>Why aren't the religious zealots freaking out about the "unborn" being unceremoniously dumped into a biohazard waste bin
As a religious zealot, I'd say that most of us ARE very upset (not "freaking out", though) about this. But it is within the law for people to do so, so there's nothing we can currently do about it.
As for "freaking out" about experiments on embryonic stem cells, that activity in itself isn't one I see a moral barrier against; far from upsetting me, I could wholly support that research, even to the point of encouraging the use of my tax dollars for it. The problem is that if there is a demand for embryos, then more people will step in to supply them by getting abortions, and THAT'S what I have a problem with. It's like the organs-for-money debate, except the donor (the embryo, the one being sacrificed) doesn't get to have a say in the matter.
Should people be able to have abortions? Maybe--I've yet to see rational debate in America on this question. Should people be able to have abortions purely because of their lack of planning? I'm against it. Should people be paid big bucks by research clinics to have abortions? Definitely not.
1) You can easily crank enough power to start your car, if the mechanism allows you to store up charge over time instead of cranking the engine directly. I don't think the parent poster was describing a direct crank, because the phrase was "connect to my battery", not "connect to my crankshaft".
2) It isn't really that much power, either. I can start my car if my battery is low by pushing it backwards up a very gradual hill for about 5 to 10 meters, then coasting and popping the clutch. I don't even break a sweat. Of course, I drive a Honda CRX HF, your mileage may vary (and is probably a lot lower).
"oil resources are distributed globally" -- NO. Saudi Arabia possesses 25% of the world's proven petroleum reserves. The remaining 75% are hardly evenly distributed. Most are owned by nations that are not our friends. Many of them hate us with a passion, as a matter of official policy.
"a jump in oil prices... a bit of a recession" -- NO. We're talking about oil prices doubling soon, and tripling and quadrupling after that, on to a price point of infinity because there WILL BE NO MORE OIL, except what we can squeeze out of weeds and rocks. Back in the 70's and 80's, OPEC was playing us for suckers, and yes, we had high inflation. This time around, the shock will only be the beginning, and it won't be some council of ministers that controls it...it will be an inexorable descent into economic desperation.
"In a decade at most we're probably right back where we were" -- NO. In a decade at most the American military will be taking oil from around the world at gunpoint. We've already started. Yes, there will be increased incentive to use other sources of energy, but it will be too little, too late.
"I will just take the damn bike to work" -- NO. You won't have a job, and neither will I.
I agree that we should worry about avian flu. But your claim that oil is one of the least important commodities on which we have a "reliance" is hogwash. Oil is far and away the most important commodity in the US and a prolonged problem with it will be a disaster. Our economic growth has been tied to it for the past century. We have to break that tie, as soon as possible. No other policy problem approaches this one in importance.
The conservation endgame is my kids get to live.
The alternative is that they die, choking on my offal.
OK, I know it isn't MY kids; I happen to live in the northwest USA in 2005, and the endgame isn't going to hit here for a few generations...but it's hitting others now, and will reach us eventually.
Do I want to speed up this process, or slow it down? Am I a bacterium, that I would blindly eat my way through my environment without considering the future?
It comes down to simple choices. Should I drive a car? What kind of car should I drive? How far should I live from my work? What kind of work should I do? I live among self-interested dolts who know nothing of science or history, and can't (won't) see the brick wall that they are already crashing into.
You can easily say the same thing about the majority of information on evolution.
Introduce the scientific method, and then spend days showing the kids artist's impressions of what life could have been like for Homo Erectus,
along with reconstructions of whole skeletons based on a few rib bones (but don't bother displaying the actual raw evidence, just throw in some big name like "Leakey" and tell 'em that "the consensus among scientists is...")
The way it's taught now, evolution isn't falsifiable either. To teach it for real, you'd have to teach the kids college-level biochemistry. Let's prioritize!
The whole origins thing is not worth spending immensely valuable class time on. It's only important if you have religious feelings about it anyway (and if you do -- you don't belong in the classroom according to current law.) Since nobody agrees, spend the time on some of the 1,000+ fascinating areas of science that are both useful and provable.
"Equal Time" indeed...it should be equal, 0 hours on creationism (by whatever name) and 0 hours on evolution.
> I won't be buying or downloading any music from now on (legal or otherwise)
So you'll be sticking with what you've already got? That's about what I've been doing, too, except for filling out my collection with the occasional purchase at the used record store.
From 1960 to 2000, there was such an explosion of good music that it may be that people don't need much more. Some of the great bands are still makingmusic. Will people continue to move from fad to fad?
I'm going to be watching with rapt fascination as my kids enter school,
to see if the style-of-the-month bands can really compete with the giants from the past few decades.
I suspect the record companies have mined the bulk of the gold already.
As I've looked at how geopolitics have changed over the last three decades,
it looks less and less likely that we'll ever have another all-out conflict between
large nation states where production capacity is an issue. Conflicts of the future
will be between people groups and ideologies that cut across geographical and political boundaries,
and technology and military hardware will not decide them. Many military writers have been working
this out, calling it 4th-Generation Warfare.
You'll notice that politicians and upper-level military leaders still put their
faith in industrial might and technology, but that's because that's where the power centers are,
not because those things will keep a nation safe.
We're not talking about what they really do, we're talking possibilities.
And the simple truth is that today, you could build a $1000 surveillance system that would keep MONTHS' worth of surveillance, by storing full-motion video for a week and then resampling it to extract frames for archival. A store that was willing to spend a few thousand dollars a year, could keep the data indefinitely. As for quality, it would look as good as a DVD still frame, and you can generally recognize people in a DVD film, right? This isn't far-fetched at all, the only problem for the government right now is that it isn't widespread. Or is it? How do I know, maybe it already is.
You didn't know that they were scanning the serial numbers on the bills you used, both when you got them out of the cash machine and when the cashier put the money in the till.
To really get away with it, you had to steal the cash beforehand, but you didn't, did you? Gotcha!
I thought others must be exaggerating, but they're not. This really does win the prize for long-winded writing.
It's no wonder they didn't publish it, it's impenetrable. Not worthless, but just too detailed. It needs some completely different organization to carry the quantity of information it has.
My guess is, he set it all down and they probably asked him to reorganize it, and he balked, and instead offered what he had up in PDF form to us. Editors really do a valuable service, one that's missing from what you'll see here.
Besides this, there is the complicating factor that many alternative remedies
act in multiple ways simultaneously. It's much easier to do scientific studies of simple compounds that have just one very noticeable effect on the body,
and treat all the other effects as "side effects". But if you have, say, a species of fungus that can make a tea which
produces a number of effects, some of them harmful and some of them beneficial, then it's natural that you find people
using it for its beneficial effects without being able to point to the one knockout punch benefit. You're right that there's no reward in proving the benefits of such compounds,
but even if it was profitable it would be much more difficult and time-consuming than what Big Pharma usually does.
Yet, there are hundreds of remedies that have exactly these properties, and given the cost of today's drugs, it's unreasonable to completely ignore them.
> finding a way for foreign oil independence
I think you meant to write "finding a way to eliminate dependence on foreign oil."
In other words, let's start using the energy we get from the sun to meet our current needs.
It's unbelievable that someone would suggest that we should restrict future energy delivery from the sun just so that we can keep on consuming energy stores from the past (oil) and pollute our sky with the smoke. Pure laziness. It's like a teenager cleaning his room by hauling his dirty laundry out of the house and burying it, wasting all the effort he ought to be using to just clean the clothes. Not that I've ever done this.
Blogs just make mass advertising feasible for individuals, that's what's new.
People have always had the ability to complain loudly, it's just easier now than it used to be.
All this reminds me of the time I went to a boat show on Lake Union in Seattle. Boating is a big deal here. A guy was out in the lake on a sailboat, driving in circles, displaying a huge sign showing a picture of the bottom of his boat that was covered with fiberglass blisters, a manufacturing defect. The sign said "30,000 blisters, I'll never buy another again."
I'm sure the dealer was cringing while thousands of potential boat-buyers gawked at the guy, but I also realized the guy must be incredibly bitter to spend a sunny summer day doing that instead of actually sailing. Now, though, you don't have to be bitter for more than about 20 minutes to get your complaint into a blog and into Google.
Your attitude is based on ignorance of the monopoly power that is held and regularly wielded by both Microsoft and Wal-Mart. Both of these companies use mammoth financial and legal resources to grind
competitors into the dust.
Wal-Mart, as far as I have read, is content with pricing its competitors out of the market, but Microsoft actually steals its competitors' work and sells it as its own.
There are many reasons you should care about local businesses. For my part, I care about the mom and pop businesses because I know some of those moms and pops. I like them and don't want to see them starve. MS/Wal-Mart won't employ them once they lose their businesses. I also know that Microsoft and Wal-Mart care about their stock price and not about their employees, and this is inevitable because they are publicly-traded corporations. Even if the local people COULD get jobs with the corporate giants, those jobs would be precisely the kinds of job I find myself trying to escape. I have worked at Microsoft and I've known people coming and going from Redmond over the last 20 years, so this is not supposition.
I view it as kind of like voting against a tax break when I know that the taxes pay for social structures that I desire. If money is all that matters to me, then I should always vote for a tax break no matter what. But money is really one of the least important matters in life. If you disagree, I pity you and those around you.
> The value of face to face meetings will never go away.
While I agree with you on this point, I also think that the first company that gets videoconferencing to work right is going to make a killing, because there's still no product that finds a usable middle ground between a phone call and actually being there.
The middle ground will have several streams (so you can see both the speaker's face in detail and the rest of the remote environment), will not need extreme resolution (i.e. bandwidth) except for occasionally transmitting a high-res snapshot of a whiteboard or some found object, and will have better audio than a telephone. It will require no more effort to connect to a remote conferencing station than making a telephone call by pushing a speed dial button.
I work frequently with people that I have never met, and though I've "known" them for a year or more I wouldn't recognize them in the street. I think there would be high value in being able to teleconference at least a few times with people I've not met, so that I can develop a mental image of who the person is. It would make working with them more effective in so many ways, even if I haven't played golf with them.
> Uh, if you are hosting child porn, you are the host of the data
You're the host, but not the creator. That's the "source" the grandparent was talking about.
If the data we're talking about is digitized images, then someone has to create the images in the first place -- like with a digital camera.
The grandparent is saying that those who get the subjects into a room with a camera are the ones we should go after. Those who store and transmit the images are in a different class.
(I happen to believe that those who trap the children, those who hold the camera, those who own the computers and those who pay for the material all share culpability in this set of machinery, but I'm not sure they all should be subject to the same penalties; nor are they all equally easy to catch.)
That was my thought exactly. The interesting advances will come when someone creates a process that a computer can control that takes some simple raw material (like plastic resin) to produce new parts, with the design of the new parts under the control of the machine itself.
I envision a factory in which molds are created using rapid prototyping technology, purely from machine-produced 3D parts specifications.
Initially, these designs could be hand-created by humans, but automated modifications could certainly be done and with complex enough design software, parts could be created and assembled in a fully automated way.
Think of a drive mechanism that uses four wheels, but testing shows that it needs more wheels to support the weight; the rear axle could be lengthened and a wheel added on each side, and the heavy part of the load could be shifted rearward. This kind of design improvement isn't simple to codify, but then the software used for routing paths on a PC board has more complex rules than these.
This is coming, it's only a matter of time. I give it 20 years before it's applied commercially.
Internal Passports. I am married to someone who has both an internal and external passport from a former Soviet country.
The internal passport is a photo ID that is physically very similar to the external passport; it is all in the local language, though, not intended to be legible to passport control officers in other countries. It has pages, on which are noted:
current residential address
marriage statistics (date of marriage, spouse's name & ID number, etc.)
list of children
space for whatever other notations might be necessary.
The external passport has everything in both the local language and in English. It has space for visas. Note that a person from this country may have to get EXIT visas (permission by the local government allowing the person to leave) as well as ENTRANCE visas from other countries, which most westerners are more familiar with.
When in the local country, the internal passport must be carried at all times. Note that this is true in places in Europe even today -- it isn't unique to the former Soviet Union. When travelling outside the country, of course the external passport must be carried.
(And yes, I too remember thinking that being forced to carry ID all the time would be the essence of living in a police state. And yes, I believe it contravenes the freedoms that America was founded on.)
> What Christian fundamentalists find so threatening about evolution is that a literal interpretation of the bible forbids it.
I disagree with this statement. I think what Christian fundamentalists find so threatening about evolution is that, if it is true, then God can be rejected as unnecessary from the general worldview.
The real threat, if I am a fundamentalist Christian (and I am), is not that I can be proven wrong somehow in MY belief; but that others, whose beliefs are still changing or not yet formed, can be convinced that God doesn't exist or is unimportant. Specifically, it is MY children for whom I am most afraid.
If some atheistic professor in a liberal university wants to study fossils in a dry and distant land, and write many books about it, that's fine by me (as long as I don't have to waste too much of my tax money to pay for it). But if he wants to TEACH MY CHILDREN THAT I AM WRONG in my belief in God, I am categorically opposed to his activity and will not rest while he continues.
My reaction is pretty much the same as that same atheistic professor's response is when the school board votes to require Bible study in his son's classroom. Neither reaction is unsurprising.
If evolutionary theories were taught the same way gravity is taught (namely, by having the kids study the empirical facts), and if the Bible were brought into the classroom purely as literature, then neither side would have a problem. But we all know that both sides don't stop at these sensible boundaries. Give a fundie a chance to preach salvation, and he'll do it. Give an atheist a chance to tell the kids that Man evolved without any supernatural influence, and he'll do that, too.
I know that ID is a sham. It's the same sham as the artist's conception of life among the early hominids seen in any textbook. They both seek to establish a worldview, without presenting any facts. Let's concentrate on teaching science, shall we, and not keep trying to undermine parents?
BTW, I think Evolution is the single most important reason parents are resorting to homeschooling. The only problem for the atheists is that homeschooled children tend to tower academically over those who have gone to the public-school-factory-indoctrination institution. And the more shrill the argument over ID gets, the more you'll lose to the homeschools, and the more sharply divided America will continue to become. We really can't afford that as a nation. We need kids who can learn to compromise with opposing viewpoints, otherwise we're toast.
You and everyone here needs to understand why these overly harsh penalties are being instituted.
It's because our copyright laws CANNOT BE WIDELY ENFORCED. Breaking the law is trivially easy and many, many people wish to do so, and finding and punishing them all is never going to work. This is the same reason that mail fraud can land you in prison for years and years.
It isn't because the sending of letters is so harmful, it's that there's no good way to control the behavior except by providing a really big stick to use when cases can be proven.
Perhaps it sounds like I agree with these tactics on the part of the lawmakers, but I don't. I think it's another step in the direction that others have mentioned here, making everyone a criminal so that those in power can choose to prosecute anyone at any time.
It's an issue of control.
The establishment believes it is losing control, and it is going to regain it or die trying. I hope everyone connected with RIAA goes bankrupt and these laws get taken off the books, but I'm not holding my breath.
Very interesting reading about your expieriences and conclusions.
I don't have anything against objective tests, but I have a strong reaction to the idea
of going easy on students in order to get a good evaluation. I aced my two first CSci courses, the ones that determined whether I'd get accepted into the program, and the first one was very challenging. It took great effort and the tests were not easy. And I respected the professor tremendously.
The second placed 40% of the grade on a 13-question, one-page multiple choice final exam that took me 20 minutes to finish. I can't remember the name of the professor or even whether it was a man or a woman, and I'm glad I can't, because I still feel angry and shortchanged by that course. Can you guess which of these professors I rated more highly in the evaluations?
That was 20 years ago. An A frequently didn't mean much back then, either. The only thing that makes it mean something is the professor. My hat is off to those, like you, who put in the thought and energy to educate us well.
No, no, you don't get it. The US is quickly muscling other nations to adopt its policies regarding intellectual property, so that the same general set of laws on copyrights and patents will apply across the globe. There will be no place to run to get away from the corporate masters.
Why? Because American and European growth is dependent on IP almost as much as it is on oil. If a significant portion of the world could trade with a nation that didn't respect "our" patents, our economy would fall over a cliff. We buy and sell bits to each other for vast sums of fiat money, but the bits have no inherent value. If they become available for the cost of the media elsewhere, the present inflated value disappears in a puff of smoke.
That won't happen, though. We have too many bullets, bombs, and airplanes. And I am convinced that (a) we will be forced to choose whether to use them to "protect our property", and (b) we will in fact use them. In fact I am so sure of this that I try not to think about it too much, it's depressing. Before GWB was re-elected, I thought there was a chance I was wrong. But no longer.
True. The article summary is just wrong, based on the incorrect assumption that the brains of people blind from birth are identical to those who have lost their sight.
The development of the visual cortext that supports sight occurs considerably before age 3. If one were to develop a prosthesis for those born without sight, it would have to be introduced very early.
You're right that the research mentioned in the article will help those who have had sight and then lost it through disease or injury, a huge group of people who I'm sure will welcome it when it becomes available. And I have hopes that future research might help those blind since birth to "see" in some way as well, though it will be a lot more difficult.
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As a religious zealot, I'd say that most of us ARE very upset (not "freaking out", though) about this. But it is within the law for people to do so, so there's nothing we can currently do about it.
As for "freaking out" about experiments on embryonic stem cells, that activity in itself isn't one I see a moral barrier against; far from upsetting me, I could wholly support that research, even to the point of encouraging the use of my tax dollars for it. The problem is that if there is a demand for embryos, then more people will step in to supply them by getting abortions, and THAT'S what I have a problem with. It's like the organs-for-money debate, except the donor (the embryo, the one being sacrificed) doesn't get to have a say in the matter.
Should people be able to have abortions? Maybe--I've yet to see rational debate in America on this question.
Should people be able to have abortions purely because of their lack of planning? I'm against it.
Should people be paid big bucks by research clinics to have abortions? Definitely not.
2) It isn't really that much power, either. I can start my car if my battery is low by pushing it backwards up a very gradual hill for about 5 to 10 meters, then coasting and popping the clutch. I don't even break a sweat. Of course, I drive a Honda CRX HF, your mileage may vary (and is probably a lot lower).
"oil resources are distributed globally" -- NO. Saudi Arabia possesses 25% of the world's proven petroleum reserves. The remaining 75% are hardly evenly distributed. Most are owned by nations that are not our friends. Many of them hate us with a passion, as a matter of official policy.
"a jump in oil prices ... a bit of a recession" -- NO. We're talking about oil prices doubling soon, and tripling and quadrupling after that, on to a price point of infinity because there WILL BE NO MORE OIL, except what we can squeeze out of weeds and rocks. Back in the 70's and 80's, OPEC was playing us for suckers, and yes, we had high inflation. This time around, the shock will only be the beginning, and it won't be some council of ministers that controls it...it will be an inexorable descent into economic desperation.
"In a decade at most we're probably right back where we were" -- NO. In a decade at most the American military will be taking oil from around the world at gunpoint. We've already started. Yes, there will be increased incentive to use other sources of energy, but it will be too little, too late.
"I will just take the damn bike to work" -- NO. You won't have a job, and neither will I.
I agree that we should worry about avian flu. But your claim that oil is one of the least important commodities on which we have a "reliance" is hogwash. Oil is far and away the most important commodity in the US and a prolonged problem with it will be a disaster. Our economic growth has been tied to it for the past century. We have to break that tie, as soon as possible. No other policy problem approaches this one in importance.
The alternative is that they die, choking on my offal.
OK, I know it isn't MY kids; I happen to live in the northwest USA in 2005, and the endgame isn't going to hit here for a few generations...but it's hitting others now, and will reach us eventually. Do I want to speed up this process, or slow it down? Am I a bacterium, that I would blindly eat my way through my environment without considering the future?
It comes down to simple choices. Should I drive a car? What kind of car should I drive? How far should I live from my work? What kind of work should I do? I live among self-interested dolts who know nothing of science or history, and can't (won't) see the brick wall that they are already crashing into.
Are you one of them?
The way it's taught now, evolution isn't falsifiable either. To teach it for real, you'd have to teach the kids college-level biochemistry. Let's prioritize!
The whole origins thing is not worth spending immensely valuable class time on. It's only important if you have religious feelings about it anyway (and if you do -- you don't belong in the classroom according to current law.) Since nobody agrees, spend the time on some of the 1,000+ fascinating areas of science that are both useful and provable.
"Equal Time" indeed...it should be equal, 0 hours on creationism (by whatever name) and 0 hours on evolution.
So you'll be sticking with what you've already got? That's about what I've been doing, too, except for filling out my collection with the occasional purchase at the used record store.
From 1960 to 2000, there was such an explosion of good music that it may be that people don't need much more. Some of the great bands are still making music. Will people continue to move from fad to fad?
I'm going to be watching with rapt fascination as my kids enter school, to see if the style-of-the-month bands can really compete with the giants from the past few decades. I suspect the record companies have mined the bulk of the gold already.
As I've looked at how geopolitics have changed over the last three decades, it looks less and less likely that we'll ever have another all-out conflict between large nation states where production capacity is an issue. Conflicts of the future will be between people groups and ideologies that cut across geographical and political boundaries, and technology and military hardware will not decide them. Many military writers have been working this out, calling it 4th-Generation Warfare. You'll notice that politicians and upper-level military leaders still put their faith in industrial might and technology, but that's because that's where the power centers are, not because those things will keep a nation safe.
We're not talking about what they really do, we're talking possibilities. And the simple truth is that today, you could build a $1000 surveillance system that would keep MONTHS' worth of surveillance, by storing full-motion video for a week and then resampling it to extract frames for archival. A store that was willing to spend a few thousand dollars a year, could keep the data indefinitely. As for quality, it would look as good as a DVD still frame, and you can generally recognize people in a DVD film, right? This isn't far-fetched at all, the only problem for the government right now is that it isn't widespread. Or is it? How do I know, maybe it already is.
To really get away with it, you had to steal the cash beforehand, but you didn't, did you? Gotcha!
It's no wonder they didn't publish it, it's impenetrable. Not worthless, but just too detailed. It needs some completely different organization to carry the quantity of information it has.
My guess is, he set it all down and they probably asked him to reorganize it, and he balked, and instead offered what he had up in PDF form to us. Editors really do a valuable service, one that's missing from what you'll see here.
Besides this, there is the complicating factor that many alternative remedies act in multiple ways simultaneously. It's much easier to do scientific studies of simple compounds that have just one very noticeable effect on the body, and treat all the other effects as "side effects". But if you have, say, a species of fungus that can make a tea which produces a number of effects, some of them harmful and some of them beneficial, then it's natural that you find people using it for its beneficial effects without being able to point to the one knockout punch benefit. You're right that there's no reward in proving the benefits of such compounds, but even if it was profitable it would be much more difficult and time-consuming than what Big Pharma usually does. Yet, there are hundreds of remedies that have exactly these properties, and given the cost of today's drugs, it's unreasonable to completely ignore them.
I think you meant to write "finding a way to eliminate dependence on foreign oil."
In other words, let's start using the energy we get from the sun to meet our current needs.
It's unbelievable that someone would suggest that we should restrict future energy delivery from the sun just so that we can keep on consuming energy stores from the past (oil) and pollute our sky with the smoke. Pure laziness. It's like a teenager cleaning his room by hauling his dirty laundry out of the house and burying it, wasting all the effort he ought to be using to just clean the clothes. Not that I've ever done this.
All this reminds me of the time I went to a boat show on Lake Union in Seattle. Boating is a big deal here. A guy was out in the lake on a sailboat, driving in circles, displaying a huge sign showing a picture of the bottom of his boat that was covered with fiberglass blisters, a manufacturing defect. The sign said "30,000 blisters, I'll never buy another again." I'm sure the dealer was cringing while thousands of potential boat-buyers gawked at the guy, but I also realized the guy must be incredibly bitter to spend a sunny summer day doing that instead of actually sailing. Now, though, you don't have to be bitter for more than about 20 minutes to get your complaint into a blog and into Google.
Your attitude is based on ignorance of the monopoly power that is held and regularly wielded by both Microsoft and Wal-Mart. Both of these companies use mammoth financial and legal resources to grind competitors into the dust. Wal-Mart, as far as I have read, is content with pricing its competitors out of the market, but Microsoft actually steals its competitors' work and sells it as its own.
There are many reasons you should care about local businesses. For my part, I care about the mom and pop businesses because I know some of those moms and pops. I like them and don't want to see them starve. MS/Wal-Mart won't employ them once they lose their businesses. I also know that Microsoft and Wal-Mart care about their stock price and not about their employees, and this is inevitable because they are publicly-traded corporations. Even if the local people COULD get jobs with the corporate giants, those jobs would be precisely the kinds of job I find myself trying to escape. I have worked at Microsoft and I've known people coming and going from Redmond over the last 20 years, so this is not supposition.
I view it as kind of like voting against a tax break when I know that the taxes pay for social structures that I desire. If money is all that matters to me, then I should always vote for a tax break no matter what. But money is really one of the least important matters in life. If you disagree, I pity you and those around you.
Kiev isn't in RU, it's in UA!
While I agree with you on this point, I also think that the first company that gets videoconferencing to work right is going to make a killing, because there's still no product that finds a usable middle ground between a phone call and actually being there.
The middle ground will have several streams (so you can see both the speaker's face in detail and the rest of the remote environment), will not need extreme resolution (i.e. bandwidth) except for occasionally transmitting a high-res snapshot of a whiteboard or some found object, and will have better audio than a telephone. It will require no more effort to connect to a remote conferencing station than making a telephone call by pushing a speed dial button.
I work frequently with people that I have never met, and though I've "known" them for a year or more I wouldn't recognize them in the street. I think there would be high value in being able to teleconference at least a few times with people I've not met, so that I can develop a mental image of who the person is. It would make working with them more effective in so many ways, even if I haven't played golf with them.
You're the host, but not the creator. That's the "source" the grandparent was talking about. If the data we're talking about is digitized images, then someone has to create the images in the first place -- like with a digital camera. The grandparent is saying that those who get the subjects into a room with a camera are the ones we should go after. Those who store and transmit the images are in a different class. (I happen to believe that those who trap the children, those who hold the camera, those who own the computers and those who pay for the material all share culpability in this set of machinery, but I'm not sure they all should be subject to the same penalties; nor are they all equally easy to catch.)
I envision a factory in which molds are created using rapid prototyping technology, purely from machine-produced 3D parts specifications. Initially, these designs could be hand-created by humans, but automated modifications could certainly be done and with complex enough design software, parts could be created and assembled in a fully automated way.
Think of a drive mechanism that uses four wheels, but testing shows that it needs more wheels to support the weight; the rear axle could be lengthened and a wheel added on each side, and the heavy part of the load could be shifted rearward. This kind of design improvement isn't simple to codify, but then the software used for routing paths on a PC board has more complex rules than these.
This is coming, it's only a matter of time. I give it 20 years before it's applied commercially.
The internal passport is a photo ID that is physically very similar to the external passport; it is all in the local language, though, not intended to be legible to passport control officers in other countries. It has pages, on which are noted:
current residential address
marriage statistics (date of marriage, spouse's name & ID number, etc.)
list of children
space for whatever other notations might be necessary.
The external passport has everything in both the local language and in English. It has space for visas. Note that a person from this country may have to get EXIT visas (permission by the local government allowing the person to leave) as well as ENTRANCE visas from other countries, which most westerners are more familiar with.
When in the local country, the internal passport must be carried at all times. Note that this is true in places in Europe even today -- it isn't unique to the former Soviet Union. When travelling outside the country, of course the external passport must be carried.
(And yes, I too remember thinking that being forced to carry ID all the time would be the essence of living in a police state. And yes, I believe it contravenes the freedoms that America was founded on.)
I disagree with this statement. I think what Christian fundamentalists find so threatening about evolution is that, if it is true, then God can be rejected as unnecessary from the general worldview.
The real threat, if I am a fundamentalist Christian (and I am), is not that I can be proven wrong somehow in MY belief; but that others, whose beliefs are still changing or not yet formed, can be convinced that God doesn't exist or is unimportant. Specifically, it is MY children for whom I am most afraid.
If some atheistic professor in a liberal university wants to study fossils in a dry and distant land, and write many books about it, that's fine by me (as long as I don't have to waste too much of my tax money to pay for it). But if he wants to TEACH MY CHILDREN THAT I AM WRONG in my belief in God, I am categorically opposed to his activity and will not rest while he continues.
My reaction is pretty much the same as that same atheistic professor's response is when the school board votes to require Bible study in his son's classroom. Neither reaction is unsurprising.
If evolutionary theories were taught the same way gravity is taught (namely, by having the kids study the empirical facts), and if the Bible were brought into the classroom purely as literature, then neither side would have a problem. But we all know that both sides don't stop at these sensible boundaries. Give a fundie a chance to preach salvation, and he'll do it. Give an atheist a chance to tell the kids that Man evolved without any supernatural influence, and he'll do that, too.
I know that ID is a sham. It's the same sham as the artist's conception of life among the early hominids seen in any textbook. They both seek to establish a worldview, without presenting any facts. Let's concentrate on teaching science, shall we, and not keep trying to undermine parents?
BTW, I think Evolution is the single most important reason parents are resorting to homeschooling. The only problem for the atheists is that homeschooled children tend to tower academically over those who have gone to the public-school-factory-indoctrination institution. And the more shrill the argument over ID gets, the more you'll lose to the homeschools, and the more sharply divided America will continue to become. We really can't afford that as a nation. We need kids who can learn to compromise with opposing viewpoints, otherwise we're toast.
Perhaps it sounds like I agree with these tactics on the part of the lawmakers, but I don't. I think it's another step in the direction that others have mentioned here, making everyone a criminal so that those in power can choose to prosecute anyone at any time.
It's an issue of control. The establishment believes it is losing control, and it is going to regain it or die trying. I hope everyone connected with RIAA goes bankrupt and these laws get taken off the books, but I'm not holding my breath.
That was 20 years ago. An A frequently didn't mean much back then, either. The only thing that makes it mean something is the professor. My hat is off to those, like you, who put in the thought and energy to educate us well.
Why? Because American and European growth is dependent on IP almost as much as it is on oil. If a significant portion of the world could trade with a nation that didn't respect "our" patents, our economy would fall over a cliff. We buy and sell bits to each other for vast sums of fiat money, but the bits have no inherent value. If they become available for the cost of the media elsewhere, the present inflated value disappears in a puff of smoke.
That won't happen, though. We have too many bullets, bombs, and airplanes. And I am convinced that (a) we will be forced to choose whether to use them to "protect our property", and (b) we will in fact use them. In fact I am so sure of this that I try not to think about it too much, it's depressing. Before GWB was re-elected, I thought there was a chance I was wrong. But no longer.
A simple description of visual system development in mammals might be interesting to some.
The development of the visual cortext that supports sight occurs considerably before age 3. If one were to develop a prosthesis for those born without sight, it would have to be introduced very early.
You're right that the research mentioned in the article will help those who have had sight and then lost it through disease or injury, a huge group of people who I'm sure will welcome it when it becomes available. And I have hopes that future research might help those blind since birth to "see" in some way as well, though it will be a lot more difficult.