That's the biggest pile of market-worshipping crap I've heard in a long time. By this token, plantation owners were completely justified in using slave labor because they were completely honest about the fact that they were using slaves.
The decisions made by businesses affect more than just their own bottom line. There's a whole world full of people there, outside the boardroom, and no matter what Mr. Friedman says, you have certain social responsibilities to them as a human being.
Wow! All this concern for the welfare of the poor starving Indians on Slashdot! And yet, when an Indian programmer gets an outsourced tech job, supposedly "stealing" it from a good ol' American programmer who is thereby forced to live a slightly less affluent lifestyle, he's pure evil.
It is simply silly to propose rights to great apes, because they can neither ask for them nor appreciate them on an abstract level.
Likewise, it is silly to propose rights to children with advanced cases of Down's syndrome, for exactly the same reason. Instead, we should use them for medical experimentation.
And chimps don't practice "infanticide." They prefer the term "total birth abortion."
Come one now. It's the wiring that counts, as mouse and human brains are made very largely of the same kinds of tissues.
RTFA. The mouse would be "dissected to see if the architecture of a human brain had formed. If it did, he'd look for traces of human cognitive behavior." In other words, if the experiment is successfull, the "wiring" as you put it would be human.
Well, then I guess I'm confused on something then... If it can be proved that a process is wrong and not reliable, then how can it be trusted at all?! If sometimes you get 2+2=4 and others you get 2+2=4000... how do you know which is right and what you can trust?
Because you have to use the right tool for the right job. The fact that a yardstick can't be used to measure red blood cells doesn't mean that it can't be used to measure cloth. Likewise, carbon dating works perfectly well for relatively young things, but not for much older things.
I'm sorry but if you hand a scientist a piece of current coral and he comes up with 50,000 years? The process does not work! He should come up with "too new to calculate" or "time undeterminable".
Suppose I park a Humvee on a standard bathroom scale. Either the dial will go up to its maximum of 300 lbs. or so, or the scale will be crushed and the dial will remain at zero. The scale will never, however, give an accurate reading, or read "too heavy to calculate." Likewise, if I try to weigh a helium-filled balloon, it won't work at all as long as I'm in an atmosphere that is heavier than helium. For a tool to be useful at all, you must know how to use it, and what factors affect the accuracy of the tool. The mere fact that some factors can cause carbon dating to give wildly inaccurate results does not automatically discredit results obtained when those factors were not present.
so maybe global warming is natural, like some unpopular scientists have been saying all along!
In other news, scientists have discovered that some forest fires in the past were the result of natural causes. Therefore, it is perfectly safe to play with matches and gasoline in the middle of a pine forest during a drought.
Just because something can occur naturally doesn't mean it can't also be due to human activity.
Does this mean Luke Skkywalker is Amish? IIRC, he was using a portable generator to charge R2D2 when visiting Yoda, but I have'nt seen him plugging the android into a wall.
That's because the droid and generator were both 110V, but the wall current was 220V. Remember, Uncle Owen wouldn't let him go to Tosche Station to pick up some power converters.
Rodney Brooks, in Flesh and Machines, briefly discusses various people (I remember Raymond Kurzweil with his "spiritual machines" concept among them) who have predicted that Real Soon Now we'll have technology which can make people virtually immortal. He cited a study of various thinkers through the years who have made this claim, which found that most of them predicted such technological innovations would come about roughly at the time they were entering old age. Brooks concluded that most of these predictions were fueled more by the desire for personal longevity than by a serious attempt to predict the likely progress of science.
The only evolution humans are likely to undergo is a scary one. Stupid people are having more children than smart people, therefore people are going to get stupider. Maybe it's already happened
If you're going to rail against "stupid people," it wouldn't hurt to learn the difference between "affect" and "effect" (hint: they're not synonymous).
In those days, Globalism was called Internationaism. Modern propaganda today may belittle nationalism as being nothing more than flag waving, but the real issue was national economic sovereignty in the face of growing international financial power.
AKA the "global Zionist conspiracy." I do remember the nationalism vs. internationalism fight. I also remember your side losing.
Thats a great idea. Concentration Camp Tycoon, from the makers of rollercoaster tycoon and railroad tycoon.
You're too late. A group of Austrian neo-Nazis already released a controversial game called "KZ Manager". Apparently the original version involved gassing Jews and making money off of selling their teeth, and an updated version substitutes Austria's Turkish minority for the Jews.
Mind telling me how many Ethopians or Native Sudanese have blue eyes?
Not many. Just like bikini tanlines are more common in Miami than in Copenhagen-- but not because of racial differences.
Eye color does not directly correlate with genetics; it is related to levels of melanin. Hence native Indians, usually classified as Caucasian, can be as dark of skin and eye as any African.
By blood sample alone I can tell the race of the person it came from.
Can you? Teach me, O Euthyphro.
Few African origin races have blue eyes for instance.
I can name several: Norwegians, Germans, English, Poles, Danes. The all came out of Africa eventually. They, and all humans, share a common genetic stock. The fact that certain clusters of traits came to be more prevalent in some areas than others does not mean that they have developed into separate and distinct entities called "races." It's never even been generally agreed how many races there are, let alone whether a given individual belongs to one or another.
When people claim to be identifying the "race" of an individual based on certain traits or features, what they are really saying is "if you define a black person as someone with features A, B, and C, and a white person as someone with features X, Y, and Z, this person has more in common with the black person than with the white person." That's a long way from necessary and sufficient conditions. Contrast that with biological sex: the presence of an XY chromosome pair is a necessary and sufficient condition for a person to be considered male, even though in some cases the individual's bodily appearance may not match that categorization due to hormonal disorders or plastic surgery.
Slashdot Mirror
Ben and Jerry's.
Like hell. They stopped making "Coffee Coffee Buzz! Buzz! Buzz!" and they named a flavor after Dave Matthews.
That's the biggest pile of market-worshipping crap I've heard in a long time. By this token, plantation owners were completely justified in using slave labor because they were completely honest about the fact that they were using slaves.
The decisions made by businesses affect more than just their own bottom line. There's a whole world full of people there, outside the boardroom, and no matter what Mr. Friedman says, you have certain social responsibilities to them as a human being.
Wow! All this concern for the welfare of the poor starving Indians on Slashdot! And yet, when an Indian programmer gets an outsourced tech job, supposedly "stealing" it from a good ol' American programmer who is thereby forced to live a slightly less affluent lifestyle, he's pure evil.
No, it was called BC's Quest for Tires, and it was based on the comic strip.
All I needed was a small biopsy from each individual, about 10% of the brain mass. They called my proposal misguided too.
"They laughed at me, those fools! Well who's laughing now? Muahahahahaha!"
Although maybe you should dress in the uniform of a dictator of a banana republic and see if the monkeys at the local zoo find that attractive?
Or, if not them, maybe some leftist gorillas. (Rim shot.)
Last years Psychology Ig Nobel Prize winner won for "Gorilla's In Our Midst"
Wow! You mean it won even though it had a misplaced apostrophe in the title?
You can't fool us with your "A. T. Hun." That wasn't a Hunalyzer, it was an Alexander-the-Greatalyzer!
t's a hoax.
Much like your sig.
Scientists attempted to make a pig-elephant chimera, only to find that pig and elephant DNA just won't splice.
It is simply silly to propose rights to great apes, because they can neither ask for them nor appreciate them on an abstract level.
Likewise, it is silly to propose rights to children with advanced cases of Down's syndrome, for exactly the same reason. Instead, we should use them for medical experimentation.
And chimps don't practice "infanticide." They prefer the term "total birth abortion."
Come one now. It's the wiring that counts, as mouse and human brains are made very largely of the same kinds of tissues.
RTFA. The mouse would be "dissected to see if the architecture of a human brain had formed. If it did, he'd look for traces of human cognitive behavior." In other words, if the experiment is successfull, the "wiring" as you put it would be human.
Well, then I guess I'm confused on something then... If it can be proved that a process is wrong and not reliable, then how can it be trusted at all?! If sometimes you get 2+2=4 and others you get 2+2=4000... how do you know which is right and what you can trust?
Because you have to use the right tool for the right job. The fact that a yardstick can't be used to measure red blood cells doesn't mean that it can't be used to measure cloth. Likewise, carbon dating works perfectly well for relatively young things, but not for much older things.
I'm sorry but if you hand a scientist a piece of current coral and he comes up with 50,000 years? The process does not work! He should come up with "too new to calculate" or "time undeterminable".
Suppose I park a Humvee on a standard bathroom scale. Either the dial will go up to its maximum of 300 lbs. or so, or the scale will be crushed and the dial will remain at zero. The scale will never, however, give an accurate reading, or read "too heavy to calculate." Likewise, if I try to weigh a helium-filled balloon, it won't work at all as long as I'm in an atmosphere that is heavier than helium. For a tool to be useful at all, you must know how to use it, and what factors affect the accuracy of the tool. The mere fact that some factors can cause carbon dating to give wildly inaccurate results does not automatically discredit results obtained when those factors were not present.
so maybe global warming is natural, like some unpopular scientists have been saying all along!
In other news, scientists have discovered that some forest fires in the past were the result of natural causes. Therefore, it is perfectly safe to play with matches and gasoline in the middle of a pine forest during a drought.
Just because something can occur naturally doesn't mean it can't also be due to human activity.
I liked it better in the 70's when all of "pop" science was preaching that we were headed for a mini ice age.
As opposed to 70's pop music, which predicted we would all burn, baby, burn.
Does this mean Luke Skkywalker is Amish? IIRC, he was using a portable generator to charge R2D2 when visiting Yoda, but I have'nt seen him plugging the android into a wall.
That's because the droid and generator were both 110V, but the wall current was 220V. Remember, Uncle Owen wouldn't let him go to Tosche Station to pick up some power converters.
and until those figures are under 50% i wouldn't go calling anyone dead.
Unless their name is BSD, of course.
Rodney Brooks, in Flesh and Machines, briefly discusses various people (I remember Raymond Kurzweil with his "spiritual machines" concept among them) who have predicted that Real Soon Now we'll have technology which can make people virtually immortal. He cited a study of various thinkers through the years who have made this claim, which found that most of them predicted such technological innovations would come about roughly at the time they were entering old age. Brooks concluded that most of these predictions were fueled more by the desire for personal longevity than by a serious attempt to predict the likely progress of science.
No Jew left behind either!
Dude, if I ever run for Knessit, that's gonna be my slogan.
First of all, no species has ever been shown to evolve into another species. No scientific experiment has ever proved this.
Incorrect.
The only evolution humans are likely to undergo is a scary one. Stupid people are having more children than smart people, therefore people are going to get stupider. Maybe it's already happened
If you're going to rail against "stupid people," it wouldn't hurt to learn the difference between "affect" and "effect" (hint: they're not synonymous).
In those days, Globalism was called Internationaism. Modern propaganda today may belittle nationalism as being nothing more than flag waving, but the real issue was national economic sovereignty in the face of growing international financial power.
AKA the "global Zionist conspiracy." I do remember the nationalism vs. internationalism fight. I also remember your side losing.
Thats a great idea. Concentration Camp Tycoon, from the makers of rollercoaster tycoon and railroad tycoon.
You're too late. A group of Austrian neo-Nazis already released a controversial game called "KZ Manager". Apparently the original version involved gassing Jews and making money off of selling their teeth, and an updated version substitutes Austria's Turkish minority for the Jews.
Mind telling me how many Ethopians or Native Sudanese have blue eyes?
Not many. Just like bikini tanlines are more common in Miami than in Copenhagen-- but not because of racial differences. Eye color does not directly correlate with genetics; it is related to levels of melanin. Hence native Indians, usually classified as Caucasian, can be as dark of skin and eye as any African.
By blood sample alone I can tell the race of the person it came from.
Can you? Teach me, O Euthyphro.
Few African origin races have blue eyes for instance.
I can name several: Norwegians, Germans, English, Poles, Danes. The all came out of Africa eventually. They, and all humans, share a common genetic stock. The fact that certain clusters of traits came to be more prevalent in some areas than others does not mean that they have developed into separate and distinct entities called "races." It's never even been generally agreed how many races there are, let alone whether a given individual belongs to one or another.
When people claim to be identifying the "race" of an individual based on certain traits or features, what they are really saying is "if you define a black person as someone with features A, B, and C, and a white person as someone with features X, Y, and Z, this person has more in common with the black person than with the white person." That's a long way from necessary and sufficient conditions. Contrast that with biological sex: the presence of an XY chromosome pair is a necessary and sufficient condition for a person to be considered male, even though in some cases the individual's bodily appearance may not match that categorization due to hormonal disorders or plastic surgery.