wtf? You are falling down the same hole you're accusing Israel of falling. A measured response is "they killed 3 people, let's kill 3 of theirs". A primitive tit-for-tat, instead of a goal-oriented stop-the-bombs-from-falling approach.
You and I disagree on what due diligence is. due diligence towards your citizens means to make the ongoing bombing stop, not nail a proportional number of theirs.
As for stopping the blockade, no, they don't need to stop it.
If canada was ***violently*** harassing the US by bombing civillian cities, I don't see a single reason why the US should continue opening up its borders so canadians can come and work on us soil and otherwise prosper from its facilities, why the US should continue feeding a country that is actively kicking it, openly endorsing violence and ignoring any prior agreements made between the two by former administrations. To me that just *doesn't* *make* *sense*.
You can't tell a country what to democratically elect - that's the palestinians right to choose the leadership that represents them. But, if you're Israel, you don't have to like what they elect either.
The blockade, an extension of the quartet+US embargo that was in place prior to the hamas having gone into power, is a NON-VIOLENT means to achieve purpose. Purpose being to accept Israel's existence, revoke violence as a means of attaining its goals, and (the big deal-breaker here) accept agreements signed by its opposition when it (the fatah) was in power.
The gazans are responsible for where they are. They're responsible for not doing what is required of them to be in a better place.
Israel didn't pack them there, Israel isn't to blame for the fact that Egypt doesn't want to touch these people with a 10-meter-pole and sealed its own border with Gaza, effectively sealing them in. They've been putting zero effort into and showing utter disinterest in rebuilding themselves, behaving badly towards their neighbours and now their neighbours (both, not just Israel) shun them. You can only do so much for someone who doesn't want to be helped.
Have a look at the (SIGNIFICANTLY IMPROVED) conditions in the other palestinian territories - they're talking to Israel (rather than exchanging gunfure), Israel is talking to them, and they're all collectively in the process of digging themselves out of the shit and rebuilding the palestinian economy. Case in point: there is nothing that Israel wants more than someone to talk to, and will happily talk to its neighbours.
It *has* made peace with Jordan and Egypt. It will eventually have fully-normalized relationship with the Fatah. It *has* ended its wrongdoing through settling gaza and vacating southern lebanon.
Israel seems like it is doing what it can to fix shit. I don't see this kind of behavior coming from Hammas. Not even an inkling of it.
You can't make peace with someone who doesn't want it. And if he keeps on hurting you, you can (and should) break his arm.
You commit billions to building SHELTERS in EVERY SINGLE HOUSE, SCHOOL, MALL. You commit 20% of your entire population's kid's schooldays to not going to school because they're cowering in a bunker. You commit your entire population's kids to FEAR.
*BUT* you manage to reduce the number of killed to just three.
Kindly remove head from orifice and have a look at the conditions these people and their children live in.
If my government were to let it deteriorate to such a pathetic level, if the only education that my kids were getting was that of cowering in a bunker from bombs falling out of the sky, I'd be VERY ANGRY at my government for addressing the symptoms rather than the cause. AKA, for not going to where these 2500 annual explosives are launched from and seriously messing up whoever is sitting there lobbing them, whoever sent him and whoever footed the bill.
This applies to both sides.
If I were in Israel, I'd feel like my elected government is paying its electorate due diligence, like it's addressing the problem.
If I were in Gaza, I'd be leading a mob of angry people and lynching hamas activists for what they'd done to my palestinian children.
And in light of the fact that 2500 explosive munitions have been chucked straight into Israeli cities (which don't even sit on disputed land or have any significant military/strategic value worth bombing) in the past year alone, with a steady 100% annual increase figure, with associated civillians, women, children who get hurt, you, in the boots of the Israeli leadership, would do.... what exactly?
Do you have a better idea?
I understand why war sucks, why collateral damage sucks, why killing kids sucks (I have two and I shudder every time I see or read about a story with a parent that loses a kid irrespective of side). But... the Hamas itself is ensuring that there is no path but war on one hand, and that there is absolutely no other way but to have collateral damage on the other:(
What whould *you* do? Let this turn you into a sponge that can be kicked around?
Indiscriminate bombing? Whatever gave you the idea that Israel is doing indiscriminate bombing? Had it ever wanted to do anything like that, Gaza would have long been a wasteland.
Unlike the people who intentionally drag kids into a battlefield so as said kids can get hurt (and the dragger to profit from this), Israel is actually does effort to minimize collateral damage. The US did like back in Baghdad, even if they messed up once in a while and nailed a bunker being used as a civilian shelter.
Sadly, when fighting people who deliberately turn UN installations, civilian shelters and schools into military targets, when applied to a large-scale operation with many (military) targets, statistics kick in and the humans involved make mistakes. There wasn't ever a war fought where this was not the case. This is tragic, and it is also implicit in the term 'war'. It's why war sucks balls and why we all (minus Hammas, apparently) would rather see conflicts resolved elsewise. This does NOT imply you (read: US, Israel, whoever) stop being human, not try to avoid mistakes, not take what measures your resources allow to avoid collateral and help/spare innocent civilians and kids. The people who would have you believe Israel isn't doing this today are the people who wave babies in the paths of bullets.
If you're not convinced that the Israeli military is made up of people who'd rather not be (and are ordered not to) killing civilians, working on the assumption that people at the head of the Israeli political and military leadership are not total idiots, I'd venture and say they fully realize that killing six kids in a ten-kid family is a proven recipe for four martyrs and 40 civilian casualties in ten years time.
Nevertheless, when being methodically pressed to a wall by a violence-hungry nutjobs, the solution isn't always to get all warm and fuzzy with them. Sometimes it involves kicking their head in, even at the expense of some human error and some erroneously killed bystanders. That is not, and has never been what most of us refer to as genocide, which your nuking idea seems to imply (keep in mind Israel *can* carpet-bomb gaza, which would be similar to nuking it, minus the radiation - it could have done same in Lebanon two years ago... It preferred jacking thousands of smart/targeted munitions into known strategic targets, and considering these urban areas are the only place where its strategic targets can be found nowadays, I can see how what Israel is doing totally makes sense).
Two known militants among the dead who are known to be associated with rocket-firing squads. Named.
The palestinians elected a government that will hurt its neighbours and put their kids in the line of return fire. They got exactly what they asked for. Their own kids, dead.
One of Israels leaders said once that Israel will have peace with its neighbours the day they love their children more than they hate Israel. Egypt and Jordan wisened up. The palestinians haven't yet.
If YOUR town, family, loved ones had explosive ordance fall in your back yards and schools, lobbed over a border by your friendly next-door-neighbour country, 2500 times in one year alone, for your sake I hope your country would go and jam its military boot up the royal hiney of whoever did that. Jammed it so hard in there that your neighbour would think twice. I'm an Aussie and I very much hope my country would do same.
Israel is doing what any sane government paying due diligence to its responsibility towards its people would and SHOULD do.
The Palestinian people DEMOCRATICALLY ELECTED a leadership that will (and has) terrorize their neighbours, then DELIBERATELY put their OWN babies in the line of the return fire. They democratically elected to have their leadership get their own babies slaughtered in the name of a specific ideology.
With any luck, they'll have a long hard think about it next time they vote.
Israel is doing us all a favor by setting the right kind of precedent.
Have a read through the mprize and SENS pages, projects geared at tackling not only cancer but ageing in general.
Aubrey De Grey addressed this question a while back - what if people stopped dying from aging altogether? Will population explode? Will we immediately cause a bigger problem than we've solved?
Following his reasoning (plus real-world numbers) the answer is no. Personally, I agree with him.
Even in the most extreme of cases, were everyone to just stop dying of age-related causes altogether (including cancer, heart-disease etc) unless a truck hits them, population would not explode overnight. It would take a long time (read: hundreds of years) to become anywhere as apocalyptic as some would have you believe, far more than enough time for us to adapt and apply solutions to (humans have proven an uncanny ability to adapt social structures to evolving environments over the past centuries, having brains is a dang good thing at times) as well as be in turn mitigated by the very same fact that caused it, much like people going from making 15 kids to having three after realizing that all three (rather than one in five) will survive to adulthood if only they washed their hands. That's to say our current population growth estimates take the existing rate as a given (200 years ago, 15 kids per family per generation was a given), but this very change is likely to change, and put predictions using these numbers far off the mark.
If people will have extended (reproduction-capable) lifetimes, the rate at which they procreate may quite possibly go down as less pressure exists to adhere to the ticking biological clock (aka "we'll have kids later"), much like many people are already preferring to do so towards their 30's rather when they're 16.
And we'd be replacing a BIG problem (causing a LOT of suffering) with a smaller one that can be tackled by education, regulation and generally more humane means than frality and losing one's mental capacity, life or loved ones.
Cancer is NOT a legitimate over-population solution. Neither are genocide, war, smallpox, AIDS or even old age. Much like amputation is not a solution for a muscle cramp.
The idea of promoting it as such is ludicrous.
They should all be cured. Overpopulation will be addressed in due time, using far better means that we ALREADY HAVE at our disposal.
Last, I heartily encourage you to read this for some perspective on the matter.
Was his job to cater to his personal interests, or those of his employer? Because for the life of me I can't see how his method of operation is good for his employer (well, half-truth, really. It's a risk his employer knowingly and willingly chose to wear, and low as the odds for something like this may be, it blew up in their face).
Nevertheless, he put his personal interests above those of his employer, so he's at fault, just as much as they are for allowing him to practice.
Surely you're smart enough to tell the primary part of my point (dislike for ignorant sensationalism affecting useful debate) from the unimportant (the current geographic source of the ignorant sensationalism)?
My point stands regardless of whether it comes from Hollywood, Bollywood or Palywood.
And politics don't come out of hollywood, only bad education for your voters... regardless of how big and powerful you think your celebs are.
My point is that yelling bullshit claims a-la let's not clone because someone'll clone Hitler or let's not do gene therapy because all of humanity will [ever] have the same set of genes is a pile lame bullshit that wastes everyone's time and distracts from the real topic at hand.
How do abortion rights fit in claim? or was that just a cheap "I don't like you" pot-shot?
Thing is, stuff only happens that way in sensationalist hollywood movies your culture spoon-feeds you from birth.
One aspect of a field of science gets blown the fuck out of proportion, applied to an entire global society (all previous traces of the people who were there before is wiped clean), with the assumption that nobody in that global society was smart enough to call for [a] Rationalization [b] Considerations of consequences, dangers, pros, cons and a learned debate on whether said overblown scientific discovery/field/whatever should proceed unrestricted, be carefully regulated (never happens in movies, nearly the only way it happens in The Real World(tm)), or, heaven forbit, not happen at all. [c] People are way too stupid to so much as forsee the problem, less so propose solutions to it.
In reality, people DO think about this. Scientists, thinkers, corporations, governments DO pay smart people to voice opinions about these things. Yes, every so often one first-world country will ignore thought-through process in a specific field, but that'd be one country, in one field. If the enire government goes to hell - then it is no longer a first-world country. Other countries will take its place. By large, it's transient issues. Most issues get handled in a reasonably smart manner, even in the US.
These thinkers also communicate with each other, publish and voice these concerns. The interweb thingie.. you may have heard about it.
Global population is big enough to allow the law of large numbers largely take care of major oversights.
In reality, if a gene is lost, then it will be lost. Big whoop. You've lost quite a few since you formed a close endosymbiotic relationship with mitochondria. By the time it happens, more than likely we'll be able to put it back too.
More to the point, if you're envisioning a world where ALL the humans come from a single genetic selection, where natural procreation does not happen in a single country in the world anymore, where EVERY ONE of the current 6+ billion person offspring comes from one centrally-selected vial and all human biodiversity has automagically been somehow eliminated, you're not contributing to the debate at hand, just to the general vibe of ignorant sensationalist idiocy coming out of Hollywood.
IAAPCABS (I am a professional coder and biology student). I'm trained in both the blinky and the wet.
You don't need to be a mechanic to know how to push the breaks.
The whole idea behind De-Grey's approach is to neither suffer the too-late finger-in-the-dam approach of geriatrics, and (in his own words) sidestep our ignorance of metabolism to avoid the pitfall of gerontology. I'm not saying we're there, but there is way closer than most people think.
What he offers is quite simply an approach of 1. identify accumulating cellular-level damage. He's actually done most of that himself. You'd find pretty much any cause of death you can think of has already been put into this roadmap, considered. 2. categorize accumulating damage into solution-oriented categories. Accumulating junk in cells, junk outside cells, cancer, etc. De Grey's famous seven deadlies. 3. Find ways to routinely remove part of that cellular-level damage as a once-in-a-period-of-time treatment. We can sustain a lot of it, up to a threshold. We absorb it quite happily till we're thirtyish. Obviate enough damage to keep us under that threshole, and voilla. This kind of work is being done sporadically here and there, but if you pull these in into a comprehensive framework, you'll end up extending the life of the machine, much like a vintage car. 4. Repeat.
There is no magic bullet. Shortening the life of any mechanism - be it a car or our body - is easy. all you have to do is break ONE critical part.
Extending lifespan, on the other hand, is a bitch. You have to extend the life of ALL critical parts. And they wear out and fail in a multitude of different and creative ways. Death from aging is basically when just one critical bit gives way. To combat it, not only death but degeneration, dementia, frality, disease susceptability etc need be considered. You'll have to undo the damage time does. Fix the bits your body can't. Everything must be considered. But - and herein lies the crux - metabolism itself need not be altered. Doing that safely is still a very distant dream. We're nowhere near achieving that. We may, eventually, but that's wild speculation.
Treating thus identified issues, all of them, methodically, through medical approaches we've already come to accept, is about as much science fiction as building the Chinese wall. A massive undertaking, to be sure, but fundamentally nothing but a big pile of dirty work. If someone'll do it, it'll get done. End of story. We can see a huge stretch of the way from where we are, unobstructed by the need for breakthroughs. Perhaps the entire stretch to the home run, perhaps at some point we'll need them. What's certain is, the way now is clear, and we have immense inertia.
Now that the whole stem-cell moral debate is behind us and iPS have been shown to be feasible, enter the age of gene modification in-vivo, of controlled re-introduction of healthy stem-cells to traumatized tissue, of biochemical pathways being discovered every other day, of genomes and proteomes being mapped right and left, an immense and ever-growing protein bank and of synthetic biology, radical life extension is... a natural mundane progression. It will happen.
As De Grey's masterant was once quoted saying, "I expect to be of the last generation to die of old age. Or, with luck, the first one not to"
Three years ago I've identified the early onset of exactly what you've described. The IT field was losing its zest, the revolution felt like it has ended. The field reached roughly the same progression curve cars have had for nearly 100 years. Computers get faster, more cores, hard drives get bigger, graphics cards push more better-looking frames. Corporations play lego with grander toys, made to be ever more simple to run. Anyone can do it. The magic is going, going, sooner or later it will be gone.
Here and there revolutionary stuff pops out. The gents at Google building insane-sized clusters of designation-less commodity-class machines, clusters that can withstand lots of failure and still work, like cells in a living body. Quantum computing is being discussed, but that's niches. By large, it's not just us. The field itself just doesn't hold the charm, the zest, the spirit of revolution it had in our day.
When I identified this, I decided to change direction. I popped my head out, had a look around. The revolution is pushing on. Huge changes are afoot, they just won't be happening in the world of UNIX system administration, of C++, perl, bash or Ruby on Rails.
Biology is nearly at critical mass. Our genetic toolbox is nearly ripe, our ability to sequence genes and proteins is nearing a price point where it will be dirt-cheap. Mountains of data are pouring in. New organisms are being sequenced. HUMANS are being sequenced. Many different humans. Genetics, the art of recording instructions to build machinery, a fine art of reverse-engineering a bunch of atoms that compose everything from the hard-drive head to the bits of a complex filesystem, is but a cornerstone. Proteomics, the study of the assembled machines themselves, is barely touched. We have yardfuls of machines whose function we do not know yet, and synthetic biology is better at constructing custom ones. Metabolomics, the processes that make them all worth together, is a layer of complexity we're only starting to gawk at.
What most people hear is better medicine, perhaps cheaper medicine, maybe kicking alzheimers, malaria and a dozen cancers in the balls. Perhaps finally finding a way to give a virus a proper kick.
What the true thinkers are saying is too radical to comprehend. Radical life extension and robust adult rejuvenation. Machine/neural I/O. Personalized medicine. Regrowth of limbs. The decade-long ethical embryonic-stem-cell stalemate had its back broken in the last three months. Pluripotent stem-cells can be produced from multiple new sources, problems associated being relatively minor. BIG shit is happening. This is not a decade away. This is *NOW*.
I've started doing a bachelor in bio in part-time, spreading it across as many generalist majors as I can. Biochem and Molecular bio, Cell bio, genetics, some anatomy. I'll follow it up with a Honors & PhD in an IT-related biology field, cutting me a multi-specialized role within a decade, giving me PhD status in IT (without ever doing any undergrad work), somewhat-above-fresh-PhD status in IT-related biology fields, and while I'll likely take a pay-cut to switch over, I'll get back on the revolution horse for a few dacedes more. I'll have the tools neccesary to get involved in what's really changing our world.
Remember, you're not measured by how much money you make. You're measured by how much money you make doing that which you love.
Synthetic biology is being discussed, protein engineering.
Being self-taught as I was, I've put together a long-term plan to re-qualify.
And what about Adam and Eve? You must have slept through the
simply through existing. bit. Surely you can prove they (rather than a tribe of man-like apes) existed, oh-he-who-jests-on-behalf-of-creationism?;)
The reason this would fail is the inability to find someone who/cannot/ prove prior art and would thus be susceptible to a patent suit. Every single individual can prove prior art simply through existing.
Were I thus inclined, I'd go for the biggest market out there - patent a "procedure to transfer one's hereditry information onto a partial duplicate of oneself or the recreational practice thereof, through the use of a pshysio-mechanical maneuver with an individual of the opposing sex..."
The DEFAULT in our society is to ALLOW stuff, unless there is a very good case why regulation is required.
Just because something was outlawed (probably with good reason) doesn't mean we should impose a blanket "NO" to people exercising their rights to their bodies in ways that do not clobber society on the head.
Regardless of whether something ends up being regulated or not, *knowing* (aka having this kind of research) is better than *not knowing*.
You do realize that large groups of people do not behave in a binary manner, right? Have you ever seen a normal curve?
People (dumb people, usually) seem to view it as an absolute on/off switch (and yes, the media would have you believe that, it makes for more sensationalism), when in fact any social behavior may and in most cases is influenced by multiple factors.
That also doesn't mean that the things that DO cause these alterations are either meaningless or do not cause any change.
Choose a metric. Measure it in two populations, one with the gene, the other without. If there is a significant difference, the gene DOES have a VERY REAL influence on this trait. This doesn't mean that a specific individual without the gene can't be ruthless due to a lot of other factors or that someone with it can't have its effect mitigated by other factors. Nevertheless, the gene DOES have an effect across a population, and you, as an individual, are far more likely to be swayed in the direction of the gene's effect by having it than against it (or even not either way).
In a future world where one may be asked to apply gene therapy to himself/a-newborn/an-embryo to reduce unwanted effects, things that CONTRIBUTE to a particular result WILL also be considered, just as they already are considered today (case in point: smoking with an effect on your length/quality of life)
As long as it's something you do to yourself, it'd be morally sound. Case in point: Tatts, piercing, sex-change ops, etc.
When it becomes something you force upon others without their consent, well, that's when morals and ethics fly out the window and Hitler starts being mentioned. It'd be just as bad if some were to PREVENT gene-therapy from others against the other's will as it would to apply it against their will.
Let's say they do identify the gene for being gay, being black, having a vagina, being bi-symmetrical or that gives you herpes. And let's say that we'll get the genetic toolbox to add and/or eliminate genes from our system.
What's wrong with people fiddling around with themselves? How is it fundamentally different from what we already have today?
Who are we to say that the knowledge of what (stemming from research such as this) and how (the genetic toolbox) are immoral for someone to use on themselves?
Any progress towards either the what or the how is good. The more we know, the sooner we can start changing shit in our bodies we don't like and can't already tackle.
Several months ago when hard-drive-speed flash disks were not readily available and I was thinking how to build a no-moving-parts gamebox, I was considering making my fileserver a RAM server as well, export the RAM as disk over the network, then install the rest of the machines at home on iSCSI devices going over this network.
Ironically, problem is not the RAM. You can easily buy 32-64GB for sane amounts of money in 2GB DDR2 sticks. Problem is cheap commodity motherboards you can put so many sticks in.
IDEA: PCI Express 16 board with many many many laptop-class SODIMM DDR2 slots. As many as you can fit. Mount them diognally over each other, both sides of the board. Just get as many of them on as you can. Sure the bus (even a PCI-Express 2.0 or 3.0) will limit the aggregate speed to the PCI Express speed of several gigabytes per sec, but this would facilitate cheap RAM servers (with disk-sync) with multiple other machines on the network using the RAM server as their disk and bottlenecked primarily by the underlying gig ethernet.
CWIS systems can knock down incoming threats at ranges similar to those of a katiusha, capable of controlled flight, and coming in at higher speeds.
Goalkeeper, Phalanx, even Israel's own Typhoon (Karma whores are welcome to add the wikipedia links, they're all there).
Yes, it would cost this and that much money putting a turret every 1km or so along 10km or relevant borders.
That said, consider:
Hitting an actively-burning missile that depends on locomotion and guidance to get to its target (what CWIS is designed and deployed to do) is easier (If you hit along the body you're likely to incapacitate propulsion/steering and possibly blow it up)
Hitting a Katyusha - a spent hollow metal tube (the rocket only burns at the very start) that has no guidance, is not flying towards any particular target (insanely low accuracy) - and is just , does not rely on aerial stability (tumbles in the air like a thrown pen) - unless you plug it right in the (tiny) warhead, it'll be just as happy and do same damage after getting torn in half, getting knocked off course or getting swiss-cheezed to hell and back.
Still, A specialized version of a tried-and-tested existing tech like CWIS sounds more promising than sharks with laser beams.
Slashdot Mirror
wtf?
You are falling down the same hole you're accusing Israel of falling.
A measured response is
"they killed 3 people, let's kill 3 of theirs". A primitive tit-for-tat, instead of a goal-oriented stop-the-bombs-from-falling approach.
You and I disagree on what due diligence is. due diligence towards your citizens means to make the ongoing bombing stop, not nail a proportional number of theirs.
As for stopping the blockade, no, they don't need to stop it.
If canada was ***violently*** harassing the US by bombing civillian cities, I don't see a single reason why the US should continue opening up its borders so canadians can come and work on us soil and otherwise prosper from its facilities, why the US should continue feeding a country that is actively kicking it, openly endorsing violence and ignoring any prior agreements made between the two by former administrations. To me that just *doesn't* *make* *sense*.
You can't tell a country what to democratically elect - that's the palestinians right to choose the leadership that represents them. But, if you're Israel, you don't have to like what they elect either.
The blockade, an extension of the quartet+US embargo that was in place prior to the hamas having gone into power, is a NON-VIOLENT means to achieve purpose. Purpose being to accept Israel's existence, revoke violence as a means of attaining its goals, and (the big deal-breaker here) accept agreements signed by its opposition when it (the fatah) was in power.
The gazans are responsible for where they are. They're responsible for not doing what is required of them to be in a better place.
Israel didn't pack them there, Israel isn't to blame for the fact that Egypt doesn't want to touch these people with a 10-meter-pole and sealed its own border with Gaza, effectively sealing them in. They've been putting zero effort into and showing utter disinterest in rebuilding themselves, behaving badly towards their neighbours and now their neighbours (both, not just Israel) shun them.
You can only do so much for someone who doesn't want to be helped.
Have a look at the (SIGNIFICANTLY IMPROVED) conditions in the other palestinian territories -
they're talking to Israel (rather than exchanging gunfure), Israel is talking to them, and they're all collectively in the process of digging themselves out of the shit and rebuilding the palestinian economy. Case in point: there is nothing that Israel wants more than someone to talk to, and will happily talk to its neighbours.
It *has* made peace with Jordan and Egypt. It will eventually have fully-normalized relationship with the Fatah. It *has* ended its wrongdoing through settling gaza and vacating southern lebanon.
Israel seems like it is doing what it can to fix shit. I don't see this kind of behavior coming from Hammas. Not even an inkling of it.
You can't make peace with someone who doesn't want it. And if he keeps on hurting you, you can (and should) break his arm.
You seem to miss the point.
2500 rockets fall. MUCH MORE than 3 people die.
You commit billions to building SHELTERS in EVERY SINGLE HOUSE, SCHOOL, MALL.
You commit 20% of your entire population's kid's schooldays to not going to school because they're cowering in a bunker.
You commit your entire population's kids to FEAR.
*BUT* you manage to reduce the number of killed to just three.
Kindly remove head from orifice and have a look at the conditions these people and their children live in.
If my government were to let it deteriorate to such a pathetic level, if the only education that my kids were getting was that of cowering in a bunker from bombs falling out of the sky, I'd be VERY ANGRY at my government for addressing the symptoms rather than the cause. AKA, for not going to where these 2500 annual explosives are launched from and seriously messing up whoever is sitting there lobbing them, whoever sent him and whoever footed the bill.
This applies to both sides.
If I were in Israel, I'd feel like my elected government is paying its electorate due diligence, like it's addressing the problem.
If I were in Gaza, I'd be leading a mob of angry people and lynching hamas activists for what they'd done to my palestinian children.
You're right.
And in light of the fact that 2500 explosive munitions have been chucked straight into Israeli cities (which don't even sit on disputed land or have any significant military/strategic value worth bombing) in the past year alone, with a steady 100% annual increase figure, with associated civillians, women, children who get hurt, you, in the boots of the Israeli leadership, would do.... what exactly?
Do you have a better idea?
I understand why war sucks, why collateral damage sucks, why killing kids sucks (I have two and I shudder every time I see or read about a story with a parent that loses a kid irrespective of side). But... the Hamas itself is ensuring that there is no path but war on one hand, and that there is absolutely no other way but to have collateral damage on the other :(
What whould *you* do? Let this turn you into a sponge that can be kicked around?
Indiscriminate bombing? Whatever gave you the idea that Israel is doing indiscriminate bombing? Had it ever wanted to do anything like that, Gaza would have long been a wasteland.
Unlike the people who intentionally drag kids into a battlefield so as said kids can get hurt (and the dragger to profit from this), Israel is actually does effort to minimize collateral damage. The US did like back in Baghdad, even if they messed up once in a while and nailed a bunker being used as a civilian shelter.
Sadly, when fighting people who deliberately turn UN installations, civilian shelters and schools into military targets, when applied to a large-scale operation with many (military) targets, statistics kick in and the humans involved make mistakes. There wasn't ever a war fought where this was not the case. This is tragic, and it is also implicit in the term 'war'. It's why war sucks balls and why we all (minus Hammas, apparently) would rather see conflicts resolved elsewise.
This does NOT imply you (read: US, Israel, whoever) stop being human, not try to avoid mistakes, not take what measures your resources allow to avoid collateral and help/spare innocent civilians and kids. The people who would have you believe Israel isn't doing this today are the people who wave babies in the paths of bullets.
If you're not convinced that the Israeli military is made up of people who'd rather not be (and are ordered not to) killing civilians, working on the assumption that people at the head of the Israeli political and military leadership are not total idiots, I'd venture and say they fully realize that killing six kids in a ten-kid family is a proven recipe for four martyrs and 40 civilian casualties in ten years time.
Nevertheless, when being methodically pressed to a wall by a violence-hungry nutjobs, the solution isn't always to get all warm and fuzzy with them. Sometimes it involves kicking their head in, even at the expense of some human error and some erroneously killed bystanders. That is not, and has never been what most of us refer to as genocide, which your nuking idea seems to imply (keep in mind Israel *can* carpet-bomb gaza, which would be similar to nuking it, minus the radiation - it could have done same in Lebanon two years ago... It preferred jacking thousands of smart/targeted munitions into known strategic targets, and considering these urban areas are the only place where its strategic targets can be found nowadays, I can see how what Israel is doing totally makes sense).
2007. 2006. Bah.
How about at the time the school actually got done in?
Two known militants among the dead who are known to be associated with rocket-firing squads. Named.
The palestinians elected a government that will hurt its neighbours and put their kids in the line of return fire. They got exactly what they asked for. Their own kids, dead.
One of Israels leaders said once that Israel will have peace with its neighbours the day they love their children more than they hate Israel. Egypt and Jordan wisened up. The palestinians haven't yet.
Are you implying that when fighting monsters who shoot artillery out of schools (check that little "two well-known members of a Hamas rocket-launching cell had been among those killed at the school, naming them as Imad and Hassan Abu Askar" bit), /might/ get hurt (while your own civillians *are* getting hurt), then mate, merecons you can bend over and I can show you exactly where one can stick those ethics and morals.
any non-perfect real-world way of stopping a barrage of 2500 (!!!) explosive projectiles shot deliberately this year into ***civilian urban neighbourhoods*** with no strategic intention other than to kill and maim civillians, women, children, babies, a hard fact Israel held off on seriously addressing for nearly two years now is a no-go for ethical/moral reasons because the civilians on the other side
If YOUR town, family, loved ones had explosive ordance fall in your back yards and schools, lobbed over a border by your friendly next-door-neighbour country, 2500 times in one year alone, for your sake I hope your country would go and jam its military boot up the royal hiney of whoever did that. Jammed it so hard in there that your neighbour would think twice. I'm an Aussie and I very much hope my country would do same.
Israel is doing what any sane government paying due diligence to its responsibility towards its people would and SHOULD do.
The Palestinian people DEMOCRATICALLY ELECTED a leadership that will (and has) terrorize their neighbours, then DELIBERATELY put their OWN babies in the line of the return fire. They democratically elected to have their leadership get their own babies slaughtered in the name of a specific ideology.
With any luck, they'll have a long hard think about it next time they vote.
Israel is doing us all a favor by setting the right kind of precedent.
4 years ago, yet again, 50% of the voting public was unable to distinguish a person that can lead the strongest nation in the world from an ape.
Sports at eleven.
Have a read through the mprize and SENS pages, projects geared at tackling not only cancer but ageing in general.
Aubrey De Grey addressed this question a while back - what if people stopped dying from aging altogether? Will population explode? Will we immediately cause a bigger problem than we've solved?
Following his reasoning (plus real-world numbers) the answer is no. Personally, I agree with him.
Even in the most extreme of cases, were everyone to just stop dying of age-related causes altogether (including cancer, heart-disease etc) unless a truck hits them, population would not explode overnight. It would take a long time (read: hundreds of years) to become anywhere as apocalyptic as some would have you believe, far more than enough time for us to adapt and apply solutions to (humans have proven an uncanny ability to adapt social structures to evolving environments over the past centuries, having brains is a dang good thing at times) as well as be in turn mitigated by the very same fact that caused it, much like people going from making 15 kids to having three after realizing that all three (rather than one in five) will survive to adulthood if only they washed their hands.
That's to say our current population growth estimates take the existing rate as a given (200 years ago, 15 kids per family per generation was a given), but this very change is likely to change, and put predictions using these numbers far off the mark.
If people will have extended (reproduction-capable) lifetimes, the rate at which they procreate may quite possibly go down as less pressure exists to adhere to the ticking biological clock (aka "we'll have kids later"), much like many people are already preferring to do so towards their 30's rather when they're 16.
And we'd be replacing a BIG problem (causing a LOT of suffering) with a smaller one that can be tackled by education, regulation and generally more humane means than frality and losing one's mental capacity, life or loved ones.
Cancer is NOT a legitimate over-population solution. Neither are genocide, war, smallpox, AIDS or even old age. Much like amputation is not a solution for a muscle cramp.
The idea of promoting it as such is ludicrous.
They should all be cured.
Overpopulation will be addressed in due time, using far better means that we ALREADY HAVE at our disposal.
Last, I heartily encourage you to read this for some perspective on the matter.
Dude, let go.
Ebay is your friend.
Was his job to cater to his personal interests, or those of his employer?
Because for the life of me I can't see how his method of operation is good for his employer (well, half-truth, really. It's a risk his employer knowingly and willingly chose to wear, and low as the odds for something like this may be, it blew up in their face).
Nevertheless, he put his personal interests above those of his employer, so he's at fault, just as much as they are for allowing him to practice.
Surely you're smart enough to tell the primary part of my point (dislike for ignorant sensationalism affecting useful debate) from the unimportant (the current geographic source of the ignorant sensationalism)?
My point stands regardless of whether it comes from Hollywood, Bollywood or Palywood.
And politics don't come out of hollywood, only bad education for your voters... regardless of how big and powerful you think your celebs are.
May I suggest you move to a first-world country? ;)
My point is that yelling bullshit claims a-la let's not clone because someone'll clone Hitler or let's not do gene therapy because all of humanity will [ever] have the same set of genes is a pile lame bullshit that wastes everyone's time and distracts from the real topic at hand.
How do abortion rights fit in claim? or was that just a cheap "I don't like you" pot-shot?
Thing is, stuff only happens that way in sensationalist hollywood movies your culture spoon-feeds you from birth.
One aspect of a field of science gets blown the fuck out of proportion, applied to an entire global society (all previous traces of the people who were there before is wiped clean), with the assumption that nobody in that global society was smart enough to call for
[a] Rationalization
[b] Considerations of consequences, dangers, pros, cons and a learned debate on whether said overblown scientific discovery/field/whatever should proceed unrestricted, be carefully regulated (never happens in movies, nearly the only way it happens in The Real World(tm)), or, heaven forbit, not happen at all.
[c] People are way too stupid to so much as forsee the problem, less so propose solutions to it.
In reality, people DO think about this. Scientists, thinkers, corporations, governments DO pay smart people to voice opinions about these things. Yes, every so often one first-world country will ignore thought-through process in a specific field, but that'd be one country, in one field. If the enire government goes to hell - then it is no longer a first-world country. Other countries will take its place. By large, it's transient issues. Most issues get handled in a reasonably smart manner, even in the US.
These thinkers also communicate with each other, publish and voice these concerns. The interweb thingie.. you may have heard about it.
Global population is big enough to allow the law of large numbers largely take care of major oversights.
In reality, if a gene is lost, then it will be lost. Big whoop. You've lost quite a few since you formed a close endosymbiotic relationship with mitochondria. By the time it happens, more than likely we'll be able to put it back too.
More to the point, if you're envisioning a world where ALL the humans come from a single genetic selection, where natural procreation does not happen in a single country in the world anymore, where EVERY ONE of the current 6+ billion person offspring comes from one centrally-selected vial and all human biodiversity has automagically been somehow eliminated, you're not contributing to the debate at hand, just to the general vibe of ignorant sensationalist idiocy coming out of Hollywood.
WRONG.
IAAPCABS (I am a professional coder and biology student). I'm trained in both the blinky and the wet.
You don't need to be a mechanic to know how to push the breaks.
The whole idea behind De-Grey's approach is to neither suffer the too-late finger-in-the-dam approach of geriatrics, and (in his own words) sidestep our ignorance of metabolism to avoid the pitfall of gerontology. I'm not saying we're there, but there is way closer than most people think.
What he offers is quite simply an approach of
1. identify accumulating cellular-level damage. He's actually done most of that himself. You'd find pretty much any cause of death you can think of has already been put into this roadmap, considered.
2. categorize accumulating damage into solution-oriented categories. Accumulating junk in cells, junk outside cells, cancer, etc. De Grey's famous seven deadlies.
3. Find ways to routinely remove part of that cellular-level damage as a once-in-a-period-of-time treatment. We can sustain a lot of it, up to a threshold. We absorb it quite happily till we're thirtyish. Obviate enough damage to keep us under that threshole, and voilla. This kind of work is being done sporadically here and there, but if you pull these in into a comprehensive framework, you'll end up extending the life of the machine, much like a vintage car.
4. Repeat.
There is no magic bullet. Shortening the life of any mechanism - be it a car or our body - is easy. all you have to do is break ONE critical part.
Extending lifespan, on the other hand, is a bitch. You have to extend the life of ALL critical parts. And they wear out and fail in a multitude of different and creative ways. Death from aging is basically when just one critical bit gives way. To combat it, not only death but degeneration, dementia, frality, disease susceptability etc need be considered. You'll have to undo the damage time does. Fix the bits your body can't. Everything must be considered. But - and herein lies the crux - metabolism itself need not be altered. Doing that safely is still a very distant dream. We're nowhere near achieving that. We may, eventually, but that's wild speculation.
Treating thus identified issues, all of them, methodically, through medical approaches we've already come to accept, is about as much science fiction as building the Chinese wall. A massive undertaking, to be sure, but fundamentally nothing but a big pile of dirty work. If someone'll do it, it'll get done. End of story. We can see a huge stretch of the way from where we are, unobstructed by the need for breakthroughs. Perhaps the entire stretch to the home run, perhaps at some point we'll need them. What's certain is, the way now is clear, and we have immense inertia.
Now that the whole stem-cell moral debate is behind us and iPS have been shown to be feasible, enter the age of gene modification in-vivo, of controlled re-introduction of healthy stem-cells to traumatized tissue, of biochemical pathways being discovered every other day, of genomes and proteomes being mapped right and left, an immense and ever-growing protein bank and of synthetic biology, radical life extension is ... a natural mundane progression. It will happen.
As De Grey's masterant was once quoted saying, "I expect to be of the last generation to die of old age. Or, with luck, the first one not to"
I'm a sysadmin/coder, Nearly 14 years in the biz.
I have a comfy well-paying job, I love what I do.
Three years ago I've identified the early onset of exactly what you've described. The IT field was losing its zest, the revolution felt like it has ended. The field reached roughly the same progression curve cars have had for nearly 100 years. Computers get faster, more cores, hard drives get bigger, graphics cards push more better-looking frames.
Corporations play lego with grander toys, made to be ever more simple to run.
Anyone can do it. The magic is going, going, sooner or later it will be gone.
Here and there revolutionary stuff pops out. The gents at Google building insane-sized clusters of designation-less commodity-class machines, clusters that can withstand lots of failure and still work, like cells in a living body. Quantum computing is being discussed, but that's niches. By large, it's not just us. The field itself just doesn't hold the charm, the zest, the spirit of revolution it had in our day.
When I identified this, I decided to change direction. I popped my head out, had a look around. The revolution is pushing on. Huge changes are afoot, they just won't be happening in the world of UNIX system administration, of C++, perl, bash or Ruby on Rails.
Biology is nearly at critical mass. Our genetic toolbox is nearly ripe, our ability to sequence genes and proteins is nearing a price point where it will be dirt-cheap. Mountains of data are pouring in. New organisms are being sequenced. HUMANS are being sequenced. Many different humans.
Genetics, the art of recording instructions to build machinery, a fine art of reverse-engineering a bunch of atoms that compose everything from the hard-drive head to the bits of a complex filesystem, is but a cornerstone. Proteomics, the study of the assembled machines themselves, is barely touched. We have yardfuls of machines whose function we do not know yet, and synthetic biology is better at constructing custom ones. Metabolomics, the processes that make them all worth together, is a layer of complexity we're only starting to gawk at.
What most people hear is better medicine, perhaps cheaper medicine, maybe kicking alzheimers, malaria and a dozen cancers in the balls. Perhaps finally finding a way to give a virus a proper kick.
What the true thinkers are saying is too radical to comprehend. Radical life extension and robust adult rejuvenation. Machine/neural I/O. Personalized medicine. Regrowth of limbs. The decade-long ethical embryonic-stem-cell stalemate had its back broken in the last three months. Pluripotent stem-cells can be produced from multiple new sources, problems associated being relatively minor. BIG shit is happening. This is not a decade away. This is *NOW*.
I've started doing a bachelor in bio in part-time, spreading it across as many generalist majors as I can. Biochem and Molecular bio, Cell bio, genetics, some anatomy. I'll follow it up with a Honors & PhD in an IT-related biology field, cutting me a multi-specialized role within a decade, giving me PhD status in IT (without ever doing any undergrad work), somewhat-above-fresh-PhD status in IT-related biology fields, and while I'll likely take a pay-cut to switch over, I'll get back on the revolution horse for a few dacedes more. I'll have the tools neccesary to get involved in what's really changing our world.
Remember, you're not measured by how much money you make. You're measured by how much money you make doing that which you love.
Synthetic biology is being discussed, protein engineering.
Being self-taught as I was, I've put together a long-term plan to re-qualify.
The reason this would fail is the inability to find someone who /cannot/ prove prior art and would thus be susceptible to a patent suit. Every single individual can prove prior art simply through existing.
Bummer.
Were I thus inclined, I'd go for the biggest market out there - patent a "procedure to transfer one's hereditry information onto a partial duplicate of oneself or the recreational practice thereof, through the use of a pshysio-mechanical maneuver with an individual of the opposing sex..."
So?
The DEFAULT in our society is to ALLOW stuff, unless there is a very good case why regulation is required.
Just because something was outlawed (probably with good reason) doesn't mean we should impose a blanket "NO" to people exercising their rights to their bodies in ways that do not clobber society on the head.
Regardless of whether something ends up being regulated or not, *knowing* (aka having this kind of research) is better than *not knowing*.
You do realize that large groups of people do not behave in a binary manner, right? Have you ever seen a normal curve?
People (dumb people, usually) seem to view it as an absolute on/off switch (and yes, the media would have you believe that, it makes for more sensationalism), when in fact any social behavior may and in most cases is influenced by multiple factors.
That also doesn't mean that the things that DO cause these alterations are either meaningless or do not cause any change.
Choose a metric. Measure it in two populations, one with the gene, the other without. If there is a significant difference, the gene DOES have a VERY REAL influence on this trait. This doesn't mean that a specific individual without the gene can't be ruthless due to a lot of other factors or that someone with it can't have its effect mitigated by other factors. Nevertheless, the gene DOES have an effect across a population, and you, as an individual, are far more likely to be swayed in the direction of the gene's effect by having it than against it (or even not either way).
In a future world where one may be asked to apply gene therapy to himself/a-newborn/an-embryo to reduce unwanted effects, things that CONTRIBUTE to a particular result WILL also be considered, just as they already are considered today (case in point: smoking with an effect on your length/quality of life)
You're missing the point here.
As long as it's something you do to yourself, it'd be morally sound. Case in point: Tatts, piercing, sex-change ops, etc.
When it becomes something you force upon others without their consent, well, that's when morals and ethics fly out the window and Hitler starts being mentioned. It'd be just as bad if some were to PREVENT gene-therapy from others against the other's will as it would to apply it against their will.
Let's say they do identify the gene for being gay, being black, having a vagina, being bi-symmetrical or that gives you herpes. And let's say that we'll get the genetic toolbox to add and/or eliminate genes from our system.
What's wrong with people fiddling around with themselves? How is it fundamentally different from what we already have today?
Who are we to say that the knowledge of what (stemming from research such as this) and how (the genetic toolbox) are immoral for someone to use on themselves?
Any progress towards either the what or the how is good. The more we know, the sooner we can start changing shit in our bodies we don't like and can't already tackle.
Several months ago when hard-drive-speed flash disks were not readily available and I was thinking how to build a no-moving-parts gamebox, I was considering making my fileserver a RAM server as well, export the RAM as disk over the network, then install the rest of the machines at home on iSCSI devices going over this network.
Ironically, problem is not the RAM. You can easily buy 32-64GB for sane amounts of money in 2GB DDR2 sticks.
Problem is cheap commodity motherboards you can put so many sticks in.
IDEA:
PCI Express 16 board with many many many laptop-class SODIMM DDR2 slots. As many as you can fit. Mount them diognally over each other, both sides of the board. Just get as many of them on as you can. Sure the bus (even a PCI-Express 2.0 or 3.0) will limit the aggregate speed to the PCI Express speed of several gigabytes per sec, but this would facilitate cheap RAM servers (with disk-sync) with multiple other machines on the network using the RAM server as their disk and bottlenecked primarily by the underlying gig ethernet.
CWIS systems can knock down incoming threats at ranges similar to those of a katiusha, capable of controlled flight, and coming in at higher speeds.
Goalkeeper, Phalanx, even Israel's own Typhoon (Karma whores are welcome to add the wikipedia links, they're all there).
Yes, it would cost this and that much money putting a turret every 1km or so along 10km or relevant borders.
That said, consider:
Hitting an actively-burning missile that depends on locomotion and guidance to get to its target (what CWIS is designed and deployed to do) is easier (If you hit along the body you're likely to incapacitate propulsion/steering and possibly blow it up)
Hitting a Katyusha - a spent hollow metal tube (the rocket only burns at the very start) that has no guidance, is not flying towards any particular target (insanely low accuracy) - and is just , does not rely on aerial stability (tumbles in the air like a thrown pen) - unless you plug it right in the (tiny) warhead, it'll be just as happy and do same damage after getting torn in half, getting knocked off course or getting swiss-cheezed to hell and back.
Still, A specialized version of a tried-and-tested existing tech like CWIS sounds more promising than sharks with laser beams.
Every time I step near a busy road with my BT headphones, I start losing connectivity because the bt band is overloaded.
How will this guy cross the road? on his hands?