for those of you in the hindu kush and the serengeti tuning into this slashdot discussion
the western world is what my words applied to
you know: lard asses, walmart, SUVs, stripmalls, and starbucks?
you know: the only places that would even vaguely care about this mouse research, and where this mouse research is taking place, and where 90% of the readers of this website reside?
"Ancient ecosystems have very different rules from the modern legal system"
i did not know that!
thank you sir, for shining the light of your great intellect upon this discussion. i am mightily humbled
i thought for sure that the jurassic period was exactly like business law, and that the paleozoic era was exactly like real estate law
boy do i need to rethink my point of view on life now
pffffffft
i think you might suffer from a fallacy known as "taking the analogy way too seriously"
i heartily await your next rhetorical salvo, in which you inform shakespeare that his love sonnets are invalid, because human love is not, in fact, a flowering shrub (otherwise known as a rose)
not only can it do these things to crystals, but it can also take a rather straightforward story summary, and twist it in such a way that it seems to imply that the magnet can bend light. that's a powerful magnet that can bend a story summary
all the experiments are doing is letting loose the maximum potential of the mouse. mother nature, evolution, purposefully attenuates this potential for an obvious reason: this mouse outruns, outlives, outreproduces... and OUTEATS normal mice
put this supermouse in the wild, and it will be quickly dead. because real mice face an enormous food resource pressure. and so it pays in the wild to need very little food, even when this reduces your overall capacity in other avenues of your existence. this supermouse will quickly starve to death with muscles that burn through calories like a jet engine set on maximum thrust
of course in contemporary human society, we greatly admire these mice. because we, like the supermice, have defeated the limitation of scarce food sources in our existence. we have all the food we could ever want to eat. and so we are all fat. in human history, this condition on a large scale is very rare, if nonexistent. throughout most of our evolutionary history, we've been faced with food shortages. and so our full potentials have been genetically self-limited to survive
if we could eat mcdonalds all day every day and run 5 marathons a week, then go home and screw our girlfriends for 8 hours straight (who can get pregnant at age 65)... solve AIDS and the Riemann Hypothesis before we nod off for the 3 hours of sleep we only need every night, AND live to the age of 175, we would want this mouse genetic modifcation too
becuase we don't have limitations on our food supply, and the self-limitation evolution has given us to survive meager diets is not useful to us anymore
and therefore, our grandchildren probably will get this modification someday
frankly, i admire you, i admire your work. i don't want you to think that i think your efforts are useless in the end. i am very glad you are there fighting this good fight, and it does have meaning in the end
it is just that, at times, the existence of things like the RIAA, the jury verdicts for people like oj simpson and robert blake and phil spector (ironically, a music mogul), they leave me profoundly disillusioned with the law
that is, in the case of the RIAA, the law seems less interested in morality and justice, and more interested in protecting the rights of corporations, and the famous and rich
and in such a mindset, i say the legal battle cannot be won, because the odds are stacked against us, who are interested in morality and reason. and so i punt the outcome of this battle to the future, when the attack dogs of the RIAA have no more funding (as most certainly will be the case, as SCO illustrates: lawsuits are not a valid businessplan)
but i don't want my disillusionment and cynicism to infect you. we need the likes of you. the fight is a good and important fight, no matter what the odds. to at least show someone somewhere that these slimeballs will not proceed unopposed. at the very least, that has meaning and value
here are two quotes i'd like to share with you:
But Mr. Obama sometimes seemed ambivalent about the law. In his 1995 memoir, "Dreams From My Father," he wrote that the law could be "a sort of glorified accounting that serves to regulate the affairs of those who have power -- and that all too often seeks to explain, to those who do not, the ultimate wisdom and justness of their condition."
and, from the great sidney lumet, david mamet, and paul newman:
[Frank is giving his summation to the jury] Frank Galvin: You know, so much of the time we're just lost. We say, "Please, God, tell us what is right; tell us what is true." And there is no justice: the rich win, the poor are powerless. We become tired of hearing people lie. And after a time, we become dead... a little dead. We think of ourselves as victims... and we become victims. We become... we become weak. We doubt ourselves, we doubt our beliefs. We doubt our institutions. And we doubt the law. But today you are the law. You ARE the law. Not some book... not the lawyers... not the, a marble statue... or the trappings of the court. See those are just symbols of our desire to be just. They are... they are, in fact, a prayer: a fervent and a frightened prayer. In my religion, they say, "Act as if ye had faith... and faith will be given to you." IF... if we are to have faith in justice, we need only to believe in ourselves. And ACT with justice. See, I believe there is justice in our hearts. [he sits down]
grammar nazis weren't viewed as brittle pedantic mediocre minds
oh no wait, there was never such a time
grammar nazis are a joke and an object of derision
i'm sorry your mind is so inflexible you need to be spoonfed perfect queen's english before your mind can engage with the message before you
i understand that you can't focus on the message because the formatting is too much noise for your weak mind to overcome
Perhaps then my improper formatting serves me in the end. It serves as a filter that brittle inflexible minds can't get past, and so they leave me alone. Perhaps then you understand that I prefer bad formatting and format badly on purpose. Even though I am quite capable of writing normally, I don't do it. On purpose.
but i would assert that sea changes in business and culture can render your entire legal argument moot
for example, in a world where no artist signs with any music label, because they can get more money putting their own shingle on the internet, then the rights of labels that don't exist economically anymore don't have any meaning
it will take time to arrive at this new world, so perhaps we have to wait a lot longer than i might wish
to put it another way: there is a great legal framework in place concerning the rights of player piano music roll manufacturers
but in world where there are no player pianos, except in museums, then what does that legal framework mean?
likewise, i am not going to counter your legal arguments, your legal arguments are 100% correct
but i am going to say that over time, the entire legal realm the arguments you are making exist in will become defunct
it will take awhile, but you have an entire generation of young people who know what i am talking about. when such children are in their 40s and 50s, and are running whatever dried up remains of bertelsmann, coumbia records, etc. still exists, then what will any of this sound and fury really mean anymore?
everyone still keeps acting like the riaa can be defeated with reason and legal leg work. as the recent jury trial showed, reason and legal legwork cannot defeat legions of well-funded lawyers. the only way to defeat the riaa is to wait them out
once there was a time when we were nothing but small mammals, and the world was ruled by terrible lizards. in the realm of intellectual property, this is that time. the internet, of course, obliterates the old economic models of distribution. the old economic models are the riaa's sustenance. so you defeat the riaa by waiting for it's food source to dry up
in the meantime, do what little mammals do best: be nocturnal, be quick, be small, be quiet. mask yourself, use proxies, do all manner of obfuscation and security through obscurity. the internet has no legal jurisdiction. don't fight them head on. just hide
there will be of course casualties, even a dying lizard can swing it's tail mightily. but in the end, it will be dead, and we shall inherit the earth. patience my friends. you cannot defeat the terrible lizard head on. just wait for it to die of starvation
it's economic model is history. the only one who doesn't know it is the riaa. there is no reasoning with the terrible beast, it's behaviors are not, and never have been, and never will be rational. you do not reason with a legal attack dog
wait, and the riaa will die. stop trying to reason with the unreasonable
suing soccer moms and grandmothers for thousands of dollars is not the actions of a rational entity. it is the mark of a last desperate stand, and the end is in sight
you are assuming the message of the RIAA is "don't trade digital music because it doesn't abide by good ethical or legal standards or common business sense"
you are giving the RIAA way too much credit if you think that thought ever motivated them
the RIAA's message has really always been "do whatever the hell we tell you to do because we have more lawyers than you"
with such a realization, you can come to understand the RIAA is operating in perfect consistency, without any hypocrisy about its behavior at all
i'm certain they can tune a laser to the right frequency and shatter a virus like an opera singer and a crystal glass
what i am also certain of is the fact that a lot of other proteins in the cell probably have the same frequency. some of those proteins might not be so important, some might
if that opera singer went into a lamp store and sang to shatter only the particular crystal chandelier in front of her, no one would be surprised if another chandelier towards the back of the store cracked too
let me illustrate for you how hysteria and panic and fear get turned into slippery slope arguments:
if you let homosexual men amrry, next you will have to make pedophilia, rape, incest, bestiality and necrophilia legal
do you believe that? i will take a guess and say no
such a thought, is, of crouse, completel bullshit: people can tell the difference between a gay man and a corpse fucker
but in the mind of some social conservatives, THEY REALLY BELIEVE THIS
why? ebcause their slippery slope argument really is nothing but a rpoxy for fear, panic, hysteria. not rational thought
in the exact same way do you talk about pinochet
the average well adjusted person can easily tell the difference between security requirements at the airport and what pinochet did. just as easily as a well adjusted person can tell the difference between homosexuality and pedophilia
but social conservatives can't tell that difference, IN THE EXACT SAME WAY you can't tell the difference between prudent trangressions of privacy in certain controlled situations and all out fascism
and they, like, you, rationalize their fear and hysteria with thte exact same bullshit slippery slope argument
no, you spastic wierdo, THERE IS NO SLIPPERY SLOPE
you may now conclude that i am a secret advance agent of the coming fascism
dissolving ants in hydrochoric acid, pouring bleach into ammonia and giving myself chemical pneumonia from chlorine gas, setting the house on fire with burning trails of isopropyl alcohol, fiddling with the mercury drops i squeezed out of that weird battery
a good example being: you just provided one above, thanks
a lot of people, slashdot being hotbed of such privacy fundamentalists, are of this weird hyperactive hysterical panic over every privacy transgression: showing your receipt when you leave a store, cameras in the innercity, etc.
in their mind, they can't balance some prudent, common sense situations where, frankly, your privacy doesn't matter. at all
privacy is AN issue to consider on complex topics. it is not THE issue. sometimes, privacy is the most important concern. and other times, privacy ranks lower in importance than other concerns. like before you get on an airplane. there are people in this world who want to blow up airplanes. therefore, people have to submit to privacy intrusions before getting on airplanes. beginning and end of story
but you listen to some people, and it's like the second coming of hitler, the shocktroops of a new fascism. well yeah, if you got your social education from a comic book and you are a paranoid schizophrenic, i guess
and some people are shocked, shocked i tell you, to find out that a lot of people don't treat their private life with the security protocols of a swiss bank. because they simply don't care
but they are not very good going after you if you hide in the ceiling tiles, they find kitchen floors slippery, and a good reflective aluminum surface should be good enough to give at least one of them a banged head
Slashdot Mirror
pfffffffft
as if that has anything to do with this subject matter
for those of you in the hindu kush and the serengeti tuning into this slashdot discussion
the western world is what my words applied to
you know: lard asses, walmart, SUVs, stripmalls, and starbucks?
you know: the only places that would even vaguely care about this mouse research, and where this mouse research is taking place, and where 90% of the readers of this website reside?
"Ancient ecosystems have very different rules from the modern legal system"
i did not know that!
thank you sir, for shining the light of your great intellect upon this discussion. i am mightily humbled
i thought for sure that the jurassic period was exactly like business law, and that the paleozoic era was exactly like real estate law
boy do i need to rethink my point of view on life now
pffffffft
i think you might suffer from a fallacy known as "taking the analogy way too seriously"
i heartily await your next rhetorical salvo, in which you inform shakespeare that his love sonnets are invalid, because human love is not, in fact, a flowering shrub (otherwise known as a rose)
you're a genius sir
i mean that in the most sarcastic way possible
not only can it do these things to crystals, but it can also take a rather straightforward story summary, and twist it in such a way that it seems to imply that the magnet can bend light. that's a powerful magnet that can bend a story summary
that's what makes them possible
all the experiments are doing is letting loose the maximum potential of the mouse. mother nature, evolution, purposefully attenuates this potential for an obvious reason: this mouse outruns, outlives, outreproduces... and OUTEATS normal mice
put this supermouse in the wild, and it will be quickly dead. because real mice face an enormous food resource pressure. and so it pays in the wild to need very little food, even when this reduces your overall capacity in other avenues of your existence. this supermouse will quickly starve to death with muscles that burn through calories like a jet engine set on maximum thrust
of course in contemporary human society, we greatly admire these mice. because we, like the supermice, have defeated the limitation of scarce food sources in our existence. we have all the food we could ever want to eat. and so we are all fat. in human history, this condition on a large scale is very rare, if nonexistent. throughout most of our evolutionary history, we've been faced with food shortages. and so our full potentials have been genetically self-limited to survive
if we could eat mcdonalds all day every day and run 5 marathons a week, then go home and screw our girlfriends for 8 hours straight (who can get pregnant at age 65)... solve AIDS and the Riemann Hypothesis before we nod off for the 3 hours of sleep we only need every night, AND live to the age of 175, we would want this mouse genetic modifcation too
becuase we don't have limitations on our food supply, and the self-limitation evolution has given us to survive meager diets is not useful to us anymore
and therefore, our grandchildren probably will get this modification someday
it's not ok to decide to sacrifice someone life for a good cause without their knowledge
it is 100% ok to volunteer to have your life sacrificied for a good cause
it is very important to understand and discern the difference between these two scenarios
and when you said "more complicated person than i am" you are giving me more credit than i am due
;-)
i believe cynicism is a poor replacement for heart, and you have heart. to hell with my pessisism, keep up the good fight!
it is just that, at times, the existence of things like the RIAA, the jury verdicts for people like oj simpson and robert blake and phil spector (ironically, a music mogul), they leave me profoundly disillusioned with the law
that is, in the case of the RIAA, the law seems less interested in morality and justice, and more interested in protecting the rights of corporations, and the famous and rich
and in such a mindset, i say the legal battle cannot be won, because the odds are stacked against us, who are interested in morality and reason. and so i punt the outcome of this battle to the future, when the attack dogs of the RIAA have no more funding (as most certainly will be the case, as SCO illustrates: lawsuits are not a valid businessplan)
but i don't want my disillusionment and cynicism to infect you. we need the likes of you. the fight is a good and important fight, no matter what the odds. to at least show someone somewhere that these slimeballs will not proceed unopposed. at the very least, that has meaning and value
here are two quotes i'd like to share with you:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/28/weekinreview/28liptak.html?ex=1351224000&en=4d08acb4582d35e9&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
and, from the great sidney lumet, david mamet, and paul newman:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084855/quotes
grammar nazis weren't viewed as brittle pedantic mediocre minds
oh no wait, there was never such a time
grammar nazis are a joke and an object of derision
i'm sorry your mind is so inflexible you need to be spoonfed perfect queen's english before your mind can engage with the message before you
i understand that you can't focus on the message because the formatting is too much noise for your weak mind to overcome
Perhaps then my improper formatting serves me in the end. It serves as a filter that brittle inflexible minds can't get past, and so they leave me alone. Perhaps then you understand that I prefer bad formatting and format badly on purpose. Even though I am quite capable of writing normally, I don't do it. On purpose.
imagine that, turd
but i would assert that sea changes in business and culture can render your entire legal argument moot
for example, in a world where no artist signs with any music label, because they can get more money putting their own shingle on the internet, then the rights of labels that don't exist economically anymore don't have any meaning
it will take time to arrive at this new world, so perhaps we have to wait a lot longer than i might wish
to put it another way: there is a great legal framework in place concerning the rights of player piano music roll manufacturers
but in world where there are no player pianos, except in museums, then what does that legal framework mean?
likewise, i am not going to counter your legal arguments, your legal arguments are 100% correct
but i am going to say that over time, the entire legal realm the arguments you are making exist in will become defunct
it will take awhile, but you have an entire generation of young people who know what i am talking about. when such children are in their 40s and 50s, and are running whatever dried up remains of bertelsmann, coumbia records, etc. still exists, then what will any of this sound and fury really mean anymore?
everyone still keeps acting like the riaa can be defeated with reason and legal leg work. as the recent jury trial showed, reason and legal legwork cannot defeat legions of well-funded lawyers. the only way to defeat the riaa is to wait them out
once there was a time when we were nothing but small mammals, and the world was ruled by terrible lizards. in the realm of intellectual property, this is that time. the internet, of course, obliterates the old economic models of distribution. the old economic models are the riaa's sustenance. so you defeat the riaa by waiting for it's food source to dry up
in the meantime, do what little mammals do best: be nocturnal, be quick, be small, be quiet. mask yourself, use proxies, do all manner of obfuscation and security through obscurity. the internet has no legal jurisdiction. don't fight them head on. just hide
there will be of course casualties, even a dying lizard can swing it's tail mightily. but in the end, it will be dead, and we shall inherit the earth. patience my friends. you cannot defeat the terrible lizard head on. just wait for it to die of starvation
it's economic model is history. the only one who doesn't know it is the riaa. there is no reasoning with the terrible beast, it's behaviors are not, and never have been, and never will be rational. you do not reason with a legal attack dog
wait, and the riaa will die. stop trying to reason with the unreasonable
suing soccer moms and grandmothers for thousands of dollars is not the actions of a rational entity. it is the mark of a last desperate stand, and the end is in sight
you are assuming the message of the RIAA is "don't trade digital music because it doesn't abide by good ethical or legal standards or common business sense"
you are giving the RIAA way too much credit if you think that thought ever motivated them
the RIAA's message has really always been "do whatever the hell we tell you to do because we have more lawyers than you"
with such a realization, you can come to understand the RIAA is operating in perfect consistency, without any hypocrisy about its behavior at all
attached to this story is more meaningful than at first glance, if any of you remember the movie
fractals, numerology, obsession, madness, religion, finding patterns in randomness, etc.
great movie if you haven't seen it
the day mankind gave the gift of Howard Stern and American Top 40 and the traffic report to bacteria
i'm certain they can tune a laser to the right frequency and shatter a virus like an opera singer and a crystal glass
what i am also certain of is the fact that a lot of other proteins in the cell probably have the same frequency. some of those proteins might not be so important, some might
if that opera singer went into a lamp store and sang to shatter only the particular crystal chandelier in front of her, no one would be surprised if another chandelier towards the back of the store cracked too
full of win
you agree with me about the stupid and incoherent "war on the unexpected" concept ;-)
let me illustrate for you how hysteria and panic and fear get turned into slippery slope arguments:
if you let homosexual men amrry, next you will have to make pedophilia, rape, incest, bestiality and necrophilia legal
do you believe that? i will take a guess and say no
such a thought, is, of crouse, completel bullshit: people can tell the difference between a gay man and a corpse fucker
but in the mind of some social conservatives, THEY REALLY BELIEVE THIS
why? ebcause their slippery slope argument really is nothing but a rpoxy for fear, panic, hysteria. not rational thought
in the exact same way do you talk about pinochet
the average well adjusted person can easily tell the difference between security requirements at the airport and what pinochet did. just as easily as a well adjusted person can tell the difference between homosexuality and pedophilia
but social conservatives can't tell that difference, IN THE EXACT SAME WAY you can't tell the difference between prudent trangressions of privacy in certain controlled situations and all out fascism
and they, like, you, rationalize their fear and hysteria with thte exact same bullshit slippery slope argument
no, you spastic wierdo, THERE IS NO SLIPPERY SLOPE
you may now conclude that i am a secret advance agent of the coming fascism
pfffffffffffft
but that would be unexpected
praise for this is idea the assumed slashdot lowest common denominator reaction
i look forward to my troll mod for being unexpected
</irony>
dissolving ants in hydrochoric acid, pouring bleach into ammonia and giving myself chemical pneumonia from chlorine gas, setting the house on fire with burning trails of isopropyl alcohol, fiddling with the mercury drops i squeezed out of that weird battery
heh
i didn't reference hitler in my argument, i alluded to those i was arguing against referencing hitler in their arguments
thereby not ending my thread, but ending their threads before they even got started
it's a reverse godwin preemptive strike
um, yeah, that's the ticket (cough)
sometimes, privacy is of secondary importance
a good example being: you just provided one above, thanks
a lot of people, slashdot being hotbed of such privacy fundamentalists, are of this weird hyperactive hysterical panic over every privacy transgression: showing your receipt when you leave a store, cameras in the innercity, etc.
in their mind, they can't balance some prudent, common sense situations where, frankly, your privacy doesn't matter. at all
privacy is AN issue to consider on complex topics. it is not THE issue. sometimes, privacy is the most important concern. and other times, privacy ranks lower in importance than other concerns. like before you get on an airplane. there are people in this world who want to blow up airplanes. therefore, people have to submit to privacy intrusions before getting on airplanes. beginning and end of story
but you listen to some people, and it's like the second coming of hitler, the shocktroops of a new fascism. well yeah, if you got your social education from a comic book and you are a paranoid schizophrenic, i guess
if you want convenience, you don't get privacy
if you want privacy, you don't get convenience
and some people are shocked, shocked i tell you, to find out that a lot of people don't treat their private life with the security protocols of a swiss bank. because they simply don't care
next nonissue please
but they are not very good going after you if you hide in the ceiling tiles, they find kitchen floors slippery, and a good reflective aluminum surface should be good enough to give at least one of them a banged head