....aren't we skating a hairsbreadth from Lamarckism? I recognize that the article doesn't imply that these genetic changes have any impact on the reproductive genes, but is it absolutely impossible that these methylation changes have some impact - if even only generally, for example on overall fitness of the offspring - that would almost be Lamarckian?
IANARG - I am not a reproductive geneticist - but as my amateur understanding is that a woman's ova are all in-place early in life, while a man's sperm are made anew regularly, I'd imagine this (hypothesized) impact could only apply to males' reproductive cells anyway?
The fact that we're finding other PLANETS is now so humdrum that this gets 7 comments, this smells very much like the latter Apollo missions "Oh, we've got guys on the moon again? Zzzz."
If I simply posted something controversial*, like an entire article about how "global warming is bullshit", that would get 300 comments, easily.
*of course, I can't use/. as my personal blog. I'm not Bennett Haselton.
I'll trade the label of 'skeptic' for 'science denier' sure, but I'd ask that people stop using the blanket term 'climate change' when they really mean 'a host of sweeping economic, societal, and governmental changes that spend $billions and $trillions to effect what we optimistically expect to be trivial changes in a dynamic system that we mostly don't really understand and have been unable to reliably predict, and which only coincidentally SEEM to conform to a leftist agenda that otherwise nobody was listening to'.
First, let's remember that lawmaking politicians of influence of either party are typically what, 60+ years old? 70+? These guys still have their staff print their emails for them and are surprised when a someone says 'let's watch a movie' and it doesn't involve (at best) a VCR. Not super-quick at adapting to change.
Second, until pretty recently the "target demographic" of electric car buyers was some sprout-eating weirdo from the Bay Area, ie, someone who wouldn't piss on a Republican if they were on fire, ie not someone that ever, in a million years, would VOTE Republican. OTOH, Car Dealerships are relatively typical small businessmen, whose concerns about running a business tend to coincide with GOP viewpoints and platforms. Whether they vote Dem/Rep is irrelevant, it's that they [i]could[/i] vote Republican, so which group would a Republican politician reasonably spend their time serving?
Ask 10 economists a question and you'll get 11 answers.
"...But if we just put it on autopilot, there's no guarantee this will work out...." That sounds suspiciously like someone wants to run something. I'd ask - sincerely - if there's a way to tell if world economics has run better since politicians started actually listening to economists? The moment economists moved from descriptive to prescriptive was arguably not a step upward.
The world of geopolitics are much more Hobbesian "red in tooth and claw" - certainly there are international "laws" but considering that a) being subject to them is entirely voluntary and b) there are no punishments for law-breakers beyond what other states are willing to exert, "international law" is more like a voluntary coordination of diplomatic efforts than an actual binding structure of laws. I know it didn't help Ukraine for shit (bye Crimea!), and is unlikely to do much for the Philippines or Vietnam in terms of a logical (ie not China-uber-alles) resolution of the various sea-disputes they're in.
If there are truly vast swathes of resources beneath the polar cap, ultimately, it's going to go to whomever can protect it (or who has big enough friends ok with them having it - in particular them having it instead of someone they like less...).
In short, Good Luck Denmark! My suspicion is that legal victory here, if they win, will be short-lived: Denmark *may* have a legitimate claim in the World Court, but this case would be followed almost immediately by a just-as-legitimate claim by Greenlanders for independence from a pre-modern colonial tie.
First, the flippant comment: I find it astonishing that in this day and age when apparently they can track everything I do, want, and own online without my permission, my ATM still asks me WHAT LANGUAGE I want to use? Seriously? After I've answered that once, it's done. I'm not changing my native language guys. Offering it subsequently is doing a favor only for the foreign-language dude that steals my card.
Second, the serious one: a) the site itself is fairly vague and misleading: "Yes! (You can be tracked!) 36.34 % of observed browsers are Chrome, as yours. 27.11 % of observed browsers are Chrome 39.0, as yours. 55.61 % of observed browsers run Windows, as yours. 39.77 % of observed browsers run Windows 7, as yours. 59.03 % of observed browsers have set "en"as their primary language, as yours. 5.51 % of observed browsers have UTC-6 as their timezone, as yours. You have the only browser out of 24041 with this fingerprint." I call bullshit on that. You're telling me I'm the only english-language individual running chrome on windows 7 in the UTC-6 timezone? Absolute nonsense.
b) when you pull the 'more details" then it starts to get more plausible, where the specific list of addons I use is rather unique, but they go down to asserting that my browser is 'identifiable' due to WebGL output - really, are vendors doing this to fingerprint my browser (as is implied) or is this more of a forensic "if I was stupid enough to send a ransom note from my browser, the FBI could eventually confirm that it came from my machine if they had physical possession of it and some weeks"? That's two different contexts of "unique", surely?
As PT Barnum is reputed to have said (OK I know he didn't say it but roll with the anecdote): "There is no bad publicity."
I've thought for years that the news coverage ITSELF is the problem.
If these individuals didn't know that they'd suddenly gain the attention of millions this would be a far less appealing strategy for them.
Now, imagine for a moment that news services voluntarily refused to share (during OR AFTER the incident): - the names/identities of the perpetrators - their "cause" - their demands - any details extrinsic to the safety of the public.
This story would hit the news as: "A hostage-event is taking place at a location in Sydney's CBD; several people are believed to be held by an individual, and police are evacuating the CBD as a standard precaution."
I know, it's a utopian idea that news stations actually stop reveling in the carnage they get to cover, and there's no question that crazy-bad people would still do bad things, but it would certainly discourage attention-seekers.
A geriatric and now wheelchair-bound Rick Deckard is called back to "retire" a collection of aging replicants whose superhuman abilities are wreaking havoc on cruise ships, nursing homes, and bingo parlors everywhere.
" The solution to climate change isn't finding ever-more-exotic carbon to extact and burn - it's to kill off 2/3 or more of the human population, and convince the rest that living in a subsistence-level squalor is worth it, in hopes that we are able to fix global climate into a steady state of conditions that it's never done on an epochal scale anyway.."
It's one thing to say "this comet's water suggests (sample size =1) that cometary water isn't the water on earth". That says NOTHING about where the water actually came from, only where it didn't.
It's a pretty clear that "welp, we didn't find it here" *doesn't* therefore mean "it must be there" unless there are a total of two possible alternatives.
I haven't bothered to read the OP determine if the leap of logic is the OP's or the summarizer's.
....smells suspicious - all the meme-generating about "utilities are terrified of renewables" from multiple sources and multiple directions makes me think that someone's laying the ground work to fight the eventual effort of "Ah, so, now that renewables are so fearsome, I guess we need to pull their subsidies".*
*to be clear, I would love to see the subsidies pulled from ALL power generation, conventional, nuclear, and renewable, and let's actually see which wins out in the marketplace as the cheapest (or, if not precisely cheapest, the best compromise for the bulk of the populace between cheap, sustainable, and clean). But that's a Pollyanna belief; I know there's too much money/power in power for it not to be gamed by every side simultaneously.
Bullshit. The 'moral relativist' argument doesn't work unless you presuppose that there IS a moral difference in the first place. "Wait, if you do this (torture) it means we aren't the good guys!!" ONLY applies if you believed that we were the good guys in the first place, which is the sort of Manichean simplification that the people upset about this like to keep pointing out in their opponents, ironically.
America isn't a magical special place on the hill. America is a country like any other that pursues its own interests ahead of any others, and if it doesn't, its political leaders should be taken out, strung up, and replaced with those who will.
Now you and I can argue all day long about enlightened self-interest and long-term self-interest and whether torture serves them or not, but that's a utilitarian argument, not a moral one. We might actually have a chance if coming to a constructive, non subjective answer.
Finally, as I saw above: "..Of course, if America decides that torturing other people is OK then America has pretty much lost any form of moral high ground, and should expect other countries to torture Americans with impunity...." Please,: let me know if the many (or even one) instances where Americans weren't tortured because America stood on some mythological high ground?
If the MafiAA have objections to anytime someone vaguely considers making a safety backup of a piece of digital media, I have to imagine companies across the world are going to unite in objecting to a non-digital "bring us your thing and you can make a copy of it" policy?
It's a laudable research goal, more likely as a way to design surveillance devices that are somewhat less detectable than drones made of plastic and bits of metal.
In either of the examples offered, however, the ubiquity and cheapness of drones already suggests that they'll simply be treated as a disposable, no matter WHAT they're made of, unless - as is the constant hurdle for bioplastics in pretty nearly every field of potential use - they become somehow cheaper than normal plastics. In a wildfire or nuclear meltdown, nobody's going to give a flying (get it?) hoot about a dozen ounces of slagged plastic crashing to earth in the area.
Nowhere in the Economist article do they use the word "hack" because - again - some dipshit is using the word "hack" to mean approximately whatever the hell they want it to mean.
You made a stupid choice, one that's had lifelong consequences. Unless you're in an exceedingly rare circumstance, you probably knew what you were doing was wrong (albeit maybe not as serious as you thought) and chose to do it anyway.
And seriously, you tell me what is a more primary function of the HR department than to catch and prevent the hiring of people with a demonstrated disregard for rules and structures that everyone else seems to be able to follow, particularly if that person wasn't perhaps forthcoming and contrite about it?
Instead of bemoaning your fate, I'd hope that you'd be volunteering your time with schools and youth organizations trying to explain to kids that yes, bad choices still do have some consequences. Honestly it sounds like you're too full of self pity to do that, though.
Yeah, it's totally unreasonable for stupid life choices to actually have consequences.
Well, you're in luck. One political party in the US (roughly 55-60% of the electorate) is committed to legislation and policies that mean nobody* ever has to live with the results of their choices.
* well, except for the people that made the right, usually harder choices; those stupid chumps are the suckers we make pay for everyone else's mistakes.
Yes, some science fiction is little more than cowboys & indians "in space", or a detective novel "in space", etc because the primary impetus for science fiction (and its claddistic cousin, fantasy) is rarely only about hewing to some speculative verisimilitude. Of course a culture set in the far future would be almost incomprehensibly different; it would also use language in a way we are unlikely to understand. Does that mean that it should +always+ be written in some sort of incomprehensible syntax? I fail to see how that would be entertaining, for all that it would satisfy some sort of weird "purist" esthetic.
For that matter, part of the wellspring from which science fiction flows is precisely the universality of the human experience. By divorcing the story from current contexts like nationality or gender (for example), an author is free to paint on a whiter canvas, and highlight subtle story elements that might otherwise get lost. By insisting that future cultures be incomprehensible, he's denying science fiction one of its most compelling abilities to tell stories that matter to people today.
Logically, no. But then, one has to understand that every position - no matter how altruistic your motivation - has a consequence. If your local group is protesting anything based on funding from Putin (or the Koch Brothers, or George Soros, etc) understand that as well-intentioned as your protests may be, you are being used as a convenient pawn.
And then understand that because of that consequence (or some associated one), that position means that you may have repugnant allies, who agree with that position for motivations of their own.
And then understand that later, people may excoriate you for those allies, utterly disregarding the context or your motivations. (The picture of Don Rumsfeld infamously shaking hands with Saddam Hussein springs to mind.)
Advancing power storage tech is practically a holy grail of power companies. You don't really think that they enjoy having to have MASSIVE overcapacity (for potential maximum-demand spikes) that sits idle not generating $1 in revenue 60%+ of the time, yet has to be purchased and maintained as if it's used every day?
Seriously, take off the tinfoil hat about "big energy" and try for one second to actually look at it from their point of view. The ability to store more power, for longer, more cheaply removes a HOST of excess-capital investment *and* allows them to forecast steadier margins instead of pricing-in overcapacity and getting grilled by consumers and government for gouging.
If I find out which trains have this, I'm so going to post a youtube of a chipmunk or gopher on the track. He might have accidentally wandered onto a patch of duct tape.
Anyway, yeah in seriousness this sounds like nonsense.
Slashdot Mirror
....aren't we skating a hairsbreadth from Lamarckism?
I recognize that the article doesn't imply that these genetic changes have any impact on the reproductive genes, but is it absolutely impossible that these methylation changes have some impact - if even only generally, for example on overall fitness of the offspring - that would almost be Lamarckian?
IANARG - I am not a reproductive geneticist - but as my amateur understanding is that a woman's ova are all in-place early in life, while a man's sperm are made anew regularly, I'd imagine this (hypothesized) impact could only apply to males' reproductive cells anyway?
Seriously, we do.
The fact that we're finding other PLANETS is now so humdrum that this gets 7 comments, this smells very much like the latter Apollo missions "Oh, we've got guys on the moon again? Zzzz."
If I simply posted something controversial*, like an entire article about how "global warming is bullshit", that would get 300 comments, easily.
*of course, I can't use /. as my personal blog. I'm not Bennett Haselton.
I'll trade the label of 'skeptic' for 'science denier' sure, but I'd ask that people stop using the blanket term 'climate change' when they really mean 'a host of sweeping economic, societal, and governmental changes that spend $billions and $trillions to effect what we optimistically expect to be trivial changes in a dynamic system that we mostly don't really understand and have been unable to reliably predict, and which only coincidentally SEEM to conform to a leftist agenda that otherwise nobody was listening to'.
That'd be great, thanks!
I see, so there's some controversy about the naming convention?
I propose "Namingconventiongate" or maybe "Slashdotpostgate".
First, let's remember that lawmaking politicians of influence of either party are typically what, 60+ years old? 70+? These guys still have their staff print their emails for them and are surprised when a someone says 'let's watch a movie' and it doesn't involve (at best) a VCR. Not super-quick at adapting to change.
Second, until pretty recently the "target demographic" of electric car buyers was some sprout-eating weirdo from the Bay Area, ie, someone who wouldn't piss on a Republican if they were on fire, ie not someone that ever, in a million years, would VOTE Republican. OTOH, Car Dealerships are relatively typical small businessmen, whose concerns about running a business tend to coincide with GOP viewpoints and platforms. Whether they vote Dem/Rep is irrelevant, it's that they [i]could[/i] vote Republican, so which group would a Republican politician reasonably spend their time serving?
Ask 10 economists a question and you'll get 11 answers.
"...But if we just put it on autopilot, there's no guarantee this will work out...."
That sounds suspiciously like someone wants to run something.
I'd ask - sincerely - if there's a way to tell if world economics has run better since politicians started actually listening to economists? The moment economists moved from descriptive to prescriptive was arguably not a step upward.
The world of geopolitics are much more Hobbesian "red in tooth and claw" - certainly there are international "laws" but considering that a) being subject to them is entirely voluntary and b) there are no punishments for law-breakers beyond what other states are willing to exert, "international law" is more like a voluntary coordination of diplomatic efforts than an actual binding structure of laws. I know it didn't help Ukraine for shit (bye Crimea!), and is unlikely to do much for the Philippines or Vietnam in terms of a logical (ie not China-uber-alles) resolution of the various sea-disputes they're in.
If there are truly vast swathes of resources beneath the polar cap, ultimately, it's going to go to whomever can protect it (or who has big enough friends ok with them having it - in particular them having it instead of someone they like less...).
In short, Good Luck Denmark! My suspicion is that legal victory here, if they win, will be short-lived: Denmark *may* have a legitimate claim in the World Court, but this case would be followed almost immediately by a just-as-legitimate claim by Greenlanders for independence from a pre-modern colonial tie.
Now he's writing policy for the White House, sadly.
First, the flippant comment:
I find it astonishing that in this day and age when apparently they can track everything I do, want, and own online without my permission, my ATM still asks me WHAT LANGUAGE I want to use? Seriously? After I've answered that once, it's done. I'm not changing my native language guys. Offering it subsequently is doing a favor only for the foreign-language dude that steals my card.
Second, the serious one:
a) the site itself is fairly vague and misleading:
"Yes! (You can be tracked!)
36.34 % of observed browsers are Chrome, as yours.
27.11 % of observed browsers are Chrome 39.0, as yours.
55.61 % of observed browsers run Windows, as yours.
39.77 % of observed browsers run Windows 7, as yours.
59.03 % of observed browsers have set "en"as their primary language, as yours.
5.51 % of observed browsers have UTC-6 as their timezone, as yours.
You have the only browser out of 24041 with this fingerprint."
I call bullshit on that. You're telling me I'm the only english-language individual running chrome on windows 7 in the UTC-6 timezone? Absolute nonsense.
b) when you pull the 'more details" then it starts to get more plausible, where the specific list of addons I use is rather unique, but they go down to asserting that my browser is 'identifiable' due to WebGL output - really, are vendors doing this to fingerprint my browser (as is implied) or is this more of a forensic "if I was stupid enough to send a ransom note from my browser, the FBI could eventually confirm that it came from my machine if they had physical possession of it and some weeks"?
That's two different contexts of "unique", surely?
As PT Barnum is reputed to have said (OK I know he didn't say it but roll with the anecdote): "There is no bad publicity."
I've thought for years that the news coverage ITSELF is the problem.
If these individuals didn't know that they'd suddenly gain the attention of millions this would be a far less appealing strategy for them.
Now, imagine for a moment that news services voluntarily refused to share (during OR AFTER the incident):
- the names/identities of the perpetrators
- their "cause"
- their demands
- any details extrinsic to the safety of the public.
This story would hit the news as: "A hostage-event is taking place at a location in Sydney's CBD; several people are believed to be held by an individual, and police are evacuating the CBD as a standard precaution."
I know, it's a utopian idea that news stations actually stop reveling in the carnage they get to cover, and there's no question that crazy-bad people would still do bad things, but it would certainly discourage attention-seekers.
"BR2: Blade Roller"
A geriatric and now wheelchair-bound Rick Deckard is called back to "retire" a collection of aging replicants whose superhuman abilities are wreaking havoc on cruise ships, nursing homes, and bingo parlors everywhere.
" The solution to climate change isn't finding ever-more-exotic carbon to extact and burn - it's to kill off 2/3 or more of the human population, and convince the rest that living in a subsistence-level squalor is worth it, in hopes that we are able to fix global climate into a steady state of conditions that it's never done on an epochal scale anyway.."
Fixed that for you.
It's one thing to say "this comet's water suggests (sample size =1) that cometary water isn't the water on earth". That says NOTHING about where the water actually came from, only where it didn't.
It's a pretty clear that "welp, we didn't find it here" *doesn't* therefore mean "it must be there" unless there are a total of two possible alternatives.
I haven't bothered to read the OP determine if the leap of logic is the OP's or the summarizer's.
Well, you guys wanted federal health care.
Please don't act all surprised when this information is used for all sorts of other purposes.
....smells suspicious - all the meme-generating about "utilities are terrified of renewables" from multiple sources and multiple directions makes me think that someone's laying the ground work to fight the eventual effort of "Ah, so, now that renewables are so fearsome, I guess we need to pull their subsidies".*
*to be clear, I would love to see the subsidies pulled from ALL power generation, conventional, nuclear, and renewable, and let's actually see which wins out in the marketplace as the cheapest (or, if not precisely cheapest, the best compromise for the bulk of the populace between cheap, sustainable, and clean). But that's a Pollyanna belief; I know there's too much money/power in power for it not to be gamed by every side simultaneously.
Bullshit. The 'moral relativist' argument doesn't work unless you presuppose that there IS a moral difference in the first place. "Wait, if you do this (torture) it means we aren't the good guys!!" ONLY applies if you believed that we were the good guys in the first place, which is the sort of Manichean simplification that the people upset about this like to keep pointing out in their opponents, ironically.
America isn't a magical special place on the hill. America is a country like any other that pursues its own interests ahead of any others, and if it doesn't, its political leaders should be taken out, strung up, and replaced with those who will.
Now you and I can argue all day long about enlightened self-interest and long-term self-interest and whether torture serves them or not, but that's a utilitarian argument, not a moral one. We might actually have a chance if coming to a constructive, non subjective answer.
Finally, as I saw above: "..Of course, if America decides that torturing other people is OK then America has pretty much lost any form of moral high ground, and should expect other countries to torture Americans with impunity...."
Please,: let me know if the many (or even one) instances where Americans weren't tortured because America stood on some mythological high ground?
If the MafiAA have objections to anytime someone vaguely considers making a safety backup of a piece of digital media, I have to imagine companies across the world are going to unite in objecting to a non-digital "bring us your thing and you can make a copy of it" policy?
It's a laudable research goal, more likely as a way to design surveillance devices that are somewhat less detectable than drones made of plastic and bits of metal.
In either of the examples offered, however, the ubiquity and cheapness of drones already suggests that they'll simply be treated as a disposable, no matter WHAT they're made of, unless - as is the constant hurdle for bioplastics in pretty nearly every field of potential use - they become somehow cheaper than normal plastics. In a wildfire or nuclear meltdown, nobody's going to give a flying (get it?) hoot about a dozen ounces of slagged plastic crashing to earth in the area.
Nowhere in the Economist article do they use the word "hack" because - again - some dipshit is using the word "hack" to mean approximately whatever the hell they want it to mean.
"Hack" != "use"
"Hack" != "terminate"
"Hack" != "amend"
Either send your editors back to junior high grammar, or maybe exercise some editorial judgement and stop this silliness.
My advice?
Try to get past the idea you're the victim.
You made a stupid choice, one that's had lifelong consequences. Unless you're in an exceedingly rare circumstance, you probably knew what you were doing was wrong (albeit maybe not as serious as you thought) and chose to do it anyway.
And seriously, you tell me what is a more primary function of the HR department than to catch and prevent the hiring of people with a demonstrated disregard for rules and structures that everyone else seems to be able to follow, particularly if that person wasn't perhaps forthcoming and contrite about it?
Instead of bemoaning your fate, I'd hope that you'd be volunteering your time with schools and youth organizations trying to explain to kids that yes, bad choices still do have some consequences. Honestly it sounds like you're too full of self pity to do that, though.
Yeah, it's totally unreasonable for stupid life choices to actually have consequences.
Well, you're in luck. One political party in the US (roughly 55-60% of the electorate) is committed to legislation and policies that mean nobody* ever has to live with the results of their choices.
* well, except for the people that made the right, usually harder choices; those stupid chumps are the suckers we make pay for everyone else's mistakes.
Yes, some science fiction is little more than cowboys & indians "in space", or a detective novel "in space", etc because the primary impetus for science fiction (and its claddistic cousin, fantasy) is rarely only about hewing to some speculative verisimilitude.
Of course a culture set in the far future would be almost incomprehensibly different; it would also use language in a way we are unlikely to understand. Does that mean that it should +always+ be written in some sort of incomprehensible syntax? I fail to see how that would be entertaining, for all that it would satisfy some sort of weird "purist" esthetic.
For that matter, part of the wellspring from which science fiction flows is precisely the universality of the human experience. By divorcing the story from current contexts like nationality or gender (for example), an author is free to paint on a whiter canvas, and highlight subtle story elements that might otherwise get lost. By insisting that future cultures be incomprehensible, he's denying science fiction one of its most compelling abilities to tell stories that matter to people today.
Logically, no. But then, one has to understand that every position - no matter how altruistic your motivation - has a consequence. If your local group is protesting anything based on funding from Putin (or the Koch Brothers, or George Soros, etc) understand that as well-intentioned as your protests may be, you are being used as a convenient pawn.
And then understand that because of that consequence (or some associated one), that position means that you may have repugnant allies, who agree with that position for motivations of their own.
And then understand that later, people may excoriate you for those allies, utterly disregarding the context or your motivations. (The picture of Don Rumsfeld infamously shaking hands with Saddam Hussein springs to mind.)
The article is very clear .... on histrionics.
Advancing power storage tech is practically a holy grail of power companies. You don't really think that they enjoy having to have MASSIVE overcapacity (for potential maximum-demand spikes) that sits idle not generating $1 in revenue 60%+ of the time, yet has to be purchased and maintained as if it's used every day?
Seriously, take off the tinfoil hat about "big energy" and try for one second to actually look at it from their point of view. The ability to store more power, for longer, more cheaply removes a HOST of excess-capital investment *and* allows them to forecast steadier margins instead of pricing-in overcapacity and getting grilled by consumers and government for gouging.
If I find out which trains have this, I'm so going to post a youtube of a chipmunk or gopher on the track. He might have accidentally wandered onto a patch of duct tape.
Anyway, yeah in seriousness this sounds like nonsense.