Apparently so many people thought the video was kind of moving, since Fox couldn't sit still in his chair and was thrashing about through the entire interview because his Parkinson's was so bad, that it made the front page of Digg.com
Sorry to hear it, but people die of all kinds of things. My father died of a number of things three years ago. One of them was Parkinson's disease. We are going to die of something, stem cells or not. And why exactly are we supposed to rush into crossing moral boundaries and ponying up billions of dollars in research money to save Michael J. Fox or Superman? It is a really bad use of celebrity to plump for the solution of YOUR special disease at all cost. And a bit hysterical, even cowardly. We are supposed to thrash around, do anything, to save these hollywood narcissists, including lose our humanity. I'm personally sick of their public whining when their mortality bites them in the ass.
The cells in question (some 400,000 of them) are being discarded en masse from in vitro fertilization labs anyways, so it's a choice between either letting them get thrown away-- or using them for research that could save lives.
It amazes me how people turn the deep discussion of morality into a simple discussion of waste. They trivialize the subject. They dismiss the un-responded-to point that it is immoral to tear unique human genetic combinations apart for research because of the selfish human need to live forever. To be perfectly clear, it is not a question of wasting a resource by discarding fertilized eggs; it is a question of using those eggs for research contrary to the correct moral strictures against experimenting on humans without their permission. Stop turning it into a mere question of "wasting research food".
Oh, and by the way, I'm not a religious nutcase. I don't believe in gods and demons. Religion is an attempt to explain moral impulses, not the source of moral impulses.
This is part of a much bigger problem: our developing fear of our own rights and our inability to accept that they cost on a daily basis. We cannot make life perfectly safe, but we can make life a straightjacket by over-legislating. Feel-good legislation is extremely dangerous, especially just before a midterm election, when testicles seem to shrivel up.
If they were serious about a fusion energy source, they would release the classified papers on shock induced fusion along with the counter++ generation designs of fusion weapons. Let's stop the nonsense with "collapsing bubbles" and "laser compression" and "cold fusion". Fusion is a gross phenomenon and you are not going to finesse it. Perhaps a properly designed fusion reactor would use an efficient, well directed fission primary initiator to start a self-sustaining shock-induced fusion reaction in the appropriate fusion fuel.
If you people come to realize one simple thing I feel I will have accomplished a great deal. THERE ARE NO COLONIES POSSIBLE ON EITHER THE MOON OR MARS. And yes, I'm shouting. A colony is a human expansion into unused resources of water, plant and animal life, arable land, and ECONOMICALLY recoverable minerals. That situation does not exist on the Moon. That situation does not exist on Mars. There will NEVER be colonies on either body. STOP USING THE WORD "COLONIES.!" At best there can only be established bases that create a vast sucking of resources FROM THE EARTH! Please put the simple enthusiasm aside and see that space is a vast desert and will never be anything else.
And since there are no self-sustaining colonies possible on either the Moon or Mars, neither the Moon nor Mars are useable as places to sustain mankind in case the Earth is wiped out. That is just idiocy. And I'm talking to YOU Professor Hawking. Get smart for crying out loud.
For the second time in my life the scientific-industrial-complex, supported by a wide-eyed US media, is going to force a massively expensive, incredibly useless journey to that desert called the moon. In order to do what exactly? Beat the Chinese? We haven't been back to the moon since we "beat" the Soviets in space. Why? Because there is no value to doing so. Let's stop this mindless waste of tax dollars and, instead, strive to get control of spending.
Scientific white elephants like the space program are threatening to bankrupt the USA and show a basic misunderstanding of the use of the governmental power to tax. Taxing steals standard-of-living from those taxed. The money belongs to those earning it, not to those spending it and forceably taking money from citizens with the threat of jail is justified only IN THE EXTREME. I see no extreme need to go to the moon.
Creak, crack, stomp stomp stomp, squeeeeeeeeek, "Oh, hello guys! What can I do for you?"
Well, Old MacDonald, it's about your farm. We're from the Canadian Revenue Agency and we have a few questions to ask you regarding the taxes you did or did not pay on the transactions you made from paperclip to farm house. Would you please put these handcuffs on so we can converse in a calm environment?"
Set me straight, but doesn't the dictionary attack mean that dictionary words are encrypted and compared to the hash of encrypted passwords? Doesn't that mean you must have the encryption algorithm? If he used standard hacker tools, the algorithm must have been known. Why doesn't the FBI have a unique encryption algorithm for such critical data?
Depends on where you are. We lost a Captain a few years ago. Convicted of taking a confiscated gun from the property lockup, fired, lost pension. He drives an auto parts car delivering car parts to garages now. He's in his sixties. Two officers got involved in a fight over a woman in a parking lot. They were both suspended, one lost rank, and one is on trial for assault last I heard. One Lieutenant gave himself a machinegun license. They thought it was contrary to state law, but it turns out he was training and fell under the law. But everything is scrutinized and little is forgiven. I've had nothing but polite interactions with local police.
So, how much of that 1/3 is due to the discovery of quarks? Don't count the contribution to the GDP of physics magazines etc. To claim that semiconductor physics and what the LHC will be exploring is in the same league insults the intelligence.
You can call it the impressive "Quine-Duhem Thesis," or you can call it what it is known as commonly--"lying." I guess lying scientists get special treatment and a fancy nomenclature.
"An important step will be the Large Hadron Collider currently being built in Switzerland, which could either help detect so called "superpartners" for known particles, or help put constraints on their nature."(my bolds)
Gee, and how many billions will that massive advance have cost?
Their greatest nightmare is that contact with real objects, directly or indirectly, may subject them to the judgement that they are "mere engineers." Thus, the impetus to climb the ladder of abstraction, to "out scientist" the others. The holy grail of physics seems to be the entirely abstract, unfalsifiable, completely useless theory that wins the Nobel Prize for Physics. With String Theory, they appear to be almost there.
It may be a "disaster for physics", but it's a string curtain shielding the real world from the attentions of these guys. Let them contemplate strings, navel lint, or trans-dimensional bozo-ons for all I care. What we don't need is an easy way to make antimatter bombs.
"The achievement is a major step in the evolution of computer semiconductor technology that could eventually lead to faster networks and more powerful electronics at lower prices, said Bernard Meyerson, vice president and chief technologist in I.B.M.'s systems and technology group. He said developments like this one typically found their way into commercial products in 12 to 24 months."
I think I'll put off buying a new computer for a couple of years or so...
NEWS ITEM: Computer industry collapses due to consumers putting off purchases in anticipation of 500 GHz computers coming real soon now.
And what exactly will altering the moon do to creatures on the Earth? Mining throws up dust. Be sure that in the weak gravity of the moon, the moon would soon be obscured by dust particles orbiting it. Just visibly altering the appearance of the moon with a viewable strip mine would do what to the psychology of humanity? Once again we will go straight ahead to do something that should not be done without severe consideration, and suffer whatever consequences there are.
The moon should be set aside as a reserved area that cannot be mined or altered in any viewable way by humans.
Once again busytech and the scientific-industrial-complex lie about the need and possibility in order to squeeze money from science illiterates.
A colony is an expansion into unused resources of water, arable land, animal and plant life, and ECONOMICALLY recoverable minerals. None of these things exist on the moon. The moon has little metal. We don't need building stone. As for He3, we wouldn't be able to afford the cost--assuming we can get sustainable fusion to work.
And the men who do go there in the delusion that it means something to do so will have the most miserable lives you can possibly imagine, grubbing their daily water requirements out of the moon dirt-if possible at all-at great effort and risk under a weak gravitational field that destroys their muscle and bone and inevitably, their lives.
Colonies are an expansion into unused resources of water, arable land, animal, plant, and economically recoverable mineral resources. There is no water, no arable land, no animal life, and no plant life on mars. No minerals will ever be economically recoverable from Mars. We know these things. There isn't even air to breath. With all due respect to Mr. Hawkings, his opinion about leaving the Earth to form "colonies" on Mars is just one more indication of the mindless support that narrowly educated and experienced scientists give to the scientific-industrial-complex and the massively expensive programs they propose to foist on the public. Mr. Hawkings is trying to scare mankind into death, misery, and suffering in space for the profit of industry and the expansion of "science" whether he is consciously aware of it or not.
Let me tell you the common sense truth of it: as far as the Universe is concerned, we humans are microbes living in a thin scum on the surface of a pebble rotating around a rather mediocre sun. We are not Masters of the Universe. We never will be Masters of the Universe. We will live our species-life and die when our time comes like every other life form in the Universe.
The struggle of mankind since before Galileo has been to suppress our childish egotism to perceive realities. We have made great progress. We no longer think we are the center of the Universe and the Sun revolves around us. But we apparently still have a way to go to see our true place.
Obviously, nature does not make a brain that is 90% unused. That is ridiculous. Evolution makes such things go away. Note your remnant tailbone. Once we started walking upright we lost the need for a tail and now we have merely a tiny piece left at the end of our spine. The 90% unused thing comes from people in the "biz" of brain science who, obviously, lack either a knowledge of evolution or the common sense not to assume that because they don't know why a thing is, it must not be useful.
Nature is not an idiot. She does not expend energy she does not need to and she does not construct objects that have no use. Understand that for many years scientists said that human dna was mostly junk that was unused. Now they find all kinds of stuff going on there. All they had to do in the first place was assume that nature is not an idiot and would not carry around useless stuff in our dna through thousands of generations - and then struggle harder to find the truth.
And, besides the denial of freedom and respect for individuals, these laws actually threaten public safety and health. Pulling someone out of the stream of traffic and making him sit on the side of the road is one of the most dangerous things a police officer can do to someone. A state police officer almost got me killed that way once. Only luck and my common sense saved me.
The whole outsourcing thing seems to be backwards to me. We should be using our massive base of educated and tech-literate people to become the destination of outsourcing from China and India. We've got the base. Let's add the language to create SuperGeeks. Chinese call centers should be in the USA. Same with India ones. Guy from Bangalore calls Detroit to get his PC straight and talks to some American in Hindi. Send our salesmen to India and China, not our programmers or call centers.
From what I've read here, Apple probably had problems with recruiting, training, costs, culture, general educational level, communications, troubleshooting, QUALITY, language etc. etc. You've got to be some kind of corporate moron or delusional to take that on.
Some day companies will get the idea. Then they'll all want to come home. And guess what? They will have lost the thread. I suggest there is a subtle, but very real, longterm cost to pay for spending x years out of country. Things are never as interchangeable or as reversible as they seem.
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently so many people thought the video was kind of moving, since Fox couldn't sit still in his chair and was thrashing about through the entire interview because his Parkinson's was so bad, that it made the front page of Digg.com
Sorry to hear it, but people die of all kinds of things. My father died of a number of things three years ago. One of them was Parkinson's disease. We are going to die of something, stem cells or not. And why exactly are we supposed to rush into crossing moral boundaries and ponying up billions of dollars in research money to save Michael J. Fox or Superman? It is a really bad use of celebrity to plump for the solution of YOUR special disease at all cost. And a bit hysterical, even cowardly. We are supposed to thrash around, do anything, to save these hollywood narcissists, including lose our humanity. I'm personally sick of their public whining when their mortality bites them in the ass.
The cells in question (some 400,000 of them) are being discarded en masse from in vitro fertilization labs anyways, so it's a choice between either letting them get thrown away-- or using them for research that could save lives.
It amazes me how people turn the deep discussion of morality into a simple discussion of waste. They trivialize the subject. They dismiss the un-responded-to point that it is immoral to tear unique human genetic combinations apart for research because of the selfish human need to live forever. To be perfectly clear, it is not a question of wasting a resource by discarding fertilized eggs; it is a question of using those eggs for research contrary to the correct moral strictures against experimenting on humans without their permission. Stop turning it into a mere question of "wasting research food".
Oh, and by the way, I'm not a religious nutcase. I don't believe in gods and demons. Religion is an attempt to explain moral impulses, not the source of moral impulses.
This is part of a much bigger problem: our developing fear of our own rights and our inability to accept that they cost on a daily basis. We cannot make life perfectly safe, but we can make life a straightjacket by over-legislating. Feel-good legislation is extremely dangerous, especially just before a midterm election, when testicles seem to shrivel up.
If they were serious about a fusion energy source, they would release the classified papers on shock induced fusion along with the counter++ generation designs of fusion weapons. Let's stop the nonsense with "collapsing bubbles" and "laser compression" and "cold fusion". Fusion is a gross phenomenon and you are not going to finesse it. Perhaps a properly designed fusion reactor would use an efficient, well directed fission primary initiator to start a self-sustaining shock-induced fusion reaction in the appropriate fusion fuel.
I have no access to classified data.
If you people come to realize one simple thing I feel I will have accomplished a great deal. THERE ARE NO COLONIES POSSIBLE ON EITHER THE MOON OR MARS. And yes, I'm shouting. A colony is a human expansion into unused resources of water, plant and animal life, arable land, and ECONOMICALLY recoverable minerals. That situation does not exist on the Moon. That situation does not exist on Mars. There will NEVER be colonies on either body. STOP USING THE WORD "COLONIES.!" At best there can only be established bases that create a vast sucking of resources FROM THE EARTH! Please put the simple enthusiasm aside and see that space is a vast desert and will never be anything else.
And since there are no self-sustaining colonies possible on either the Moon or Mars, neither the Moon nor Mars are useable as places to sustain mankind in case the Earth is wiped out. That is just idiocy. And I'm talking to YOU Professor Hawking. Get smart for crying out loud.
For the second time in my life the scientific-industrial-complex, supported by a wide-eyed US media, is going to force a massively expensive, incredibly useless journey to that desert called the moon. In order to do what exactly? Beat the Chinese? We haven't been back to the moon since we "beat" the Soviets in space. Why? Because there is no value to doing so. Let's stop this mindless waste of tax dollars and, instead, strive to get control of spending.
Scientific white elephants like the space program are threatening to bankrupt the USA and show a basic misunderstanding of the use of the governmental power to tax. Taxing steals standard-of-living from those taxed. The money belongs to those earning it, not to those spending it and forceably taking money from citizens with the threat of jail is justified only IN THE EXTREME. I see no extreme need to go to the moon.
[Two guys on the porch of a rickety farmhouse]
Knock Knock Knock. "I don't think he's answering." KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK!
Creak, crack, stomp stomp stomp, squeeeeeeeeek, "Oh, hello guys! What can I do for you?"
Well, Old MacDonald, it's about your farm. We're from the Canadian Revenue Agency and we have a few questions to ask you regarding the taxes you did or did not pay on the transactions you made from paperclip to farm house. Would you please put these handcuffs on so we can converse in a calm environment?"
Set me straight, but doesn't the dictionary attack mean that dictionary words are encrypted and compared to the hash of encrypted passwords? Doesn't that mean you must have the encryption algorithm? If he used standard hacker tools, the algorithm must have been known. Why doesn't the FBI have a unique encryption algorithm for such critical data?
Depends on where you are. We lost a Captain a few years ago. Convicted of taking a confiscated gun from the property lockup, fired, lost pension. He drives an auto parts car delivering car parts to garages now. He's in his sixties. Two officers got involved in a fight over a woman in a parking lot. They were both suspended, one lost rank, and one is on trial for assault last I heard. One Lieutenant gave himself a machinegun license. They thought it was contrary to state law, but it turns out he was training and fell under the law. But everything is scrutinized and little is forgiven. I've had nothing but polite interactions with local police.
If you've got savage police, blame yourselves.
The only thing you mature toward is death.
So, how much of that 1/3 is due to the discovery of quarks? Don't count the contribution to the GDP of physics magazines etc. To claim that semiconductor physics and what the LHC will be exploring is in the same league insults the intelligence.
I suggest that even 1+1=2 is wrong at 207.3 teraflops for more than a few seconds.
You can call it the impressive "Quine-Duhem Thesis," or you can call it what it is known as commonly--"lying." I guess lying scientists get special treatment and a fancy nomenclature.
What would things look like to a human if one more dimension suddenly went SPROING! and curled up? Would we all die?
"An important step will be the Large Hadron Collider currently being built in Switzerland, which could either help detect so called "superpartners" for known particles, or help put constraints on their nature."(my bolds)
Gee, and how many billions will that massive advance have cost?
Their greatest nightmare is that contact with real objects, directly or indirectly, may subject them to the judgement that they are "mere engineers." Thus, the impetus to climb the ladder of abstraction, to "out scientist" the others. The holy grail of physics seems to be the entirely abstract, unfalsifiable, completely useless theory that wins the Nobel Prize for Physics. With String Theory, they appear to be almost there.
It may be a "disaster for physics", but it's a string curtain shielding the real world from the attentions of these guys. Let them contemplate strings, navel lint, or trans-dimensional bozo-ons for all I care. What we don't need is an easy way to make antimatter bombs.
I wonder if it can be overclocked? And if so, by how much?
"The achievement is a major step in the evolution of computer semiconductor technology that could eventually lead to faster networks and more powerful electronics at lower prices, said Bernard Meyerson, vice president and chief technologist in I.B.M.'s systems and technology group. He said developments like this one typically found their way into commercial products in 12 to 24 months."
I think I'll put off buying a new computer for a couple of years or so...
NEWS ITEM: Computer industry collapses due to consumers putting off purchases in anticipation of 500 GHz computers coming real soon now.
And what exactly will altering the moon do to creatures on the Earth? Mining throws up dust. Be sure that in the weak gravity of the moon, the moon would soon be obscured by dust particles orbiting it. Just visibly altering the appearance of the moon with a viewable strip mine would do what to the psychology of humanity? Once again we will go straight ahead to do something that should not be done without severe consideration, and suffer whatever consequences there are.
The moon should be set aside as a reserved area that cannot be mined or altered in any viewable way by humans.
Once again busytech and the scientific-industrial-complex lie about the need and possibility in order to squeeze money from science illiterates.
A colony is an expansion into unused resources of water, arable land, animal and plant life, and ECONOMICALLY recoverable minerals. None of these things exist on the moon. The moon has little metal. We don't need building stone. As for He3, we wouldn't be able to afford the cost--assuming we can get sustainable fusion to work.
And the men who do go there in the delusion that it means something to do so will have the most miserable lives you can possibly imagine, grubbing their daily water requirements out of the moon dirt-if possible at all-at great effort and risk under a weak gravitational field that destroys their muscle and bone and inevitably, their lives.
There will be no moon "colonies."
P.S. Play in their world, live in ours.
Colonies are an expansion into unused resources of water, arable land, animal, plant, and economically recoverable mineral resources. There is no water, no arable land, no animal life, and no plant life on mars. No minerals will ever be economically recoverable from Mars. We know these things. There isn't even air to breath. With all due respect to Mr. Hawkings, his opinion about leaving the Earth to form "colonies" on Mars is just one more indication of the mindless support that narrowly educated and experienced scientists give to the scientific-industrial-complex and the massively expensive programs they propose to foist on the public. Mr. Hawkings is trying to scare mankind into death, misery, and suffering in space for the profit of industry and the expansion of "science" whether he is consciously aware of it or not.
Let me tell you the common sense truth of it: as far as the Universe is concerned, we humans are microbes living in a thin scum on the surface of a pebble rotating around a rather mediocre sun. We are not Masters of the Universe. We never will be Masters of the Universe. We will live our species-life and die when our time comes like every other life form in the Universe.
The struggle of mankind since before Galileo has been to suppress our childish egotism to perceive realities. We have made great progress. We no longer think we are the center of the Universe and the Sun revolves around us. But we apparently still have a way to go to see our true place.
Yeah, it says space is continuous, that there is nothing outside of space. Big deal.
Obviously, nature does not make a brain that is 90% unused. That is ridiculous. Evolution makes such things go away. Note your remnant tailbone. Once we started walking upright we lost the need for a tail and now we have merely a tiny piece left at the end of our spine. The 90% unused thing comes from people in the "biz" of brain science who, obviously, lack either a knowledge of evolution or the common sense not to assume that because they don't know why a thing is, it must not be useful.
Nature is not an idiot. She does not expend energy she does not need to and she does not construct objects that have no use. Understand that for many years scientists said that human dna was mostly junk that was unused. Now they find all kinds of stuff going on there. All they had to do in the first place was assume that nature is not an idiot and would not carry around useless stuff in our dna through thousands of generations - and then struggle harder to find the truth.
And, besides the denial of freedom and respect for individuals, these laws actually threaten public safety and health. Pulling someone out of the stream of traffic and making him sit on the side of the road is one of the most dangerous things a police officer can do to someone. A state police officer almost got me killed that way once. Only luck and my common sense saved me.
The whole outsourcing thing seems to be backwards to me. We should be using our massive base of educated and tech-literate people to become the destination of outsourcing from China and India. We've got the base. Let's add the language to create SuperGeeks. Chinese call centers should be in the USA. Same with India ones. Guy from Bangalore calls Detroit to get his PC straight and talks to some American in Hindi. Send our salesmen to India and China, not our programmers or call centers.
From what I've read here, Apple probably had problems with recruiting, training, costs, culture, general educational level, communications, troubleshooting, QUALITY, language etc. etc. You've got to be some kind of corporate moron or delusional to take that on.
Some day companies will get the idea. Then they'll all want to come home. And guess what? They will have lost the thread. I suggest there is a subtle, but very real, longterm cost to pay for spending x years out of country. Things are never as interchangeable or as reversible as they seem.