Both of these could fly to space of course, but the take off and accelerating to orbital speed would mean that in the context of a single game session, it'd be same as losing the unit. So, to simulate this, just disband the unit (there was disband in Starcraft, wasn't there?).
One, move to far enough north. Then you'll freeze during winter 'cos you don't have oil for heating, but at least you won't go thirsty, and the cold winter will thin out the riff-raff yearly (especially after the global warming triggers the next ice age).
Two, move to south. At least you don't freeze to death without energy, but you'll have to fight for clean drinking water.
Three, pop a few plasmids, grow wings, and then migrate with the birds.
Well, in the hospitals etc, the normal strain is indeed killed of by disinfectants and antibiotics, and only the resistant ones survive. And we do a bit of this already automatically, because when one drug on disinfectant stops working, we obviously switch to a new one. The problem is, that sometimes we're running out of stuff to use, or have to use stuff with bad side effects.
What I'm talking about would be to intentionally design different disinfectants and antibiotics and use them as a sort of rigged rock-paper-scissors game. The most likely resistance for the bacteria to evolve against current stuff would make the bacteria more susceptible to the stuff that is intended to be used next. Or to say it an other way, design disinfectants and antibiotics to target the bacterial resistance mechanisms against other disinfectants and antibiotics.
But this was just a random idea I got. Maybe it's not even possible, maybe the mechanisms are too complex and bacteria too adaptive for this to work any better than what we do now.
What came before the "Big Bang" a meaningless question? That is very unscientific.
No, it is not. It is literally a meaningless question. Time is a characteristic of the universe. Without the universe the idea of time is meaningless.
It certainly is not meaningless question. For starters, we don't even know how universe began, we don't have science that covers time t_zero. So making assertions about meaninglessness of "before t_zero" is a bit arrogant.
Secondly, "before" can easily be imagined to mean something other than "before in time". As a simple example, "before t_zero" could mean anything that was part of determining how exactly our universe is, the universal constants etc. For example, if you're into brane collision theories, clearly the branes existed "before" they collided and created our universe. Maybe not "before" in our physical time, but still "before"
But will the resistant bacteria be as adapted to human body? I mean, everything is a tradeoff. If they have for example proteins that won't get denatured by certain bad chemicals, then those proteins probably are not as efficient at what is their primary function. Less efficient proteins, less efficient bacteria, easier job for human immune system to deal with 'em.
Actually I think that would be a good thing to research. Can we develop anti-bacterial substanses that guide their evolution into direction that makes them more susceptible to human immune system, and/or more suscpetible to certain drugs that can then be admistered if human infection occurs?
Stating a wish is advocating. And trying to justify advocating assasination of a sitting president is never a good idea either. Expect a knock on your door at any moment. When you hear the knock, duck and cover, because they're about to come through the opposite wall right after you hear the knocking...
Getting new stuff is a form of "leveling up", especially when you know (from FAQs etc) what gear you're trying to get and how. In this context (giving player a so called artificial reward) there really is no difference.
Fundamentalis stamp collectors wanting to kill gardeners aside, there are plenty of christians who want to do more than ask if they can tell their version of the ultimate truth to you. Especially annoying is that they'd very much want force feed their version of the ultimate truth to my kids weekly, if they just would get the chance.
You probably think this is ok. I don't know if you're with the crowd who thinks that for example plate tectonics is part geology religion, but I'm sure you know there are such christians even if you're not one of them. They'd like every geology class to teach that "alternatively the mountains were magicked into existence by the God Almighty (no, not that god, that god doesn't exist, we mean our God, the real God).
Now everybody is entitled to believe what they want, but once they start trying to brainwash my kids, they become something that needs to be opposed.
iTunes installs system level drivers. System level drivers by definition have the ability to crash the OS. And the reason for the system level drivers, the ultimate evil, it is DRM. You can't allow the user to easily get between the music files and the playback or burning, and you can do that only with system level drivers directly coupled with the user space software.
I think there is a Microsoft framwork for that too, but apparently iTunes doesn't use it, but instead wants to use it's own drivers for whatever reason.
I'd get on with doing whatever I want to do, and just ignore the stamp collectors. Who cares what they think? And if they say I really really really have to collect stamps because it's so great, I'd still ignore them if I'm not interested in stamp collecting. And I'd continue doing whatever I wanted to do. Suppose it was gardening. If somebody asked me what hobbies I enjoyed, I'd say "gardening". I might even say that I was a gardener. I wouldn't go around telling everybody that I am an "anti-stamp-collector" and getting into never-ending stupid arguments with stamp collectors. I'd just ignore them, because I don't care about stamp collecting. I like gardening. I'm a gardener.
And I'd never talk about stamp collecting again. On the internet, I wouldn't go to a big Stamp Collecting Forum and argue with stamp collectors about how their hobby is so lame and dumb. I wouldn't go to an Anti-Stamp-Collecting Forum and rabbit on about how bad stamp collectors are. I'd go to a big Gardening Forum and talk about gardening, which I like.
Gardening!? Aargh, blasphemer! Sometimes stamps get thrown in to composts and this is a deadly sin! Some liberal stamp collectors would allow you garden in privacy, like if you had high enough fence around your garden, but they're on the slippery slope. All gardening must be forbidden and gardeners thrown into jail (and see how lenient we are, in the olden days of the great inquisition you would have been burned at stake after torture!), before they corrupt our youth. </hyperbole>
I grant you that there are atheists for whom atheism is an ideology, a belief. It's still not religion any more than, say, a nationalism is, but they can still be vocal about it. And just like nationalists easily go against foreign influence, these atheists go against religious influence.
I personally think that religion is important to humanity, a direct result of our tendecy for spirituality. The problems start only when religions state that everybody else needs to follow and obey their spiritual beliefs. Extreme cases are going to war by saying "it's a mission from God" or something to the effect. This seems to be the case (unless said christian leaders are just lying) with current war in Iraq, for example. There are people *dying* in there, both Iraqis and other nationalities.
So you'd just keep "gardening" and not care about those deaths? *That* kind of religion is something I think everybody, atheists and believers alike, should be opposing.
I wonder if a delay system in the stock trade would be in order? Something like, there'd be a one hour or even a one day perioid during which the trade is on hold, and during that time both sides would have the right to cancel the trade.
Perhaps there would need to be a small penalty for cancelling the trade in addition to expenses. Obiviously some sort of a dynamic black list system so you wouldn't accientally sell to or buy from somebody who is very likely to cancel even with the penalty (like competitor who wants to mess with your stock). Maybe there should be a possibility to negotiate a new price during the cancellation perioid instead of cancelling without the perioid getting extended. And probalby there'd be other kinks to be worked out too, but the point would be to slow down the movements of the stock market, to prevent events like this.
One thing is sure though. A system like this would make stock market a very different place... And even if it would be good for the economy overall, it might be bad for the stock market business, as they want as much and as fast trading as possible to maximize their own cut of the action.
Money doesn't just evaporate, I'm sure it's still somewhere!
Indeed, those that sold their stock got some money. They might have gotten less than they paid when they bought it, but they still got money now. Those that bought the stock lost slightly more money (the difference went to trading fees and other expenses), but they probably plan to get more money later, by selling the stock for a higher price.
The money was originally created by the Federal Reserve, by deciding that it exists. The value of that money was determined by various competing capital market processes. This whole thing probably didn't really affect the value of money though, so no money, nor value of money evaporated.
There was a long time (like millions of years?) between the forests getting buried. So it could even have been a volcano erupting repeatedly every million years. Or a river where "mother of all floods" would happen with periodic climate shifts (like Milankovitch cycles), causing thousands of years worth of mud deposits to be suddenly released. Huge glacial lakes bursting are one source of huge sudden floods, and they can be triggered both by climate change and by volcanoes.
For another, if you put as much effort into not collecting stamps as most of the atheists on slashdot put into not believing in god, people would be suggesting support groups for your aphilatelism problem.
Well, imagine if there were people who were trying to actively convert you to a stamp collector or at least force you to life your life so it won't offend the stamp collectors... Would you put any effort into not collecting stamps then, or would you just submit to the tyranny of stamp collectors?
Evolution *does* take the direct route, as it has no ability to anticipate. It never takes an indirect route to a goal.
Evolution doesn't have a goal. It has an effect or a current result (that of course will keep changing as time goes on), but not a goal. And a route from one state to another state can be as convoluted as you can imagine, like losing features and then gaining them again in a different form, instead of just adapting the old feature.
I'm not really talking about everything turning into all-eating grey goo, I'm talking about something taking over from current biological life.
It has happened before, current DNA-based cellular life has completely taken over from whatever existed before it or tried to evolve at the same time. And there have been lesser takeovers, such as the oxygen catastrophe, where only large part of the planet was taken over by organisms able to use oxygen.
We really don't want to produce something radically different that, if released into the wild, would be superior to current life. Something like "green goo", nanomachines or artificial life using solar energy and slowly but steadily and unstoppably taking over from plants, and as a side effect destroying current ecology of the Earth and killing everything except the most adaptive micro-organisms that would be able to live side-by-side with the "green goo".
Some humans might survive too, with help of technology. I mean, all our current food crops are inferior to weeds, yet we manage to grow them just fine. But it would not be a very happy future for the survivors, strugling to keep enough current ecology alive to be able to get food.
There is no guarantee that something like that won't happen even naturally. Though I think that's very unlikely, because if it hasn't evolved over last 4 billion years, it probably can't evolve. Or to put it the other way, the current life is "it" already.
If something becomes autonomous on it's own, it does it under same restrictions of biological evolution as everything else now living.
What defence against bacteria would this new life have? None. Could it develop some? I don't think it'd have time... Bacteria and archae have biochemical machinery for attack and defence, predation, battle and digestion, that has evolved for and survived almost 4 billion years. Protists have inherited a lot of that machinery and developed new more complex machinery to do the same over last maybe billion years. What we have now is best of the best, the stuff that has been able to beat everything that no longer exists.
So if this new life would start spreadig enough to make a food source, it would be eaten. And it would not have time to develop any defences, and it would not be the only food of microbes eating it, so it would be eaten to extinction.
Everything will be burned in the end - whether you do it now or later REALLY doesn't matter in the Universal Grand Scheme.
Who cares about universal grand scheme? I personally would be satisfied if my children and even grandchildren won't have to become climate refugees or face a famine or a war. Beyond that, I don't think it's not really my business any more, but for the next hundred years or so, I'm partially responsible (and so is everybody else now living).
You don't GET to go outside the system. There is no unnatural.
One completely valid definition of "natural" is "not made/influenced by humans". That is in fact the most common meaning of the word "natural". Or to put it another way, if it is "made", it is not "natural". If it is "natural", it was "formed" or "evolved".
Then of course "unnatural" has additional meaning, something like "extraordinary in a bad or sinister way". Like "unnatural weather".
I'm sorry (well, not really), but you have no authority to decide what words mean...
Why? You don't imagine that something as fragile and immature as this could actually compete outside the lab do you?
Well, probably not *this*, but it's not impossible that we come up with something that is fundamentally superior to current bacteria and archae based life (including us eucaryotes). Evolution has many limits, it can only "go" where it can go in small, beneficial steps, starting from existing organisms. We humans have no such limitation with our bio- and nanoengineering.
So even if it is unlikely, there is a possibility that we can come up with stuff that evolution has been unable to develop, for example a completely new kind of cellular wall that is superior to anything current life has and imprevious to any attempts of existing microbes to eat it.
I'd say that what ever we do in labs, we should always have some thought put to controlling it. Like the above example, we should have a chemical that is mostly harmless to existing life but able to destroy this new cell wall easily. And same applies to any self-replicating nanomachines we may some day create. The good news is, if something is very different, it is very likely that there is an antidote that can target just the difference.
But even if evolution has been going on for 4 billion years or whatever, it doesn't mean that we can't come up with dangerous self-replicating stuff that is outside the reach of biological evolution.
Good security isn't something you "band aid", it's something you design from the beginning.
Yes, but that still doesn't work. You'd have to remove the human element. Enough nuking from orbit should remove both the virus creator and the hapless user, so as long as you protect the actual computer from the EMPs during the bombardment that's probably the safest way to go.
Slashdot Mirror
Both of these could fly to space of course, but the take off and accelerating to orbital speed would mean that in the context of a single game session, it'd be same as losing the unit. So, to simulate this, just disband the unit (there was disband in Starcraft, wasn't there?).
When that happens, there are a few choices.
One, move to far enough north. Then you'll freeze during winter 'cos you don't have oil for heating, but at least you won't go thirsty, and the cold winter will thin out the riff-raff yearly (especially after the global warming triggers the next ice age).
Two, move to south. At least you don't freeze to death without energy, but you'll have to fight for clean drinking water.
Three, pop a few plasmids, grow wings, and then migrate with the birds.
What has legality to do with advocating assassination being a not-so-good idea under current regime? They certainly don't care about that.
(Substitute your own "them", for example the neighborhood association keeping the neighborhood clean of wrong thinking... ;-).
Well, in the hospitals etc, the normal strain is indeed killed of by disinfectants and antibiotics, and only the resistant ones survive. And we do a bit of this already automatically, because when one drug on disinfectant stops working, we obviously switch to a new one. The problem is, that sometimes we're running out of stuff to use, or have to use stuff with bad side effects.
What I'm talking about would be to intentionally design different disinfectants and antibiotics and use them as a sort of rigged rock-paper-scissors game. The most likely resistance for the bacteria to evolve against current stuff would make the bacteria more susceptible to the stuff that is intended to be used next. Or to say it an other way, design disinfectants and antibiotics to target the bacterial resistance mechanisms against other disinfectants and antibiotics.
But this was just a random idea I got. Maybe it's not even possible, maybe the mechanisms are too complex and bacteria too adaptive for this to work any better than what we do now.
What came before the "Big Bang" a meaningless question? That is very unscientific.
No, it is not. It is literally a meaningless question. Time is a characteristic of the universe. Without the universe the idea of time is meaningless.
It certainly is not meaningless question. For starters, we don't even know how universe began, we don't have science that covers time t_zero. So making assertions about meaninglessness of "before t_zero" is a bit arrogant.
Secondly, "before" can easily be imagined to mean something other than "before in time". As a simple example, "before t_zero" could mean anything that was part of determining how exactly our universe is, the universal constants etc. For example, if you're into brane collision theories, clearly the branes existed "before" they collided and created our universe. Maybe not "before" in our physical time, but still "before"
But will the resistant bacteria be as adapted to human body? I mean, everything is a tradeoff. If they have for example proteins that won't get denatured by certain bad chemicals, then those proteins probably are not as efficient at what is their primary function. Less efficient proteins, less efficient bacteria, easier job for human immune system to deal with 'em.
Actually I think that would be a good thing to research. Can we develop anti-bacterial substanses that guide their evolution into direction that makes them more susceptible to human immune system, and/or more suscpetible to certain drugs that can then be admistered if human infection occurs?
Stating a wish is advocating. And trying to justify advocating assasination of a sitting president is never a good idea either. Expect a knock on your door at any moment. When you hear the knock, duck and cover, because they're about to come through the opposite wall right after you hear the knocking...
Getting new stuff is a form of "leveling up", especially when you know (from FAQs etc) what gear you're trying to get and how. In this context (giving player a so called artificial reward) there really is no difference.
We are animals like any other mammal, there's no magic line separating us from the rest of nature.
Yes, there is magic that separates us from the other animals. AFAIK no other animal can even begin comprehend this type of magic.
Fundamentalis stamp collectors wanting to kill gardeners aside, there are plenty of christians who want to do more than ask if they can tell their version of the ultimate truth to you. Especially annoying is that they'd very much want force feed their version of the ultimate truth to my kids weekly, if they just would get the chance.
You probably think this is ok. I don't know if you're with the crowd who thinks that for example plate tectonics is part geology religion, but I'm sure you know there are such christians even if you're not one of them. They'd like every geology class to teach that "alternatively the mountains were magicked into existence by the God Almighty (no, not that god, that god doesn't exist, we mean our God, the real God).
Now everybody is entitled to believe what they want, but once they start trying to brainwash my kids, they become something that needs to be opposed.
iTunes installs system level drivers. System level drivers by definition have the ability to crash the OS. And the reason for the system level drivers, the ultimate evil, it is DRM. You can't allow the user to easily get between the music files and the playback or burning, and you can do that only with system level drivers directly coupled with the user space software.
I think there is a Microsoft framwork for that too, but apparently iTunes doesn't use it, but instead wants to use it's own drivers for whatever reason.
But does it run iTunes?
I'd get on with doing whatever I want to do, and just ignore the stamp collectors. Who cares what they think? And if they say I really really really have to collect stamps because it's so great, I'd still ignore them if I'm not interested in stamp collecting. And I'd continue doing whatever I wanted to do. Suppose it was gardening. If somebody asked me what hobbies I enjoyed, I'd say "gardening". I might even say that I was a gardener. I wouldn't go around telling everybody that I am an "anti-stamp-collector" and getting into never-ending stupid arguments with stamp collectors. I'd just ignore them, because I don't care about stamp collecting. I like gardening. I'm a gardener.
And I'd never talk about stamp collecting again. On the internet, I wouldn't go to a big Stamp Collecting Forum and argue with stamp collectors about how their hobby is so lame and dumb. I wouldn't go to an Anti-Stamp-Collecting Forum and rabbit on about how bad stamp collectors are. I'd go to a big Gardening Forum and talk about gardening, which I like.
Gardening!? Aargh, blasphemer! Sometimes stamps get thrown in to composts and this is a deadly sin! Some liberal stamp collectors would allow you garden in privacy, like if you had high enough fence around your garden, but they're on the slippery slope. All gardening must be forbidden and gardeners thrown into jail (and see how lenient we are, in the olden days of the great inquisition you would have been burned at stake after torture!), before they corrupt our youth.
</hyperbole>
I grant you that there are atheists for whom atheism is an ideology, a belief. It's still not religion any more than, say, a nationalism is, but they can still be vocal about it. And just like nationalists easily go against foreign influence, these atheists go against religious influence.
I personally think that religion is important to humanity, a direct result of our tendecy for spirituality. The problems start only when religions state that everybody else needs to follow and obey their spiritual beliefs. Extreme cases are going to war by saying "it's a mission from God" or something to the effect. This seems to be the case (unless said christian leaders are just lying) with current war in Iraq, for example. There are people *dying* in there, both Iraqis and other nationalities.
So you'd just keep "gardening" and not care about those deaths? *That* kind of religion is something I think everybody, atheists and believers alike, should be opposing.
I wonder if a delay system in the stock trade would be in order? Something like, there'd be a one hour or even a one day perioid during which the trade is on hold, and during that time both sides would have the right to cancel the trade.
Perhaps there would need to be a small penalty for cancelling the trade in addition to expenses. Obiviously some sort of a dynamic black list system so you wouldn't accientally sell to or buy from somebody who is very likely to cancel even with the penalty (like competitor who wants to mess with your stock). Maybe there should be a possibility to negotiate a new price during the cancellation perioid instead of cancelling without the perioid getting extended. And probalby there'd be other kinks to be worked out too, but the point would be to slow down the movements of the stock market, to prevent events like this.
One thing is sure though. A system like this would make stock market a very different place... And even if it would be good for the economy overall, it might be bad for the stock market business, as they want as much and as fast trading as possible to maximize their own cut of the action.
Money doesn't just evaporate, I'm sure it's still somewhere!
Indeed, those that sold their stock got some money. They might have gotten less than they paid when they bought it, but they still got money now. Those that bought the stock lost slightly more money (the difference went to trading fees and other expenses), but they probably plan to get more money later, by selling the stock for a higher price.
The money was originally created by the Federal Reserve, by deciding that it exists. The value of that money was determined by various competing capital market processes. This whole thing probably didn't really affect the value of money though, so no money, nor value of money evaporated.
There was a long time (like millions of years?) between the forests getting buried. So it could even have been a volcano erupting repeatedly every million years. Or a river where "mother of all floods" would happen with periodic climate shifts (like Milankovitch cycles), causing thousands of years worth of mud deposits to be suddenly released. Huge glacial lakes bursting are one source of huge sudden floods, and they can be triggered both by climate change and by volcanoes.
For another, if you put as much effort into not collecting stamps as most of the atheists on slashdot put into not believing in god, people would be suggesting support groups for your aphilatelism problem.
Well, imagine if there were people who were trying to actively convert you to a stamp collector or at least force you to life your life so it won't offend the stamp collectors... Would you put any effort into not collecting stamps then, or would you just submit to the tyranny of stamp collectors?
Evolution *does* take the direct route, as it has no ability to anticipate. It never takes an indirect route to a goal.
Evolution doesn't have a goal. It has an effect or a current result (that of course will keep changing as time goes on), but not a goal. And a route from one state to another state can be as convoluted as you can imagine, like losing features and then gaining them again in a different form, instead of just adapting the old feature.
I'm not really talking about everything turning into all-eating grey goo, I'm talking about something taking over from current biological life.
It has happened before, current DNA-based cellular life has completely taken over from whatever existed before it or tried to evolve at the same time. And there have been lesser takeovers, such as the oxygen catastrophe, where only large part of the planet was taken over by organisms able to use oxygen.
We really don't want to produce something radically different that, if released into the wild, would be superior to current life. Something like "green goo", nanomachines or artificial life using solar energy and slowly but steadily and unstoppably taking over from plants, and as a side effect destroying current ecology of the Earth and killing everything except the most adaptive micro-organisms that would be able to live side-by-side with the "green goo".
Some humans might survive too, with help of technology. I mean, all our current food crops are inferior to weeds, yet we manage to grow them just fine. But it would not be a very happy future for the survivors, strugling to keep enough current ecology alive to be able to get food.
There is no guarantee that something like that won't happen even naturally. Though I think that's very unlikely, because if it hasn't evolved over last 4 billion years, it probably can't evolve. Or to put it the other way, the current life is "it" already.
"I had sex last night with a supermodel (almost)."
almost..... shes not really a supermodel until you drink the whole keg.
In slashdot "(almost)" refers to sex obviously.
And "supermodel" refers to a professional porn star, probably of the "teen amateur" type.
If something becomes autonomous on it's own, it does it under same restrictions of biological evolution as everything else now living.
What defence against bacteria would this new life have? None. Could it develop some? I don't think it'd have time... Bacteria and archae have biochemical machinery for attack and defence, predation, battle and digestion, that has evolved for and survived almost 4 billion years. Protists have inherited a lot of that machinery and developed new more complex machinery to do the same over last maybe billion years. What we have now is best of the best, the stuff that has been able to beat everything that no longer exists.
So if this new life would start spreadig enough to make a food source, it would be eaten. And it would not have time to develop any defences, and it would not be the only food of microbes eating it, so it would be eaten to extinction.
Everything will be burned in the end - whether you do it now or later REALLY doesn't matter in the Universal Grand Scheme.
Who cares about universal grand scheme? I personally would be satisfied if my children and even grandchildren won't have to become climate refugees or face a famine or a war. Beyond that, I don't think it's not really my business any more, but for the next hundred years or so, I'm partially responsible (and so is everybody else now living).
You don't GET to go outside the system. There is no unnatural .
One completely valid definition of "natural" is "not made/influenced by humans". That is in fact the most common meaning of the word "natural". Or to put it another way, if it is "made", it is not "natural". If it is "natural", it was "formed" or "evolved".
Then of course "unnatural" has additional meaning, something like "extraordinary in a bad or sinister way". Like "unnatural weather".
I'm sorry (well, not really), but you have no authority to decide what words mean...
Why? You don't imagine that something as fragile and immature as this could actually compete outside the lab do you?
Well, probably not *this*, but it's not impossible that we come up with something that is fundamentally superior to current bacteria and archae based life (including us eucaryotes). Evolution has many limits, it can only "go" where it can go in small, beneficial steps, starting from existing organisms. We humans have no such limitation with our bio- and nanoengineering.
So even if it is unlikely, there is a possibility that we can come up with stuff that evolution has been unable to develop, for example a completely new kind of cellular wall that is superior to anything current life has and imprevious to any attempts of existing microbes to eat it.
I'd say that what ever we do in labs, we should always have some thought put to controlling it. Like the above example, we should have a chemical that is mostly harmless to existing life but able to destroy this new cell wall easily. And same applies to any self-replicating nanomachines we may some day create. The good news is, if something is very different, it is very likely that there is an antidote that can target just the difference.
But even if evolution has been going on for 4 billion years or whatever, it doesn't mean that we can't come up with dangerous self-replicating stuff that is outside the reach of biological evolution.
Good security isn't something you "band aid", it's something you design from the beginning.
Yes, but that still doesn't work. You'd have to remove the human element. Enough nuking from orbit should remove both the virus creator and the hapless user, so as long as you protect the actual computer from the EMPs during the bombardment that's probably the safest way to go.