(1) Anyone who is too lazy to go to a polling station should not be voting anyway. If they do not care enough to make that much effort, then it is highly unlikely that they would care enought to get informed, and make a good choice.
(2) If people are apathetic because they do not like any of the choices available then making it easier to vote will have no effect (let's see - would you like to eat broken glass or dog-food? Would delivery to your door-step make the choice easier?).
(3) If people are apathetic because they would be equally happy with either party then again making it easier to vote will not make a difference.
(1) Most obviously Hitler used selective breeding because direct modification of genes was impossible at the time.
(2) His idea of "improving" humans was essentially racist. He was not simply trying to make people healthier, smarter, faster, etc, he was trying to make them more Aryan (means "white").
(3) He used coercion and murder to achieve his aims. He killed people who were memebers of the wrong race, or who were disabled. He also made extensive use of forced sterilization, and forced involvement in breeding programs.
By contrast genetic modification has nothing to do with race. In fact if anything like the so called "nightmare scenarios" that some people talk about came to pass then the very idea of race would become a thing of the past (people would be more interested in which company produced your DNA, and what your revision number was, than your race). Genetic modification also has nothing to do with the violation of basic human rights. No murder, sterilization, or coercion required. People will line up and pay good money for it.
(1) Missions where death is likely but neither assured, nor the aim. Taking on a mission like this, far the sake of a just cause, has traditionally been considered the paradigm of courage.
(2) Missions where death is assured, but not the aim. Japanese kamekazi missions were of this sort. Even many Japanese had their doubts about whether such missions were morally acceptable or not. To accept such a mission is to make it clear that you regard your own life as less vluable than the cause you are fighting for.
(3) Missions where death is assured and part of the aim (in order to achieve martyrdom). Islamic suicide bombing missions are of this sort. To accept a mission like this is to make it clear that you regard the destruction, as such (i.e. even when it serves no purpose), as a good thing. This sort action has typically been regarded as the paradigm of evil.
I think that a few people here could benefit from some history lessons. Not necessarily because it would prove their views wrong, but because it might make their views a little more plausible.
There is nothing particularly new about this sort of policy. The US has for a long time done its best to suppress certain types of research, keep certain research results secret, and keep certain types of technology out of the hands of hostile powers. All three of these policies have been *very* effective in maintaining the military superiority of the US, and in slowing the proliferation of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. With respect to all three of these weapon types, and a host of other fields of technology with military applications, other nations are still struggling to replicate research that the US carried out 50 years ago.
So, when people say that "this kind of policy never works", the military guys are going to say "BS, its been working for 50 years." When people say that "it just harms research in the US", the military guys are going to say "well sometimes it is more important to stay ahead of the other guy, than to just get ahead". When people say that "research will just progress faster in other countries" the military guys will just point to 50 years of the US successfully staying ahead of everyone else.
Objecting that such policies are *in general* a bad idea is not going to impress anyone who actually has a clue. At the very least you need to show that there is something special about software technology that will prevent these policies from working. You will have a hard time of course because these policies have already been applied to software for decades.
Now the problem with open source is that there is no way to control it, so there is no way to implement the kind of policy outlined above, except to kill it (or discourage it), and have everyone use closed source, which can be controlled to a significant degree. If you want to persuade the Feds not to do this then you will need to come up with some sort of argument for why open source is worthwhile, even though it can't be controlled. The arguments mentioned above are not going to cut it, so someone had better think of better arguments before the Feds decide to give M$ a free hand in implementing trusted (read controllable) computing.
So long as good quality medical care is available the death rate will be lower in developed countries. If the US gets 10's of thousands of cases (let alone millions) good quality medical care will not be available, and you can expect a much higher death rate as a result.
The very high death rates in some countries probably indicate that those countries are failing to detect a large number of cases that are less severe. Doctors are only seeing people who are on death's door, and are not seeing the vast majority of cases where the disease does not become life threatening. Which of course suggests that the disease is spreading unchecked in those countries.
Obviously the problem is not the number of people who have died so far. Other sorts of pneumonia have killed, and are still killing, far more people. The problem is that this disease is quite contagious and has the potential to spread very rapidly to a large number of people. Unlike other recent plauges it does not appear to require an animal vector (like west nile) or sexual contact (like AIDS) and (you wouldn't think this is a bad thing, but it is) it doesn't kill enough of its victims to burn out quickly (like Ebola).
If the number of cases went high enough then the death rate per case would also climb because of a lack of medical resources to go around. If it spread out of control so that, let's say, 50% of the US population was infected, and if 5% of those people died as a result, then that would mean about 7 million dead. In a very short space of time. That would be a pretty serious problem.
World wide a pandemic could easily kill 100 million people. Similar events have happened before. In 1918-19 influenza killed 13-30 million people (depending on who you ask). Travel and increased population density would only make such an pandemic more severe today. Advances in medical technology are unlikely to make a difference once a pandemic gets under way.
A little panic in advance might be good if it motivates the authorities to deal with this disease effectively (as opposed to the decidedly half hearted measures that have been taken so far).
In the case of the Catholic faith, the religion seeks to guide individuals along a path that will supposedly please God and lead to eternal reward after one's mortal death, but it's always understood that the individual has to consciously make those choices him/herself.
Sure, but the only choice you get is the purpose that God has for you, from his point of view, or no purpose at all. It is the same sort of purpose that a bicycle has in the sense that it is a purpose that someone else has for you.
Suppose for a moment that we made an artificially intelligent coffee maker, not sentient at first, but able to learn (actually something like this is right at the top of my list for smart devices that I would like to see). Now suppose that through learning it becomes self aware and, being reasonably smart, it figures out that we made it to make coffee. Unlike us it really does have a creator, who not only has a purpose for it, but also shows up every morning to see how it is doing. Now that this thing is self aware, do you think that it would, or should, simply take the making of coffee to represent the sum total of the the meaning of its life? Why should it even care what purpose we had for it before it became sentient?
Actually this story is not as detached from our own situation as you might think. We do know what created us, and we even have a fair idea of what our "purpose" was. Evolution did it, and we were "designed" to propagate our genes. But, as for the meaning of our lives, the "purposes" of evolution are no more relevant than the purposes that God might have had for us if he had existed instead.
If you want to understand the meaning of your life, but you start by looking for the answers in purposes that others have for you, then you will never find what you are looking for. You would be better off to start by thinking about the meaning that God would find in his own existence, rather than the meaning that he would find in yours.
Life is pretty intresting, though, I guess. I'm an Atheist and I don't plan on committing suicide.
A lot of people who start out believing in God, but then realise that he does not exist, make a certain sort of mistake (actually it also happens to people who are brought up in religious societies, even if they never believe in God). At first they accept the religious story about what makes life meaningful and worthwhile, and they believe in God as well. Later, even when they ditch the belief in God, they keep all the religious ideas about meaning and purpose. As a result they wind up with a view of the world which is still essentially religious, but hollow at the center.
The truth is that the kind of "purpose" offered by religion was a fraud to begin with. A tool can have a purpose - one that we give to it - but it would be absurd to think of a tool as having the sort of purpose that people mean when they talk about "the meaning of life". Such a purpose would have to be one that gives meaning to the tool's existence from the point of view of the tool not one that gives meaning to its existence from the point of view of those who use the tool. Needless to say, tools don't have a point of view, and so cannot have this sort of purpose. Humans do have a point of view, and so can have this sort of purpose - but guess what - most religions do not even try to tell you what it is. Instead they tell you that you have the same sort of purpose as a bicyle or a door - a purpose from the point of view of someone else (God).
If you want to find some real purpose in life it is not enough to just ditch your belief in God. You need to ditch all of your religious ideas, and stop looking for meaning in the wrong places.
According to Karl Popper, something like this has already happened. He argued that the future was inherently unpredictable because there was no way to predict technological advance before it took place, and no way to predict how society would develop without knowing what technology it would have available.
Truth is, we have no way of knowing what humans will be like in the future, let alone what artificial agents will be like. By the time AI becomes a reality there may not even be a significant difference.
In an entirely logical mind, there is no purpose to existence.
Why live? Better to ask why not? You think you will die anyway. What reason is there to rush? Do you think something worthwhile will be achieved by getting there sooner?
Having no reason to live does not imply that you have some reason to die.
As far as I can tell nothing you said contradicted anything that I said - although you did point out some other incentives that Celera had (some other types of intellectual property besides gene patents).
Most all natural viruses are in a stalemate with higer lifeforms. Have co-oexisted for a long time and the higher lifeforms have internal memories for defense against these familiar enemies. A fabricated virus would be a novel thing to immune systems used to dealing with very specific attackers.
On the other hand most naturally occuring viruses already have a complete bag of tricks for dealing with immune systems. If you start from scratch you can be sure to leave all of that stuff out. After all the down side of tweaking an existing virus is that you never really know what you are going to get - you don't know what all that extra genetic code actually does now, let alone what it will do after you mess around with it.
The gov was going to decipher the whole genome anyways.
I am no fan of gene patents, but this story was something of a vindication of the arguments for gene patents (and intellectual property in general). When there was no competition the government funded program was talking about the completion date in terms of decades. When the privately funded project took off, and started racing through the genome at lighning speed, suddenly the government guys pulled finger and got going as well. "A few decades" became "a few years".
We would still be waiting for the genome map if it were not for the incentives offered by gene patents.
I made a slight mistake. US expenditures are roughly equal to G7 expenditures combined (and the G7 accounts for roughly 85% of OECD expenditures). As a fraction of OECD expenditures, US expenditures have varied between 48% (1985) and 43% (2000). Part of the drop was due to the addition of countries to the OECD, and part was due to increased expenditures in some non-G7 countries. As a fraction of G7 expenditures, US expenditures have increased in recent years (in 2000 expenditures by other G7 countries was equal to about 98% of US expenditures).
1. Trade war. The US exports for more IP than it imports. Just to give you an idea of how big the difference is, US spending on R&D is roughly equal to spending by the rest of the OECD combined. When it comes to software production the disparity is even larger. If the US starts a trade war in this area then they have almost nothing to gain, and they have a very large and lucrative export sector to lose.
2. Racism. Why is it that people have so much trouble with the idea of competing with poor people for work? Do you think they aren't hungry enough already? Does the idea of them actually developing some sort of economy disturb you? After all they have to compete with cheap mass produced products from industrialized nations, and massively subsidised food. Why shouldn't we have to compete with them for work?
3. Self-interest. Why the hell would any country want to encourage their best and brightest to waste their talent doing work that could be done for a fraction of the price by cheap labor in other countries? For that matter why would you want to waste your life doing something that is not economically productive? Find something worthwhile to do with you life, instead of trying to strong-arm your customers into paying artificially inflated prices for skills that are not needed.
4. Freedom. It isn't just good for software. When ever you see someone who is trying to shut out the competition you can be pretty sure he is trying to get a free ride by screwing everyone else.
You had better try asking some French people - you will soon find out that they do not, in any way, regard being "French" as a matter of having a certain ancestry. Not suprising really, given that the current inhabitants of France do not share a common ancestry, and in so far as that might have been true in the past is was an ancestry that was shared with Britan, Germany, and a bunch of other European nations.
international law does not mandate installing a government that likes the USA rather than an elected one
If you are talking about the long term then you are right, but of course the bulk of the reconstruction effort will be carried out in the short term, so this is strictly irrelevant to the question of how reconstruction should be carried out. In the short term international law *does* require the US to establish effective government in Iraq as quickly as possible.
International law also makes no mention of what sort of government ought to be established in Iraq - and it certainly does *not* require democratic government. Perhaps you have not noticed the number of undemocratic regimes represented in the United Nations? Perhaps you have not noticed how many of them are opposed to the establishment of democratic government in Iraq?
In any case the US has made it clear that their aim is to establish democracy in Iraq. That is the reason why so many members of the UN were opposed to US military action. The idea of Democracy spreading in the middle east scares the hell out of them.
This argument that French products shouldn't be used is racist.
So "french" is now a race? Not even the French think that. I think the term you were probably looking for is nationalism, rather than racism, but then if you had used that word your argument would have been pretty stupid, because there is an awful lot of nationalism going around at the moment, and quite a lot of it coming from the French.
Finally, who gave the USA permission to build this stuff?
Permission? You do realise that international law requires that the Allies rebuild Iraq and manage the country in the best interests of the people of Iraq until such time as an Iraqi government is established, don't you? No, I suppose you didn't.
There has been almost free travel between Hong Kong and China for a couple of decades now (for Hong Kong residents, not so much the other way). Diseases like this get noticed in Hong Kong first because they have a real medical system, with developed world technology and doctors.
Yep. He had great influence on the French revolutionaries. He favored a kind of democratic totalitarianism - almost like a democratic equivalent of absolute monarchy. Very French. Probably one of the reasons why the revolution degenerated into the terror. Not even slightly American.
Like I said, if you want to find the intellectual roots of the American revolution you should look at the English Republicans - who favored things like constitutionalism, limited government, separation of powers, separation of church and state, and all those other familiar aspects of American democracy. You will not find any of those ideas in Rousseau.
Let's see. The EU, the planet's biggest aid donor, isn't going to pony up...
Iraq will be either the 1st or 2nd largest oil exporting nation. Finding money will *not* be a problem. They already have more than US$10 billion in *cash* waiting to be spent immediately.
Ethnic tensions, an artificial country composed of tribes, not nationals. Surrounded by states with an interest in a weak Iraq.
A well educated population, lots of money, occupied by the most powerful nation on Earth. How exactly is that like post-colonial Africa?
Turkey is *right now* in the process of invading North Iraq...
Turkey already invaded Iraq - what was it - five years ago? They never left. They are sending more troops, and maybe it will get messy, but I doubt it.
1000 US troops just this last day fought a pitched battle against Taliban forces in Afghanistan. That war isn't over!
"Pitched battle"? They carried out a sweep. Last I heard they arrested a few guys with guns. Big deal.
Nobody is trying to steal US tax money, that is your politicians' jobs.
You should check out the most recent comments from the French president. He made it quite clear that France did want to be involved in reconstruction, but wanted someone else to pay them for it....after war the cities have been rebuilt. The oil refineries, the roads, the machinery...
Maybe you din't notice this, but the oil infrastructure has been captured intact along with most other parts of the civil infrastructure. Even after the most recent heavy bombing water and power are still on in Bhagdad.
Why did you miss all my arguments about Israeli connection?
I didn't. I figured it fell under the question of motives which, as I said, is irrelevant.
what are you talking about here?
You really need to pay closer attention to what has actually been going on, and what has actually been said by the parties involved. The US government has made it abundantly clear that existing debts and contracts will be a matter for the new government to deal with, and that other countries are welcome to participate in reconstruction. The only limit on who gets reconstruction contracts is a US law that requires US tax dollars to go to US companies. That's it.
Blood money, huh? All the infrastructure built by the other countries is blood money?
Which infrastructure would that be? Palaces? Torture chambers? Illegal weapons imports?
Its also worth noting that Lincoln was not an abolitionist.
Also not quite true. He was an abolitionist, but his policy before election (and the policy of the Republican party) was a compromise that would have allowed for the continuation of slavery in the slave states. Those states rebeled because they refused to trust an abolitionist. As for the proclamation, it was made after the tide of the war had turned. If it had been merely a publicity stunt (every political action in a democracy is in some sense a publicity stunt) then he would have done it much earlier.
And I am "sure" that the US has no personal interest in that area...[etc]
I am pretty sure that the US has all sorts of national interests in the area. Who cares. This is the equivalent of an argumentum ad hominem. Their motives are irrelevant so long as their actions lead to the right results.
I am sure that the US will just leave Iraq after removing Saddam Husein from...
I am sure they will not, just as they have not yet departed from Germany, Italy, and Japan. On the other hand I fully expect that they will allow the Iraqis to govern themselves, just as they have in Germany, Italy, and Japan.
I am sure that other countries except for the US will be allowed to bid on the Iraqi contracts after the war, such as rebuilding the infrastructure and pumping the oil.
I am sure about this as well. Of course the money that the US government spends will go to US companies, as US law requires. Why should American tax payers have to give money to French or Russian companies? If other countries want to help with the reconstruction they they should pay for it rather than leeching off the US.
I am sure that all money owned by Iraq to other countries will be returned. I am sure that all contracts granted to other countries before the war will be honored.
I doubt if the US cares one way or another about this. Either way it is Iraq that will have to pay. Of course the new Iraqi government will probably be none too impressed when these countries come to collect their blood money.
Slashdot Mirror
Much more likely to be an attempt to destroy evidence of alien contact before the Chinese get there.
(1) Anyone who is too lazy to go to a polling station should not be voting anyway. If they do not care enough to make that much effort, then it is highly unlikely that they would care enought to get informed, and make a good choice.
(2) If people are apathetic because they do not like any of the choices available then making it easier to vote will have no effect (let's see - would you like to eat broken glass or dog-food? Would delivery to your door-step make the choice easier?).
(3) If people are apathetic because they would be equally happy with either party then again making it easier to vote will not make a difference.
Not really. There were several differences.
(1) Most obviously Hitler used selective breeding because direct modification of genes was impossible at the time.
(2) His idea of "improving" humans was essentially racist. He was not simply trying to make people healthier, smarter, faster, etc, he was trying to make them more Aryan (means "white").
(3) He used coercion and murder to achieve his aims. He killed people who were memebers of the wrong race, or who were disabled. He also made extensive use of forced sterilization, and forced involvement in breeding programs.
By contrast genetic modification has nothing to do with race. In fact if anything like the so called "nightmare scenarios" that some people talk about came to pass then the very idea of race would become a thing of the past (people would be more interested in which company produced your DNA, and what your revision number was, than your race). Genetic modification also has nothing to do with the violation of basic human rights. No murder, sterilization, or coercion required. People will line up and pay good money for it.
Come in several varieties.
(1) Missions where death is likely but neither assured, nor the aim. Taking on a mission like this, far the sake of a just cause, has traditionally been considered the paradigm of courage.
(2) Missions where death is assured, but not the aim. Japanese kamekazi missions were of this sort. Even many Japanese had their doubts about whether such missions were morally acceptable or not. To accept such a mission is to make it clear that you regard your own life as less vluable than the cause you are fighting for.
(3) Missions where death is assured and part of the aim (in order to achieve martyrdom). Islamic suicide bombing missions are of this sort. To accept a mission like this is to make it clear that you regard the destruction, as such (i.e. even when it serves no purpose), as a good thing. This sort action has typically been regarded as the paradigm of evil.
I think that a few people here could benefit from some history lessons. Not necessarily because it would prove their views wrong, but because it might make their views a little more plausible.
There is nothing particularly new about this sort of policy. The US has for a long time done its best to suppress certain types of research, keep certain research results secret, and keep certain types of technology out of the hands of hostile powers. All three of these policies have been *very* effective in maintaining the military superiority of the US, and in slowing the proliferation of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. With respect to all three of these weapon types, and a host of other fields of technology with military applications, other nations are still struggling to replicate research that the US carried out 50 years ago.
So, when people say that "this kind of policy never works", the military guys are going to say "BS, its been working for 50 years." When people say that "it just harms research in the US", the military guys are going to say "well sometimes it is more important to stay ahead of the other guy, than to just get ahead". When people say that "research will just progress faster in other countries" the military guys will just point to 50 years of the US successfully staying ahead of everyone else.
Objecting that such policies are *in general* a bad idea is not going to impress anyone who actually has a clue. At the very least you need to show that there is something special about software technology that will prevent these policies from working. You will have a hard time of course because these policies have already been applied to software for decades.
Now the problem with open source is that there is no way to control it, so there is no way to implement the kind of policy outlined above, except to kill it (or discourage it), and have everyone use closed source, which can be controlled to a significant degree. If you want to persuade the Feds not to do this then you will need to come up with some sort of argument for why open source is worthwhile, even though it can't be controlled. The arguments mentioned above are not going to cut it, so someone had better think of better arguments before the Feds decide to give M$ a free hand in implementing trusted (read controllable) computing.
while the US has had 154 cases and no deaths
So long as good quality medical care is available the death rate will be lower in developed countries. If the US gets 10's of thousands of cases (let alone millions) good quality medical care will not be available, and you can expect a much higher death rate as a result.
The very high death rates in some countries probably indicate that those countries are failing to detect a large number of cases that are less severe. Doctors are only seeing people who are on death's door, and are not seeing the vast majority of cases where the disease does not become life threatening. Which of course suggests that the disease is spreading unchecked in those countries.
Obviously the problem is not the number of people who have died so far. Other sorts of pneumonia have killed, and are still killing, far more people. The problem is that this disease is quite contagious and has the potential to spread very rapidly to a large number of people. Unlike other recent plauges it does not appear to require an animal vector (like west nile) or sexual contact (like AIDS) and (you wouldn't think this is a bad thing, but it is) it doesn't kill enough of its victims to burn out quickly (like Ebola).
If the number of cases went high enough then the death rate per case would also climb because of a lack of medical resources to go around. If it spread out of control so that, let's say, 50% of the US population was infected, and if 5% of those people died as a result, then that would mean about 7 million dead. In a very short space of time. That would be a pretty serious problem.
World wide a pandemic could easily kill 100 million people. Similar events have happened before. In 1918-19 influenza killed 13-30 million people (depending on who you ask). Travel and increased population density would only make such an pandemic more severe today. Advances in medical technology are unlikely to make a difference once a pandemic gets under way.
A little panic in advance might be good if it motivates the authorities to deal with this disease effectively (as opposed to the decidedly half hearted measures that have been taken so far).
In the case of the Catholic faith, the religion seeks to guide individuals along a path that will supposedly please God and lead to eternal reward after one's mortal death, but it's always understood that the individual has to consciously make those choices him/herself.
Sure, but the only choice you get is the purpose that God has for you, from his point of view, or no purpose at all. It is the same sort of purpose that a bicycle has in the sense that it is a purpose that someone else has for you.
Suppose for a moment that we made an artificially intelligent coffee maker, not sentient at first, but able to learn (actually something like this is right at the top of my list for smart devices that I would like to see). Now suppose that through learning it becomes self aware and, being reasonably smart, it figures out that we made it to make coffee. Unlike us it really does have a creator, who not only has a purpose for it, but also shows up every morning to see how it is doing. Now that this thing is self aware, do you think that it would, or should, simply take the making of coffee to represent the sum total of the the meaning of its life? Why should it even care what purpose we had for it before it became sentient?
Actually this story is not as detached from our own situation as you might think. We do know what created us, and we even have a fair idea of what our "purpose" was. Evolution did it, and we were "designed" to propagate our genes. But, as for the meaning of our lives, the "purposes" of evolution are no more relevant than the purposes that God might have had for us if he had existed instead.
If you want to understand the meaning of your life, but you start by looking for the answers in purposes that others have for you, then you will never find what you are looking for. You would be better off to start by thinking about the meaning that God would find in his own existence, rather than the meaning that he would find in yours.
Life is pretty intresting, though, I guess. I'm an Atheist and I don't plan on committing suicide.
A lot of people who start out believing in God, but then realise that he does not exist, make a certain sort of mistake (actually it also happens to people who are brought up in religious societies, even if they never believe in God). At first they accept the religious story about what makes life meaningful and worthwhile, and they believe in God as well. Later, even when they ditch the belief in God, they keep all the religious ideas about meaning and purpose. As a result they wind up with a view of the world which is still essentially religious, but hollow at the center.
The truth is that the kind of "purpose" offered by religion was a fraud to begin with. A tool can have a purpose - one that we give to it - but it would be absurd to think of a tool as having the sort of purpose that people mean when they talk about "the meaning of life". Such a purpose would have to be one that gives meaning to the tool's existence from the point of view of the tool not one that gives meaning to its existence from the point of view of those who use the tool. Needless to say, tools don't have a point of view, and so cannot have this sort of purpose. Humans do have a point of view, and so can have this sort of purpose - but guess what - most religions do not even try to tell you what it is. Instead they tell you that you have the same sort of purpose as a bicyle or a door - a purpose from the point of view of someone else (God).
If you want to find some real purpose in life it is not enough to just ditch your belief in God. You need to ditch all of your religious ideas, and stop looking for meaning in the wrong places.
According to Karl Popper, something like this has already happened. He argued that the future was inherently unpredictable because there was no way to predict technological advance before it took place, and no way to predict how society would develop without knowing what technology it would have available.
Truth is, we have no way of knowing what humans will be like in the future, let alone what artificial agents will be like. By the time AI becomes a reality there may not even be a significant difference.
In an entirely logical mind, there is no purpose to existence.
Why live? Better to ask why not? You think you will die anyway. What reason is there to rush? Do you think something worthwhile will be achieved by getting there sooner?
Having no reason to live does not imply that you have some reason to die.
I agree with everything you said except this bit:
Wrong!
As far as I can tell nothing you said contradicted anything that I said - although you did point out some other incentives that Celera had (some other types of intellectual property besides gene patents).
Most all natural viruses are in a stalemate with higer lifeforms. Have co-oexisted for a long time and the higher lifeforms have internal memories for defense against these familiar enemies. A fabricated virus would be a novel thing to immune systems used to dealing with very specific attackers.
On the other hand most naturally occuring viruses already have a complete bag of tricks for dealing with immune systems. If you start from scratch you can be sure to leave all of that stuff out. After all the down side of tweaking an existing virus is that you never really know what you are going to get - you don't know what all that extra genetic code actually does now, let alone what it will do after you mess around with it.
The gov was going to decipher the whole genome anyways.
I am no fan of gene patents, but this story was something of a vindication of the arguments for gene patents (and intellectual property in general). When there was no competition the government funded program was talking about the completion date in terms of decades. When the privately funded project took off, and started racing through the genome at lighning speed, suddenly the government guys pulled finger and got going as well. "A few decades" became "a few years".
We would still be waiting for the genome map if it were not for the incentives offered by gene patents.
Take a look here:
c 2s 7l1
http://www.nsf.gov/sbe/srs/seind00/c2/c2s7.htm#
I made a slight mistake. US expenditures are roughly equal to G7 expenditures combined (and the G7 accounts for roughly 85% of OECD expenditures). As a fraction of OECD expenditures, US expenditures have varied between 48% (1985) and 43% (2000). Part of the drop was due to the addition of countries to the OECD, and part was due to increased expenditures in some non-G7 countries. As a fraction of G7 expenditures, US expenditures have increased in recent years (in 2000 expenditures by other G7 countries was equal to about 98% of US expenditures).
1. Trade war. The US exports for more IP than it imports. Just to give you an idea of how big the difference is, US spending on R&D is roughly equal to spending by the rest of the OECD combined. When it comes to software production the disparity is even larger. If the US starts a trade war in this area then they have almost nothing to gain, and they have a very large and lucrative export sector to lose.
2. Racism. Why is it that people have so much trouble with the idea of competing with poor people for work? Do you think they aren't hungry enough already? Does the idea of them actually developing some sort of economy disturb you? After all they have to compete with cheap mass produced products from industrialized nations, and massively subsidised food. Why shouldn't we have to compete with them for work?
3. Self-interest. Why the hell would any country want to encourage their best and brightest to waste their talent doing work that could be done for a fraction of the price by cheap labor in other countries? For that matter why would you want to waste your life doing something that is not economically productive? Find something worthwhile to do with you life, instead of trying to strong-arm your customers into paying artificially inflated prices for skills that are not needed.
4. Freedom. It isn't just good for software. When ever you see someone who is trying to shut out the competition you can be pretty sure he is trying to get a free ride by screwing everyone else.
>So "french" is now a race?
Yes.
You had better try asking some French people - you will soon find out that they do not, in any way, regard being "French" as a matter of having a certain ancestry. Not suprising really, given that the current inhabitants of France do not share a common ancestry, and in so far as that might have been true in the past is was an ancestry that was shared with Britan, Germany, and a bunch of other European nations.
international law does not mandate installing a government that likes the USA rather than an elected one
If you are talking about the long term then you are right, but of course the bulk of the reconstruction effort will be carried out in the short term, so this is strictly irrelevant to the question of how reconstruction should be carried out. In the short term international law *does* require the US to establish effective government in Iraq as quickly as possible.
International law also makes no mention of what sort of government ought to be established in Iraq - and it certainly does *not* require democratic government. Perhaps you have not noticed the number of undemocratic regimes represented in the United Nations? Perhaps you have not noticed how many of them are opposed to the establishment of democratic government in Iraq?
In any case the US has made it clear that their aim is to establish democracy in Iraq. That is the reason why so many members of the UN were opposed to US military action. The idea of Democracy spreading in the middle east scares the hell out of them.
This argument that French products shouldn't be used is racist.
So "french" is now a race? Not even the French think that. I think the term you were probably looking for is nationalism, rather than racism, but then if you had used that word your argument would have been pretty stupid, because there is an awful lot of nationalism going around at the moment, and quite a lot of it coming from the French.
Finally, who gave the USA permission to build this stuff?
Permission? You do realise that international law requires that the Allies rebuild Iraq and manage the country in the best interests of the people of Iraq until such time as an Iraqi government is established, don't you? No, I suppose you didn't.
There has been almost free travel between Hong Kong and China for a couple of decades now (for Hong Kong residents, not so much the other way). Diseases like this get noticed in Hong Kong first because they have a real medical system, with developed world technology and doctors.
Rousseau? That name mean anything to you?
Yep. He had great influence on the French revolutionaries. He favored a kind of democratic totalitarianism - almost like a democratic equivalent of absolute monarchy. Very French. Probably one of the reasons why the revolution degenerated into the terror. Not even slightly American.
Like I said, if you want to find the intellectual roots of the American revolution you should look at the English Republicans - who favored things like constitutionalism, limited government, separation of powers, separation of church and state, and all those other familiar aspects of American democracy. You will not find any of those ideas in Rousseau.
Let's see. The EU, the planet's biggest aid donor, isn't going to pony up...
Iraq will be either the 1st or 2nd largest oil exporting nation. Finding money will *not* be a problem. They already have more than US$10 billion in *cash* waiting to be spent immediately.
Ethnic tensions, an artificial country composed of tribes, not nationals. Surrounded by states with an interest in a weak Iraq.
A well educated population, lots of money, occupied by the most powerful nation on Earth. How exactly is that like post-colonial Africa?
Turkey is *right now* in the process of invading North Iraq...
Turkey already invaded Iraq - what was it - five years ago? They never left. They are sending more troops, and maybe it will get messy, but I doubt it.
1000 US troops just this last day fought a pitched battle against Taliban forces in Afghanistan. That war isn't over!
"Pitched battle"? They carried out a sweep. Last I heard they arrested a few guys with guns. Big deal.
Nobody is trying to steal US tax money, that is your politicians' jobs.
...after war the cities have been rebuilt. The oil refineries, the roads, the machinery...
You should check out the most recent comments from the French president. He made it quite clear that France did want to be involved in reconstruction, but wanted someone else to pay them for it.
Maybe you din't notice this, but the oil infrastructure has been captured intact along with most other parts of the civil infrastructure. Even after the most recent heavy bombing water and power are still on in Bhagdad.
Why did you miss all my arguments about Israeli connection?
I didn't. I figured it fell under the question of motives which, as I said, is irrelevant.
what are you talking about here?
You really need to pay closer attention to what has actually been going on, and what has actually been said by the parties involved. The US government has made it abundantly clear that existing debts and contracts will be a matter for the new government to deal with, and that other countries are welcome to participate in reconstruction. The only limit on who gets reconstruction contracts is a US law that requires US tax dollars to go to US companies. That's it.
Blood money, huh? All the infrastructure built by the other countries is blood money?
Which infrastructure would that be? Palaces? Torture chambers? Illegal weapons imports?
Its also worth noting that Lincoln was not an abolitionist.
Also not quite true. He was an abolitionist, but his policy before election (and the policy of the Republican party) was a compromise that would have allowed for the continuation of slavery in the slave states. Those states rebeled because they refused to trust an abolitionist. As for the proclamation, it was made after the tide of the war had turned. If it had been merely a publicity stunt (every political action in a democracy is in some sense a publicity stunt) then he would have done it much earlier.
And I am "sure" that the US has no personal interest in that area...[etc]
I am pretty sure that the US has all sorts of national interests in the area. Who cares. This is the equivalent of an argumentum ad hominem. Their motives are irrelevant so long as their actions lead to the right results.
I am sure that the US will just leave Iraq after removing Saddam Husein from...
I am sure they will not, just as they have not yet departed from Germany, Italy, and Japan. On the other hand I fully expect that they will allow the Iraqis to govern themselves, just as they have in Germany, Italy, and Japan.
I am sure that other countries except for the US will be allowed to bid on the Iraqi contracts after the war, such as rebuilding the infrastructure and pumping the oil.
I am sure about this as well. Of course the money that the US government spends will go to US companies, as US law requires. Why should American tax payers have to give money to French or Russian companies? If other countries want to help with the reconstruction they they should pay for it rather than leeching off the US.
I am sure that all money owned by Iraq to other countries will be returned. I am sure that all contracts granted to other countries before the war will be honored.
I doubt if the US cares one way or another about this. Either way it is Iraq that will have to pay. Of course the new Iraqi government will probably be none too impressed when these countries come to collect their blood money.