The main reason i will not buy HD DVD or BR is they are loaded down with DRM crap. If they were not and i could copy disks, and I could get a driver and a HDDVD or BR recorder for the computer, that wasnt loaded down with DRM, i might consider it. I think consumers would be smart to avoid this until the DRM shit is removed from the players. The high capacity disks might be useful on the computer if they would sell a recorder that was reasonably priced. I think as well, if they werent shooting themselves in the foot with consumer unfriendly technology, that HD-DVD would probably gradually phase in overtime. It wont be adopted by everyone right away, but if most new DVD players could also play HD, gradually the number of HD players would increase.
Ive always wondered how, or if, they repair cables which are located several miles underwater and continue for a thousand miles. How would you ever hook onto such a cable, and pulling it to the surface seems rather difficult to me and would put a lot of stress on the cable. I just assumed if the cable went bad, they would have to lay all new cable.
The fahrenhiet scale uses smaller degrees, so when you say for instance, "its in the 80s", you are referring to a smaller range of temperatures, so it more precisely specifies a temperature range. I am used to associating 90s with hot, 80s with warm, 70s with mild, 60s with cool, 50s with cold, etc. Again, it may be due to the fact that I am not used to celsius that I consider fahrenhiet to be more natural. I have become more used to celsius gradually and associating its different degree points with different temperatures. I do agree that placing zero at freezing makes sense. Originally fahrenhiet was going to place 100 at the average temperature of the human body, but its a few degrees off.
I can see a reason in switching to metric for some scientific and industrial applications, such as the dimensions of various computer components perhaps, but not for speed limit signs or the weather reports (actually which can be given in both measurements). I have the philosophy that no one measurement system is the best for every use. I actually find fahrenheit to be preferable, I think inches and feet seem more practical and natural for everday use, it is something about the size of the units I suppose. Perhaps it is due to the fact it is what I am used to, but I do think the units seem more convenient in some cases. I actually tend to use both metric and english measurements (like NASA:-) ), and am familiar with both, and use which one is most convenient for the task.
Perl is a highly dynamic language and is actually well suited to long running applications. There really is no reason it cannot be. In fact, the automatic memory allocation and the VM adds a level of safety. The problems of buffer overruns are much less on perl and it is also eisier to prevent memory leaks. In my opinion, Ruby, Python and perl are better choices for applications than C or C++.
Perhaps you should simply purchase the US version and pay to have it shipped internationally, for Autocard. With the online downloads, try to pay for it with US dollars instead of Euros, from the US version of their site.
I think the UWB idea is simply horrendous. First, privacy. Has anyone thought of this? Do you REALLY want the chance of someone being able to eavesdrop on every keyboard press or mouse click you make, or all other communications to your peripherals, perhaps what you are printing out? Another concern is the exposure to the EMF fields. This will surely just increase the nasty soup of RF fields that pollute our environment already. I have heard from many people who come down with all sorts of symptoms being near the wireless networking hubs, which go away once they move away from them, such as nausea. I certainly do not trust the wireless technology myself. And we have the issue of RF pollution, disabling or interfering with broadcasting services, amateur and CB radio and such. Finally, it just isnt that practical. Since a wire allows you to concentrate the transmission in the wire, there is a far greater potential for bandwidth, since the signal only uses the space inside of the wire, rather than all of the room within a radius from the device. I like being able to use different USB cables and give high bandwidth devices their own cable and port to improve their speed. RF spectrum is actually quite limited, people who think everything can be wireless are obviously ignorant. Wired technology can provide far greater bandwidth and speeds than wireless ever will, without all of the interference, privacy and health concerns of wireless.
With technology such as the 3D technology, why make a stop at HD-DVD instead of going straight to the better technology? HD-DVD is obsolete before it has even really gone into much use.
It is possible to run an X server on Mac OS X that will display all of your X applications straight to your Aqua desktop. This way you can run Aqua and X11 applications side by side, and it is very easy to get it running. For more information:
I have found Yahoos services to be among the better ones on the internet, so I dont really see what he is talking about. The yahoo services I use work better than any other.
This book sounds like it does a pretty good job of explaining many of the issues, often caused by the greed of the factory farming and agribusiness companies which seek to maximise profit, at the expense of everything else. The fact that chickens are fed shit (literally), and kept in inhumane and unhealthy conditions has been well known for years. We also see this in the cattle industry, where cows were fed parts of other animals, which may have led to mad cow disease. Cows are herbivorous, and should not eat meat.
Not only are the health issues deplorable, but the way these animals are treated as well. Many of these farms are called concentration camp farms and are hell on earth. The animals are kept in small cages where they cannot move, crowded with many other birds. Some are kept in large warehouses and never see the outdoors, and are still crowded and often go insane, attacking other chickens. This often leads to cruel practices such as debeaking the chickens with hot blades. Like people, chickens need time away from others of their type.
At slaughter, cows are supposed to be stunned with a bolt gun. But since the line moves so fast, many cows are not stunned properly and knocked out, and make it to the disassembly part of the line still conscious. Workers are not allowed to stop the line or if they do they may be fired.
Chickens are not stunned, their necks are slit and they bleed to death, slow and painful, but hopefully before they get to the processing sections of the line. The floor in this facilities is basically a lake of blood.
If most Americans knew what happens to animals in these plants, most would demand humane slaughter and living conditions for all animals, or at least, I would hope.
I think encryption is better done in software, such as with GPG. Then at least we can read the software code, rather than relying on black box technology.
I also am concerned about the DRM implications of this. Could for instance, in the future, the disk perhaps allow Windows to request that an NTFS filesystem be locked and Linux not be allowed to access it? Could this be used by Microsoft to lock open source programs out of reading data from other programs?
I believe that many of the classics in this library are already in the public domain. However, that would apply to copies of them written in their native language. I think translations are copyrighted by their translator. However, you often can get older translations where the copyright has expired. It would also be nice to have these works avialable online in their native language and in English.
Still, even with public domain items, digitisation is still a target for funding.
I also would like to see physics, mathematics, history, philosophy, ethics, and all sorts of other textbooks be placed in the public domain. It would be nice to make avialable the vast knowledge of these sciences and literature available to anyone.
I tend to disagree that the poor always are there because of lack of potential intelligence. Rather, even societies such as the US can have a sort of caste system, whereby a poor family cannot afford to send its children to the expensive schools, so they are later do not make more than their parents money and thus the process is repeated with their own children.
Often I think the rich are where they are at not because they are genitally superior, but instead because they were born into the right family, they were encouraged by their family to read, learn, write, do well in school, they may have had tutors, encyclopedias and computers in their homes, things not common in the homes of poor families. Ive met many people who are poor, but I see as much potential intelligence their that could be developed in many of them, as wealthy billionaires. They are simply downtrodden and have not been encouraged to develop this intellectual capability that lies within them. I think if we had a society that in fact did not encourage or require a desperate struggle to survive, that provides a good quality of life, security, and intense intellectual pursuits for its residents, in fact we would evolve intellectually much quicker. The brutal fight for survival does not in my opinion encourage a developments in intellectual skills and capacity as a great extent as reading, writing, math and science could, and the physical body could be developed simply through fitness and exercise, we have people who jog, ride bikes, life weight, just for the fun of it, just as we can have people apply their minds to creative endevour, just for the fun of it, and in so doing enhance and evolve body and mind, without the need for distress and suffering.
I agree with you completely. I think we need to obviously find some way to feed these poor people and transform third world countries into much better places to live where the people have enought to eat, feel secure, and can enrich themselves with vast intellectual pursuits. There should be libraries, schools, art museums, in every town and city. If we want humanity to continue to expand its intellect and refine itself, we need to encourage people to read, write, paint, draw, think, ponder, get active in politics, debate, and so on. If the people are starving to death they certianly cannot do that, if they have to spend all of their time struggling to just get food to eat, they cannot do it. Yet, we must also improve living standard while protecting the earths environment. I think a clean and healthy environment, with beautiful sceneries and natural wonders is an important thing for maintaining the psychological and emotional health of our species. Perhaps, we need some sort of free energy/free matter technology that will provide us with all of the energy and material we need without taking anything from the earth, with minimal impact on it. No more destructive and labour intensive mining, we could use our technology to run computerised tractors and machines to harvest crops in the field without manual labour, water pumps to grow food in african deserts, and so on. All not consuming any resources (except growing the food in soil). That would be ideal. If only, if only...
Labelling does work and allows consumers to be aware of the food that they are putting into their bodies. After all, its their bodies and no one elses, they should have a right to know whats going into it. Unless there is a legal requirement, companies are not required to tell you what is in their products. I have tried calling companies before and often they are clueless, the people on the phone, or they told me "thats a secret, i cant tell you". Many people do not have time to call and fight with these phone representatives, having labelling makes it much more certain to consumers what the product contains. The labelling requirement would also work backwards through the supply chain, so intermediate suppliers would know what a product contains or how it is produced, and thus can more easily make choices about whether or not to include it in their product. It makes giving people a choice eisier by making it eisier for manufacturers to give people a choice of different products through the required record keeping and labelling avialable at all levels of the supply chain.
I also think this cloning technology is not in the best interest of the consumer. Particularly it will improve corporate profits, but does so at the expense of the well being of the animals, perhaps even the consumer. I think it will actually lock farmers into the control of these corporations, once they have switched to clones, they will no longer have a sufficient breeding population to breed their own cattle. Think about what this technology will do. It will replace the vast and deverse genetic base of cattle with one copy of genetic material, making cattl breeding impossible and requiring farmers to go to these corporations to get cattle. The corporations can then charge whatever they want, even patent the cattle. As more farmers use the technology, it will be harder for a farmer to find another farmer who has a cattle he can breed his cattle with.
The means of production does affect the foods nutritional value. If the food is grown in dead, nutrient starved soil, its not going to have as many nutrients. As well, we arent only concerned about whats in the food but whats not in it, we dont want pesticides and other nasty things in the food. I believe in both the precautionary principle, that when introducing exotic new technology, we should be safe rather than sorry and keep it off shelves until it is proven safe, by an independant party (not a corporate controlled one like the FDA which cares more about corporate profits than peoples health), and as well that humans have evolved for thousands of years to handle certian types of food. When we start adding in things that we have not eaten before, strange new chemicals, the body is not as well prepared to process these, and it may even be harmful. Technology is great in computers, but not on my plate.
The metaphysical aspects are what you might call speculation. But that a scientist can basically influence what sort of a body that the creature will live in, since they are able to select a cow for instance that has a feature they like, for good or bad, make hundreds of copies of that cow, and thus force this feature on all of those cloned cows, it is clear that a scientist, who unlike nature, can have an agenda, good intentioned or bad intentioned, but even good intentions can lead to disaster, they can through cloning force their agenda on all of these cows. At least if we leave the genetics that a cow consists of up to nature, its random, nature doesnt have an agenda.
CLoning may have dangers we dont understand yet. Its doing something with living and conscious beings at a very basic level, and is really pretty frightening to me for the above reasons. Its direct manipulation of life, by others, forcing on a being a certian body by others. I feel much better at least leaving it to the chance of nature rather than of scientists who can be corrupt and have evil agendas.
Perhaps there are reasons nature codes and programs DNA over different generations and different organisms that we dont understand, but which are vital. And I think it is the fact that each being is unique and individual, makes each one an individual, special, unique like no other, it adds richness and diversity, which is a good thing. The whole idea of creating huge populations of conformist, identical, robot like clones, who have no individuality or uniqueness, is truly terrifying and there is something deeply troubling and disturbing about it to me.
I think this is all tampering something, the life and even consciousness of being, forcing our ideas of what kind of body they have upon them, that we have no business meddling in.
Oh, I also forgot to mention all of the possible monoculture issues regarding this practice. Each animal should have a different genetic code. We know that the sexual reproductive system is essential in producing diversity, and the diversity of parent genetic code is really quite essential to the health of the animal. We know that animals are best produced from two parents who are not related for more diverse genetic code to be healthy, and inbreeding can lead to genetic problems. Animals which have been reduced to a very small breeding population and who are near extinction tend to have breeding problems because of this. We also know that the more diverse a genetically a population is, the greater the chance that there will be members of that population that will be resistant to viruses. One of the reasons that the commercial cavendish banana is now being decimated by massive virus plague, is the fact that in the new world, bananas were commonly propogated asexually which led to very little diversity between different banana plants. It is believed that this has led to a virus that affects that genetic strain that is so predominant being able to wipe out a large percentage of the banana trees in the new world, since there is very little genetic diversity and very little chance of at least some of them being resistant to the virus.
Using cloned animals, could essentially wipe out a large amount of the genetic diversity of the cattle population, to be replaced with a monoculture clone variety. Perhaps as well, the more varied genetic code leads to a more diverse range of nutrition from the organism. It really is a frightening concept that really should be confined to science fiction books, but not allowed in real life.
I think cloning of animals is a bad idea, for the animal and also the people who will eat it. What kind of side effects of the animal will there be as a result of this? The Dolly the Sheep had a shortened lifespan. Will a number of cows be cloned which will have terrible defects and health issues?
Also the genetic code of animal may not be at all random whatsoever. For all we know, there may be a specific reason why certian genetic code is used for a certian animal, perhaps even influenced by the animals own consciousness before it enters this body. Could it be that conscious beings exist beyond the body? Could there be something called reincarnation? This idea has been a part of many eastern metahphysical concepts for thousands of years, perhaps they are right. I think it is quite possible, and that their bodies are specifically programmed, perhaps to match and for compatability with the consciousness of the being that will inhabit it. Perhaps this is a free will issue, the right of the conscious being to decide and determine the genetic code that it will live in, which would be one of the most sacred rights of any being, to choose its own body it will live its life in. Cloning deprives the being of the right to make that choice for themselves regarding the body they will live in by imposing the body that was meant for another conscious being upon them.
You may call this speculation, but it could very well be true. There is so much we dont know, and we are ignorant about who we are and where we really come from. I believe it is best to leave the genetic composition of the body of conscious beings to nature, god or the control of the conscious being that will inhabit it. Even if you only accept that nature influences the programming of an animals DNA, the selection of a cloned genetics selected by scientists allows specific bodies to be forced upon these beings, by scientists who have an agenda which may not at all be in the best interest of either the animals or even those who will eat it. It is better to leave it to chance as with nature, who has no agenda, or to the animals own choice, which they make before they enter the body that will be theirs and chosen by them.
This is a really lousy idea. Boats can sink or get knocked around, and it will be close to shore where water is shallow. The idea of all of this radioactive material just waiting to get tossed into a waterway is not appealing.
Nuclear power, with safe reactor designs, on stable, firm ground, on land, might be a good idea. But this is just crazy and insane.
Interesting yes. I wondered about the issue of including a font to be used by the web brower to display text. However, the font would not be used in context of encouraging the user to download it and install it on their system to use for their projects, but with the intention of the web browser using it to display your web page and then discarding it.
Obviously, you can get away with using fonts in your web graphics and images, everyone does it. One feature that I think would actually be nice, come to think of it, would be to specify image files to use to display each character in a block of text. This would allow the browser to only have to download the image once for each character and re use that same image each time the character is used in a block of text, unlike a huge JPG of the entire block of text. Such as this: <span style="font-img: a a.jpg b b.jpg c c.jpg h h.jpg e e.jpg l l.jpg o jpg;">hello abc</span> Or something like that. This would associate each character with an image file which will be used to display that character. This would allow the web browser to make sure that copy and paste could be used as well with this kind of text.
I believe Firefox should continue to enhance and add support for SVG, SMIL, CSS, HTML, Javascript, MNG, DOM, and other technologies. I have never quite understood why, as well, there is not some sort of portable font system that could be used in web pages, where if a font is unavialable locally, one can be including on the web site, downloaded, and temporalily used to display the web page. One such system is Open Type. As far as implementing new protocol features not yet standardised, I think the best thing to do is go ahead and implement the feature and then send in a protocol document to the W3C or whoever to have it standardised and make the documentation widely avialable.
I believe that the Windows operating system is no where near losing its near monopoly grip on the desktop. Most people are locked in with hardware and software that only runs on Windows.
Of course, the OS being dead and the OS sharing the marketplace and allowing users other choices are two different things. people are too much focused on will that or this OS win rather than for them all to coexist. In order for them to co-exist well you need for one OS to run the other OSs applications, with source level compatability at least. This means at least each OS vendor must fully publish and even provide code regarding their OSs interfaces for hardware and software, so all operating systems can provide a compatability layer for them. Better, OSs could support some basic underlying system APIs, so software works on all OSs with a recompile. What prevents people from moving between OSs is not being able to take their apps and hardware with them, and when they cannot do so, people are locked into an OS, which happens to be windows, and that OS maintains control of those users.
OS choice is a far better alternative to one dominant OS, it allows for competition and different ideas and technologies to be tried on each. All that is needed is for each to support the same application visible API and DPI (driver programming interface). But these are abstractions and completely different kernel architectures can be used under the hood.
I would like to see more support of technologies such as SVG, SMIL, CSS3, DOM, and so on as well. I would also like to see features such as MNG support added, which is helpful in doing animated images. I wonder if they there has been any talk of implementing a portable fonts system in firefox such as open type so, if a font is not installed locally on the system, it is downloaded from the web site and used by the web browser to display the font.
These kinds of features, to provide a high degree of control and visual effects, while ridiculed by some, is actually necessary to fend off proprietary software like Flash and its proprietary formats. Obviously there was a need for the sort of thing Flash does, since there was no open source solution, we ended up with this situation where flash has become pandemic on the web, and you must download a proprietary closed source viewer that wont run on many OSs just to view a web page.
I do not think that adding new features are a bad thing necessarily as far as features and performance is concerned, relatively speaking. I think people incorrectly blame the features on the high memory usage of firefox, but I suspect this has nothing to do with features but poor data handling practices , in the handling of data from web page. This is indicated in the way that firefox starts out small, but as you load more pages, tends to expand and increase in size quite significantly.
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The main reason i will not buy HD DVD or BR is they are loaded down with DRM crap. If they were not and i could copy disks, and I could get a driver and a HDDVD or BR recorder for the computer, that wasnt loaded down with DRM, i might consider it. I think consumers would be smart to avoid this until the DRM shit is removed from the players. The high capacity disks might be useful on the computer if they would sell a recorder that was reasonably priced. I think as well, if they werent shooting themselves in the foot with consumer unfriendly technology, that HD-DVD would probably gradually phase in overtime. It wont be adopted by everyone right away, but if most new DVD players could also play HD, gradually the number of HD players would increase.
Ive always wondered how, or if, they repair cables which are located several miles underwater and continue for a thousand miles. How would you ever hook onto such a cable, and pulling it to the surface seems rather difficult to me and would put a lot of stress on the cable. I just assumed if the cable went bad, they would have to lay all new cable.
The fahrenhiet scale uses smaller degrees, so when you say for instance, "its in the 80s", you are referring to a smaller range of temperatures, so it more precisely specifies a temperature range. I am used to associating 90s with hot, 80s with warm, 70s with mild, 60s with cool, 50s with cold, etc. Again, it may be due to the fact that I am not used to celsius that I consider fahrenhiet to be more natural. I have become more used to celsius gradually and associating its different degree points with different temperatures. I do agree that placing zero at freezing makes sense. Originally fahrenhiet was going to place 100 at the average temperature of the human body, but its a few degrees off.
I can see a reason in switching to metric for some scientific and industrial applications, such as the dimensions of various computer components perhaps, but not for speed limit signs or the weather reports (actually which can be given in both measurements). I have the philosophy that no one measurement system is the best for every use. I actually find fahrenheit to be preferable, I think inches and feet seem more practical and natural for everday use, it is something about the size of the units I suppose. Perhaps it is due to the fact it is what I am used to, but I do think the units seem more convenient in some cases. I actually tend to use both metric and english measurements (like NASA :-) ), and am familiar with both, and use which one is most convenient for the task.
Perl is a highly dynamic language and is actually well suited to long running applications. There really is no reason it cannot be. In fact, the automatic memory allocation and the VM adds a level of safety. The problems of buffer overruns are much less on perl and it is also eisier to prevent memory leaks. In my opinion, Ruby, Python and perl are better choices for applications than C or C++.
Perhaps you should simply purchase the US version and pay to have it shipped internationally, for Autocard. With the online downloads, try to pay for it with US dollars instead of Euros, from the US version of their site.
I think the UWB idea is simply horrendous. First, privacy. Has anyone thought of this? Do you REALLY want the chance of someone being able to eavesdrop on every keyboard press or mouse click you make, or all other communications to your peripherals, perhaps what you are printing out? Another concern is the exposure to the EMF fields. This will surely just increase the nasty soup of RF fields that pollute our environment already. I have heard from many people who come down with all sorts of symptoms being near the wireless networking hubs, which go away once they move away from them, such as nausea. I certainly do not trust the wireless technology myself. And we have the issue of RF pollution, disabling or interfering with broadcasting services, amateur and CB radio and such. Finally, it just isnt that practical. Since a wire allows you to concentrate the transmission in the wire, there is a far greater potential for bandwidth, since the signal only uses the space inside of the wire, rather than all of the room within a radius from the device. I like being able to use different USB cables and give high bandwidth devices their own cable and port to improve their speed. RF spectrum is actually quite limited, people who think everything can be wireless are obviously ignorant. Wired technology can provide far greater bandwidth and speeds than wireless ever will, without all of the interference, privacy and health concerns of wireless.
With technology such as the 3D technology, why make a stop at HD-DVD instead of going straight to the better technology? HD-DVD is obsolete before it has even really gone into much use.
It is possible to run an X server on Mac OS X that will display all of your X applications straight to your Aqua desktop. This way you can run Aqua and X11 applications side by side, and it is very easy to get it running. For more information:
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/x11/
I have found Yahoos services to be among the better ones on the internet, so I dont really see what he is talking about. The yahoo services I use work better than any other.
This book sounds like it does a pretty good job of explaining many of the issues, often caused by the greed of the factory farming and agribusiness companies which seek to maximise profit, at the expense of everything else. The fact that chickens are fed shit (literally), and kept in inhumane and unhealthy conditions has been well known for years. We also see this in the cattle industry, where cows were fed parts of other animals, which may have led to mad cow disease. Cows are herbivorous, and should not eat meat.
Not only are the health issues deplorable, but the way these animals are treated as well. Many of these farms are called concentration camp farms and are hell on earth. The animals are kept in small cages where they cannot move, crowded with many other birds. Some are kept in large warehouses and never see the outdoors, and are still crowded and often go insane, attacking other chickens. This often leads to cruel practices such as debeaking the chickens with hot blades. Like people, chickens need time away from others of their type.
At slaughter, cows are supposed to be stunned with a bolt gun. But since the line moves so fast, many cows are not stunned properly and knocked out, and make it to the disassembly part of the line still conscious. Workers are not allowed to stop the line or if they do they may be fired.
Chickens are not stunned, their necks are slit and they bleed to death, slow and painful, but hopefully before they get to the processing sections of the line. The floor in this facilities is basically a lake of blood.
If most Americans knew what happens to animals in these plants, most would demand humane slaughter and living conditions for all animals, or at least, I would hope.
I think encryption is better done in software, such as with GPG. Then at least we can read the software code, rather than relying on black box technology.
I also am concerned about the DRM implications of this. Could for instance, in the future, the disk perhaps allow Windows to request that an NTFS filesystem be locked and Linux not be allowed to access it? Could this be used by Microsoft to lock open source programs out of reading data from other programs?
I believe that many of the classics in this library are already in the public domain. However, that would apply to copies of them written in their native language. I think translations are copyrighted by their translator. However, you often can get older translations where the copyright has expired. It would also be nice to have these works avialable online in their native language and in English.
Still, even with public domain items, digitisation is still a target for funding.
I also would like to see physics, mathematics, history, philosophy, ethics, and all sorts of other textbooks be placed in the public domain. It would be nice to make avialable the vast knowledge of these sciences and literature available to anyone.
I tend to disagree that the poor always are there because of lack of potential intelligence. Rather, even societies such as the US can have a sort of caste system, whereby a poor family cannot afford to send its children to the expensive schools, so they are later do not make more than their parents money and thus the process is repeated with their own children.
Often I think the rich are where they are at not because they are genitally superior, but instead because they were born into the right family, they were encouraged by their family to read, learn, write, do well in school, they may have had tutors, encyclopedias and computers in their homes, things not common in the homes of poor families. Ive met many people who are poor, but I see as much potential intelligence their that could be developed in many of them, as wealthy billionaires. They are simply downtrodden and have not been encouraged to develop this intellectual capability that lies within them. I think if we had a society that in fact did not encourage or require a desperate struggle to survive, that provides a good quality of life, security, and intense intellectual pursuits for its residents, in fact we would evolve intellectually much quicker. The brutal fight for survival does not in my opinion encourage a developments in intellectual skills and capacity as a great extent as reading, writing, math and science could, and the physical body could be developed simply through fitness and exercise, we have people who jog, ride bikes, life weight, just for the fun of it, just as we can have people apply their minds to creative endevour, just for the fun of it, and in so doing enhance and evolve body and mind, without the need for distress and suffering.
I agree with you completely. I think we need to obviously find some way to feed these poor people and transform third world countries into much better places to live where the people have enought to eat, feel secure, and can enrich themselves with vast intellectual pursuits. There should be libraries, schools, art museums, in every town and city. If we want humanity to continue to expand its intellect and refine itself, we need to encourage people to read, write, paint, draw, think, ponder, get active in politics, debate, and so on. If the people are starving to death they certianly cannot do that, if they have to spend all of their time struggling to just get food to eat, they cannot do it. Yet, we must also improve living standard while protecting the earths environment. I think a clean and healthy environment, with beautiful sceneries and natural wonders is an important thing for maintaining the psychological and emotional health of our species. Perhaps, we need some sort of free energy/free matter technology that will provide us with all of the energy and material we need without taking anything from the earth, with minimal impact on it. No more destructive and labour intensive mining, we could use our technology to run computerised tractors and machines to harvest crops in the field without manual labour, water pumps to grow food in african deserts, and so on. All not consuming any resources (except growing the food in soil). That would be ideal. If only, if only...
Labelling does work and allows consumers to be aware of the food that they are putting into their bodies. After all, its their bodies and no one elses, they should have a right to know whats going into it. Unless there is a legal requirement, companies are not required to tell you what is in their products. I have tried calling companies before and often they are clueless, the people on the phone, or they told me "thats a secret, i cant tell you". Many people do not have time to call and fight with these phone representatives, having labelling makes it much more certain to consumers what the product contains. The labelling requirement would also work backwards through the supply chain, so intermediate suppliers would know what a product contains or how it is produced, and thus can more easily make choices about whether or not to include it in their product. It makes giving people a choice eisier by making it eisier for manufacturers to give people a choice of different products through the required record keeping and labelling avialable at all levels of the supply chain.
I also think this cloning technology is not in the best interest of the consumer. Particularly it will improve corporate profits, but does so at the expense of the well being of the animals, perhaps even the consumer. I think it will actually lock farmers into the control of these corporations, once they have switched to clones, they will no longer have a sufficient breeding population to breed their own cattle. Think about what this technology will do. It will replace the vast and deverse genetic base of cattle with one copy of genetic material, making cattl breeding impossible and requiring farmers to go to these corporations to get cattle. The corporations can then charge whatever they want, even patent the cattle. As more farmers use the technology, it will be harder for a farmer to find another farmer who has a cattle he can breed his cattle with.
The means of production does affect the foods nutritional value. If the food is grown in dead, nutrient starved soil, its not going to have as many nutrients. As well, we arent only concerned about whats in the food but whats not in it, we dont want pesticides and other nasty things in the food. I believe in both the precautionary principle, that when introducing exotic new technology, we should be safe rather than sorry and keep it off shelves until it is proven safe, by an independant party (not a corporate controlled one like the FDA which cares more about corporate profits than peoples health), and as well that humans have evolved for thousands of years to handle certian types of food. When we start adding in things that we have not eaten before, strange new chemicals, the body is not as well prepared to process these, and it may even be harmful. Technology is great in computers, but not on my plate.
The metaphysical aspects are what you might call speculation. But that a scientist can basically influence what sort of a body that the creature will live in, since they are able to select a cow for instance that has a feature they like, for good or bad, make hundreds of copies of that cow, and thus force this feature on all of those cloned cows, it is clear that a scientist, who unlike nature, can have an agenda, good intentioned or bad intentioned, but even good intentions can lead to disaster, they can through cloning force their agenda on all of these cows. At least if we leave the genetics that a cow consists of up to nature, its random, nature doesnt have an agenda.
CLoning may have dangers we dont understand yet. Its doing something with living and conscious beings at a very basic level, and is really pretty frightening to me for the above reasons. Its direct manipulation of life, by others, forcing on a being a certian body by others. I feel much better at least leaving it to the chance of nature rather than of scientists who can be corrupt and have evil agendas.
Perhaps there are reasons nature codes and programs DNA over different generations and different organisms that we dont understand, but which are vital. And I think it is the fact that each being is unique and individual, makes each one an individual, special, unique like no other, it adds richness and diversity, which is a good thing. The whole idea of creating huge populations of conformist, identical, robot like clones, who have no individuality or uniqueness, is truly terrifying and there is something deeply troubling and disturbing about it to me.
I think this is all tampering something, the life and even consciousness of being, forcing our ideas of what kind of body they have upon them, that we have no business meddling in.
Oh, I also forgot to mention all of the possible monoculture issues regarding this practice. Each animal should have a different genetic code. We know that the sexual reproductive system is essential in producing diversity, and the diversity of parent genetic code is really quite essential to the health of the animal. We know that animals are best produced from two parents who are not related for more diverse genetic code to be healthy, and inbreeding can lead to genetic problems. Animals which have been reduced to a very small breeding population and who are near extinction tend to have breeding problems because of this. We also know that the more diverse a genetically a population is, the greater the chance that there will be members of that population that will be resistant to viruses. One of the reasons that the commercial cavendish banana is now being decimated by massive virus plague, is the fact that in the new world, bananas were commonly propogated asexually which led to very little diversity between different banana plants. It is believed that this has led to a virus that affects that genetic strain that is so predominant being able to wipe out a large percentage of the banana trees in the new world, since there is very little genetic diversity and very little chance of at least some of them being resistant to the virus.
Using cloned animals, could essentially wipe out a large amount of the genetic diversity of the cattle population, to be replaced with a monoculture clone variety. Perhaps as well, the more varied genetic code leads to a more diverse range of nutrition from the organism. It really is a frightening concept that really should be confined to science fiction books, but not allowed in real life.
I think cloning of animals is a bad idea, for the animal and also the people who will eat it. What kind of side effects of the animal will there be as a result of this? The Dolly the Sheep had a shortened lifespan. Will a number of cows be cloned which will have terrible defects and health issues?
Also the genetic code of animal may not be at all random whatsoever. For all we know, there may be a specific reason why certian genetic code is used for a certian animal, perhaps even influenced by the animals own consciousness before it enters this body. Could it be that conscious beings exist beyond the body? Could there be something called reincarnation? This idea has been a part of many eastern metahphysical concepts for thousands of years, perhaps they are right. I think it is quite possible, and that their bodies are specifically programmed, perhaps to match and for compatability with the consciousness of the being that will inhabit it. Perhaps this is a free will issue, the right of the conscious being to decide and determine the genetic code that it will live in, which would be one of the most sacred rights of any being, to choose its own body it will live its life in. Cloning deprives the being of the right to make that choice for themselves regarding the body they will live in by imposing the body that was meant for another conscious being upon them.
You may call this speculation, but it could very well be true. There is so much we dont know, and we are ignorant about who we are and where we really come from. I believe it is best to leave the genetic composition of the body of conscious beings to nature, god or the control of the conscious being that will inhabit it. Even if you only accept that nature influences the programming of an animals DNA, the selection of a cloned genetics selected by scientists allows specific bodies to be forced upon these beings, by scientists who have an agenda which may not at all be in the best interest of either the animals or even those who will eat it. It is better to leave it to chance as with nature, who has no agenda, or to the animals own choice, which they make before they enter the body that will be theirs and chosen by them.
This is a really lousy idea. Boats can sink or get knocked around, and it will be close to shore where water is shallow. The idea of all of this radioactive material just waiting to get tossed into a waterway is not appealing.
Nuclear power, with safe reactor designs, on stable, firm ground, on land, might be a good idea. But this is just crazy and insane.
Interesting yes. I wondered about the issue of including a font to be used by the web brower to display text. However, the font would not be used in context of encouraging the user to download it and install it on their system to use for their projects, but with the intention of the web browser using it to display your web page and then discarding it.
Obviously, you can get away with using fonts in your web graphics and images, everyone does it. One feature that I think would actually be nice, come to think of it, would be to specify image files to use to display each character in a block of text. This would allow the browser to only have to download the image once for each character and re use that same image each time the character is used in a block of text, unlike a huge JPG of the entire block of text. Such as this:
<span style="font-img: a a.jpg b b.jpg c c.jpg h h.jpg e e.jpg l l.jpg o jpg;">hello abc</span> Or something like that. This would associate each character with an image file which will be used to display that character. This would allow the web browser to make sure that copy and paste could be used as well with this kind of text.
I believe Firefox should continue to enhance and add support for SVG, SMIL, CSS, HTML, Javascript, MNG, DOM, and other technologies. I have never quite understood why, as well, there is not some sort of portable font system that could be used in web pages, where if a font is unavialable locally, one can be including on the web site, downloaded, and temporalily used to display the web page. One such system is Open Type. As far as implementing new protocol features not yet standardised, I think the best thing to do is go ahead and implement the feature and then send in a protocol document to the W3C or whoever to have it standardised and make the documentation widely avialable.
I believe that the Windows operating system is no where near losing its near monopoly grip on the desktop. Most people are locked in with hardware and software that only runs on Windows.
Of course, the OS being dead and the OS sharing the marketplace and allowing users other choices are two different things. people are too much focused on will that or this OS win rather than for them all to coexist. In order for them to co-exist well you need for one OS to run the other OSs applications, with source level compatability at least. This means at least each OS vendor must fully publish and even provide code regarding their OSs interfaces for hardware and software, so all operating systems can provide a compatability layer for them. Better, OSs could support some basic underlying system APIs, so software works on all OSs with a recompile. What prevents people from moving between OSs is not being able to take their apps and hardware with them, and when they cannot do so, people are locked into an OS, which happens to be windows, and that OS maintains control of those users.
OS choice is a far better alternative to one dominant OS, it allows for competition and different ideas and technologies to be tried on each. All that is needed is for each to support the same application visible API and DPI (driver programming interface). But these are abstractions and completely different kernel architectures can be used under the hood.
I would like to see more support of technologies such as SVG, SMIL, CSS3, DOM, and so on as well. I would also like to see features such as MNG support added, which is helpful in doing animated images. I wonder if they there has been any talk of implementing a portable fonts system in firefox such as open type so, if a font is not installed locally on the system, it is downloaded from the web site and used by the web browser to display the font.
These kinds of features, to provide a high degree of control and visual effects, while ridiculed by some, is actually necessary to fend off proprietary software like Flash and its proprietary formats. Obviously there was a need for the sort of thing Flash does, since there was no open source solution, we ended up with this situation where flash has become pandemic on the web, and you must download a proprietary closed source viewer that wont run on many OSs just to view a web page.
I do not think that adding new features are a bad thing necessarily as far as features and performance is concerned, relatively speaking. I think people incorrectly blame the features on the high memory usage of firefox, but I suspect this has nothing to do with features but poor data handling practices , in the handling of data from web page. This is indicated in the way that firefox starts out small, but as you load more pages, tends to expand and increase in size quite significantly.