I'm sorry, but there are two lives we are talking about, not one.
Pro-life or Pro-choice is whether you agree with this premise or not. Nobody who supports abortion thinks that it's killing a "human". As for when a fetus* becomes "human", there's no consensus since there's no scientific distinction. If you think that you can determine that with absolute certainty, I'm sure the medical and religious communities would love to finally end the debate.
* Fetus != baby. We have different words because they are different things. Meaningful communication relies on shared meanings of words. Changing definitions to suit your argument isn't convincing, it's confusing.
But why is there no other way? I could easily imagine a self-employed person making tremendous profits by having a highly successful product with low incremental costs (e.g. a computer program). There are also the wonders of compounding interest on excellent investments (in general, not just on the stock market).
I try to keep a scientific mindset. "All wealthy people are corrupt" isn't a falsifiable theory unless we make 'corrupt' something that can be tested. If we do, then Buffett and Gate's philanthropy would be a strong contradictory data point. One can rationalize how they're still corrupt, but at that point you've lost falsifiability. I kinda wish that "all wealthy people are corrupt" was a strawman, but apparently people are fine with absolutes on this topic.
As for my childhood, you are rather far off. I grew up in the poorest place in America that I know of (rural Appalachia). There I saw many people with no desire to do more than draw a $200/month check. It was during my education that I met wealthy people and developed my opinion that wealth is usually the product of hard work and luck. No kool-aid involved, I don't know of a single person who shares my major beliefs.
By that logic, the wealthiest 1% are always unethical, regardless of their actions. While getting into that 1% can be done on sheer skill or sheer luck, getting to the top.1% requires high levels of both. I suppose you could call it a game, but the consequences of losing are quite dire, and, short of inheriting money, there's no risk-free way of gaining wealth.
Now, you argue that no man's work can earn $53 billion. Money is a proxy for the value we place on goods and services. Society as a whole values a billionaire's work at billions of dollars. You disagree. I'm inclined to go with what everybody else thinks since that's how an economy works. Plus, look at software companies like Microsoft and Google. They generate a lot more profit per worker than a manufacturing plant. It's not that their employees work harder, it's just the value placed on their unique skills by society. As is how it should be, unless you wish for the government to tell people what they can and cannot do, rather than let the market handle what's needed and what isn't.
Society hates the rich. Seriously, it's pretty rare for a non-asshole to admit to being wealthy. So the public perception is biased. Combine that with people's misperception of required effort and you have a large number of people that think the only way to become rich is to lie, cheat, and steal. I won't say nobody got to the top using that method, but I do disagree that it's the only way. I suppose you could closely examine every wealthy person and find a few moral lapses, as you would in almost anyone, but you'll find that those lapses aren't the reason that many of them are wealthy.
OTOH, I disagree with you so I am wrong. Clearly I'm irrational and can't see the truth of the world.
35 mph isn't that bad. If you land on your head or stomach you're (probably) dead, but landing on your feet is survivable. Some could probably even walk away from that. Most would be in a wheelchair for a while (maybe forever) but it wouldn't be that much worse than a car accident.
This isn't an insurmountable problem. I'm sure the first cars that could go faster than a horse were criticized in the same way. Throw in a small parachute to ensure you don't land on your head, and lessen your speed by 25% and it's basically the same as jumping out of a barn loft.
It's rather amusing to me that in 2010 virtual worlds are economically more powerful than about 50 real countries. Population-wise, they beat about 100 real countries. While largely an irrelevant apples-to-oranges comparison, it does portend interesting changes in politics as decentralized global NGO-esk groups become larger and more powerful. Of course, while the current lot has a militia that's globally unprecedented in training and equipment, I think they're content enough within the virtual world to be basically harmless to the real one.
But transposons aren't viruses. Viruses are thought to have evolved from transposons (or vice versa, though last I heard that theory was less favored), but there's a pretty fundamental difference between them. A virus is genetically autonomous, parasitic, and infectious. A transposon is a part of your genome, and thus you can't think of it like a parasite; "selfish" implies that it has a "self" that isn't the same as the whole organism. Take maize for example. Having multicolored kernels is a trait, not a disease or infection.
But the GP's point about not changing your whole genome is still valid, even for tranposons. It's not like all of your transposons work together to simultaneously jump to the same location in every cell in your body. Since it's confined to a single cell then it's largely irrelevant for the organism. In gametes they can be passed on to your offspring, so that's important evolutionarily. Also, they are mutagens and thus one of the many factors that contribute to cancer and aging.
Now, transposons are very important for the species. Both transposons and viruses can carry (adjacent) genes with them. For transposons this creates many duplicates of a gene, which creates "junk DNA". The duplicates provide redundancy so a mutation in a single copy won't knock-out that gene product, thus it can mutate freely without harming the organism, which is a major benefit to having transposons, and the reason our cells carry so many. But none of this matters if it doesn't affect a gamete that gives rise to an offspring.
It's basically like a virus that not only infects and disables your antivirus scanner, but the very installation media that it came on as well. Hence why it's a particularly nasty infection that's hard to get rid of.
IMHO, that's rather backwards. Doing whatever I want with something I payed for ought to be legal. Receiving money for something then remotely disabling it ought to be illegal.
This is common sense. This is societal expectation. Why is this not the law? (Thought question, no need for politics.)
My medical school does a lot of this. Several of our classes are taught almost entirely by practicing doctors or researchers that come in for a handful of lectures. All-in-all, it's a mixed bag. A good clinician is often a mediocre teacher or worse depending on their teaching experience, and the lack of a unified teaching approach has its downsides. OTOH, there are the obvious advantages to this as well.
Who cares? Guess what? Everyone has done strange things in their life.
Strange things, yes, but I would venture a guess that the vast majority of people don't torture animals. For neglect type abuse I could see how that could just be an apathetic individual. For sadistic type abuse there has to be something fundamentally different about that person. Most people just find the whole concept inconceivable.
BTW, I mean real torture. Killing for a purpose is logical, and humans are inherently violent, so even a "normal" individual might occasionally kill for amusement. Heck, chimps and dolphins do as well. Slowly eviscerating a living mammal while it struggles helplessly is an example of what isn't within the range of normal.
Basically, for that you need an Intel 4500 MHD (much more powerful than prior GMAs) or something from ATI or nVidia and a decent CPU. Plenty of laptops have these, but anything smaller than 11.1" uses different types of hardware, and there have to be sacrifices. Gamers usually prefer large desktop replacement laptops, which are on the opposite end of the spectrum from netbooks.
That said, consider getting a portable gaming console with real gaming controls and games optimized for it. PC games are designed to maximize the hardware of much larger devices. Obviously smaller devices are going to lag behind by several years.
Startup time is the most visible, and essential for when you want to quickly check a single website (e.g. googling something really quick). Javascript speed is the limiting factor for web apps, flash speed for gaming.
Page load time is important, but dwarfed by network latency and speed in non-pathological cases, so I'd actually guess it's among the least important for end-users. Also, while there was a 20% difference between fastest and slowest, that's only about 1/26th of a second so it's approaching the limits of human perception. That said, ignoring 40 ms here, 50 ms there will lead to users finding a program laggy but not being able to specifically point out what's slow.
The only time the police have an easy job is in a police state.
So, in other words, unless you want to live in a police state you should aid the police. Obviously police are a necessary element of society that has to work. If the populace doesn't cooperate then their job becomes impossible, and thus a police state is necessary.
We live in the society we make. Altruism, such as helping someone being victimized, is rarely beneficial for the person who choses to help. Talking to the police is a big risk, but it has a good chance of helping their investigation. 80% of the US population will never be arrested, but most will be the victim of a crime at some point. If you want to be selfish and gain the benefit of having police without helping them then that's your choice. Being selfish works, but it's hardly honorable.
Science is where you disprove the old theory (defaults to "nothing happens"), within a 95% probability. Then you propose a new idea that fits with the data. You can't prove a hypothesis, so I personally wouldn't bother reading an article by someone who thinks they did.
Acetaminophen is not added to pure morphine, hence the qualifier "pure". Morphine Sulfate can be injected intramuscularly, subdermally, intravenously, and comes in immediate release, normal, extended release capsules, and even a suppository. Plenty of choices, and that's just one opioid out of the family. Heck, switching between, say, Tylenol 3 and MS-Contin is fairly trivial with an equianalgesic table.
The US does not add acetaminophen to all (most?) opioids. The combination of acetaminophen and opioids is beneficial, hence their popularity.
“As with the misuse of antibiotics, if bacteria are exposed continually to small amounts of the disinfectants and antiseptics which are supposed to kill them, they will eventually develop tolerance to them,” says Karen Smith from the University of Strathclyde who carried out the study.
Resistance != Immunity
While bacteria are remarkably adaptive, they can't break the laws of physics. That's why you'll never see bacteria that are immune to various chemicals, UV light, or Gamma radiation, since DNA itself is vulnerable to such things. They can gain a little resistance, but only if you let them live and it's pretty easy to overcome. If you double the intensity the bacteria are forced to make four times as much of an otherwise useless protein, which is especially difficult since they can't get much nutrition out of a good disinfectant. There are also limits, such as cockroaches being unable to gain immunity to stomping since their exoskeletons just can't physically become that strong (analogy for bacterial cell walls VS noxious stimuli).
Antibiotics are a different story, since the bacteria may become more resistant to the drug than the human patient, and you can't cut off their food supply without killing the patient. But when the bacteria is out in the environment you don't need to hold back. Evolution can't occur when the local population goes extinct, although that's obviously difficult to do with bacteria. The linked article deals with what happens when "good enough" isn't, since hospitals obviously have practical limits to how thoroughly they clean.
IMHO not enough emphasis is placed on killing bacteria before they infect patients. It might be expensive to irradiate a room with gamma radiation or whatever, but at least nobody loses life or limb. But this will become a moot point before long, since a) bacteria are gaining antibiotic resistance faster than new antibiotics are being developed (so uber bugs become a death sentence), and b) hospitals are about to no longer get paid for treating nosocomial infections (raising the value of preventing them).
Acetaminophen overdose will harm your liver, although it's reversible at low overdoses (oxymoron), and has a treatment window of many hours even at high doses. Opioid overdose will stop your breathing. So... which would you rather overdose on?
There is no maximum dose for opioids, and it's simple to prescribe pure morphine. Doctors outside of hospice/oncology are extremely hesitant to prescribe doses that would be almost certainly lethal for opioid-naive patients though. Hence why drug companies add other pain killers at the highest possible doses so as to maximize pain relief.
Also, oxycotin's manufacturer recently lost a lawsuit and was held liable for poor outcomes associated with abusing the drug. That opened the door for individual doctors to be sued as well. Obviously now there's huge financial incentive for drug companies and doctors ensure that addicts go to the ER with liver failure and live, rather than simply die and be found later, hence acetaminophen being added to opioids. Plus oxycotin is now ridiculously expensive and other companies aren't about to make a generic.
Where is this science under attack that you speak of? I only see accusations of politics being disguised as science. Obviously there is great incentive for this because science, unlike politics, is shielded from criticism by non-experts. "Science" that is difficult to falsify with RCTs is particularly vulnerable to this type of manipulation.
The IPCC report isn't science, it's politics. They don't exactly try to hide that fact, "IP" stands for "International Panel", it's founded by the UN, and does no original research. You don't need to be a scientist to verify the origin of citations, and the people have a right to criticize politics.
There are two pretty big assumptions that are being made. First, one has to have a constant and reliable internet connection, so what of those who use wireless access points, or who play games on airplanes or in vehicles? Second, the crux of this scheme is assuming that online servers can't be emulated, which I think the prevalence of MMORPG private servers has disproven.
Of course, being the cynical optimist that I am, I hope that they go ahead with this plan, fail miserably, and create enough backlash to deal a heavy blow to DRM.
I would imagine that cellphones won't replace watches for the same reason that the wristwatch was developed in the first place. Pulling a pocket watch out is annoying, and I can't imagine a cell phone is much better (especially since you have to do something to activate the backlight).
Watches are also a more mature technology. Many are waterproof, and most are more durable than a cellphone. Battery life is a couple orders of magnitude better, and they're next to impossible to lose. Furthermore, a watch says a lot more about you than a cell phone. Some people opt for aesthetics, going for classy, for modern, or for something that appeals to their interests (e.g. binary time). Others get something indestructible. Some like nostalgic mechanical watches, some go for high-tech ones (solar powered with atomic time synchronization). Finally, a watch can have far greater utility than a cellphone since there's so much diversity. You can get a watch with an altimeter, a compass, a depth gauge, a thermometer, a mosquito repellent, a heart rate monitor, a laser, a TV remote, a TV tuner, a walkie-talkie, or even a star chart.
If they're more advance then it's their ethics that will dictate what happens.
If they're essentially equal (e.g. better than us in physics, worse in chemistry) then economics will dominate.
If they're less advance then we'll observe and debate until we figure out the best course of action.
In any case, the threat of biological contamination would necessitate nearly absolute isolation. A single invasive species (e.g. a microorganism) from either world would have the potential to devastate the other. So we wouldn't be landing and shaking hands, or crossbreeding or anything. (BTW, crossbreeding? We can't do that between species within a genus, let alone between organisms more distantly related than prokaryotes and eukaryotes.) The economics and logistics of space travel would dictate how much interaction would be practical and I see little reason as to why we wouldn't maximize that.
Good story telling involves either overt fantasy or being plausible. Modern movies do neither in most cases. Story writers seem to have a very poor understanding of reality, and subsequently their work suffers. Technology is usually used as a plot device, something novel to surprise the audience. Generally it's novel because it doesn't happen in reality, which, in turn, is simply because it's impossible.
Some of the best examples of technology in non-technology oriented stories use it in the background. The seemingly mundane realities of the fictional world. The most recent examples that I've seen include Avatar's back story, and a character in A Certain Scientific Railgun using Irfanview to do bulk processing of image data from CCTV cameras.
It's been alleged that the company marketing this stuff simply used the lax rules governing homeopathic preparations in the US as a way of circumventing regulatory approval, which sounds like a rather worrying loophole.
In the past, the FDA tried to subject herbal medicine to the same standards of Safety and Efficacy as real medicine. The People were outraged, so the FDA backed down. Studies have shown that a large number of Americans use alternative medicine and they are just as satisfied with the services they receive as they are with doctors.
IMHO a lot of this is culture. In the past, there were some treatments that worked. These have been adopted by the medical system, regulated, and now most of what's left is the useless but harmless treatments. Beneficial herbs became pharmaceuticals, spinal manipulations that work are incorporated into osteopathic medicine and physical therapy, and even leeches and bloodletting are valid medical procedures.
With the amount of money that would need to be spent, people will die if the money is spent. So the question is what will minimize the loss of life, whether it be slow people living on coastal areas, or poor people who suddenly can't afford the things they need because the economy is messed up.
Extinction of the species isn't realistic. Humans can live in any climate and can eat about anything.
For my own specialty, the licensing organization that everyone is required to use requires fingerprints and SSNs. They also exert copyright over one's memory, which I find rather disturbing (apparently reading is a form of copying the data from the paper to your mind). Fingerprints are used in case you ever want to leave the testing area, tested upon check-in for everyone (???), then upon exiting, and upon return. SSNs are collected for no discernible reason since they assign their own ID numbers (still mandatory though).
Throw in the credit card number I had to use to pay their fee ($550; oh how I wish for them to have competition) and they have enough information to really be worrisome. Thankfully my information is secure so long as nobody guesses the zip code for my hometown... That and they don't lose the data (encrypted only in transit), nor ever decide to change their rather vague privacy policy about their indefinite data retention...
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I'm sorry, but there are two lives we are talking about, not one.
Pro-life or Pro-choice is whether you agree with this premise or not. Nobody who supports abortion thinks that it's killing a "human". As for when a fetus* becomes "human", there's no consensus since there's no scientific distinction. If you think that you can determine that with absolute certainty, I'm sure the medical and religious communities would love to finally end the debate.
* Fetus != baby. We have different words because they are different things. Meaningful communication relies on shared meanings of words. Changing definitions to suit your argument isn't convincing, it's confusing.
But why is there no other way? I could easily imagine a self-employed person making tremendous profits by having a highly successful product with low incremental costs (e.g. a computer program). There are also the wonders of compounding interest on excellent investments (in general, not just on the stock market).
I try to keep a scientific mindset. "All wealthy people are corrupt" isn't a falsifiable theory unless we make 'corrupt' something that can be tested. If we do, then Buffett and Gate's philanthropy would be a strong contradictory data point. One can rationalize how they're still corrupt, but at that point you've lost falsifiability. I kinda wish that "all wealthy people are corrupt" was a strawman, but apparently people are fine with absolutes on this topic.
As for my childhood, you are rather far off. I grew up in the poorest place in America that I know of (rural Appalachia). There I saw many people with no desire to do more than draw a $200/month check. It was during my education that I met wealthy people and developed my opinion that wealth is usually the product of hard work and luck. No kool-aid involved, I don't know of a single person who shares my major beliefs.
By that logic, the wealthiest 1% are always unethical, regardless of their actions. While getting into that 1% can be done on sheer skill or sheer luck, getting to the top .1% requires high levels of both. I suppose you could call it a game, but the consequences of losing are quite dire, and, short of inheriting money, there's no risk-free way of gaining wealth.
Now, you argue that no man's work can earn $53 billion. Money is a proxy for the value we place on goods and services. Society as a whole values a billionaire's work at billions of dollars. You disagree. I'm inclined to go with what everybody else thinks since that's how an economy works. Plus, look at software companies like Microsoft and Google. They generate a lot more profit per worker than a manufacturing plant. It's not that their employees work harder, it's just the value placed on their unique skills by society. As is how it should be, unless you wish for the government to tell people what they can and cannot do, rather than let the market handle what's needed and what isn't.
Society hates the rich. Seriously, it's pretty rare for a non-asshole to admit to being wealthy. So the public perception is biased. Combine that with people's misperception of required effort and you have a large number of people that think the only way to become rich is to lie, cheat, and steal. I won't say nobody got to the top using that method, but I do disagree that it's the only way. I suppose you could closely examine every wealthy person and find a few moral lapses, as you would in almost anyone, but you'll find that those lapses aren't the reason that many of them are wealthy.
OTOH, I disagree with you so I am wrong. Clearly I'm irrational and can't see the truth of the world.
35 mph isn't that bad. If you land on your head or stomach you're (probably) dead, but landing on your feet is survivable. Some could probably even walk away from that. Most would be in a wheelchair for a while (maybe forever) but it wouldn't be that much worse than a car accident.
This isn't an insurmountable problem. I'm sure the first cars that could go faster than a horse were criticized in the same way. Throw in a small parachute to ensure you don't land on your head, and lessen your speed by 25% and it's basically the same as jumping out of a barn loft.
It's rather amusing to me that in 2010 virtual worlds are economically more powerful than about 50 real countries. Population-wise, they beat about 100 real countries. While largely an irrelevant apples-to-oranges comparison, it does portend interesting changes in politics as decentralized global NGO-esk groups become larger and more powerful. Of course, while the current lot has a militia that's globally unprecedented in training and equipment, I think they're content enough within the virtual world to be basically harmless to the real one.
But transposons aren't viruses. Viruses are thought to have evolved from transposons (or vice versa, though last I heard that theory was less favored), but there's a pretty fundamental difference between them. A virus is genetically autonomous, parasitic, and infectious. A transposon is a part of your genome, and thus you can't think of it like a parasite; "selfish" implies that it has a "self" that isn't the same as the whole organism. Take maize for example. Having multicolored kernels is a trait, not a disease or infection.
But the GP's point about not changing your whole genome is still valid, even for tranposons. It's not like all of your transposons work together to simultaneously jump to the same location in every cell in your body. Since it's confined to a single cell then it's largely irrelevant for the organism. In gametes they can be passed on to your offspring, so that's important evolutionarily. Also, they are mutagens and thus one of the many factors that contribute to cancer and aging.
Now, transposons are very important for the species. Both transposons and viruses can carry (adjacent) genes with them. For transposons this creates many duplicates of a gene, which creates "junk DNA". The duplicates provide redundancy so a mutation in a single copy won't knock-out that gene product, thus it can mutate freely without harming the organism, which is a major benefit to having transposons, and the reason our cells carry so many. But none of this matters if it doesn't affect a gamete that gives rise to an offspring.
It's basically like a virus that not only infects and disables your antivirus scanner, but the very installation media that it came on as well. Hence why it's a particularly nasty infection that's hard to get rid of.
IMHO, that's rather backwards. Doing whatever I want with something I payed for ought to be legal. Receiving money for something then remotely disabling it ought to be illegal.
This is common sense. This is societal expectation. Why is this not the law?
(Thought question, no need for politics.)
My medical school does a lot of this. Several of our classes are taught almost entirely by practicing doctors or researchers that come in for a handful of lectures. All-in-all, it's a mixed bag. A good clinician is often a mediocre teacher or worse depending on their teaching experience, and the lack of a unified teaching approach has its downsides. OTOH, there are the obvious advantages to this as well.
Who cares? Guess what? Everyone has done strange things in their life.
Strange things, yes, but I would venture a guess that the vast majority of people don't torture animals. For neglect type abuse I could see how that could just be an apathetic individual. For sadistic type abuse there has to be something fundamentally different about that person. Most people just find the whole concept inconceivable.
BTW, I mean real torture. Killing for a purpose is logical, and humans are inherently violent, so even a "normal" individual might occasionally kill for amusement. Heck, chimps and dolphins do as well. Slowly eviscerating a living mammal while it struggles helplessly is an example of what isn't within the range of normal.
Basically, for that you need an Intel 4500 MHD (much more powerful than prior GMAs) or something from ATI or nVidia and a decent CPU. Plenty of laptops have these, but anything smaller than 11.1" uses different types of hardware, and there have to be sacrifices. Gamers usually prefer large desktop replacement laptops, which are on the opposite end of the spectrum from netbooks.
That said, consider getting a portable gaming console with real gaming controls and games optimized for it. PC games are designed to maximize the hardware of much larger devices. Obviously smaller devices are going to lag behind by several years.
Startup time is the most visible, and essential for when you want to quickly check a single website (e.g. googling something really quick). Javascript speed is the limiting factor for web apps, flash speed for gaming.
Page load time is important, but dwarfed by network latency and speed in non-pathological cases, so I'd actually guess it's among the least important for end-users. Also, while there was a 20% difference between fastest and slowest, that's only about 1/26th of a second so it's approaching the limits of human perception. That said, ignoring 40 ms here, 50 ms there will lead to users finding a program laggy but not being able to specifically point out what's slow.
The only time the police have an easy job is in a police state.
So, in other words, unless you want to live in a police state you should aid the police. Obviously police are a necessary element of society that has to work. If the populace doesn't cooperate then their job becomes impossible, and thus a police state is necessary.
We live in the society we make. Altruism, such as helping someone being victimized, is rarely beneficial for the person who choses to help. Talking to the police is a big risk, but it has a good chance of helping their investigation. 80% of the US population will never be arrested, but most will be the victim of a crime at some point. If you want to be selfish and gain the benefit of having police without helping them then that's your choice. Being selfish works, but it's hardly honorable.
Science is where you disprove the old theory (defaults to "nothing happens"), within a 95% probability. Then you propose a new idea that fits with the data. You can't prove a hypothesis, so I personally wouldn't bother reading an article by someone who thinks they did.
Acetaminophen is not added to pure morphine, hence the qualifier "pure". Morphine Sulfate can be injected intramuscularly, subdermally, intravenously, and comes in immediate release, normal, extended release capsules, and even a suppository. Plenty of choices, and that's just one opioid out of the family. Heck, switching between, say, Tylenol 3 and MS-Contin is fairly trivial with an equianalgesic table.
The US does not add acetaminophen to all (most?) opioids. The combination of acetaminophen and opioids is beneficial, hence their popularity.
“As with the misuse of antibiotics, if bacteria are exposed continually to small amounts of the disinfectants and antiseptics which are supposed to kill them, they will eventually develop tolerance to them,” says Karen Smith from the University of Strathclyde who carried out the study.
Resistance != Immunity
While bacteria are remarkably adaptive, they can't break the laws of physics. That's why you'll never see bacteria that are immune to various chemicals, UV light, or Gamma radiation, since DNA itself is vulnerable to such things. They can gain a little resistance, but only if you let them live and it's pretty easy to overcome. If you double the intensity the bacteria are forced to make four times as much of an otherwise useless protein, which is especially difficult since they can't get much nutrition out of a good disinfectant. There are also limits, such as cockroaches being unable to gain immunity to stomping since their exoskeletons just can't physically become that strong (analogy for bacterial cell walls VS noxious stimuli).
Antibiotics are a different story, since the bacteria may become more resistant to the drug than the human patient, and you can't cut off their food supply without killing the patient. But when the bacteria is out in the environment you don't need to hold back. Evolution can't occur when the local population goes extinct, although that's obviously difficult to do with bacteria. The linked article deals with what happens when "good enough" isn't, since hospitals obviously have practical limits to how thoroughly they clean.
IMHO not enough emphasis is placed on killing bacteria before they infect patients. It might be expensive to irradiate a room with gamma radiation or whatever, but at least nobody loses life or limb. But this will become a moot point before long, since a) bacteria are gaining antibiotic resistance faster than new antibiotics are being developed (so uber bugs become a death sentence), and b) hospitals are about to no longer get paid for treating nosocomial infections (raising the value of preventing them).
Acetaminophen overdose will harm your liver, although it's reversible at low overdoses (oxymoron), and has a treatment window of many hours even at high doses. Opioid overdose will stop your breathing. So... which would you rather overdose on?
There is no maximum dose for opioids, and it's simple to prescribe pure morphine. Doctors outside of hospice/oncology are extremely hesitant to prescribe doses that would be almost certainly lethal for opioid-naive patients though. Hence why drug companies add other pain killers at the highest possible doses so as to maximize pain relief.
Also, oxycotin's manufacturer recently lost a lawsuit and was held liable for poor outcomes associated with abusing the drug. That opened the door for individual doctors to be sued as well. Obviously now there's huge financial incentive for drug companies and doctors ensure that addicts go to the ER with liver failure and live, rather than simply die and be found later, hence acetaminophen being added to opioids. Plus oxycotin is now ridiculously expensive and other companies aren't about to make a generic.
Where is this science under attack that you speak of? I only see accusations of politics being disguised as science. Obviously there is great incentive for this because science, unlike politics, is shielded from criticism by non-experts. "Science" that is difficult to falsify with RCTs is particularly vulnerable to this type of manipulation.
The IPCC report isn't science, it's politics. They don't exactly try to hide that fact, "IP" stands for "International Panel", it's founded by the UN, and does no original research. You don't need to be a scientist to verify the origin of citations, and the people have a right to criticize politics.
There are two pretty big assumptions that are being made. First, one has to have a constant and reliable internet connection, so what of those who use wireless access points, or who play games on airplanes or in vehicles? Second, the crux of this scheme is assuming that online servers can't be emulated, which I think the prevalence of MMORPG private servers has disproven.
Of course, being the cynical optimist that I am, I hope that they go ahead with this plan, fail miserably, and create enough backlash to deal a heavy blow to DRM.
I would imagine that cellphones won't replace watches for the same reason that the wristwatch was developed in the first place. Pulling a pocket watch out is annoying, and I can't imagine a cell phone is much better (especially since you have to do something to activate the backlight).
Watches are also a more mature technology. Many are waterproof, and most are more durable than a cellphone. Battery life is a couple orders of magnitude better, and they're next to impossible to lose. Furthermore, a watch says a lot more about you than a cell phone. Some people opt for aesthetics, going for classy, for modern, or for something that appeals to their interests (e.g. binary time). Others get something indestructible. Some like nostalgic mechanical watches, some go for high-tech ones (solar powered with atomic time synchronization). Finally, a watch can have far greater utility than a cellphone since there's so much diversity. You can get a watch with an altimeter, a compass, a depth gauge, a thermometer, a mosquito repellent, a heart rate monitor, a laser, a TV remote, a TV tuner, a walkie-talkie, or even a star chart.
It all seems rather obvious:
If they're more advance then it's their ethics that will dictate what happens.
If they're essentially equal (e.g. better than us in physics, worse in chemistry) then economics will dominate.
If they're less advance then we'll observe and debate until we figure out the best course of action.
In any case, the threat of biological contamination would necessitate nearly absolute isolation. A single invasive species (e.g. a microorganism) from either world would have the potential to devastate the other. So we wouldn't be landing and shaking hands, or crossbreeding or anything. (BTW, crossbreeding? We can't do that between species within a genus, let alone between organisms more distantly related than prokaryotes and eukaryotes.) The economics and logistics of space travel would dictate how much interaction would be practical and I see little reason as to why we wouldn't maximize that.
Good story telling involves either overt fantasy or being plausible. Modern movies do neither in most cases. Story writers seem to have a very poor understanding of reality, and subsequently their work suffers. Technology is usually used as a plot device, something novel to surprise the audience. Generally it's novel because it doesn't happen in reality, which, in turn, is simply because it's impossible.
Some of the best examples of technology in non-technology oriented stories use it in the background. The seemingly mundane realities of the fictional world. The most recent examples that I've seen include Avatar's back story, and a character in A Certain Scientific Railgun using Irfanview to do bulk processing of image data from CCTV cameras.
It's been alleged that the company marketing this stuff simply used the lax rules governing homeopathic preparations in the US as a way of circumventing regulatory approval, which sounds like a rather worrying loophole.
In the past, the FDA tried to subject herbal medicine to the same standards of Safety and Efficacy as real medicine. The People were outraged, so the FDA backed down. Studies have shown that a large number of Americans use alternative medicine and they are just as satisfied with the services they receive as they are with doctors.
IMHO a lot of this is culture. In the past, there were some treatments that worked. These have been adopted by the medical system, regulated, and now most of what's left is the useless but harmless treatments. Beneficial herbs became pharmaceuticals, spinal manipulations that work are incorporated into osteopathic medicine and physical therapy, and even leeches and bloodletting are valid medical procedures.
With the amount of money that would need to be spent, people will die if the money is spent. So the question is what will minimize the loss of life, whether it be slow people living on coastal areas, or poor people who suddenly can't afford the things they need because the economy is messed up.
Extinction of the species isn't realistic. Humans can live in any climate and can eat about anything.
For my own specialty, the licensing organization that everyone is required to use requires fingerprints and SSNs. They also exert copyright over one's memory, which I find rather disturbing (apparently reading is a form of copying the data from the paper to your mind). Fingerprints are used in case you ever want to leave the testing area, tested upon check-in for everyone (???), then upon exiting, and upon return. SSNs are collected for no discernible reason since they assign their own ID numbers (still mandatory though).
Throw in the credit card number I had to use to pay their fee ($550; oh how I wish for them to have competition) and they have enough information to really be worrisome. Thankfully my information is secure so long as nobody guesses the zip code for my hometown... That and they don't lose the data (encrypted only in transit), nor ever decide to change their rather vague privacy policy about their indefinite data retention...