That seems to be your interpretation of 21:22, all the text says is that the judges will decide how to punish men for abusing a pregnant woman who loses her baby as a result of the abuse.
In any event, you want the US government to establish your religious beliefs as law in this case, don't you?
> If men strive, and hurt a woman with child, so that her fruit depart from her, and yet no mischief follow: he shall be surely punished, according as the woman's husband will lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine.
This pretty clearly is talking about causing a miscarriage by abusing a pregnant woman, not growing stem cells in a petri dish.
Meanwhile, ESCR uses cells grown in a petri dish, so obvioulsy has nothing at all to do with Exodus.
> The argument that an embryo is not human life has always seemed very "hand-wavey" to me, with heavy use of scientific terminology that can't do justice to the profound question of l-i-f-e.
It's also a straw man. Pro-ESCR folks don't make the argument that an embryo is not "human life". In fact, their argument is that it is the same kind of "human life" as other tissue culture, organ transplants, human cells grown for cancer research, etc.
Pro-ESCR folks make the argument that a fertilized egg and the undifferentiated embryo that forms from it in a petri dish is not _A Human Being.
In fact, most of the pro-ESCR arguments I've seen have made the distinction between "human life" and "a human being" pretty clear.
Why do Anti-ESCR folks keep using the generai term "human life" when they mean a specific "human being"? Are you also against tissue culture and organ transplant?
> I have no qualms whatsoever with next of kin donating the organs of any deceased person.
How about an encephalitic infant? Should parents be forced to keep a child without a brain alive until they die of old age (or the power goes out)?
Generally, the medical standard is that when there is no brain activity, it is ok to harvest the organs, since waiting until complete and total cellular death generally means the organs can't be used. Are you also against organ transplant?
Well, it (fertilized egg) clearly becomes an individual human life when it can no longer split to form twins+ or merge to form a chimeric individual. This occurs in the first several weeks.
Spectre and Feinstein's cloning bill, for instance, defines the stage at which the generic mass of cells becomes protected at 14 days, which is the most conservative limit in the world (other than a complete ban), but still allows ESCR and therapeutic cloning research to proceed.
As far as when this individual human life becomes a human being (entitled to the same protections as other human beings), I'd say the best criteria is the same one we use to determine when life ends: presence or absence of brain activity.
> (1) That this mass of cells doesn't have distinct organs doesn't mean it's not a individual human life.
According to the defintion of "individual", it does. You might switch the context of "an individual" to merely "a single thing", but then how is your mass of cells different from a tumor or clump of "adult" stem cells?
> (2) Failing to implant certainly implies death for such a mass of cells. Slamming into a telephone pole at 60 miles per hour probably implies the same for this mass of cells (and for the mass of cells that is the original poster).
Only if the cells are already in a uterus. If the cells are in a petri dish, they can live indefinitely in culture, or be grown into (living) organ tissue to save the lives of individual human beings.
> (5) If one accepts the premise that an embyo is human life (which is not at all irrational), than it follows that you can't kill one human just to benefit another that might be suffering.
Only if one switches the context of "human life" mid-sentence to "human being". The "human life" of course is not "killed", like with other tissue transplants, it is just moved from one form of living (in vitro) to another (in vivo).
So we're human beings, unique individuals of the human species. We can't divide to form two human beings, or merge with another to form a single human being, right?
OTOH, generic human cells are not unique. Do you really want to remove uniqueness from the definition of human being?
> Pretty amazing how it works, huh? But why does it make it any less a human life?
"A human life" as defined as some living human tissue, a stem cell (just like any other human cell in culture) certainly is. But "A" human being is an individual composed of differentiated cells. A cell that might become one or several or part of an individual given the right environment is not "an" individual human being.
> Not any more than we investigate folks that get in car accidents or whose loved ones die of cancer.
Accidental deaths must be reported as such, and evidence presented that the death was indeed accidental. With human beings, if it is not known why a person died, generally there is an investigation. If you want fertilized eggs treated as human beings, why would you deny them this standard protection afforded to other human beings?
> Current definition of "human being" according to whom?
According to the way the word has always been used. It has never applied to individual cells or microscopic masses of generic cells.
> What makes the first cell after fertilization any less a human life that after it has been dividing for a while?
What makes it different from a dividing "adult" stem cell or cancer cell? All have the potential to continue to divide in the right conditions. How would you tell an individual living human cell from a single celled "human being" by looking at the cell?
> Furthermore, don't **you** need the right environment in order to live?
Live? Stem cells are alive, or they are not very useful. *I* however, do not need the right environment to become a human being. Furthermore, current research seems to be moving toward being able to return any human cell to a totipotent (where it could become an embryo if implanted).
Are we then to declare all living human cells "human beings"?
> Lacking the evironment to continue to live doesn't mean you weren't living before. Just ask a drowned person.
Check your tense. My point was that the generic cell needs the right environment to _become_ a person, which is entirely different from a person needing the right environment to "survive". In other words, human stem cells (or fertlized eggs) can survive just fine in various different environments, but they need a _specific_ environment to _become_ one or several or part of one people.
On the other hand, most folks don't think that a human being becomes something else when they are put into another environment where they *survive*.
Things Anti- embryonic Stem cell research folks say:
Anti: But it's a human being! A microscopic brainless little human being and taking cells from it is murder!
Pro: No, it's a mass of generic totipotent cells. If it makes it into a mother's womb, it might (about 1/2 fail to implant) become twins, triplets, or it might merge with another blastula to form a single individual. Or it might fail to implant and be expelled as waste. If we start declaring that fertilized eggs are human beings, do we then investigate every woman who has an early miscarriage for suspicion of murder or neglect (too much excercise, coffee or stress can cause a zygote to fail to implant)?
Better to stick with our current definition of "human being": unique individual of the human species, rather than redefine human being to mean one or more or part of something that might become a human being if inserted in the right environment just to try and get a leg up in the battle agains the pro-choicers.
Anti: Adult stem cells are providing cures while the liberals want to waste money on embryonic work just to upset the religious!
Pro: Unipotent adult stem cells were discovered over fifty years ago, and only recently have treatments with them become safe and effective. Yet such treatments are frequently claimed by anti-embryonic stem cell folks to be proof that adult _pluripotent_ stem cells will be effective, even though no human trials have been conducted with adult pluripotent stem cells to justify this claim!
Sadly, one can easily make the claim that adult stem cell research is a good thing without lying about embryonic stem cells research and therapeutic cloning. I wonder why folks who are interested in ASCR seem to constantly have to attack ESCR and SCNT? Doesn't their field of interest hold enough promise without cutting down the others?
In an ideal world, where curing sick people came first, all three avenues would be fully explored for the best cures.
Often the above is accompanied by something like:
Anti: Adult stem cells are currently healing hearts from only a few injections!
Pro: One form of disease has been alieviated in one patient. There has been no widespread set of human trials to show this will work in all cases, nor has there been comparative studies to see if this one method is better than methods using SCNT or ESCR. There is no scientific reason not to explore multiple methods for treatment to find the best one for various different forms of disease. Surgury stops some cancers, taxol stops others. It would be rather silly and unscientific to say since surgery is 70% effective agains cancer A, we should not fund other forms of cancer research, wouldn't it?
Anti: This research will lead to growing children for body parts!
Pro: No, that is not at all likely, even aside from the moral implications, it would be impractical. Instead, the specific needed organ cells are grown in the numbers required from pluripotent stem cells and injected, or the organ itself is grown on a synthetic mesh. No serious researcher in the field of regenerativ medicine is proposing "growing a clone for replacement organs", one only hears such nonsense from bad sci-fi writers and religious nuts.
Anti: Stem cell therapy will be too expensive for ordinary people anyway!
Pro: This is pure speculation. Any new procedure is expensive, including adult pluripotent stem cell work and certainly killing a person's immune system and replacing it with marrow stem cells grown in the lab. Fund the research normally and demand that the research is made available for everyone.
The best thing about stem cell research is that it is about finding _cures_: new organs, new nerves, new brain tissue. Folks cured should be able to return to their lives, get back to work, etc. This is the ultimate dream of medicine: curing people of the ravages of disease and age, rather than just keeping sick folks alive for a few more years.
Not CNS, no brain tissue, no heart, no lungs, etc.
About half of the naturally created zygotes die in the first two weeks after fertilization.
If these are "human beings", then half of our population dies before even being implanted! Of these are "human beings" then why don't pregnant women get counted twice for taxes & apportionment?
Finally, the fear of "growing people for organs" is bad sci-fi, not science. The idea is to grow organs and organ tissue directly from stem cells, and save real suffering and dying human beings with the result.
The next evolution I see (as a courseware developer at a university) is an open degree program: folks take the best classes for their degree from schools all over the world, and then receive the degree from their preferred degree granting institution.
The benefits of this is that one is not limited to the quality of classes at your local U, if the CS dept is better at MIT, or a particular class is better at Yale, on can take the course there (virtually).
The things that local schools will provide: computer/web access, standard software and help for that software, places to collaborate with other students, get cheap beer and pizza, take classes that require in person interaction, places to take proctored tests, etc.
Overall, moving a good part of education online will help free us from the geographical bounds that currently make it tough for kids from San Diego (or Capetown) to get an MIT education, while allowing the best teachers to teach the best students from around the world.
Of course, how to pay & get paid for all this is another issue, and the one currently holding back alot of technology use in education.
Some of the other problems:
Faculty often don't get paid for taking the time to put their materials online. Some schools have a team that does this for the faculty, but many other schools expect them to learn to make their web pages themselves.
(The irony is that while the don't get paid to type and format their lectures in html and draw their diagrams in illustrator or gimp, they _do_ get paid to spend man-decades of their teaching career scrawling on blackboards! One of the things that drives me nuts about the "traditional" in class experience is sitting around or trying to keep up while a prof. scratches away at a black board or white board when this information could be so much better displayed in a nice, readable font on a projected website!)
The effectiveness of classes is often partly judged by how many students show up. We had a prof. who teaches an 7am ecology class take all his very good online materials down because he got marked down on reviews for having so few students show up.
Of course the problems with monitoring testing & providing hands on technology help for students who lack tech skills, the 'digital divide'.
Fair use of copywritten materials.
In any event, it's a great first step by MIT. Hopefully the politics and economics of online education will catch up with the technology someday.
Forensic scientists can only work with the evidence they have & the evidence is generally gathered by non-scientists (to put it mildly).
IOW, we'd be alot further from discovering the origins of the universe if we had to rely on the Detective Fubars (Furhman) of the world to gather the evidence.
Then of course the _findings_ of the FS's are not always made enterely public in cases with political ramifications...
I'd also point out that _Scientists_ aren't in charge of figuring out who did those things, LE is (or has been). An entirely different group you should be mocking for their failures.
Meanwhile, scientists have figured out a few things long before they "mattered" (such as how to build a transistor).
In fact, seems to me that many real problems happen because folks refuse to listen to scientists until too late, (such as the folks warning the Govt. for years that the US mail was in danger of being used in a biochemical attack).
I'd say that if "scientists" were a team in the ball game of figuring out stuff that matters, they'd be pretty much taking the pennant every year...
An unlawful system uses the same amount of energy as a lawful system.
A Lemur's biochemistry is just as complex as a chimps.
A thousand "a"s use just as much energy to transmit as a thousand letters of "Brief History of Time" (http://www.pbs.org/wnet/hawking/strange/html/bigb ang.html)
The limit Entropy puts on Life doesn't limit the _intelligence_ of the system, just the total amount of energy available to do work. The work can be intelligent or stupid, Entropy doesn't care.
Add a "Free Beer" sign and your analogy is more like an open DHCP server on a WiFi network (the server is actively broadcasting "Get an IP address here").
Of course you could still get in trouble if underage kids took you up on it:-).
Seems to me that if you put a sign up saying "Have a Free IP Addy", as an open DHCP server does to a laptop with the default DHCP settings, folks certainly have a "right" to assume its ok to say "OK".
But here we have a DHCP server saying "Have a free IP address", and the user's laptop just says "OK".
Which seems to me an entirely different scenario from actively stealing cable: to your laptop, an open DHCP server has a sign on it saying: "Get Free Bandwidth Here". Period.
I see no difference between this an Nokia accusing folks of theft for drinking from a water fountain that Nokia pays for, that has a sign on it saying "Get Free Water Here".
With a WAP, its as if you were to install jacks all over public sidewalk, in the laundry mat accross the street, the coffee shop, etc.
One might say that folks walking up to a jack on your building and hooking up were tresspassing, but it does seem to me that if folks are merely plugging into an port you are making available in a space you don't own, it's a leap to turn around and accuse them of theft.
Seems to me that if securing the WAP is too much for them, they should at least put a sign up: The virtual ports available on this block are for Nokia employees only! before making accusations of theft.
Maybe they could save some $ by making their TANSTAAFWAP sign in chalk?
"The whole point is -- and the reason I started the story where I did -- is that Anakin is a normal, good kid. And how does somebody who is normal and good turn bad? What are the qualities, what is it that we all have within us that will turn us bad?"
I dunno about you, but this seems like a kind of serious subject. What drives a nice young kid to turn on his friends and teachers and try to kill them all? What drives a father to try and bring his son around to a world view that has justified the wholesale slaughter of entire planets full of people?
I dunno, but I think part of Brin's comments are that Lucas attempts to answer this question, but his answers seem more than a bit lame.
"I've said this a few times, but it's a complex idea that's hard to get across. I'm approaching these films, for better or worse, like a symphony. I have a lot of themes that I keep repeating over and over again through the whole thing. Different notes and different instrumentation, but when you see all six movies together you'll see that there's a lot of recurring notes being played. Sometimes they're played with the oboe, and sometimes they're played with the violin, and sometimes they're played with a full orchestra. And it's done on purpose." (ibid)
So you don't think statements like the above are not Lucas suggesting that we take the SW films with a grain of seriousness?
"Overall, I don't think that article was any more accurate or insightful than the movie it chose to criticize. It, too, was somewhat obvious and full of factual errors. (Lucas did not direct all five movies, for example.)
Do you find it ironic that Brin knew this and in fact pointed it out in the very statement you are attempting to criticize?
"Out of the _four_ Star Wars films that Lucas has directed, for the first time he did not resolve the action by having someone fly a teeny ship into a great big ship, shoot the 'reactor' and then run away real fast from a slow-motion explosion!"
Right, but, Lucas seems to want folks to feel there _is_ a message in his films, claiming to be inspired by the work of Campbell (who definitely claimed that even 'escapist' cultural myths reveal the underlying philosophy of a culture).
So Brin is critiqeing from the view that Lucas does want to be taken seriously.
I happen to agree that Lucas just wants to make a bunch of money and play with some cool new digital toys & that he is using Campbellian patterns in his stories because they are recepies for popularity, not because he actually wants or expects his stories to teach or shape the culture.
But a central theme to Campbell's work was that popular myths _do_ shape and teach...
And the plane is being prototyped with batteries, but the plan is to eventually power it with hydrogen fuel cells (which produce electricity, which powers the moter).
The electric engine itself of course is non-polluting as it runs as well as silent. The silence is particularly golden as small planes are very noisy.
The source of the electricity might range from clean sources like hydro, geothermal, wind, to less clean like solar or nuclear to downright dirty like coal (solar panels require some rather dirty manufacturing processes).
However, generally, even coal generated electricity in the uS is cleaner than what comes out of the tail pipe of a small plane, or even a car with smog equipment, as the coal plants generally have to clean their exhaust to higher standards than the car.
Re:Kind of like all the people here using Micro$so
on
Star Trek: Pick A Plot
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Anyone saying anything at all was "trapped on Earth at the Big Bang" needs to go back to his/her Geology books for a few years.
Hint: BB = current theory of formation of the _Universe_. Formation of Earth = several billion years later...
Slashdot Mirror
That seems to be your interpretation of 21:22, all the text says is that the judges will decide how to punish men for abusing a pregnant woman who loses her baby as a result of the abuse. In any event, you want the US government to establish your religious beliefs as law in this case, don't you?
> If men strive, and hurt a woman with child, so that her fruit depart from her, and yet no mischief follow: he shall be surely punished, according as the woman's husband will lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine.
This pretty clearly is talking about causing a miscarriage by abusing a pregnant woman, not growing stem cells in a petri dish.
Meanwhile, ESCR uses cells grown in a petri dish, so obvioulsy has nothing at all to do with Exodus.
> The argument that an embryo is not human life has always seemed very "hand-wavey" to me, with heavy use of scientific terminology that can't do justice to the profound question of l-i-f-e.
It's also a straw man. Pro-ESCR folks don't make the argument that an embryo is not "human life". In fact, their argument is that it is the same kind of "human life" as other tissue culture, organ transplants, human cells grown for cancer research, etc.
Pro-ESCR folks make the argument that a fertilized egg and the undifferentiated embryo that forms from it in a petri dish is not _A Human Being.
In fact, most of the pro-ESCR arguments I've seen have made the distinction between "human life" and "a human being" pretty clear.
Why do Anti-ESCR folks keep using the generai term "human life" when they mean a specific "human being"? Are you also against tissue culture and organ transplant?
> I have no qualms whatsoever with next of kin donating the organs of any deceased person.
How about an encephalitic infant? Should parents be forced to keep a child without a brain alive until they die of old age (or the power goes out)?
Generally, the medical standard is that when there is no brain activity, it is ok to harvest the organs, since waiting until complete and total cellular death generally means the organs can't be used. Are you also against organ transplant?
Well, it (fertilized egg) clearly becomes an individual human life when it can no longer split to form twins+ or merge to form a chimeric individual. This occurs in the first several weeks.
Spectre and Feinstein's cloning bill, for instance, defines the stage at which the generic mass of cells becomes protected at 14 days, which is the most conservative limit in the world (other than a complete ban), but still allows ESCR and therapeutic cloning research to proceed.
As far as when this individual human life becomes a human being (entitled to the same protections as other human beings), I'd say the best criteria is the same one we use to determine when life ends: presence or absence of brain activity.
> (1) That this mass of cells doesn't have distinct organs doesn't mean it's not a individual human life.
According to the defintion of "individual", it does. You might switch the context of "an individual" to merely "a single thing", but then how is your mass of cells different from a tumor or clump of "adult" stem cells?
> (2) Failing to implant certainly implies death for such a mass of cells. Slamming into a telephone pole at 60 miles per hour probably implies the same for this mass of cells (and for the mass of cells that is the original poster).
Only if the cells are already in a uterus. If the cells are in a petri dish, they can live indefinitely in culture, or be grown into (living) organ tissue to save the lives of individual human beings.
> (5) If one accepts the premise that an embyo is human life (which is not at all irrational), than it follows that you can't kill one human just to benefit another that might be suffering.
Only if one switches the context of "human life" mid-sentence to "human being". The "human life" of course is not "killed", like with other tissue transplants, it is just moved from one form of living (in vitro) to another (in vivo).
> You and I are masses of non-generic cells, so?
So we're human beings, unique individuals of the human species. We can't divide to form two human beings, or merge with another to form a single human being, right?
OTOH, generic human cells are not unique. Do you really want to remove uniqueness from the definition of human being?
> Pretty amazing how it works, huh? But why does it make it any less a human life?
"A human life" as defined as some living human tissue, a stem cell (just like any other human cell in culture) certainly is. But "A" human being is an individual composed of differentiated cells. A cell that might become one or several or part of an individual given the right environment is not "an" individual human being.
> Not any more than we investigate folks that get in car accidents or whose loved ones die of cancer.
Accidental deaths must be reported as such, and evidence presented that the death was indeed accidental. With human beings, if it is not known why a person died, generally there is an investigation. If you want fertilized eggs treated as human beings, why would you deny them this standard protection afforded to other human beings?
> Current definition of "human being" according to whom?
According to the way the word has always been used. It has never applied to individual cells or microscopic masses of generic cells.
> What makes the first cell after fertilization any less a human life that after it has been dividing for a while?
What makes it different from a dividing "adult" stem cell or cancer cell? All have the potential to continue to divide in the right conditions. How would you tell an individual living human cell from a single celled "human being" by looking at the cell?
> Furthermore, don't **you** need the right environment in order to live?
Live? Stem cells are alive, or they are not very useful. *I* however, do not need the right environment to become a human being. Furthermore, current research seems to be moving toward being able to return any human cell to a totipotent (where it could become an embryo if implanted).
Are we then to declare all living human cells "human beings"?
> Lacking the evironment to continue to live doesn't mean you weren't living before. Just ask a drowned person.
Check your tense. My point was that the generic cell needs the right environment to _become_ a person, which is entirely different from a person needing the right environment to "survive". In other words, human stem cells (or fertlized eggs) can survive just fine in various different environments, but they need a _specific_ environment to _become_ one or several or part of one people.
On the other hand, most folks don't think that a human being becomes something else when they are put into another environment where they *survive*.
Things Anti- embryonic Stem cell research folks say:
Anti: But it's a human being! A microscopic brainless little human being and taking cells from it is murder!
Pro: No, it's a mass of generic totipotent cells. If it makes it into a mother's womb, it might (about 1/2 fail to implant) become twins, triplets, or it might merge with another blastula to form a single individual. Or it might fail to implant and be expelled as waste. If we start declaring that fertilized eggs are human beings, do we then investigate every woman who has an early miscarriage for suspicion of murder or neglect (too much excercise, coffee or stress can cause a zygote to fail to implant)?
Better to stick with our current definition of "human being": unique individual of the human species, rather than redefine human being to mean one or more or part of something that might become a human being if inserted in the right environment just to try and get a leg up in the battle agains the pro-choicers.
Anti: Adult stem cells are providing cures while the liberals want to waste money on embryonic work just to upset the religious!
Pro: Unipotent adult stem cells were discovered over fifty years ago, and only recently have treatments with them become safe and effective. Yet such treatments are frequently claimed by anti-embryonic stem cell folks to be proof that adult _pluripotent_ stem cells will be effective, even though no human trials have been conducted with adult pluripotent stem cells to justify this claim!
Sadly, one can easily make the claim that adult stem cell research is a good thing without lying about embryonic stem cells research and therapeutic cloning. I wonder why folks who are interested in ASCR seem to constantly have to attack ESCR and SCNT? Doesn't their field of interest hold enough promise without cutting down the others?
In an ideal world, where curing sick people came first, all three avenues would be fully explored for the best cures.
Often the above is accompanied by something like:
Anti: Adult stem cells are currently healing hearts from only a few injections!
Pro: One form of disease has been alieviated in one patient. There has been no widespread set of human trials to show this will work in all cases, nor has there been comparative studies to see if this one method is better than methods using SCNT or ESCR. There is no scientific reason not to explore multiple methods for treatment to find the best one for various different forms of disease. Surgury stops some cancers, taxol stops others. It would be rather silly and unscientific to say since surgery is 70% effective agains cancer A, we should not fund other forms of cancer research, wouldn't it?
Anti: This research will lead to growing children for body parts!
Pro: No, that is not at all likely, even aside from the moral implications, it would be impractical. Instead, the specific needed organ cells are grown in the numbers required from pluripotent stem cells and injected, or the organ itself is grown on a synthetic mesh. No serious researcher in the field of regenerativ medicine is proposing "growing a clone for replacement organs", one only hears such nonsense from bad sci-fi writers and religious nuts.
Anti: Stem cell therapy will be too expensive for ordinary people anyway!
Pro: This is pure speculation. Any new procedure is expensive, including adult pluripotent stem cell work and certainly killing a person's immune system and replacing it with marrow stem cells grown in the lab. Fund the research normally and demand that the research is made available for everyone.
The best thing about stem cell research is that it is about finding _cures_: new organs, new nerves, new brain tissue. Folks cured should be able to return to their lives, get back to work, etc. This is the ultimate dream of medicine: curing people of the ravages of disease and age, rather than just keeping sick folks alive for a few more years.
Not a "body".
Not CNS, no brain tissue, no heart, no lungs, etc.
About half of the naturally created zygotes die in the first two weeks after fertilization.
If these are "human beings", then half of our population dies before even being implanted! Of these are "human beings" then why don't pregnant women get counted twice for taxes & apportionment?
Finally, the fear of "growing people for organs" is bad sci-fi, not science. The idea is to grow organs and organ tissue directly from stem cells, and save real suffering and dying human beings with the result.
The next evolution I see (as a courseware developer at a university) is an open degree program: folks take the best classes for their degree from schools all over the world, and then receive the degree from their preferred degree granting institution.
The benefits of this is that one is not limited to the quality of classes at your local U, if the CS dept is better at MIT, or a particular class is better at Yale, on can take the course there (virtually).
The things that local schools will provide: computer/web access, standard software and help for that software, places to collaborate with other students, get cheap beer and pizza, take classes that require in person interaction, places to take proctored tests, etc.
Overall, moving a good part of education online will help free us from the geographical bounds that currently make it tough for kids from San Diego (or Capetown) to get an MIT education, while allowing the best teachers to teach the best students from around the world.
Of course, how to pay & get paid for all this is another issue, and the one currently holding back alot of technology use in education.
Some of the other problems:
Faculty often don't get paid for taking the time to put their materials online. Some schools have a team that does this for the faculty, but many other schools expect them to learn to make their web pages themselves.
(The irony is that while the don't get paid to type and format their lectures in html and draw their diagrams in illustrator or gimp, they _do_ get paid to spend man-decades of their teaching career scrawling on blackboards! One of the things that drives me nuts about the "traditional" in class experience is sitting around or trying to keep up while a prof. scratches away at a black board or white board when this information could be so much better displayed in a nice, readable font on a projected website!)
The effectiveness of classes is often partly judged by how many students show up. We had a prof. who teaches an 7am ecology class take all his very good online materials down because he got marked down on reviews for having so few students show up.
Of course the problems with monitoring testing & providing hands on technology help for students who lack tech skills, the 'digital divide'.
Fair use of copywritten materials.
In any event, it's a great first step by MIT. Hopefully the politics and economics of online education will catch up with the technology someday.
Forensic scientists can only work with the evidence they have & the evidence is generally gathered by non-scientists (to put it mildly).
IOW, we'd be alot further from discovering the origins of the universe if we had to rely on the Detective Fubars (Furhman) of the world to gather the evidence.
Then of course the _findings_ of the FS's are not always made enterely public in cases with political ramifications...
Really? Than the origin of the Universe?
I'd also point out that _Scientists_ aren't in charge of figuring out who did those things, LE is (or has been). An entirely different group you should be mocking for their failures.
Meanwhile, scientists have figured out a few things long before they "mattered" (such as how to build a transistor).
In fact, seems to me that many real problems happen because folks refuse to listen to scientists until too late, (such as the folks warning the Govt. for years that the US mail was in danger of being used in a biochemical attack).
I'd say that if "scientists" were a team in the ball game of figuring out stuff that matters, they'd be pretty much taking the pennant every year...
An unlawful system uses the same amount of energy as a lawful system. A Lemur's biochemistry is just as complex as a chimps. A thousand "a"s use just as much energy to transmit as a thousand letters of "Brief History of Time" (http://www.pbs.org/wnet/hawking/strange/html/bigb ang.html)
The limit Entropy puts on Life doesn't limit the _intelligence_ of the system, just the total amount of energy available to do work. The work can be intelligent or stupid, Entropy doesn't care.
Add a "Free Beer" sign and your analogy is more like an open DHCP server on a WiFi network (the server is actively broadcasting "Get an IP address here").
Of course you could still get in trouble if underage kids took you up on it:-).
Seems to me that if you put a sign up saying "Have a Free IP Addy", as an open DHCP server does to a laptop with the default DHCP settings, folks certainly have a "right" to assume its ok to say "OK".
Or break an agreement you signed.
But here we have a DHCP server saying "Have a free IP address", and the user's laptop just says "OK".
Which seems to me an entirely different scenario from actively stealing cable: to your laptop, an open DHCP server has a sign on it saying: "Get Free Bandwidth Here". Period.
I see no difference between this an Nokia accusing folks of theft for drinking from a water fountain that Nokia pays for, that has a sign on it saying "Get Free Water Here".
Because the Network is _actively_ saying "Get your Free IP address here".
It's like you put a water fountain out on the street with a sign on it saying "drink from me".
In such a case, all the justification a person needs is that they are thirsty.
With a WAP, its as if you were to install jacks all over public sidewalk, in the laundry mat accross the street, the coffee shop, etc.
One might say that folks walking up to a jack on your building and hooking up were tresspassing, but it does seem to me that if folks are merely plugging into an port you are making available in a space you don't own, it's a leap to turn around and accuse them of theft.
Seems to me that if securing the WAP is too much for them, they should at least put a sign up: The virtual ports available on this block are for Nokia employees only! before making accusations of theft.
Maybe they could save some $ by making their TANSTAAFWAP sign in chalk?
http://www.starwars.com/episode-ii/feature/2002011 5/indexp2.html
"The whole point is -- and the reason I started the story where I did -- is that Anakin is a normal, good kid. And how does somebody who is normal and good turn bad? What are the qualities, what is it that we all have within us that will turn us bad?"
I dunno about you, but this seems like a kind of serious subject. What drives a nice young kid to turn on his friends and teachers and try to kill them all? What drives a father to try and bring his son around to a world view that has justified the wholesale slaughter of entire planets full of people?
I dunno, but I think part of Brin's comments are that Lucas attempts to answer this question, but his answers seem more than a bit lame.
"I've said this a few times, but it's a complex idea that's hard to get across. I'm approaching these films, for better or worse, like a symphony. I have a lot of themes that I keep repeating over and over again through the whole thing. Different notes and different instrumentation, but when you see all six movies together you'll see that there's a lot of recurring notes being played. Sometimes they're played with the oboe, and sometimes they're played with the violin, and sometimes they're played with a full orchestra. And it's done on purpose." (ibid)
So you don't think statements like the above are not Lucas suggesting that we take the SW films with a grain of seriousness?
"Overall, I don't think that article was any more accurate or insightful than the movie it chose to criticize. It, too, was somewhat obvious and full of factual errors. (Lucas did not direct all five movies, for example.)
Do you find it ironic that Brin knew this and in fact pointed it out in the very statement you are attempting to criticize?
"Out of the _four_ Star Wars films that Lucas has directed, for the first time he did not resolve the action by having someone fly a teeny ship into a great big ship, shoot the 'reactor' and then run away real fast from a slow-motion explosion!"
http://www.davidbrin.com/starwarsarticle3.html
Right, but, Lucas seems to want folks to feel there _is_ a message in his films, claiming to be inspired by the work of Campbell (who definitely claimed that even 'escapist' cultural myths reveal the underlying philosophy of a culture).
So Brin is critiqeing from the view that Lucas does want to be taken seriously.
I happen to agree that Lucas just wants to make a bunch of money and play with some cool new digital toys & that he is using Campbellian patterns in his stories because they are recepies for popularity, not because he actually wants or expects his stories to teach or shape the culture.
But a central theme to Campbell's work was that popular myths _do_ shape and teach...
"an unelected quango situation where the public can do nothing!"
However, the idea of the review boards was to provide a more objective opinion than politicians are capable of (kind of like the idea of the USSC).
Of course, like the once and future ideal of democracy, when folks stop believing, it pretty much is just words on paper or bytes on disk...
On the bright side, the defeat of democracy by capitalism means it just not our fault anymore!
Well, lets all tap a keg and say "Woo Hoo" really loud!
And the plane is being prototyped with batteries, but the plan is to eventually power it with hydrogen fuel cells (which produce electricity, which powers the moter).
See for more on hydrogen fuel cells:
http://www.humboldt.edu/~serc/h2fuel.html
The electric engine itself of course is non-polluting as it runs as well as silent. The silence is particularly golden as small planes are very noisy.
The source of the electricity might range from clean sources like hydro, geothermal, wind, to less clean like solar or nuclear to downright dirty like coal (solar panels require some rather dirty manufacturing processes).
However, generally, even coal generated electricity in the uS is cleaner than what comes out of the tail pipe of a small plane, or even a car with smog equipment, as the coal plants generally have to clean their exhaust to higher standards than the car.
Change hehe to Behe and you have a funny pun...
Anyone saying anything at all was "trapped on Earth at the Big Bang" needs to go back to his/her Geology books for a few years. Hint: BB = current theory of formation of the _Universe_. Formation of Earth = several billion years later...