Does this affect motherboard manufactured by intel only, or motherboards using the intel chipset? I'd be interested in knowing - I'm about to sink some serious money into an upgrade to my system, gonna go with the Abit BP6, but if there's a problem with that as well, I just might wait....
I found this article a while back. Unfortunately, I lost the author/publication information. An excellent read on the Columbine tragedy and the aftermath. If anyone has the information on the writer/publication, please let me know. I typed this in myself, so there may be a few typos. Sorry.
"When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school...," Paul Simon mused in a popular song some years ago. Simon, of course, was in high school long before multiculturalism, Afrocentrism, Outcome-Based Education, bilingual education, Heather Has 17 Mommies, Holocaust Studies, and assorted therapeutic group gropes and mass séances in "counseling" displaced the deathless vapidities about history, life, and literature that typically spill from the lips of teachers in all ages and nations. But no matter what sort of crap Simon endured in his high school and what sort poisons the minds and spirits of teenagers today, it is nothing compared to the offal that the American news media regularly inject into grown-ups and anyone else who pays attention to them. The mass murder of 12 students at Littleton, Colorado's Columbine High School on April 20 was the occasion for the construction of a veritable mountain of journalistic chicken doodle by almost every major newspaper and news service in the world. The blood had not stopped flowing before the ace reporters and investigative journalists had the whole gory mess all figured out and ready to serve hot and piping to a gape-jawed public. As it turned out, almost everything they reported was wrong - some of it almost certainly deliberately wrong - and not only wrong, but a carefully crafted wrongness that pointed in the exact opposite direction of the truth about Littleton and a lot of other things in the United States that it is important for some people to hide. The two teenage killers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, an Associated Press story told us on April 21, were "said to be part of an outcast group with right-wing overtones called the Trenchcoat Mafia." "Students said the group was fascinated with World War II and the Nazis and noted that Tuesday [April 20] was Adolf Hitler's birthday," it continued. The same day, yet another AP story described "Trenchcoat Mafia" as a group that "hated blacks, Hispanics, Jews and athletes." A student named Aaron Cohn, repeatedly quoted in several stories, claimed the "Mafia" "often made anti-Semitic comments"; he was the apparent source of the story that the killers had called the black student they murdered by a racial epithet, while other students said the group or the killers themselves worse "Nazi crosses" and "made generally derogatory remarks' about Hispanics and blacks." "They talked about Hitler and worse clothes with German insignia," gasped the New York Times on April 23. "They hated jocks, admired Nazis and scorned normalcy... They were white supremacists...," the Washington Post bubbled on the same day. And so it went for the next week or so, with proponents of more gun control, more voodoo education, more hate crime laws, and more federal manipulation of schools, law enforcement, and families flapping their wings and their jaws overtime, intent on squeezing every possible ounce of political advantage from what the press at once dubbed "the worst attack on a school in American history." Even that wasn't true. In 1927, a school board member named Andrew Kehos planted several dynamite bombs under his local schoolhouse in Michigan and blew it to splinters, killing himself and 45 other people. Including 38 students. Whether Mr. Kehos was also reported to have "right-wing overtones" and to be a "white supremacist" is not known, but that atrocity committed by a lunatic, like most others in civilized countries, was soon forgotten. The Littleton massacre wasn't forgotten, at least not for several weeks after it happened, and it soon became clear that the media were trying to use it in almost exactly the same way they had exploited the Oklahoma City bombing of April 19, 1995. They were setting a Reichstag fire, creating a vast and elaborate lie that sought to pin the blame for the Littleton massacre on "the right." But the Littleton Lie couldn't last because it was just so contrary to certain facts that soon began to emerge from the carnage, and in any case, the Lie was largely irrelevant to the main political usage of the massacre, more gun control. Yet the major media kept the Littleton incident on their front pages for at least two weeks after it occurred; it was only when the facts did emerge that they lost interest in it and the story began to follow Mr. Kehos and his dynamite bombs into that subcontinent of oblivion reserved for inconvenient facts and truths. The facts, you see, not only gave the lie to the Littleton Lie but pointed to a truth the news media didn't want to bring up. One glimpse of reality began to creep onto the national screen when the contents of Eric Harris's website were released. Those contents had been reported to the local police by an alarmed parent more than a year before young Master Harris tripped over the edge on April 20, but the cops had ignored them. As soon as the massacre occurred, however, American Online shut down the Harris website, and no one got a gander at what was on it until the New York Times, to its credit, reported at least some of the contents on May 1. The Times found the following passage, written by Harris, "intriguing": "You know what I hate?" Harris "repeatedly asked readers of the site," the Times reported. "One of the answers he gave was, 'RACISM!'" "He wrote that people who are biased against 'blacks, Asians, Mexicans or people from any other country or race besides white-American' should 'have their arms ripped off' and be burned." "'Don't let me catch you making fun of someone just because they are of a different color,' he wrote." Young Master Harris, as it turns out, hated many things besides "RACISM," among them fans of "Star Wars," people who mispronounce words, liars, country music, freedom of expression, opponents of the death penalty, and smokers. But "RACISM," so far from being a creed to which he subscribed, was definitely on the enemies' list. As for Dylan Klebold, it soon came out that he was of Jewish background and that his grandfather had been a prominent Jewish philanthropist in Ohio. In fact, young Master Klebold was reported to have taken part in a Passover seder only shortly before the massacre. Whatever motivated him to splatter the brains of his pals, it probably wasn't the admiration for Hitler and the Nazis that the press had attributed to him and his colleague, nor did Eric Harris's website reveal any sympathy for Hitler or for "racism" or indeed for any "right-wing overtones" except perhaps his enthusiasm for capital punishment. But what finally and definitely exposed the fantasies, speculations, unexamined assumptions, and outright lies the news media concocted and inflicted on us for two weeks was an interview in the New York Times on April 30 with several students at the high school who had actually known the killers. What they had to say should have ended the professional careers of several of the con artists who pass themselves off as "reporters" and whose misreporting had already fabricated myths and legends about the Littleton killings that will probably never die completely. The infamous "Trenchcoat Mafia" that was supposedly behind the bloodshed, said 16-year-old Devon Adams, consisted last year of about 15 or 20 people who wore black trenchcoats as a kind of clique uniform. They played cards and hung out and smoked together. "That's all it was," and anyway, more than half of them had graduated last year; the group barely existed anymore. Harris and Klebold weren't even a part of it, he told the Times. Well, but what about the racism, the sympathy for Hitler, the obsession with World War II? Meg Hains, 17, said, I am black/white mixed. And when the media is coming up with this thing that Dylan and Eric were racists, they weren't. They were my friends. They were very nice to me, both of them. I don't get this whole racial thing that people are coming up with. Miss Hains, you can see, has a lot to learn, and no doubt a good deal of the remainder of her learning experience will be devoted to "getting" the "whole racial thing" with which her elders are so obsessed. Devon Adams acknowledged that Harris and Klebold did use "racial slurs," but "I don't think it meant that they were racist." "What about the Nazi stuff?" the Times insisted. Meg Hains replied, "That is the biggest load of [expletive] I've ever heard. They never wore swastikas on their arms. Never. Not in this entire year that I've known them. No." Devon Adams said, "They're not Nazis. They didn't worship Nazis." They read books about Nazis because they were studying World War II history in school, he said. The report that they shouted "Heil Hitler" when bowling was also untrue, said Dustin Thurman, 18. In short, when the press told the public that Harris and Klebold were "white supremacists," "right wingers," "racists," "neo-Nazis," etc., they lied. Journalists assumed, probably because unconsciously they have come to believe their own propaganda line, that all mass violence is the work of the "right," a catch-all term that can include anyone from Elizabeth Dole to the Aryan Nations. If it's the assassination of a president, the bombing of a federal building, or the mass murder of high-school students by wigged-out teenagers full of pubescent resentment, plugged-up hormones, and the mental and moral garbage regularly served them by their schools, their televisions,, their movies, their music, their books, their government, and their newspapers, then it has to be because "the right" is on the march. And of course, this myth is useful for discrediting anyone who really is on "the right" when he questions the quack nostrums and increased state power that the left demands as a "solution" to the "crisis." What, then, did cause the massacre at Littleton. The simple answer is "human nature," the propensity that all human beings have to explode, as Mr. Kehos exploded back in 1927 and as lots of other people do in one way or another every now and then. Of course, not everybody does explode. Why did Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold do so? The question is probably still unanswerable, but one story that popped up in the Washington Post is suggestive. A woman who was a friend of the Klebold family recalls that Dylan used to play with her daughters and remembers telling his mother that in her house she had only girl toys while in your house, you have only "boy toys." "Boy toys," replied Mrs. Klebold, "but no toy guns." Dylan Klebold's father is said to be "a liberal who favors gun control," yet another Associated Press story reported several days after the killings. His mother worked in a community program that helped "disabled students gain access to education." When Dylan and Eric broke into a car and got caught, they were placed in an "anger management" program, and the police who ran the program praised them for their conduct. As for Mark Manes, the pal of Eric and Dylan who sold them the semi-automatic pistol they used in the shootings, his mother is a member of Handgun Control, Inc., the country's largest gun-control lobbying organization. "She has been against guns forever," Manes' lawyer told the New York Times. "Mark grew up in a house where no weapons were present." Much the same seems to have been true of Eric Harris,, who was an enthusiastic fan of Bill Clinton's bombing of Serbia. "I hope we do go to war," he told a classmate. "I'll be the first one there." That exactly why Harris tried to enlist in the Marines a few days before the blow-up at the school. Maybe it wasn't Marilyn Manson that lit his fuse so much as the Weekly Standard or the Wall Street Journal editorial page. The dirty little truth the American propaganda machine won't tell us directly, the secret that has to be pried out from between the lines of the machine's unreliable newspapers and thinly disguised politicization, is that all three of these young men grew up in the make-believe world concocted by liberalism, a fantastic place where race and sex mean nothing; where violence and crime don't exist and guns have no function and no meaning, even as toys; where wars against "ethnic nationalists" for "humanitarian goals" are morally imperative but owning a handgun to protect your home and family ought to be a crime; where war is only one more goody-good community project like getting disabled students access to education; where people who adhere to "RACISM!" deserve to have their arms ripped off and be burned and human beings, including healthy young men whose genes and glands and brains drive them to aggression and conflict, are simply blank slates to be shaped and twisted and scribbled over by "anger management" programs and all the therapeutic witchcraft that Hillary Clinton and her friends really believe in. It was not Adolf Hitler or Marilyn Manson or the "right" that made Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold pop their corks in April but liberalism itself and all the illusions liberalism conjures up to mask the truths about human beings and human society that it refuses to face. That's a secret the news media can't expose, partly because those who run them can't even recognize it and partly because, if they every did, the whole system constructed on the lies of liberalism would crumble.
I think the problem with the idea of a Virtual University is the capacity to be ripped off. Figure that it wouldn't be all that challenging for someone to create their own virtual "university" and have people sending them thousands of dollars for degrees that mean nothing. There's already been something like this with the mail-order degree deal where you "earn your degree from home." I wonder what security measures would be enacted to prevent fraud.
It's sad to see someone in a position of such power to abuse it the way JV does. I read both sides of the story from an unbiased view, and in my eyes, Attrition.org wins this one hands down. JV's argument is baseless - his "evidence" is weak at best. But the really sad thing is that this isn't just children fighting - there's a very real possibility that people are going to be hurt in this war of words.
But see, what if you could do it without really "aging" all that much physically? What if you were able to pass from one body of yours, when you're maybe 50 or 60, to a clone body created 20 years earlier? So you become wiser and wiser but maintain peak physical condition (or at least start over in it every 40 years or so). You're able to watch civilization grow, to watch technology surpass even our wildest dreams... I don't want to live forever, because as someone mentioend earlier, death is a pretty healthy part of the life cycle. But if you can extend my life by maybe another 100 years so I can watch as technology progresses and as we evolve as a society... sign me right up.
I'm sure that we'll be using nanotechnology to help as well. Imagine creating tiny computers that float around in the bloodstream and maybe help clear arteries or repair wounds? It's amazing to think that probably someone reading Slashdot will be involved with this too. Maybe creating the hardware or programming computers to reconnect all of the tiny fibers of the spinal cord. This technology, combined with what's in development now, really has far-reaching implications. Absolutely fascinating.
What if this technology were used with head transplants (reported a week or two or three ago here on Slashdot)? We're one step closer to immortality. Scientists and Doctors would use cloning to create the rest of the body, transplant the head to the new body, and revive dying brain cells. The only technology we're really missing out on now is reconnecting the spinal cord and all the nerves, and I'm sure that will be developing soon enough. It's incredible to think that maybe by the end of my lifetime (I'm 18 now) the technology will exist to extend my life another 80 or 90 or 300 years. I'm sure I speak for a lot of us when I say that I'd love to see what technology develops after my "regular" life span has come to an end. It would be incredible to be able to extend life using this technologies. Incredible.
Slashdot Mirror
Does this affect motherboard manufactured by intel only, or motherboards using the intel chipset? I'd be interested in knowing - I'm about to sink some serious money into an upgrade to my system, gonna go with the Abit BP6, but if there's a problem with that as well, I just might wait....
Most of it has been heard before, but the interview does a nice job of pulling a lot of it together. Still worth the read.
I found this article a while back. Unfortunately, I lost the author/publication information. An excellent read on the Columbine tragedy and the aftermath. If anyone has the information on the writer/publication, please let me know. I typed this in myself, so there may be a few typos. Sorry.
"When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school...," Paul
Simon mused in a popular song some years ago. Simon, of course, was in
high school long before multiculturalism, Afrocentrism, Outcome-Based
Education, bilingual education, Heather Has 17 Mommies, Holocaust
Studies, and assorted therapeutic group gropes and mass séances in
"counseling" displaced the deathless vapidities about history, life, and
literature that typically spill from the lips of teachers in all ages
and nations. But no matter what sort of crap Simon endured in his high
school and what sort poisons the minds and spirits of teenagers today,
it is nothing compared to the offal that the American news media
regularly inject into grown-ups and anyone else who pays attention to
them.
The mass murder of 12 students at Littleton, Colorado's Columbine High
School on April 20 was the occasion for the construction of a veritable
mountain of journalistic chicken doodle by almost every major newspaper
and news service in the world. The blood had not stopped flowing before
the ace reporters and investigative journalists had the whole gory mess
all figured out and ready to serve hot and piping to a gape-jawed
public. As it turned out, almost everything they reported was wrong -
some of it almost certainly deliberately wrong - and not only wrong, but
a carefully crafted wrongness that pointed in the exact opposite
direction of the truth about Littleton and a lot of other things in the
United States that it is important for some people to hide.
The two teenage killers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, an Associated
Press story told us on April 21, were "said to be part of an outcast
group with right-wing overtones called the Trenchcoat Mafia." "Students
said the group was fascinated with World War II and the Nazis and noted
that Tuesday [April 20] was Adolf Hitler's birthday," it continued. The
same day, yet another AP story described "Trenchcoat Mafia" as a group
that "hated blacks, Hispanics, Jews and athletes." A student named Aaron
Cohn, repeatedly quoted in several stories, claimed the "Mafia" "often
made anti-Semitic comments"; he was the apparent source of the story
that the killers had called the black student they murdered by a racial
epithet, while other students said the group or the killers themselves
worse "Nazi crosses" and "made generally derogatory remarks' about
Hispanics and blacks." "They talked about Hitler and worse clothes with
German insignia," gasped the New York Times on April 23. "They hated
jocks, admired Nazis and scorned normalcy... They were white
supremacists...," the Washington Post bubbled on the same day.
And so it went for the next week or so, with proponents of more gun
control, more voodoo education, more hate crime laws, and more federal
manipulation of schools, law enforcement, and families flapping their
wings and their jaws overtime, intent on squeezing every possible ounce
of political advantage from what the press at once dubbed "the worst
attack on a school in American history." Even that wasn't true. In 1927,
a school board member named Andrew Kehos planted several dynamite bombs
under his local schoolhouse in Michigan and blew it to splinters,
killing himself and 45 other people. Including 38 students. Whether Mr.
Kehos was also reported to have "right-wing overtones" and to be a
"white supremacist" is not known, but that atrocity committed by a
lunatic, like most others in civilized countries, was soon forgotten.
The Littleton massacre wasn't forgotten, at least not for several weeks
after it happened, and it soon became clear that the media were trying
to use it in almost exactly the same way they had exploited the Oklahoma
City bombing of April 19, 1995. They were setting a Reichstag fire,
creating a vast and elaborate lie that sought to pin the blame for the
Littleton massacre on "the right."
But the Littleton Lie couldn't last because it was just so contrary to
certain facts that soon began to emerge from the carnage, and in any
case, the Lie was largely irrelevant to the main political usage of the
massacre, more gun control. Yet the major media kept the Littleton
incident on their front pages for at least two weeks after it occurred;
it was only when the facts did emerge that they lost interest in it and
the story began to follow Mr. Kehos and his dynamite bombs into that
subcontinent of oblivion reserved for inconvenient facts and truths. The
facts, you see, not only gave the lie to the Littleton Lie but pointed
to a truth the news media didn't want to bring up.
One glimpse of reality began to creep onto the national screen when the
contents of Eric Harris's website were released. Those contents had been
reported to the local police by an alarmed parent more than a year
before young Master Harris tripped over the edge on April 20, but the
cops had ignored them. As soon as the massacre occurred, however,
American Online shut down the Harris website, and no one got a gander at
what was on it until the New York Times, to its credit, reported at
least some of the contents on May 1.
The Times found the following passage, written by Harris, "intriguing":
"You know what I hate?" Harris "repeatedly asked readers of the site,"
the Times reported. "One of the answers he gave was, 'RACISM!'" "He
wrote that people who are biased against 'blacks, Asians, Mexicans or
people from any other country or race besides white-American' should
'have their arms ripped off' and be burned." "'Don't let me catch you
making fun of someone just because they are of a different color,' he
wrote." Young Master Harris, as it turns out, hated many things besides
"RACISM," among them fans of "Star Wars," people who mispronounce words,
liars, country music, freedom of expression, opponents of the death
penalty, and smokers. But "RACISM," so far from being a creed to which
he subscribed, was definitely on the enemies' list.
As for Dylan Klebold, it soon came out that he was of Jewish background
and that his grandfather had been a prominent Jewish philanthropist in
Ohio. In fact, young Master Klebold was reported to have taken part in a
Passover seder only shortly before the massacre. Whatever motivated him
to splatter the brains of his pals, it probably wasn't the admiration
for Hitler and the Nazis that the press had attributed to him and his
colleague, nor did Eric Harris's website reveal any sympathy for Hitler
or for "racism" or indeed for any "right-wing overtones" except perhaps
his enthusiasm for capital punishment.
But what finally and definitely exposed the fantasies, speculations,
unexamined assumptions, and outright lies the news media concocted and
inflicted on us for two weeks was an interview in the New York Times on
April 30 with several students at the high school who had actually known
the killers. What they had to say should have ended the professional
careers of several of the con artists who pass themselves off as
"reporters" and whose misreporting had already fabricated myths and
legends about the Littleton killings that will probably never die
completely.
The infamous "Trenchcoat Mafia" that was supposedly behind the
bloodshed, said 16-year-old Devon Adams, consisted last year of about 15
or 20 people who wore black trenchcoats as a kind of clique uniform.
They played cards and hung out and smoked together. "That's all it was,"
and anyway, more than half of them had graduated last year; the group
barely existed anymore. Harris and Klebold weren't even a part of it, he
told the Times.
Well, but what about the racism, the sympathy for Hitler, the obsession
with World War II? Meg Hains, 17, said,
I am black/white mixed. And when the media is coming up with this
thing that Dylan and Eric were racists, they weren't. They were my
friends. They were very nice to me, both of them. I don't get this whole
racial thing that people are coming up with.
Miss Hains, you can see, has a lot to learn, and no doubt a good deal
of the remainder of her learning experience will be devoted to "getting"
the "whole racial thing" with which her elders are so obsessed. Devon
Adams acknowledged that Harris and Klebold did use "racial slurs," but
"I don't think it meant that they were racist." "What about the Nazi
stuff?" the Times insisted. Meg Hains replied, "That is the biggest load
of [expletive] I've ever heard. They never wore swastikas on their arms.
Never. Not in this entire year that I've known them. No." Devon Adams
said, "They're not Nazis. They didn't worship Nazis." They read books
about Nazis because they were studying World War II history in school,
he said. The report that they shouted "Heil Hitler" when bowling was
also untrue, said Dustin Thurman, 18.
In short, when the press told the public that Harris and Klebold were
"white supremacists," "right wingers," "racists," "neo-Nazis," etc.,
they lied. Journalists assumed, probably because unconsciously they have
come to believe their own propaganda line, that all mass violence is the
work of the "right," a catch-all term that can include anyone from
Elizabeth Dole to the Aryan Nations. If it's the assassination of a
president, the bombing of a federal building, or the mass murder of
high-school students by wigged-out teenagers full of pubescent
resentment, plugged-up hormones, and the mental and moral garbage
regularly served them by their schools, their televisions,, their
movies, their music, their books, their government, and their
newspapers, then it has to be because "the right" is on the march. And
of course, this myth is useful for discrediting anyone who really is on
"the right" when he questions the quack nostrums and increased state
power that the left demands as a "solution" to the "crisis."
What, then, did cause the massacre at Littleton. The simple answer is
"human nature," the propensity that all human beings have to explode, as
Mr. Kehos exploded back in 1927 and as lots of other people do in one
way or another every now and then. Of course, not everybody does
explode. Why did Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold do so?
The question is probably still unanswerable, but one story that popped
up in the Washington Post is suggestive. A woman who was a friend of the
Klebold family recalls that Dylan used to play with her daughters and
remembers telling his mother that in her house she had only girl toys
while in your house, you have only "boy toys." "Boy toys," replied Mrs.
Klebold, "but no toy guns."
Dylan Klebold's father is said to be "a liberal who favors gun
control," yet another Associated Press story reported several days after
the killings. His mother worked in a community program that helped
"disabled students gain access to education." When Dylan and Eric broke
into a car and got caught, they were placed in an "anger management"
program, and the police who ran the program praised them for their
conduct. As for Mark Manes, the pal of Eric and Dylan who sold them the
semi-automatic pistol they used in the shootings, his mother is a member
of Handgun Control, Inc., the country's largest gun-control lobbying
organization. "She has been against guns forever," Manes' lawyer told
the New York Times. "Mark grew up in a house where no weapons were
present." Much the same seems to have been true of Eric Harris,, who was
an enthusiastic fan of Bill Clinton's bombing of Serbia. "I hope we do
go to war," he told a classmate. "I'll be the first one there." That
exactly why Harris tried to enlist in the Marines a few days before the
blow-up at the school. Maybe it wasn't Marilyn Manson that lit his fuse
so much as the Weekly Standard or the Wall Street Journal editorial
page.
The dirty little truth the American propaganda machine won't tell us
directly, the secret that has to be pried out from between the lines of
the machine's unreliable newspapers and thinly disguised politicization,
is that all three of these young men grew up in the make-believe world
concocted by liberalism, a fantastic place where race and sex mean
nothing; where violence and crime don't exist and guns have no function
and no meaning, even as toys; where wars against "ethnic nationalists"
for "humanitarian goals" are morally imperative but owning a handgun to
protect your home and family ought to be a crime; where war is only one
more goody-good community project like getting disabled students access
to education; where people who adhere to "RACISM!" deserve to have their
arms ripped off and be burned and human beings, including healthy young
men whose genes and glands and brains drive them to aggression and
conflict, are simply blank slates to be shaped and twisted and scribbled
over by "anger management" programs and all the therapeutic witchcraft
that Hillary Clinton and her friends really believe in. It was not Adolf
Hitler or Marilyn Manson or the "right" that made Eric Harris and Dylan
Klebold pop their corks in April but liberalism itself and all the
illusions liberalism conjures up to mask the truths about human beings
and human society that it refuses to face. That's a secret the news
media can't expose, partly because those who run them can't even
recognize it and partly because, if they every did, the whole system
constructed on the lies of liberalism would crumble.
He said that we must be in another time zone. I'm saying "no, i'm in EST, not in england or something." eastern standard time, aka gmt -5:00
And #3...reminiscent of Ferris Bueller's Day Off...we NEED more Ben Stein's teaching us..."Bueller...Bueller...Bueller"...
and by the way, i'm in the eastern time zone :)
been up since about 5 pm yesterday :)
I think the problem with the idea of a Virtual University is the capacity to be ripped off. Figure that it wouldn't be all that challenging for someone to create their own virtual "university" and have people sending them thousands of dollars for degrees that mean nothing. There's already been something like this with the mail-order degree deal where you "earn your degree from home." I wonder what security measures would be enacted to prevent fraud.
Scientific American seems to be one of the best written magazines to date. Always have quality stuff. Good interview too.
It's sad to see someone in a position of such power to abuse it the way JV does. I read both sides of the story from an unbiased view, and in my eyes, Attrition.org wins this one hands down. JV's argument is baseless - his "evidence" is weak at best. But the really sad thing is that this isn't just children fighting - there's a very real possibility that people are going to be hurt in this war of words.
But see, what if you could do it without really "aging" all that much physically? What if you were able to pass from one body of yours, when you're maybe 50 or 60, to a clone body created 20 years earlier? So you become wiser and wiser but maintain peak physical condition (or at least start over in it every 40 years or so). You're able to watch civilization grow, to watch technology surpass even our wildest dreams... I don't want to live forever, because as someone mentioend earlier, death is a pretty healthy part of the life cycle. But if you can extend my life by maybe another 100 years so I can watch as technology progresses and as we evolve as a society... sign me right up.
I'm sure that we'll be using nanotechnology to help as well. Imagine creating tiny computers that float around in the bloodstream and maybe help clear arteries or repair wounds? It's amazing to think that probably someone reading Slashdot will be involved with this too. Maybe creating the hardware or programming computers to reconnect all of the tiny fibers of the spinal cord. This technology, combined with what's in development now, really has far-reaching implications. Absolutely fascinating.
What if this technology were used with head transplants (reported a week or two or three ago here on Slashdot)? We're one step closer to immortality. Scientists and Doctors would use cloning to create the rest of the body, transplant the head to the new body, and revive dying brain cells. The only technology we're really missing out on now is reconnecting the spinal cord and all the nerves, and I'm sure that will be developing soon enough. It's incredible to think that maybe by the end of my lifetime (I'm 18 now) the technology will exist to extend my life another 80 or 90 or 300 years. I'm sure I speak for a lot of us when I say that I'd love to see what technology develops after my "regular" life span has come to an end. It would be incredible to be able to extend life using this technologies. Incredible.