After all our advances in technology and thousands of years of hard work towards our dreams, we finally cross the gulfs of space to settle upon our new homes; and end up back where we started, living in caves.
Someone mod this guy up. What kind of bizzaro thinking leads a person to say, "It would be best for my child's medical conditions to remain a deep, dark secret, unknown even to me." Yes. That way, they can get good insurance, with reasonable rates, to fall back on when they pass out in the street with a sudden "mystery" ailment - that is actually a treatable condition they've had since they were a child. Maybe I'm crazy, but I'd want to know if my child had a condition as early as possible, when they were still on my insurance, and then have something proactive done about it. Much better than just hoping for them to make it to adulthood in order to receive medical care.
Umm, what does the Flu, a VIRUS, have to do with antibiotics, which are treatment for BACTERIAL infections?
It has to do with using the said antibiotics to keep pig density at unhealthy levels, so that when a virus breaks out it has a maximum number of animals to infect and an incredibly easy time infecting them. More hosts, more chances for mutation, more opportunities to jump to humans. None of which antibiotics can stop, as you pointed out. Keeping pigs in clean, sanitary conditions has the effect of reducing the spread of both bacteria and viruses, rather than just treating one and hoping the other won't happen.
The idea that being "great" at something is a result of a lot of hard work put into it as early as possible reminds me of something my father used to say about military strategy. As he put it, the basic formula for victory was "Be there firstest with the mostest." If you've already honed your skills when your peers are just starting out, it's easy to see how you might develop an unshakable lead.
My question would be what stops the process of reinvention, by which I mean accumulating the skills later and still making a mark? is it internal or external? Is is peer group, societal pressure, lack of motivation, time allocation, or something else? Or does it happen all the time without us taking much note of it?
It absolutely is, because you had to skim, at most, a paragraph of something useless to you. I had to sift through pages and pages of comments that were useless to everyone.
This argument has nothing to do with religion, I'm sorry if the header convinced you otherwise. So I'm not going to touch your argument about "souls waiting in line", as far as my argument is concerned, the OP is a walking protoplasmic mass with a certain genetic sequence and a set of conditioning. That is what never would have occurred. I have zero interest in the religious side of the argument. My point was that this is not about "improving" any single organism, it's all about amplifying natural selection. The problem is you are arbitrarily skewing your fitness factors. As cruel as nature can be, she lets the majority of the contestants play, and sometimes we have surprising winners. Is there any worth to nearsighted people? You wouldn't know if you aborted them all.
So you just skimmed the title and the summary, inadvertently failing to notice the idle tag, then clicked the link even though the story was clearly related to belly button lint. Moreover, having done so by what I can only assume is the purest accident, you read through the comments, and picked one to respond to? Now we're supposed to believe that idle somehow is wasting your time? Actually it's the mindless groupthink of the idle haters that is wasting my time, because I for one am curious about belly button lint, and rather than see comments relating to that topic, I have to suffer through the same stale rants about how someone saw idle and it hurt their little eyes and wasted their precious, precious time.
As a person born with near-sightedness and a couple of other issues (which we all have), I would not mind having my genes a bit altered.
The salient point of this that you seem to be missing is that you would never have had your genes altered. Based on your genetics, you simply never would have been born.
The human body doesn't come with a vaccine for anything. What the human body did come with was antibodies that were effective against smallpox. All the vaccine did, all any vaccine does, was encourage production of the cells that made these antibodies. So when your body came in contact with smallpox, or whatever else you were vaccinated against, it was already primed for the fight.
What the article seems to be implying is that in this case, there are no naturally occurring antibodies to be produced. If that's the case, you can vaccinate all you want, it's not going to do anything.
Which is to say, will fail in the marketplace just "like Linux". iPhone/Android pale in comparsion to REAL SDK power; they are toys compared to WinMob !! Play in your sandboxes and your web browsers - we who like REAL POWER are out of the first grade a long, long time ago.
This is why examples fail. There is no physical "horizon" like there would be on earth, the only "horizon" is time and the speed of light. To try to repair the ships example, the horizon would be expanding away at cannonball speed, thus when you see the first ship hit by a cannonball, you should logically bee able to see the ship that fired it at the same time, if not earlier. Thus if you see a ship hit by a cannonball, and don't see the ship that fired it, you might assume that the cannonball somehow travelled above cannonball speed. Or not, since this example isn't complete: The ocean is also expanding between you and the ships, and betwen the two other ships. To summerize, the naval analogy isn't really optimal for this problem.
Copyright is supposed to be an incentive to create new works, not a license to print money.
Well, then I guess copyright is working here. "Don't try to sell copies of old games, or we put your ass in jail" sounds like a *great* incentive to create new works.
This line of thinking has happened before. Take a look at the history of the F4 Phantom, particularly that they didn't mount a cannon on the first models. The thinking was that cannons were for dogfighting, and dogfighting was a thing of the past in the era of guided missiles. It didn't take them long to change their minds.
You don't seem to be grasping the math very well. There is no upside to freeing guilty man by himself. That is harm G. There is no upside to keeping an innocent man in jail. That is harm I, plus harm G. But if you had a choice between freeing a guilty man and a innocent man together, or keeping them both in jail, assuming they were convicted of the same crime, freeing them both would be better. The harm would be G, vs. G+I. So unless the prisons are currently full of innocent men and guilty men in equal measure, then I would suggest keeping the doors shut for now.
I'm unsure why you have this idea that the best way for the justice system to work is to convict innocent men. Justice is best served by strong police work, informed juries, and competent legal counsel on both sides. Simply convicting someone every time there's a crime, in whatever way possible, is not justice, and isn't the way to reduce crime.
I'll bite, because we don't need lofty quotes to prove it's worse to convict an innocent man than let a guilty man go free, I can do it with simple algebra.
Let's take the harm suffered by letting a guilty party go free. We can call it G. We will assume this is a positive value, since I think we can agree that letting guilty people go free is harmful to society.
Now, let's take the harm of imprisoning an innocent man, which we will call I. Also positive, since putting an otherwise useful member of society in jail for no reason is something I think we'll agree is harmful.
So let's look at the harm caused by each of our actions. Letting a guilty man free is of course G, as by our previous definition. Now to calculate the value of imprisoning an innocent man, we take our value I, and add G. Why? Well, in convicting the wrong man, we have inherently allowed the guilty party to go unpunished. So we can conclude that that G is less than I + G, i.e. it is better let a guilty man go free than to punish an innocent man.
Didn't think of that, did you?
So while convicting an innocent man might give you the opportunity to go tell that rape victim, "It's ok, we got him" it's a lie, and that lie not only destroys an innocent mans life, it lets the real rapist go free.
Slashdot Mirror
After all our advances in technology and thousands of years of hard work towards our dreams, we finally cross the gulfs of space to settle upon our new homes; and end up back where we started, living in caves.
...Is okay in Canada? They can acquit you then just decide "eh, that's not what we wanted. Let's have another trial"?
Intelligence is a tool to be used toward a goal, and goals are not always chosen intelligently. -Larry Niven
Someone mod this guy up. What kind of bizzaro thinking leads a person to say, "It would be best for my child's medical conditions to remain a deep, dark secret, unknown even to me." Yes. That way, they can get good insurance, with reasonable rates, to fall back on when they pass out in the street with a sudden "mystery" ailment - that is actually a treatable condition they've had since they were a child. Maybe I'm crazy, but I'd want to know if my child had a condition as early as possible, when they were still on my insurance, and then have something proactive done about it. Much better than just hoping for them to make it to adulthood in order to receive medical care.
It has to do with using the said antibiotics to keep pig density at unhealthy levels, so that when a virus breaks out it has a maximum number of animals to infect and an incredibly easy time infecting them. More hosts, more chances for mutation, more opportunities to jump to humans. None of which antibiotics can stop, as you pointed out. Keeping pigs in clean, sanitary conditions has the effect of reducing the spread of both bacteria and viruses, rather than just treating one and hoping the other won't happen.
Maybe he was thinking about "Strength of Stones"
The idea that being "great" at something is a result of a lot of hard work put into it as early as possible reminds me of something my father used to say about military strategy. As he put it, the basic formula for victory was "Be there firstest with the mostest." If you've already honed your skills when your peers are just starting out, it's easy to see how you might develop an unshakable lead.
My question would be what stops the process of reinvention, by which I mean accumulating the skills later and still making a mark? is it internal or external? Is is peer group, societal pressure, lack of motivation, time allocation, or something else? Or does it happen all the time without us taking much note of it?
It absolutely is, because you had to skim, at most, a paragraph of something useless to you. I had to sift through pages and pages of comments that were useless to everyone.
This argument has nothing to do with religion, I'm sorry if the header convinced you otherwise. So I'm not going to touch your argument about "souls waiting in line", as far as my argument is concerned, the OP is a walking protoplasmic mass with a certain genetic sequence and a set of conditioning. That is what never would have occurred. I have zero interest in the religious side of the argument. My point was that this is not about "improving" any single organism, it's all about amplifying natural selection. The problem is you are arbitrarily skewing your fitness factors. As cruel as nature can be, she lets the majority of the contestants play, and sometimes we have surprising winners. Is there any worth to nearsighted people? You wouldn't know if you aborted them all.
So you just skimmed the title and the summary, inadvertently failing to notice the idle tag, then clicked the link even though the story was clearly related to belly button lint. Moreover, having done so by what I can only assume is the purest accident, you read through the comments, and picked one to respond to? Now we're supposed to believe that idle somehow is wasting your time? Actually it's the mindless groupthink of the idle haters that is wasting my time, because I for one am curious about belly button lint, and rather than see comments relating to that topic, I have to suffer through the same stale rants about how someone saw idle and it hurt their little eyes and wasted their precious, precious time.
The salient point of this that you seem to be missing is that you would never have had your genes altered. Based on your genetics, you simply never would have been born.
The human body doesn't come with a vaccine for anything. What the human body did come with was antibodies that were effective against smallpox. All the vaccine did, all any vaccine does, was encourage production of the cells that made these antibodies. So when your body came in contact with smallpox, or whatever else you were vaccinated against, it was already primed for the fight.
What the article seems to be implying is that in this case, there are no naturally occurring antibodies to be produced. If that's the case, you can vaccinate all you want, it's not going to do anything.
What are you smoking and why aren't you sharing?
Aren't you paying attention? He's not sharing because he's a republican.
Is that similar to real ultimate power?
This is why examples fail. There is no physical "horizon" like there would be on earth, the only "horizon" is time and the speed of light. To try to repair the ships example, the horizon would be expanding away at cannonball speed, thus when you see the first ship hit by a cannonball, you should logically bee able to see the ship that fired it at the same time, if not earlier. Thus if you see a ship hit by a cannonball, and don't see the ship that fired it, you might assume that the cannonball somehow travelled above cannonball speed. Or not, since this example isn't complete: The ocean is also expanding between you and the ships, and betwen the two other ships. To summerize, the naval analogy isn't really optimal for this problem.
Well, then I guess copyright is working here. "Don't try to sell copies of old games, or we put your ass in jail" sounds like a *great* incentive to create new works.
Ah, I see your point more clearly now, and it's true.
This line of thinking has happened before. Take a look at the history of the F4 Phantom, particularly that they didn't mount a cannon on the first models. The thinking was that cannons were for dogfighting, and dogfighting was a thing of the past in the era of guided missiles. It didn't take them long to change their minds.
Wow. Someone's going for gold in petty.
Oh I so wish I had a mod point.
So what you're telling me is that the internet is serious business?
On page 166 it very clearly states that they are recommending life disbarment, regardless of whether he pays or not.
I'm unsure why you have this idea that the best way for the justice system to work is to convict innocent men. Justice is best served by strong police work, informed juries, and competent legal counsel on both sides. Simply convicting someone every time there's a crime, in whatever way possible, is not justice, and isn't the way to reduce crime.
That is a very, very good point.
Let's take the harm suffered by letting a guilty party go free. We can call it G. We will assume this is a positive value, since I think we can agree that letting guilty people go free is harmful to society.
Now, let's take the harm of imprisoning an innocent man, which we will call I. Also positive, since putting an otherwise useful member of society in jail for no reason is something I think we'll agree is harmful.
So let's look at the harm caused by each of our actions. Letting a guilty man free is of course G, as by our previous definition. Now to calculate the value of imprisoning an innocent man, we take our value I, and add G. Why? Well, in convicting the wrong man, we have inherently allowed the guilty party to go unpunished. So we can conclude that that G is less than I + G, i.e. it is better let a guilty man go free than to punish an innocent man.
Didn't think of that, did you?
So while convicting an innocent man might give you the opportunity to go tell that rape victim, "It's ok, we got him" it's a lie, and that lie not only destroys an innocent mans life, it lets the real rapist go free.