Not only is it not radioactive, it also isn't useful in non-thermonuclear fission weapons AFAIK. For a straight A-bomb, you really need enriched Uranium and/or Plutonium, but you have no need for Deuterium. Small quantities of Tritium can also be used in some designs, but I think that's a little beyond where Iran is today. It's only H-bombs that use Deuterium, and they're a lot more advanced than what we're talking about here.
I don't know what source the GP has for the US "having a fit" over Iranian Deuterium, but it sounds fishy to me. Either the US government is being irrational (what possible harm could Iran do with Deuterium?), or the GP doesn't actually have a clue what Deuterium is.
First up, what evidence is there for an increase in tectonic activity? The past few years have got nothing at all on Krakatoa. We've had one standout (the Indian Ocean tsunami), a few minor earthquakes, and that's about it. You don't even have to go back much more than a century to see an era with more earthquakes and eruptions than today.
Second, how do you get from ocean temperature to tectonic activity? Those things are not strongly related to each other. Ocean temperature is mostly a function of solar input.
Thirdly, even the pseudo-scientific "gaia" theory only make provisions for the activity in the biosphere. Basically the theory boils down to the notion that the planetary ecology is self-regulating. That does not have anything to do with tectonic activity, as that is a wholly inorganic process. Moreover, nobody in their right mind would suggest that the planet is self-aware; even the founder of gaia theory presents it as a blind reactionary process, not a sentient one. And even then, the evidence supporting this theory is almost nonexistent.
And then promptly releases it again. Did you miss the part where I mentioned that trees release Co2, the same way we do? Even if you don't burn them, they will respire. And when they die, they will rot.
You are quite correct however, in that storing carbon as biomass reduces the amount in the atmosphere. I don't think I ever said otherwise in my post. A good way of looking at it is to think of a forest as a carbon reservoir; the carbon is stored, but not eliminated, and the storage capacity is finite per unit area (X many square km of land stores Y many tonnes of carbon as biomass).
If you can change the ratio of CO2 in the atmosphere to carbon bound solid organic molecules, the greenhouse effect will get less.
Agreed. My point was more that the level of those same organic molecules is elastic. The carbon is stored, but it isn't "locked" the same way it is in a fossil fuel bed. Hence why I said doing this alleviates the problem, but doesn't completely solve it.
A forest will, given enough time, do that. The end result is called "soil".
Here, I think you are mistaken. I did say "outside of the carbon cycle", and soil is not outside of the carbon cycle, it is still biologically active. Organisms in the soil still respire. Moreover, a forest is not needed if we wish to store carbon in soil; the soil itself is a carbon sink, with or without trees. It isn't relevant to a discussion on planting forests as a way to combat the greenhouse effect.
As long as you can lock up more carbon in solid form than finds its way back into the air in the same amount of time, the CO2 level in the atmosphere will drop.
To a degree, yes. You will note that I never said otherwise - I argued that it was not a be all and end all solution. We will also need more permanent carbon sinks, and energy sources that don't come from fossil fuels, if we are to fix the problem fully.
Doesn't work that way I'm afraid. Trees slow the problem, but they don't solve it.
There is a global process called the "carbon cycle" that I invite you to research on your own. Essentially, all organisms excrete carbon dioxide, which is then reused by plants during photosynthesis, releasing oxygen and storing the carbon. What you may not realize is that plants are not exempt from the first part of the carbon cycle; they still release the carbon they absorb. A closed system that included plants, but no animal life, would still have airborne Co2, which would be absorbed by plants during the day, and released during the night. Planting more trees adds a carbon "sink", since it's that much more carbon locked up as biomass, but they don't magic it away.
As long as the amount of carbon in the system doesn't change, the greenhouse effect will remain where it is (at least over human timeframes). What we've done with fossil fuels is taken hydrocarbons that were outside of the carbon cycle, and burned them (increasing the amount of Co2 in the atmosphere), thereby increasing the existing greenhouse effect.
To solve this permanently, we'd need to create carbon sinks that are outside of the carbon cycle, to replace the fossil fuel carbon sinks we've already burned. This is possible, but not as simple as planting trees; such artificial carbon sinks would have to be inorganic if they're to be permanent. Any carbon locked up in in organisms is going to find it's way back into the air.
I just knew this petulant and ignorant whine would show up [whiny voice] But the promised, they did! They did![/whiny voice] Grow the fuck up - R&D isn't amenable to precise scheduling and prediction, especially when working at the frontiers of science and technology.
Actually, quite apart from what you said, the "fusion has been 30 years off for the past 50" argument is a red herring. There was never any such promise.
Nobody outside of science fiction writers and science reporters in the press said that fusion was going to be easy. It's been clear from the get-go that it's an incredibly hard field to develop. What was said by the people in the field was along the lines of "if we start seriously working on this now, it'll pay off in a matter of decades". Had we actually put the money in at the time, we'd be further along today.
But we didn't. Those "huge budgets" that people claim fusion sucks up? They're a pittance, and in almost all cases, the cost is spread among several nations. Expressed as a fraction of those countries' annual budget, fusion R&D is a minor expense. Moreover, political bickering (the bane of any multi-national project) has gotten in the way more than once, most recently with the question of where to build the ITER project.
Simply put, we're barely trying, and given how monumentally hard it is to build a working fusion reactor, that minimal effort has had predictable results. Saying "X years ago, they said we'd have fusion" assumes that R&D happens magically, without any human element.
Both use the toroidal design. JET is even older than I am, and has already achieved fusion.
What we don't have yet is fusion power plants. But then again, that isn't what Bussard is proposing in TFA either; he (like all other fusion researchers) is still at the R&D stage. So, while I'm all in favor of giving this guy some funding to see what he can do, it isn't as if he's going to magically jump over the hurdles that fusion research has faced these past fifty years. Getting a fusion reaction to occur is damn hard; getting a self sufficient reaction to occur is still beyond our reach.
(Note: This says nothing of whether I think Bussard is a nut. I haven't seen enough compelling evidence for or against. Whether he is or not is irrelevant; what matters is if he can produce a repeatable fusion experiment that actually pans out.)
It isn't a question of it being an energy drain, it's a question of how long the injury affects you. If it's a choice between getting hurt then regenerating over a period of weeks (during which the wound will affect your ability to function), and getting hurt then healing with scarring over a period of days (thus shortening the vulnerable period), then the latter makes more sense for us. The former makes more sense for reptiles, who can go for weeks to months without food, which we obviously cannot. Remember that doing the job right takes time, whereas a quick and dirty fix does not.
Of course, in reality it probably isn't a clear cut either/or scenario, but more likely a spectrum ranging from one extreme to the other (faster healing versus complete healing). In that sense, we do regenerate (our wounds heal, don't they?), we just don't regrow lost limbs, or heal without permanent marks.
Sure, but how many procedures do ya think they'd sell when the customers realize that in order to enlarge it, they have to cut it off first and then let it regrow? I wouldn't touch that sort of surgery with a ten foot pole, even if I got a ten foot pole out of it...
For a fusion reactor, that would be the off button. No containment = no reaction.
This is actually one of the biggest safety advantages of fusion of fission. With a fission reactor, loss of control or containment doesn't stop the fission reactions from occurring, since fission occurs naturally in Uranium, whereas with a fusion reactor, loss of containment or control stops the reaction, as fusion does not occur naturally in Deuterium or Tritium under terrestrial conditions.
The explanation that I am familiar with (and if there are any evolutionary biologists present, feel free to correct me) is that regeneration is too time consuming for a warm blooded animal.
With a reptile or amphibian, the wounded individual can afford to lose the weeks or more of downtime while their wounds or missing limbs regenerate. With a mammal or bird, the constant need for food to fuel a warm blooded metabolism wouldn't give a wounded individual time to heal in the same fashion; instead of regeneration, we scar instead. To use an technological metaphor, mammals slap a patch on the wound for faster recovery, while reptiles take the time to do a thorough repair job.
In any case, in the wild complete loss of limb would almost always be fatal for a mammal (barring infection or blood loss, you might live long enough to starve to death), so faster, incomplete healing via scarring is going to be good enough for most of the injuries we'd have a chance to recover from. We trade the ability to recover fully for the ability to recover quickly.
Today of course we no longer die as easily from our wounds, or from the inability to fend for ourselves after being crippled, so we have a vested interest in reworking this process. If we could induce regeneration in amputees for example, we could put them in a hospital for however long it takes to grow back and regain the use of their limbs - something we never could have done in our evolutionary history.
Think of her children on the playground, "Your mommy is a slut!" or "You're a bastard!"
Would those children face those same insults if people like yourself didn't teach them that their mother was somehow in the wrong? Your beliefs make sex dirty, ergo when your children are the ones flinging insults like "slut", the blame lies with you.
The difference being, microwaves and radio waves are non-ionizing. Whereas UV is ionizing, as are X-rays and gamma rays. You can't equate the former with the latter, not if you want to be taken seriously.
Now, there is no known method by which non-ionizing radiation can cause cancer. Moreover, if there were some unknown means by which radio or microwaves could cause health problems of any kind, then you'd fully expect to see major health problems the world over. These are things to which we expose ourselves daily, and in quantity.
This technology doesn't use some scary new type of Star Trek radiation, the effects of which are unknown. EM radiation is well understood, and if it were harmful in it's non-ionizing forms, we'd be putting ourselves at risk to a greater degree already.
Now, I'd be willing to accept that there could be unknown risks associated with the technology. But understand - if there are such risks, they aren't caused by some gap in our understanding of the basic science involved.
For example, we know from a science and engineering standpoint what makes a faulty battery explode, but knowing how it happens, and making sure it doesn't happen, are two different things. There could indeed be problems with wireless power transmission that will only be apparent in the prototype stage (overheating comes to mind as an obvious one), but such are engineering problems, and they are born from human error or oversight, not scientific ignorance.
True, but you could say the same thing about movies. Or book publishing for that matter (son of an author here, so I know this one second hand). This is called "barrier to entry" and it's a huge, inevitable hurdle to new talent. By no means is the barrier to entry for gaming any harder, or any easier, to surmount than it is in other creative industries.
The flip side of the barrier is that it also screens out some of the crap ideas that shouldn't be made. I'm sure if you asked people, you'd get a large number of individuals who think they have wonderful ideas that would never actually amount to anything if they were realized. It's often hard to tell the good from the bad without seeing the finished product.
OTOH, I'm not sure you'd get those sort of results most of the time. Usually when an inexperienced third party is suggesting design decisions to the pros, the result isn't so successful. The classic example would be letting marketing or management design a product over the objections of the experienced developers (who are then often blamed or fired for the product's failure).
Getting feedback from an semi-objective outsider isn't a bad idea, but letting them direct the process probably is. I would admit that game designers could probably use more of the former.
As for the gender imbalance, I'm of the opinion that no change within the games industry will fix that. "Recruiting" won't help, nor will trying to make games have more mass appeal. The root problem is cultural; games are seen as lowbrow "guy things", and women are discouraged from being interested in such forms of entertainment from a very early age.
As long as those two facts remain true, you will continue to see few female gamers, no matter what changes the game developers make. And simply going for mass appeal won't change their reputation for being lowbrow, since that reputation is imposed from without as much as it is supported from within.
Two things. First, the one example you listed of a widely appealing game (the Sims) was developed by, you guessed it, serious gamers. Will Wright isn't enough of a gaming geek for ya?
Second, expecting people to design games when they don't have a clue what makes a game good is a recipe for disaster. One of the most common ideas espoused by writers, moviemakers and artists is that in order to create something you must also enjoy it. Every good writer is also an avid reader, every good director also watches movies, and every halfway competent game designer is also a gamer. This doesn't just apply to the pretentious artistic fringe either; mainstream authors have said the exact same thing (Stephen King comes to mind).
Maybe more casual gamers getting into game design would be an improvement. Perhaps a gamer whose ideal was a game like the Sims would make a game that would appeal to non-gamers. But non-gamers as game designers? That's a horrible idea.
Source? And, regardless, I did state that consciousness is a spectrum, not a binary state. If an animal comes close to us in terms of what makes us human, then we must carefully consider how to treat that animal. I'm all in favor of protecting species that demonstrate near-human consciousness; such would be the logical outcome of a definition for "human" that centered on thought. Perhaps "person" would be a better word for "conscious, sapient entity".
Besides, "mentally retarded" is not by any possible stretch the same as "lacking the capacity for consciousness". The only point that it would demonstrate, if indeed babies are functionally retarded, is that humans at a very early stage need constant supervision. Which is the kinda point that'd make you say "well, duh". And, apart from that, why would it be a problem that humans at a young age are less sapient/conscious/aware than adult primates?
True, but my counterpoint still stands. Is the US today freer than it was before the DMCA, PATRIOT act, warrentless wiretapping, etc? Do those not constitue "slipping"?
If you choose to compare the US of a decade or so ago with the US today, then yes, it is slipping. Compare it to the US of the McCarthy era and it's progressing. It's all in what point of reference you use to compare it to.
Which is exactly why I said that cherry picking an era to make the current state of affairs look better or worse isn't a useful measure. All you can look at is the current state and the current trend, and reasonably speaking, things are indeed deteriorating. It isn't about what things were like five years ago, or fifty, but what they're like now, and where they're headed. Better to stem the tide now and undo the damage done than wait for it to get worse.
You'll note that I specifically focused on those things that directly affect US citizens, and that I included the DMCA (which predates the current administration). This isn't a partisan issue, nor is it a foreign policy one, though both play a role; this is a more generalized civil liberties issue.
How far back do you want to compare? I'd fully agree that the United States of the 1950's was less free than the US of today, but that isn't the point. To take an arbitrary point in time and say "it was worse then" tells you very little about what progress is being made now. Likewise, to take an oppressive totalitarian regime like the PRC and say "it's worse over there" (an argument I see all too often here) doesn't tell you what it's like at home.
To reverse the situation, is the US as of 2006 a freer place to live than the US of, for instance 1990? Is the US a freer country than other western democracies? These two examples illustrate what's wrong with the argument; you can cherry pick any place or era that was worse, or better, to make the current situation look good or bad by way of comparison. For the record, I don't think that the two comparisons I just listed are valid ones, but they are no less valid than your own.
And your examples are frankly a little dated. Red scares? The cold war is long over, and the worst deprivations of civil rights were done by people like McCarthy 40+ years ago. That's history. Slavery? That's been gone for almost a century and a half. Yes, it was indeed worse before, much worse, but it could stand to be better. And the current erosion of rights goes a little bit farther than "library records".
I have a one month old baby girl. After observing here for some time, I would say that she is not quite capable of thought. Is it OK to experiment on her?
I'd guess, based on what I know of human brain functions, that she is capable of thought. What she isn't capable of is communication, which is the only proven way we have in this day and age to determine thought. A one month old simply hasn't learned that yet. But babies start to learn from a very early age, and I can only assume that the groundwork is laid earlier.
Of course, applying this logically, we'd have to therefor assume that just because an entity can't communicate, it doesn't follow that he/she can't think. If consciousness were the basis for legal personhood, we'd have to devise ways of identifying it in children, certain animal species and people with brain damage. And it would obviously be a spectrum, rather than an either/or question; better to err on the side of caution.
Unfortunately for your argument, any conscious capacity is going to be linked to brain function, and that simply doesn't apply with newly fertilized embryos. To think, one must have at least the beginnings of a brain. From what I remember of biology, that doesn't develop until the much later. The line might be blurry, but it isn't that blurry.
Your toenail clippings can not grow into a human. However, if you wanted to clone your toenail clippings for stem cells, I'm OK with that. That's what the whole "adult stem cell" thing is all about.
Nether can an embryo outside a womb. "Grow into a human being" leaves an awful lot of wiggle room; what about freezer embryos in IVF clinics (our current source for stem cells, incidentally)? What about clone cells that aren't capable of developing into a human? What about sperm and unfertilized eggs?
Plus, you didn't address my other point about using DNA to identify a life form as human. Such tests would tell you that a chimp is very nearly human, with something like 99% of its genes identical. If a living pre-human hominid (such as Homo Erectus) was every produced, it would show an even higher number of common genes. Does this make them human? If so, where is the cutoff? We've been lucky in that none of our first cousins survived to be our modern contemporaries, else we'd have far more problems along these lines. All humans today are Homo Sapiens. We are the only extant species.
Cognitive ability does not make one human. There are many "humans" who are alive that have little or no brain function. However, medical experimentation is not allowed on the invalids in our society, and rightly so.
True, but again, lack of communication does not automatically mean lack of thought. I'd say we're erring on the side of caution here.
Plus, people who are truly brain-dead are usually kept alive only on life support, and sometimes not even for long. We do not view such people as being fully alive, or at least not everyone in society agrees on their status; "pulling the plug" on a conscious human being would be considered murder, while doing the same to someone with no brain function left is often seen as mercy.
There are monkeys with more smarts that some humans. It is not the reasoning mind that makes one human.
I would argue that, if a monkey can be shown to have a human-level consciousness, then the monkey deserves some measure of ethical and legal protection. They are our relatives after all. Again, consciousness is a spectrum, not a switch.
I don't know either. That's why I don't leave it to chance. Jews are considered by some to not be human. They are called apes and pigs by many Muslims throughout the world. The Germans considered them sub-humans as well and had no ethical qualms about doing horrific experiments on them.
In those cases though, the characterization of Jews as "subhuman" i
I've not yet seen anyone argue that the US is currently worse than China. I've seen the occasional moral relativist argue that it isn't possible to judge the Chinese government, but that isn't the same position to take, and in any case few people these days take moral relativism very seriously.
What I have seen argued is that the US is slipping. What gives most Americans the high ground when comparing the US government to the PRC's? The fact that the latter espouses censorship, torture, invasion of privacy, strongarm military policies, and general human rights and due process violations. Americans are protected by the constitution and a multitude of checks and balances. Erosion of those protections is the concern.
If the US loses that high ground, you've got a problem. Do you really want your country to only be no worse than China? It would be one thing if that meant that the Chinese government had decided to treat its citizens better, but it's quite another if the US drops down to their current level of rights.
America isn't there yet, not by a long shot, and the constant cries of "OMG, Orwell" do grow a little tiresome, but the underlying concern is completely valid. It is easier to protect your rights in the here and now than it is to try and fight for them once they're gone.
OK, when does it become human? Two cells? 100? Birth?
I suppose you'll tell me it's when it gets a soul?
I'd say a human is a "person" for our purposes when and if they become capable of thought. DNA is irrelevant; my toenail clippings will show up as "100% human" on a DNA test. Moreover, depending on the test, you might have a hard time telling me a chimp isn't also "human", since the DNA is much the same.
The human form (shape and body) is irrelevant, as a human in some other form would still qualify as a person (for example, somebody seriously deformed or crippled). Plus, I don't think anyone would seriously argue that what defines us as human is the shape of our flesh, which is all that the human form and human genome amount to.
What about life you say? Get back to me when we no longer eat other mammals. There is no "sanctity of life" in any society (with a few notable exceptions); there is only sanctity of human life, which gets you right back to the question of what we define as "human". And no, I am not a vegan or vegetarian, but if I personally believed that life itself was sacred in some way, then it would be hypocritical of me to eat meat.
What does that leave? The mind, and little else. There is no trait that is more distinctly human on earth.
So, when does a human mind develop to the point where we consider the human a legal or ethical person? I have no idea. Since newborns clearly have some degree of consciousness, it must be before birth. Presumably he development of a mind would coincide with the development of the higher centers of the brain.
But it would be utterly, utterly moronic to suggest that a few replicating cells have attained consciousness. A fetus in it's third trimester might or might not qualify; a newly fertilized embryo certainly does not.
Of course, this definition is not espoused by any law I know of, but I can think of no other definition of "human life" that is both logical and consistent with our current practices of agriculture, medical care and the like. And I suppose that this definition would be broad enough that we should apply some protection to other species that display intellect, such as dolphins, whales and primates.
They would either have to invent a way to transmit power wirelessly
Power transmission in space via microwave is an old concept, been around since at least the 80s. You have a beam emitter on your power generating satellite, and a receiver station on the ground. The losses in transmission from orbit to ground are offset by the lack of atmospheric interference at the generating satellite. In space, there are no cloudy days, and no kilometers of air filtering your sunlight. It's like a hydroelectric dam, but without the habitat destruction, and without the need for a local geographic feature to build on.
The main reason we haven't done something like this yet is the launch costs are much too high. Plus, like any theoretical technology, we'd need to build and test prototypes, work out any unforseen bugs that crop up, etc, meaning the upfront cost is astronomical (pun not intended). And it's not like we're spending a whole lot of money on space technologies at the moment - private enterprise just isn't interested, and NASA is limping along with an over-expensive shuttle program, and an underfunded budget.
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Not only is it not radioactive, it also isn't useful in non-thermonuclear fission weapons AFAIK. For a straight A-bomb, you really need enriched Uranium and/or Plutonium, but you have no need for Deuterium. Small quantities of Tritium can also be used in some designs, but I think that's a little beyond where Iran is today. It's only H-bombs that use Deuterium, and they're a lot more advanced than what we're talking about here.
I don't know what source the GP has for the US "having a fit" over Iranian Deuterium, but it sounds fishy to me. Either the US government is being irrational (what possible harm could Iran do with Deuterium?), or the GP doesn't actually have a clue what Deuterium is.
First up, what evidence is there for an increase in tectonic activity? The past few years have got nothing at all on Krakatoa. We've had one standout (the Indian Ocean tsunami), a few minor earthquakes, and that's about it. You don't even have to go back much more than a century to see an era with more earthquakes and eruptions than today.
Second, how do you get from ocean temperature to tectonic activity? Those things are not strongly related to each other. Ocean temperature is mostly a function of solar input.
Thirdly, even the pseudo-scientific "gaia" theory only make provisions for the activity in the biosphere. Basically the theory boils down to the notion that the planetary ecology is self-regulating. That does not have anything to do with tectonic activity, as that is a wholly inorganic process. Moreover, nobody in their right mind would suggest that the planet is self-aware; even the founder of gaia theory presents it as a blind reactionary process, not a sentient one. And even then, the evidence supporting this theory is almost nonexistent.
You are quite correct however, in that storing carbon as biomass reduces the amount in the atmosphere. I don't think I ever said otherwise in my post. A good way of looking at it is to think of a forest as a carbon reservoir; the carbon is stored, but not eliminated, and the storage capacity is finite per unit area (X many square km of land stores Y many tonnes of carbon as biomass).
Agreed. My point was more that the level of those same organic molecules is elastic. The carbon is stored, but it isn't "locked" the same way it is in a fossil fuel bed. Hence why I said doing this alleviates the problem, but doesn't completely solve it.
Here, I think you are mistaken. I did say "outside of the carbon cycle", and soil is not outside of the carbon cycle, it is still biologically active. Organisms in the soil still respire. Moreover, a forest is not needed if we wish to store carbon in soil; the soil itself is a carbon sink, with or without trees. It isn't relevant to a discussion on planting forests as a way to combat the greenhouse effect.
To a degree, yes. You will note that I never said otherwise - I argued that it was not a be all and end all solution. We will also need more permanent carbon sinks, and energy sources that don't come from fossil fuels, if we are to fix the problem fully.
Doesn't work that way I'm afraid. Trees slow the problem, but they don't solve it.
There is a global process called the "carbon cycle" that I invite you to research on your own. Essentially, all organisms excrete carbon dioxide, which is then reused by plants during photosynthesis, releasing oxygen and storing the carbon. What you may not realize is that plants are not exempt from the first part of the carbon cycle; they still release the carbon they absorb. A closed system that included plants, but no animal life, would still have airborne Co2, which would be absorbed by plants during the day, and released during the night. Planting more trees adds a carbon "sink", since it's that much more carbon locked up as biomass, but they don't magic it away.
As long as the amount of carbon in the system doesn't change, the greenhouse effect will remain where it is (at least over human timeframes). What we've done with fossil fuels is taken hydrocarbons that were outside of the carbon cycle, and burned them (increasing the amount of Co2 in the atmosphere), thereby increasing the existing greenhouse effect.
To solve this permanently, we'd need to create carbon sinks that are outside of the carbon cycle, to replace the fossil fuel carbon sinks we've already burned. This is possible, but not as simple as planting trees; such artificial carbon sinks would have to be inorganic if they're to be permanent. Any carbon locked up in in organisms is going to find it's way back into the air.
Nobody outside of science fiction writers and science reporters in the press said that fusion was going to be easy. It's been clear from the get-go that it's an incredibly hard field to develop. What was said by the people in the field was along the lines of "if we start seriously working on this now, it'll pay off in a matter of decades". Had we actually put the money in at the time, we'd be further along today.
But we didn't. Those "huge budgets" that people claim fusion sucks up? They're a pittance, and in almost all cases, the cost is spread among several nations. Expressed as a fraction of those countries' annual budget, fusion R&D is a minor expense. Moreover, political bickering (the bane of any multi-national project) has gotten in the way more than once, most recently with the question of where to build the ITER project.
Simply put, we're barely trying, and given how monumentally hard it is to build a working fusion reactor, that minimal effort has had predictable results. Saying "X years ago, they said we'd have fusion" assumes that R&D happens magically, without any human element.
If by "around my town" you instead meant "in the world", I direct your attention to the JET project:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JET
And it's (not yet build) follow up, ITER:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER
Both use the toroidal design. JET is even older than I am, and has already achieved fusion.
What we don't have yet is fusion power plants. But then again, that isn't what Bussard is proposing in TFA either; he (like all other fusion researchers) is still at the R&D stage. So, while I'm all in favor of giving this guy some funding to see what he can do, it isn't as if he's going to magically jump over the hurdles that fusion research has faced these past fifty years. Getting a fusion reaction to occur is damn hard; getting a self sufficient reaction to occur is still beyond our reach.
(Note: This says nothing of whether I think Bussard is a nut. I haven't seen enough compelling evidence for or against. Whether he is or not is irrelevant; what matters is if he can produce a repeatable fusion experiment that actually pans out.)
It isn't a question of it being an energy drain, it's a question of how long the injury affects you. If it's a choice between getting hurt then regenerating over a period of weeks (during which the wound will affect your ability to function), and getting hurt then healing with scarring over a period of days (thus shortening the vulnerable period), then the latter makes more sense for us. The former makes more sense for reptiles, who can go for weeks to months without food, which we obviously cannot. Remember that doing the job right takes time, whereas a quick and dirty fix does not.
Of course, in reality it probably isn't a clear cut either/or scenario, but more likely a spectrum ranging from one extreme to the other (faster healing versus complete healing). In that sense, we do regenerate (our wounds heal, don't they?), we just don't regrow lost limbs, or heal without permanent marks.
Sure, but how many procedures do ya think they'd sell when the customers realize that in order to enlarge it, they have to cut it off first and then let it regrow? I wouldn't touch that sort of surgery with a ten foot pole, even if I got a ten foot pole out of it...
For a fusion reactor, that would be the off button. No containment = no reaction.
This is actually one of the biggest safety advantages of fusion of fission. With a fission reactor, loss of control or containment doesn't stop the fission reactions from occurring, since fission occurs naturally in Uranium, whereas with a fusion reactor, loss of containment or control stops the reaction, as fusion does not occur naturally in Deuterium or Tritium under terrestrial conditions.
Brings new and interesting meanings to the concept of googlebombing :-)
The explanation that I am familiar with (and if there are any evolutionary biologists present, feel free to correct me) is that regeneration is too time consuming for a warm blooded animal.
With a reptile or amphibian, the wounded individual can afford to lose the weeks or more of downtime while their wounds or missing limbs regenerate. With a mammal or bird, the constant need for food to fuel a warm blooded metabolism wouldn't give a wounded individual time to heal in the same fashion; instead of regeneration, we scar instead. To use an technological metaphor, mammals slap a patch on the wound for faster recovery, while reptiles take the time to do a thorough repair job.
In any case, in the wild complete loss of limb would almost always be fatal for a mammal (barring infection or blood loss, you might live long enough to starve to death), so faster, incomplete healing via scarring is going to be good enough for most of the injuries we'd have a chance to recover from. We trade the ability to recover fully for the ability to recover quickly.
Today of course we no longer die as easily from our wounds, or from the inability to fend for ourselves after being crippled, so we have a vested interest in reworking this process. If we could induce regeneration in amputees for example, we could put them in a hospital for however long it takes to grow back and regain the use of their limbs - something we never could have done in our evolutionary history.
The difference being, microwaves and radio waves are non-ionizing. Whereas UV is ionizing, as are X-rays and gamma rays. You can't equate the former with the latter, not if you want to be taken seriously.
Now, there is no known method by which non-ionizing radiation can cause cancer. Moreover, if there were some unknown means by which radio or microwaves could cause health problems of any kind, then you'd fully expect to see major health problems the world over. These are things to which we expose ourselves daily, and in quantity.
This technology doesn't use some scary new type of Star Trek radiation, the effects of which are unknown. EM radiation is well understood, and if it were harmful in it's non-ionizing forms, we'd be putting ourselves at risk to a greater degree already.
Now, I'd be willing to accept that there could be unknown risks associated with the technology. But understand - if there are such risks, they aren't caused by some gap in our understanding of the basic science involved.
For example, we know from a science and engineering standpoint what makes a faulty battery explode, but knowing how it happens, and making sure it doesn't happen, are two different things. There could indeed be problems with wireless power transmission that will only be apparent in the prototype stage (overheating comes to mind as an obvious one), but such are engineering problems, and they are born from human error or oversight, not scientific ignorance.
True, but you could say the same thing about movies. Or book publishing for that matter (son of an author here, so I know this one second hand). This is called "barrier to entry" and it's a huge, inevitable hurdle to new talent. By no means is the barrier to entry for gaming any harder, or any easier, to surmount than it is in other creative industries.
The flip side of the barrier is that it also screens out some of the crap ideas that shouldn't be made. I'm sure if you asked people, you'd get a large number of individuals who think they have wonderful ideas that would never actually amount to anything if they were realized. It's often hard to tell the good from the bad without seeing the finished product.
Ah, OK, that sounds a bit more reasonable.
OTOH, I'm not sure you'd get those sort of results most of the time. Usually when an inexperienced third party is suggesting design decisions to the pros, the result isn't so successful. The classic example would be letting marketing or management design a product over the objections of the experienced developers (who are then often blamed or fired for the product's failure).
Getting feedback from an semi-objective outsider isn't a bad idea, but letting them direct the process probably is. I would admit that game designers could probably use more of the former.
As for the gender imbalance, I'm of the opinion that no change within the games industry will fix that. "Recruiting" won't help, nor will trying to make games have more mass appeal. The root problem is cultural; games are seen as lowbrow "guy things", and women are discouraged from being interested in such forms of entertainment from a very early age.
As long as those two facts remain true, you will continue to see few female gamers, no matter what changes the game developers make. And simply going for mass appeal won't change their reputation for being lowbrow, since that reputation is imposed from without as much as it is supported from within.
Two things. First, the one example you listed of a widely appealing game (the Sims) was developed by, you guessed it, serious gamers. Will Wright isn't enough of a gaming geek for ya?
Second, expecting people to design games when they don't have a clue what makes a game good is a recipe for disaster. One of the most common ideas espoused by writers, moviemakers and artists is that in order to create something you must also enjoy it. Every good writer is also an avid reader, every good director also watches movies, and every halfway competent game designer is also a gamer. This doesn't just apply to the pretentious artistic fringe either; mainstream authors have said the exact same thing (Stephen King comes to mind).
Maybe more casual gamers getting into game design would be an improvement. Perhaps a gamer whose ideal was a game like the Sims would make a game that would appeal to non-gamers. But non-gamers as game designers? That's a horrible idea.
Nah, it'll go to 16 777 216 replies, at which point their comment database will crap out. The 2^24th comment will be a marriage proposal :-)
What's so funny about the parent? Those are all perfectly cromulant words!
Source? And, regardless, I did state that consciousness is a spectrum, not a binary state. If an animal comes close to us in terms of what makes us human, then we must carefully consider how to treat that animal. I'm all in favor of protecting species that demonstrate near-human consciousness; such would be the logical outcome of a definition for "human" that centered on thought. Perhaps "person" would be a better word for "conscious, sapient entity".
Besides, "mentally retarded" is not by any possible stretch the same as "lacking the capacity for consciousness". The only point that it would demonstrate, if indeed babies are functionally retarded, is that humans at a very early stage need constant supervision. Which is the kinda point that'd make you say "well, duh". And, apart from that, why would it be a problem that humans at a young age are less sapient/conscious/aware than adult primates?
True, but my counterpoint still stands. Is the US today freer than it was before the DMCA, PATRIOT act, warrentless wiretapping, etc? Do those not constitue "slipping"?
If you choose to compare the US of a decade or so ago with the US today, then yes, it is slipping. Compare it to the US of the McCarthy era and it's progressing. It's all in what point of reference you use to compare it to.
Which is exactly why I said that cherry picking an era to make the current state of affairs look better or worse isn't a useful measure. All you can look at is the current state and the current trend, and reasonably speaking, things are indeed deteriorating. It isn't about what things were like five years ago, or fifty, but what they're like now, and where they're headed. Better to stem the tide now and undo the damage done than wait for it to get worse.
You'll note that I specifically focused on those things that directly affect US citizens, and that I included the DMCA (which predates the current administration). This isn't a partisan issue, nor is it a foreign policy one, though both play a role; this is a more generalized civil liberties issue.
How far back do you want to compare? I'd fully agree that the United States of the 1950's was less free than the US of today, but that isn't the point. To take an arbitrary point in time and say "it was worse then" tells you very little about what progress is being made now. Likewise, to take an oppressive totalitarian regime like the PRC and say "it's worse over there" (an argument I see all too often here) doesn't tell you what it's like at home.
To reverse the situation, is the US as of 2006 a freer place to live than the US of, for instance 1990? Is the US a freer country than other western democracies? These two examples illustrate what's wrong with the argument; you can cherry pick any place or era that was worse, or better, to make the current situation look good or bad by way of comparison. For the record, I don't think that the two comparisons I just listed are valid ones, but they are no less valid than your own.
And your examples are frankly a little dated. Red scares? The cold war is long over, and the worst deprivations of civil rights were done by people like McCarthy 40+ years ago. That's history. Slavery? That's been gone for almost a century and a half. Yes, it was indeed worse before, much worse, but it could stand to be better. And the current erosion of rights goes a little bit farther than "library records".
I'd guess, based on what I know of human brain functions, that she is capable of thought. What she isn't capable of is communication, which is the only proven way we have in this day and age to determine thought. A one month old simply hasn't learned that yet. But babies start to learn from a very early age, and I can only assume that the groundwork is laid earlier.
Of course, applying this logically, we'd have to therefor assume that just because an entity can't communicate, it doesn't follow that he/she can't think. If consciousness were the basis for legal personhood, we'd have to devise ways of identifying it in children, certain animal species and people with brain damage. And it would obviously be a spectrum, rather than an either/or question; better to err on the side of caution.
Unfortunately for your argument, any conscious capacity is going to be linked to brain function, and that simply doesn't apply with newly fertilized embryos. To think, one must have at least the beginnings of a brain. From what I remember of biology, that doesn't develop until the much later. The line might be blurry, but it isn't that blurry.
Nether can an embryo outside a womb. "Grow into a human being" leaves an awful lot of wiggle room; what about freezer embryos in IVF clinics (our current source for stem cells, incidentally)? What about clone cells that aren't capable of developing into a human? What about sperm and unfertilized eggs?
Plus, you didn't address my other point about using DNA to identify a life form as human. Such tests would tell you that a chimp is very nearly human, with something like 99% of its genes identical. If a living pre-human hominid (such as Homo Erectus) was every produced, it would show an even higher number of common genes. Does this make them human? If so, where is the cutoff? We've been lucky in that none of our first cousins survived to be our modern contemporaries, else we'd have far more problems along these lines. All humans today are Homo Sapiens. We are the only extant species.
True, but again, lack of communication does not automatically mean lack of thought. I'd say we're erring on the side of caution here.
Plus, people who are truly brain-dead are usually kept alive only on life support, and sometimes not even for long. We do not view such people as being fully alive, or at least not everyone in society agrees on their status; "pulling the plug" on a conscious human being would be considered murder, while doing the same to someone with no brain function left is often seen as mercy.
I would argue that, if a monkey can be shown to have a human-level consciousness, then the monkey deserves some measure of ethical and legal protection. They are our relatives after all. Again, consciousness is a spectrum, not a switch.
In those cases though, the characterization of Jews as "subhuman" i
I've not yet seen anyone argue that the US is currently worse than China. I've seen the occasional moral relativist argue that it isn't possible to judge the Chinese government, but that isn't the same position to take, and in any case few people these days take moral relativism very seriously.
What I have seen argued is that the US is slipping. What gives most Americans the high ground when comparing the US government to the PRC's? The fact that the latter espouses censorship, torture, invasion of privacy, strongarm military policies, and general human rights and due process violations. Americans are protected by the constitution and a multitude of checks and balances. Erosion of those protections is the concern.
If the US loses that high ground, you've got a problem. Do you really want your country to only be no worse than China? It would be one thing if that meant that the Chinese government had decided to treat its citizens better, but it's quite another if the US drops down to their current level of rights.
America isn't there yet, not by a long shot, and the constant cries of "OMG, Orwell" do grow a little tiresome, but the underlying concern is completely valid. It is easier to protect your rights in the here and now than it is to try and fight for them once they're gone.
I'd say a human is a "person" for our purposes when and if they become capable of thought. DNA is irrelevant; my toenail clippings will show up as "100% human" on a DNA test. Moreover, depending on the test, you might have a hard time telling me a chimp isn't also "human", since the DNA is much the same.
The human form (shape and body) is irrelevant, as a human in some other form would still qualify as a person (for example, somebody seriously deformed or crippled). Plus, I don't think anyone would seriously argue that what defines us as human is the shape of our flesh, which is all that the human form and human genome amount to.
What about life you say? Get back to me when we no longer eat other mammals. There is no "sanctity of life" in any society (with a few notable exceptions); there is only sanctity of human life, which gets you right back to the question of what we define as "human". And no, I am not a vegan or vegetarian, but if I personally believed that life itself was sacred in some way, then it would be hypocritical of me to eat meat.
What does that leave? The mind, and little else. There is no trait that is more distinctly human on earth.
So, when does a human mind develop to the point where we consider the human a legal or ethical person? I have no idea. Since newborns clearly have some degree of consciousness, it must be before birth. Presumably he development of a mind would coincide with the development of the higher centers of the brain.
But it would be utterly, utterly moronic to suggest that a few replicating cells have attained consciousness. A fetus in it's third trimester might or might not qualify; a newly fertilized embryo certainly does not.
Of course, this definition is not espoused by any law I know of, but I can think of no other definition of "human life" that is both logical and consistent with our current practices of agriculture, medical care and the like. And I suppose that this definition would be broad enough that we should apply some protection to other species that display intellect, such as dolphins, whales and primates.
The main reason we haven't done something like this yet is the launch costs are much too high. Plus, like any theoretical technology, we'd need to build and test prototypes, work out any unforseen bugs that crop up, etc, meaning the upfront cost is astronomical (pun not intended). And it's not like we're spending a whole lot of money on space technologies at the moment - private enterprise just isn't interested, and NASA is limping along with an over-expensive shuttle program, and an underfunded budget.