The great thing about this type of genetic modification is that the anti-science left and right will get selected out of the population by, ironically, a new process of intelligent design. A century from now there might be an "Amish island" where tourists can go to look at the last of them.
This will happen too, but in this area there will be no forced speciation. A steady drift toward choosing similarly-enhanced mates, but no specific point at which the species divides into two or more non-interbreedable groups. Instead, we will se gradual decline in the numbers of the unenhanced.
I don't see any ethics problem with treating genetic diseases, which is where this tech will be applied first - though I'm sure that in both the more progressively-inclined and the most God-fearing parts of the US and Europe there will be a Natural Disease Coalition, led by the likes of Dolce and Gabbana, promoting breast cancer as the Lord's will.
The ethics will get interesting when we start to see lines of humanity modified to fit extreme environments, such as microgravity or underwater. At some point there will be speciation, when humans adapted for one environment can no longer breed with "root" humanity. Our common heritage will eventually have to be taught as history.
There will be life on Mars, and it will probably be the result of intelligent design.
It would be mass transit if instead of needing your own van, you could just arrange a ride with one with a simple Uber-like app whenever you needed one, riding with up to several other people who might be going your way. There could be options to pay extra for exclusivity or cargo ("I need to pick up ten bags of lawn fertilizer at Home Depot").
So Verizon gets fined $3.4M for a 911 outage that endangered some possibly significantly large number of lives. In 2011 Google paid a $500M fine for the crime of carrying advertising by Canadian pharmacies offering discounted prices to American consumers for filling their prescriptions.
Next time you vote on the national level, keep in mind that your federal government considers the "threat" of competition undercutting the pharma lobby's price monopoly 145.35 times more of an offense than having the 911 service not work when you need it.
The idea of streaming may have been around for years, but the implementation sucks donkeys. I live in a rural area where I get my big-city broadcast channels through a major nationwide cable provider. If I miss an episode of something on broadcast, I can sometimes catch it after the next day or two on streaming, except when it's on one of the networks where I have to wait 8 days for no particular reason, meaning that before I can see my missed episode I have to wait until the day after next week's episode, or when it's on "verify my provider" and my cable company is never one of the six or eight you can choose from. That's if I'm lucky, of course, for some programs are just not available on streaming at all. For non-br0adcast channels that are carried by my cable company, I should be able to stream catchup episodes by logging in with my provider, right? So why is there still only a tiny list of verifiable providers that seldom includes my own?
What Apple can bring to a mess like this is a markedly better user interface. Because I pay for cable programming with transmission fees, and for OTA content wit commercials and retransmission fees, I have every right to view the content after scheduled broadcast. That's why I torrent everything they won't give me my rightful open access to. What I would like to see Apple do is just buy a vertical slice of about a third of Hollywood and force a unified access paradigm onto it. Make it easy to get BS-free access to the corresponding slice of total content, and viewers will find it so much easier to watch their chosen content that the rest of the industry will have to fall into line.
The one renewable that load-follows really well is hydro. Solar and wind can be paired with dams on the grid, so long as the overnight rise in river level stays tolerable.
Apple is just one of the many vendors supporting the global NFC standard. Cognizant of all those stories coming out of Europe about wallet-brushing skimming devices, Apple Pay is just a more secure implementation of the standard.
The complete exterior of every rental car being checked out should be photographed in high resolution, so that if damage is reported on checkin, the check-out record can be compared. Naturally, a time-stamped copy of the checkout photos should be emailed to the customer right after being taken. A damage assessment would legally be made if and only if the checkout images clearly showed no damage at that location.
Up to now the customer has been responsible to taking checkout photos, but what that has led to is darkened checkout areas and damage reports in weird places where no renter dressed up for a business assignment would be reasonably expected to crawl.
One-way missions have been a common feature of human exploration. In the nineteenth century, thousands of people signed up to settle California as a one way mission, with no idea of what awaited them. "California" in those days did mean what it means now; the settlers had to grow their own milk and honey, many died of miscellaneous causes, and a few ended up as the Donner Party.
If this account is to be believed, the problem with Mars One is lack of control over the mission by those who signed up. If this projectis going to attract participants, it needs to be open about allowing those who sign up exchange information freely. If it hides information and gets coercive about financial contributions, it could be regarded as a cult. And if you're going to Mars, you wouldn't want your traveling companions to be members of a cult.
You're probably thinking of NFC. Passive RFID tags have a range of 1-3m, which is perfect for determining whether items on one of my lists of must-have items is on the user's body: http://www.rfidjournal.com/faq...
The product would be a RFID tag reader that attaches to your keychain, rather than being embedded in one personal item like Woolet, and stays connected to your smartphone with Bluetooth. The device would read passive RFID tags in its vicinity, the simple stick-on tags with a range of a few meters.
In the accompanying app, you would build lists of items you need to have with you on a series of given named occasions. When you leave the house to do something important, you scroll to, say "See Mistress" and the app has the device tell you of some tagged item you placed on the list is not right near you. Of course, your keys, with the device itself, would be the first thing checked. The app would display messages for any item on the lt that you don't have with you. "Forgot condoms!" would be a reminder on the example list, for instance.
I can envision a "pharma singularity" occurring when our supercomputing power is able to model human biology well enough to replace the glacial and unethical plod of double-blind testing. Instead of giving half your population of Ebola patients a placebo and having to lie through your teeth to their grieving relatives, we will be able to directly test new compounds against the model to shortcut right to a final "smoke test" with human patients.
The FAA's job is to regulate flying objects. it has no business fiddling with advertising. Time to cut its budget until it stays within its statutory boundaries.
These links are not about random ranters, but well-funded activist groups with the legal resources it takes to tie up vital projects for as long as it takes to starve them to death. It's time we investigated where all the activist cash is coming from.
The one European country that consistently supports science is France. It's been this way since the Revolution - small wonder that our own first ambassador was Ben Franklin. But even France has participated in the anti-GMO hysteria spreading through Europe. Now there's an anti-vaccine movement as well: http://www.thedailybeast.com/a... And of course, everyone is familiar with Germany's replacement, in direct collision with the concern over carbon, of nuclear power with brown coal.
The last mention of fracking I heard of in Germany was that attempt to develop geothermal energy in an old volcanic stump in the southwestern corner of the country. As soon as the first tiny dish-rattler earthquake was felt in Basel, the Germans shut down geothermal development, and it was never heard from again.
Slashdot Mirror
The great thing about this type of genetic modification is that the anti-science left and right will get selected out of the population by, ironically, a new process of intelligent design. A century from now there might be an "Amish island" where tourists can go to look at the last of them.
This will happen too, but in this area there will be no forced speciation. A steady drift toward choosing similarly-enhanced mates, but no specific point at which the species divides into two or more non-interbreedable groups. Instead, we will se gradual decline in the numbers of the unenhanced.
I don't see any ethics problem with treating genetic diseases, which is where this tech will be applied first - though I'm sure that in both the more progressively-inclined and the most God-fearing parts of the US and Europe there will be a Natural Disease Coalition, led by the likes of Dolce and Gabbana, promoting breast cancer as the Lord's will.
The ethics will get interesting when we start to see lines of humanity modified to fit extreme environments, such as microgravity or underwater. At some point there will be speciation, when humans adapted for one environment can no longer breed with "root" humanity. Our common heritage will eventually have to be taught as history.
There will be life on Mars, and it will probably be the result of intelligent design.
It would be mass transit if instead of needing your own van, you could just arrange a ride with one with a simple Uber-like app whenever you needed one, riding with up to several other people who might be going your way. There could be options to pay extra for exclusivity or cargo ("I need to pick up ten bags of lawn fertilizer at Home Depot").
Did you know that every elevator once had a elevator operator? Did we have more freedom, somehow, back when this was the case?
So Verizon gets fined $3.4M for a 911 outage that endangered some possibly significantly large number of lives. In 2011 Google paid a $500M fine for the crime of carrying advertising by Canadian pharmacies offering discounted prices to American consumers for filling their prescriptions.
Next time you vote on the national level, keep in mind that your federal government considers the "threat" of competition undercutting the pharma lobby's price monopoly 145.35 times more of an offense than having the 911 service not work when you need it.
The idea of streaming may have been around for years, but the implementation sucks donkeys. I live in a rural area where I get my big-city broadcast channels through a major nationwide cable provider. If I miss an episode of something on broadcast, I can sometimes catch it after the next day or two on streaming, except when it's on one of the networks where I have to wait 8 days for no particular reason, meaning that before I can see my missed episode I have to wait until the day after next week's episode, or when it's on "verify my provider" and my cable company is never one of the six or eight you can choose from. That's if I'm lucky, of course, for some programs are just not available on streaming at all. For non-br0adcast channels that are carried by my cable company, I should be able to stream catchup episodes by logging in with my provider, right? So why is there still only a tiny list of verifiable providers that seldom includes my own?
What Apple can bring to a mess like this is a markedly better user interface. Because I pay for cable programming with transmission fees, and for OTA content wit commercials and retransmission fees, I have every right to view the content after scheduled broadcast. That's why I torrent everything they won't give me my rightful open access to. What I would like to see Apple do is just buy a vertical slice of about a third of Hollywood and force a unified access paradigm onto it. Make it easy to get BS-free access to the corresponding slice of total content, and viewers will find it so much easier to watch their chosen content that the rest of the industry will have to fall into line.
The one renewable that load-follows really well is hydro. Solar and wind can be paired with dams on the grid, so long as the overnight rise in river level stays tolerable.
Apple is just one of the many vendors supporting the global NFC standard. Cognizant of all those stories coming out of Europe about wallet-brushing skimming devices, Apple Pay is just a more secure implementation of the standard.
All they care about is that Slashdot be made Apfelrein.
OR...a titanium dioxide shield on your house, to raise its albedo and counteract your family's carbon footprint:
http://www.homedepot.com/p/BEH...
The complete exterior of every rental car being checked out should be photographed in high resolution, so that if damage is reported on checkin, the check-out record can be compared. Naturally, a time-stamped copy of the checkout photos should be emailed to the customer right after being taken. A damage assessment would legally be made if and only if the checkout images clearly showed no damage at that location.
Up to now the customer has been responsible to taking checkout photos, but what that has led to is darkened checkout areas and damage reports in weird places where no renter dressed up for a business assignment would be reasonably expected to crawl.
One-way missions have been a common feature of human exploration. In the nineteenth century, thousands of people signed up to settle California as a one way mission, with no idea of what awaited them. "California" in those days did mean what it means now; the settlers had to grow their own milk and honey, many died of miscellaneous causes, and a few ended up as the Donner Party.
If this account is to be believed, the problem with Mars One is lack of control over the mission by those who signed up. If this projectis going to attract participants, it needs to be open about allowing those who sign up exchange information freely. If it hides information and gets coercive about financial contributions, it could be regarded as a cult. And if you're going to Mars, you wouldn't want your traveling companions to be members of a cult.
You're probably thinking of NFC. Passive RFID tags have a range of 1-3m, which is perfect for determining whether items on one of my lists of must-have items is on the user's body:
http://www.rfidjournal.com/faq...
This is the one time you would want to pray for gang warfare.
The product would be a RFID tag reader that attaches to your keychain, rather than being embedded in one personal item like Woolet, and stays connected to your smartphone with Bluetooth. The device would read passive RFID tags in its vicinity, the simple stick-on tags with a range of a few meters.
In the accompanying app, you would build lists of items you need to have with you on a series of given named occasions. When you leave the house to do something important, you scroll to, say "See Mistress" and the app has the device tell you of some tagged item you placed on the list is not right near you. Of course, your keys, with the device itself, would be the first thing checked. The app would display messages for any item on the lt that you don't have with you. "Forgot condoms!" would be a reminder on the example list, for instance.
...about the unarmed bobby who is pursuing a suspect, and yells, "Stop, or I shall have to yell Stop again!"
But yes, this is offtopic here, especially in comparison to some of the interesting ideas that never make the climb out of Firehose.
I can envision a "pharma singularity" occurring when our supercomputing power is able to model human biology well enough to replace the glacial and unethical plod of double-blind testing. Instead of giving half your population of Ebola patients a placebo and having to lie through your teeth to their grieving relatives, we will be able to directly test new compounds against the model to shortcut right to a final "smoke test" with human patients.
I can remember all of those predictions of yours being made in the early 1970s, about the year 2000.
The FAA's job is to regulate flying objects. it has no business fiddling with advertising. Time to cut its budget until it stays within its statutory boundaries.
That doesn't have to be plugged in to charge all your gear? Where can I order one of those?
You think Greens would actually support desalination? Look at these:
http://www.foodandwaterwatch.o...
(Huntington Beach is a small coastal town in our country which is suffering a record drought).
http://www.citizen.org/documen...
http://desalalternatives.org/
http://www.dcbureau.org/201103...
http://www.watereducation.org/...
These links are not about random ranters, but well-funded activist groups with the legal resources it takes to tie up vital projects for as long as it takes to starve them to death. It's time we investigated where all the activist cash is coming from.
The one European country that consistently supports science is France. It's been this way since the Revolution - small wonder that our own first ambassador was Ben Franklin. But even France has participated in the anti-GMO hysteria spreading through Europe. Now there's an anti-vaccine movement as well:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/a...
And of course, everyone is familiar with Germany's replacement, in direct collision with the concern over carbon, of nuclear power with brown coal.
The last mention of fracking I heard of in Germany was that attempt to develop geothermal energy in an old volcanic stump in the southwestern corner of the country. As soon as the first tiny dish-rattler earthquake was felt in Basel, the Germans shut down geothermal development, and it was never heard from again.
I know that the anti-sciecne movement has prevented Europe from drilling its own gas, but aren't they just buying it from Russia?
More likely, it's the steady replacement of coal by natural gas. If carbon is as real a problem as claimed, this in the long run will not be enough.