The first two appear to require a "simulated loan officer". I doubt that the poster's site is doing that.
The third is essentially dynamic generation of displayed "marketing" information on a client computer customized to the particular customer. E.g., what every single commercial web site is doing. This is an absurd patent. They all three are, really.
Tell me about it. I have a '93 840ci, and my insurer was surprised to discover that it's in the same rate class as the Corvette.
True, the 800's were built to be more "sporty" than the 700's ever have been; but that article mentions that they're going to introduce a V-12 model in the 700 series. (The 850ci was the V-12).
My 840 was built to be a high-performance "touring" automobile, and it's electronically governed to top out at 155mph. That's not just theoretical -- it'll actually go that fast. I took it up to 135mph (late at night on a deserted highway) with no trouble at all, and it rode like a dream. I'd never been over a hundred in a car before that drove like it was supposed to be going that fast. This is probably why the insurance rates are so high.
The 700's, I guess, are more designed to be high-performing super-luxury cars; rather than luxurious high-performing (touring, not pure acceleration) cars. My 840ci is, for the most part, an example of simplified luxurious instrumentation.
I have never owned -- not even driven -- a car that compares to my 840ci. This is a car that is almost ten years old now, and has no rattles or squeaks of any kind. It is truly an awe-inspiring piece of engineering. You could eat dinner off of any of the surfaces in the engine compartment, and I've never cleaned them. (That's a slight exageration, I wouldn't actually eat off of it.)
I think I'm more inclined toward the 500 series than these new 700's. Maybe the sport V-12 model will be interesting. But I would like to see BMW making something like the 800s again, even thought they didn't sell very well in the US.
I have a question about white LEDs. Isn't it the case that they are synthesizing the "white" light by combining red, green, and the new blue LEDs into a single, integrated LED? And, if so, then the resulting "white" light certainly isn't actual white light, since it isn't broad spectrum (like sunlight or even incandescent light); but rather is just the perceived result of the combination of the three narrow bands. It seems to me that this would produce very unpleasant lighting, as colors far enough outside those three narrow bands wouldn't be illuminated very well; and, secondly, the total illumination would be quite low. I can't see how this would produce decent illumination.
Having no real knowledge of such things it seems odd to me that we'd change from having the traditional two chunks of matter slamming together; to a more complex system with lots of little pieces and precision patterns.
Is there a good reason to do so? I'm assuming there must be and I'm just not capable of thinking of it at the moment..
As the previous poster said, the gun type weapon fires a subcritical mass of fissionable material at another subcritical mass of fissionable material. It is much simpler to construct. However, since this design requires the use of uranium-235 as the fissionable material, it is both much larger and heavier than the implosion type, and the fissionable material (u-235) is much harder to produce than what the implosion device uses.
The reason for this is because plutonium-239 (what the implosion weapon uses) has a high enough neutron absorption cross-section that a) you need much less p-239 for a critical mass than you do u-235; and b) you can't shoot one sub-critical mass of p-239 into another quickly enough to avoid premature detonation in a gun design. You can't use p-239 in a gun design weapon. So it's obvious that the gun type has the disadvantage of being much larger and heavier, since it requires u-235 instead of p-239.
But the bigger problem is that u-235 is very, very hard to produce. It makes up less than a tenth of a percent of natural uranium, which is mostly made up of u-238. It differs from u-238 only very, very slightly in mass, and so "enrichening" uranium (which means increasing the ratio of u-235 to u-238) is a very, very expensive and difficult process. The fact that anyone has managed to do it is something of an engineering marvel in itself.
On the other hand, a fission reactor using uranium-238 (u-238 works fine for a reactor, which doesn't require explosive criticality....in fact, explosive criticality would be something of a design flaw, wouldn't it?) produces plutonium-239 in small amounts in the course of its operation. And p-239 is pretty easy to refine from the u-238.
So, at the time at which they were ready to test the first bomb at Trinity Site, they had only enough u-235 for a single bomb, but enough p-239 for two bombs. The gun design was almost certain to work, and so they didn't need to test it -- and they only had enough u-235 for one bomb anyway. What they weren't sure of was whether the implosion type would work. They had enough for two, so they could test one.
The real trick isn't just in getting a perfectly sperical implosion, as the previous poster said. Rather, the real trick was figuring out how to shape the charges by "lensing" such that the compression waves interfered with each other just so that chaotic effects were delayed long enough for super-criticality to occur. Without the lensing, a simple spherical implosion had compression wave interference patterns that would desymmetricize the super-criticality and causing only a small, if any, mass to explosively become super-critical. The implosion design is the other quite amazing engineering marvel of the Manhatten Project. And it worked the first time. They used the single u-235 gun-type weapon on Hiroshima, which they were pretty sure would work. They used the other p-239 on Nagasaki.
So, gun type bombs are easy to build, but they require hard-to-produce fissionable material. And they're big and heavy. Implosion type bombs are much harder to build, but they use very easy to produce fissionable material, and are quite small. (Note that the gun design also requires a total mass that is somewhat higher than critical mass; while a sophisticated implosion design can actually utilize a total mass that's sub-critical and achieve criticality through compression.)
Movellan is part of a growing network of scientists working to disprove long-held assumptions that computers are, by nature, logical geniuses but emotional dunces.
The ability to interpret markers for emotion--facial expressions, vocal tones and metabolic responses such as blood pressure--may seem like crude first steps.
Yet experts see machine intelligence, unswayed by human frailty and bias, as an eventual advantage. They envision machines that know us better than we know ourselves.
The idea that consciousness could occur outside the context of emotion is a pernicious misconception. It arose from the combination of a greatly oversimplified view of thought and the legacy of dualism.
It is true that what we experience as "emotion" is a subtly different kind of cognition than what we experience as deliberate thought. It's more fundamental, and more closely tied to other physical systems. So I do agree that it makes a certain sort of sense to distinguish "thought" and "emotion". Ultimately, however, both are manifestations of the same fundamental brain activity. They are deeply related and are not in opposition.
We've been spectacularly bad at analysis of our own consciousness. History has shown that much of what we don't notice and so take completely for granted are fundamental and extremely difficult problems; while what we are very aware of and have concentrated upon have proven to be trivial. The predicate calculus, in this context, is trivial.
I've long railed against the cliche of the "unfeeling" thinking machine/being one sees in popular science fiction. Neither Spock nor Data would be able to carry on a meaningful conversation if their thought didn't exist within the context of emotion. The idea that a thinking machine could imitate human consciousness without including human emotion is absurd if examined carefully.
Be that as it may, "affective computing" is only a very minor addition to computing in the context of AI. It's just another form of data acquisition, albeit one that would no doubt be very useful for an AI. None of this stuff we hear about is even remotely close to actual AI; at best it's just "smarter" computing. Real AI will only be achieved when we are able to build (or more properly, "grow") very high-level complex adaptive systems aimed at complex human interaction.
As others have already pointed out, using relays to send mail as the preferred method is not in the RFCs, and it shouldn't be.
Given the cost/benefit analysis and the low number of people running their own servers that aren't spammers, I agree that it makes sense to use the DUL. Still, that doesn't make it any more "fair" to those legitimate netizens that are being blocked. And there certainly is no justification for being angry with them. It's just one more bit of basic functionality of the 'net that is taken away from the end user as a result of egregious exploitation of that functionality by a few opportunists. If you keep trying to deal with these vandals in successive ways that generate collateral damage, eventually the collateral damage is going to add up to an amount that is unacceptable. Thus, such solutions are a temporary fix, at best; and, at worse, delay the implementation of real solutions.
Not really. The retrograde motion of the outer planets around opposition had been known for a long time, and Ptolemy & Co. had a very hard time explaining it.
As one of the tiny minority of people who've studied Ptolemy's Almagest in detail, I must disagree with you.
Ptolemy explained retrogradation perfectly well. Retrogradation wasn't the problem. You can have retrogradation with a simple epicycle on a centered deferent, given certain angular velocities. This is extremely simple geometry, and there's nothing objectionable about it.
The real problem was the equant. To explain some planetary motions, Ptolemy had to make the center of their rate of motion independent of the motions themselves. [The analogy I use to explain this is to imagine a circular train track, with a hollow ball pushed around the track by a rod affixed to a motor at the center of the circle. If you make the motor eccentric to the track (by moving the motor or the track), the ball's motion will continue to be centered on the center of the track (as long as the ball can slide in and out along the rod), but its rate of motion will be centered on the motor.]
It's already pushing it when you postulate a geocentric universe and then have some of the celestial bodies move about the Earth eccentricaly (though very slightly). But, in my opinion, disconnecting the rate of motion from the path of motion was too ugly. Circles on circles centered on the Earth is elegant enough to "just be". Making the rate of the motion eccentric to the path of motion makes one want an answer to "why?". The equant is the subtle negative evidence within the classic geocentric model. The ancients accepted a certain amount of increased complexity in order to avoid a proposition they couldn't stomach: that the Earth was in motion. It's my opinion that the equant pushed the limits of acceptable complexity, and they knew it.
The positive evidence for a heliocentric model contained within the geocentric model is that the motions of all the planets have a constant relationship with the motion of the Sun. In the geocentric model, this doesn't have to be true. But it is, and it points clearly to a heliocentric model.
Those before Ptolemy and Ptolemy himself were aware of a heliocentric model. They were aware that the geometry is simpler and more elegant. But they quite rightly had a great deal of difficulty accepting that the Earth was in motion; and they had a great deal of difficulty accepting that the visible cosmos would have to be so large as to allow the "fixed" stars to show no parallax across the Earth's orbit. Newtonian physics is at the heart of accepting the former, and the latter is still not comprehensible to most people. (Most people dramatically underestimate cosmic distances.) The heliocentric model is much more elegant than the geocentric model, and I'm a big fan of the principle of parsimony. But elegance is not suficient for an acceptable theory. All the premises have to be "reasonable", as well. Those were not acceptable premises at the time. The ancients were not "stupid" to reject them.
Copernicus asserted the heliocentric model without any empirical evidence. In other words, he did so for the reasons of mathematical elegance alluded to above. Daniel Boorstein in "Dicoverers" conjectures that it was because Ptolemy's geography had been proven so false that it became possible to seriously question his astronomy. Nevertheless, it was only with Galileo's telescope that observations were available that couldn't be reconciled with the geocentric model.
I see people here describing vastly different personal experiences. It is a mistake to extrapolate carelessly from your own experience.
I have about a hundred recordable CDs due to arrive at my front door tomorrow. I did not buy them for the purpose of copying music CDs, nor did I buy them for the purpose of burning to CD downloaded music I don't own. It's not very efficient, but I use them to back up applications I've bought electronically (which I do more and more often). I use them to make images of Linux distros. I use them to back up my porn (which may be objectionable, but that's a seperate issue). I use them for.... I don't know what. I probably won't use all those CDs before I upgrade to a DVD writer. I think it's absurd that I have to pay a compensatory tax on something as multiple use as recordable CDs. I also rip all the CDs I buy (and, hmm, let's see, I've probably bought already 20 music CDs this year) and convert them to MP3s, particularly so I can transfer them to my car Empeg player. I am absolutely furious that the recording industry is agitating to prevent me from what I'm legally (and justifiably) entitled to do with the music I buy.
I'm highly skeptical of the RIAA's claims because they're so dissimilar to my experience. But I'm 37 years old. I have no idea what teenagers are doing these days. Furthermore, I do know people who have accumulated large (illegal) MP3 collections and are burning those to disk. So I have reason to believe there's a problem. I just don't think it's as enormous as the recording industry is claiming that it is.
What's desperately needed is a good, authoritative study of the actual use of purchased CDs, downloaded CDs, and recordable CDs. Everything I've seen so far has been funded by someone with something they're trying to prove. I'd like to see a comprehensive academic study.
They've improved this significantly with XP Pro (I don't know about Home). I've not found anything yet in the networking configuration that requires the machine to be rebooted, except perhaps a machine name change. They seem to have nicely isolated the networking code, and network connections can be dynamically enabled or disabled, and reconfigured. I am ashamed to say that I've not known what thay option did on the advanced networking tab, and I've left it enabled. Just now I turned it off. No reboot. Networking just restarted, as it would on a UN*X box.
As a side note, XP's setup seems to really want to use my 1394 card for networking, and then it automatically "bridges" it to the ethernet connection. I don't think it should do that by default. But it could be pretty handy to have my machines on a 1394 network (what is that 400mbps or so?), and only one on ethernet to the firewalling router. Finally, I was aware that there was something new out there (that had caused some security problems) called "UPnP", but I didn't know anything about it. Well, I did a firmware update on my linksys, and a little while later a new networking connection appeared and displayed as being "connected" in my system tray. Suddenly XP knew about the linksys, and I could control forwarding by the linksys with the config for that "gateway" connection known to XP. This really freaked me out until I did some research and discovered that UPnP is enabled invisibly by default on XP, and that it's a broadcast protocol that finds devices on the network. It's pretty cool when it works -- and I had no problems with it -- but I suspect that lots of things could go horribly, horribly wrong.
Part of the group that wrote the consitution didn't want a list, but the other part that eventually won, knew that if things were left to ambigous, it would be taken as license to do whatever the government wanted to do.
That's an inaccurate representation of the controversy about the Bill of Rights. In fact, the majority that was initially against such a thing were mostly very uncomfortable with anyting that tilted the balance so far toward the individual and away from the state. Most of them harbored a considerable mistrust of the "common man". However, a significant minority of those opposed were those who, as you say, believed that to specifically protect some liberties would weaken any implied protections of those that were not specifically mentioned.
What actually caused the Bill of Rights to be realized was a populist movement that demanded it. Madison was initially opposed to a Bill of Rights, but then became convinced of its necessity and subsequently rode that populist wave to successfully include it.
This strife between the writers of the Constitution and the general population is a historical fact that has been typically elided in our conventional, mythological view of the supposed infallibility and unsullied motives of the "Founding Fathers".
Furthermore, the Bill of Rights didn't actually amount to very much until this century. Obviously state governments violated it consistently, as it didn't apparently apply to them; but so did the federal government routinely ignore whatever it didn't like. Censorship, unreasonable search and seizure, what have you -- all were fairly commonplace. This, too, is conveniently forgotten by those that mythologize a past America where civil liberties were supposedly untrammeled. Unfortunately, that time never existed. We live in an era of unprecedented governmental respect for civil liberties.
Nevertheless, that doesn't make me any more comfortable with Ashcroft and his myriad offenses.
Re:Genetics discrediting evolution
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e-Denounce
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Assuming that ecologists and specialists in evolutionary theory are unlikely to be friendly to your argument; I'm curious: can you find and post here ten molecular biologists that support your arguments? My friend (sole-authorship in a recent "Nature") won't.
Most of your objections are old, old, old objections to evolution that pre-date much knowledge about genetics. They didn't hold water then, and they don't hold water now.
And, please, write "punctuated equilibrium" instead of your ridiculous use of an absurd diminutive intended to imply your possession of a supposedly esoteric knowledge. It's more embarassing than impressive.
I agree with you except that I don't think that it's necessarily either/or.
I think that there are lots of reasons why the UNIX tool model is still very useful in a modern-GUI desktop OS. The biggest is that the set of all possible tasks is always going to be much greater than the set of monolithic applications designed to accomplish specific tasks. The reason that it doesn't have to be either/or is that a great many GUI tools could be designed to offer command-line UNIX-esque interfaces friendly to scripting. It's my understanding that MS has moved in this direction with much of the key toolset of XP (and I realize that there's a strange history involved in all this, with NT originally being designed to conform to POSIX), and I think that's terrific.
99.9% of users will never need to utilitize the toolset functionality of many of their apps, but it sure seems to make sense to me to provide it for those that will -- even though they are a small number of your user base, they will disproportionately solve problems and extend the functionality of the environment, possible even exporting that functionality to naive users. This is a good thing.
(Please, put those flamethrowers away. I've been an off-and-of Linux user for eight years.)
Am I the only person that is really impressed and happy with all the little GUI improvements and knick-knacks found in XP? I upgraded my 2000 box -- my main desktop box -- to XP Pro in January, and I've been very pleased with it. All the power of NT-->2K with the GUI maturity of a post-98 Windows world. It's very slick and quite attractive. Noticeably increased usability, too, I think.
I've been futzing around with a Redhat 7.1 distro, and quickly got frustrated with the GUI. I like BeOS, but, sadly, it's dead and it didn't work completely with any of my machines anyway. I got quite turned on by QNX last year -- there's something really competent "feeling" about it. And I admit that the Mandrake installation is very nice.
Still, though, at this point I can't really imagine leaving Windows behind as my main desktop environment. With the software ubquitity of regulat Windows coupled with the greatly increased sopphistication and stability of NT that was achieved with 2K -- and now the significant increase in usability and attractiveness in XP -- going anywhere else at this point would require a significant sacrifice in one area or another.
Don't get me wrong: I crave the toolset functionality of UNIX. I've shell-scripted professionally, and I have done a lot to convert my Windows boxes to pseudo-UNIX machines in order to achieve this sort of functionality. U/Win and Active State's fine version of Perl and related tools go a long way towards this. Still, though, haveing said all this, what I really crave is a real UNIX with the software base of Windows and the GUI maturity of XP or, presumably (because I've not used it) OS X. I have never been a Mac person (like many of us here at/., I've always been aware that pre-OS X Mac OS's were technically crap, and I praised the Gods-That-Be when Windows dumped cooperative multitasking with 95 back in '96.), but I've been open to the idea of a Mac ever since OS X shipped -- for all the reasons I state above. UNIX underneath, a mature GUI on top. Sounds good. I'm sorry to hear that you think it fails at the latter.
The truth is that the producer and the consumer together decide what the consumer purchases. This is because a market never operates at perfect efficiency. And markets don't operate at perfect efficiency because everyone isn't omniscient. Are you following me, maggard?
As you point out, the producers don't always recognize what the consuer wants. If they don't recognize it, they are unlikely to produce it; and if they don't produce it, no one can buy it. This fallibility of producers -- in this example, record companies -- was central to maggard's counter-argument that the record companies often get their "stickers" wrong, which they do. Maggard should also realize that this fallibility implies inefficiency in the market which further implies that that inefficiency allows the producer to a certain degree to dictate the consumer's choices. And they do.
I found maggard's post hilarious and I agreed with it heartily, for the most part. "Pop culture" is inevitable going to be of lower-quality than other culture simply because all of its consumers are not as interested in its quality (how many people do you know that don't actually buy many CDs but do listen to the radio and enjoy pop music that they don't listen to very closely?), and a large portion of its consumers aren't sophisticated enough to make judgments of quality -- mostly because they don't care. They have other things to worry about than to expand their exposure to various forms of art. That's human nature.
However, what I've been trying to explain ealier in this post is that there is a general principle why producers can greatly influence consumer's choices. Furthermore, it is also simply the case that, in relative terms, the American music industry has a great deal of influence in consumer taste. They control the overwhelming portion of the indsutry, all the way from production to distribution to retailing. It doesn't have to be that way, and they are terrified that it won't.
However, the fact remains that as Napster useage increased, music sales really did go up. When Napster died, music sales really did go down.
Yeah, and is it possible that the reason for that, and the reason that music sales are down now, might be that this trend nicely correlates with the economic environment of the times? Yes, it's more than possible, it's likely.
The increase of decline in music sales is overwhelmingly influenced by economic conditions; and only secondarily by this whole network piracy situation.
That said, I'd like to mention that I, too, am an exception to the rule: I've never prirated more than a couple of dozen songs, at most; and only then because they were hard to find, I was unsure whether I liked them enough to by them, or for similar reasons.
Since I buy more CDs now than I ever have in the past, and I have an Empeg in my car that I need to rip them to; this whole supposed MP3s == piracy equation and the RIAA's propoganda about it is especially galling. As you can see, there are many like us. The argument against the RIAA and their allies is quite strong.
However, it is also simply true that most of the people that I know that are also "into" MP3s are pirating most of them. So I do think that I and those like me are, in fact, the exception to the rule, not the rule. But that doesn't change the fact that the RIAA's argument is fundamentally unsound in that they are trying to fight the lawbreakers by restricting the legally recognized fair use of copyrighted materials in an extremely unreasonable manner.
Yeah, I spent a couple of years "in the biz". I was not paid, but worked voluntarily on an online-only game rag that has since bitten the dust.
Those two sentences strung together are possibly the most hilariously pathetic I've seen in several weeks. And I thought that nobodies in LA mentioning that they were "in ths biz" was bad.
Heh. No, I'm not a Communist, I'm a guy who wrote a check to the government in '00 for $96,000 to pay (the rest of!) my income taxes. And "66%" is not the highest bracket, much less the total amount that the wealthiest pay in taxes. The highest bracket right now is about 40%. Only people whose majority of their income is in the very top bracket -- about 200K or so -- will actually pay close (as a total percentage of their income) to that 40% in taxes. In a nutshell, you don't know what the hell you're talking about; and not only do I know what I'm talking about, I'm one of those "rich people" you're talking about.
The reason that this is a problem is the same reason that providing only the very best education to rich children is a problem: it creates a permanant underclass where only the wealthiest have the best opportunities to make money. This isn't good for democracy; but just on a purely pragmatic level it isn't good for capitalism. Any given poor, underfed, undereducated kid could be a potential Bill Gates but is far less likely to become a Bill Gates. We all benefit materially when people create new wealth. That's the beauty of market economics.
When advanced reproductive technology becomes available to only the wealthy, they will use it, naturally, to give their children as many advantages as possible. This will the rest of the children out in the cold and create, eventually, an insurmountable barrier for them to contribute at the same level. The result will be a rigid class society -- something Americans aren't too fond of (which is why we have financial aid and not the sort of prep school system that, for example, Britain has) -- that will also be less economically productive. America's economic mobility between classes and its large middle-class have played a large role in our extraodinary productivity. Technologies and social policies that concentrate wealth in families through generations are a bad thing for a whole host of reasons. Not the least of which is that it means there will be less rich people, and less wealth creation.
Well, no offense, but I think I'm a little more up on reproductive biology than you are. Thanks for trying to answer my questions, though.
The reason that women have the so-called "biological clock" is because they are born with the few million eggs they'll ever have already in their ovaries. Those eggs sit there, being released one at a time (usually) each month starting at menses. The reason there are increasing complications with pregnancy as a woman's years advance has much more to do with the increasing likeliehood of harmful mutations in the DNA of those eggs as a result of, primarily, cosmic radiation. The older the mother, the greater the likliehood of birth defects.
Sperm cells don't reproduce (except in reproduction!), of course; but they are produced by cells that are -- I'm assuming -- themselves reproducing and so are prone to cumulative mutation. I bring this up because this is one of the main problems with cloning -- as it was explained to me years ago by a friend who's a molecular biologist -- in that taking the DNA from any random cell of an adult's body will likely yield DNA that's been significantly corrupted from the DNA at birth. It normally doesn't matter (but does not infrequently result in cancer!) mostly because these cells are already highly specialized and so the odds are against any given mutation being relevant to that cell's workings. But when you take that damaged DNA and use it to generate stem cells, then that damaged DNA will be expressed in the functional damage of some of the differentiated cells which result. My question is how do sperm cells avoid this problem. One possible answer I provided was that they don't -- since half of the genetic material comes from the mother, and most mutations are irrelevant because they're recessive -- then it ends up not mattering. I don't know if that's the case or not, but it seems plausible. But anyway, this is all why men don't have the "biological clock" the way that women do. It's (mostly) not because older women's bodies are less robust for pregnancy and birth than are younger women's.
It does make me wonder why people aren't harvesting some of the young females' eggs and putting them in cold storage protected from radiation. Especially so if cloning becomes viable.
But it still seems to me that all of these problems with cloning could be overcome. You could only use the least likely to be damaged DNA from the woman. You could do a statistical analysis of many DNA samples from the woman (or man), and thus getting a "corrected" genome to use (providing you could put it together somehow). If it's the mitochondrial DNA that's part of the problem, then start cloning it, one way or another. (Why not simply transport the mitochondria into the new cell as well as the nuclear DNA?) If it's the alien cellular environment (apart from the mitochondria problem), then why not do the whole thing in a two-step process wher you make sure the cellular environment is "correct" for the DNA package you're transporting?
The minor problems with cloning are the access problems -- will it be only for the rich? But that's a general health care problem. What is a real threat, in my opinion, is that widespread cloning will reduce the genetic variability across the human population. That's a bad thing for a huge number of different reasons.
Hey, AC-with-a-score-of-five, I have some questions.
First of all, do sperm and ova show the same amount of degredation through mutation (via cosmic radiation, mostly?) as the rest of the DNA in the body? (Well, since ova are single generation then they're not mutated, just damaged, right?) Also, since ova are "original eqipment", and so aren't subject to generational mutation -- but they are still subject to damage in place. So that's why older women are more prone to having babies with deformities. But if regular cells accrue genetic drift through generational changes, how come this isn't so with sperm? Or if it is the case, how come we don't worry about older men reproducing as much as we worry about older women? (It occurs to me that the reson for this is that the younger woman's uncorrupted DNA from her ova counteracts the corrupted DNA from the male's sperm. But was women get older, then both the DNA from the sperm and ovum are likely to be corrupted.)
Secondly, is this largely corrected via sexual reproduction, and how?
Thirdly, so how do creatures that reproduce asexually avoid this problem? Is it simply that they're less complex?
Fourthly, at some point won't we be able to actually sequence, easily, an individual's DNA and then do a statistical analysis that produces the "corrected" genome? Could we then synthesize that corrected genome?
Fifthly, why are they only cloning females? Because DNA taken from ova is such an easier task than taking it from sperm? Or is it something else?
Sixthly, I'm really curious about sexual differentiation. Since sex is determined by the Y chromosome, and a chromosome is such a large unit of genetic data; isn't it correct that it doesn't make sense to say that there is a "male" version of a female (because it's dependent upon the particular Y chromosome inherited from the father); but that there is a "female" version of a male (just duplicate the X chromosome that came from the mother)?
Seventhly (okay, this is getting annoying, huh?), I thought that I read that many of the problems associated with damaged clones has to do with the fact that the DNA doesn't match the cellular environment it's been placed into. It's not just that the DNA is degraded, supposedly... If so, however, I imagine that this is a surmountable problem.
Eighthly, just how much does the mitochondrial DNA matter, anyway? Does the genome of the mitochodrial DNA influence anything beyond the mitochondria? Do we know? Is it possible that there are complex developmental (to pick something plausible) differences that might result from a cascade of increasing effects that stem from a mitochnodrial difference?
It's odd that you would recommend either of those Donaldson books -- in my opinion, they are his two worst. The only thing he's done that is first-rate have been the Covenant books. And I say that as someone who's read all his novels, has two of them autographed and whose family plays bridge regularly with Donaldson. Pullman's trilogy is easily superior to anything of Donaldson's except the Covenant books (which I consider to be both genre and almost-but-not-quite literary classics).
Having said that, I will agree that Pullman's trilogy is quite overrated. It is quite inventive in its specifics (not theme), well written and certainly of sufficient quality to be not limited to merely children. And it is far more rich than the Potter books (though certainly not as charming). However, I strongly suspect that a good portion of the praise its generated is the result of its rather astonishingly anti-Christian stridency. I'm not myself a particular fan of Christianity, but I found the books' polemics to be their nearly-fatal flaw. But then I don't really like to be beaten over the head with a brick by any author -- I find "The Poisonwood Bible" similarly off-putting. (Indeed, Tolstoy's occasional lengthy narrative-destroying monologues in "War and Peace" are that book's only flaws. I mention this only to make the point that I don't tolerate such heavy handedness even in the novel I believe to be the first among all.)
I also caution everyone not to judge a book by its marketing. Just because it is marketed -- or even written -- for children doesn't mean that it is necessarily any less deserving of adult respect or interest. "Alice in Wonderland" was/is a "children's book" but I might even include it as part of the western canon (I say that as someone who has had a "Great Books" education).
Kevin,
As a neuroscientist, then perhaps you can address the concern that I have.
Wasn't the previous poster that talked about "burn in" possibly more correct than people are giving him credit for? It seems to me that users would find it desirable to have an image remain fixed within their field of vision; and consequently some receptors will be relatively continuously stimulated at a given frequency and amplitude over a long period of time, while others (nearby) will not. From what little I know about neurology, I'd expect some aberrant behavior -- of the receptors themselves and stuff further down the line -- to result.
Wouldn't this type of fixed, constant and long-term stimulation of discrete areas be unprecedented biologically?
Well, uncorrected Myopia would most certainly affect the display, as the outer lens of my eye is stretched incorrectly causing the focal point to differ....
But the previous poster pointed out that:
...since a laser beam is collimated, and the area of the field is small...
This would be even more the case with your eye.
That's part of the beauty of this system. The change of the focal length of your eye while you use the device has a negligible affect on the focal point -- and tracking -- of the laser. It would be just like something superimposed on a television screen while the camera changes focus. I'm guessing -- but am not certain -- that this might be unsettling. Wouldn't there be a strong perception of the projected image growing and shrinking (or moving nearer and farther)? Although the lack of parallax would diminish that.
A better solution would be for the laser track to mimic a fixed percieved focal length, along with two devices creating parallax. A sufficiently sophisticated system could orient the image relative to the external environment rather than relative to your head. This is how you could get the perception of something like a "hologram" -- a term the author uses in the article and which I questioned.
Slashdot Mirror
The first two appear to require a "simulated loan officer". I doubt that the poster's site is doing that. The third is essentially dynamic generation of displayed "marketing" information on a client computer customized to the particular customer. E.g., what every single commercial web site is doing. This is an absurd patent. They all three are, really.
True, the 800's were built to be more "sporty" than the 700's ever have been; but that article mentions that they're going to introduce a V-12 model in the 700 series. (The 850ci was the V-12).
My 840 was built to be a high-performance "touring" automobile, and it's electronically governed to top out at 155mph. That's not just theoretical -- it'll actually go that fast. I took it up to 135mph (late at night on a deserted highway) with no trouble at all, and it rode like a dream. I'd never been over a hundred in a car before that drove like it was supposed to be going that fast. This is probably why the insurance rates are so high.
The 700's, I guess, are more designed to be high-performing super-luxury cars; rather than luxurious high-performing (touring, not pure acceleration) cars. My 840ci is, for the most part, an example of simplified luxurious instrumentation.
I have never owned -- not even driven -- a car that compares to my 840ci. This is a car that is almost ten years old now, and has no rattles or squeaks of any kind. It is truly an awe-inspiring piece of engineering. You could eat dinner off of any of the surfaces in the engine compartment, and I've never cleaned them. (That's a slight exageration, I wouldn't actually eat off of it.)
I think I'm more inclined toward the 500 series than these new 700's. Maybe the sport V-12 model will be interesting. But I would like to see BMW making something like the 800s again, even thought they didn't sell very well in the US.
Anyone?
As the previous poster said, the gun type weapon fires a subcritical mass of fissionable material at another subcritical mass of fissionable material. It is much simpler to construct. However, since this design requires the use of uranium-235 as the fissionable material, it is both much larger and heavier than the implosion type, and the fissionable material (u-235) is much harder to produce than what the implosion device uses.
The reason for this is because plutonium-239 (what the implosion weapon uses) has a high enough neutron absorption cross-section that a) you need much less p-239 for a critical mass than you do u-235; and b) you can't shoot one sub-critical mass of p-239 into another quickly enough to avoid premature detonation in a gun design. You can't use p-239 in a gun design weapon. So it's obvious that the gun type has the disadvantage of being much larger and heavier, since it requires u-235 instead of p-239.
But the bigger problem is that u-235 is very, very hard to produce. It makes up less than a tenth of a percent of natural uranium, which is mostly made up of u-238. It differs from u-238 only very, very slightly in mass, and so "enrichening" uranium (which means increasing the ratio of u-235 to u-238) is a very, very expensive and difficult process. The fact that anyone has managed to do it is something of an engineering marvel in itself.
On the other hand, a fission reactor using uranium-238 (u-238 works fine for a reactor, which doesn't require explosive criticality....in fact, explosive criticality would be something of a design flaw, wouldn't it?) produces plutonium-239 in small amounts in the course of its operation. And p-239 is pretty easy to refine from the u-238.
So, at the time at which they were ready to test the first bomb at Trinity Site, they had only enough u-235 for a single bomb, but enough p-239 for two bombs. The gun design was almost certain to work, and so they didn't need to test it -- and they only had enough u-235 for one bomb anyway. What they weren't sure of was whether the implosion type would work. They had enough for two, so they could test one.
The real trick isn't just in getting a perfectly sperical implosion, as the previous poster said. Rather, the real trick was figuring out how to shape the charges by "lensing" such that the compression waves interfered with each other just so that chaotic effects were delayed long enough for super-criticality to occur. Without the lensing, a simple spherical implosion had compression wave interference patterns that would desymmetricize the super-criticality and causing only a small, if any, mass to explosively become super-critical. The implosion design is the other quite amazing engineering marvel of the Manhatten Project. And it worked the first time. They used the single u-235 gun-type weapon on Hiroshima, which they were pretty sure would work. They used the other p-239 on Nagasaki.
So, gun type bombs are easy to build, but they require hard-to-produce fissionable material. And they're big and heavy. Implosion type bombs are much harder to build, but they use very easy to produce fissionable material, and are quite small. (Note that the gun design also requires a total mass that is somewhat higher than critical mass; while a sophisticated implosion design can actually utilize a total mass that's sub-critical and achieve criticality through compression.)
The idea that consciousness could occur outside the context of emotion is a pernicious misconception. It arose from the combination of a greatly oversimplified view of thought and the legacy of dualism.
It is true that what we experience as "emotion" is a subtly different kind of cognition than what we experience as deliberate thought. It's more fundamental, and more closely tied to other physical systems. So I do agree that it makes a certain sort of sense to distinguish "thought" and "emotion". Ultimately, however, both are manifestations of the same fundamental brain activity. They are deeply related and are not in opposition.
We've been spectacularly bad at analysis of our own consciousness. History has shown that much of what we don't notice and so take completely for granted are fundamental and extremely difficult problems; while what we are very aware of and have concentrated upon have proven to be trivial. The predicate calculus, in this context, is trivial.
I've long railed against the cliche of the "unfeeling" thinking machine/being one sees in popular science fiction. Neither Spock nor Data would be able to carry on a meaningful conversation if their thought didn't exist within the context of emotion. The idea that a thinking machine could imitate human consciousness without including human emotion is absurd if examined carefully.
Be that as it may, "affective computing" is only a very minor addition to computing in the context of AI. It's just another form of data acquisition, albeit one that would no doubt be very useful for an AI. None of this stuff we hear about is even remotely close to actual AI; at best it's just "smarter" computing. Real AI will only be achieved when we are able to build (or more properly, "grow") very high-level complex adaptive systems aimed at complex human interaction.
Given the cost/benefit analysis and the low number of people running their own servers that aren't spammers, I agree that it makes sense to use the DUL. Still, that doesn't make it any more "fair" to those legitimate netizens that are being blocked. And there certainly is no justification for being angry with them. It's just one more bit of basic functionality of the 'net that is taken away from the end user as a result of egregious exploitation of that functionality by a few opportunists. If you keep trying to deal with these vandals in successive ways that generate collateral damage, eventually the collateral damage is going to add up to an amount that is unacceptable. Thus, such solutions are a temporary fix, at best; and, at worse, delay the implementation of real solutions.
As one of the tiny minority of people who've studied Ptolemy's Almagest in detail, I must disagree with you.
Ptolemy explained retrogradation perfectly well. Retrogradation wasn't the problem. You can have retrogradation with a simple epicycle on a centered deferent, given certain angular velocities. This is extremely simple geometry, and there's nothing objectionable about it.
The real problem was the equant. To explain some planetary motions, Ptolemy had to make the center of their rate of motion independent of the motions themselves. [The analogy I use to explain this is to imagine a circular train track, with a hollow ball pushed around the track by a rod affixed to a motor at the center of the circle. If you make the motor eccentric to the track (by moving the motor or the track), the ball's motion will continue to be centered on the center of the track (as long as the ball can slide in and out along the rod), but its rate of motion will be centered on the motor.]
It's already pushing it when you postulate a geocentric universe and then have some of the celestial bodies move about the Earth eccentricaly (though very slightly). But, in my opinion, disconnecting the rate of motion from the path of motion was too ugly. Circles on circles centered on the Earth is elegant enough to "just be". Making the rate of the motion eccentric to the path of motion makes one want an answer to "why?". The equant is the subtle negative evidence within the classic geocentric model. The ancients accepted a certain amount of increased complexity in order to avoid a proposition they couldn't stomach: that the Earth was in motion. It's my opinion that the equant pushed the limits of acceptable complexity, and they knew it.
The positive evidence for a heliocentric model contained within the geocentric model is that the motions of all the planets have a constant relationship with the motion of the Sun. In the geocentric model, this doesn't have to be true. But it is, and it points clearly to a heliocentric model.
Those before Ptolemy and Ptolemy himself were aware of a heliocentric model. They were aware that the geometry is simpler and more elegant. But they quite rightly had a great deal of difficulty accepting that the Earth was in motion; and they had a great deal of difficulty accepting that the visible cosmos would have to be so large as to allow the "fixed" stars to show no parallax across the Earth's orbit. Newtonian physics is at the heart of accepting the former, and the latter is still not comprehensible to most people. (Most people dramatically underestimate cosmic distances.) The heliocentric model is much more elegant than the geocentric model, and I'm a big fan of the principle of parsimony. But elegance is not suficient for an acceptable theory. All the premises have to be "reasonable", as well. Those were not acceptable premises at the time. The ancients were not "stupid" to reject them.
Copernicus asserted the heliocentric model without any empirical evidence. In other words, he did so for the reasons of mathematical elegance alluded to above. Daniel Boorstein in "Dicoverers" conjectures that it was because Ptolemy's geography had been proven so false that it became possible to seriously question his astronomy. Nevertheless, it was only with Galileo's telescope that observations were available that couldn't be reconciled with the geocentric model.
...and mostly written by Szilard. Einstein wrote a quick introduction of his own.
I have about a hundred recordable CDs due to arrive at my front door tomorrow. I did not buy them for the purpose of copying music CDs, nor did I buy them for the purpose of burning to CD downloaded music I don't own. It's not very efficient, but I use them to back up applications I've bought electronically (which I do more and more often). I use them to make images of Linux distros. I use them to back up my porn (which may be objectionable, but that's a seperate issue). I use them for.... I don't know what. I probably won't use all those CDs before I upgrade to a DVD writer. I think it's absurd that I have to pay a compensatory tax on something as multiple use as recordable CDs. I also rip all the CDs I buy (and, hmm, let's see, I've probably bought already 20 music CDs this year) and convert them to MP3s, particularly so I can transfer them to my car Empeg player. I am absolutely furious that the recording industry is agitating to prevent me from what I'm legally (and justifiably) entitled to do with the music I buy.
I'm highly skeptical of the RIAA's claims because they're so dissimilar to my experience. But I'm 37 years old. I have no idea what teenagers are doing these days. Furthermore, I do know people who have accumulated large (illegal) MP3 collections and are burning those to disk. So I have reason to believe there's a problem. I just don't think it's as enormous as the recording industry is claiming that it is.
What's desperately needed is a good, authoritative study of the actual use of purchased CDs, downloaded CDs, and recordable CDs. Everything I've seen so far has been funded by someone with something they're trying to prove. I'd like to see a comprehensive academic study.
They've improved this significantly with XP Pro (I don't know about Home). I've not found anything yet in the networking configuration that requires the machine to be rebooted, except perhaps a machine name change. They seem to have nicely isolated the networking code, and network connections can be dynamically enabled or disabled, and reconfigured. I am ashamed to say that I've not known what thay option did on the advanced networking tab, and I've left it enabled. Just now I turned it off. No reboot. Networking just restarted, as it would on a UN*X box. As a side note, XP's setup seems to really want to use my 1394 card for networking, and then it automatically "bridges" it to the ethernet connection. I don't think it should do that by default. But it could be pretty handy to have my machines on a 1394 network (what is that 400mbps or so?), and only one on ethernet to the firewalling router. Finally, I was aware that there was something new out there (that had caused some security problems) called "UPnP", but I didn't know anything about it. Well, I did a firmware update on my linksys, and a little while later a new networking connection appeared and displayed as being "connected" in my system tray. Suddenly XP knew about the linksys, and I could control forwarding by the linksys with the config for that "gateway" connection known to XP. This really freaked me out until I did some research and discovered that UPnP is enabled invisibly by default on XP, and that it's a broadcast protocol that finds devices on the network. It's pretty cool when it works -- and I had no problems with it -- but I suspect that lots of things could go horribly, horribly wrong.
What actually caused the Bill of Rights to be realized was a populist movement that demanded it. Madison was initially opposed to a Bill of Rights, but then became convinced of its necessity and subsequently rode that populist wave to successfully include it.
This strife between the writers of the Constitution and the general population is a historical fact that has been typically elided in our conventional, mythological view of the supposed infallibility and unsullied motives of the "Founding Fathers".
Furthermore, the Bill of Rights didn't actually amount to very much until this century. Obviously state governments violated it consistently, as it didn't apparently apply to them; but so did the federal government routinely ignore whatever it didn't like. Censorship, unreasonable search and seizure, what have you -- all were fairly commonplace. This, too, is conveniently forgotten by those that mythologize a past America where civil liberties were supposedly untrammeled. Unfortunately, that time never existed. We live in an era of unprecedented governmental respect for civil liberties.
Nevertheless, that doesn't make me any more comfortable with Ashcroft and his myriad offenses.
Assuming that ecologists and specialists in evolutionary theory are unlikely to be friendly to your argument; I'm curious: can you find and post here ten molecular biologists that support your arguments? My friend (sole-authorship in a recent "Nature") won't. Most of your objections are old, old, old objections to evolution that pre-date much knowledge about genetics. They didn't hold water then, and they don't hold water now. And, please, write "punctuated equilibrium" instead of your ridiculous use of an absurd diminutive intended to imply your possession of a supposedly esoteric knowledge. It's more embarassing than impressive.
I think that there are lots of reasons why the UNIX tool model is still very useful in a modern-GUI desktop OS. The biggest is that the set of all possible tasks is always going to be much greater than the set of monolithic applications designed to accomplish specific tasks. The reason that it doesn't have to be either/or is that a great many GUI tools could be designed to offer command-line UNIX-esque interfaces friendly to scripting. It's my understanding that MS has moved in this direction with much of the key toolset of XP (and I realize that there's a strange history involved in all this, with NT originally being designed to conform to POSIX), and I think that's terrific.
99.9% of users will never need to utilitize the toolset functionality of many of their apps, but it sure seems to make sense to me to provide it for those that will -- even though they are a small number of your user base, they will disproportionately solve problems and extend the functionality of the environment, possible even exporting that functionality to naive users. This is a good thing.
(Please, put those flamethrowers away. I've been an off-and-of Linux user for eight years.)
Am I the only person that is really impressed and happy with all the little GUI improvements and knick-knacks found in XP? I upgraded my 2000 box -- my main desktop box -- to XP Pro in January, and I've been very pleased with it. All the power of NT-->2K with the GUI maturity of a post-98 Windows world. It's very slick and quite attractive. Noticeably increased usability, too, I think.
I've been futzing around with a Redhat 7.1 distro, and quickly got frustrated with the GUI. I like BeOS, but, sadly, it's dead and it didn't work completely with any of my machines anyway. I got quite turned on by QNX last year -- there's something really competent "feeling" about it. And I admit that the Mandrake installation is very nice.
Still, though, at this point I can't really imagine leaving Windows behind as my main desktop environment. With the software ubquitity of regulat Windows coupled with the greatly increased sopphistication and stability of NT that was achieved with 2K -- and now the significant increase in usability and attractiveness in XP -- going anywhere else at this point would require a significant sacrifice in one area or another.
Don't get me wrong: I crave the toolset functionality of UNIX. I've shell-scripted professionally, and I have done a lot to convert my Windows boxes to pseudo-UNIX machines in order to achieve this sort of functionality. U/Win and Active State's fine version of Perl and related tools go a long way towards this. Still, though, haveing said all this, what I really crave is a real UNIX with the software base of Windows and the GUI maturity of XP or, presumably (because I've not used it) OS X. I have never been a Mac person (like many of us here at /., I've always been aware that pre-OS X Mac OS's were technically crap, and I praised the Gods-That-Be when Windows dumped cooperative multitasking with 95 back in '96.), but I've been open to the idea of a Mac ever since OS X shipped -- for all the reasons I state above. UNIX underneath, a mature GUI on top. Sounds good. I'm sorry to hear that you think it fails at the latter.
He's (she's?) not totally right.
The truth is that the producer and the consumer together decide what the consumer purchases. This is because a market never operates at perfect efficiency. And markets don't operate at perfect efficiency because everyone isn't omniscient. Are you following me, maggard?
As you point out, the producers don't always recognize what the consuer wants. If they don't recognize it, they are unlikely to produce it; and if they don't produce it, no one can buy it. This fallibility of producers -- in this example, record companies -- was central to maggard's counter-argument that the record companies often get their "stickers" wrong, which they do. Maggard should also realize that this fallibility implies inefficiency in the market which further implies that that inefficiency allows the producer to a certain degree to dictate the consumer's choices. And they do.
I found maggard's post hilarious and I agreed with it heartily, for the most part. "Pop culture" is inevitable going to be of lower-quality than other culture simply because all of its consumers are not as interested in its quality (how many people do you know that don't actually buy many CDs but do listen to the radio and enjoy pop music that they don't listen to very closely?), and a large portion of its consumers aren't sophisticated enough to make judgments of quality -- mostly because they don't care. They have other things to worry about than to expand their exposure to various forms of art. That's human nature.
However, what I've been trying to explain ealier in this post is that there is a general principle why producers can greatly influence consumer's choices. Furthermore, it is also simply the case that, in relative terms, the American music industry has a great deal of influence in consumer taste. They control the overwhelming portion of the indsutry, all the way from production to distribution to retailing. It doesn't have to be that way, and they are terrified that it won't.
The increase of decline in music sales is overwhelmingly influenced by economic conditions; and only secondarily by this whole network piracy situation.
That said, I'd like to mention that I, too, am an exception to the rule: I've never prirated more than a couple of dozen songs, at most; and only then because they were hard to find, I was unsure whether I liked them enough to by them, or for similar reasons.
Since I buy more CDs now than I ever have in the past, and I have an Empeg in my car that I need to rip them to; this whole supposed MP3s == piracy equation and the RIAA's propoganda about it is especially galling. As you can see, there are many like us. The argument against the RIAA and their allies is quite strong.
However, it is also simply true that most of the people that I know that are also "into" MP3s are pirating most of them. So I do think that I and those like me are, in fact, the exception to the rule, not the rule. But that doesn't change the fact that the RIAA's argument is fundamentally unsound in that they are trying to fight the lawbreakers by restricting the legally recognized fair use of copyrighted materials in an extremely unreasonable manner.
Those two sentences strung together are possibly the most hilariously pathetic I've seen in several weeks. And I thought that nobodies in LA mentioning that they were "in ths biz" was bad.
Sorry, this wasn't that nice of me.
Okay, but then why (I have been told) are transcription errors in DNA taken from regular cells for cloning a problem?
The reason that this is a problem is the same reason that providing only the very best education to rich children is a problem: it creates a permanant underclass where only the wealthiest have the best opportunities to make money. This isn't good for democracy; but just on a purely pragmatic level it isn't good for capitalism. Any given poor, underfed, undereducated kid could be a potential Bill Gates but is far less likely to become a Bill Gates. We all benefit materially when people create new wealth. That's the beauty of market economics.
When advanced reproductive technology becomes available to only the wealthy, they will use it, naturally, to give their children as many advantages as possible. This will the rest of the children out in the cold and create, eventually, an insurmountable barrier for them to contribute at the same level. The result will be a rigid class society -- something Americans aren't too fond of (which is why we have financial aid and not the sort of prep school system that, for example, Britain has) -- that will also be less economically productive. America's economic mobility between classes and its large middle-class have played a large role in our extraodinary productivity. Technologies and social policies that concentrate wealth in families through generations are a bad thing for a whole host of reasons. Not the least of which is that it means there will be less rich people, and less wealth creation.
The reason that women have the so-called "biological clock" is because they are born with the few million eggs they'll ever have already in their ovaries. Those eggs sit there, being released one at a time (usually) each month starting at menses. The reason there are increasing complications with pregnancy as a woman's years advance has much more to do with the increasing likeliehood of harmful mutations in the DNA of those eggs as a result of, primarily, cosmic radiation. The older the mother, the greater the likliehood of birth defects.
Sperm cells don't reproduce (except in reproduction!), of course; but they are produced by cells that are -- I'm assuming -- themselves reproducing and so are prone to cumulative mutation. I bring this up because this is one of the main problems with cloning -- as it was explained to me years ago by a friend who's a molecular biologist -- in that taking the DNA from any random cell of an adult's body will likely yield DNA that's been significantly corrupted from the DNA at birth. It normally doesn't matter (but does not infrequently result in cancer!) mostly because these cells are already highly specialized and so the odds are against any given mutation being relevant to that cell's workings. But when you take that damaged DNA and use it to generate stem cells, then that damaged DNA will be expressed in the functional damage of some of the differentiated cells which result. My question is how do sperm cells avoid this problem. One possible answer I provided was that they don't -- since half of the genetic material comes from the mother, and most mutations are irrelevant because they're recessive -- then it ends up not mattering. I don't know if that's the case or not, but it seems plausible. But anyway, this is all why men don't have the "biological clock" the way that women do. It's (mostly) not because older women's bodies are less robust for pregnancy and birth than are younger women's.
It does make me wonder why people aren't harvesting some of the young females' eggs and putting them in cold storage protected from radiation. Especially so if cloning becomes viable.
But it still seems to me that all of these problems with cloning could be overcome. You could only use the least likely to be damaged DNA from the woman. You could do a statistical analysis of many DNA samples from the woman (or man), and thus getting a "corrected" genome to use (providing you could put it together somehow). If it's the mitochondrial DNA that's part of the problem, then start cloning it, one way or another. (Why not simply transport the mitochondria into the new cell as well as the nuclear DNA?) If it's the alien cellular environment (apart from the mitochondria problem), then why not do the whole thing in a two-step process wher you make sure the cellular environment is "correct" for the DNA package you're transporting?
The minor problems with cloning are the access problems -- will it be only for the rich? But that's a general health care problem. What is a real threat, in my opinion, is that widespread cloning will reduce the genetic variability across the human population. That's a bad thing for a huge number of different reasons.
First of all, do sperm and ova show the same amount of degredation through mutation (via cosmic radiation, mostly?) as the rest of the DNA in the body? (Well, since ova are single generation then they're not mutated, just damaged, right?) Also, since ova are "original eqipment", and so aren't subject to generational mutation -- but they are still subject to damage in place. So that's why older women are more prone to having babies with deformities. But if regular cells accrue genetic drift through generational changes, how come this isn't so with sperm? Or if it is the case, how come we don't worry about older men reproducing as much as we worry about older women? (It occurs to me that the reson for this is that the younger woman's uncorrupted DNA from her ova counteracts the corrupted DNA from the male's sperm. But was women get older, then both the DNA from the sperm and ovum are likely to be corrupted.)
Secondly, is this largely corrected via sexual reproduction, and how?
Thirdly, so how do creatures that reproduce asexually avoid this problem? Is it simply that they're less complex?
Fourthly, at some point won't we be able to actually sequence, easily, an individual's DNA and then do a statistical analysis that produces the "corrected" genome? Could we then synthesize that corrected genome?
Fifthly, why are they only cloning females? Because DNA taken from ova is such an easier task than taking it from sperm? Or is it something else?
Sixthly, I'm really curious about sexual differentiation. Since sex is determined by the Y chromosome, and a chromosome is such a large unit of genetic data; isn't it correct that it doesn't make sense to say that there is a "male" version of a female (because it's dependent upon the particular Y chromosome inherited from the father); but that there is a "female" version of a male (just duplicate the X chromosome that came from the mother)?
Seventhly (okay, this is getting annoying, huh?), I thought that I read that many of the problems associated with damaged clones has to do with the fact that the DNA doesn't match the cellular environment it's been placed into. It's not just that the DNA is degraded, supposedly... If so, however, I imagine that this is a surmountable problem.
Eighthly, just how much does the mitochondrial DNA matter, anyway? Does the genome of the mitochodrial DNA influence anything beyond the mitochondria? Do we know? Is it possible that there are complex developmental (to pick something plausible) differences that might result from a cascade of increasing effects that stem from a mitochnodrial difference?
Having said that, I will agree that Pullman's trilogy is quite overrated. It is quite inventive in its specifics (not theme), well written and certainly of sufficient quality to be not limited to merely children. And it is far more rich than the Potter books (though certainly not as charming). However, I strongly suspect that a good portion of the praise its generated is the result of its rather astonishingly anti-Christian stridency. I'm not myself a particular fan of Christianity, but I found the books' polemics to be their nearly-fatal flaw. But then I don't really like to be beaten over the head with a brick by any author -- I find "The Poisonwood Bible" similarly off-putting. (Indeed, Tolstoy's occasional lengthy narrative-destroying monologues in "War and Peace" are that book's only flaws. I mention this only to make the point that I don't tolerate such heavy handedness even in the novel I believe to be the first among all.)
I also caution everyone not to judge a book by its marketing. Just because it is marketed -- or even written -- for children doesn't mean that it is necessarily any less deserving of adult respect or interest. "Alice in Wonderland" was/is a "children's book" but I might even include it as part of the western canon (I say that as someone who has had a "Great Books" education).
Wasn't the previous poster that talked about "burn in" possibly more correct than people are giving him credit for? It seems to me that users would find it desirable to have an image remain fixed within their field of vision; and consequently some receptors will be relatively continuously stimulated at a given frequency and amplitude over a long period of time, while others (nearby) will not. From what little I know about neurology, I'd expect some aberrant behavior -- of the receptors themselves and stuff further down the line -- to result.
Wouldn't this type of fixed, constant and long-term stimulation of discrete areas be unprecedented biologically?
That's part of the beauty of this system. The change of the focal length of your eye while you use the device has a negligible affect on the focal point -- and tracking -- of the laser. It would be just like something superimposed on a television screen while the camera changes focus. I'm guessing -- but am not certain -- that this might be unsettling. Wouldn't there be a strong perception of the projected image growing and shrinking (or moving nearer and farther)? Although the lack of parallax would diminish that.
A better solution would be for the laser track to mimic a fixed percieved focal length, along with two devices creating parallax. A sufficiently sophisticated system could orient the image relative to the external environment rather than relative to your head. This is how you could get the perception of something like a "hologram" -- a term the author uses in the article and which I questioned.