We are a threat to ourselves and in a hundred years (if we survive them intact) a threat to everyone else in the galaxy. Much of Star Trek on this is plausible. They are likely to intervene at least before we become a threat to them.
Then there's the question of what they might want from us. Do we have any resources here that they might want? Any data? That is harder to understand but we cannot rule it out. For that reason, I agree with Hawking. Why take the risk?
So the main effect of the smoking-related-methylation is to stop those genes getting replicated? I presume missing genes means missing proteins... but if neighbouring cells produce them, it won't cause much of a problem? What else can go wrong from missing genes in an individual cell?
Also, what is transcribed instead of the methylated group, out of interest?
I don't really care about more surveillance if it means people's lives will be saved.
Apparently, it can't, else at least one govt would have provided evidence of that. But I'm also guessing you'd ban cars, guns and junk food, as they kill around 10,000x as many people as terrorists.
I've concluded the people who have the most to lose from increased surveillance are drug users, pedophiles and those paranoid of the government.
It's also repeatedly demonstrated throughout the world that whistleblowers, journalists and the public they protect will be worse off.
If there is a compelling national security interest to tap my phone or monitor my communications - I won't like it (obviously) but I'm okay with it.
a) You'd never know you were under surveillance so you'd never get to challenge it. b) Are you dumb enough to take the govt's word for it or should a judge get to make that decision?
Every Western country will ban it completely. There will be much debate about medical cases and, eventually, that will be allowed -- and at-risk parents will get help via socialised medicine. But it won't be germline alteration. It will be embryo gene therapy.
There may be some non-religious govts that embrace it. Rich parents will fly out to get inseminated. It may start off with medical cases but it will soon be designer babies, with or without your line in the sand.
In the West, public attitudes will be very important. The US may be the last to adopt designer babies, though if China or Russia start breeding genetically-engineered soldiers, it will become a national security issue.
I suspect it will be 20-30 years before most Western countries allow more than embryo gene therapy.
Yep, it's all about state aid. Now none of my easily-outraged lefty FBriends knew this was a breach of state aid and it's possible neither Ireland nor Apple knew this might be. But they should have known.
That it's been going on for over a decade is neither here nor there. Apple and Ireland might have hoped they'd never get called on it, but that doesn't make it more ethical or legal.
Same EU law was at the centre of the British steel row four months ago.
Lastly, what does this say about Tim Cook? I strongly suspected their refusal to hack was one of the few times market forces lined up with privacy rights. It's possible he's a pro-privacy libertarian, or simply doing his job & hoping Apple fanbois will get Apple off the hook.
What the Brexit guys were saying was that we'd not be sending £350 million a week over the Channel and letting the EU bureacrats decide how it got spent.
This too was a lie. The rebate is deducted before the money is sent.
It's hard to tell why exactly this has happened under successive governments, particularly as this one clawed back some of the totalitarianism of the last one.
We know that Theresa May's is advised by Stasi spook, Charles Farr, as well as his fiance. Farr wrote this legislation about 8 years ago. This is his 5th attempt to get it passed.
Yes, that would work better on a party basis, but you still need an electoral system which isn't massively biased towards two parties ie not plurality. You'd really need 10+ parties for that to work.
Plenty of countries use, or have used, these alternatives to plurality voting. There is little evidence that they lead to better government. In fact, there is little evidence that better reflection of the will of the people leads to better government.
There's no evidence that it doesn't.
I'd be willing to bet that plurality countries have higher corruption scores compared with any other electoral system. It's pretty obvious that when only 2 parties can win, they will have both have tinkered with the system to benefit themselves, leaving one which benefits both.
You also get a more divided country, which makes people less open-minded. Democracy suffers again.
Rather than a senator representing the people of California, it would be better to have one senator representing all the nerds, another representing all the construction workers, and yet another representing all the medicare recipients, etc.
Size of the ballot paper would be huge and would be asking too much of voters too.
This should be in the summary, not buried several comments deep, modded only to 3. Sorry, I haven't seen/. mod points in years else I'd have put you up to 4.
If that were the case, it would be called a "low barrier to entry market".
You mean like how football is called "pass and run ball"?
But it is called a "free market" because its participants are "free" to engage in economic transactions as they choose. You don't get to redefine that.
I get to think through the logical conclusions of the primary criterion and laugh at those who don't. You cannot have a free market if there is a high barrier to entry.
Firstly, online voting isn't trustworthy. If it didn't use blockchain technology, it's extremely prone to hacking. No blockchain-based system has been built yet. It would have to be open source and verified by experts. Even then, vulnerabilities are discovered in code all the time.
What you're talking about is either direct democracy or liquid democracy. The former exists and works extremely well in Switzerland. Contrary to myth, the Swiss system is a mix of representative and direct. Govts make ~95% of laws. The electorate can overrule them within a couple of months. The other ~5% are made by the judiciary (I believe) by interpreting citizen-initiated referendums.
Basically, the Swiss are in control of their govt rather than the other way around. They have a mature electorate -- obviously the US and frankly most countries would pass some horrific laws under direct democracy. It would need to be introduced gradually.
Liquid democracy is where you can vote for any issue you want. If you choose not to, your delegate ie representative will vote on your behalf. It's never been tried and may leave govts with too much power.
Yours is the most accurate critique. Jackson attempted a completely different way of telling the story and it failed utterly. How was the audience supposed to perceive the films? I mean, how could we have found them anything but boring?
Perhaps the biggest failing of the films was not making us care. Most of the dwarves were rubbish and this is possibly due to Jackson's energy being elsewhere. But every director should know that you cannot make an audience care about more than 3-4 characters. That's basically Gandalf, Thorin and Bilbo... and we already liked Gandalf.
Now Bilbo didn't like Thorin and that's a problem if you're telling the story from his perspective. If the rest of the film had been good enough, Jackson would have got away with it. The book I recall shows the other dwarves paying immense respect to Thorin and that's another way Jackson could have got us to care.
Jackson should have learned by now that every time you deviate significantly from the script, you alienate your core audience. The female elf love plot wasn't the worst thing in the films by any means but didn't fit in with Bilbo's story.
LotR spent a good portion of time showing us beautiful vistas of the world. The Hobbit looked like it was filmed in the world's smallest studio with extremely dodgy lighting. This made the dwarves and the goblins look ridiculous.
I truly wonder how much of this could be fixed by a fan edit. Obviously you can't change it to Bilbo's perspective but you can remove anything that doesn't make the audience care. Use some filter or even blurring on the overlit scenes. Make the barrel and Goblintown escapes look less stupid.
Much of the third film was excellent -- if you like battles.
Slashdot Mirror
... and thus consider all biological lifeforms inherently dangerous.
We are a threat to ourselves and in a hundred years (if we survive them intact) a threat to everyone else in the galaxy. Much of Star Trek on this is plausible. They are likely to intervene at least before we become a threat to them.
Then there's the question of what they might want from us. Do we have any resources here that they might want? Any data? That is harder to understand but we cannot rule it out. For that reason, I agree with Hawking. Why take the risk?
So the main effect of the smoking-related-methylation is to stop those genes getting replicated? I presume missing genes means missing proteins... but if neighbouring cells produce them, it won't cause much of a problem? What else can go wrong from missing genes in an individual cell?
Also, what is transcribed instead of the methylated group, out of interest?
Sorry, my biology education sucked.
I don't really care about more surveillance if it means people's lives will be saved.
Apparently, it can't, else at least one govt would have provided evidence of that. But I'm also guessing you'd ban cars, guns and junk food, as they kill around 10,000x as many people as terrorists.
I've concluded the people who have the most to lose from increased surveillance are drug users, pedophiles and those paranoid of the government.
It's also repeatedly demonstrated throughout the world that whistleblowers, journalists and the public they protect will be worse off.
If there is a compelling national security interest to tap my phone or monitor my communications - I won't like it (obviously) but I'm okay with it.
a) You'd never know you were under surveillance so you'd never get to challenge it.
b) Are you dumb enough to take the govt's word for it or should a judge get to make that decision?
How about a less touchy and sarcastic attitude?
Because EU law doesn't insist that taxes are paid where 'real' profits are made. Even if such a law can be drafted.
Specifically, a British Overseas Territory.
It was a deliberate policy during the dissolution of the British Empire to channel some of the more illegitimate money into the UK economy.
This may well have been apparent but it's not very well-known even amongst political lefties in Britain.
Every Western country will ban it completely. There will be much debate about medical cases and, eventually, that will be allowed -- and at-risk parents will get help via socialised medicine. But it won't be germline alteration. It will be embryo gene therapy.
There may be some non-religious govts that embrace it. Rich parents will fly out to get inseminated. It may start off with medical cases but it will soon be designer babies, with or without your line in the sand.
In the West, public attitudes will be very important. The US may be the last to adopt designer babies, though if China or Russia start breeding genetically-engineered soldiers, it will become a national security issue.
I suspect it will be 20-30 years before most Western countries allow more than embryo gene therapy.
Yep, it's all about state aid. Now none of my easily-outraged lefty FBriends knew this was a breach of state aid and it's possible neither Ireland nor Apple knew this might be. But they should have known.
That it's been going on for over a decade is neither here nor there. Apple and Ireland might have hoped they'd never get called on it, but that doesn't make it more ethical or legal.
Same EU law was at the centre of the British steel row four months ago.
Lastly, what does this say about Tim Cook? I strongly suspected their refusal to hack was one of the few times market forces lined up with privacy rights. It's possible he's a pro-privacy libertarian, or simply doing his job & hoping Apple fanbois will get Apple off the hook.
The only thing a labor union would do here is to drive the business elsewhere.
It costs a lot of money to relocate and retrain people. There's also the high potential of bad PR.
They are encrypted.
http://www.opera.com/blogs/sec...
Yet he has the power to cause Britain to leave the EU against its best interests, cause a recession, cause a 57% increase in racist assaults...
What the Brexit guys were saying was that we'd not be sending £350 million a week over the Channel and letting the EU bureacrats decide how it got spent.
This too was a lie. The rebate is deducted before the money is sent.
https://fullfact.org/europe/ou...
Whilst this lie was incidental, lying politicians should face criminal charges and jail time. Blair's lie about 45min WMD may be responsible for ISIS.
It's hard to tell why exactly this has happened under successive governments, particularly as this one clawed back some of the totalitarianism of the last one.
We know that Theresa May's is advised by Stasi spook, Charles Farr, as well as his fiance. Farr wrote this legislation about 8 years ago. This is his 5th attempt to get it passed.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new...
I also know that MI5 are strongly anti-privacy, through somebody who did contract work for them.
Yes, that would work better on a party basis, but you still need an electoral system which isn't massively biased towards two parties ie not plurality.
You'd really need 10+ parties for that to work.
Plenty of countries use, or have used, these alternatives to plurality voting. There is little evidence that they lead to better government. In fact, there is little evidence that better reflection of the will of the people leads to better government.
There's no evidence that it doesn't.
I'd be willing to bet that plurality countries have higher corruption scores compared with any other electoral system. It's pretty obvious that when only 2 parties can win, they will have both have tinkered with the system to benefit themselves, leaving one which benefits both.
You also get a more divided country, which makes people less open-minded. Democracy suffers again.
Rather than a senator representing the people of California, it would be better to have one senator representing all the nerds, another representing all the construction workers, and yet another representing all the medicare recipients, etc.
Size of the ballot paper would be huge and would be asking too much of voters too.
Apart from gamifying karma, some golden advice here.
all that Slashdot really has going for it is a (minority) smart readership and a superior comment rating system.
Yes. "Don't read the comments" is well-known advice elsewhere on the internet. But here, I come for the comments.
This should be in the summary, not buried several comments deep, modded only to 3. Sorry, I haven't seen /. mod points in years else I'd have put you up to 4.
If that were the case, it would be called a "low barrier to entry market".
You mean like how football is called "pass and run ball"?
But it is called a "free market" because its participants are "free" to engage in economic transactions as they choose. You don't get to redefine that.
I get to think through the logical conclusions of the primary criterion and laugh at those who don't. You cannot have a free market if there is a high barrier to entry.
Unless I'm missing something, all those experiments demonstrated string theory just as much as they did QM.
Actually, the primary criterion of a free market is low barrier to entry. This means no lock-ins to proprietary upgrades/maintenance.
It's a no-brainer if it's done independently and transparently.
I vaguely trust the EU to do this. Not so much the US.
Firstly, online voting isn't trustworthy. If it didn't use blockchain technology, it's extremely prone to hacking. No blockchain-based system has been built yet. It would have to be open source and verified by experts. Even then, vulnerabilities are discovered in code all the time.
What you're talking about is either direct democracy or liquid democracy. The former exists and works extremely well in Switzerland. Contrary to myth, the Swiss system is a mix of representative and direct. Govts make ~95% of laws. The electorate can overrule them within a couple of months. The other ~5% are made by the judiciary (I believe) by interpreting citizen-initiated referendums.
Basically, the Swiss are in control of their govt rather than the other way around. They have a mature electorate -- obviously the US and frankly most countries would pass some horrific laws under direct democracy. It would need to be introduced gradually.
Liquid democracy is where you can vote for any issue you want. If you choose not to, your delegate ie representative will vote on your behalf. It's never been tried and may leave govts with too much power.
David Deutsch argues that it is core:
https://www.ted.com/talks/davi...
Also, string theory is surely as testable as quantum mechanics. It's just currently impossible to say which is more valid.
Yours is the most accurate critique. Jackson attempted a completely different way of telling the story and it failed utterly. How was the audience supposed to perceive the films? I mean, how could we have found them anything but boring?
Perhaps the biggest failing of the films was not making us care. Most of the dwarves were rubbish and this is possibly due to Jackson's energy being elsewhere. But every director should know that you cannot make an audience care about more than 3-4 characters. That's basically Gandalf, Thorin and Bilbo... and we already liked Gandalf.
Now Bilbo didn't like Thorin and that's a problem if you're telling the story from his perspective. If the rest of the film had been good enough, Jackson would have got away with it. The book I recall shows the other dwarves paying immense respect to Thorin and that's another way Jackson could have got us to care.
Jackson should have learned by now that every time you deviate significantly from the script, you alienate your core audience. The female elf love plot wasn't the worst thing in the films by any means but didn't fit in with Bilbo's story.
LotR spent a good portion of time showing us beautiful vistas of the world. The Hobbit looked like it was filmed in the world's smallest studio with extremely dodgy lighting. This made the dwarves and the goblins look ridiculous.
I truly wonder how much of this could be fixed by a fan edit. Obviously you can't change it to Bilbo's perspective but you can remove anything that doesn't make the audience care. Use some filter or even blurring on the overlit scenes. Make the barrel and Goblintown escapes look less stupid.
Much of the third film was excellent -- if you like battles.