When you have children, you will understand why it makes sense to keep things of a sexual nature out of the mainstream.
When you have children, you will understand why it makes sense to keep things of a religious nature out of the mainstream.
What's the difference?
However it is very hard to make a distinction of what is tasteful. Thus it is simply easier to keep things of sexual nature in an easy accessible, but separate location. Like the magazine racks at your local liquor store.
This is impossible to do on the Internet, because of its very nature. Unfettered access to the Internet is for mature adults. If you don't like what's on the unfiltered Internet, don't let your kid access it. Just like you wouldn't let your kid walk the streets in the city alone at night.
If you have a problem with the content on the Internet, create and define your own acceptable subset thereof, and only allow yourself and your kids to access that subset.
I wholeheartedly advocate the creation of a.kids domain or the equivalent. There's room for even more differentiation; you could have a.teens domain where teenagers can congregate safely. Or make a.christian.teens and a.buddhist.teens domain and have people who care police and regulate these subdomains. It's your problem to create, police, and limit your kids' access to these areas, not mine.
However, I don't like it when I inadvertently come across that material when I'm at work, or while one of the kids are sitting next to me. And I certainly don't like the idea of my, increasingly web proficient, 8 year old seeing it when she's on the web (always supervised btw).
So do I. I find religious propaganda highly offensive. I think it's dangerous for my kids to get exposed to such literature. The other day there were Watchtower publications left at the laudromat, right there at eye level for any impressionable kid to read and possibly swallow. Every day on broadcast television this lunatic named Pat Robertson and his cronies spout fundamentalism, religious extremism, and hatred. How am I supposed to protect my kids from that? I think the TV channels and magazines from cults and religious wackos are harmful and should be banned or at least constrained to behind-the-counter status.
Or I could teach my kids how to deal with such things they run into in the sick society we have today.
... Another example of keeping the freedom of choice for the consumer while also respecting the wishes of those who prefer not to be exposed. I have no problem with scantily clad people, or even nudes... I wouldn't be upset if my 8 year old girl were to see a tasteful photo of a naked man, however if that man was receiving head from a bimbo in crotchless panties and high heels I might be a bit angry to be put in that situation.
I don't want my kids to see TV shows that glorify violence and hatred and torture, but these things are broadcast daily on national TV. The 700 Club. 24. These things come in over the airwaves, whereas you are advocating the censorship of a medium (the Internet) which you have to specifically subscribe to and allow access to. Do you see the difference between consensual sexual activity which is harmful to neither party, and the garbage on 24 involving chopping off people's fingers and injecting painful chemicals, shooting people left and right, and proselytizing religious intolerance on the 700 Club? It's OK and mostly harmless to give or receive oral sex, it's NOT OK to torture and kill people or tell them they're condemned to eternal punishment for some improper conduct.
But regardless of what I think of all of that, it's my job, not society's job, to educate and pass on values to my own kids. It's impossible to shield kids from undesirable stimuli nowadays, so why not instead just accept the fact that they're going to see stuff you don't like, and you'll need to teach them why you think they shouldn't like it either?
That is the really sad thing about tongue piercings and mouth piercings that nobody tells you about before you get them.
Unless they're properly sized, your teeth will get worn and chipped. I chipped a molar a week after I had my tongue pierced.
Regarding the technique in the article, I think a better solution for many people is to figure out how to stimulate the growth of completely new teeth in adults, yank 'em all, and have all new ones grow in place. Especially if you can decide to omit extra molars the second time around for people with smaller mouths.
Excellent points. Of course, this places the burden for the cost and tedium of administrating such a kid-friendly program squarely and solely on the potential "benefactors".
Nevertheless, they're testing out the possibilities: see Conservapedia
A week ago they didn't even have an article for Sex. Now it just redirects to "Gender".
Exactly my point, the current 'system' prevents me from excercising my desire to not see such content and undermines my wishes. Organizing content into easily located and/or avoided locations is only sensible. That's why the DNS system is setup the way that it is, to help categorize information.
On a similar vein, I would love to see a bunch of new TLD's started and popular. If the information were organized properly into the correct TLD, and everyone knew that blogs were in.blog for example, they could determine what was on a site before they clicked a link. You could search for blogs about certain subjects by restricting the scope of your search. etc.
I'm sorry but you have no idea what you're talking about. DNS is not set up to categorize information, it categorizes site names on a vague, broad basis according to guidelines that were eroded significantly in the 90s during the explosive commercial growth of the WWW. Those guidelines are all but meaningless now.
Slashdot.org is not an.org. It really should have been a.com. What is digg? Is digg a blog? Is slashdot a blog? Is fark a blog? Are they all just entertainment sites? How about 4chan? How about everything2 ? What if the global wikipedia community decides it's appropriate to put up some representative photos of "pornography" on the page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornography ? Maybe we could even rotate them on a daily basis? "Featured Pornography Example Picture of the Day". Or does that not count as.porn because it's educational?
Go take a look at your local magazine rack in the supermarket. Instead of banning Sports Car Weekly, Guns and Ammo, and Stupid Celebrity Rehab Roundup (which I would advocate if I were as fucked up as you seem to be), instead you simply realize that you don't have to buy them, and you can teach your own kids why they're supposed to believe all those publications are chock-full of worthless, inane drivel (as perhaps I would). Or better yet, teach your kids how to make up their own minds. God forbid they grow up less stifled and prudish than you.
You don't want to accidentally see a scantily-clothed adult on a billboard advertising the local gym, eh? Well how do you think I feel--I think virtually all commercial billboards are garish, offensive monstrosities. Doesn't mean I get to ban them.
videos/images of nude people engaging in sexual activities intended as a source of entertainment for adults is pornographic.
I'm not sure if you're a troll or if you seriously believe the utter bullshit you've ejaculated into this discussion.
Do you actually believe that there is something morally wrong with the type of content you mention in the quote above? Do you actually think that sex is "dirty" (whatever that means)? Come on, we ALL do it. Even bacteria conjugate.
You are claiming that there is something wrong with visual, auditory, textual, even ARTISTIC representation of a basic human need. Sex ranks up there with other important stuff like food, water and shelter.
Ever since I went to college there were guys that had a thing for strip clubs/titty bars/whatever you want to call them. I thought they were kind of silly and have never been inside one to this day. Problem solved for me, without banning them for others. Who am I to judge? Who are you? If you can't handle what's on the Internet, go watch basketball or something, and leave the interesting content to the adults (and probably quite a few precocious teenagers too).
Holy fucking shit, there is something seriously wrong with you anti-sex people.
Oh-no. I said "fucking" and "ejaculate" in this post. I contaminated your whole thread with filth. Better relegate this post to http://slashdot.xxx/ so the good people can't read my dirty words.
I dunno -- I still would like my onocologist to understand on a fundamental level how RNA transcriptase works and the biophysical interactions that take place during radiation therapy. I want my psychiatrist to understand why inhibiting serotonin reuptake is sometimes desirable. In fact, I want them to have a deeper level of knowledge and understanding of all these concepts than my own.
Same thing for programmers. The best professionals in any field will have a very deep understanding of their knowledge domain. A programmer doesn't have to go down to the level of electrons on bare wires (the electrical engineers can do that) but at least should have a feel for what they're doing down at the level of registers and operating system.
As I have stated before here in other postings, I believe that simulation is the unrecognized and discounted factor that accounts for the Fermi Paradox, the fudge factor in the Drake equation that explains why we don't have aliens walking among us today. We are getting quite good at simulating reality ourselves, and there is no reason why extraterrestrial intelligences wouldn't do the exact same thing.
At some point soon, the synthesis of our scientific knowledge will allow us to assume, with considerable certainty, that aliens with similar biology and physics exist, probably in other solar systems in this galaxy and almost certainly in other galaxies.
They have of course reached the same conclusions and that is why they aren't trying to contact us.
We don't have to go exploring to find them. It's cheaper to just imagine them and simulate them. The real problem is what do we do if we decide to believe this?
Maybe our efforts at keeping people alive, no matter what the quality of life are misguided. 94 years is a good run.
You know, I have been thinking about this for six years now, and I really haven't come to a conclusion. Maybe I'm too young.
Define "quality of life". Define "health". My grandmother enjoys quite good health, her only complaint is occasional constipation and the inevitable aches and pains of being 94 which she cannot even express anymore. She has arthritis, she had an ingrown toenail. But she doesn't complain about being in pain very often. Sometimes she says her head hurts and I'm not sure if she means she has a headache, or that she cannot think or express her thoughts.
As far as quality of life is concerned, she's beyond the point of being able to express her opinion. She doesn't say "I wish I was dead". But I don't think she'd be capable of saying that, even if that is what she felt. She's in a kind of limbo.
As we continue to develop cures for fatal diseases and make chronic illnesses more manageable, our society will be forced to confront the troubling issues raised in this thread, including euthanasia and assisted suicide.
I would not ever consider euthanasia (murder) and I would be reluctant to assist someone with suicide. But if she had told me ten years ago, "If I ever get Alzheimer's, shoot me!", well, what the fuck are you supposed to do in that case? People say things like that to their relatives all the time.
Who am I to deny helping her achieve the enjoyment of seeing the sun rise yet again tomorrow morning, even if that's one of the few things that makes her smile that day? She is happy when she wakes up in the morning, she is often happy when she curls up in bed at night, she sometimes smiles during the day in response to various stimuli.
Maybe her life now is better than most of the rest of us can claim.
Well, whatever you do, don't get Alzheimer's disease. It sucks.
My grandmother just turned 94 and has advanced Alzheimer's
disease. She can barely walk anymore. I devote a few hours of my life
every single day to caregiving. If you've never known someone like
this, you really have no idea what's involved. Yeah, we could put her
in a home. We could watch her die sooner that way, wearing diapers
and ceaselessly, hopelessly calling out for someone to please take her
home. As it is now, she wears diapers, but at least we always change
them. In nursing homes, they don't.
Have you ever had someone you know and love, who helped raise you and
even changed *your* diapers and then helped teach you how to count and how
to read and how to do puzzles and math and typing and how to play
games, who taught you the names of the plants that grow out in the
back yard? And now she can smile and say "Hello", and tell you to get
the hell out because she don't know who you are a moment later?
That's Alzheimer's. You can be helping to manage her most intimate
financial affairs completely honestly, you can be doing her laundry
and getting her medicine and bringing her groceries and cooking her
meals and washing her dishes and vacuuming her floors and helping her
get to the doctor and even wiping her ass, when she cannot do it
herself anymore, and yet she'll still tell you she loves you one
night, and the next morning she wants you to go away, go to hell, or
just please, please take her home. Because she doesn't know what home
means anymore. She's already at home, and she doesn't know who you are anymore.
She knows what she knew in 1920 or 1930 sometimes, funny stories she
can still tell sometimes, but she mixes up everyone's names; she
doesn't know who is who anymore. She used to speak three languages,
English, German, and French. But now she often speaks gibberish, a
weird combination of whatever words she still can recall. She can't
always understand simple sentences. She's like a kid who cannot
learn.
Alzheimer's sucks; nursing homes suck. Go visit one someday if you
doubt me. My grandmother's genes and her circumstances allowed her to
outlive two of her children. She never got cancer, but that's what
killed her elder son at 50. She had a heart attack thirty years ago,
but she didn't die of heart disease. That's what killed her elder
daughter at 60. Yet my grandmother lives on, as her mind slowly disintegrates.
She still likes to watch children playing, or to meet a drooling
baby, maybe a child of someone who helps care for her, brought over to
visit. She still likes to pet her cats and smile and watch them roll
on the floor with catnip at her feet, she still can interface with her
two grandchildren, she still has a sense of humor that we all can
understand and sometimes laugh about together.
She doesn't know what year it is or what day it is, and sometimes she
can't remember how to properly hold a spoon (or she'll try drinking
from it like a straw). But she especially likes bananas and squash
and sweet potatoes and chocolate chip cookies. I know this because
I'm there sometimes to remind her to take another bite. She says
"This is good, thank you!"
And sometimes when you help lift her into bed at night, she'll tell
you she loves you. I guess that helps make it all worthwhile.
Anyway, this is what will happen to you if you don't die of anything
else or get hit by a bus before your brain starts to degrade. I suppose it hasn't been
all bad, I have learned a lot caring for my grandmother. But she is
no longer able to offer her opinion.
I've been semi-interested in Computer Science/Mathematics lately, and from everything I've seen and read so far, I've ascertained that we don't know much. Between dark fiber, optimal algorithms, P=NP, O(n log n) (and other equations like that), cryptography, etc. it seems like we just conveniently make up "stuff" to fit some model or equation. Do discoveries like this mean anything at this time considering there's no way to prove any of it?
[No offense intended--just pointing out that a lack of sophisticated understanding in a field of study does not imply the field is in any way bogus or the knowledge is "shaky". The reason it's called "dark matter" or "dark energy" is precisely because we aren't sure exactly what it is yet.]
We're promoting our official beverages and foods to be enjoyed at our alternative Quadrennial Cold-Climate-Oriented Amateur Athletic Competition Festival (QCCOAACF).
[my apologies if QCCOAACF actually means something in some Inuit language]
On the other hand, I have a Yahoo! email account of the form xx2000xxx@yahoo.com and I have never received a single spam in that account whatsoever. It was registered in 2000 and used for communicating with a certain well-known online auction site.
Never received a single spam in my inbox or in my junk email folder. So I have concluded that 1) nobody's doing dictionary spamming that complex, and also 2) ebay hasn't shared their customer email list with spammers (yet).
So if you really want to be sure, register as bestbuy2007@example.com and you probably can be sure when they start spamming you that somehow, that address got onto the spammers' lists.
I believe you're referring to panspermia, which could have been accidental or deliberate. In the former case, life happens to make it from one habitable environment into another across interplanetary/interstellar distances. A situation analogous to accidental panspermia occurs on earth all the time, when a coconut floats from one island to another, or an insect is blown up in a storm and lands on another continent. For interplanetary cases to be feasible, life needs to be able to make it from, say Earth to Europa or vice-versa, which I think is entirely plausible. If there is other life in this solar system how closely related to life on Earth it is will answer some questions and clarify many new ones.
In the latter case, deliberate panspermia may be the signature of intelligence far greater than our own. Life on Earth could simply be the evidence and the result from von Neumann probes from another civilization (possibly long gone) or even another galaxy (which to me is not completely implausible).
I don't believe in this theory, but I am open to everything. Always keep an open mind.
You shouldn't "believe in" any theories; simply weigh them according to how likely they seem based on current knowledge and valid criticism, and choose the best one at this time to guide further research and actions. Indeed, an open mind is required.
The first few digits of pi, or the Euler constant, or a fibonacci series, that would be kinda cool
How about instructions coding for beings which will evolve the ability to perceive and describe such mathematical concepts? The constants themselves would degrade, but the instructions for these capabilities would confer real evolutionary advantages and would be passed on for generations, and improved over time.
It's interesting that when you apply computer science to biology at their most fundamental levels, you simply confirm the feasibility of solutions long since developed by what we believe to be completely natural evolutionary processes.
The Universe is a giant computer. Or a simulation running inside another one. Either way, it doesn't matter.
Moreover, there is nothing more important when it comes to your future career opportunities than your networking abilities and ability to make friends and contacts who can help you decide where you want to take your life. Your most important contact might be someone from a nearby school who you met at a party once who has nothing to do with your major.
And there will be little nudges and profound unexpected events that affect your life in ways you could never have predicted.
It doesn't matter so much where you go, as what you do there. And even then, random chance will radically change what happens. My life and the lives of many people I've known over the past decade and a half would be both radically different and yet possibly much the same, had that one coin I flipped come up heads instead of tails, and had I gone to a different school.
Your life will incorporate a striking amount of/dev/random despite your best intentions otherwise.
You do realize that you've basically argued that since we have Star Wars and Star Trek, we don't need to look for extra-terrestrial life, don't you?
Not quite. What I'm saying is that if we find another example of carbon-based life on Mars, or on Europa, or if we find the signature of carbon based life on planet orbiting a star 50 LYA, that's good enough for me to assume there's life everywhere. What I would expect is a slightly different assortment of nucleic acids which code for somewhat different proteins with the same functionality. So the aliens might have six fingers, but they will probably be able to extract energy from glucose.
To make a car analogy out of it, we know we have Chevys here on earth and that conditions are favorable for Fords and Hondas. All we need to do is find evidence of an Oldsmobile somewhere nearby.
I believe our understanding of biochemistry will grow to the point that we can reasonably extrapolate the existence of extraterrestrial life on other planets circling other stars from our knowledge of extremophiles here on Earth, and possibly one or two additional examples of microbial life we discover on Mars, Europa, etc.
At some point the perspective in the problem statement must change from "Prove there's life on other planets" to "Prove that there isn't".
Once a civilization has derived the laws of physics and chemistry to
sufficient precision and certainty, there is no longer any pressing
need to pursue direct observation of extraterrestrial intelligence.
You can simply assume that it exists, based on your local knowledge.
We are reaching this same point with our knowledge of biology;
everywhere we look on Earth, we find life. Simply confirming the
existence of microbial life on Mars would make it a bit less urgent to
get all the way to Europa and verify that it's there too. If we did
make it to Europa to confirm that life has evolved there as well, I'd
be reasonably comfortable making the prediction that life exists
pretty much everywhere else in the galaxy.
If there's no reason to doubt life elsewhere in the galaxy, there's
probably intelligent life too. So why worry about going there and
confirming something by direct observation, when there's a 99.999%
probability that it's true? It makes more sense to stick around here
for now and simulate what they're like instead of going there
and seeing it directly.
Once we have learned how to just simulate the biochemistry of Europa
with high enough fidelity, there's no longer any pressing need to go
there, is there? If we make it that far and our simulations and
models indicate the presence of life on extrasolar planets, that's
good enough for me.
In other words, the reason the aliens haven't bothered to travel
here, land, and say "take me to your leader" is because they know what
would happen already. It doesn't matter what we are actually like.
It doesn't matter what they're actually like either, because we can
imagine them now and we will be able to simulate them soon enough.
The reason we don't run into aliens is because we can imagine and simulate them and they can imagine and simulate us and there's no point in actually confronting each other expensively IRL.
we'll probably be extinct within the next 1000 years unless we learn more about how to better "fuck with nature".
I don't think it will take that long.
But that's beside the point and irrelevant anyway. I think what people need to start to realize is that everything we humans do is natural, whether it's clear-cutting a forest, nuking your enemy's cities, or creating a rainforest preserve, it's all natural (though the ethical status of these actions is another matter).
We're just the latest step life is taking to overcome a series of evolutionary humps leading to increased complexity. We made it past the most recent hump, the one separating genetic evolution and cultural evolution. Whether we can manage that for long enough to either get off this planet and start expanding exponentially much as we are now as a species, or we first become more civilized and then decide as a planetary civilization to expand more coherently, ultimately makes no difference to the universe.
There are numerous legitimate reasons for joining a swarm and not participating in the exchange, including doing research like this.
Should it also be illegal for me to drive along a shady avenue downtown and count the number of prostitutes for research on a book or a blog post I'm writing about prostitution in my city? If I ask them if they're prostitutes but don't offer them money for sex, what did I do wrong?
And let us not forget that we are still unable to reliably predict the weather more than a few days in advance, yet we have sufficient hubris to believe we can predict 100 years forward.
This is a fallacious argument. Climate and weather prediction are related but different problems. There is good reason to believe we can predict climate changes with more certainty than we can predict whether it will rain next week. Nobody's trying to predict the weather 100 years forward (on a particular day), nor is anyone claiming we have this ability.
Slashdot Mirror
When you have children, you will understand why it makes sense to keep things of a sexual nature out of the mainstream.
When you have children, you will understand why it makes sense to keep things of a religious nature out of the mainstream.
What's the difference?
However it is very hard to make a distinction of what is tasteful. Thus it is simply easier to keep things of sexual nature in an easy accessible, but separate location. Like the magazine racks at your local liquor store.
This is impossible to do on the Internet, because of its very nature. Unfettered access to the Internet is for mature adults. If you don't like what's on the unfiltered Internet, don't let your kid access it. Just like you wouldn't let your kid walk the streets in the city alone at night.
If you have a problem with the content on the Internet, create and define your own acceptable subset thereof, and only allow yourself and your kids to access that subset.
I wholeheartedly advocate the creation of a .kids domain or the equivalent. There's room for even more differentiation; you could have a .teens domain where teenagers can congregate safely. Or make a .christian.teens and a .buddhist.teens domain and have people who care police and regulate these subdomains. It's your problem to create, police, and limit your kids' access to these areas, not mine.
However, I don't like it when I inadvertently come across that material when I'm at work, or while one of the kids are sitting next to me. And I certainly don't like the idea of my, increasingly web proficient, 8 year old seeing it when she's on the web (always supervised btw).
So do I. I find religious propaganda highly offensive. I think it's dangerous for my kids to get exposed to such literature. The other day there were Watchtower publications left at the laudromat, right there at eye level for any impressionable kid to read and possibly swallow. Every day on broadcast television this lunatic named Pat Robertson and his cronies spout fundamentalism, religious extremism, and hatred. How am I supposed to protect my kids from that? I think the TV channels and magazines from cults and religious wackos are harmful and should be banned or at least constrained to behind-the-counter status.
Or I could teach my kids how to deal with such things they run into in the sick society we have today.
I don't want my kids to see TV shows that glorify violence and hatred and torture, but these things are broadcast daily on national TV. The 700 Club. 24. These things come in over the airwaves, whereas you are advocating the censorship of a medium (the Internet) which you have to specifically subscribe to and allow access to. Do you see the difference between consensual sexual activity which is harmful to neither party, and the garbage on 24 involving chopping off people's fingers and injecting painful chemicals, shooting people left and right, and proselytizing religious intolerance on the 700 Club? It's OK and mostly harmless to give or receive oral sex, it's NOT OK to torture and kill people or tell them they're condemned to eternal punishment for some improper conduct.
But regardless of what I think of all of that, it's my job, not society's job, to educate and pass on values to my own kids. It's impossible to shield kids from undesirable stimuli nowadays, so why not instead just accept the fact that they're going to see stuff you don't like, and you'll need to teach them why you think they shouldn't like it either?
That is the really sad thing about tongue piercings and mouth piercings that nobody tells you about before you get them.
Unless they're properly sized, your teeth will get worn and chipped. I chipped a molar a week after I had my tongue pierced.
Regarding the technique in the article, I think a better solution for many people is to figure out how to stimulate the growth of completely new teeth in adults, yank 'em all, and have all new ones grow in place. Especially if you can decide to omit extra molars the second time around for people with smaller mouths.
Today I was in a bar and a middle aged couple I know were asking me about their computer.
1977 pickup line: So, what's your sign?
2007 pickup line: So, you have an Apple or Dell?
1977 closing time: So, you wanna come back to my place?
2007 closing time: So, you wanna come back to my place and reconfigure my email?
Creepy, if you ask me.
Excellent points. Of course, this places the burden for the cost and tedium of administrating such a kid-friendly program squarely and solely on the potential "benefactors".
Nevertheless, they're testing out the possibilities: see Conservapedia
A week ago they didn't even have an article for Sex. Now it just redirects to "Gender".
Exactly my point, the current 'system' prevents me from excercising my desire to not see such content and undermines my wishes. Organizing content into easily located and/or avoided locations is only sensible. That's why the DNS system is setup the way that it is, to help categorize information.
On a similar vein, I would love to see a bunch of new TLD's started and popular. If the information were organized properly into the correct TLD, and everyone knew that blogs were in .blog for example, they could determine what was on a site before they clicked a link. You could search for blogs about certain subjects by restricting the scope of your search. etc.
I'm sorry but you have no idea what you're talking about. DNS is not set up to categorize information, it categorizes site names on a vague, broad basis according to guidelines that were eroded significantly in the 90s during the explosive commercial growth of the WWW. Those guidelines are all but meaningless now.
Slashdot.org is not an .org. It really should have been a .com. What is digg? Is digg a blog? Is slashdot a blog? Is fark a blog? Are they all just entertainment sites? How about 4chan? How about everything2 ? What if the global wikipedia community decides it's appropriate to put up some representative photos of "pornography" on the page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornography ? Maybe we could even rotate them on a daily basis? "Featured Pornography Example Picture of the Day". Or does that not count as .porn because it's educational?
Go take a look at your local magazine rack in the supermarket. Instead of banning Sports Car Weekly, Guns and Ammo, and Stupid Celebrity Rehab Roundup (which I would advocate if I were as fucked up as you seem to be), instead you simply realize that you don't have to buy them, and you can teach your own kids why they're supposed to believe all those publications are chock-full of worthless, inane drivel (as perhaps I would). Or better yet, teach your kids how to make up their own minds. God forbid they grow up less stifled and prudish than you.
You don't want to accidentally see a scantily-clothed adult on a billboard advertising the local gym, eh? Well how do you think I feel--I think virtually all commercial billboards are garish, offensive monstrosities. Doesn't mean I get to ban them.
videos/images of nude people engaging in sexual activities intended as a source of entertainment for adults is pornographic.
I'm not sure if you're a troll or if you seriously believe the utter bullshit you've ejaculated into this discussion.
Do you actually believe that there is something morally wrong with the type of content you mention in the quote above? Do you actually think that sex is "dirty" (whatever that means)? Come on, we ALL do it. Even bacteria conjugate.
You are claiming that there is something wrong with visual, auditory, textual, even ARTISTIC representation of a basic human need. Sex ranks up there with other important stuff like food, water and shelter.
Ever since I went to college there were guys that had a thing for strip clubs/titty bars/whatever you want to call them. I thought they were kind of silly and have never been inside one to this day. Problem solved for me, without banning them for others. Who am I to judge? Who are you? If you can't handle what's on the Internet, go watch basketball or something, and leave the interesting content to the adults (and probably quite a few precocious teenagers too).
Holy fucking shit, there is something seriously wrong with you anti-sex people.
Oh-no. I said "fucking" and "ejaculate" in this post. I contaminated your whole thread with filth. Better relegate this post to http://slashdot.xxx/ so the good people can't read my dirty words.
I dunno -- I still would like my onocologist to understand on a fundamental level how RNA transcriptase works and the biophysical interactions that take place during radiation therapy. I want my psychiatrist to understand why inhibiting serotonin reuptake is sometimes desirable. In fact, I want them to have a deeper level of knowledge and understanding of all these concepts than my own.
Same thing for programmers. The best professionals in any field will have a very deep understanding of their knowledge domain. A programmer doesn't have to go down to the level of electrons on bare wires (the electrical engineers can do that) but at least should have a feel for what they're doing down at the level of registers and operating system.
As I have stated before here in other postings, I believe that simulation is the unrecognized and discounted factor that accounts for the Fermi Paradox, the fudge factor in the Drake equation that explains why we don't have aliens walking among us today. We are getting quite good at simulating reality ourselves, and there is no reason why extraterrestrial intelligences wouldn't do the exact same thing.
At some point soon, the synthesis of our scientific knowledge will allow us to assume, with considerable certainty, that aliens with similar biology and physics exist, probably in other solar systems in this galaxy and almost certainly in other galaxies.
They have of course reached the same conclusions and that is why they aren't trying to contact us.
We don't have to go exploring to find them. It's cheaper to just imagine them and simulate them. The real problem is what do we do if we decide to believe this?
Maybe our efforts at keeping people alive, no matter what the quality of life are misguided. 94 years is a good run.
You know, I have been thinking about this for six years now, and I really haven't come to a conclusion. Maybe I'm too young.
Define "quality of life". Define "health". My grandmother enjoys quite good health, her only complaint is occasional constipation and the inevitable aches and pains of being 94 which she cannot even express anymore. She has arthritis, she had an ingrown toenail. But she doesn't complain about being in pain very often. Sometimes she says her head hurts and I'm not sure if she means she has a headache, or that she cannot think or express her thoughts.
As far as quality of life is concerned, she's beyond the point of being able to express her opinion. She doesn't say "I wish I was dead". But I don't think she'd be capable of saying that, even if that is what she felt. She's in a kind of limbo.
As we continue to develop cures for fatal diseases and make chronic illnesses more manageable, our society will be forced to confront the troubling issues raised in this thread, including euthanasia and assisted suicide.
I would not ever consider euthanasia (murder) and I would be reluctant to assist someone with suicide. But if she had told me ten years ago, "If I ever get Alzheimer's, shoot me!", well, what the fuck are you supposed to do in that case? People say things like that to their relatives all the time.
Who am I to deny helping her achieve the enjoyment of seeing the sun rise yet again tomorrow morning, even if that's one of the few things that makes her smile that day? She is happy when she wakes up in the morning, she is often happy when she curls up in bed at night, she sometimes smiles during the day in response to various stimuli.
Maybe her life now is better than most of the rest of us can claim.
Well, whatever you do, don't get Alzheimer's disease. It sucks.
My grandmother just turned 94 and has advanced Alzheimer's disease. She can barely walk anymore. I devote a few hours of my life every single day to caregiving. If you've never known someone like this, you really have no idea what's involved. Yeah, we could put her in a home. We could watch her die sooner that way, wearing diapers and ceaselessly, hopelessly calling out for someone to please take her home. As it is now, she wears diapers, but at least we always change them. In nursing homes, they don't.
Have you ever had someone you know and love, who helped raise you and even changed *your* diapers and then helped teach you how to count and how to read and how to do puzzles and math and typing and how to play games, who taught you the names of the plants that grow out in the back yard? And now she can smile and say "Hello", and tell you to get the hell out because she don't know who you are a moment later?
That's Alzheimer's. You can be helping to manage her most intimate financial affairs completely honestly, you can be doing her laundry and getting her medicine and bringing her groceries and cooking her meals and washing her dishes and vacuuming her floors and helping her get to the doctor and even wiping her ass, when she cannot do it herself anymore, and yet she'll still tell you she loves you one night, and the next morning she wants you to go away, go to hell, or just please, please take her home. Because she doesn't know what home means anymore. She's already at home, and she doesn't know who you are anymore.
She knows what she knew in 1920 or 1930 sometimes, funny stories she can still tell sometimes, but she mixes up everyone's names; she doesn't know who is who anymore. She used to speak three languages, English, German, and French. But now she often speaks gibberish, a weird combination of whatever words she still can recall. She can't always understand simple sentences. She's like a kid who cannot learn.
Alzheimer's sucks; nursing homes suck. Go visit one someday if you doubt me. My grandmother's genes and her circumstances allowed her to outlive two of her children. She never got cancer, but that's what killed her elder son at 50. She had a heart attack thirty years ago, but she didn't die of heart disease. That's what killed her elder daughter at 60. Yet my grandmother lives on, as her mind slowly disintegrates.
She still likes to watch children playing, or to meet a drooling baby, maybe a child of someone who helps care for her, brought over to visit. She still likes to pet her cats and smile and watch them roll on the floor with catnip at her feet, she still can interface with her two grandchildren, she still has a sense of humor that we all can understand and sometimes laugh about together.
She doesn't know what year it is or what day it is, and sometimes she can't remember how to properly hold a spoon (or she'll try drinking from it like a straw). But she especially likes bananas and squash and sweet potatoes and chocolate chip cookies. I know this because I'm there sometimes to remind her to take another bite. She says "This is good, thank you!"
And sometimes when you help lift her into bed at night, she'll tell you she loves you. I guess that helps make it all worthwhile.
Anyway, this is what will happen to you if you don't die of anything else or get hit by a bus before your brain starts to degrade. I suppose it hasn't been all bad, I have learned a lot caring for my grandmother. But she is no longer able to offer her opinion.
I've been semi-interested in Computer Science/Mathematics lately, and from everything I've seen and read so far, I've ascertained that we don't know much. Between dark fiber, optimal algorithms, P=NP, O(n log n) (and other equations like that), cryptography, etc. it seems like we just conveniently make up "stuff" to fit some model or equation. Do discoveries like this mean anything at this time considering there's no way to prove any of it?
[No offense intended--just pointing out that a lack of sophisticated understanding in a field of study does not imply the field is in any way bogus or the knowledge is "shaky". The reason it's called "dark matter" or "dark energy" is precisely because we aren't sure exactly what it is yet.]
We're promoting our official beverages and foods to be enjoyed at our alternative Quadrennial Cold-Climate-Oriented Amateur Athletic Competition Festival (QCCOAACF).
[my apologies if QCCOAACF actually means something in some Inuit language]
On the other hand, I have a Yahoo! email account of the form xx2000xxx@yahoo.com and I have never received a single spam in that account whatsoever. It was registered in 2000 and used for communicating with a certain well-known online auction site.
Never received a single spam in my inbox or in my junk email folder. So I have concluded that 1) nobody's doing dictionary spamming that complex, and also 2) ebay hasn't shared their customer email list with spammers (yet).
So if you really want to be sure, register as bestbuy2007@example.com and you probably can be sure when they start spamming you that somehow, that address got onto the spammers' lists.
I believe you're referring to panspermia, which could have been accidental or deliberate. In the former case, life happens to make it from one habitable environment into another across interplanetary/interstellar distances. A situation analogous to accidental panspermia occurs on earth all the time, when a coconut floats from one island to another, or an insect is blown up in a storm and lands on another continent. For interplanetary cases to be feasible, life needs to be able to make it from, say Earth to Europa or vice-versa, which I think is entirely plausible. If there is other life in this solar system how closely related to life on Earth it is will answer some questions and clarify many new ones.
In the latter case, deliberate panspermia may be the signature of intelligence far greater than our own. Life on Earth could simply be the evidence and the result from von Neumann probes from another civilization (possibly long gone) or even another galaxy (which to me is not completely implausible).
I don't believe in this theory, but I am open to everything. Always keep an open mind.
You shouldn't "believe in" any theories; simply weigh them according to how likely they seem based on current knowledge and valid criticism, and choose the best one at this time to guide further research and actions. Indeed, an open mind is required.
The first few digits of pi, or the Euler constant, or a fibonacci series, that would be kinda cool
How about instructions coding for beings which will evolve the ability to perceive and describe such mathematical concepts? The constants themselves would degrade, but the instructions for these capabilities would confer real evolutionary advantages and would be passed on for generations, and improved over time.
It's interesting that when you apply computer science to biology at their most fundamental levels, you simply confirm the feasibility of solutions long since developed by what we believe to be completely natural evolutionary processes.
The Universe is a giant computer. Or a simulation running inside another one. Either way, it doesn't matter.
Moreover, there is nothing more important when it comes to your future career opportunities than your networking abilities and ability to make friends and contacts who can help you decide where you want to take your life. Your most important contact might be someone from a nearby school who you met at a party once who has nothing to do with your major.
And there will be little nudges and profound unexpected events that affect your life in ways you could never have predicted.
It doesn't matter so much where you go, as what you do there. And even then, random chance will radically change what happens. My life and the lives of many people I've known over the past decade and a half would be both radically different and yet possibly much the same, had that one coin I flipped come up heads instead of tails, and had I gone to a different school.
Your life will incorporate a striking amount of /dev/random despite your best intentions otherwise.
You do realize that you've basically argued that since we have Star Wars and Star Trek, we don't need to look for extra-terrestrial life, don't you?
Not quite. What I'm saying is that if we find another example of carbon-based life on Mars, or on Europa, or if we find the signature of carbon based life on planet orbiting a star 50 LYA, that's good enough for me to assume there's life everywhere. What I would expect is a slightly different assortment of nucleic acids which code for somewhat different proteins with the same functionality. So the aliens might have six fingers, but they will probably be able to extract energy from glucose.
To make a car analogy out of it, we know we have Chevys here on earth and that conditions are favorable for Fords and Hondas. All we need to do is find evidence of an Oldsmobile somewhere nearby.
I believe our understanding of biochemistry will grow to the point that we can reasonably extrapolate the existence of extraterrestrial life on other planets circling other stars from our knowledge of extremophiles here on Earth, and possibly one or two additional examples of microbial life we discover on Mars, Europa, etc.
At some point the perspective in the problem statement must change from "Prove there's life on other planets" to "Prove that there isn't".
I think the answer to the Fermi paradox is this:
Once a civilization has derived the laws of physics and chemistry to sufficient precision and certainty, there is no longer any pressing need to pursue direct observation of extraterrestrial intelligence. You can simply assume that it exists, based on your local knowledge.
We are reaching this same point with our knowledge of biology; everywhere we look on Earth, we find life. Simply confirming the existence of microbial life on Mars would make it a bit less urgent to get all the way to Europa and verify that it's there too. If we did make it to Europa to confirm that life has evolved there as well, I'd be reasonably comfortable making the prediction that life exists pretty much everywhere else in the galaxy.
If there's no reason to doubt life elsewhere in the galaxy, there's probably intelligent life too. So why worry about going there and confirming something by direct observation, when there's a 99.999% probability that it's true? It makes more sense to stick around here for now and simulate what they're like instead of going there and seeing it directly.
Once we have learned how to just simulate the biochemistry of Europa with high enough fidelity, there's no longer any pressing need to go there, is there? If we make it that far and our simulations and models indicate the presence of life on extrasolar planets, that's good enough for me.
In other words, the reason the aliens haven't bothered to travel here, land, and say "take me to your leader" is because they know what would happen already. It doesn't matter what we are actually like. It doesn't matter what they're actually like either, because we can imagine them now and we will be able to simulate them soon enough.
The reason we don't run into aliens is because we can imagine and simulate them and they can imagine and simulate us and there's no point in actually confronting each other expensively IRL.
No.
we'll probably be extinct within the next 1000 years unless we learn more about how to better "fuck with nature".
I don't think it will take that long.
But that's beside the point and irrelevant anyway. I think what people need to start to realize is that everything we humans do is natural, whether it's clear-cutting a forest, nuking your enemy's cities, or creating a rainforest preserve, it's all natural (though the ethical status of these actions is another matter).
We're just the latest step life is taking to overcome a series of evolutionary humps leading to increased complexity. We made it past the most recent hump, the one separating genetic evolution and cultural evolution. Whether we can manage that for long enough to either get off this planet and start expanding exponentially much as we are now as a species, or we first become more civilized and then decide as a planetary civilization to expand more coherently, ultimately makes no difference to the universe.
Potatoes Modify YOU!
There are numerous legitimate reasons for joining a swarm and not participating in the exchange, including doing research like this.
Should it also be illegal for me to drive along a shady avenue downtown and count the number of prostitutes for research on a book or a blog post I'm writing about prostitution in my city? If I ask them if they're prostitutes but don't offer them money for sex, what did I do wrong?
You can take the computer away from the four-year-old. Your dad will want to try "one more thing".
This is a fallacious argument. Climate and weather prediction are related but different problems. There is good reason to believe we can predict climate changes with more certainty than we can predict whether it will rain next week. Nobody's trying to predict the weather 100 years forward (on a particular day), nor is anyone claiming we have this ability.