What puzzles me is why it's necessary to send animals to Mars at all. Are there really that many more cosmic rays en route to Mars than there are where the ISS is?
Courtesy of the Magnetosphere, yes. The ISS is only about 300km up, while the magnetosphere extends over a dozen Earth radii (tens of thousands of km), blocking most radiation. There is far more in space than in Earth orbit.
Typically specist human thinks all creatures exist to serve him, hmm?
Well, yes, the entire point of the human intelligence is that we survived by mastering our environment. I suppose you would also protest lions eating deer?
Part of that mastery, of course, is to care for the environment and not destroy it.
Inactions of dictators and governments, are usually a good thing. Not so for an organization that is supposed to hold dictators and governments back. Then it only makes things worse, because actions cease to have consequences, especially if the governments of the world rely on the UN to resolve the situation, which they often do. Well, except Israel, and the US for the past few years. Israel wouldn't exist anymore if it relied on the UN.
That was definitely not my only source, just the summary of it. I'm curious where you found that "the U.S. government itself claimed that those treatments were likely effective against cancer." The patent application (here) for the synthesis of what he calls A-10 only says he claims (or claims to have shown) that it is effective against cancer. And per the National Cancer Institute here:"No randomized, controlled trials showing the effectiveness of antineoplastons have been published in peer-reviewed scientific journals. " and "Nonrandomized clinical trials are ongoing at Dr. Burzynski’s clinic to study the effect of antineoplastons on cancer. (See Question 6.)" Full list of answers to questions here, including a list of the fairly nasty side effects (and, BTW, if you are going to indirectly cite a source you really should have seen these things for yourself.) In other words, no proper studies have ever been performed (there where several, such as at the Mayo Clinic, one of the most respected cancer treatment centers in America: it was canceled due to ethical concerns because the treatment showed poor results after two years. Zero regressions, several deaths, and severe side effects. The Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center has a good summary here).
On the other hand, the only sources I could find praising antineoplastons where sites like this (here specifically). That was the second site for "antineoplastons" on Google too. And in any cases which they say it has been shown to work, no source is referenced. The only outside link on the blurb was to the Burzynski clinic itself. No scientific cancer institute, and especially not the National Cancer Institute, has said antineoplastons work.
"Ongoing studies" is completely meaningless. I could register a "study" on the effects of gasoline on fire. That wouldn't give my work any scientific credibility, except among ignorant hope-seeking patients.
I did my research, TYVM. I'm wondering how well you did yours. This only took me about 5 minutes.
That "future" already more or less exists. In fact, it always has. What prevents it from getting bleak is the checks and balances. Governments can screw other governments of course, but being caught really sucks for them diplomatically, so they have to be cautious. Corporations can be caught either by the government (which often seems to do little or nothing) or by the public eye, which can wreck the company. Or by other companies, of course.
This has always been true, and in far more than "cyber"-space. Covert attacks are limited by pressure from various sources. Some of those weaken or grow stronger as public opinion or diplomatic situations change, but it always exists. Except in full-on war (and even some there), and then the attacks stop being covert.
China, for example, could attack the US infrastructure (probably). They don't, because they need our money as much (more, IIRC) as we need their manufacturing. And intelligence agencies have, supposedly, built in backdoors to many systems for decades now. The danger of those being abused is present, but not much greater than the abuse any intelligence agency ever could do. Which is a lot, in theory, but in practice is usually relatively limited (again, by public pressure.)
Link. Someone way down the page posted this, there are other sources too. Basically, he is using a possibly toxic chemical refined from human urine, which has no form of chemical interaction with DNA like he claims it does (a fact he, himself, has admitted), and which has under study been shown to have no effect on cancer.
While refining chemicals from urine is exactly the kind of of-the-wall treatment that might cure cancer (remember the study that used HIV to reprogram cells to kill cancer?), this doesn't.
Oh, the irony! (for those who don't wanna click even on a Wikipedia link: Baidu is a Chinese search engine and is one, and probably the, worst at censorship of all search engines.)
The term "random" is generally (even in science, from what I know of it) taken to refer to things which we are not able to predict, even theoretically. We do not, however, know for sure if the system is non-deterministic (that is, truly random) or only apparently so.
Again, not a quantum physicist. But I believe that is the general state of affairs. See Wikipedia for more.
Stanislaw Burzynski is a fraud, completely utterly and proven so. With that said, I should point out that all medical treatments, of any kind whatsoever, begin life not proven to work. And therefore all medical research would, according to that poem, be "alternative medicine." This is not true. Therefore, that poem is also not true, although nevertheless insightful.
Poster right below you dropped this link. They did replicate his work, and found no effect on cancer. The man is a quack, a liar, a fraud, probably not even a doctor, and deserves to be sued into oblivion for intimidation.
This seems quite likely, since the German company doesn't go by Merck in the US, they are called EMD Chemicals. In this case, since Facebook is a US based company it seems like US trademark (which belongs to the US company, I presume) would take precedence, but they already had an agreement with the German company. A large problem with any international Internet site.
Kinda good illustration would be Deus Ex. First scene occurs in a destroyed Statue of Liberty, destroyed by terrorists, who (I would say *SPOILER*, but come on, the games is ten years old and hey did you know Snape kills Dumbledore?) turn out to be the good guys and the people you end up helping. Oh yeah and you end up nuking area 51 (excuse me: the Groom Lake Facility). Granted it came out pre-9/11, but still. Didn't even rate a blip on the censorship radar. No, the only thing people in the US seem to want to censor are those nasty boobies. Those things are dangerous! Sex is AFAIK literally the only way to get AO in a game.
Which is why I acknowledge that change will need to happen eventually. And, somewhat ironically, Star Trek (well, at least TNG, to be precise) portrays exactly that kind of future, where no human in the Federation needs to work, as replicators can produce anything anyone ever needs, at least on civilized worlds. The quote was meant more as a nerdy reference, though, TBH.
Honestly, I'm not sure what the shape of the future human economy will be. Ir probably won't be what we have now, although I'm not yet sure that machines can take over everything. But attempts to force change based on some theoretical system have never worked in the past, and have caused tremendous amounts of damage. So in the end I would agree with you, but with caution.
Standard of living != wealth. Especially not to relative wealth at the time. The average person now has better health-care, better food, better sanitation, almost always access to a car or public transportation, refrigeration, luxuries (coffee, chocolate, fresh fruit and vegetables, Internet access). Note that this is not true for the entire world, just the majority of the industrialized part.
But not the wealth, although that is far more distributed too. The average person today is also richer than average 100 years ago (but not than kings), but that wasn't my point, my point was the improvement of the standard of living brought on by modern technology and society eclipses anything wealth could buy. And automation is what allowed that to happen.
Four-hundred years ago, on the planet Earth, workers who felt their livelihood threatened by automation, flung their wooden shoes, called sabo, into the machines to stop them . . . hence the word: sabotage.
It is funny how pretty much your EXACT argument was made some 100+ years ago. Today, in the industrialized world, we have a higher standard of living, on average, than the richest kings did 500, or even 200, years ago.
I'm not saying your points are an exact correlation to the late 19th century complaints, but you really should keep it in mind. And people have already tried to change the economic systems to account for industrialization and automation. Communism was precisely such an attempt (indeed, you language sounds extremely like Marx, especially your closing comment. I'm not criticizing: just commenting. Wrong as he may have been, Marx did have a few valid points.) I'm not saying we won't need to change: that is practically inevitable at some point. What I am saying is we should be very, very careful about how and when we do it.
I really don't agree with him selling his software to such a large corporation, on moral grounds. Will the software stay free and open?
I realize you probably aren't trying to be hypocritical (and aren't strictly speaking), you probably just didn't realize how hypocritical this sounds. Of course you are free to "disagree" with him selling his software... but it's his, and as his, he is free to do with it as he likes. That is fundamentally a part of freedom. And, ultimately, the goal of most human productivity is to profit by it (or at least one of the goals: it doesn't have to be the only or even the main one).
Also, it is most probable that Twitter realized their security is crap and wants tools, and / or people, who can improve that. Whisper Systems provides both. The moderately recent high-profile Twitter hacks have brought this problem to light, I cannot find fault with Twitter in trying to fix that problem. In fact, I laud them for doing so, if that is why they bought his company (and that seems extremely likely).
Liberty, personal responsibility, and free markets may seem intellectually less appealing and less fair, but we keep them because they still end up producing better results for everybody, even those at the bottom.
What the hell are you smoking? Those are exactly the ideas I was saying came from intellectuals who studied "useless" things. Adam Smith, all the American Founding Fathers (yes, most of them were rich), Rousseau. I could go on. Those ideas are incredibly intellectually appealing. Actually, Marx in large part argued for communism out of practicality, not intellectual appeal. And yes, Marx and Engels, despite being wrong, were still great intellectuals, and their work is considered some of the great works of literature. Totally and completely wrong, but still quite interesting. I recommend studying them at some point if you haven't and have the time/ inclination.
And most writers, mathematicians, and musicians who have day jobs don't tend to produce great works. A few, sure, but not most. Nor do those who do it for money (J.K. Rowling may be a good writer, but I wouldn't call her work a great accomplishment in literature). It's simply a matter of time: you need to put in years just to get to the point where you know what has been done in the past, never mind producing something new.
I think it might be a combination of both. People who are busy working seldom have time for thinking, and majors that focus on employable work rarely lift the mind to contemplation of things like human rights or freedom.
Most of the great thinkers in human history have been educated (self or through establishments) in the "liberal arts" (literally, the freeing arts, specifically geometry, astronomy, music, arithmetic, grammar, logic, and rhetoric). Nowadays, liberal arts has an extremely poor reputation, because those who seek it seldom do so out of interest in the higher things, but it used to be that people who learned them did so because they were interested in advancing the state of human knowledge, and in lifting humanity as a whole towards higher and better things. Also, because today's culture focuses so highly on productivity, and people who study those areas are rarely great producers of goods.
What they do produce are things like the concept of human rights, new (and sometimes better) political and economic systems, great works of literature, and new areas of mathematics. Sure, you can use some of those things to produce money, but generally the more important thing is the evolution of human knowledge. It is quite unfortunate that society does not generally value that, because our culture would be tremendously impoverished did they not exist. Don Quixote wasn't a work that paid a lot of money: but it did greatly enhance human culture.
Oh yeah, and those people also tend to produce revolutions in human society (such as Marxism, somewhat ironically). It is pretty obvious that governments which are interested primarily in preserving the status quo and not in the good of it's citizens wouldn't encourage such leisurely pursuits.
Huh? Righthaven was ruled against, by multiple judges. They missed several deadlines to pay the fees, and US Marshals were ordered to seize their property (not sure how that turned out). To be honest, I'm not even sure how or why they can still file briefs.
If anything, Righthaven is an example of the legal system actually working more or less as it should: frivolous lawsuits get thrown out and the defendants get paid their legal fees. Or will, if Righthaven ever actually obeys the law.
Slashdot Mirror
What puzzles me is why it's necessary to send animals to Mars at all. Are there really that many more cosmic rays en route to Mars than there are where the ISS is?
Courtesy of the Magnetosphere, yes. The ISS is only about 300km up, while the magnetosphere extends over a dozen Earth radii (tens of thousands of km), blocking most radiation. There is far more in space than in Earth orbit.
Maybe, but seriously: fuck mosquitoes.
Typically specist human thinks all creatures exist to serve him, hmm?
Well, yes, the entire point of the human intelligence is that we survived by mastering our environment. I suppose you would also protest lions eating deer?
Part of that mastery, of course, is to care for the environment and not destroy it.
Inactions of dictators and governments, are usually a good thing. Not so for an organization that is supposed to hold dictators and governments back. Then it only makes things worse, because actions cease to have consequences, especially if the governments of the world rely on the UN to resolve the situation, which they often do. Well, except Israel, and the US for the past few years. Israel wouldn't exist anymore if it relied on the UN.
Damn link eating Slashdot: link to patent application is here
That was definitely not my only source, just the summary of it. I'm curious where you found that "the U.S. government itself claimed that those treatments were likely effective against cancer." The patent application (here) for the synthesis of what he calls A-10 only says he claims (or claims to have shown) that it is effective against cancer. And per the National Cancer Institute here:"No randomized, controlled trials showing the effectiveness of antineoplastons have been published in peer-reviewed scientific journals. " and "Nonrandomized clinical trials are ongoing at Dr. Burzynski’s clinic to study the effect of antineoplastons on cancer. (See Question 6.)" Full list of answers to questions here, including a list of the fairly nasty side effects (and, BTW, if you are going to indirectly cite a source you really should have seen these things for yourself.) In other words, no proper studies have ever been performed (there where several, such as at the Mayo Clinic, one of the most respected cancer treatment centers in America: it was canceled due to ethical concerns because the treatment showed poor results after two years. Zero regressions, several deaths, and severe side effects. The Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center has a good summary here).
On the other hand, the only sources I could find praising antineoplastons where sites like this (here specifically). That was the second site for "antineoplastons" on Google too. And in any cases which they say it has been shown to work, no source is referenced. The only outside link on the blurb was to the Burzynski clinic itself. No scientific cancer institute, and especially not the National Cancer Institute, has said antineoplastons work.
"Ongoing studies" is completely meaningless. I could register a "study" on the effects of gasoline on fire. That wouldn't give my work any scientific credibility, except among ignorant hope-seeking patients.
I did my research, TYVM. I'm wondering how well you did yours. This only took me about 5 minutes.
That "future" already more or less exists. In fact, it always has. What prevents it from getting bleak is the checks and balances. Governments can screw other governments of course, but being caught really sucks for them diplomatically, so they have to be cautious. Corporations can be caught either by the government (which often seems to do little or nothing) or by the public eye, which can wreck the company. Or by other companies, of course.
This has always been true, and in far more than "cyber"-space. Covert attacks are limited by pressure from various sources. Some of those weaken or grow stronger as public opinion or diplomatic situations change, but it always exists. Except in full-on war (and even some there), and then the attacks stop being covert.
China, for example, could attack the US infrastructure (probably). They don't, because they need our money as much (more, IIRC) as we need their manufacturing. And intelligence agencies have, supposedly, built in backdoors to many systems for decades now. The danger of those being abused is present, but not much greater than the abuse any intelligence agency ever could do. Which is a lot, in theory, but in practice is usually relatively limited (again, by public pressure.)
I considered he might be posting it ironically.. but he got modded informative, and his other links seem serious.
Link. Someone way down the page posted this, there are other sources too. Basically, he is using a possibly toxic chemical refined from human urine, which has no form of chemical interaction with DNA like he claims it does (a fact he, himself, has admitted), and which has under study been shown to have no effect on cancer.
While refining chemicals from urine is exactly the kind of of-the-wall treatment that might cure cancer (remember the study that used HIV to reprogram cells to kill cancer?), this doesn't.
Uplink is freelance style, so it is neither linear nor short. Does get a tiny bit repetitive, but that is it.
Probably not gonna happen. They are too busy coming up with clever new games.
Oh, the irony! (for those who don't wanna click even on a Wikipedia link: Baidu is a Chinese search engine and is one, and probably the, worst at censorship of all search engines.)
The term "random" is generally (even in science, from what I know of it) taken to refer to things which we are not able to predict, even theoretically. We do not, however, know for sure if the system is non-deterministic (that is, truly random) or only apparently so.
Again, not a quantum physicist. But I believe that is the general state of affairs. See Wikipedia for more.
Stanislaw Burzynski is a fraud, completely utterly and proven so. With that said, I should point out that all medical treatments, of any kind whatsoever, begin life not proven to work. And therefore all medical research would, according to that poem, be "alternative medicine." This is not true. Therefore, that poem is also not true, although nevertheless insightful.
Poster right below you dropped this link. They did replicate his work, and found no effect on cancer. The man is a quack, a liar, a fraud, probably not even a doctor, and deserves to be sued into oblivion for intimidation.
This seems quite likely, since the German company doesn't go by Merck in the US, they are called EMD Chemicals. In this case, since Facebook is a US based company it seems like US trademark (which belongs to the US company, I presume) would take precedence, but they already had an agreement with the German company. A large problem with any international Internet site.
Kinda good illustration would be Deus Ex. First scene occurs in a destroyed Statue of Liberty, destroyed by terrorists, who (I would say *SPOILER*, but come on, the games is ten years old and hey did you know Snape kills Dumbledore?) turn out to be the good guys and the people you end up helping. Oh yeah and you end up nuking area 51 (excuse me: the Groom Lake Facility). Granted it came out pre-9/11, but still. Didn't even rate a blip on the censorship radar. No, the only thing people in the US seem to want to censor are those nasty boobies. Those things are dangerous! Sex is AFAIK literally the only way to get AO in a game.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but licence." -- John Milton, Tenure of Kings and Magistrates
Which is why I acknowledge that change will need to happen eventually. And, somewhat ironically, Star Trek (well, at least TNG, to be precise) portrays exactly that kind of future, where no human in the Federation needs to work, as replicators can produce anything anyone ever needs, at least on civilized worlds. The quote was meant more as a nerdy reference, though, TBH.
Honestly, I'm not sure what the shape of the future human economy will be. Ir probably won't be what we have now, although I'm not yet sure that machines can take over everything. But attempts to force change based on some theoretical system have never worked in the past, and have caused tremendous amounts of damage. So in the end I would agree with you, but with caution.
Standard of living != wealth. Especially not to relative wealth at the time. The average person now has better health-care, better food, better sanitation, almost always access to a car or public transportation, refrigeration, luxuries (coffee, chocolate, fresh fruit and vegetables, Internet access). Note that this is not true for the entire world, just the majority of the industrialized part.
But not the wealth, although that is far more distributed too. The average person today is also richer than average 100 years ago (but not than kings), but that wasn't my point, my point was the improvement of the standard of living brought on by modern technology and society eclipses anything wealth could buy. And automation is what allowed that to happen.
With apologies to Star Trek:
Four-hundred years ago, on the planet Earth, workers who felt their livelihood threatened by automation, flung their wooden shoes, called sabo, into the machines to stop them . . . hence the word: sabotage.
It is funny how pretty much your EXACT argument was made some 100+ years ago. Today, in the industrialized world, we have a higher standard of living, on average, than the richest kings did 500, or even 200, years ago.
I'm not saying your points are an exact correlation to the late 19th century complaints, but you really should keep it in mind. And people have already tried to change the economic systems to account for industrialization and automation. Communism was precisely such an attempt (indeed, you language sounds extremely like Marx, especially your closing comment. I'm not criticizing: just commenting. Wrong as he may have been, Marx did have a few valid points.) I'm not saying we won't need to change: that is practically inevitable at some point. What I am saying is we should be very, very careful about how and when we do it.
I really don't agree with him selling his software to such a large corporation, on moral grounds. Will the software stay free and open?
I realize you probably aren't trying to be hypocritical (and aren't strictly speaking), you probably just didn't realize how hypocritical this sounds. Of course you are free to "disagree" with him selling his software... but it's his, and as his, he is free to do with it as he likes. That is fundamentally a part of freedom. And, ultimately, the goal of most human productivity is to profit by it (or at least one of the goals: it doesn't have to be the only or even the main one).
Also, it is most probable that Twitter realized their security is crap and wants tools, and / or people, who can improve that. Whisper Systems provides both. The moderately recent high-profile Twitter hacks have brought this problem to light, I cannot find fault with Twitter in trying to fix that problem. In fact, I laud them for doing so, if that is why they bought his company (and that seems extremely likely).
Liberty, personal responsibility, and free markets may seem intellectually less appealing and less fair, but we keep them because they still end up producing better results for everybody, even those at the bottom.
What the hell are you smoking? Those are exactly the ideas I was saying came from intellectuals who studied "useless" things. Adam Smith, all the American Founding Fathers (yes, most of them were rich), Rousseau. I could go on. Those ideas are incredibly intellectually appealing. Actually, Marx in large part argued for communism out of practicality, not intellectual appeal. And yes, Marx and Engels, despite being wrong, were still great intellectuals, and their work is considered some of the great works of literature. Totally and completely wrong, but still quite interesting. I recommend studying them at some point if you haven't and have the time/ inclination.
And most writers, mathematicians, and musicians who have day jobs don't tend to produce great works. A few, sure, but not most. Nor do those who do it for money (J.K. Rowling may be a good writer, but I wouldn't call her work a great accomplishment in literature). It's simply a matter of time: you need to put in years just to get to the point where you know what has been done in the past, never mind producing something new.
I think it might be a combination of both. People who are busy working seldom have time for thinking, and majors that focus on employable work rarely lift the mind to contemplation of things like human rights or freedom.
Most of the great thinkers in human history have been educated (self or through establishments) in the "liberal arts" (literally, the freeing arts, specifically geometry, astronomy, music, arithmetic, grammar, logic, and rhetoric). Nowadays, liberal arts has an extremely poor reputation, because those who seek it seldom do so out of interest in the higher things, but it used to be that people who learned them did so because they were interested in advancing the state of human knowledge, and in lifting humanity as a whole towards higher and better things. Also, because today's culture focuses so highly on productivity, and people who study those areas are rarely great producers of goods.
What they do produce are things like the concept of human rights, new (and sometimes better) political and economic systems, great works of literature, and new areas of mathematics. Sure, you can use some of those things to produce money, but generally the more important thing is the evolution of human knowledge. It is quite unfortunate that society does not generally value that, because our culture would be tremendously impoverished did they not exist. Don Quixote wasn't a work that paid a lot of money: but it did greatly enhance human culture.
Oh yeah, and those people also tend to produce revolutions in human society (such as Marxism, somewhat ironically). It is pretty obvious that governments which are interested primarily in preserving the status quo and not in the good of it's citizens wouldn't encourage such leisurely pursuits.
Huh? Righthaven was ruled against, by multiple judges. They missed several deadlines to pay the fees, and US Marshals were ordered to seize their property (not sure how that turned out). To be honest, I'm not even sure how or why they can still file briefs.
If anything, Righthaven is an example of the legal system actually working more or less as it should: frivolous lawsuits get thrown out and the defendants get paid their legal fees. Or will, if Righthaven ever actually obeys the law.