just because those fish didn't evolve the way we would have liked that it somehow means that it "hurt their evolution."
I'd in fact go further and say it has helped their evolution. If they become small enough that us humans cannot be bothered with them then they have managed to eliminate the most dangerous predator on the planet as a concern. Seems like a smart move to me.
Yes that is pretty weird. We use Meters over here.
Everyone uses meters like voltmeters, ammeters etc. A meter is simply a device that measure something. Perhaps that's why you found metres the unit too confusing and stuck to using yards, inches, furlongs etc.?
Our new paper, "America's Loss Is the World's Gain"...
Shouldn't that be "America's Loss Is the Rest of the World's Gain"? I know you insist on calling us aliens and think we use strange units like metres and kilograms but we are all part of the same world.
Hell, it isn't so much the Dr's making the decisions now...for the past decades, we've had the beancounters in HMO's
In the UK the problem has been the government. Several years ago before my dad retired they introduced a target percentage for all women to have pap smears (something like 95%). The problem was that the idiots in charge did not make any exceptions for women who had had hysterectomies i.e. had no cervix. Additionally they penalized the doctors, by paying them less, if they did not screen the target percentage of their patients. The result was that patients without a cervix were screened and patients who refused to have the procedure were threatened with being dropped as patients (not in my dad's practice but elsewhere this certainly happened) because otherwise the doctors got penalized. I think this has all been fixed now but usually I find that the doctors do actually know what they are doing (at least in the UK) but have medically unqualified and politically motivated idiots messing the system up for them.
Re:A little story in how this is dangerous
on
Designer Babies
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· Score: 1
Frankly, your claim that genetically selected people won't be willing to do what work needs to be done is highly suspect
Really? Then why is it the UK and the US have large numbers of immigrants entering the country to perform jobs that the un-modified local population will not do? I can only see genetic modifications as raising expectations further and increasing the problem. My main argument though is the lack of genetic diversity which I think would be very worrying.
Would you be upset if companies were allowed to contruct paying-subscriber-only lanes on the freeway?
No, I would not be upset by this because I would be paying for exactly what I got. What would upset me would be if I found I could not leave at the exit I wanted to because the local town had reached the maximum number of cars that day and refused to pay for a larger quota from the highway company despite the fact that they had built an exit easily capable of handling more.
I pay my ISP for access to the internet at a particular bandwidth. The company I connect to is also paying their ISP for a particular bandwidth access to the internet. Some of that money should go to ensuring that there is sufficient infrastructure to connect us together without the ISP trying to extort more money from either of us just because they have realised that they can.
Not many, but in a few years time when the software sounds more like Patrick Stewart/Morgan Freeman/pick your favourite actor/accent a lot more will want it and be unable to have it because the fight was lost now.
I don't think DRM (we called it "copy-protection" when I was a lad) should be stopped because I think authors should have a right to protect their labor from theft.
I completely agree and if DRM did only that there would be no issue. However DRM goes well beyond that. It stops be transferring a book from say a Kindle to an iTouch, it stops me from making a backup, it gives control of my device to a publisher etc.
These are important capabilities when dealing with digital media because while a physical book may last for decades digital devices last for 5 years at most. Books are hard to destroy by accident, whereas memory can easily be wiped or rendered inaccessible either be accident or by a fault in the device. Lastly nobody but me should have control over a device which I own. If a publisher thinks it is illegal for me to use a device to read-aloud their book then they should sue me in court and prove their case (which I highly doubt they can do, at least here in Canada), they should not be able to restrict my use of the device based on their whim - or at least if they do I should at least have the right to overule those restrictions if I can.
Sounds like a lot of work. I'd rather just buy the amazon.com book, and then download the pure text file off bittorent as a "backup" that I can conveniently play in my laptop or Iphone or Kindle.
Of course since you now HAVE to do this in order to have the Kindle TTS work it makes me wonder how many people will simple skip the amazon.com step. It seems to me that this is the usual result of DRM: customer is prevented from doing something reasonable, customer gets really irritated with the company, customer finds out they can stick it to the company by downloading from P2P, customer stops being a customer.
They are not ignorant of history they are afraid of it and so are trying to cling to what they have for as long as possible.
Re:A little story in how this is dangerous
on
Designer Babies
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· Score: 1
Amazingly I have heard of robotics. I've never yet heard of a robotic road sweeper or janitor that can perform all the tasks of a human one though (and no a Roomba does NOT count!). I'm not saying that we'll never get there it just that I don't know when we will.
Re:A little story in how this is dangerous
on
Designer Babies
·
· Score: 1
This story mostly speaks to diversification as a strategy for survival, and diversification as a species will not be lost simply because a few people decide to filter out potential children with down syndrome.
Diversification is my exact point. Filtering out downs syndrome or the other genetic diseases is also something I have no problem with - removing a bad disease is clearly a good thing and worth what is only a slight potential risk (possibly none at all since many bad genetic diseases limit or prevent scope for procreation). However selecting unimportant characteristics like height, sex, eye-colour etc. is of no benefit and carries a potential of reduced diversification.
Re:A little story in how this is dangerous
on
Designer Babies
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· Score: 1
Humans will one day be extinct.
I agree but wouldn't you prefer that the extinction comes either from us evolving into a more advanced species or from the eventual heat death of the Universe than in 100 years time from a viral mutation coupled with low genetic diversity?
Re:A little story in how this is dangerous
on
Designer Babies
·
· Score: 1
I was not suggesting that evolution did have foresight all I was suggesting was that the "perfect" health gene might not always be the best thing to have. i.e. genetic diversity is a good thing to have because if we all have the same genetic makeup and conditions change we may find we removed the gene we need to survive.
If you compare it to investments then it is like comparing putting your money in a broad diverse portfolio where it will grow reasonably well vs. putting all your money in a single stock which might do spectacularly well for a time and then collapse and disappear without trace. Of course you can have a global disaster which affects everyone but even then being diverse is safer unless the disaster is so large it completely wipes out everyone in which case it makes no difference what strategy you take.
Sounds reasonable to me. If not then you could initially agree to a search and then if the police found anything suddenly disagree to it and have the evidence thrown out because it was an illegal search.
The trick is that since the terrorist will say no, they can be deported for lying on an immigration form, which has much less of a legal burden than proving that they actually are terrorists.
Errr...but if you cannot prove that they are terrorists then how can you prove that they lied on the form? Besides if they are terrorists then the LAST thing you want to do is just deport them.
A little story in how this is dangerous
on
Designer Babies
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· Score: 5, Interesting
There are 3 things I might select for, health, high intelligence, and physical fitness.
I had a palaentology professor who described the interesting puzzle of a type of ocean bacteria which uses a tiny magnetic crystal to determine which way is up (the Earth's magnetic field having a vertical component). What the biologists could not figure out is why a small fraction of each generation would be born with the crystal the wrong way around and then swim down, instead of up, and perish. Surely evolution would have corrected this error?
What the palaentologists did was use the crystals that fell from the bacteria when they died to measure the direction of the magnetic field - this in part lead to the discovery of the flipping of the field every 100k years and suddenly things became clear. What was a bad genetic mutation 99.99% of the time suddenly became essential to the survival of the species after the field flip. The few percent with the wrong crystal then became the survivors.
So convince me that in selecting the "perfect" health gene and high intelligence gene we are not also potentially removing other genetic traits that might appear to be useless at the moment but which may offer resistance to some future virus or similar threat? Not to mention the social problems of trying to find a road sweeper or janitor when we are all giving birth to baby Einsteins.
The important part about the 96% limit is that it is the maximum obtainable by distillation. If you achieve >96% by use of chemicals it is easy to maintain it at that level by putting it in a sealed bottle which prevents it absorbing water vapour from the air.
You should elaborate as to why you think this is a bad idea.
In the early 19th century France lost literally all of its grapes to Phylloxera, an aphid imported from the US and to which the limited variety of French grapes had no resistance. The solution was to import US vines and graft these onto the French varieties. If we restrict our genetic pool to people with blues eyes and blond hair the danger is that we are also restricting our genetic resistance to disease.
Being able to screen for genes that cause cystic fibrosis, Huntington disease, Alzheimer disease, trisomy 13/18/21, etc.
I have no problem with this. This might have a minimal risk of limiting genetic diversity (assuming the disease does not itself prevent procreation) and making us susceptible to some other disease but balanced against this risk is the guarentee of removing a nasty genetic disease.
NOT questioning imposed morality and superstition is what will doom us.
Correct. However natural selection has been question extensively and found to work EXTREMELY well for maintaining the health of the species. Choosing visible characteristics based on the latest fashion trends is an idea that has not been thoroughly tested and I can think of almost no reason why it will improve the survivability of the species and a lot of reasons why it will not.
I have no problem for screening for things like genetic diseases but screening for eye colour, height, sex etc. is not a good way to go unless we can be sure we know what other characteristics we may also be screening out. With diseases the risk is arguably worth the reward (you might screen out a useful characteristic but you are certainly removing a very bad one), with eye-colour, height etc. it is most certainly not.
It depends - if they ban all declarations of sexual preference then they are safe, even in Canada. Equality laws are just that - if you treat everyone equally badly then its ok.
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Of course not! It's Evolution 2.0!
If that is like Web 2.0 then perhaps we should refer to it as unintelligent design.
just because those fish didn't evolve the way we would have liked that it somehow means that it "hurt their evolution."
I'd in fact go further and say it has helped their evolution. If they become small enough that us humans cannot be bothered with them then they have managed to eliminate the most dangerous predator on the planet as a concern. Seems like a smart move to me.
Yes that is pretty weird. We use Meters over here.
Everyone uses meters like voltmeters, ammeters etc. A meter is simply a device that measure something. Perhaps that's why you found metres the unit too confusing and stuck to using yards, inches, furlongs etc.?
Our new paper, "America's Loss Is the World's Gain"...
Shouldn't that be "America's Loss Is the Rest of the World's Gain"? I know you insist on calling us aliens and think we use strange units like metres and kilograms but we are all part of the same world.
Hell, it isn't so much the Dr's making the decisions now...for the past decades, we've had the beancounters in HMO's
In the UK the problem has been the government. Several years ago before my dad retired they introduced a target percentage for all women to have pap smears (something like 95%). The problem was that the idiots in charge did not make any exceptions for women who had had hysterectomies i.e. had no cervix. Additionally they penalized the doctors, by paying them less, if they did not screen the target percentage of their patients. The result was that patients without a cervix were screened and patients who refused to have the procedure were threatened with being dropped as patients (not in my dad's practice but elsewhere this certainly happened) because otherwise the doctors got penalized. I think this has all been fixed now but usually I find that the doctors do actually know what they are doing (at least in the UK) but have medically unqualified and politically motivated idiots messing the system up for them.
Frankly, your claim that genetically selected people won't be willing to do what work needs to be done is highly suspect
Really? Then why is it the UK and the US have large numbers of immigrants entering the country to perform jobs that the un-modified local population will not do? I can only see genetic modifications as raising expectations further and increasing the problem. My main argument though is the lack of genetic diversity which I think would be very worrying.
Would you be upset if companies were allowed to contruct paying-subscriber-only lanes on the freeway?
No, I would not be upset by this because I would be paying for exactly what I got. What would upset me would be if I found I could not leave at the exit I wanted to because the local town had reached the maximum number of cars that day and refused to pay for a larger quota from the highway company despite the fact that they had built an exit easily capable of handling more.
I pay my ISP for access to the internet at a particular bandwidth. The company I connect to is also paying their ISP for a particular bandwidth access to the internet. Some of that money should go to ensuring that there is sufficient infrastructure to connect us together without the ISP trying to extort more money from either of us just because they have realised that they can.
Not many, but in a few years time when the software sounds more like Patrick Stewart/Morgan Freeman/pick your favourite actor/accent a lot more will want it and be unable to have it because the fight was lost now.
I don't think DRM (we called it "copy-protection" when I was a lad) should be stopped because I think authors should have a right to protect their labor from theft.
I completely agree and if DRM did only that there would be no issue. However DRM goes well beyond that. It stops be transferring a book from say a Kindle to an iTouch, it stops me from making a backup, it gives control of my device to a publisher etc.
These are important capabilities when dealing with digital media because while a physical book may last for decades digital devices last for 5 years at most. Books are hard to destroy by accident, whereas memory can easily be wiped or rendered inaccessible either be accident or by a fault in the device. Lastly nobody but me should have control over a device which I own. If a publisher thinks it is illegal for me to use a device to read-aloud their book then they should sue me in court and prove their case (which I highly doubt they can do, at least here in Canada), they should not be able to restrict my use of the device based on their whim - or at least if they do I should at least have the right to overule those restrictions if I can.
Sounds like a lot of work. I'd rather just buy the amazon.com book, and then download the pure text file off bittorent as a "backup" that I can conveniently play in my laptop or Iphone or Kindle.
Of course since you now HAVE to do this in order to have the Kindle TTS work it makes me wonder how many people will simple skip the amazon.com step. It seems to me that this is the usual result of DRM: customer is prevented from doing something reasonable, customer gets really irritated with the company, customer finds out they can stick it to the company by downloading from P2P, customer stops being a customer.
Correct, but they are afraid of the future because of the history of what has/is happening to the music industry.
They are not ignorant of history they are afraid of it and so are trying to cling to what they have for as long as possible.
Amazingly I have heard of robotics. I've never yet heard of a robotic road sweeper or janitor that can perform all the tasks of a human one though (and no a Roomba does NOT count!). I'm not saying that we'll never get there it just that I don't know when we will.
This story mostly speaks to diversification as a strategy for survival, and diversification as a species will not be lost simply because a few people decide to filter out potential children with down syndrome.
Diversification is my exact point. Filtering out downs syndrome or the other genetic diseases is also something I have no problem with - removing a bad disease is clearly a good thing and worth what is only a slight potential risk (possibly none at all since many bad genetic diseases limit or prevent scope for procreation). However selecting unimportant characteristics like height, sex, eye-colour etc. is of no benefit and carries a potential of reduced diversification.
Humans will one day be extinct.
I agree but wouldn't you prefer that the extinction comes either from us evolving into a more advanced species or from the eventual heat death of the Universe than in 100 years time from a viral mutation coupled with low genetic diversity?
I was not suggesting that evolution did have foresight all I was suggesting was that the "perfect" health gene might not always be the best thing to have. i.e. genetic diversity is a good thing to have because if we all have the same genetic makeup and conditions change we may find we removed the gene we need to survive.
If you compare it to investments then it is like comparing putting your money in a broad diverse portfolio where it will grow reasonably well vs. putting all your money in a single stock which might do spectacularly well for a time and then collapse and disappear without trace. Of course you can have a global disaster which affects everyone but even then being diverse is safer unless the disaster is so large it completely wipes out everyone in which case it makes no difference what strategy you take.
You've got it backwards, if you want to make something illegal you need to convince me it is inherently dangerous.
Are you SURE that you want to take this attitude for medical procedures? Really? Excellent idea for criminal law though.
Is "I forgot" or "I never knew the password in the first place" considered a valid defense?
Probably not but they could be valid passwords if you really want to mess with border guards' minds (which I would probably recommend against!).
Sounds reasonable to me. If not then you could initially agree to a search and then if the police found anything suddenly disagree to it and have the evidence thrown out because it was an illegal search.
The trick is that since the terrorist will say no, they can be deported for lying on an immigration form, which has much less of a legal burden than proving that they actually are terrorists.
Errr...but if you cannot prove that they are terrorists then how can you prove that they lied on the form? Besides if they are terrorists then the LAST thing you want to do is just deport them.
There are 3 things I might select for, health, high intelligence, and physical fitness.
I had a palaentology professor who described the interesting puzzle of a type of ocean bacteria which uses a tiny magnetic crystal to determine which way is up (the Earth's magnetic field having a vertical component). What the biologists could not figure out is why a small fraction of each generation would be born with the crystal the wrong way around and then swim down, instead of up, and perish. Surely evolution would have corrected this error?
What the palaentologists did was use the crystals that fell from the bacteria when they died to measure the direction of the magnetic field - this in part lead to the discovery of the flipping of the field every 100k years and suddenly things became clear. What was a bad genetic mutation 99.99% of the time suddenly became essential to the survival of the species after the field flip. The few percent with the wrong crystal then became the survivors.
So convince me that in selecting the "perfect" health gene and high intelligence gene we are not also potentially removing other genetic traits that might appear to be useless at the moment but which may offer resistance to some future virus or similar threat? Not to mention the social problems of trying to find a road sweeper or janitor when we are all giving birth to baby Einsteins.
The important part about the 96% limit is that it is the maximum obtainable by distillation. If you achieve >96% by use of chemicals it is easy to maintain it at that level by putting it in a sealed bottle which prevents it absorbing water vapour from the air.
You should elaborate as to why you think this is a bad idea.
In the early 19th century France lost literally all of its grapes to Phylloxera, an aphid imported from the US and to which the limited variety of French grapes had no resistance. The solution was to import US vines and graft these onto the French varieties. If we restrict our genetic pool to people with blues eyes and blond hair the danger is that we are also restricting our genetic resistance to disease.
Being able to screen for genes that cause cystic fibrosis, Huntington disease, Alzheimer disease, trisomy 13/18/21, etc.
I have no problem with this. This might have a minimal risk of limiting genetic diversity (assuming the disease does not itself prevent procreation) and making us susceptible to some other disease but balanced against this risk is the guarentee of removing a nasty genetic disease.
NOT questioning imposed morality and superstition is what will doom us.
Correct. However natural selection has been question extensively and found to work EXTREMELY well for maintaining the health of the species. Choosing visible characteristics based on the latest fashion trends is an idea that has not been thoroughly tested and I can think of almost no reason why it will improve the survivability of the species and a lot of reasons why it will not.
I have no problem for screening for things like genetic diseases but screening for eye colour, height, sex etc. is not a good way to go unless we can be sure we know what other characteristics we may also be screening out. With diseases the risk is arguably worth the reward (you might screen out a useful characteristic but you are certainly removing a very bad one), with eye-colour, height etc. it is most certainly not.
It depends - if they ban all declarations of sexual preference then they are safe, even in Canada. Equality laws are just that - if you treat everyone equally badly then its ok.