My "argument" was to take the emotional weight of the term "designer babies" off the table and look at how it was likely to be used. Yes, the result could be called a "designer baby", but so could surgery to correct a cleft palate.
But marginal differences in brain size don't correlate to anything. Sure, if your brain shrinks due to disease it stops working so well, but that's the effect of brain damage.
Brain performance is still pretty mysterious, but it clearly emerges from complexity, organization and behavior, not gross size.
I'm not sure that gene editing immediately leads to "designer" babies, except in the most superficial way. Sure, you can change things like hair, eye, or skin color, but most parents are going to be interested in those things; they'll be more interested in editing out genetic diseases like Huntington's. It's possible that families undergoing IVF with one or more donated gametes may wish to have the child resemble the non-contributor parents.
The really controversial eugenic manipulations are ones that involve things that we don't know how to conjure up with genetic manipulation: intelligence and character.
Even so, this is the sort of detail that a system designer ought to get right, even if he thinks that there probably won't be troublesome consequences if he gets it a little bit wrong.
When in doubt, a quality algorithm is always better than a bad one. This is the thing about security; when the bad guys figure out an angle to your sloppiness you've overlooked, you lose.
I once volunteered for a group which tidied up and fixed used furniture and housewares and provided them to poor families.
The economics of that was interesting. I once fixed an old Singer sewing machine that had frozen up because the old oil had congealed. Now if you paid me what my time was worth as an engineer that'd make no sense: you could buy a new one for that. But in fact I wasn't paid in money. The next week a family came in and the mom knew how to sew. When I loaded the sewing machine on the van I had the satisfaction of seeing something I'd fixed with my own hands go where it would mean clothes for the kids.
Sometimes we got antiques or other pieces that were valuable. These went to auctions and the proceeds bought re-manufactured mattresses. Other times we got stuff that was just trash; this went into the dumpster, or if it were metal to a scrap dealer with the pennies earned going into the mattress kitty.
I suspect the same kind of charitable sweat-equity economics could be applied to a lot of the things being destroyed by Amazon. They could go to community volunteer groups and diverted to local causes where they would do good without affecting the primary market for those goods.
International law is just a more efficient and less barbaric way for the strong to enforce their will on the weak. International laws and norms matter insofar as the strong have a political interest in enforcing them.
Take Iraq vs. North Korea. Iraq tested the waters of defiance by pushing back on nuclear inspections, but North Korea outright flouted its NNPT obligations and withdrew when it was caught. But even though North Korea's violation of the treaty was well-documented, and its weapons program known to be much closer to fruition, an international coalition invaded Iraq because a US president wanted that country invaded.
Not "Russia and China" -- the Soviet Union and Pakistan. So far as I know there is no evidence that the Russian Federation or PRC have transferred nuclear technology to the DPRK.
Americans tend to view the world in bilateral terms: either you're with us or against us. But that model doesn't fit many conflicts, such as Syria, Yemen, or North Korea. Since China and the US don't agree on Korea policy, we assume that the DPRK has good relations with China. In fact the DPRK has bad relations with both the US and the PRC.
China is believed to have broached the possibility of replacing Kim Jong-Un with Kim Jong-nam with Kim's uncle Jang Song-thaek. That's why Jang was executed and Jong-nam assasinated. DPRK did once have friendly relations with the PRC, but they've been a PITA for China's leadership for many years now.
There's really no way to stop a country of twenty five million people with its own uranium reserves from developing nuclear weapons, if they're patient and willing to inflict enough economic pain on their own people.
You can keep nuclear fuel out of a country like Iraq, but countries like North Korea and Iran can dig uranium out of their own soil. North Korea has millions ot tons of high grade uranium reserves, and in in the 70s-90s it received key technology and equipment from Pakistan and Russia. This technology enabled them to pursue both the uranium and plutonium routes: centrifuge enrichment and production of chemically separable plutonium from natural uranium.
Access to uranium and fuel-processing know-how: once a rogue state has passed those two milestones there's no attractive options left for keeping them out of the nuclear club. There's really only one thing you can do: put international inspectors on the ground. Any "agreement" with a regime like the DPRK that doesn't include inspections is worthless.
Getting inspectors on the ground puts us in the old "pick any two" scenario. Military force would be effective and quick, but the cost is astronomical, especially given Seoul's proximity to the DMZ. All the cheaper effective options are much slower. They take patience, diplomacy, and coordination with allies -- presuming we have any left.
Of course, this works because the fool thinks he's more clever than the fools that came before him.
Fools aren't put off by a sharp dealer's history of path ethical lapses because they imagine that attitude being put to work for their benefit... this time.
Can you get that Internet access to his constituents instantaneously? Because if you can't, folks in places like Cumberland still have to find a way to book travel.
I don't know if you've traveled through Appalachia, but a lot of it's incredibly remote. I don't see this as punitive at all.
It could be coincidence, but China granted Ivanka Trump (who is working in the White House in a somewhat nebulous capacity) a number of trademarks.
Trump's taking such personal efforts to save ZTE is curious to say the least, given its involvement with transferring sensitive US technology to Iran, the fact that it is ultimately mainly owned by the Chinese State, and the fact has been implicated in various overseas bribery scandal.
I'm not saying where there's smoke, there's fire, but that's a hell of a lot of smoke.
Actually, it's simplistic survey questions that are useless. People are quite useful, but you have to know how to extract insight from them.
I used to be the lead developer on a small vertical market app. The company was constantly asking people what they though the app should do, but despite trying to do the things people were telling us to do, the product never gained traction. Then when they brought me on, I added one simple question to every features conversation I had with customers: would you pay me a thousand dollars to put that into the product?.
That question had amazing power to cut through bullshit. Suddenly things people were telling me was absolutely crucial became unthinkable. We'd be focused on things nobody would pay a penny for, when there were things that people would pay tens of thousands for.
But I don't want to overemphasize asking questions, even powerful questions. Questions are important, but what you really have to do is engage people.
These goals don't make any sense as near term goals, not until the cost of moving mass around in space drops by many orders of magnitude.
Take asteroid mining. In order for it to make sense, the cost for asteroid sourced minerals has to be less than the same stuff from terrestrial sources. And if you amortize the cost of all the momentum changes you have to generate in order to prospect and deliver asteroid minerals to Earth, it's a pipe dream. Asteroid mining will only make economic sense when (a) space travel becomes literally dirt cheap or (b) we start to actually consume raw material in space. Delivering raw materials to a factory in the Asteroid Belt might in some cases be cheaper than ferrying them from Earth. I'm envisioning a robotic factory on Eros taking deliveries from Earth and the Asteroid Belt depending where it is in its orbit.
Until we start building foundries in space, asteroid mining is like extracting gold from seawater -- it's technologically possible, but economically pointless. The only things worth retrieving from space are the things with an extremely high value to mass ratio, and at present the only commodities that pass that minimum bar are (a) knowledge and (b) glory.
By that standard a Moon colony might pass muster if you can contrive to win sufficient knowledge and glory from it. But having a Moon base won't be enough per se; it depends on what you plan on doing there. You can't win any glory without at least some pretext for why a lunar base is the best way to do something.
This strategy of recouping fixed costs by extending a robotic missions for years after the planned work is done works well. They should use it on manned missions too.
Although it's just as hard to generalize about Muslims as it is Christians, you are projecting a kind of thinking onto Islam that would be regarded as heterodox,
Most if not all orthodox schools of Muslim thought don't believe good or bad luck have anything to do with reward and punishment. In fact they view such beliefs as superstitious. Actual reward and punishment are only meted out on the Day of Judgment.
Orthodox Muslims believe God wills good or bad things to people as a test of character. If Karachi is running out of water, that must be something that people there are capable of handling, if only they do the right thing.
I understand you're trying to be snarky, but it doesn't work if you are obviously ignorant about the people you're mocking. It actually tells us more about you and the religious traditions you are personally familiar with.
Not by design, actually. More by necessity. The way security works is that when the other guy has more determination than you have vigilance, you lose.
Such a community was promoted a few years back as "Galt's Gulch Chile". Chile isn't a libertarian country, but it is one of the best countries for a middle class person to try to become rich, rating quite high on most rankings by libertarian economics.
The promoters turned out to be con-men. Some of the people involved have regrouped and are attempting to build another Chile based project with a cryptocurrency based economy.
Naturally it has a cryptocurrency. If it had been conceived fifteen years ago it's constitution would probably have been written in XML. Twenty-five years ago and it would have had a domain consisting of a common English noun and ".com".
It appears to be a hybrid subway/taxi system with autonomously piloted vehicles.
Since the system's "roadways" would be designed around those vehicles it should be possible to achieve much higher safety than you'd get with autonomous vehicles on roads designed for human drivers.
comes up every Republican administration, because after running against deficits they cut taxes and raise defense spending. Trying to use NOAA or NASA's environmental monitoring data as a piggy bank is the budgetary equivalent of rooting through your sofa cushions for rent money.
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My "argument" was to take the emotional weight of the term "designer babies" off the table and look at how it was likely to be used. Yes, the result could be called a "designer baby", but so could surgery to correct a cleft palate.
So, you think plastic surgery is morally wrong?
But marginal differences in brain size don't correlate to anything. Sure, if your brain shrinks due to disease it stops working so well, but that's the effect of brain damage.
Brain performance is still pretty mysterious, but it clearly emerges from complexity, organization and behavior, not gross size.
I'm not sure that gene editing immediately leads to "designer" babies, except in the most superficial way. Sure, you can change things like hair, eye, or skin color, but most parents are going to be interested in those things; they'll be more interested in editing out genetic diseases like Huntington's. It's possible that families undergoing IVF with one or more donated gametes may wish to have the child resemble the non-contributor parents.
The really controversial eugenic manipulations are ones that involve things that we don't know how to conjure up with genetic manipulation: intelligence and character.
"Unbiased" is what you're going for.
Even so, this is the sort of detail that a system designer ought to get right, even if he thinks that there probably won't be troublesome consequences if he gets it a little bit wrong.
When in doubt, a quality algorithm is always better than a bad one. This is the thing about security; when the bad guys figure out an angle to your sloppiness you've overlooked, you lose.
I once volunteered for a group which tidied up and fixed used furniture and housewares and provided them to poor families.
The economics of that was interesting. I once fixed an old Singer sewing machine that had frozen up because the old oil had congealed. Now if you paid me what my time was worth as an engineer that'd make no sense: you could buy a new one for that. But in fact I wasn't paid in money. The next week a family came in and the mom knew how to sew. When I loaded the sewing machine on the van I had the satisfaction of seeing something I'd fixed with my own hands go where it would mean clothes for the kids.
Sometimes we got antiques or other pieces that were valuable. These went to auctions and the proceeds bought re-manufactured mattresses. Other times we got stuff that was just trash; this went into the dumpster, or if it were metal to a scrap dealer with the pennies earned going into the mattress kitty.
I suspect the same kind of charitable sweat-equity economics could be applied to a lot of the things being destroyed by Amazon. They could go to community volunteer groups and diverted to local causes where they would do good without affecting the primary market for those goods.
International law is just a more efficient and less barbaric way for the strong to enforce their will on the weak. International laws and norms matter insofar as the strong have a political interest in enforcing them.
Take Iraq vs. North Korea. Iraq tested the waters of defiance by pushing back on nuclear inspections, but North Korea outright flouted its NNPT obligations and withdrew when it was caught. But even though North Korea's violation of the treaty was well-documented, and its weapons program known to be much closer to fruition, an international coalition invaded Iraq because a US president wanted that country invaded.
Not "Russia and China" -- the Soviet Union and Pakistan. So far as I know there is no evidence that the Russian Federation or PRC have transferred nuclear technology to the DPRK.
Americans tend to view the world in bilateral terms: either you're with us or against us. But that model doesn't fit many conflicts, such as Syria, Yemen, or North Korea. Since China and the US don't agree on Korea policy, we assume that the DPRK has good relations with China. In fact the DPRK has bad relations with both the US and the PRC.
China is believed to have broached the possibility of replacing Kim Jong-Un with Kim Jong-nam with Kim's uncle Jang Song-thaek. That's why Jang was executed and Jong-nam assasinated. DPRK did once have friendly relations with the PRC, but they've been a PITA for China's leadership for many years now.
There's really no way to stop a country of twenty five million people with its own uranium reserves from developing nuclear weapons, if they're patient and willing to inflict enough economic pain on their own people.
You can keep nuclear fuel out of a country like Iraq, but countries like North Korea and Iran can dig uranium out of their own soil. North Korea has millions ot tons of high grade uranium reserves, and in in the 70s-90s it received key technology and equipment from Pakistan and Russia. This technology enabled them to pursue both the uranium and plutonium routes: centrifuge enrichment and production of chemically separable plutonium from natural uranium.
Access to uranium and fuel-processing know-how: once a rogue state has passed those two milestones there's no attractive options left for keeping them out of the nuclear club. There's really only one thing you can do: put international inspectors on the ground. Any "agreement" with a regime like the DPRK that doesn't include inspections is worthless.
Getting inspectors on the ground puts us in the old "pick any two" scenario. Military force would be effective and quick, but the cost is astronomical, especially given Seoul's proximity to the DMZ. All the cheaper effective options are much slower. They take patience, diplomacy, and coordination with allies -- presuming we have any left.
Of course, this works because the fool thinks he's more clever than the fools that came before him.
Fools aren't put off by a sharp dealer's history of path ethical lapses because they imagine that attitude being put to work for their benefit... this time.
Can you get that Internet access to his constituents instantaneously? Because if you can't, folks in places like Cumberland still have to find a way to book travel.
I don't know if you've traveled through Appalachia, but a lot of it's incredibly remote. I don't see this as punitive at all.
It could be coincidence, but China granted Ivanka Trump (who is working in the White House in a somewhat nebulous capacity) a number of trademarks.
Trump's taking such personal efforts to save ZTE is curious to say the least, given its involvement with transferring sensitive US technology to Iran, the fact that it is ultimately mainly owned by the Chinese State, and the fact has been implicated in various overseas bribery scandal.
I'm not saying where there's smoke, there's fire, but that's a hell of a lot of smoke.
Actually, it's simplistic survey questions that are useless. People are quite useful, but you have to know how to extract insight from them.
I used to be the lead developer on a small vertical market app. The company was constantly asking people what they though the app should do, but despite trying to do the things people were telling us to do, the product never gained traction. Then when they brought me on, I added one simple question to every features conversation I had with customers: would you pay me a thousand dollars to put that into the product?.
That question had amazing power to cut through bullshit. Suddenly things people were telling me was absolutely crucial became unthinkable. We'd be focused on things nobody would pay a penny for, when there were things that people would pay tens of thousands for.
But I don't want to overemphasize asking questions, even powerful questions. Questions are important, but what you really have to do is engage people.
These goals don't make any sense as near term goals, not until the cost of moving mass around in space drops by many orders of magnitude.
Take asteroid mining. In order for it to make sense, the cost for asteroid sourced minerals has to be less than the same stuff from terrestrial sources. And if you amortize the cost of all the momentum changes you have to generate in order to prospect and deliver asteroid minerals to Earth, it's a pipe dream. Asteroid mining will only make economic sense when (a) space travel becomes literally dirt cheap or (b) we start to actually consume raw material in space. Delivering raw materials to a factory in the Asteroid Belt might in some cases be cheaper than ferrying them from Earth. I'm envisioning a robotic factory on Eros taking deliveries from Earth and the Asteroid Belt depending where it is in its orbit.
Until we start building foundries in space, asteroid mining is like extracting gold from seawater -- it's technologically possible, but economically pointless. The only things worth retrieving from space are the things with an extremely high value to mass ratio, and at present the only commodities that pass that minimum bar are (a) knowledge and (b) glory.
By that standard a Moon colony might pass muster if you can contrive to win sufficient knowledge and glory from it. But having a Moon base won't be enough per se; it depends on what you plan on doing there. You can't win any glory without at least some pretext for why a lunar base is the best way to do something.
This strategy of recouping fixed costs by extending a robotic missions for years after the planned work is done works well. They should use it on manned missions too.
Although it's just as hard to generalize about Muslims as it is Christians, you are projecting a kind of thinking onto Islam that would be regarded as heterodox,
Most if not all orthodox schools of Muslim thought don't believe good or bad luck have anything to do with reward and punishment. In fact they view such beliefs as superstitious. Actual reward and punishment are only meted out on the Day of Judgment.
Orthodox Muslims believe God wills good or bad things to people as a test of character. If Karachi is running out of water, that must be something that people there are capable of handling, if only they do the right thing.
I understand you're trying to be snarky, but it doesn't work if you are obviously ignorant about the people you're mocking. It actually tells us more about you and the religious traditions you are personally familiar with.
Yes but is it half the water they need in gallons? We Americans don't understand metric fractions.
I suspect it's a matter of how the politician uses social media. If he uses it to conduct a public discussion of official business, then sure.
You're the one who brought up that particular straw man.
Not by design, actually. More by necessity. The way security works is that when the other guy has more determination than you have vigilance, you lose.
Such a community was promoted a few years back as "Galt's Gulch Chile". Chile isn't a libertarian country, but it is one of the best countries for a middle class person to try to become rich, rating quite high on most rankings by libertarian economics.
The promoters turned out to be con-men. Some of the people involved have regrouped and are attempting to build another Chile based project with a cryptocurrency based economy.
Naturally it has a cryptocurrency. If it had been conceived fifteen years ago it's constitution would probably have been written in XML. Twenty-five years ago and it would have had a domain consisting of a common English noun and ".com".
It appears to be a hybrid subway/taxi system with autonomously piloted vehicles.
Since the system's "roadways" would be designed around those vehicles it should be possible to achieve much higher safety than you'd get with autonomous vehicles on roads designed for human drivers.
Department of Interior is paid for with taxpayer dollars too.
Anyhow Landsat us currently a joint NASA/USGS(Department of Interior) program; it used to be NASA/NOAA(Dept. of Commerce)
comes up every Republican administration, because after running against deficits they cut taxes and raise defense spending. Trying to use NOAA or NASA's environmental monitoring data as a piggy bank is the budgetary equivalent of rooting through your sofa cushions for rent money.