Have you thought through the ethical implications of genetic modification? Firstly, during the research you're creating human-ish life, and then terminating it. For those with problems with ethical issues on abortion on demand this is a problem. Secondly, if this ever reaches commercialisation (and it will be to recoup the costs), only the rich will have access to these medical advances. If it leads to the potential to pick and chose better genes for your children then you'll create a two-tier humanity, with the wealthy as the genetically superior a la gattica.
It's not as simple as just being close minded to the opportunities.
The problem is that there are potentially huge negative social implications of human genetic modification, not least because it won't be available to all. The wealthy will be able to chose genes that make one superior and so create a wealthy, more capable race that will rule over the poor and genetically inferior. We already have this to some extent through generations of class structures, but now there is at least random chance that keeps stirring the gene pool, and there isn't a clear divide between the genetic haves and have-nots.
IVF? That doesn't involve sex. One could imagine artificial wombs and cloning tech which can derive gametes from cells other than a sperm and an egg. The result would be genetically 100% human but would not qualify under your definition. It may even be possible one day to encourage adult stem cells to start dividing and grow into a full human clone identical to the originator. Not human?
What if you have a human but with slightly modified DNA from an animal which gave improved sight, hearing or muscle efficiency? Where do you draw the line? What about the ethical and social implications if modified DNA that gave superior abilities (cognative etc) were only available to the rich? I think Gattica gave a glimpse of what that future might look like. What if the genetically pure human were the poor, and the elite became almost a separate race? I suspect such a divided future would lead to violence and a nightmarish dystopia.
Actually that reading is pretty far from mainstream orthodox Christian teaching, even within protestantism. Pre-millennial dispensationalism is a minority view among theologians and almost unheard of outside the USA.
Actually the problem is not when production peaks, but when production cannot keep up with demand. At that point prices will rise rapidly, even if production continues to grow. A fall off in production will only exacerbate the price rises, and the rapid decline in production that peak oil predicts will make oil too expensive for many parts of the world, severely limiting their growth and ability to produce food and goods.
The problem is not the lack of oil per se, but the lack of cheap oil.
Both, and more. The new tech should give at least 4x better sensitivity with higher resolutions, but the other major benefit over CMOS is something else called "Fill Factor". Basically this is the amount of the sensor surface which collects useful light. With typical CMOS chips this is something like 40%, but with these quantum dot devices it is 100% as the light sensitive region lies on the surface of the chip with the electronics below. This is not such a huge deal for mobile phone cameras, but it is a big deal in astronomy and scientific imaging applications which use very low light levels, and currently have to use CCDs with all their disadvantages.
This could be revolutionary in the field of Raman spectroscopy and other similar fields, and I for one am waiting with baited breath for this to become a reality.
Nevertheless, they did exist. I have a Russian friend who did "Atheism class", who now has a PhD in Mathematics. The irony was that it was the atheism class which made her believe there was a God. I too was stunned when she told be about the class, as it made no sense, but she insisted that it was a class dedicated to teaching children that there was no god, and used evolution to try and prove it. It sounded like precisely the sort of thing that Richard Dawkins was trying to promote with his atheist summer camps for children. You can shift the goal posts and do as much mental gymnastics as you like; the fact remains that the worst atrocities in history were perpetrated by regimes who asserted the God did not exist.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: "Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened." Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: "Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.
Edward E. Ericson, Jr., "Solzhenitsyn – Voice from the Gulag," Eternity, October 1985, pp. 23, 24.
That's not to say that all religions have clean hands, they don't, but humans seem to have an inbuilt need to worship something, and what we worship will heavily influence who we live and act, and how we understand the importance of the lives of those around us. If we don't worship a God for whom all people everywhere are equally loved and important, then we will see others as less than human and do evil things to them (and that can, and does occur with some forms of christian theology). If we worship the state then people who threaten the state must be corrected or killed. If you worship science then people who are "anti-scientific" in your view must be corrected, or if they threaten science, killed. In soviet russia, christians and others threatened the state and its religion of the "science" of Marxism–Leninism, and were controlled, imprisoned and killed in vast numbers.
As has been said before, the only thing worse than what happens when man worships god, is what happens when man worships man.
Well you start by confiscating children of believers, in the name of preventing "brainwashing", move on to imprisoning believers for "anti-revolutionary activities", and then start killing millions. You might also set up state approved alternatives that gradually remove spiritual elements. You also mandate "atheism lessons" for all school children.
a risk based approach is required, so that users know that occasionally a message box will appear that will have serious negative consequences if they fail to take the correct action.
For example "If you don't turn around right now I'm going to smack you over the head with a baseball bat" [OK]
Religion will wither, very slowly. It cannot be abolihed without the abolishers becoming as bad as the worst of religionists.
No evidence that this is the case. It is often stated but the reality is that today both hardline disbelief and orthodox faith are growing rapidly world wide. The truth is that apathy is withering and faith (both in it positive and negative forms) is growing.
Hey, an atheist utopia! Except that it's closer to hell IMHO. East germany is dead and lifeless, grey and miserable. I do not want to go back there any time soon.
No such thing as a fact. Every measurement has uncertainty, and the possibility of failure. Therefore a datum is not a fact. It is merely data with a confidence value, and that confidence value is itself culturally conditioned to some extent.
In my view, the best evidence of these powers is that the disciples were all killed for claiming Jesus rose from the dead, but since they all claimed to be eyewitnesses they would have had to have known it was a lie. In my experience people don't cheerfully and joyfully allow themselves to be executed for something they KNOW to be false. I find their faith in a life after death, flowing from their experience, in the face of certain death to be compelling.
This is not constrained to formal organised religion, but is instead universal to anyone who has any worldview, and that includes atheists. What makes you think that somehow atheists hold an privileged position where they alone have access to the truth, and how is that unjustifiable belief any different to any other form of belief, or that somehow they have direct access to reality with it being altered by their beliefs? In other words, those who self identify as members of religious organisations are no different than anyone else when it comes to interpreting facts through the filter of their worldview, and yet you appear to be asserting the supremacy of yours which is ironic, given that when a religious person does that you would call it bigotry.
Can I recommend "The Reason For God", by Tim Keller, as it delves more deeply into the inconsistencies of such a belief.
No need. Pestilence, War, Famine and Death would all be the consequence of Global Warming, if it happens.
I must admit, I find it hard to decide whether or not it's real, and I studied atmospheric physics at uni. I'm not sure whether the data we have now can really show us whether the warming trend is part of a long term warming on a scale of millenia with shorter cycles overlaid, or whether there is genuine AGW going on. Certainly the weather over the last decade is not statistically significant enough to declare warming over, and a couple of cold winters does nothing to undermine the AGW theory, particularly as global warming could easily mean local cooling or increased snowfall in some areas. My fear is that by the time we get the required data it may be too late to do anything about it, if it's not already.
I think what really winds up the AGW proponents is that the denialists are (with some success) managing to get the media to portray the AGW, IPCC etc as the ones who are "religious" about their beliefs, while the deniers sound very reasonable and plausable saying "the case is not proven", and "there is still some doubt here". They manage to sound like scientists, while the real scientists might as well be standing on street corners shouting "The end is neigh!"
You are aware, aren't you, that a static analyzer was reporting uninitialized-data use, and the patch made the subtly-false-positive defect report go away?
That they were in fact following best practices, but in hindsight they missed a subtle detail?
Surely best practice means, if it means anything, that only suitably expert people in a particular piece of code make changes to it. This clearly wasn't the debian maintainer, and he knew it. Furthermore, instead of submitting his change to the OpenSSL devs to be approved he asked a mailing list a very limited question without proper context, and then changes his code without really telling anyone. Fundamentally the problem was a failure of process. Yes valgrind reported an error, and in truth it is dodgy code. Using a buffer which MAY contain random data (depending on the compiler) as entropy is not a great idea. In fact that behaviour is undefined in the C spec, so a compiler is free to magically initialise that buffer for you if it likes, which would reintroduce the bug. A proper code review would have caught this bug before it made it out the door, and of course, had OpenSSL actually been ClosedSSL the debian maintainer could NEVER have screwed it up.
That this bug was in fact found thanks to the many-eyeballs effect in operation?
That Mr. Hernan's premise and your claim that Microsoft's products are
Not quite. Luciano Bello accidentally found the bug through using the code to generate a lot of SSL certificates and got same certificate five times in 24 hours of generating certificates, not by studying the code. Yes he subsequently also found the cause of the bug, but lets not forget that he was already a debian maintainer, so inside the cathedral, as it were.
NOT relying solely on "many eyeballs", which is why they are secure
is directly and contradicted by the only example you cite is
I don't agree. Many eyeballs (i.e. an outsider making changes) caused the bug, which could never have happened if he hadn't got access to the source code. The guy managed to remove pretty much the only source of entropy from the code and the "many eyeballs" did not prevent bad code being written and used widely. The truth is, ANY code review ought to have picked up on the error before it got out the door.
Yeah it can. It works pretty well on a VM with on 520mb of RAM, albeit with no aero. In fact the VM with 7 on almost performs as well as the XP host OS with 2Gb
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Have you thought through the ethical implications of genetic modification?
Firstly, during the research you're creating human-ish life, and then terminating it. For those with problems with ethical issues on abortion on demand this is a problem.
Secondly, if this ever reaches commercialisation (and it will be to recoup the costs), only the rich will have access to these medical advances. If it leads to the potential to pick and chose better genes for your children then you'll create a two-tier humanity, with the wealthy as the genetically superior a la gattica.
It's not as simple as just being close minded to the opportunities.
Good uses for those who can afford them
The problem is that there are potentially huge negative social implications of human genetic modification, not least because it won't be available to all. The wealthy will be able to chose genes that make one superior and so create a wealthy, more capable race that will rule over the poor and genetically inferior. We already have this to some extent through generations of class structures, but now there is at least random chance that keeps stirring the gene pool, and there isn't a clear divide between the genetic haves and have-nots.
IVF? That doesn't involve sex.
One could imagine artificial wombs and cloning tech which can derive gametes from cells other than a sperm and an egg. The result would be genetically 100% human but would not qualify under your definition. It may even be possible one day to encourage adult stem cells to start dividing and grow into a full human clone identical to the originator. Not human?
What if you have a human but with slightly modified DNA from an animal which gave improved sight, hearing or muscle efficiency? Where do you draw the line? What about the ethical and social implications if modified DNA that gave superior abilities (cognative etc) were only available to the rich? I think Gattica gave a glimpse of what that future might look like. What if the genetically pure human were the poor, and the elite became almost a separate race? I suspect such a divided future would lead to violence and a nightmarish dystopia.
Actually that reading is pretty far from mainstream orthodox Christian teaching, even within protestantism. Pre-millennial dispensationalism is a minority view among theologians and almost unheard of outside the USA.
Actually the problem is not when production peaks, but when production cannot keep up with demand. At that point prices will rise rapidly, even if production continues to grow. A fall off in production will only exacerbate the price rises, and the rapid decline in production that peak oil predicts will make oil too expensive for many parts of the world, severely limiting their growth and ability to produce food and goods.
The problem is not the lack of oil per se, but the lack of cheap oil.
I believe their profits are in the regions of $14B last year. It ought to be enough to cover the damage.
Both, and more. The new tech should give at least 4x better sensitivity with higher resolutions, but the other major benefit over CMOS is something else called "Fill Factor". Basically this is the amount of the sensor surface which collects useful light. With typical CMOS chips this is something like 40%, but with these quantum dot devices it is 100% as the light sensitive region lies on the surface of the chip with the electronics below. This is not such a huge deal for mobile phone cameras, but it is a big deal in astronomy and scientific imaging applications which use very low light levels, and currently have to use CCDs with all their disadvantages.
This could be revolutionary in the field of Raman spectroscopy and other similar fields, and I for one am waiting with baited breath for this to become a reality.
The company I work for also makes robots for surgery, but this time for brain surgery.
neuromate®: the No. 1 image-guided neurosurgical robot
Nevertheless, they did exist. I have a Russian friend who did "Atheism class", who now has a PhD in Mathematics. The irony was that it was the atheism class which made her believe there was a God. I too was stunned when she told be about the class, as it made no sense, but she insisted that it was a class dedicated to teaching children that there was no god, and used evolution to try and prove it. It sounded like precisely the sort of thing that Richard Dawkins was trying to promote with his atheist summer camps for children.
You can shift the goal posts and do as much mental gymnastics as you like; the fact remains that the worst atrocities in history were perpetrated by regimes who asserted the God did not exist.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn:
Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: "Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened." Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: "Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.
Edward E. Ericson, Jr., "Solzhenitsyn – Voice from the Gulag," Eternity, October 1985, pp. 23, 24.
That's not to say that all religions have clean hands, they don't, but humans seem to have an inbuilt need to worship something, and what we worship will heavily influence who we live and act, and how we understand the importance of the lives of those around us. If we don't worship a God for whom all people everywhere are equally loved and important, then we will see others as less than human and do evil things to them (and that can, and does occur with some forms of christian theology). If we worship the state then people who threaten the state must be corrected or killed. If you worship science then people who are "anti-scientific" in your view must be corrected, or if they threaten science, killed. In soviet russia, christians and others threatened the state and its religion of the "science" of Marxism–Leninism, and were controlled, imprisoned and killed in vast numbers.
As has been said before, the only thing worse than what happens when man worships god, is what happens when man worships man.
Well you start by confiscating children of believers, in the name of preventing "brainwashing", move on to imprisoning believers for "anti-revolutionary activities", and then start killing millions. You might also set up state approved alternatives that gradually remove spiritual elements. You also mandate "atheism lessons" for all school children.
It's what the USSR, PRC, and DPRK did.
a risk based approach is required, so that users know that occasionally a message box will appear that will have serious negative consequences if they fail to take the correct action.
For example "If you don't turn around right now I'm going to smack you over the head with a baseball bat" [OK]
Religion will wither, very slowly. It cannot be abolihed without the abolishers becoming as bad as the worst of religionists.
No evidence that this is the case. It is often stated but the reality is that today both hardline disbelief and orthodox faith are growing rapidly world wide. The truth is that apathy is withering and faith (both in it positive and negative forms) is growing.
Hey, an atheist utopia! Except that it's closer to hell IMHO. East germany is dead and lifeless, grey and miserable. I do not want to go back there any time soon.
No such thing as a fact. Every measurement has uncertainty, and the possibility of failure. Therefore a datum is not a fact. It is merely data with a confidence value, and that confidence value is itself culturally conditioned to some extent.
Well said.
In my view, the best evidence of these powers is that the disciples were all killed for claiming Jesus rose from the dead, but since they all claimed to be eyewitnesses they would have had to have known it was a lie. In my experience people don't cheerfully and joyfully allow themselves to be executed for something they KNOW to be false. I find their faith in a life after death, flowing from their experience, in the face of certain death to be compelling.
Thus proving the premise of TFA
This is not constrained to formal organised religion, but is instead universal to anyone who has any worldview, and that includes atheists. What makes you think that somehow atheists hold an privileged position where they alone have access to the truth, and how is that unjustifiable belief any different to any other form of belief, or that somehow they have direct access to reality with it being altered by their beliefs?
In other words, those who self identify as members of religious organisations are no different than anyone else when it comes to interpreting facts through the filter of their worldview, and yet you appear to be asserting the supremacy of yours which is ironic, given that when a religious person does that you would call it bigotry.
Can I recommend "The Reason For God", by Tim Keller, as it delves more deeply into the inconsistencies of such a belief.
I'm pretty sure you can so long as you're a 64bit native app, and not just a 32bit app on a 64bit OS.
No need. Pestilence, War, Famine and Death would all be the consequence of Global Warming, if it happens.
I must admit, I find it hard to decide whether or not it's real, and I studied atmospheric physics at uni. I'm not sure whether the data we have now can really show us whether the warming trend is part of a long term warming on a scale of millenia with shorter cycles overlaid, or whether there is genuine AGW going on. Certainly the weather over the last decade is not statistically significant enough to declare warming over, and a couple of cold winters does nothing to undermine the AGW theory, particularly as global warming could easily mean local cooling or increased snowfall in some areas.
My fear is that by the time we get the required data it may be too late to do anything about it, if it's not already.
I think what really winds up the AGW proponents is that the denialists are (with some success) managing to get the media to portray the AGW, IPCC etc as the ones who are "religious" about their beliefs, while the deniers sound very reasonable and plausable saying "the case is not proven", and "there is still some doubt here". They manage to sound like scientists, while the real scientists might as well be standing on street corners shouting "The end is neigh!"
It's interesting that you should cite that.
You are aware, aren't you, that a static analyzer was reporting uninitialized-data use, and the patch made the subtly-false-positive defect report go away?
That they were in fact following best practices, but in hindsight they missed a subtle detail?
Surely best practice means, if it means anything, that only suitably expert people in a particular piece of code make changes to it. This clearly wasn't the debian maintainer, and he knew it. Furthermore, instead of submitting his change to the OpenSSL devs to be approved he asked a mailing list a very limited question without proper context, and then changes his code without really telling anyone. Fundamentally the problem was a failure of process. Yes valgrind reported an error, and in truth it is dodgy code. Using a buffer which MAY contain random data (depending on the compiler) as entropy is not a great idea. In fact that behaviour is undefined in the C spec, so a compiler is free to magically initialise that buffer for you if it likes, which would reintroduce the bug.
A proper code review would have caught this bug before it made it out the door, and of course, had OpenSSL actually been ClosedSSL the debian maintainer could NEVER have screwed it up.
That this bug was in fact found thanks to the many-eyeballs effect in operation?
That Mr. Hernan's premise and your claim that Microsoft's products are
Not quite. Luciano Bello accidentally found the bug through using the code to generate a lot of SSL certificates and got same certificate five times in 24 hours of generating certificates, not by studying the code. Yes he subsequently also found the cause of the bug, but lets not forget that he was already a debian maintainer, so inside the cathedral, as it were.
NOT relying solely on "many eyeballs", which is why they are secure
is directly and contradicted by the only example you cite is
I don't agree. Many eyeballs (i.e. an outsider making changes) caused the bug, which could never have happened if he hadn't got access to the source code. The guy managed to remove pretty much the only source of entropy from the code and the "many eyeballs" did not prevent bad code being written and used widely. The truth is, ANY code review ought to have picked up on the error before it got out the door.
Yeah it can. It works pretty well on a VM with on 520mb of RAM, albeit with no aero. In fact the VM with 7 on almost performs as well as the XP host OS with 2Gb
You might want to get your sarcasm detector serviced. It appears to be mis-calibrated.