Telemeres may only be one factor, and in fact other ageing research indicates that this is the case.
Admittedly I am fairly ignorant on the subject (not being a medical researcher, biologist, or geneticist), but I believe telomeres are more or less analogous to a countdown timer, to let cells know when it's time to stop reproducing as the odds of critical errors have grown too high. If you extend the timer, you're still not fixing the underlying failures.
Now, if you had some way of fixing deleterious mutation in situ... self-repairing teleomeres would seem the way to go. Eternal cell lines, and you 'just' kill off mistakes as they happen.
And that's still ignoring a few other major root issues that cause ageing. We really need to get to a technological level where we can redesign an organism from scratch, because humans are not particularly well put together compared to the improvements we can envision.
"statements in any public place, incites hatred against any identifiable group where such incitement is likely to lead to a breach of the peace."
" an accused is not guilty: (a) if he establishes that the statements communicated were true; (b) if, in good faith, the person expressed or attempted to establish by an argument an opinion on a religious subject or an opinion based on a belief in a religious text; (c) if the statements were relevant to any subject of public interest, the discussion of which was for the public benefit, and if on reasonable grounds he believed them to be true; or (d) if, in good faith, he intended to point out, for the purpose of removal, matters producing or tending to produce feelings of hatred toward an identifiable group in Canada."
Well, if you add 'currently practical' to that, yes.
However, human faces are unique and very little is required for recognition - as long as the recognition engine is a human brain familiar with the subject. Eventually we should be able to mimic that with a computer algorithm.
Using facial recognition on an iPhone at this point, though, was an ill-conceived marketing ploy. It's simply still too easy to fool.
>Reminds me of some Jews who won't turn electronics or cooking equipment on for one day a week.
I believe that's because they're not allowed to make a spark. But as you said, they find workarounds. And then there's the eruv - where they put string around a neighborhood to turn the outside into inside so that God's restrictions aren't so onerous. That's right... you can lawyer your way around God's rules with technicalities, because obviously loopholes are consistent with edicts set by an infallible omnipotent being.
They're not the only religion to do things like that either, because people will ultimately do what they want and find justifications for it.
Good is a value judgement. I want to have more choice in when and how I die, so anything that reduces the effective limitations on my choice is good in my opinion.
Most of the time a man will let you know he hates you, why, and eventually try to stab you in the face. It's not unusual for a woman to secretly nurse a grudge and plot for a long time about how best to stab you in the back, and any old superficially plausible justification will do. This starts with puberty and never really changes after that.
The people most effective at surviving in competitive environments can choose which method is best employed, regardless of their sex. And, in my opinion, the best kind of people use their understanding of the game to avoid it rather than play it.
Given that you could make these swarms with COTS parts and mostly open-source software... yeah.
Of course, drones that are capable of carrying a significant payload are still expensive. Right now this would very much be a 'one person per drone that gets through the defenses' kill tool. It's for assassinations, not terrorism.
The real fun starts when someone realizes you can fly very small drones at high altitude and have them loiter until someone on the ground marks the target for them. There are already military weapons designed to do this - to home in on SAM installations that dare to turn on their targeting systems, I believe. There's nothing stopping you from scaling it down to a small Pi-powered hobby plane with a half-kilogram of explosives flying too high for anyone to notice, searching the ground below for a laser painted target.
The day may come when high profile people don't ever want to be under an open sky.
>even more important than the fact that no power producing fusion reactors have yet been built, nor are likely to be in the next 30 years, is that they will not be able to compete with other sources of electricity.
At this point I am moderately confident that when artificial over-unity fusion becomes a thing, it will turn out to be fundamentally and insurmountably too expensive due to physics.
Ideas a a dime a dozen; I have several Facebook-killers in mind. Give me the resources to implement just one of them and I can get the job done.
So there's really two problems - first is getting the financing to take on an established industry giant, second is that whatever I did to destroy Facebook would, in fact, likely be less desirable.
On the other hand, I'd be rich instead of Zuckerberg, so I'm willing to try.
If I was to say something on the subject... I'd most likely directly identify 'social media' as an amplifying agent of an underlying problem.
I see two possible scenarios - 1) kids are harassing the emotionally vulnerable on social media (whereas in the past you'd at least get a break when not actually in the physical presence of your tormentors), and 2) the Internet in general is providing access to a lot of material that depressed kids might seek out that reinforces their suicidal thoughts (whereas in the past there wasn't much beyond finding a sad book to read or playing a Smith's record over and over).
In both scenarios, people are the problem. The only possible blame I can put on 'screen time' directly I would think would be indistinguishable from the expected effect of television with a full cable package and a decent VHS library, and I'm pretty sure TV didn't kill all the kids 30 years ago.
1) Fusion rockets are a thing. You don't worry about complete magnetic confinement in a very specific way, and the result is that you get a particle stream that provides thrust.
2) " the putative NASA EM-cavity drive, and the physics of that are definitely not sure"? It's pure fantasy.
So, basically you've ignorantly discounted an actual thing while promoting something that isn't a thing. You're not ready to take part in this discussion quite yet.
Some people, perhaps even the vast majority, are frightened sheep who need a shepherd. The problem is we all think we know who the best shepherd is (frequently we imagine it is us) and everyone else is a sheep, and nobody can agree on a shepherd-identification method other than "they agree with my firmly held beliefs".
Somebody needs to tell the mob when they're wrong, when they're hurting themselves, and force them to behave in their own best interests. The inability (and perhaps fundamental impossibility) to identify and accept the best leaders and then follow their lead does not change the fact that the average person is a short-sighted, self-defeating, ignorant fool who is easily influenced but incapable of deciding what best to be influenced by. It's amazing the species has gotten as far as it has, really.
When I was a kid, I got on my bike and simply had to be back before the street lights came on at night. Doing that today will result in a visit from the authorities for failing to properly care for your kids. And long before you get to that, plenty of family would be worried the kid got picked up and molested five minutes after they left home.
Putting a GPS tracker on a kid means you can let them have a bit more freedom a bit earlier while still keeping the paranoid adults a bit calmer.
Trackers today will do live ping response with decimal lat-long, they can handle scheduled geofences that let you know if the kid isn't where they're supposed to be when they're supposed to be there, and they come with emergency stealth communications - they can call mom or dad or whoever (or be called by them) but mute the audio so the parents can hear what's happening without anyone around the kid being alerted to the monitoring.
The kid trackers are basically child-adapted versions of devices made for adults with dementia or the paranoid worried about being kidnapped.
Every time I think I'm getting paranoid in my old age, somebody points out something worse that either has already happened or could credibly be happening.
Apparently, even as a cranky old man I'm an optimist, relatively speaking.
>I don't think the Toronto subway system (http://www.ttc.ca/) could ever get their collective heads wrapped around the idea that they MUST be on time
It's also pretty popular in the GTA to jump in front of trains. Something like a dozen people a year jump in front of a TTC subway, and another dozen decide to use the GO train instead. That's an average of twice a month a rail line is stopped because of a suicide attempt.
It seems it'd be easier to integrate Facebook with government databases and use it in place of birth, death, and marriage certificates, land registration, drivers' licenses, public school diplomas, maybe even health records (you can trust those privacy settings, we swear!).
Nuclear Pulse Propulsion - the original Orion - can achieve 0.05c. No new technology required, just the will to put a large portion of the economy into moving a lot of mass into space.
More or less you build a big-ass spaceship (that's a metric big-ass, too!) into orbit, mount an ablative shield on the front and a big pusher plate on the back... and then toss the occasional nuclear bomb out behind you and ride the resulting explosions. It's a very 'blunt instrument' approach to moving at high velocities. The math was done a long time ago - as were some practical scale tests using chemical explosives and a model.
The problem, of course, is that even 0.05c isn't all that fast when you're traveling between stars, and people get nervous when you say you want to put hundreds of nuclear bombs into orbit. Or spend the next few years' GDP on building a huge ship that you're never going to see again.
It's worth noting that they've also been more or less the 'good guys' for a large hunk of their history, that there are American-driven charitable efforts around the globe, and a hell of a lot of technical innovation in modern times traces back to a lab in the USA.
They're ALSO dangerous, ignorant, armed to the teeth, and have a huge double standard when it comes to what's right for Americans vs. what's right for everyone else.
Lots of nations are two-faced... if not all of them. The Americans just matter more because of their military dominance.
Yep. Definitely bigger crowds. No collusion - nobody EVER met Russian agents. Mexico's gonna pay for the wall. Both sides are bad when non-white people protest at a Nazi rally and a Nazi drives through non-whites. Oh, and Trump was totally right when he claimed Obama was a Kenyan-born secret Muslim. And Hillary's definitely responsible for giving all of the US's uranium to the commies. He's going to drain the swamp.
Jesus, how stupid are you that you can be consistently lied to and you just keep accepting it?
>Oh so both sides are to blame where have we heard that one before
I would like to murder you, in a violent, painful and slow fashion. Presumably you're not keen on that and would like to prevent it, perhaps even defending yourself with violence.
When you start hating foreigners, it doesn't take long to start discounting their research. Not that I'm comparing the degree, but you are aware that the Nazis didn't like 'Jewish' science, right? More recently, there have been lots of Muslim fundie groups in the Middle East that have decided Western knowledge is bad.
Within the borders of the United States, you have Trump calling facts 'fake' if he doesn't like the source (which is usually divided along political lines that align fairly well with cultural and geographical regions), and a large percentage of the population is going along with it.
I don't think you're giving enough credit to how serious the issue can get, and how easily.
Slashdot Mirror
Telemeres may only be one factor, and in fact other ageing research indicates that this is the case.
Admittedly I am fairly ignorant on the subject (not being a medical researcher, biologist, or geneticist), but I believe telomeres are more or less analogous to a countdown timer, to let cells know when it's time to stop reproducing as the odds of critical errors have grown too high. If you extend the timer, you're still not fixing the underlying failures.
Now, if you had some way of fixing deleterious mutation in situ... self-repairing teleomeres would seem the way to go. Eternal cell lines, and you 'just' kill off mistakes as they happen.
And that's still ignoring a few other major root issues that cause ageing. We really need to get to a technological level where we can redesign an organism from scratch, because humans are not particularly well put together compared to the improvements we can envision.
>Nobody has clearly defined what hate speech actually means.
Canada's done a pretty good job - "don't intentionally incite violence based on prejudice and falsehoods", more or less.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"statements in any public place, incites hatred against any identifiable group where such incitement is likely to lead to a breach of the peace."
" an accused is not guilty: (a) if he establishes that the statements communicated were true; (b) if, in good faith, the person expressed or attempted to establish by an argument an opinion on a religious subject or an opinion based on a belief in a religious text; (c) if the statements were relevant to any subject of public interest, the discussion of which was for the public benefit, and if on reasonable grounds he believed them to be true; or (d) if, in good faith, he intended to point out, for the purpose of removal, matters producing or tending to produce feelings of hatred toward an identifiable group in Canada."
Well, if you add 'currently practical' to that, yes.
However, human faces are unique and very little is required for recognition - as long as the recognition engine is a human brain familiar with the subject. Eventually we should be able to mimic that with a computer algorithm.
Using facial recognition on an iPhone at this point, though, was an ill-conceived marketing ploy. It's simply still too easy to fool.
>Reminds me of some Jews who won't turn electronics or cooking equipment on for one day a week.
I believe that's because they're not allowed to make a spark. But as you said, they find workarounds. And then there's the eruv - where they put string around a neighborhood to turn the outside into inside so that God's restrictions aren't so onerous. That's right... you can lawyer your way around God's rules with technicalities, because obviously loopholes are consistent with edicts set by an infallible omnipotent being.
They're not the only religion to do things like that either, because people will ultimately do what they want and find justifications for it.
Good is a value judgement. I want to have more choice in when and how I die, so anything that reduces the effective limitations on my choice is good in my opinion.
They've found a gene mutation that adds 10% to your lifespan. That's good!
If you have two copies, you get a nasty blood disorder. That's bad.
But maybe they can isolate the specific effect that slows ageing and give us a pill. That's good!
It's not ready yet, and I'm middle aged already. That's bad.
Even 'better'... http://www.bbc.com/future/stor...
>Women have always been poor losers
Most of the time a man will let you know he hates you, why, and eventually try to stab you in the face. It's not unusual for a woman to secretly nurse a grudge and plot for a long time about how best to stab you in the back, and any old superficially plausible justification will do. This starts with puberty and never really changes after that.
The people most effective at surviving in competitive environments can choose which method is best employed, regardless of their sex. And, in my opinion, the best kind of people use their understanding of the game to avoid it rather than play it.
Given that you could make these swarms with COTS parts and mostly open-source software... yeah.
Of course, drones that are capable of carrying a significant payload are still expensive. Right now this would very much be a 'one person per drone that gets through the defenses' kill tool. It's for assassinations, not terrorism.
The real fun starts when someone realizes you can fly very small drones at high altitude and have them loiter until someone on the ground marks the target for them. There are already military weapons designed to do this - to home in on SAM installations that dare to turn on their targeting systems, I believe. There's nothing stopping you from scaling it down to a small Pi-powered hobby plane with a half-kilogram of explosives flying too high for anyone to notice, searching the ground below for a laser painted target.
The day may come when high profile people don't ever want to be under an open sky.
>even more important than the fact that no power producing fusion reactors have yet been built, nor are likely to be in the next 30 years, is that they will not be able to compete with other sources of electricity.
At this point I am moderately confident that when artificial over-unity fusion becomes a thing, it will turn out to be fundamentally and insurmountably too expensive due to physics.
>Start something even more retarded and flashy
Ideas a a dime a dozen; I have several Facebook-killers in mind. Give me the resources to implement just one of them and I can get the job done.
So there's really two problems - first is getting the financing to take on an established industry giant, second is that whatever I did to destroy Facebook would, in fact, likely be less desirable.
On the other hand, I'd be rich instead of Zuckerberg, so I'm willing to try.
If I was to say something on the subject... I'd most likely directly identify 'social media' as an amplifying agent of an underlying problem.
I see two possible scenarios - 1) kids are harassing the emotionally vulnerable on social media (whereas in the past you'd at least get a break when not actually in the physical presence of your tormentors), and 2) the Internet in general is providing access to a lot of material that depressed kids might seek out that reinforces their suicidal thoughts (whereas in the past there wasn't much beyond finding a sad book to read or playing a Smith's record over and over).
In both scenarios, people are the problem. The only possible blame I can put on 'screen time' directly I would think would be indistinguishable from the expected effect of television with a full cable package and a decent VHS library, and I'm pretty sure TV didn't kill all the kids 30 years ago.
1) Fusion rockets are a thing. You don't worry about complete magnetic confinement in a very specific way, and the result is that you get a particle stream that provides thrust.
2) " the putative NASA EM-cavity drive, and the physics of that are definitely not sure"? It's pure fantasy.
So, basically you've ignorantly discounted an actual thing while promoting something that isn't a thing. You're not ready to take part in this discussion quite yet.
> It won't work, they won't care.
Some people, perhaps even the vast majority, are frightened sheep who need a shepherd. The problem is we all think we know who the best shepherd is (frequently we imagine it is us) and everyone else is a sheep, and nobody can agree on a shepherd-identification method other than "they agree with my firmly held beliefs".
Somebody needs to tell the mob when they're wrong, when they're hurting themselves, and force them to behave in their own best interests. The inability (and perhaps fundamental impossibility) to identify and accept the best leaders and then follow their lead does not change the fact that the average person is a short-sighted, self-defeating, ignorant fool who is easily influenced but incapable of deciding what best to be influenced by. It's amazing the species has gotten as far as it has, really.
When I was a kid, I got on my bike and simply had to be back before the street lights came on at night. Doing that today will result in a visit from the authorities for failing to properly care for your kids. And long before you get to that, plenty of family would be worried the kid got picked up and molested five minutes after they left home.
Putting a GPS tracker on a kid means you can let them have a bit more freedom a bit earlier while still keeping the paranoid adults a bit calmer.
Trackers today will do live ping response with decimal lat-long, they can handle scheduled geofences that let you know if the kid isn't where they're supposed to be when they're supposed to be there, and they come with emergency stealth communications - they can call mom or dad or whoever (or be called by them) but mute the audio so the parents can hear what's happening without anyone around the kid being alerted to the monitoring.
The kid trackers are basically child-adapted versions of devices made for adults with dementia or the paranoid worried about being kidnapped.
Every time I think I'm getting paranoid in my old age, somebody points out something worse that either has already happened or could credibly be happening.
Apparently, even as a cranky old man I'm an optimist, relatively speaking.
>I don't think the Toronto subway system (http://www.ttc.ca/) could ever get their collective heads wrapped around the idea that they MUST be on time
It's also pretty popular in the GTA to jump in front of trains. Something like a dozen people a year jump in front of a TTC subway, and another dozen decide to use the GO train instead. That's an average of twice a month a rail line is stopped because of a suicide attempt.
It seems it'd be easier to integrate Facebook with government databases and use it in place of birth, death, and marriage certificates, land registration, drivers' licenses, public school diplomas, maybe even health records (you can trust those privacy settings, we swear!).
Think of all the cost savings!
Nuclear Pulse Propulsion - the original Orion - can achieve 0.05c. No new technology required, just the will to put a large portion of the economy into moving a lot of mass into space.
More or less you build a big-ass spaceship (that's a metric big-ass, too!) into orbit, mount an ablative shield on the front and a big pusher plate on the back... and then toss the occasional nuclear bomb out behind you and ride the resulting explosions. It's a very 'blunt instrument' approach to moving at high velocities. The math was done a long time ago - as were some practical scale tests using chemical explosives and a model.
The problem, of course, is that even 0.05c isn't all that fast when you're traveling between stars, and people get nervous when you say you want to put hundreds of nuclear bombs into orbit. Or spend the next few years' GDP on building a huge ship that you're never going to see again.
It's worth noting that they've also been more or less the 'good guys' for a large hunk of their history, that there are American-driven charitable efforts around the globe, and a hell of a lot of technical innovation in modern times traces back to a lab in the USA.
They're ALSO dangerous, ignorant, armed to the teeth, and have a huge double standard when it comes to what's right for Americans vs. what's right for everyone else.
Lots of nations are two-faced... if not all of them. The Americans just matter more because of their military dominance.
Yep. Definitely bigger crowds. No collusion - nobody EVER met Russian agents. Mexico's gonna pay for the wall. Both sides are bad when non-white people protest at a Nazi rally and a Nazi drives through non-whites. Oh, and Trump was totally right when he claimed Obama was a Kenyan-born secret Muslim. And Hillary's definitely responsible for giving all of the US's uranium to the commies. He's going to drain the swamp.
Jesus, how stupid are you that you can be consistently lied to and you just keep accepting it?
Damn. I keep doing that. Decimal places...
I actually meant 0.05c, which is what would be expected out of an Orion nuclear pulse drive.
0.1c should be achievable with a fusion drive that doesn't require any incredible new scientific discoveries.
>unless Einstein is suddenly and completely unexpectedly proven wrong
I want my personal warp drive so badly, but I'm betting Einstein was right. :)
> the US is just following a European trend of electing right wing wackos
Where the hell is Hari Seldon when you need him, right?
>Oh so both sides are to blame where have we heard that one before
I would like to murder you, in a violent, painful and slow fashion. Presumably you're not keen on that and would like to prevent it, perhaps even defending yourself with violence.
Well... BOTH sides are to blame, aren't they?
Idiot.
When you start hating foreigners, it doesn't take long to start discounting their research. Not that I'm comparing the degree, but you are aware that the Nazis didn't like 'Jewish' science, right? More recently, there have been lots of Muslim fundie groups in the Middle East that have decided Western knowledge is bad.
Within the borders of the United States, you have Trump calling facts 'fake' if he doesn't like the source (which is usually divided along political lines that align fairly well with cultural and geographical regions), and a large percentage of the population is going along with it.
I don't think you're giving enough credit to how serious the issue can get, and how easily.