Err - did you actually pay attention during the film? The "minority report" was the dissenting opinion that questioned the verdict decided by the majority, as with a supreme court case.
This is great progress, because it means that lesbian mothers will eventually be able to have children that are genetically related to both parents. This would mean that all their children are female, but they may not mind.
This is false. Male and female genetic contributions are different because of maternal and paternal imprinting - certain genes are "flagged" on or off by methylation of DNA segments, and the pattern is different in men and women. This results in a careful balance - if you used two female sets, crucial genes would appear either in 2x the necessary dose, or be completely shut off, and the fetus would not be viable. As far as I know, to date no one has managed to alter imprinting patterns to that of the other sex. Until they do, same-sex parents are not possible.
Hardly an apt comparison; in the case of terminally ill people, they're going to die anyway, and suicide might save their loved ones millions of dollars (in the US, anyway). The same calculus doesn't apply in the case of infertility.
Not only that, but since the mitochondrial DNA only codes for a small amount of the respiration chain -- cytochrome C oxidase, ATP synthase, and some of the core proteins of the NADH reductase complex, in most eukaryotic cells -- while the nuclear DNA codes for much of the rest of the proteins in the respiration chain, you need to have an excellent match between proteins that come from two different chunks of DNA. There's no guarantee that'll happen, and there's evidence that one of the reasons cloning has such a poor success rate and so many cloned animals die young of strange damage, is precisely because of poor matching between mitochondrial and nuclear dna products, leading to oxidative damage throughout the cell and early cell death because of leakage from the poorly-functioning respiration chain.
Man, once our genetic engineering is good enough, one of the first things we should do is migrate those mtDNA genes into the nucleus, already, and get them working under proper sexual reproduction/selection. Clean that shit up.
It also occurs to me that you can use this to identify specific alleles associated with increased risk of cancer. Not that genetic screening is generally very useful yet, but more maps like this will give a better idea of an individual's chance of developing specific types of cancer, maybe even associated with specific activities. E.g., "if you have these particular variants, you're much more likely to develop lung cancer, so you should smoke even less than a normal person." (I hope to GOD we (in the US) have public health insurance before this becomes widespread.)
> I'm a bit more skeptical, given that gene therapy and immunotherapy are
> still very much in their infancy at the current time
Those are not the only applications for this knowledge.
Err, to fill in that empty shell of a comment, specifically, this will hopefully generate at least a few new genes that are useful as drug targets. Anything that can make chemotherapy a bit more specific instead of just a general metabolic poison is a bonus.
My objection to your line of reasoning is that you impute value to these events at all, and assert that we should be thankful for them, somehow, or consider them beneficial, because they brought us about. But the past is in stone; it does not care if we remember it, or if it is revered. Only the future is malleable. There may one day come a season for us to die in, but I don't believe we've reached it yet; I want to die in a time of our own choosing, not one that our folly thrust upon us.
Uh, so what? World War II enabled me, too. Without it, Indian independence probably would have been delayed, my grandparents may not have met and I would not have been born. Should I thus celebrate Hitler's invasion of Poland? What an odd line of reasoning.
Your notions of adaptation are extremely optimistic. Life is not inevitable or omnipotent; it cannot overcome any adaptive landscape. If it could, the Moon would be teeming. It is entirely possible for extinction events to eliminate all life. It is entirely possible for us to create such an extinction event. Stop assuming that just because it can happen, life will recover, or that these events are somehow noteworthy and beneficial.
Why are people lauding this dude? He's celebrating our imminent deaths. You can have your own death party, buddy. Me, I want our species to survive at least another few million years, not precipitate a mass extinction event right now.
Only someone with zero understanding of selection could make a statement like this. Natural selection is a pretty precise knife - it multiplies exponentially over generations. Even a minor selective disadvantage - a tiny fraction of a percent - results in removal of deleterious variation.
Well, surely you aren't suggesting that forcing kids to do schoolwork for no pay -- the status quo -- is somehow more likely to turn them into writers/poets/scientists than paying them to do schoolwork. So what's your alternative?
What? That's exactly what I'm suggesting - I'm saying that kids who are paid to do schoolwork are more likely to turn into drones and less likely to turn into writers/poets/scientists. That is, they will learn, "The reason I am doing this is to get money," not, "The reason I am doing this is because science/art/music/literature/philosophy/dance/woodworking/programming/math/history/writing is fun."
The compensation is deferred, but we already do pay students to do well in school. I had a full ride plus in college; that was a direct result of doing well in high school.
However, there's research[citation needed] demonstrating that the ability to defer rewards is an indicator of an individual's future success. You're surely familiar with the fable of the Ant and the Grasshopper, right? Right?
Okay, yes, I agree: all that matters is RESULTS. But you're ignoring the other RESULTS you'll accidentally succeed in achieving, viz. teaching the kid that remuneration is the only acceptable form of reward.
I suppose that's acceptable if you're only interested in creating drones to staff your factories and offices, the kind of people who ARE "incentivized" by bonuses and pay raises. Personally, I'm interested in intelligent, creative kids - writers, poets, scientists, kids with real curiosity who want to do things because they love to do them, because the problem fascinates them, because they want to KNOW, goddamnit. Not because they're going to get a buck. That's a recipe for producing amoral scum.
Yes, it IS good for them. And bad for you. You're talking about one of the most powerful entities in the world - Exxon Mobil is larger than most countries - with no accountability to anyone. The government that you hate so much is being steadily dismantled BECAUSE private tyrannies (i.e. corporations) are using their vast coffers to break and twist it into the form they desire. Why, exactly, do you think the government gives money to banks or the MIC?
The more power corporations have, the more they can resist the controlling influence of democracy, the worse off we are. Observe Exxon's use of their power to confuse the debate on global warming for years, assuring that nothing gets done to compromise their profits and that the planet continues to choke on the waste gases their products emit.
As someone who's been an anarchist most of my adult life, I find it bizarre when so-called libertarians cheer the destruction of democratic government and the increasing devolution of power into the hands of the people who have, for the better part of this past century, been largely in control of our society. If you're REALLY in the favor of liberty, why are you such a fan of enabling so much power going into such few hands?
I assume that they'd prefer to do this, but a supervised learning method that builds a classifier function requires that you have a training set that is already classified - a set of images that contain storms and a set of images that don't contain storms. My guess is, since this system just went online and started generating images, they don't really have a huge number of examples to draw from. And the data is pretty noisy, as you can see, so training a machine to be reliable would probably require a large input set. So they're counting on us humans being able to do the machines' jobs for a while, until there's enough examples that you can train your function.
In addition, training the machine to spot "interesting stuff" is much harder, maybe impossible, depending on your definition of "interesting stuff". Human eyeballs are better in that regard.
I make a similar proposal here. Universities have used this model for years to share expensive content - digital library subscriptions for journals. Paysites could certainly arrange the same thing with digital library sites. If it becomes ubiquitous (which it probably should), then (a) everyone will pay for viewing content (indirectly, through their library subscription), and (b) linking won't be an issue, since everyone will be able to read behind most of the important paywalls. $10 a month seems more than enough - I can get a bunch of magazine subscriptions for that price, and there's a much lower distribution cost involved here.
I haven't thought this out fully, since I just came up with it, but here's an interesting idea for a business:
My biggest problem with pay sites is that most of the time, I don't really want to read the thing regularly enough to make it worthwhile. Some people like to read the NY times ever day; I don't, I'd rather just read it once in a while when someone suggests a good article to me. Many other people - probably the majority on the web - fall into this category. For people running a site, as with most things on the web, they need a way to catch the Internet's famous long tail.
So why aren't there digital library sites instead? You pay them a small subscription fee (say, $10 a month), and in return get access to any paysite you want - the site negotiates a revenue-sharing model with each paysite and takes a modest cut of the subscription for itself. Everyone wins: I get to browse the internet for a minor fee without being assaulted by ads or having to sign up on every damn site I want to look at, content providers have a way to make money without cutting people out. The only downside seems to be that as usual there's a damn bootstrapping problem...
Past history suggests that if GW is not anthropogenic, it probably won't run out of bounds - the biosphere is pretty good at regulating itself when we're not mucking it up (see Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis).
However, you seem to be under the impression that "we shall overcome" as a species. There is no inevitable course of human history - extinction is a very real possibility. The fact that we have, so far, surmounted all obstacles that came upon us does not mean we can survive everything. We've had a pretty easy going. No comets have hit our planet, for example (Tunguska aside). Yes, we're incredibly powerful. We're also incredibly stupid and full of hubris. And the hubris gets us every time.
Yes, and species go extinct all the time. While I agree that we probably won't be able to create an environment that destroys life on this planet, I really DON'T want the way things end up getting fixed by the rest of the biosphere restoring homeostasis after our unfortunate disappearance.
Meanwhile, Humans continue to become the most adaptable mammal on the planet.
Let me point out that in order to "adapt" you have to change, not keep doing the same damn thing and hoping it'll all get better, somehow.
Actually, not the ice cap, but clathrate hydrate crystals - methane hydrates that are frozen at the bottom of the ocean. Now that the Arctic is warming up thanks to Al Gore and his lies, those methane hydrates are being leaked into the atmosphere. This is what we call "negative feedback". Sound the gongs.
Slashdot Mirror
your child doesn't fall into the minority report.
Err - did you actually pay attention during the film? The "minority report" was the dissenting opinion that questioned the verdict decided by the majority, as with a supreme court case.
This is false. Male and female genetic contributions are different because of maternal and paternal imprinting - certain genes are "flagged" on or off by methylation of DNA segments, and the pattern is different in men and women. This results in a careful balance - if you used two female sets, crucial genes would appear either in 2x the necessary dose, or be completely shut off, and the fetus would not be viable. As far as I know, to date no one has managed to alter imprinting patterns to that of the other sex. Until they do, same-sex parents are not possible.
Hardly an apt comparison; in the case of terminally ill people, they're going to die anyway, and suicide might save their loved ones millions of dollars (in the US, anyway). The same calculus doesn't apply in the case of infertility.
Not only that, but since the mitochondrial DNA only codes for a small amount of the respiration chain -- cytochrome C oxidase, ATP synthase, and some of the core proteins of the NADH reductase complex, in most eukaryotic cells -- while the nuclear DNA codes for much of the rest of the proteins in the respiration chain, you need to have an excellent match between proteins that come from two different chunks of DNA. There's no guarantee that'll happen, and there's evidence that one of the reasons cloning has such a poor success rate and so many cloned animals die young of strange damage, is precisely because of poor matching between mitochondrial and nuclear dna products, leading to oxidative damage throughout the cell and early cell death because of leakage from the poorly-functioning respiration chain.
Man, once our genetic engineering is good enough, one of the first things we should do is migrate those mtDNA genes into the nucleus, already, and get them working under proper sexual reproduction/selection. Clean that shit up.
It also occurs to me that you can use this to identify specific alleles associated with increased risk of cancer. Not that genetic screening is generally very useful yet, but more maps like this will give a better idea of an individual's chance of developing specific types of cancer, maybe even associated with specific activities. E.g., "if you have these particular variants, you're much more likely to develop lung cancer, so you should smoke even less than a normal person." (I hope to GOD we (in the US) have public health insurance before this becomes widespread.)
> I'm a bit more skeptical, given that gene therapy and immunotherapy are > still very much in their infancy at the current time
Those are not the only applications for this knowledge.
Err, to fill in that empty shell of a comment, specifically, this will hopefully generate at least a few new genes that are useful as drug targets. Anything that can make chemotherapy a bit more specific instead of just a general metabolic poison is a bonus.
My objection to your line of reasoning is that you impute value to these events at all, and assert that we should be thankful for them, somehow, or consider them beneficial, because they brought us about. But the past is in stone; it does not care if we remember it, or if it is revered. Only the future is malleable. There may one day come a season for us to die in, but I don't believe we've reached it yet; I want to die in a time of our own choosing, not one that our folly thrust upon us.
Uh, so what? World War II enabled me, too. Without it, Indian independence probably would have been delayed, my grandparents may not have met and I would not have been born. Should I thus celebrate Hitler's invasion of Poland? What an odd line of reasoning.
Yes, you're right, because if the planet, say, heated up enough that liquid water couldn't exist in our atmosphere, we would certainly benefit.
Your notions of adaptation are extremely optimistic. Life is not inevitable or omnipotent; it cannot overcome any adaptive landscape. If it could, the Moon would be teeming. It is entirely possible for extinction events to eliminate all life. It is entirely possible for us to create such an extinction event. Stop assuming that just because it can happen, life will recover, or that these events are somehow noteworthy and beneficial.
Why are people lauding this dude? He's celebrating our imminent deaths. You can have your own death party, buddy. Me, I want our species to survive at least another few million years, not precipitate a mass extinction event right now.
Some useful reading.
Only someone with zero understanding of selection could make a statement like this. Natural selection is a pretty precise knife - it multiplies exponentially over generations. Even a minor selective disadvantage - a tiny fraction of a percent - results in removal of deleterious variation.
What? That's exactly what I'm suggesting - I'm saying that kids who are paid to do schoolwork are more likely to turn into drones and less likely to turn into writers/poets/scientists. That is, they will learn, "The reason I am doing this is to get money," not, "The reason I am doing this is because science/art/music/literature/philosophy/dance/woodworking/programming/math/history/writing is fun."
Quit your job, dude. Quit your job. You're hurting yourself.
However, there's research[citation needed] demonstrating that the ability to defer rewards is an indicator of an individual's future success. You're surely familiar with the fable of the Ant and the Grasshopper, right? Right?
Okay, yes, I agree: all that matters is RESULTS. But you're ignoring the other RESULTS you'll accidentally succeed in achieving, viz. teaching the kid that remuneration is the only acceptable form of reward.
I suppose that's acceptable if you're only interested in creating drones to staff your factories and offices, the kind of people who ARE "incentivized" by bonuses and pay raises. Personally, I'm interested in intelligent, creative kids - writers, poets, scientists, kids with real curiosity who want to do things because they love to do them, because the problem fascinates them, because they want to KNOW, goddamnit. Not because they're going to get a buck. That's a recipe for producing amoral scum.
If you had bothered to watch the demo video, you'd see that the linux desktop he plays it on is, in fact, recognizably Ubuntu.
I can't bring myself to adequately ridicule your "newbie sheep masses" comment. It's puerile enough that it ridicules itself, I suppose.
Shit, yeah. As TFA says, corporations have already got it so tough, man.
Yes, it IS good for them. And bad for you. You're talking about one of the most powerful entities in the world - Exxon Mobil is larger than most countries - with no accountability to anyone. The government that you hate so much is being steadily dismantled BECAUSE private tyrannies (i.e. corporations) are using their vast coffers to break and twist it into the form they desire. Why, exactly, do you think the government gives money to banks or the MIC?
The more power corporations have, the more they can resist the controlling influence of democracy, the worse off we are. Observe Exxon's use of their power to confuse the debate on global warming for years, assuring that nothing gets done to compromise their profits and that the planet continues to choke on the waste gases their products emit.
As someone who's been an anarchist most of my adult life, I find it bizarre when so-called libertarians cheer the destruction of democratic government and the increasing devolution of power into the hands of the people who have, for the better part of this past century, been largely in control of our society. If you're REALLY in the favor of liberty, why are you such a fan of enabling so much power going into such few hands?
I assume that they'd prefer to do this, but a supervised learning method that builds a classifier function requires that you have a training set that is already classified - a set of images that contain storms and a set of images that don't contain storms. My guess is, since this system just went online and started generating images, they don't really have a huge number of examples to draw from. And the data is pretty noisy, as you can see, so training a machine to be reliable would probably require a large input set. So they're counting on us humans being able to do the machines' jobs for a while, until there's enough examples that you can train your function. In addition, training the machine to spot "interesting stuff" is much harder, maybe impossible, depending on your definition of "interesting stuff". Human eyeballs are better in that regard.
I make a similar proposal here. Universities have used this model for years to share expensive content - digital library subscriptions for journals. Paysites could certainly arrange the same thing with digital library sites. If it becomes ubiquitous (which it probably should), then (a) everyone will pay for viewing content (indirectly, through their library subscription), and (b) linking won't be an issue, since everyone will be able to read behind most of the important paywalls. $10 a month seems more than enough - I can get a bunch of magazine subscriptions for that price, and there's a much lower distribution cost involved here.
I haven't thought this out fully, since I just came up with it, but here's an interesting idea for a business:
My biggest problem with pay sites is that most of the time, I don't really want to read the thing regularly enough to make it worthwhile. Some people like to read the NY times ever day; I don't, I'd rather just read it once in a while when someone suggests a good article to me. Many other people - probably the majority on the web - fall into this category. For people running a site, as with most things on the web, they need a way to catch the Internet's famous long tail.
So why aren't there digital library sites instead? You pay them a small subscription fee (say, $10 a month), and in return get access to any paysite you want - the site negotiates a revenue-sharing model with each paysite and takes a modest cut of the subscription for itself. Everyone wins: I get to browse the internet for a minor fee without being assaulted by ads or having to sign up on every damn site I want to look at, content providers have a way to make money without cutting people out. The only downside seems to be that as usual there's a damn bootstrapping problem...
Past history suggests that if GW is not anthropogenic, it probably won't run out of bounds - the biosphere is pretty good at regulating itself when we're not mucking it up (see Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis).
However, you seem to be under the impression that "we shall overcome" as a species. There is no inevitable course of human history - extinction is a very real possibility. The fact that we have, so far, surmounted all obstacles that came upon us does not mean we can survive everything. We've had a pretty easy going. No comets have hit our planet, for example (Tunguska aside). Yes, we're incredibly powerful. We're also incredibly stupid and full of hubris. And the hubris gets us every time.
Let me point out that in order to "adapt" you have to change, not keep doing the same damn thing and hoping it'll all get better, somehow.
Actually, not the ice cap, but clathrate hydrate crystals - methane hydrates that are frozen at the bottom of the ocean. Now that the Arctic is warming up thanks to Al Gore and his lies, those methane hydrates are being leaked into the atmosphere. This is what we call "negative feedback". Sound the gongs.