defines the center, you would be correct, and you could simply adjust the center to equalize the elevation in the two hemispheres. In the latter case, that's not an option.
While I was shocked how little nuclear power would reduce emission and the fact apparently intelligent people thought this would be a silver bullet deal, it should not surprise anyone that
There is no quick fix. A lot of things have to change, like our automobile usage, suburban lifestyle, and the excessive packaging of one time use products.
In and of itself, nuclear power won't make a huge impact. But combined with other advances, it can. Automobile usage is a major greenhouse gas contributer. Plug in hybrid vehicles will help a little, but not that much as long as you have to burn fossil fuels to make the electricity. but plug in hybrids plus nuclear power has a synergistic effect that can make a difference.
It's a complex problem, so simplistic single solutions won't solve it. That doesn't mean a solution isn't possible, just that it will have to be multifaceted.
At the time it was conceived, we were engaged in a great struggle over the future direction of civilization. The Cold War. While munitions (which I think we can all agree are legitimate government expenditure) were used in this struggle, the ultimate weapon of the struggles was national prestige. 132 billion in 2006 dollars spent over the course of a decade is not an unreasonable to get a decisive advantage in this area. By contrast the Vietnam war cost four times as much, not counting the downstream costs of dealing with maimed soldiers; it was a much worse investment.
Subsequently, one can argue that the resources put into the program were only sufficient to maintain our decisive advantage in this area. Since our lead was insurmountable, there was not much competition, and the coherency of the effort suffered accordingly.
While there is some validity to this point of view, it's also the kind of thinking that will keep us in schackles. It's past time for this country and the world to get beyond tribal rivalries and perceptions of relative advantage and invest in the future of our world. Not just environmentally, but as a civilization. As it is, we seem to be still suffering from the Tower of Babble syndrone. The story implies that working together, mankind could do miraculous things, but divided we were "kept in our place." Even without the religious baggage, the principle still applies. Why not make the world a better place, instead of making "us" beat "them"?
In the cold war, the US and the USSR embarked on a mutually suicidal pattern of military overspending behavior. Fortunately for us, the Soviets bankrupted themselves before we did. I suspect it was a close race. But both countries were diminshed by the foolish effort. Imagine where we could have been had all that money and effort been spent productively.
The NASA Mission to Earth concept has been one of it's most beneficial programs. Yet even at the time, it was perormed on a shoestring, competing with the manned shuttle program (IAARS of sorts, or at least I was at the time, working on Landsat algorithms). The economic benefit of those programs is staggering, but NASA and the politicians haven't made that clear to the public. Nor is the vast majority of the public informed enough or educated enough to appreciate such acheivements, which is another area of universal benefit we need to work on. Nowadays we have NASA Public Relations people telling the public the Big Bang is a "theory" and not telling them about benefits of remote sensing. Why not? Because such information doesn't make people want to fight the Soviets or the Iraqis or the Iranians.
Until that attitude changes, I'm not optimistic about our future.
Do you honestly think Comcast gives a flying turd about getting sued by its customers? The amount of money they can make by destroying the competition is much larger than anything they'd have to pay to settle a lawsuit, and the risk of a finding against them in a court of law is remote (as most people will bankrupt themselves long before a suit sees a courtroom, and a class action could take years, and will eventually be settled for an amount far less than the profit they will have realized by then.) As far as Comcast is concerned, their network, their rules; they'll continue to filter their network as they see fit (restricting general bandwidth for power users, filtering torrent traffic, fucking up VoIP etc.) until someone forces them to act otherwise. AFAIK the only entity that could do that would be the federal government, and Comcast and its executives donate far more to politicians' campaigns than you or I do.
Not saying it's right, but that's the way it is.
--
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
Your summary paragraph seems to be contradicted by your signature.
The most general fix is to get corporations out of the politician's pockets. Ban corporate contributions to political campaigns. Then the politicians will have to listen to the people who elect them and not to the special interests that fund them. And corporations will only be subject t the law when they can't buy it outright.
(Lawyers are good people, down deep.)
How deep do you have to go, and what kind of power tool do you use to get there? (Sorry, couldn't resist)
I always thought programming was more art than science, and a dark art at that. This proves that at it's best computers are magic. Soon they'll have computers that give their answers even if it hasn't been programmed, or better yet even if it hasn't been built yet. Those answers will be the most accurate of all!
When does stuff like this make people start to lose credibility? Are we there yet? IANAQM, but on a simple gut level I can't buy any of this.
"Even if CDs do become damaged, replacements are readily available at affordable prices."
In this statement, are the manufacturers accepting legal responsibility to continue to have such copies available in perpetuity? If my copy of Gryphon's good but never hugely popular album "Red Queen to Gryphon Three" becomes damaged is there a guarantee that a replacement will always be readily available and reasonably priced? Somehow, I don't think so.
Maybe we should be allowed to bombard the manufactures with making replacements for us on demand, even if it's only a run of a single copy, and even if their costs far exceed the "reasonable price" they've promised us. I bet if they were faced with such expenses, they wouldn't tolerate it nearly so much as they expect us to tolerate it.
Absolute skepticism is arrogance, or at least an utter lack of trust in the experiences and knowledge of others.
:-)
You hear something from a friend, but you're skeptical, so you go look it up. You find ten other people that agree with what your friend said, but you're skeptical of them. Where does it end?
When people say absolute skepticism is impossible to maintain, they're not lying; it is impossible. Eventually you have to give in to trust.
I don't know. While I find your reasoning perfectly sound, I'm still skeptical of your conclusion.
Sorry, couldn't resist.
It's not just a question of will I pay more for BluRay, it's also a question of will I pay anything for a Sony product.
That's an easy answer. No.
4. Motivations. Placing limits on science by appointing sycophantic toadies who are carrying out a politically and/or religiously motivated agenda is becoming a recurring theme in this administration which leads one to suspect potentially other agendas.
I nominate this post for the Understanement Of The Week award.
Like the blimp idea though. That has real possibilities for developing world aid etc...
:-(
Yeah, like we'll ever see that happen.
I may well be an idiot. Dog-Cow isn't the first to call me that, nor is he likely to be the last. But it's more constructive to justify the accusation. Unfortunately, claiming the Judeo-Christian God is believed to have created the machine falls somewhat short, since the world is not such a simple machine in Judeo-Christian belief. In that view, God intervenes, hence restoring the Will of God term to my original equation. Claiming that at some times the Will of God term equals 0 doesn't change the principle of the equation if at other times the Will of God term is nonzero. Unless you mean to imply that the Will of God is only nonzero at the instant of creation, which is a decidedly un-Judeo-Christian notion that not long ago would have gotten you burnt at the stake as a heretic. Personally, I find the Deistic notion of a God that creates the universe and then withdraws rather unsatisfying, and adds no understandin to the system overall. The Deistic notion strikes me as a trivial solution, in the mathematical sense of the term.
Thank to Fiacha06 for his more reasoned response. Note that the OP which I quoted specifically referred to the "hard core religious." My reply specifically referred to "the more fundamentalist." Certainly there are moderates in belief and nonbelief, even though the topic does tend towards the extremes.
Science and religion are not mutaully exclusive. People can keep their religious belief and their science seprate but some of the worlds greatest scientists have had god to fill the gaps science couldn't without any ethical or moral dilema.
The human mind excels at holding contradictory and mutually exclusive notions at the same time. It's one of our greatest strengths as a species. Compartmentaliztion is a necessary comfort to people, and not just about religion. Some resolve this particular conundrum by relegating the sphere of religion as distinct from the world of science. The mind as machine as influenced by psychopharmacology muddies this view for those who care to think about it, but that's a whole different debate. Ethics and moraslits is another such area, since a formal scientific approach to these issues is so roundabout as to be meaningless. But in the domain of science, especially int he hard, physical sciences, the intrusion of religious belief is antithetical. We no longer have to believe that angels move the planets in their orbits. Not only is such a belief unnecessary, it is unscientific, or anti-scientific if you will.
Those who belive science disolves the need for religion and spirituality in the world are as misguided and the people this article gives out about.
There is a struggle to find the right way to partition spiritual feelings and scientific knowledge. Certainly one can see the rainbow both as a thing of sublime beauty and as the optical result of double reflection and refraction. There's no contradiction there at all. But to believe that there actually is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is antiscientific, and so is the notion that God can intervene to flood the entire planet.
One can redefine religion and redefine science to accomodate the flood as a scientific fact, but in principle it requires an acceptance of contradiction. It's possible to avoid thinking about that contradiction, or not to feel disturbed by the contradiction, but that doesn't mean the contradiction isn't there.
You don't have to believe in anything but that doesn't mean all those with faith in something are as cole minded as the extreamists.
Presuming you meant cold minded, I find the opposite is true. People at the farther extremes tend to be the most heated and most passionate about their beliefs, as if strong conviction and intensity of feeling provide an alternative to truth. More often than not it's an impediment.
When will the hardcore religious faithful who try to influence these things realise that science poses no danger to their beliefs.
But science does pose a danger to their beliefs. The scientific attitude is that the world operates as a simple machine following deterministic laws. The basic equation is F = ma, not F = ma + the will of God. And the more fundamentalist of the religious rather see this as F = the will of God, with the mass and acceleration bit at best being so much inconsequential flippancy, and at worst the very presence of the Great Deciever.
Is the world understandable as a machine? Is the human body understandable as a machine? Does the mind also operate under such mechanistic principles? The God of the Gaps is not acceptable to the faithful unless the Gaps are all of existence. As this is antithetical to the scientific view, science is antithetical to religious belief.
Maybe you guys disagree with Bush's proposal. But HOW would you change it? What would you remove? Is it valid to sell or buy a human embryo? To clone embryos? To make human-animal hybrids? As with all controversial issues, it's not possible to please everybody. So I'd like to ask slashdot what parts they agree and disagree with, and why.
The debate is premature unless we have a clear and reliable definition of what human life and personhood is. That's not as easy as it sounds, as it has to include everything that should be included and exclude everything that should be excluded. Is it legal for a parent to allow a child to starve to death or is it murder (easy one there)? But is it legal to remove the feeding tube from an anechpalitic baby, or not to provide the tube in the first place? What about cases like Terry Schiavo? At the point they removed her feeding tube, did she have all the legal rights and privilidges and obligations of a human person? What about charging for IVF? What about destroying fertilized ovums? How damaged does the ovum have to be before this is considered murder? What about bone marrow transplants if the stem cells it contains could be manipulated into becomming a person?
Want to declare all abortion illegal from the moment of conception? Then how can you avoid charging a pregnant woman who miscarries with (at least) involuntary manslaughter?
What's a human animal hybrid? Pigs chanting "Are we not men?" (Does anyone else find it ironic that Bush takes his cues from Animal Farm but not 1984?) How about goats with human genes to produce immune hormones in their milk? Where's the line? Want to make a law about it, and the line has to be drawn clearly and not in the sand.
Unless we decide, not just philosophically but legally, what it means to be a human, to think and feel and live as a human being does, there's no way to decide these issues.
Personally, I suggest that humanity resides in the brain. Life isn't defined just by a beating heart, or just by breathing. Those old methods of deciding when someone was alive and when they were dead didn't work well, and can't always be applied to featuses or people undergoing cardiac surgery. Id like to see some definitive evaluation of brain function based on remote fMRI studies. Before that point, a fetus isn't a real human being and so abortion isn't taking a human life. After that point, maybe restrictions on abortion would be defensible. If a patient is brain damaged and can't maintain that level of organized neural activity, then that person is brain dead, or more simply dead. Where exactly to set that point, unambiguously and as an absolute dividing line? I don't know, but then, I Am Not A Doctor.
Research on human tissue lacking that intrinsic humanity is acceptable, but manipulating people for research isn't. Find a way to direct a blastocyte to develop mature liver cells without developing the neurological capacity or humanity, and I don't have a problem with it. Why should I? It doesn't bother me if fibroid tumors are excised and treated as trash. Any other hunk of meat without the capacity to think and feel as a human doesn't get any more consideration.
What's remarkable is that the religious right and the policicians who cater to them take such an unbiblical view of these issues. According to the Holy Word of God, personhod is established by breath. The Bible explicitely excludes causing the death of a fetus from the "life for life" punishment system. A man who assaults a pregnant woman and destroys the fetus, as long as no other injury to the woman ensues, at most pays a fine. Therefore the fetus is not a human life. But what the Bible says God wants has nothing to do with how the religious pursue political power.
Okay, now, as Johnny says, "Flame On!"
I mean the chances of anything coming from Mars are a Million to One !
Sure, but you can count on a million to one shot happening half of the time.
I can't believe most everyone here is up in arms because the term "earthlike" was used. That basically refers to mass, and is technically correct in it's field. Remember, astronomers refer to anything above helium as "metals." But it leads so many to say "Nothing to see here, there's no giant trees or sea monsters on that planet." How jaded do you have to be to have ridiculous expectations like that?
That astronomers can detect that planet at all is a phenomenal acheivement. Before this, the only extrasolar planets that could be detected had large masses in close orbits, a rather extreme situation. But here's something quite outside that class. So its parameters aren't inside the "habitable zone." It's the first discovery of its kind. The attitude I'm seeing here is like someone claiming poker is no fun because they haven't been dealt a royal flush on their first hand. It's the process, more than this particular result, that should inspire amazement.
And it was seen at 20,000 light years away. That really, really far, a galactic distance! That means there are a lot of stars potentially obnservable using this technique. Even if the alignment is relatively rare, with billions of stars to try, perhaps sooner or later one or two will prove themselves to be more interesting to this unreasonably demanding crowd. But then I'm sure the discovery will be discounted if the alien civilization hasn't developed Linux.
They don't cause lawsuits from the paper boy who just got his gonads chewed.
Of course not, thanks to the three laws.
In hard science/math we do not yet have that problem since we still try to be stringent and keep the science in good health by completely discarding and disallowing anything that can not be formally proven true.
Like the continuum hypothesis?
One thing I've learned from history is that freedom and liberties are often the hardest things to find once you've lost them.
Which is why it's so important to do more than just discuss it here. Any politician who supports this slaughter of justice and liberties should be voted out of office. Votes can make a difference. The next opportunity comes up in just a few months, and the effort needs to be repeated and reinforced in 2008, and never slacked off. Get involved as much as you can. Write to those who represent you and let them know what you think. Attend town hall meetings if you can. Volunteer for those you support. And if there isn't anyone worthwhile in office, consider running for it yourself. Do whatever you can, but do something.
Slavery is easy to obtain, and liberty is hard to maintain. And both are more available to us than you might think.
Could this be used also to better apply physics to videogames? Perhaps enhancing weather simulations for RTS games or physics properties for FPS games?
Yes, but if the algotithm is used, it will require that your character, once dead, stay dead.