No, the article is saying that because of the common cold, super viruses are much harder to make. If we didn't have script kiddys running around keeping us on our toes, then real black hat hackers would be as effective as they are in the movies.
In a drug deal the buyer almost never hates the seller for what he has done, and wants to turn them in, hence its a victimless crime. Spam, on the other hands, has about a hundred victims for every "satisfied" customer, and so the police should get plenty of help.
I doubt that even in that case it would take more than 60 years to be considered an adult. Diminishing returns for experience vs. maturity seem to kick in pretty swiftly.
That may be true, but whats the point of new discoveries if we aren't there to know about them?
Actually, one way to solve this might be for people to switch specialties every once in a while. Someone going to biology from physics won't have many preconceptions, at least compared to old biologists.
I'd suspect that initially extended life expectency will become the exclusive dominion of the rich
perhaps at first, but new medical techniques have a way of trickling down to the masses after a while. I mean, now even poor people have glasses!
But even if extended life expectency became standard for all people, unless the way the world works changes one hell of a lot, would you want to live forever? Working 9 to 5 for two hundred years doesn't sound too appealing to me.
You can thank your lucky stars that you weren't a farmer in the dark ages, then you'd really have to work. Working hours have been going down pretty consistantly over the centuries. Now we usually don't even have to work on Saturdays.
Only until economy of scale makes it cheap. After all, dentistry used to only be for rich people, and now everybody gets to have their cavities drilled!
I definitly think this might be a problem for the first few hundred years, but sooner or later we'll probably figure out how to make backups of our minds, so if we do happen to get nuked or something they'll be able to grow us a new body, and we'll be back on our feet in no time.
The nice thing about living a long time is that the tech we can expect to see goes way, way up. Future medecine and cybernetic/genetic engineering will probably make it much easier to survive disasters as well.
Did anybody else here, upon learning of Chimeras, immdediatly think of the Daggers in Seaquest?
I mean, they've got the striped skin, they don't breed true, they're a perfect example of what a human chimera with strongly disparate genetic sources would look like. Of course, natural chimeras get all they're genes from the same set, and from only two sources too, so they don't look as interesting, but ain't-it-cool?
Actually, there aren't any immune system problems. The knowledge of which protiens are "other" and which are "us" isn't stricktly geneticly encoded, so the immune cells grow up recognizing all the protiens that the person's body produces. I expect that massibly chimeric (hundreds of genetic sources) organisms might run into problems as the number of protiens recognized as "self" greatly exceeds normal, and might grow to encompass all the protiens produced by some random disease (at which point the organism is f***ed) but there don't seem to be any problems for two part chimeras.
First, I have to say that the articles don't have the the details neccesary to make an informed judgement on whether the studies were valid or not.
Second, if you've ever read a science article in a popular source and then checked back to the origonal in a journal, you'll find that there are usually big differences, even in science specializing magazines like New Scientist, let alone the BBC. Thus we have no way of knowing if the results of the journal article were reported correctly, even if it was valid.
But even given those, there are still numerous grounds to critisize the articles on. In the first one I assume that they found twins where one had voluntarily decided to take up smoking marijuana instead of forcing one of them to start, meaning that one was already more likly to use illegal drugs, and so it should be no suprise that that twin would continue to use drugs later in life.
The seocnd study doesn't seem to have any glaring problems like that, and has kept me of teh opinion that abusing marijuana is bad for you. However, I'm pretty sure that the consiquences of 25 years of heavy alchohol use are far, far worse than a moderate memory impairment. In fact, the first study makes the same oversight (from the drug prohibition view) of not comparing early use of marijuana to early use of alchohol.
I've been reading articles articles like this for quite a while, and have still found nothing to convince me that smoking weed has even half the negitive consiquences of drinking. I'm not pretending that its a good thing, just that its less harmeful than many of the drugs that are legally sanctioned. I don't smoke weed, but I don't drink either.
But after the civil war the Bill of Rights was later extended to cover the states as well. I quote from the fourteenth ammendment:
"Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."
In regards to their panic and need to sue everyone under the sun over mp3's, why do they get so upset when their public statements regarding the quality of pirated music as inferior to the CDs they sell? It would seem to me that inferior, unauthorized, copies would give downloaders an extra incentive to purchase after they download.
Because people will be more likely to buy actual CDs if the MP3 are lower quality, but its easier to get legislation passed if among those who don't download, MP3s aren't known to be lower quality.
You'd proabaly want a one or two month delay to prevent people under surveilence from being warned prematurely, but that basically sound like a great idea.
I agree with you in principle, but I think we need alot more than just laws to make sure that abuse is prevented. After all, its the very poeple charged with enforcing the laws that we are in danger from. What we need is either some sort of watchdog orginization charged specifically with preventing abuses of this power, or (better yet) some sort of mutual transparency that lets *the general public* monitor how the police use this power.
I'd like to agree, I really would, but the existence of extreme sports is no reason not to believe that the government will regulate private spacecraft out of existence if there is a single fatality. After all, if someone dies when rock climbing it might not even make the local news, and besides people have been rock climbing for centuries.
Private space travel, on the other hand, is both new and spectacular, so there'll be a big pressure to Do Something to protect those poor space tourists from their own stupidity. And besides, shouldn't that money be spent here on Earth than out in space?
I don't think that this sort of disaster is inevitable, but its certainly something we need to be wary of.
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No, the article is saying that because of the common cold, super viruses are much harder to make. If we didn't have script kiddys running around keeping us on our toes, then real black hat hackers would be as effective as they are in the movies.
You've obviously never heard of Steer Roast.
In a drug deal the buyer almost never hates the seller for what he has done, and wants to turn them in, hence its a victimless crime. Spam, on the other hands, has about a hundred victims for every "satisfied" customer, and so the police should get plenty of help.
North West Passage here I come!
I think you missed the reference. I paraphrased Watson and Crick's famous paper on the structure of DNA.
That might be true, but sufficient automation does mean that we won't have to spend as much time working, regardless of other considerations.
Did the research paper conclude with "The implications of these finding for cybenetics have not escaped our notice?"
I doubt that even in that case it would take more than 60 years to be considered an adult. Diminishing returns for experience vs. maturity seem to kick in pretty swiftly.
Depends on progress in automation.
That may be true, but whats the point of new discoveries if we aren't there to know about them?
Actually, one way to solve this might be for people to switch specialties every once in a while. Someone going to biology from physics won't have many preconceptions, at least compared to old biologists.
To answer your comments,
I'd suspect that initially extended life expectency will become the exclusive dominion of the rich
perhaps at first, but new medical techniques have a way of trickling down to the masses after a while. I mean, now even poor people have glasses!
But even if extended life expectency became standard for all people, unless the way the world works changes one hell of a lot, would you want to live forever? Working 9 to 5 for two hundred years doesn't sound too appealing to me.
You can thank your lucky stars that you weren't a farmer in the dark ages, then you'd really have to work. Working hours have been going down pretty consistantly over the centuries. Now we usually don't even have to work on Saturdays.
Only until economy of scale makes it cheap. After all, dentistry used to only be for rich people, and now everybody gets to have their cavities drilled!
In 300 years we can probably expect the chances of dieing in train wrecks, etc to go way, way down.
I definitly think this might be a problem for the first few hundred years, but sooner or later we'll probably figure out how to make backups of our minds, so if we do happen to get nuked or something they'll be able to grow us a new body, and we'll be back on our feet in no time.
The nice thing about living a long time is that the tech we can expect to see goes way, way up. Future medecine and cybernetic/genetic engineering will probably make it much easier to survive disasters as well.
If you'll live to be 5000 you have a good reason to delay having kids...
In any event, hundreds of years is a *long* time, and there's a lot of space in the solar system.
Did anybody else here, upon learning of Chimeras, immdediatly think of the Daggers in Seaquest?
I mean, they've got the striped skin, they don't breed true, they're a perfect example of what a human chimera with strongly disparate genetic sources would look like. Of course, natural chimeras get all they're genes from the same set, and from only two sources too, so they don't look as interesting, but ain't-it-cool?
Actually, there aren't any immune system problems. The knowledge of which protiens are "other" and which are "us" isn't stricktly geneticly encoded, so the immune cells grow up recognizing all the protiens that the person's body produces. I expect that massibly chimeric (hundreds of genetic sources) organisms might run into problems as the number of protiens recognized as "self" greatly exceeds normal, and might grow to encompass all the protiens produced by some random disease (at which point the organism is f***ed) but there don't seem to be any problems for two part chimeras.
First, I have to say that the articles don't have the the details neccesary to make an informed judgement on whether the studies were valid or not.
Second, if you've ever read a science article in a popular source and then checked back to the origonal in a journal, you'll find that there are usually big differences, even in science specializing magazines like New Scientist, let alone the BBC. Thus we have no way of knowing if the results of the journal article were reported correctly, even if it was valid.
But even given those, there are still numerous grounds to critisize the articles on. In the first one I assume that they found twins where one had voluntarily decided to take up smoking marijuana instead of forcing one of them to start, meaning that one was already more likly to use illegal drugs, and so it should be no suprise that that twin would continue to use drugs later in life.
The seocnd study doesn't seem to have any glaring problems like that, and has kept me of teh opinion that abusing marijuana is bad for you. However, I'm pretty sure that the consiquences of 25 years of heavy alchohol use are far, far worse than a moderate memory impairment. In fact, the first study makes the same oversight (from the drug prohibition view) of not comparing early use of marijuana to early use of alchohol.
I've been reading articles articles like this for quite a while, and have still found nothing to convince me that smoking weed has even half the negitive consiquences of drinking. I'm not pretending that its a good thing, just that its less harmeful than many of the drugs that are legally sanctioned. I don't smoke weed, but I don't drink either.
"A number of misconceptions are examined and dispelled. For example, introversion is not shyness or a lack of social skills."
As a shy extrovert, I can attest to this.
But after the civil war the Bill of Rights was later extended to cover the states as well. I quote from the fourteenth ammendment:
"Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."
In regards to their panic and need to sue everyone under the sun over mp3's, why do they get so upset when their public statements regarding the quality of pirated music as inferior to the CDs they sell? It would seem to me that inferior, unauthorized, copies would give downloaders an extra incentive to purchase after they download.
Because people will be more likely to buy actual CDs if the MP3 are lower quality, but its easier to get legislation passed if among those who don't download, MP3s aren't known to be lower quality.
You'd proabaly want a one or two month delay to prevent people under surveilence from being warned prematurely, but that basically sound like a great idea.
I agree with you in principle, but I think we need alot more than just laws to make sure that abuse is prevented. After all, its the very poeple charged with enforcing the laws that we are in danger from. What we need is either some sort of watchdog orginization charged specifically with preventing abuses of this power, or (better yet) some sort of mutual transparency that lets *the general public* monitor how the police use this power.
I'd like to agree, I really would, but the existence of extreme sports is no reason not to believe that the government will regulate private spacecraft out of existence if there is a single fatality. After all, if someone dies when rock climbing it might not even make the local news, and besides people have been rock climbing for centuries.
Private space travel, on the other hand, is both new and spectacular, so there'll be a big pressure to Do Something to protect those poor space tourists from their own stupidity. And besides, shouldn't that money be spent here on Earth than out in space?
I don't think that this sort of disaster is inevitable, but its certainly something we need to be wary of.
I'd agree for most textbooks, but the Giancoli physics textbooks seem to be written well.