those on the left are usually spouting what they've heard second hand
Quite a few years ago I heard Glenn Beck say he thought security was the most important thing to America. Not liberty. Security. That's the point I realized he was the enemy.
That is why I rarely use my real name on the Internet
Unfortunately there are a half a dozen other people using your real name. Better hope none of them is into stuff your prospective employers or whatever don't like!
My last name is unexceptionable but not common and there are at least one or two people I can find on google with exact matches, including middle name. One of them is even in a vaguely-related technical field, albeit in a different country. A sufficiently lazy search--and really, what other kind is there likely to be, what with automated processing of results and all--could easily conflate us.
I see that my browser is unique among the 1.4 million tested, with 20 bits of identifying information.
Yeah, so is mine, despite it being part of corporate install that is copied across tens or hundreds of thousands of computers within this company, so I'm kind of doubting that it's as unique as all that.
That their out-of-print books from the 60s, 70s, and 80s, that are currently making them ZERO money, could be sold for $2-$5 as pdfs
This is unlikely to happen.
Having dealt with academic publishers I've found them to be the most ignorant bunch of incompetent rent-seekers imaginable, whose entire business model is fortunately doomed. I once tried to find a copy of an out-of-print book that I wanted to use for part of a class I was teaching. I asked the publisher if they knew where any were available, and also for permission for photocopying limited sections of any copy I did find for teaching purposes (fewer than 10 students, but I figured I may as well play nice.)
I got a nastygram back refusing permission to make copies, and also asking me to inform them if I found a copy because they didn't actually have a copy anywhere. They had "ownership" of the copyright, but not the actual text! This raises any number of fun questions, the first one being: how can they know if I've violated their copyright if they aren't in possession of the text?
As it turns out it was all moot because I never did find a complete copy, but its still the most egregiously stupid thing I've ever heard from the bloodsucking, parasitic, rent-seeking academic publishing industry.
And we all know what a bad thing that is! I mean, look what happened with situational physics! First it was all simple: EVERYTHING fell toward the center of the Earth or moved in perfect circles around it. Then Gallileo and Newton and those guys got all up about situational physics, saying what planet things orbited or fell towards was dependent on the situation, and even the shape of the orbit could be different depending on circumstances. Freaking morons!
Culture determines what many consider freedoms let alone quality of life
The funny thing is that everyone who has replied to your post with examples of places that are more free than the US are all using exactly the same standard of freedom: a higher degree of individual autonomy. This is not subject to cultural variation.
There are other concepts that some people use the word "freedom" for, and some people are even too stupid to understand that concepts and words don't aways travel together, so they think that if the term "freedom" is used differently the concept "individual autonomy" is culturally variable, but really, no one that idiotic would be posting in this forum, one hopes!
It might seem like women are repressing themselves, but that's simply not the case.
Women in sexually repressive societies are almost always one of the major vectors of repression.
But here's the thing: a woman telling another woman she must wear a burka is just as repressive as a man telling a woman she must wear a burka.
See, the thing that matters is that the two women involved--and I know this is a difficult concept so please bear with me--ARE DIFFERENT PEOPLE.
Only a gibbering idiot would suggest that it's ok to repress someone if they happen to belong to the same socially-constructed abstract category as you.
It would make no more sense to say, "It's ok for women to repress other women" than it would to say, "It's ok for humans to repress other humans." The reification of one particular abstract category does nothing but announce the political agenda of the reifier. It adds nothing but noise to the discourse.
North Dakota is doing well for a variety of reasons, paramount being that they've got oil.
And Texas doesn't?
"They've got oil and it hasn't had time to corrupt the political process to the point where Big Oil pays almost no taxes" I could maybe believe. But just "they've got oil" as if that was the key to a low deficit when the storiy is (in part) about the need for new sources of cash in Texas is a little too naive.
This prevents cancer from having the usual fitness detriment in relation to reproduction, providing an alternative explanation for why it hasn't been selected out.
It actually has been selected out to a great degree in humans, and this is one of the reasons why we live such astonishingly long lives. The average mammal lives about a billion of its own heartbeats. We live more than twice that.
This is also what makes human cancers so hard to cure. Unlike rats, which will get cancer from a dirty look, the cancers that make it past our defenses are seriously nasty.
Grandparents transmit culture, and having a few much older people in your kin group would be very significant reproductive advantage to individuals who are social primates with both operational and representational intelligence. As such, there is a very plausible selective mechanism for our long lives, and relatively large cancer-resistance.
That web scam's putative mechanism for DCA activity is that cancer cells have completely inactive mitochondria?
While this guy is clearly a nut, there are some cancers whose preferred metabolic pathway (aerobic glycolysis) is interfered with by DCA. This is a case where you need to not (completely) dismiss an idea because its promoters contain a large number of ignorant nutcases.
If I were a conspiracy theorist I'd suggest that the large number of nuts promoting DCA is a stealth campaign by Big Pharma to discredit the drug, but I've worked closely enough with Big Pharma to be fairly sure that is well outside their relatively narrow range of competencies.
I did a bunch of research on DCA last year, as one of my cats had an inoperable (metastatic) mammary cancer, and for fun (for a certain value of "fun") I figured I may as well test DCA, since the side effects are small (a few reports of peripheral neuralgia after more than six weeks of treatment at relatively high doses). So the worst case would be the cat would die anyway, and the best case might be an extended life or improved quality of life, and in either case it would give me the feeling that I was doing something rather than simply waiting for her to die.
There was a notable placebo effect--at least I presume that's what it was--as she was perkier and more comfortable in the weeks after I started the treatment, but the primary tumor mass did not decrease and she did not survive very long. Placebo effects of this kind have been reported in animals in the past, although the mechanism of action is entirely unclear, as it is in humans in those cases when neither the patient nor the physician are aware that a placebo is being given.
In any case, as near as I can tell the basic science behind DCA is sound and it is likely to have a positive effect on a significant fraction of cancers, and that has been backed up by some clinical research. But it isn't a miracle cure and isn't being supressed by Big Pharma, although anyone in the industry (who is honest) will tell you that IP issues, particularly IP fragmentation, are significant impediments to the development of new treatments. The IP ownership of important biological pathways tends to be spread across multiple companies, requiring co-operation to develop treatments that target the full pathway, and such co-operation is simply difficult between competing organizations, though by no means impossible.
they merely had this great idea, while looking at the stars after smoking some of the good stuff.
Their entire "theory" boils down to this: "We think that the tumours that develop in cancer patients today take the same form as these simple cellular structures did more than a billion years ago,” he said. ("but we have no particular reason to believe that", he added quietly.)
There is simply no basis for their claim other than "cars are a means of transportation, planes are a means of transportation, so maybe cars are planes after they've landed". I mean, "cancers are loose aggregations of cells, early metazooans were probably loose aggregations of cells, so maybe cancers are early metazooans resurfacing in your body."
Everything we know about the detailed genetics of cancer--which is quite a lot--suggests this is nonsense. If this were the case we'd expect to see far more genetic similarity between cancers than we do, as the hypothesis implies ancient conserved mechanisms for which there is no sign in the genomics of cancer. Cancer is a diverse disease, and while we are making steady progress against it there are fundamental mechanisms that are still poorly understood because they are complicated. The role of various micro-RNAs in particular is only now becoming clear, for example.
The fundamental complexity of the disease is exactly what you would expect if it metazooan life was pulling off a complex and delicate balancing act that can go wrong in multiple ways, and humans had been subject to intense selective pressure for longer lives due to the advantage to a social primate with both representational and operational intelligence of having a few grandparents around in your kin-group. Human cancers are ferociously complex compared to most other species, which is exactly what you would not expect based on this hypothesis that all cancers in all species are pretty much similar at root.
Their "advice" to researchers to focus on what amount to tumour supressor genes would be important if this was 1990.
The genius here is all marketing, not science. They have managed to get an idiotic idea that has zero utility to anyone working on the genetics of cancer quite widely disseminated. That's pretty clever. I only wish the scientists who are in the trenches doing detailed experimental investigations of actual cancer mechanisms were half as good at promoting their thankless and difficult work as these clowns are. Their hypothesis would make a great science fiction story. Unfortunately, that's not the way they've chosen to promote it.
The plan was pitched to Bank of America on the 3rd. Amazon and EveryDNS already had withdrawn services so I think it's a stretch to try to insinuate that Paypal doing the same on the 4th is somehow related to a proposal submitted to a separate financial institution on the 3rd.
The more likely thing is that the suit was describing stuff that had already happened and was likely to keep on happening so if they got the contract they would be able to take credit for what was going to happen anyway. Given the average manager has poor reading comprehension, a terrible memory for details, and very little interest in current events this would have been an easy scam to pull off.
The heads of our intelligence agencies must have been home schooled.
Huh? You mean they're highly educated, broadly socialized into the adult world at an earlier age than most kids, and are used to self-organized, project-based learning?
I know in parts of the US there are Christian nutjob homeschoolers who teach their kids a bunch of gibberish, but I don't think that's the majority even there, and in the rest of the Anglosphere homeschooling is a pretty strong indicator of a good education relative to current high-school standards (my kids were not homeschooled, but I know people who are homeschooling their kids and they've recieved education that ranges from perfectly adequate to above-average.)
.Some suspect the insectlike drones are high-tech surveillance tools, perhaps deployed by the Department of Homeland Security. "
I'm just glad they aren't using this tech for anything that would actually make anyone more secure, like improving crop yields, delivery of clean water, improving waste management, and so on. I mean, can you imagine what would happen if technology like this was deployed in any economically useful way!? It's a good thing it's being carefully restricted to the deadweight loss of the security-industrial complex!
Many are surprised that Jason Chaffetz (R Utah) voted for it. He as sure been hearing it from his constituents last night and this morning.
By "consituents" you mean the Party Whip or whatever the American equivalent of that position is?
Since people in Congress represent only their Party leadership, I'm not sure who else his "constituents" could be. The Party controls who gets elected and who partakes in the best perks once elected, so representatives represent the Party, not the People.
anyone who spent any time studying history in the last couple thousand years was already fully aware of that particular insight...
The important insight from the Stanford Prison Experiment is the Law of Common Humanity: "We are just like Them."
People have a tendency to say, "Oh sure bad people did bad things with unlimited power years ago, but We are Different! We are Good People!" The Stanford Prison Experiment--which was not a single instance, but a test of multiple individuals--showed that what most "good people" lack is opportunity, not capability, when it comes to being evil.
HISTORY, on the other hand, has taught us that power without oversight usually leads to abuse and corruption.
Mathematics, on the other hand, teaches us that power without oversight will ALWAYS lead to abuse and corruption, given sufficient time. The (few) historical cases where it hasn't have been due to the short timescales involved.
Just as evolution by variation and natural selection is a mathematical necessity, so power without oversight falling into corrupt hands is a matter of mathematical necessity, given sufficient time. All you need to know is that corrupt people pursue power (an undoubted fact) and that once they possess power they do not give it up (also an undoubted fact). Ergo, while power without oversight may reside for a time with people who don't abuse it, they will eventually die or relenquish their power, and that will necessarily create opportunities for corrupt people to acquire it. It is a statistical certainty, just like heat flowing from hot to cold objects is.
The polish SF writer Stanislaw Lem has predicted the evolution of warfare we're observing today as far back as 1986
Even earlier: "The Invincible" was a fictional account of the endgame of the same process of using the technology of prosperity to fight the wars of scarcity, and it was published in English in 1973, and in Polish in 1964.
Lem is mostly ignored because he makes it impossible for ignorant idiots to claim there's anything new or interesting about their tired old recycled ideas. I've been seeing people claim "synthetic insects" as a "brilliant new idea" from at least the mid-80's, at which time it was at least a decade old.
The sad thing about his prognositcations and speculations coming true is that it tends to confirm his pesimistic view of humanity as too stupid to use the technology of prosperity to create prosperity, instead continuing to use the products of the highest form of rationality to engage in the least rational human behaviour: warefare.
As a solution to problems of scarity almost anything is better than utilizing scarce resources to build machines and employ labour in ways that are a dead weight loss in terms of economic productivity. The Germans went to war in Eastern Europe in no small part because they were worried about food production, and you think someone might have noticed that investing in machines to destroy things was unlikely to increase production of food, while investing in agricultural research might have quite astonishing dividends (which in fact it did.) And of course with regard to risk, investing in agricultural research has zero risk of resulting in your country being left in a state where barely one brick is still sitting on top of another. So war as a solution to that particular problem was as usual the best of all possible solutions--except compared to all the others.
But people are incredibly stupid, and Lem's satires seem to have correctly predicted that incredibly stupid people will continue to do incredibly stupid things, not just going to war, but extending the war model of problem solving to areas like social welfare, recreational drug use, and randomly blowing things up. One can only presume the people who do this are too either too stupid to recognize that the war model is radically ineffective, or have managed to position themselves such that a larger slice of a smaller economy comes their way.
Corporations are merely a legal device for lowering risk of entrepreneurial activities by people.
And regulations are merely a legal device for lowing the risk to the rest of us from the agency issues created by corporate officers being shielded from the free market by the nanny state.
I have no beef with corporations--I own one myself. But I have a big problem with people who claim that corporations ought to be unregulated, when in a free market no corporations would exist.
We need a new model to encourage cures over treatment.
Given the effectiveness of vaccine development in the middle years of the 20th century I'd suggest we need an OLD model to encourage cures over treatment. I'm not familiar with the details, but it sure looks like a good place to start.
This will be great if the changes necessary to get around it make it unable to infect humans. After all, influenza does infect pigs and birds.
Why do you say that? Rabies is capable of infecting every warm-blooded organism, and there's a reasonably effective vaccine against it. What would the number or variety of species a virus is capable of infecting have to do with the ability to find a vaccine that is effective against it?
No part of any quickly-evolving virus is too vital to change.
False.
Viruses have some pretty tight constraints on what they have to do, and there are perfectly ordinary, finite number of ways to do it. They just can't arbitrarily change anything that needs to be changed to respond to a new threat.
We see the same thing in bacteria with antibiotic resistance: it's a serious problem, but the populations at risk from anti-biotic-resitant strains are generally immune-compromised to begin with, because while anti-biotic-resistance is a good trick, it is not without cost, and in the case of bacteria that cost is in virulence.
Your claim amounts to this: "If we destroy aircraft by shooting their wings off, pretty soon designers will come up with wingless aircraft." It's an article of faith unsupported by fact. Even if you look at the milder claim, "If we detect planes with radar pretty soon designers will come up with stealth planes" you'll see the same effect: stealth tech is costly and fragile, and no matter how nice it would be to have the cost and fragility have really limited its utility.
You are assuming for some reason that viruses can deal with new threats by adaptations that have nearly zero cost, and that is just not realistic.
Let me ask: how well did the smallpox virus adapt to the vaccines against it? Or polio to the vaccines against it? Or any of the other major viral killers that have been nearly wiped out in the past half century with the help of good science and good social policy? Why didn't THEY magically evolve resistance?
Slashdot Mirror
those on the left are usually spouting what they've heard second hand
Quite a few years ago I heard Glenn Beck say he thought security was the most important thing to America. Not liberty. Security. That's the point I realized he was the enemy.
That is why I rarely use my real name on the Internet
Unfortunately there are a half a dozen other people using your real name. Better hope none of them is into stuff your prospective employers or whatever don't like!
My last name is unexceptionable but not common and there are at least one or two people I can find on google with exact matches, including middle name. One of them is even in a vaguely-related technical field, albeit in a different country. A sufficiently lazy search--and really, what other kind is there likely to be, what with automated processing of results and all--could easily conflate us.
I see that my browser is unique among the 1.4 million tested, with 20 bits of identifying information.
Yeah, so is mine, despite it being part of corporate install that is copied across tens or hundreds of thousands of computers within this company, so I'm kind of doubting that it's as unique as all that.
this is potentially another way of tracking that few people would have thought about.
Right, because the idea of tracking people by name has escaped everyone's notice!
That their out-of-print books from the 60s, 70s, and 80s, that are currently making them ZERO money, could be sold for $2-$5 as pdfs
This is unlikely to happen.
Having dealt with academic publishers I've found them to be the most ignorant bunch of incompetent rent-seekers imaginable, whose entire business model is fortunately doomed. I once tried to find a copy of an out-of-print book that I wanted to use for part of a class I was teaching. I asked the publisher if they knew where any were available, and also for permission for photocopying limited sections of any copy I did find for teaching purposes (fewer than 10 students, but I figured I may as well play nice.)
I got a nastygram back refusing permission to make copies, and also asking me to inform them if I found a copy because they didn't actually have a copy anywhere. They had "ownership" of the copyright, but not the actual text! This raises any number of fun questions, the first one being: how can they know if I've violated their copyright if they aren't in possession of the text?
As it turns out it was all moot because I never did find a complete copy, but its still the most egregiously stupid thing I've ever heard from the bloodsucking, parasitic, rent-seeking academic publishing industry.
This whole thing smells of situation ethics.
And we all know what a bad thing that is! I mean, look what happened with situational physics! First it was all simple: EVERYTHING fell toward the center of the Earth or moved in perfect circles around it. Then Gallileo and Newton and those guys got all up about situational physics, saying what planet things orbited or fell towards was dependent on the situation, and even the shape of the orbit could be different depending on circumstances. Freaking morons!
Culture determines what many consider freedoms let alone quality of life
The funny thing is that everyone who has replied to your post with examples of places that are more free than the US are all using exactly the same standard of freedom: a higher degree of individual autonomy. This is not subject to cultural variation.
There are other concepts that some people use the word "freedom" for, and some people are even too stupid to understand that concepts and words don't aways travel together, so they think that if the term "freedom" is used differently the concept "individual autonomy" is culturally variable, but really, no one that idiotic would be posting in this forum, one hopes!
It might seem like women are repressing themselves, but that's simply not the case.
Women in sexually repressive societies are almost always one of the major vectors of repression.
But here's the thing: a woman telling another woman she must wear a burka is just as repressive as a man telling a woman she must wear a burka.
See, the thing that matters is that the two women involved--and I know this is a difficult concept so please bear with me--ARE DIFFERENT PEOPLE.
Only a gibbering idiot would suggest that it's ok to repress someone if they happen to belong to the same socially-constructed abstract category as you.
It would make no more sense to say, "It's ok for women to repress other women" than it would to say, "It's ok for humans to repress other humans." The reification of one particular abstract category does nothing but announce the political agenda of the reifier. It adds nothing but noise to the discourse.
North Dakota is doing well for a variety of reasons, paramount being that they've got oil.
And Texas doesn't?
"They've got oil and it hasn't had time to corrupt the political process to the point where Big Oil pays almost no taxes" I could maybe believe. But just "they've got oil" as if that was the key to a low deficit when the storiy is (in part) about the need for new sources of cash in Texas is a little too naive.
This prevents cancer from having the usual fitness detriment in relation to reproduction, providing an alternative explanation for why it hasn't been selected out.
It actually has been selected out to a great degree in humans, and this is one of the reasons why we live such astonishingly long lives. The average mammal lives about a billion of its own heartbeats. We live more than twice that.
This is also what makes human cancers so hard to cure. Unlike rats, which will get cancer from a dirty look, the cancers that make it past our defenses are seriously nasty.
Grandparents transmit culture, and having a few much older people in your kin group would be very significant reproductive advantage to individuals who are social primates with both operational and representational intelligence. As such, there is a very plausible selective mechanism for our long lives, and relatively large cancer-resistance.
That web scam's putative mechanism for DCA activity is that cancer cells have completely inactive mitochondria?
While this guy is clearly a nut, there are some cancers whose preferred metabolic pathway (aerobic glycolysis) is interfered with by DCA. This is a case where you need to not (completely) dismiss an idea because its promoters contain a large number of ignorant nutcases.
If I were a conspiracy theorist I'd suggest that the large number of nuts promoting DCA is a stealth campaign by Big Pharma to discredit the drug, but I've worked closely enough with Big Pharma to be fairly sure that is well outside their relatively narrow range of competencies.
I did a bunch of research on DCA last year, as one of my cats had an inoperable (metastatic) mammary cancer, and for fun (for a certain value of "fun") I figured I may as well test DCA, since the side effects are small (a few reports of peripheral neuralgia after more than six weeks of treatment at relatively high doses). So the worst case would be the cat would die anyway, and the best case might be an extended life or improved quality of life, and in either case it would give me the feeling that I was doing something rather than simply waiting for her to die.
There was a notable placebo effect--at least I presume that's what it was--as she was perkier and more comfortable in the weeks after I started the treatment, but the primary tumor mass did not decrease and she did not survive very long. Placebo effects of this kind have been reported in animals in the past, although the mechanism of action is entirely unclear, as it is in humans in those cases when neither the patient nor the physician are aware that a placebo is being given.
In any case, as near as I can tell the basic science behind DCA is sound and it is likely to have a positive effect on a significant fraction of cancers, and that has been backed up by some clinical research. But it isn't a miracle cure and isn't being supressed by Big Pharma, although anyone in the industry (who is honest) will tell you that IP issues, particularly IP fragmentation, are significant impediments to the development of new treatments. The IP ownership of important biological pathways tends to be spread across multiple companies, requiring co-operation to develop treatments that target the full pathway, and such co-operation is simply difficult between competing organizations, though by no means impossible.
they merely had this great idea, while looking at the stars after smoking some of the good stuff.
Their entire "theory" boils down to this: "We think that the tumours that develop in cancer patients today take the same form as these simple cellular structures did more than a billion years ago,” he said. ("but we have no particular reason to believe that", he added quietly.)
There is simply no basis for their claim other than "cars are a means of transportation, planes are a means of transportation, so maybe cars are planes after they've landed". I mean, "cancers are loose aggregations of cells, early metazooans were probably loose aggregations of cells, so maybe cancers are early metazooans resurfacing in your body."
Everything we know about the detailed genetics of cancer--which is quite a lot--suggests this is nonsense. If this were the case we'd expect to see far more genetic similarity between cancers than we do, as the hypothesis implies ancient conserved mechanisms for which there is no sign in the genomics of cancer. Cancer is a diverse disease, and while we are making steady progress against it there are fundamental mechanisms that are still poorly understood because they are complicated. The role of various micro-RNAs in particular is only now becoming clear, for example.
The fundamental complexity of the disease is exactly what you would expect if it metazooan life was pulling off a complex and delicate balancing act that can go wrong in multiple ways, and humans had been subject to intense selective pressure for longer lives due to the advantage to a social primate with both representational and operational intelligence of having a few grandparents around in your kin-group. Human cancers are ferociously complex compared to most other species, which is exactly what you would not expect based on this hypothesis that all cancers in all species are pretty much similar at root.
Their "advice" to researchers to focus on what amount to tumour supressor genes would be important if this was 1990.
The genius here is all marketing, not science. They have managed to get an idiotic idea that has zero utility to anyone working on the genetics of cancer quite widely disseminated. That's pretty clever. I only wish the scientists who are in the trenches doing detailed experimental investigations of actual cancer mechanisms were half as good at promoting their thankless and difficult work as these clowns are. Their hypothesis would make a great science fiction story. Unfortunately, that's not the way they've chosen to promote it.
The plan was pitched to Bank of America on the 3rd. Amazon and EveryDNS already had withdrawn services so I think it's a stretch to try to insinuate that Paypal doing the same on the 4th is somehow related to a proposal submitted to a separate financial institution on the 3rd.
The more likely thing is that the suit was describing stuff that had already happened and was likely to keep on happening so if they got the contract they would be able to take credit for what was going to happen anyway. Given the average manager has poor reading comprehension, a terrible memory for details, and very little interest in current events this would have been an easy scam to pull off.
The heads of our intelligence agencies must have been home schooled.
Huh? You mean they're highly educated, broadly socialized into the adult world at an earlier age than most kids, and are used to self-organized, project-based learning?
I know in parts of the US there are Christian nutjob homeschoolers who teach their kids a bunch of gibberish, but I don't think that's the majority even there, and in the rest of the Anglosphere homeschooling is a pretty strong indicator of a good education relative to current high-school standards (my kids were not homeschooled, but I know people who are homeschooling their kids and they've recieved education that ranges from perfectly adequate to above-average.)
like not using Firefox icon for IE8, haha.
And not spelling "Julien"'s name incorrectly...
.Some suspect the insectlike drones are high-tech surveillance tools, perhaps deployed by the Department of Homeland Security. "
I'm just glad they aren't using this tech for anything that would actually make anyone more secure, like improving crop yields, delivery of clean water, improving waste management, and so on. I mean, can you imagine what would happen if technology like this was deployed in any economically useful way!? It's a good thing it's being carefully restricted to the deadweight loss of the security-industrial complex!
Many are surprised that Jason Chaffetz (R Utah) voted for it. He as sure been hearing it from his constituents last night and this morning.
By "consituents" you mean the Party Whip or whatever the American equivalent of that position is?
Since people in Congress represent only their Party leadership, I'm not sure who else his "constituents" could be. The Party controls who gets elected and who partakes in the best perks once elected, so representatives represent the Party, not the People.
anyone who spent any time studying history in the last couple thousand years was already fully aware of that particular insight...
The important insight from the Stanford Prison Experiment is the Law of Common Humanity: "We are just like Them."
People have a tendency to say, "Oh sure bad people did bad things with unlimited power years ago, but We are Different! We are Good People!" The Stanford Prison Experiment--which was not a single instance, but a test of multiple individuals--showed that what most "good people" lack is opportunity, not capability, when it comes to being evil.
HISTORY, on the other hand, has taught us that power without oversight usually leads to abuse and corruption.
Mathematics, on the other hand, teaches us that power without oversight will ALWAYS lead to abuse and corruption, given sufficient time. The (few) historical cases where it hasn't have been due to the short timescales involved.
Just as evolution by variation and natural selection is a mathematical necessity, so power without oversight falling into corrupt hands is a matter of mathematical necessity, given sufficient time. All you need to know is that corrupt people pursue power (an undoubted fact) and that once they possess power they do not give it up (also an undoubted fact). Ergo, while power without oversight may reside for a time with people who don't abuse it, they will eventually die or relenquish their power, and that will necessarily create opportunities for corrupt people to acquire it. It is a statistical certainty, just like heat flowing from hot to cold objects is.
The polish SF writer Stanislaw Lem has predicted the evolution of warfare we're observing today as far back as 1986
Even earlier: "The Invincible" was a fictional account of the endgame of the same process of using the technology of prosperity to fight the wars of scarcity, and it was published in English in 1973, and in Polish in 1964.
Lem is mostly ignored because he makes it impossible for ignorant idiots to claim there's anything new or interesting about their tired old recycled ideas. I've been seeing people claim "synthetic insects" as a "brilliant new idea" from at least the mid-80's, at which time it was at least a decade old.
The sad thing about his prognositcations and speculations coming true is that it tends to confirm his pesimistic view of humanity as too stupid to use the technology of prosperity to create prosperity, instead continuing to use the products of the highest form of rationality to engage in the least rational human behaviour: warefare.
As a solution to problems of scarity almost anything is better than utilizing scarce resources to build machines and employ labour in ways that are a dead weight loss in terms of economic productivity. The Germans went to war in Eastern Europe in no small part because they were worried about food production, and you think someone might have noticed that investing in machines to destroy things was unlikely to increase production of food, while investing in agricultural research might have quite astonishing dividends (which in fact it did.) And of course with regard to risk, investing in agricultural research has zero risk of resulting in your country being left in a state where barely one brick is still sitting on top of another. So war as a solution to that particular problem was as usual the best of all possible solutions--except compared to all the others.
But people are incredibly stupid, and Lem's satires seem to have correctly predicted that incredibly stupid people will continue to do incredibly stupid things, not just going to war, but extending the war model of problem solving to areas like social welfare, recreational drug use, and randomly blowing things up. One can only presume the people who do this are too either too stupid to recognize that the war model is radically ineffective, or have managed to position themselves such that a larger slice of a smaller economy comes their way.
If you look at the AA role, you might have a point, but what are the chances of us seeing Air to Air engagements this day in age?
If you aren't prepared for them?
One hundred percent.
Corporations are merely a legal device for lowering risk of entrepreneurial activities by people.
And regulations are merely a legal device for lowing the risk to the rest of us from the agency issues created by corporate officers being shielded from the free market by the nanny state.
I have no beef with corporations--I own one myself. But I have a big problem with people who claim that corporations ought to be unregulated, when in a free market no corporations would exist.
We need a new model to encourage cures over treatment.
Given the effectiveness of vaccine development in the middle years of the 20th century I'd suggest we need an OLD model to encourage cures over treatment. I'm not familiar with the details, but it sure looks like a good place to start.
This will be great if the changes necessary to get around it make it unable to infect humans. After all, influenza does infect pigs and birds.
Why do you say that? Rabies is capable of infecting every warm-blooded organism, and there's a reasonably effective vaccine against it. What would the number or variety of species a virus is capable of infecting have to do with the ability to find a vaccine that is effective against it?
No part of any quickly-evolving virus is too vital to change.
False.
Viruses have some pretty tight constraints on what they have to do, and there are perfectly ordinary, finite number of ways to do it. They just can't arbitrarily change anything that needs to be changed to respond to a new threat.
We see the same thing in bacteria with antibiotic resistance: it's a serious problem, but the populations at risk from anti-biotic-resitant strains are generally immune-compromised to begin with, because while anti-biotic-resistance is a good trick, it is not without cost, and in the case of bacteria that cost is in virulence.
Your claim amounts to this: "If we destroy aircraft by shooting their wings off, pretty soon designers will come up with wingless aircraft." It's an article of faith unsupported by fact. Even if you look at the milder claim, "If we detect planes with radar pretty soon designers will come up with stealth planes" you'll see the same effect: stealth tech is costly and fragile, and no matter how nice it would be to have the cost and fragility have really limited its utility.
You are assuming for some reason that viruses can deal with new threats by adaptations that have nearly zero cost, and that is just not realistic.
Let me ask: how well did the smallpox virus adapt to the vaccines against it? Or polio to the vaccines against it? Or any of the other major viral killers that have been nearly wiped out in the past half century with the help of good science and good social policy? Why didn't THEY magically evolve resistance?