I stayed up late Sunday night posting to various Usenet newsgroups through Deja.com. Monday morning, I decided to see if anyone had replied. Instead of getting my list of replies, I got a message announcing that Google now owns Deja. I tried what few links were on the page, but none of them worked ("Page not found").
A few hours after my initial attempt, I tried using the advanced search. The options are sparse. The most important missing element is some way to date-limit searches. Until Google puts a date-range option into the search options, I have no use for their service. I don't even need to visit their site until they add that feature, because I can't use their service. I've been posting to Usenet for 5 years (about 2500 posts), and without a date-range, I cannot get recent posts (a post from December was the most recent post when I tried using Googles advanced search engine).
Nearly as bad as not being able to review current discussions is the lack of ability to post any new material to newsgroups.
Google is a great company, and I've enjoyed using their services. I can see that their search results are faster than Deja's. Unfortunately, "power without control is useless."
it's not violating anybody's rights because they are only trying to find people with outstanding warrants and arrest them
Just because their intentions are good doesn't mean that it's OK.
Good intentions don't mean what they did was wrong, either. I don't see anything wrong with what the police did, either. What's the difference between having an security patrol or officer (they have those at big games) watching out for these people and having an automated system watching out for these people? As the article said, this was a highly public place; unlike the complaint in the article, the police weren't waiting for a chance to see someone commit a crime--they were looking for known criminals.
I suppose you have a problem with police looking for known criminals in highly public areas? Or, is it just that having a camera doing it instead of a human is somehow cheating? Do you see crime as a sport, a reasonable competition between authority and anti-authority? I don't see crime as a game or a sport; I believe that criminals must be stopped. I don't respect those who glorify someone who is simply a crook.
As I understand it, Zero-sum Economic Theory (which I've never studied) is not about non-competition, but the concept that work increases available resources. Merely fighting over resources is non-helpful; the individual may get riches that way (like a pirate), but he is not contributing anything of value to society (not much, anyway). Instead of simply sucking in available wealth, an entity (individual to corporation) needs to perform work on resources to increase their value (i.e., create wealth); this is beneficial to all involved, whereas the other is harmful, ultimately to everyone including the person who is sucking in the available resources.
I am gratified by your explaination, because it makes sense, but more importantly does not automatically dictate that competition is zero-sum. I regret that I haven't studied the theory, but the little I have heard of it makes sense, and I can extend it. Work converts potential wealth into usable wealth, thus increasing the total amount of available wealth. Wealth is a general term that includes all resources that increase the power of the possessors. My social influences have led me to assume that wealth can be tangible or intangible, but I am inclined to believe that wealth is more of a concept than a material good. I am also toying with the idea of treating wealth as a thermodynamic property. There are analogies between wealth creation and product refinement; the more highly refined, the more value is assigned to it and the better compensated the refiner is. However, wealth creation is highly dependant on the worker, as he is the one who actually creates (converts) the wealth (from potential to actual); managers are important in that they provide order to the worker's efforts, but I haven't figured out what share the worker and the manager has in the total role of wealth creation. I suspect that something is strange when a CEO makes millions of dollars a year, but the low-level help makes minimum wage, but I'm not sure how to evaluate the details. I doubt that any human could be as good as the CEO salary would imply.
I like playing Sid Meier's "Alpha Centuri," but there are times the game operation has an annoying philosophical bias.
After all, there _is_ a limited amount of resources (terrain, actually) and the several civilizations all compete with each other to obtain and control such resources.
Supposedly, people hold theories because they model the real world. In the real world, we also have the same terrain limitation that the various Sid Meier games have (our space-fairing tech isn't good enough to make a difference, and Sid Meier's "Alpha Centuari" actually goes centuries beyond our current expansion technology). Thus, if terrain limitation means the game is zero-sum, then reality is also zero-sum, and the theory is flawed.
"Lighthouse Communications Inc., Littleton, CO
Constructed and tested an optical through-the-air communications system with a 10 mile range. Proposed methods and wrote description of a wide area, high speed information broadcasting service. Service would provide terabytes of library type information to subscribers at high data rates. No FCC approval needed."
The ammount of power needed to trasnmit data through a light beam in open space is really big,
No, it isn't.
turning the whole process whortless.
Lasers can removed "whorts," too.
That's why we use laser light in a restricting environment (aka optic fiber).
Sorry, but it's the worst use for a telescope I could ever imagine....
Laser light communications holds great promise for providing high bandwidth, line-of-sight communication between points that cannot be spanned by cable. A few years ago, some astronomers pinged a laser modulator off the Galileo space probe when it passed near Earth. If Galileo had been equiped with an optical demodulator, it would have been able to decode our signals as it zipped by at thousands of miles an hour.
"In the Galileo Optical Experiment (GOPEX), optical
transmissions were beamed to the Galileo spacecraft by
Earth-based transmitters at Table Mountain Observatory
(TMO), California, and Starfire Optical Range (SOR),
New Mexico. The demonstration took place over an
eight-day period (December 9 through December 16) as
Galileo receded from Earth on its way to Jupiter. At 6
million kilometers (15 times the Earth-Moon distance),
the laser beam sent from Table Mountain Observatory
eight days after Earth flyby covered the longest known
range for laser transmission and detection.!"
The only group that could realistically put this together is the government.
Uh, no, that is incorrect. Current Earth technology would be able to detect a low-wattage Argon Ion laser beam (say, 10 watts) from 5 light years away with only modest equipment. The cost of such a transmitter is comparible to what is currently being spent on SETI; I'd estimate it quickly to be less than $5000. A 1 kW transmitter would be a bit pricey for an individual, but even small shops could afford such units. A 1 kW laser would be able to communicate out to 100 light years using current detector technology; that would be do-able for under $10 000.
The first page loads a bit slowly, but it has lots of interesting info.
As long as you guys want to pursue this with your own money, fine. I could even argue that a laser communicator designed for intersteller communication would come in useful for human civilization, someday. I consider SETI itself to be a colossal waste of time and resources, but whatever keeps you off the streets can't be all bad.
Maybe we should be scanning through gravity waves, too.
If we could detect gravity waves, we might do that. As it is, we have yet to have ever detected a gravity wave.
Who knows? Maybe any lifeform that has any real sense uses controlled quantized subspace variations to communicate over interstellar distances, and they figure no-one else is intelligent enough to talk to yet.
Sure, why not? Anything goes.... just don't waste my taxpaying dollars on it.
Radio waves are a good place to look, because so many processes produce them. ET wouldn't have to be trying to communicate using radio waves; he could scarcely avoid it! The fact that we have found nothing doesn't surprise me in the least, though; I fully expect that SETI will never find any ET intelligence.
...so how do these cells then decide they want to be liver, brain, heart cells etc? Do we know how to make a cell do that yet?
I'm not sure if you are referring to totipotent or pluripotent cells. I do not know what triggers the transformation from totipotent to pluripotent, but one important influence that transforms pluripotent cells into organs in the embryo appears to be the distribution of a hormone along the length of the embryo. The farther from head of the embryo, the more diffuse the hormone. Experiments in controlling the concentration of the hormone resulted in predictable changes in organ development.
Stanford Reports has an article describing yet another control mechanism in the differentiation of pluripotent cells into organs.
"The research, which was conducted primarily
by doctoral student Amy Kiger in Fuller's
laboratory, was published last week in the
journal Nature. Their study revealed
that stem cell reproduction is controlled in
part by special surrounding support cells in
the body that play a guardian role. These
guardian cells send key information that
ensures that at least one of the two daughters
of a stem cell division differentiates instead
of retaining stem cell identity. 'Under the
influence of the guardian cells, the stem cell
divides to produce one stem cell and one
specialized cell, rather than two stem cells,'
Fuller said.
(Stanford Report, October 18, 2000)
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/news/report/news/octo ber18/stem_cells-101800.html
Totipotent cells can become any type of tissue found in the human body. They're the cells found in embryos & (female) reproductive tissues.
Actually, the stem cells in human embryoes are only totipotent for about 4 days after fertilization; after that point, they specialize into pluripotent stem cells. The stem cells harvested from embryoes are pluripotent, not totipotent.
"When a sperm fertilizes an egg, the product is a single cell that has the potential to form an entire organism. This fertilized egg is a totipotent stem cell, which has the potential to develop into a complete organism. In the first hours and days after fertilization, this cell begins to divide into identical totipotent stem cells. Then, approximately four days after fertilization, these totipotent stem cells begin to specialize, forming a hollow sphere of cells called a blastocyst. One part of the blastocyst is a cluster of cells called the inner cell mass, which are the stem cells that will go on to form most of the cells and tissues of the human body. These are pluripotent stem cells, which are different than totipotent stem cells -- pluripotent stem cells do not develop into a complete organism.
"Recently, human pluripotent stem cells have been isolated from two sources: the inner cell mass of human embryos at the blastocyst stage and from fetal tissue obtained from terminated pregnancies. Because these cells are capable of limitless division and self-renewal, they can be maintained indefinitely in tissue culture, making them a vital resource for research."
It might be handy to refer to some of the research in stem cell plasticity, so here are some links I found:
STEM CELL PLASTICITY IN HEMATOPOIETIC AND NON-HEMATOPOIETIC TISSUE
Release Date: November 13, 2000
RFA: HL-01-007
RESEARCH OBJECTIVES
Background
"Stem cell research offers enormous potential for treating devastating malignant and non-malignant diseases. Recently, a number of groups have reported that stem cells derived from adults may be capable of surprising plasticity or versatility. Investigators reported that after bone marrow transplantation, donor-derived cells could be found in non-hematopoietic tissues. These tissues included astroglia in the central nervous system, skeletal muscle, liver oval cells, cardiomyocytes, vascular-endothelial cells, and bone forming osteoblasts. In addition, bone marrow stromal cells from rats and humans can apparently give rise to large numbers of cells with neuronal properties under specific culture conditions. Also, muscle derived
material was reported to display hematopoietic activity. In these studies, diagnostic cell surface markers have shown the reconstitution of both myeloid and lymphoid cell lineages after transplantation. Neuronal cells have also been reported to give rise to progenitors of all blood lineages and to demonstrate myogenic potential. Thus, increasing evidence suggests that adult cells could have far greater differentiative plasticity even at advanced stages of their differentiation programs than previously thought. The plasticity concept resembles the documented phenomenon known as transdifferentiation. However, the extent to which the transdifferentiation principle can be generalized to current findings is unknown.
"Findings such as those described above raise many unanswered and intriguing questions regarding the biology of stem cells and the routes they take to express their differentiation potential. This RFA is developed to encourage research to substantiate stem cell plasticity and to characterize cellular, molecular, and genetic mechanisms that allow cells to express plasticity."
"Many types of stem cells exist in the human body. All have the capacity to replicate, to self-renew; and they have the capacity to differentiate in order to produce specific body parts such as muscle cells, skin cells, nerve cells, and such. Yet scientists believe they are organized in a hierarchy according to a scale of specialization. Please watch carefully as I label the steps on the hierarchical staircase.
"On the top we find totipotent (totally potent) stem cells, which are capable of forming every type of body cell. Each totipotent cell could replicate and differentiate and become a human being. All cells within the early embryo are totipotent up until the 16 cell stage or so.
"Next are the pluripotent stem cells which can develop into any of the three major tissue types: endoderm (interior gut lining), mesoderm (muscle, bone, blood), and ectoderm (epidermal tissues and nervous system). Pluripotent stem cells can eventually specialize in any bodily tissue, but they cannot themselves develop into a human being.
"Finally, we have tissue specific stem cells committed to making blood, muscle, nerve, bone, or other tissues. Hematopoietic stem cells, for example, are responsible for all types of blood cells, but no other tissue types. These renew themselves, yet they specialize in the tissue they produce. Their continued presence in an adult person gives the body its repairing and healing ability.
So-called pro-lifers should keep out of forcing the passage of laws which restrict embryo stem cell research. They are killing people whose disease and manner of death would be cured by this completely harmless research.
The ultimate moral authority has spoken. No need to keep asking all these pesky ethical questions; he has thought it all out and decided once for all that it is ethical to use human bodies any way he deems necessary to save people's lives.
If this is true, and the technology becomes cheap/popular enough, does this mean the end of hospitals/morgues/doctors? Cancer of the liver? Just cut it out, and grow a new one.
FYI, your liver is naturally able to regrow itself; it is one of the few human organs that have long been known to regenerate themselves. It is possible to remove 3/4 of it, and it can still regrow to full size, under normal conditions. It has to be pretty vivacious to act as the primary waste collector for your blood.
In the end, I can't see how "forgetting" to add something to the media suddenly would do this.
That bothers me a lot, also. I might wonder what the person had in mind who first proscribed the addition of that agent? I can see him thinking, after his first experiments,
"The cells are still alive and acting strangly. Better add this *other* agent to finish them off!"
It sounds a bit like a bad Saturday morning children's show.
There were a lot of little comments like that in the newspaper's account that bothered me. Maybe it's just the way the English write?
I live on the North side of Dallas. NY has subways; we, of course, do not. Many NY buildings are ancient (I guess the city has an average age of at least 100 years, maybe 150); we, of course, are younger (I guess an average age of 40 or 50 years). NY is a city of over 11 million people; we have about 6 million. (These numbers are all from the top of my head, at 1 in the morning, but I think I'm pretty close.) Thus, NY has a lot more potential. However, all is not lost. I noticed when I was South of downtown that there are quite a few old structures. I went trapsing around some when I was taking some pictures of the Dallas skyline. I might have done more, but that wasn't my purpose at the time, and I was a little afraid of getting jumped.
Come to Europe and then take a long, hard look at US law from a european perspective. I assure you, US law seems every bit as draconian as Chinese + Arab. Sure, it stresses different things, but it's still very restrictive.
As it happens, I've been to Europe. I spent over 3 months just in Italy, besides France and Spain. It is fine to travel, but Europe? Pooey! Europe has nothing that's better than the US, and a lot that is much worse... and their morals stink!
Contrary to what the pablum-puking Commie recruits would have us believe, the US has not reached the depraved depths of China. We do not outlaw peaceful protests (though we do keep some 100 yards from the clinic doors). We do not regularly arrest and destroy great numbers of religious leaders. Despite Clinton's White House term, we do not yet have a real Communist government. The question isn't whether US laws are restrictive; the question is, are they just, and do they permit moral human freedoms?
You know, in claiming that Libertarianism is "Leftist," you somewhat invalidate your arguement right there.
Libertarianism is only fiscally conservative; it is socially liberal. The Libertarian ideal approaching anarchy is the same as Communism (you did know that the supposed goal of Communism under Marxist theory is anarchy, right?).
I wouldn't get too uptight about the labels, though; it is sometimes difficult to derive much meaning purely from political labels. It is more useful to see how the labels are being used, or even the specific issues that are being discussed.
Re:Steam Tunnels: what are they?
on
Infiltration
·
· Score: 1
Seriously, I have never heard of these things. What is steam being transported for? At first I assumed that this was to remove a waste product, but then the steam plants came up. What is this steam being produced for
What? Didn't you ever watch, The Time Machine?
(BTW, I have the DVD of George Pal's movie, if you want to stop by my apartment to watch it with me. And, while I'm getting it set up, I might tell you about my experience as a steam plant engineer for the US Navy, or tell you about HVAC.)
Pooua: At what point did the Internet change from being a government-sponsored communications entity to being the great bastion of unregulated free-speech and anonymity?
When private ISPs first connected to it, of course. When it was run purely by government agencies for government purposes, those agencies had the right to control it for the same reason I have the right to control the use of the computer sitting in front of me. Once that situation changed, the government lost this property-based right, and has no such right on any other basis.
That is an interesting theory, but it sounds to me like a "pop-law" version of the way US laws were meant to work. I think you should look up some articles on FindLaw, to see how the US government really is supposed to work, instead of relying on the armchair philosophies of your peers.
the idea that the purpose of the Internet was such an anarchy was a self-appointed decision by anti-establishment people who imposed their own social agenda on a communication medium
Insofar as I can parse this statement, it seems to be asserting that some anacho-fascist cabal forcibly imposed the agenda of rejecting all forcibly imposed agendas.
The words, "anacho-fascist cabal" are your own, of course. I simply find it amazing that after a group of Net users announces that the Internet is a regulation-free zone that those people would act surprised a few years later to find out that they were ignored by their governments. Of course they were wrong! What right did they have to declare what the regulation of the Internet would be? Government simply ignored them as the bunch of armchair philosophers they were.
They acted without authority
They acted without authority to impose an absence of authority?
My brain hurts.
That's because you don't know the difference between an empty declaration of rights and a legally-meaningful declaration of rights.
and today scream with indignation when governments exercise their due powers
Er, the claim that censorship is part of any government's "due powers" is what you're required to prove before your argument can be taken seriously.
As I said, if you were to spend time actually reading legal cases, instead of putting so much weight on discussions with your buddies, you would have seen, for example, that the (local) government regulates the ad content on the side of buses, that the (federal) government regulates the content of some broadcasts, that no government and no sensible public group permits unauthorized trespassing into private computer systems. It is because the Net culture is based on so much personal philosophy, rather than on established law, that the indignation of netizens is largely irrelevant to the course of Internet regulation.
anarchic rules
You keep using that word... I do not think it means what you think it means.
Anarchy is a a social structure in which there is no governmental leader or civil force to compel compliance. The only "laws" or rules that are recognized in such a structure are those that are agreed upon between the parties involved, and that recognition ends once any members cease agreement with the laws or rules. There are various conceptions as to how this would be implemented in practice. Relevant to this discussion, there are those people who imagined that the Internet would be a world community, one in which the laws of any nation would be unenforcible. Supposedly, the completely unrestricted, unregulated nature of the Internet would liberate the latent intellectual powers of the world, enobling and empowering everyone. For example, the ability for anyone to publish a Web page was supposed to (in this anarchic view) result in the liberation of the great masses around the world who (supposedly) suffered without a voice. Disappointingly, the most profound thing that most people could put on their Web site were pictures of their pets.
I should not have to tell you that a great many things done on the Internet are irresponsible, reprehensible and damaging to the interests of others
You have misframed the argument in a manner which avoids the issue. If I say that you seem profoundly clueless, that may be irresponsible and reprehensible, and insofar as anybody believes me it is certainly damaging to your interests, but you really have no recourse except to offer a rebuttal. If, on the other hand, I say something actionable, you do have recourse, because I would then be violating your rights, not your far more expansive "interests".
Whatever legal tools might or might not be available to counter the destruction of an innocent person, the point remains that either people are held accountable for their actions, or society will retrograde. However, even you appear to recognize that when someone does something "actionable" on the Internet, such as, perhaps, entering into a private computer system--say, Egghead's credit card database, that the government is in its right to take legal countermeasures.
They ignore the fact that when any tool or system becomes destructive of our society, we have the right to disband or destroy that tool or system.
No, you don't.
For examples, the Industrial Revolution was destructive of the existing pre-industrial society, and yet Luddite mobs had no right to "disband or destroy" the private property of the industrialists.
You have misapplied the principle of which I spoke, in several ways. I spoke of tools or systems destructive to society; you countered by changing the focus from society to a special interest of society. I spoke of lawful means in which established rights were guarded by a court system and laws; you spoke of a mob riot.
I won't feel sorrow if the government regulates Internet content, provided that it is in keeping with the laws of our nation.
Er, "Congress shall make no law...." IS the law of our nation.
Don't confuse yourself by restricting this discussion only to speech; the Internet is capable of far more than just posting one's personal opinion, which is a critical point in a discussion about Internet regulation. So, on a number of levels, government regulation would be a valid option: on speech, the government has never provided an absolute, unlimited freedom to say anything that anyone might chose to say; on actions, even you must acknowledge that the government holds the authority and responsibility (as her people expect her to hold) to restrict property abuses.
Seeing is that when I was a teenager working at the teenage hell boot camp that is McDonalds, and then later doing tech support(in '95 and we DIDN'T have internet access),I'd say a bad tech job PERIOD is better than flipping burgers.
Oh, yeah? How about providing tech support for McDonald's? That's what I'm doing right now. During the summer, I support USPS equipment installations. During the winter, I provide help desk support for McDonald's POS and KVS. At least, this is the way it's worked for me the last 2 years. Maybe it's time to move on to something else?
That takes the cake for the best 'worst job' tale in this discussion.
Oh, not yet. I was an enlisted man in the US Navy. My only problem is deciding which job to list here.
How about the time during my mess deck duty (all lower-level enlisted personnel have to spend so many weeks doing mess deck duty after they are assigned to a ship)... I worked in the chief's mess, which included the chief's berthing and other chief's country areas. If someone happened to flush paper towels down the toilet, the system backed up and flooded the compartment with sewage. Guess who got to clean it...
Well, as it happened, there was another man on the mess decks, who was scheduled to work after hours with me. He and I weren't terribly good friends (he once snuck into my berthing compartment and doused me with ice water as I slept, because, he said, he couldn't find any boiling water at that hour with which to douse me). There was another guy in our mess deck group who also wasn't too fond of me, but he was quite a bit smarter than the first guy, and he worked a different shift. I could tell when he got off duty because, about a half-hour later, the toilets would overflow, and then I and the other man on duty would get to spend a few hours of quality time together, cleaning up raw human sewage, applying Betadine to the walls and fixtures and wiping down everything. IIRC, we were scheduled to get off duty at 1700, but the extra cleanup kept us a while longer. Having this happen once or twice could be written off as an accident, but when it happened several times a week for a few weeks, and only on days when I had to work a little later, it seemed an obvious tip-off.
Oh, I had lots of similar experiences in the Navy, some of them much more serious than the mess decks. Of course, the military in general has centuries of humiliating and abusing its recruits; it's probably impossible to expose one person to all the forms of degredation available in a single enlistment. If they wish (not just the administration, but the other recruits), they really can put you through 4 years of Hell on Earth. Fortunately, there are ways to stop it legally.
The Economist did not say "The Internet was originally supposed to be all about freedom." Well, it is very much that now...
It is true that "The Economist" did not say, "the original purpose," but this brings up the question of what purpose they had in mind. At what point did the Internet change from being a government-sponsored communications entity to being the great bastion of unregulated free-speech and anonymity? The answer is never; the idea that the purpose of the Internet was such an anarchy was a self-appointed decision by anti-establishment people who imposed their own social agenda on a communication medium. They acted without authority, and today scream with indignation when governments exercise their due powers. They didn't own, fund or establish the Internet; they saw themselves as liberal visionaries, and so felt they had the right to proclaim a new, virtual world with new, anarchic rules.
Is the desire not to be beholden to short-sighted laws like those in the U.S., China and Islamic countries "Leftist mind-rot?"
Usually it is. I would have to question the judgement of someone who lumps US laws in the same group as China and Islamic countries.
am I amiss in saying people want their privacy and to be treated like adults, not money holes or little children? Or is this nonsense in your view?
What is nonsense in my view is the idea that we are faced with either an unregulated Internet, or the universal decay of freedom of speech. It is nonsense in my view that a person should be given the protection to say anything he wishes to whomever he wishes as often as he wishes.
Because you indicate that you don't like being treated like a child, I should not have to tell you that a great many things done on the Internet are irresponsible, reprehensible and damaging to the interests of others; for example, pirating software, stealing and distributing data beyond the limits of the law and distributing pornographic materials to people without regard for the desires or eligibility of those receiving the materials, besides entering private networks and viewing or destroying private files. Certainly, there is a sizeable group of Internet users who do not behave themselves responsibly, and in the process violate the historical rights of others.
Can you tell me any reason that a government is under any obligation to allow anyone to use the Internet in any way? This is one of the most amazing aspects of this issue to me. The United States existed for almost 200 years without the Internet, and has expanded the forums in which the publication of ideas is possible (from standing on street corners on a soap box and printing in newspapers, books and magazines to radio and television). The government formed the Internet so that DoD computers could share resources. After 3 decades of strong government regulation, the government opened up the Internet to commercial development. All of the sudden, people act as if the Constitution based the 1st Ammendment directly on Internet access. They ignore the fact that when any tool or system becomes destructive of our society, we have the right to disband or destroy that tool or system. Now, I don't believe the Internet is going to be disbanded or destroyed, but I won't feel sorrow if the government regulates Internet content, provided that it is in keeping with the laws of our nation. The counter-argument I usually get is that the Internet makes the laws of our nation obsolete; hence, the comments I made in my initial post.
Slashdot Mirror
A few hours after my initial attempt, I tried using the advanced search. The options are sparse. The most important missing element is some way to date-limit searches. Until Google puts a date-range option into the search options, I have no use for their service. I don't even need to visit their site until they add that feature, because I can't use their service. I've been posting to Usenet for 5 years (about 2500 posts), and without a date-range, I cannot get recent posts (a post from December was the most recent post when I tried using Googles advanced search engine).
Nearly as bad as not being able to review current discussions is the lack of ability to post any new material to newsgroups.
Google is a great company, and I've enjoyed using their services. I can see that their search results are faster than Deja's. Unfortunately, "power without control is useless."
Just because their intentions are good doesn't mean that it's OK.
Good intentions don't mean what they did was wrong, either. I don't see anything wrong with what the police did, either. What's the difference between having an security patrol or officer (they have those at big games) watching out for these people and having an automated system watching out for these people? As the article said, this was a highly public place; unlike the complaint in the article, the police weren't waiting for a chance to see someone commit a crime--they were looking for known criminals.
I suppose you have a problem with police looking for known criminals in highly public areas? Or, is it just that having a camera doing it instead of a human is somehow cheating? Do you see crime as a sport, a reasonable competition between authority and anti-authority? I don't see crime as a game or a sport; I believe that criminals must be stopped. I don't respect those who glorify someone who is simply a crook.
I like playing Sid Meier's "Alpha Centuri," but there are times the game operation has an annoying philosophical bias.
Supposedly, people hold theories because they model the real world. In the real world, we also have the same terrain limitation that the various Sid Meier games have (our space-fairing tech isn't good enough to make a difference, and Sid Meier's "Alpha Centuari" actually goes centuries beyond our current expansion technology). Thus, if terrain limitation means the game is zero-sum, then reality is also zero-sum, and the theory is flawed.
You mean, like this?
http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~clock/twibright/r onja/
or this?
"Lighthouse Communications Inc., Littleton, CO Constructed and tested an optical through-the-air communications system with a 10 mile range. Proposed methods and wrote description of a wide area, high speed information broadcasting service. Service would provide terabytes of library type information to subscribers at high data rates. No FCC approval needed."
http://www.djandassoc.com/projects.html
or, like this?
http://www.fas.org/spp/military/budget/peds_98a/06 03006a.htm
(and we humans are quite stupid).
Speak for yourself.
The ammount of power needed to trasnmit data through a light beam in open space is really big,
No, it isn't.
turning the whole process whortless.
Lasers can removed "whorts," too.
That's why we use laser light in a restricting environment (aka optic fiber). Sorry, but it's the worst use for a telescope I could ever imagine....
Laser light communications holds great promise for providing high bandwidth, line-of-sight communication between points that cannot be spanned by cable. A few years ago, some astronomers pinged a laser modulator off the Galileo space probe when it passed near Earth. If Galileo had been equiped with an optical demodulator, it would have been able to decode our signals as it zipped by at thousands of miles an hour.
See also:
http://www.spie.org/web/abstracts/1400/1417.html
or
http://www.spie.org/web/abstracts/1800/1866.html
"In the Galileo Optical Experiment (GOPEX), optical
transmissions were beamed to the Galileo spacecraft by
Earth-based transmitters at Table Mountain Observatory
(TMO), California, and Starfire Optical Range (SOR),
New Mexico. The demonstration took place over an
eight-day period (December 9 through December 16) as
Galileo receded from Earth on its way to Jupiter. At 6
million kilometers (15 times the Earth-Moon distance),
the laser beam sent from Table Mountain Observatory
eight days after Earth flyby covered the longest known
range for laser transmission and detection.!"
Uh, no, that is incorrect. Current Earth technology would be able to detect a low-wattage Argon Ion laser beam (say, 10 watts) from 5 light years away with only modest equipment. The cost of such a transmitter is comparible to what is currently being spent on SETI; I'd estimate it quickly to be less than $5000. A 1 kW transmitter would be a bit pricey for an individual, but even small shops could afford such units. A 1 kW laser would be able to communicate out to 100 light years using current detector technology; that would be do-able for under $10 000.
You might want to have a look at
http://www.coseti.org/osetimap.htm
The first page loads a bit slowly, but it has lots of interesting info.
As long as you guys want to pursue this with your own money, fine. I could even argue that a laser communicator designed for intersteller communication would come in useful for human civilization, someday. I consider SETI itself to be a colossal waste of time and resources, but whatever keeps you off the streets can't be all bad.
If we could detect gravity waves, we might do that. As it is, we have yet to have ever detected a gravity wave.
Who knows? Maybe any lifeform that has any real sense uses controlled quantized subspace variations to communicate over interstellar distances, and they figure no-one else is intelligent enough to talk to yet.
Sure, why not? Anything goes .... just don't waste my taxpaying dollars on it.
Radio waves are a good place to look, because so many processes produce them. ET wouldn't have to be trying to communicate using radio waves; he could scarcely avoid it! The fact that we have found nothing doesn't surprise me in the least, though; I fully expect that SETI will never find any ET intelligence.
Yeah, just because they fund and staff the libraries doesn't mean they have any say in what happens inside, right?
I'm not sure if you are referring to totipotent or pluripotent cells. I do not know what triggers the transformation from totipotent to pluripotent, but one important influence that transforms pluripotent cells into organs in the embryo appears to be the distribution of a hormone along the length of the embryo. The farther from head of the embryo, the more diffuse the hormone. Experiments in controlling the concentration of the hormone resulted in predictable changes in organ development.
Stanford Reports has an article describing yet another control mechanism in the differentiation of pluripotent cells into organs.
"The research, which was conducted primarily
by doctoral student Amy Kiger in Fuller's
laboratory, was published last week in the
journal Nature. Their study revealed
that stem cell reproduction is controlled in
part by special surrounding support cells in
the body that play a guardian role. These
guardian cells send key information that
ensures that at least one of the two daughters
of a stem cell division differentiates instead
of retaining stem cell identity. 'Under the
influence of the guardian cells, the stem cell
divides to produce one stem cell and one
specialized cell, rather than two stem cells,'
Fuller said.
(Stanford Report, October 18, 2000)o ber18/stem_cells-101800.html
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/news/report/news/oct
Actually, the stem cells in human embryoes are only totipotent for about 4 days after fertilization; after that point, they specialize into pluripotent stem cells. The stem cells harvested from embryoes are pluripotent, not totipotent.
"When a sperm fertilizes an egg, the product is a single cell that has the potential to form an entire organism. This fertilized egg is a totipotent stem cell, which has the potential to develop into a complete organism. In the first hours and days after fertilization, this cell begins to divide into identical totipotent stem cells. Then, approximately four days after fertilization, these totipotent stem cells begin to specialize, forming a hollow sphere of cells called a blastocyst. One part of the blastocyst is a cluster of cells called the inner cell mass, which are the stem cells that will go on to form most of the cells and tissues of the human body. These are pluripotent stem cells, which are different than totipotent stem cells -- pluripotent stem cells do not develop into a complete organism.
"Recently, human pluripotent stem cells have been isolated from two sources: the inner cell mass of human embryos at the blastocyst stage and from fetal tissue obtained from terminated pregnancies. Because these cells are capable of limitless division and self-renewal, they can be maintained indefinitely in tissue culture, making them a vital resource for research."
http://www.ninds.nih.gov/about_ninds/spieg_fisch_t estimony.htm#Why%20are%20human%20pluripotent%20ste m%20cells%20important
STEM CELL PLASTICITY IN HEMATOPOIETIC AND NON-HEMATOPOIETIC TISSUE
Release Date: November 13, 2000
RFA: HL-01-007
RESEARCH OBJECTIVES
Background
"Stem cell research offers enormous potential for treating devastating malignant and non-malignant diseases. Recently, a number of groups have reported that stem cells derived from adults may be capable of surprising plasticity or versatility. Investigators reported that after bone marrow transplantation, donor-derived cells could be found in non-hematopoietic tissues. These tissues included astroglia in the central nervous system, skeletal muscle, liver oval cells, cardiomyocytes, vascular-endothelial cells, and bone forming osteoblasts. In addition, bone marrow stromal cells from rats and humans can apparently give rise to large numbers of cells with neuronal properties under specific culture conditions. Also, muscle derived material was reported to display hematopoietic activity. In these studies, diagnostic cell surface markers have shown the reconstitution of both myeloid and lymphoid cell lineages after transplantation. Neuronal cells have also been reported to give rise to progenitors of all blood lineages and to demonstrate myogenic potential. Thus, increasing evidence suggests that adult cells could have far greater differentiative plasticity even at advanced stages of their differentiation programs than previously thought. The plasticity concept resembles the documented phenomenon known as transdifferentiation. However, the extent to which the transdifferentiation principle can be generalized to current findings is unknown.
"Findings such as those described above raise many unanswered and intriguing questions regarding the biology of stem cells and the routes they take to express their differentiation potential. This RFA is developed to encourage research to substantiate stem cell plasticity and to characterize cellular, molecular, and genetic mechanisms that allow cells to express plasticity."
http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/rfa-files/RFA-H L-01-007.html
Stem Cells: What Are They?
"Many types of stem cells exist in the human body. All have the capacity to replicate, to self-renew; and they have the capacity to differentiate in order to produce specific body parts such as muscle cells, skin cells, nerve cells, and such. Yet scientists believe they are organized in a hierarchy according to a scale of specialization. Please watch carefully as I label the steps on the hierarchical staircase.
"On the top we find totipotent (totally potent) stem cells, which are capable of forming every type of body cell. Each totipotent cell could replicate and differentiate and become a human being. All cells within the early embryo are totipotent up until the 16 cell stage or so.
"Next are the pluripotent stem cells which can develop into any of the three major tissue types: endoderm (interior gut lining), mesoderm (muscle, bone, blood), and ectoderm (epidermal tissues and nervous system). Pluripotent stem cells can eventually specialize in any bodily tissue, but they cannot themselves develop into a human being.
"Finally, we have tissue specific stem cells committed to making blood, muscle, nerve, bone, or other tissues. Hematopoietic stem cells, for example, are responsible for all types of blood cells, but no other tissue types. These renew themselves, yet they specialize in the tissue they produce. Their continued presence in an adult person gives the body its repairing and healing ability.
http://www.ctns.org/Information/research/Stem_Cell /stem_cell.html
You are in no position to be condescending.
The ultimate moral authority has spoken. No need to keep asking all these pesky ethical questions; he has thought it all out and decided once for all that it is ethical to use human bodies any way he deems necessary to save people's lives.
FYI, your liver is naturally able to regrow itself; it is one of the few human organs that have long been known to regenerate themselves. It is possible to remove 3/4 of it, and it can still regrow to full size, under normal conditions. It has to be pretty vivacious to act as the primary waste collector for your blood.
That bothers me a lot, also. I might wonder what the person had in mind who first proscribed the addition of that agent? I can see him thinking, after his first experiments,
"The cells are still alive and acting strangly. Better add this *other* agent to finish them off!"
It sounds a bit like a bad Saturday morning children's show.
There were a lot of little comments like that in the newspaper's account that bothered me. Maybe it's just the way the English write?
I live on the North side of Dallas. NY has subways; we, of course, do not. Many NY buildings are ancient (I guess the city has an average age of at least 100 years, maybe 150); we, of course, are younger (I guess an average age of 40 or 50 years). NY is a city of over 11 million people; we have about 6 million. (These numbers are all from the top of my head, at 1 in the morning, but I think I'm pretty close.) Thus, NY has a lot more potential. However, all is not lost. I noticed when I was South of downtown that there are quite a few old structures. I went trapsing around some when I was taking some pictures of the Dallas skyline. I might have done more, but that wasn't my purpose at the time, and I was a little afraid of getting jumped.
As it happens, I've been to Europe. I spent over 3 months just in Italy, besides France and Spain. It is fine to travel, but Europe? Pooey! Europe has nothing that's better than the US, and a lot that is much worse... and their morals stink!
Contrary to what the pablum-puking Commie recruits would have us believe, the US has not reached the depraved depths of China. We do not outlaw peaceful protests (though we do keep some 100 yards from the clinic doors). We do not regularly arrest and destroy great numbers of religious leaders. Despite Clinton's White House term, we do not yet have a real Communist government. The question isn't whether US laws are restrictive; the question is, are they just, and do they permit moral human freedoms?
Europe ... Pooey!
Libertarianism is only fiscally conservative; it is socially liberal. The Libertarian ideal approaching anarchy is the same as Communism (you did know that the supposed goal of Communism under Marxist theory is anarchy, right?).
I wouldn't get too uptight about the labels, though; it is sometimes difficult to derive much meaning purely from political labels. It is more useful to see how the labels are being used, or even the specific issues that are being discussed.
What? Didn't you ever watch, The Time Machine?
(BTW, I have the DVD of George Pal's movie, if you want to stop by my apartment to watch it with me. And, while I'm getting it set up, I might tell you about my experience as a steam plant engineer for the US Navy, or tell you about HVAC.)
Why do you ask?
When private ISPs first connected to it, of course. When it was run purely by government agencies for government purposes, those agencies had the right to control it for the same reason I have the right to control the use of the computer sitting in front of me. Once that situation changed, the government lost this property-based right, and has no such right on any other basis.
That is an interesting theory, but it sounds to me like a "pop-law" version of the way US laws were meant to work. I think you should look up some articles on FindLaw, to see how the US government really is supposed to work, instead of relying on the armchair philosophies of your peers.
the idea that the purpose of the Internet was such an anarchy was a self-appointed decision by anti-establishment people who imposed their own social agenda on a communication medium
Insofar as I can parse this statement, it seems to be asserting that some anacho-fascist cabal forcibly imposed the agenda of rejecting all forcibly imposed agendas.
The words, "anacho-fascist cabal" are your own, of course. I simply find it amazing that after a group of Net users announces that the Internet is a regulation-free zone that those people would act surprised a few years later to find out that they were ignored by their governments. Of course they were wrong! What right did they have to declare what the regulation of the Internet would be? Government simply ignored them as the bunch of armchair philosophers they were.
They acted without authority
They acted without authority to impose an absence of authority?
My brain hurts.
That's because you don't know the difference between an empty declaration of rights and a legally-meaningful declaration of rights.
and today scream with indignation when governments exercise their due powers
Er, the claim that censorship is part of any government's "due powers" is what you're required to prove before your argument can be taken seriously.
As I said, if you were to spend time actually reading legal cases, instead of putting so much weight on discussions with your buddies, you would have seen, for example, that the (local) government regulates the ad content on the side of buses, that the (federal) government regulates the content of some broadcasts, that no government and no sensible public group permits unauthorized trespassing into private computer systems. It is because the Net culture is based on so much personal philosophy, rather than on established law, that the indignation of netizens is largely irrelevant to the course of Internet regulation.
anarchic rules
You keep using that word... I do not think it means what you think it means.
Anarchy is a a social structure in which there is no governmental leader or civil force to compel compliance. The only "laws" or rules that are recognized in such a structure are those that are agreed upon between the parties involved, and that recognition ends once any members cease agreement with the laws or rules. There are various conceptions as to how this would be implemented in practice. Relevant to this discussion, there are those people who imagined that the Internet would be a world community, one in which the laws of any nation would be unenforcible. Supposedly, the completely unrestricted, unregulated nature of the Internet would liberate the latent intellectual powers of the world, enobling and empowering everyone. For example, the ability for anyone to publish a Web page was supposed to (in this anarchic view) result in the liberation of the great masses around the world who (supposedly) suffered without a voice. Disappointingly, the most profound thing that most people could put on their Web site were pictures of their pets.
I should not have to tell you that a great many things done on the Internet are irresponsible, reprehensible and damaging to the interests of others
You have misframed the argument in a manner which avoids the issue. If I say that you seem profoundly clueless, that may be irresponsible and reprehensible, and insofar as anybody believes me it is certainly damaging to your interests, but you really have no recourse except to offer a rebuttal. If, on the other hand, I say something actionable, you do have recourse, because I would then be violating your rights, not your far more expansive "interests".
Whatever legal tools might or might not be available to counter the destruction of an innocent person, the point remains that either people are held accountable for their actions, or society will retrograde. However, even you appear to recognize that when someone does something "actionable" on the Internet, such as, perhaps, entering into a private computer system--say, Egghead's credit card database, that the government is in its right to take legal countermeasures.
They ignore the fact that when any tool or system becomes destructive of our society, we have the right to disband or destroy that tool or system.
No, you don't.
For examples, the Industrial Revolution was destructive of the existing pre-industrial society, and yet Luddite mobs had no right to "disband or destroy" the private property of the industrialists.
You have misapplied the principle of which I spoke, in several ways. I spoke of tools or systems destructive to society; you countered by changing the focus from society to a special interest of society. I spoke of lawful means in which established rights were guarded by a court system and laws; you spoke of a mob riot.
I won't feel sorrow if the government regulates Internet content, provided that it is in keeping with the laws of our nation.
Er, "Congress shall make no law...." IS the law of our nation.
Don't confuse yourself by restricting this discussion only to speech; the Internet is capable of far more than just posting one's personal opinion, which is a critical point in a discussion about Internet regulation. So, on a number of levels, government regulation would be a valid option: on speech, the government has never provided an absolute, unlimited freedom to say anything that anyone might chose to say; on actions, even you must acknowledge that the government holds the authority and responsibility (as her people expect her to hold) to restrict property abuses.
Oh, yeah? How about providing tech support for McDonald's? That's what I'm doing right now. During the summer, I support USPS equipment installations. During the winter, I provide help desk support for McDonald's POS and KVS. At least, this is the way it's worked for me the last 2 years. Maybe it's time to move on to something else?
Oh, not yet. I was an enlisted man in the US Navy. My only problem is deciding which job to list here.
How about the time during my mess deck duty (all lower-level enlisted personnel have to spend so many weeks doing mess deck duty after they are assigned to a ship) ... I worked in the chief's mess, which included the chief's berthing and other chief's country areas. If someone happened to flush paper towels down the toilet, the system backed up and flooded the compartment with sewage. Guess who got to clean it ...
Well, as it happened, there was another man on the mess decks, who was scheduled to work after hours with me. He and I weren't terribly good friends (he once snuck into my berthing compartment and doused me with ice water as I slept, because, he said, he couldn't find any boiling water at that hour with which to douse me). There was another guy in our mess deck group who also wasn't too fond of me, but he was quite a bit smarter than the first guy, and he worked a different shift. I could tell when he got off duty because, about a half-hour later, the toilets would overflow, and then I and the other man on duty would get to spend a few hours of quality time together, cleaning up raw human sewage, applying Betadine to the walls and fixtures and wiping down everything. IIRC, we were scheduled to get off duty at 1700, but the extra cleanup kept us a while longer. Having this happen once or twice could be written off as an accident, but when it happened several times a week for a few weeks, and only on days when I had to work a little later, it seemed an obvious tip-off.
Oh, I had lots of similar experiences in the Navy, some of them much more serious than the mess decks. Of course, the military in general has centuries of humiliating and abusing its recruits; it's probably impossible to expose one person to all the forms of degredation available in a single enlistment. If they wish (not just the administration, but the other recruits), they really can put you through 4 years of Hell on Earth. Fortunately, there are ways to stop it legally.
It is true that "The Economist" did not say, "the original purpose," but this brings up the question of what purpose they had in mind. At what point did the Internet change from being a government-sponsored communications entity to being the great bastion of unregulated free-speech and anonymity? The answer is never; the idea that the purpose of the Internet was such an anarchy was a self-appointed decision by anti-establishment people who imposed their own social agenda on a communication medium. They acted without authority, and today scream with indignation when governments exercise their due powers. They didn't own, fund or establish the Internet; they saw themselves as liberal visionaries, and so felt they had the right to proclaim a new, virtual world with new, anarchic rules.
Is the desire not to be beholden to short-sighted laws like those in the U.S., China and Islamic countries "Leftist mind-rot?"
Usually it is. I would have to question the judgement of someone who lumps US laws in the same group as China and Islamic countries.
am I amiss in saying people want their privacy and to be treated like adults, not money holes or little children? Or is this nonsense in your view?
What is nonsense in my view is the idea that we are faced with either an unregulated Internet, or the universal decay of freedom of speech. It is nonsense in my view that a person should be given the protection to say anything he wishes to whomever he wishes as often as he wishes.
Because you indicate that you don't like being treated like a child, I should not have to tell you that a great many things done on the Internet are irresponsible, reprehensible and damaging to the interests of others; for example, pirating software, stealing and distributing data beyond the limits of the law and distributing pornographic materials to people without regard for the desires or eligibility of those receiving the materials, besides entering private networks and viewing or destroying private files. Certainly, there is a sizeable group of Internet users who do not behave themselves responsibly, and in the process violate the historical rights of others.
Can you tell me any reason that a government is under any obligation to allow anyone to use the Internet in any way? This is one of the most amazing aspects of this issue to me. The United States existed for almost 200 years without the Internet, and has expanded the forums in which the publication of ideas is possible (from standing on street corners on a soap box and printing in newspapers, books and magazines to radio and television). The government formed the Internet so that DoD computers could share resources. After 3 decades of strong government regulation, the government opened up the Internet to commercial development. All of the sudden, people act as if the Constitution based the 1st Ammendment directly on Internet access. They ignore the fact that when any tool or system becomes destructive of our society, we have the right to disband or destroy that tool or system. Now, I don't believe the Internet is going to be disbanded or destroyed, but I won't feel sorrow if the government regulates Internet content, provided that it is in keeping with the laws of our nation. The counter-argument I usually get is that the Internet makes the laws of our nation obsolete; hence, the comments I made in my initial post.