Wait, what? Why can't the brain produce energy anaerobically? Every cell can produce energy anaerobically, it's a prerequisite to producing energy aerobically. Maybe you meant the brain can't produce *enough* energy aerobically, since aerobic respiration produces about 20 times as much energy as anaerobic?
So you're suggesting that Ubisoft is releasing this game and assuming they're going to lose scads of money, just to provide them with a datapoint in a grand experiment of some sort? In the end Ubisoft wants to make money, not install DRM whenever and wherever they can. They'll do what seems to support that end. Don't assume conspiracies unnecessarily.
Moderate this man up - the Prisoner's Dilemna and Game Theory is EXACTLY how we, as a society, should view cooperation, and it is exactly what is wrong with conventional corporate and capitalistic models. So long as you have competition instead of cooperation, you're going to end up with either a) some people get stiffed and others win (America and Latin America) or b) everyone gets stiffed (say, DHTML, crippled by lack of standards)
Anyone who says competition is better is correct: as long as you have a fall-guy to pay the price for you, competition is better. I don't think this is the sort of world-model to advance. (Hah! I didn't say paradigm.. ah, fuck)
Uh, sorry to tell you this, but that's never going to happen - evolution stopped happening in humans about 50,000 years ago, and in fact can't happen anymore, because the basic mechanism of evolution (survival of the fittest, death of the weakest) can't happen anymore, since we support each other and keep even the weak/crippled/retarded alive.
Would anyone object if there were simply a prohibition on registering a domain name exclusively for resale purposes?
I should think you have to demonstrate a legitimate interest in the domain (i.e., be using it, and not put up a squat site) - and should it be demonstrated that you are a squatter, the domain name is revoked. This is conceptually simple, since the distinction between legitimate use and a squat is pretty clear...
Of course the chances of this happening are slim, since it means less money/more work for whatever registrar takes up this policy. I fear only a legislative solution will repair this... if only Clinton wasn't such a dumb shit about this.
As anyone who has studied cognitive science can tell you, 'beautiful' is NOT subjective. There are definite standards of what is beautiful for males and what is beautiful for females, and they are genetically determined, not culturally determined. Read the works of Nancy Etcoff (of MIT, woo!) for more on this subject.
Some examples:
Ideal facial characteristics for women:
Small jaw
Small brow ridges (and therefore small eyebrows)
Full lips
Clear skin
.70 waist-to-hip ratio
Firm, symmetrical breasts
Generally symmetrical body structure
Ideal Characteristics for men:
Prominent brow ridges
Larger upper musculature
Large jaw
.90 waist-to-hip ratio
Etc, etc. The point is, you can't assume that there's no genetic determination for preference. What IS unclear is if there's genetic determination for features, or if they are merely byproducts of healthy development (i.e., low testosterone levels in women results in small jaws, high testosterone levels in men results in large jaws). So don't assume that there's no agreement on what constitutes 'beautiful'. There probably is. I just don't think 1) everyone will agree on enforcing it and 2) it will result in genes being bred out of the population.
This is only with respect to beauty, of course, I might agree on intelligence/personality, where it's much more subjective.
First of all, Katz fails to qualify WHY exactly he is afraid of genetic selection - does he fear that everyone will, amazingly, select for the same thing? I don't agree. First of all, even when the HG is decoded, people won't agree on what's the 'better' standard - everyone doesn't go out and say, "Hey, let me go marry a blonde, so I can have blonde babies, because blonde babies are better!" - so why would they when they can choose it genetically?
And if you're going to debate things like intelligence, it's unclear, even, how much they are genetically determined. Idiosyncracies of personality seem to have reasonably high heritability, but intelligence estimates vary drastically (read the Bell Curve by Herrnstein and Murray for pro-inherited intelligence, search PubMed for hundreds of journal rebuttals of their dubious conclusions). Science isn't even close to agreeing on the genetic nature of intelligence.
And, assuming in the future that they do find that intelligence is genetically determined, would Katz contend that genetic enhancement of intelligence is evil? That it's more 'human' and 'natural' to have stupider kids? I fail to see the meaning of such sentiments - they're simply vacuuous blubbering and fear of change.
Finally, any sort of eugenics is impossible. First, there's no one to enforce any standard - who will decide, with an open Human Genome, what's good and what's bad? Not the government, certainly. No matter what, people will always have the right to normal children, and so it's impossible for the government to try and restrict genomic choice. GATTACA, fine, maybe. Nice dream. Not going to happen. There's nothing inherently evil in the knowledge of the Human Genome - if the government was going to pursue eugenics in a socially dominating manner, it would have done it already. The Nazis tried, certainly. We can see how well they did.
I agree with those who say that the Human Genome is going to be mostly positive. Genetic profiling may happen, I agree. It's likely that even with legislation against it you'll see genetic discrimination - but against what characteristics? Has anyone ever agreed on what makes a better human being? Why do you assume that, once we know the DNA code for the genome, everyone suddenly will?
For those who are claiming that corporations opening factories overseas will NOT be damaging, I fail to see how this follows...
Labor is directed away from local industry. This should be fairly obvious - Nike can easily out-pay any local industry and still do much better than they would operating out of America. So I don't see how local industry can develop with a labor sink - and an increasingly strong one, as they globalize more and more. (Then again.. there's hundreds of millions of potential workers in Bangladesh)
Of course, if one does NOT allow corporations to invest/export factories overseas, one wonders how small, third-world nations are supposed to start developing global economies. Maybe WB loans.. this is questionable at best, although I am by no means informed on this point.
But, at the same time, I'm wondering how, exactly, does money flood in, when, say, Nike builds a Thai factory? Nike products are being exported and profits retained in America... What do the Thai folk get out of it, other than a pittance? Nike products? My ass.
Obviously, though, the 3WCs must have SOME reason to admit American corporations - other than maybe Nike slipping a few million into the pockets of some Thai government official, which, despite my cynicism, I doubt is what happens. So what do they get out of it?
Note that I am not condemning anyone yet: I am uneducated. I am asking for a brief tutorial, here. (Email would be appreciated.)
God, how the hell can you DARE to call those 'thoughts', you self-centered, complacent piece of shit!
Just because everything is OK for you, Mr. Hoity-toity "Hey, Look, I'm Gainfully Employed" Motherfuck, doesn't mean it's OK for the rest of the world or even the rest of the nation.
I am so SICK of people like you, who live in their own sense of contentment and assume that the rest of the world must be getting along well, and if someone is complaining they're just whiners busting a gut without any cause. It's people like you who kept black people enslaved for generations.. "Aw, fuck, whining niggers.. they don' t have it so bad!" FUCK YOU!
I wish there was something I could do to remove the bullet from your brain that keeps you from identifying with people in need, people with problems. But unfortunately, I can't, because you're secure in your job and maybe your wife and 2 kids and Ford Windstar minivan. I can only hope that someday, all this comes and bites you in the ass, and then you'll realize what those 'whiney, spoiled' people are 'bitching' about.
As to your complaints, HELL YES this decade is worse than the 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s. Because if anything, there are even MORE fucks like you who think everything is A-ok, who are ignorant to the plight of the vast majority of humanity, and don't give a fuck about improving their lot, either. You conveniently pigeonhole all protestors into the category of ignorant whiners, but some of the most educated people in the WORLD are 'ignorant whiners'. Far smarter than you. The leading intellectual in America is one such man. Get off your high horse and EDUCATE yourself, before you post such complacent garbage.
And as to the Romans, Greeks and Persians and their perfect systems? You're even MORE of an ignorant fuck, because anyone who has studied any amount of history knows that the famous democracy of Athens and the Republic of Rome were FABULOUSLY corrupt and wrought with murder, ballot-rigging and scandal to top ANYTHING we've seen today.
Just.. just shut up, damnit, i'm sick of dealing with people like you. You want us to go away? Well, we want you to go away too.
Forget about sawed-offs and other restrictions. The second amendment says unambiguously that the right of the people to keep and bear arms SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED, period, with no exceptions, and this has not been amended at all, as far as i'm aware. But you still have: the ATF. Which does what? regulates firearms. Well, damn. I don't care if you support gun control or not, but this sort of blatant unconstitutionality is RAMPANT and EVIL. If we can't even be assured of basic rights granted to us in the constitution (free speech, right to bear arms, etc.), then what do we have?
Hey, look, our civil rights are being air-lifted away! Bye-bye! bye!
Why is oxygen such a big deal? Life isn't dependent on atmospheric oxygen.. observe the plethora of anaerobic bacteria. Also oxygen doesn't mean diatomic oxygen - for all we know the atmosphere could be gaseous glass. Plus the environment is SO different from Earth, who knows what sort of life would develop? Obviously not like on earth, although I wouldn't rule out autonomous replication completely.
Anyway, me, I think it's all just hooey until they find a class-M planet, which they never will until we develop IST. So everyone mail their congressman to pursue fusion research! (also it will solve problems like having to burn petroleum for making fertilizers and other heinous things).
As a sometimes graphic-artist (read: I doodle on PS in my spare time), I think this is a kickass innovation. The mouse, as a drawing tool, frankly, sucks ass. I can render a human figure in perhaps three minutes with a pen, but with a mouse it takes endless hours of correction to get it right. Forget about subtle things like shading/cross-hatching or anything remotely artistically complex. Mice STINK for drawing.
Also lightpens are just as irritating, because if you don't maintain contact with the surface properly, you're screwed. I'd like to see something that's easy to control the motion of, like a pen. For most of you, precise control isn't that important - just gotta center the mouse on the button/url/whatever and click. If you want to draw a nice curve, though, mice are horrid and disgusting. I, for one, will buy this pen ASAP.
You know, i hate insulting someone who writes so much better than I do, and can even use words like 'perspicacious' without having to look them up, but YOU ARE AN IDIOT.
The point your attacker was making was that the Gregorian/Julian calendar is a CONVENTION, which is NOT BASED ON HARD MATHEMATICS, YOU MORON. It's just decided based on what most people use. Like positive charge flow, you dickhead. Everyone knows that electrons are the units of charge, yet we all persist in using positive charge flow as the convention. Why? BECAUSE IT'S A CONVENTION, YOU SCHLEP.
Galileo wasn't a convention. The setup of the universe wasn't a convenience decided on by the masses to make life easier for themselves. It was a fact of science which could be proved or disproved. The gregorian calendar, on the other hand, is NOT based on any falsifiable facts. It's purely arbitrary. There's no principle which dictates that 2000 MUST be in the 20th century, there's only the axioms that set up the calendar, which can be changed as we deem fit. It's exactly like a software standard. You don't HAVE to say true = 1 and false = 0, you could just as well have it the other way around. But for convenience, the majority have agreed to this standard.. If we felt like, we could change it. Like we did with the calendar, albeit tacitly.
How the hell can you read slashdot and not understand what a standard is, you ignorant slime? How can you be SO DENSE? Don't pretend superiority, you arrogant little puss! Whatever people decide is most convenient for representing the desired goes. In this case, deciding what year a century falls in goes according to the same convention: this would be, century = (int)(year/100) + 1. If you don't like this, go screw yourself, and you and the five other people who are quibbling about how the Gregorian calendar says it won't be the 21st century till 2001 can throw a party a year from now. Dumbass.
Note: all bile and venom in this post is exaggerated. I only think you're slightly dumb.
This might be insane, but instead of being subjective, it might behoove pen devils who like to debate this sort of thing to actually, you know, put some money into researching this, instead of pundit-ing their asses off.
As far as I've read, viewing violent scenarios does tip you towards violence. There's papers out there justifying this fact. However, they all occur in the short-term - there's not much evidence, mostly because of lack of easy experimental verifiability, for viewing violence having long-term effects on your psyche. It would be much better for all of this if someone did this study and shut the fuckers up one way or the other.
On another note, the effect of 'good parenting' which I noticed a lot of people like to tout is questionable - or being questioned, anyway. Read 'The Nurture Assumption' for the full foul on this subject - it claims peers are a bigger influence on kids' development/socialization than parents are. Credible? maybe not. But evolutionary psychology does a fairly good job of dissecting issues like this, and it's sort of irritating that none of these things show up in media articles about the relative merits of games.
If you're going to write like you're informed, it usually makes sense to inform yourself completely, instead of just faking it. Why do we bother debating articles written by people who have NO CLUE what they're talking about, and don't even investigate the facts?
My guess would be that you don't try to defeat the size requirement.. you just use different computational methods. The human brain works quite well, and that's just a big parallel/threshold logic gate setup. Computationally the brain does things that would bog down the best of machines today (like visual processing) just using massive parallelism. I'd guess processors, once they hit the ultimate limit, will basically have to change to more parallel models (this doesn't mean Beowulf) in order to perform faster computation.
You have to wonder how suitable current circuit design (i mean in terms of the basic building blocks, i.e., binary logic gates and binary states) is for pushing speed barriers - I mean you lend yourself to easy duplication and brute-force speed, but I don't think it's the best schema in terms of fast computing - as maybe evidenced by the necessity for hardware specialization. But who knows, not like I know what i'm talking about.
Needless to say, this is bad news. At least assuming from the story if this is being used to protect American business interests, this is the worst sort of nationalism. Geez.. they should rename it from NSA to NZI. Too bad we can't, uh, vote the NSA out of office. Who the fuck comes up with things like that? Democracy, my ass.
Not to defend Gould completely, who maybe has some problems in his logic, but there ARE literal explosions of new species. There are at least two specific points in time that it happened - one, when life first developed (no competition, or little competition for resources) - and 65 million years ago when mammals evolved and dinosaurs went poof. I don't know if you'd consider the last an 'explosion' because only a small subset of life changed character, but evolutionarily speaking a line that had previously remained relatively constant (the dinosaurs) evolved into bizarre new forms.
I don't really understand Bear's point from the review - is he saying that nature forces evolutionary events, or that wide, catastrophic events crop up every so often and force a change? The former smacks of anthropomorphism... the latter I can buy.
Once we are able to design a micro-machine capable to recognising a disease carrying agent, and physically tearing it apart from the inside, resistance via natural selection ceases to be a factor.
The problem is you're basically describing, ah, the human immune system. This is what the immune system does, it recognizes a bug as foreign and zaps it, killing it dead (tm). It's got an elaborate and complex mechanism for recognizing existing bugs and learning new ones. The problem, usually, is bugs don't conveniently remain constant, i.e., if Mr. T-cell is killing off all the cells with o-antigen on their surface, some bacteria will evolve with an o-antigen that will avoid it. I doubt nanotech would be a good antibiotic. Now what it WOULD be good for is going into human cells, snipping retroviral inserts (like HIV) from the human genome, and thus curing people of HIV efficiently.
Sorry to bust your bubble, but this is frankly bullshit. There's no such thing as proper administration of antibiotics - it's impossible to administer them in a manner that will prevent a resistant form from eventually evolving. Sure, if you use it judiciously you can maybe prolong your use of it. But it's always inevitable that it'll evolve resistance - this is how life is.
Also the argument that vanc resistance is a result of farmers feeding antibiotics to cattle is bullshit, because vanc resistant strains develop and thrive in hospitals far earlier than they do agriculturally simply because 'magic bullet' drugs are reserved for clinical use. Vancomycin hasn't been used in agriculture, actually, as far as I know. It's ONLY used for human therapy. There's a ton of antibiotic drugs out there, and resistance to each one is different.
And, as someone else pointed out, there's no way around it - even if you use antibiotics judiciously, they only have a limited lifespan. It's impossible to make them last forever, because selective pressure forces bacteria to develop around them (especially in hospitals, where they're used most and transmission is easy). If you want to stay ahead of the curve you have to find a new 'magic bullet' before your old one goes bad. There are some current favorites - I forget the name, Strathosomething or Sicosomething. This is not a mistake on anyone's part - it's a simple fact of nature.
Exactly. The key point about the Diamond Age being, of course, that we're centuries away from developing nanotechnology. Building these things involves molecular engineering on a vast scale, and a knowledge of biology so precise that you can reduce it to basic simple machines. If you want to produce an autonomous unit capable of reproducing and carrying out a specific function, as well as producing it's own energy, you're essentially talking about a cell.
Obviously research into developing nanotechnology won't start off so sophisticated - you've no doubt heard tales of bugs that can be injected into the bloodstream. But the Diamond Age kind of nanotechnology - nanosites so small and ubiquitous they can interact with individual cells, but so powerful they can produce individual fabrics and computational behavior - this is years away. We need to distill the principles of biology out before we can reproduce them mechanically.
Not to bust your bubble or anything, but the Neanderthals were not our ancestors, they were our contemporaries, probably driven to extinction by war/competition with homo sapiens or maybe homo sapiens sapiens, depending on what you believe.
As to mammoths, most theories hold that we (homo sapiens) chased them into North America and finished them off here.
Ideally a free market represents total absence of any government control. You seem to be of the opinion that this is a two-way street, and that as good capitalists, businessmen should fold over and stay out of politics. This is flawed, because America clearly isn't an ideal free market. The government is already doing a great deal of 'dabbling.' Separation of economics and politics is a fiction, and has been since Alexander Hamilton created the Bank. I don't find it contradictory that a good capitalist would try to control politics - he's merely trying to restore his own control over the market by reducing the role of government.
As far as American individualism goes, you seem to be living in some sort of dream-world. You can take your enlightened self-interest to the American Indians, amongst others. Second, as with any generalization, I don't apply it to individuals. Your insinuation that I am being bigoted by making any sort of generalization is, frankly, stupid. There most certainly is such a thing as national character, and from my experience with the people of this and other nations, this is a fair assessment of America in general. You may take issue with it, but don't call me bigoted until I start judging individuals based on my generalizations. Or learn what bigoted means. As far as so-called American humanitarianism, you are again living in a dream world. I suggest you read some American post-WWII history on the activities of the US State Department. Americans police the world only to maintain their own vested interests. To suggest otherwise is naive in the extreme. Please inform yourself a little further about how American foreign policy really works. It's not motivated by any such thing as 'noble sentiment,' as is befitting of a superpower. US policy clearly states maintenance of the appearance of nobility and morality for the sake of public sentiment, but never the exercise of such in foreign policy except where American interests are protected. This is why we ignore Rwandas and East Timors.
Noble sentiment. I agree with a lot of what you're saying. Unfortunately I think you're being a bit naive about the way democracy works in this country. The reason it fails is because the main avenues of control are corrupted. Observe:
i. Informationbr> Any good democracy requires a well-informed public. If the public is going to decide what's right and what's wrong, they need to know all the facts from an unbiased source. This is impossible in America, because media is a big business. The media outlets that will succeed best are those that are most corporate in nature. Everyone won't listen to NPR, because NPR is a poor marketer. Therefore everyone will get the tainted information peddled by the bastard child of GE, NBC, and the bastard child of tabloid merchant Rupert Murdoch, Fox, and the bastard child of Disney, ABC, and the bastard child of Warner Brothers, Time/Newsweek/CNN. Reporting is not objective or interested in disseminating relevant information. Information flow is fundamentally flawed. The internet has the power to change such things. Maybe/. is one such example - reporting of things the public (or one segment of it) wants to hear about, not what a corporation feels will market well. I.e., no Diana or Junior stories here.
ii. Expertise The public no longer has anywhere near the expertise necessary to know what's in their best interest. Even basic economic principles like flat-taxes have to be digested by commentators and explained to the masses to tell them what the effects are. Forget about complex issues like research biology funding/free speech and censorship/separation of church and state. The public is wholly unable to, for the most part, comprehend all the factors involved. Before you go jumping in about how you disagree, recognize that you are a select minority and you're not representative of how most people think.
iii. Capitalism Not to fault free markets in general, but when you have a society built on money, as ours is, it's inevitable that those with more money will control everything. I don't find it surprising that someone like GE can have such an influence on politics, or that health care reform is so difficult to move along, because damnit, we created the beast that's controlling us. We allow a free market to develop giant corporations with tons of resources and very strong vested interest. Isn't it inevitable that they attempt to exercise their considerable power to protect those vested interests? Certainly. Especially since capitalism is probably good at getting unscrupulous people on top. No one got rich feeding orphans. The solution, of course, is put in controls on how much corporations can influence government, via controlling contributions, etc. Of course, since they're the puppetmasters right now, this is somewhat more difficult than saying "Let's change it."
iv. Individualism Fundamentally American culture is selfish and egocentric. Few individuals are motivated by notions of higher societal good, as is quite common in other nations (like our close neighbor Canada). It's inevitable that in such a situation corruption develops. Until such a fundamental aspect of Americana changes, we'll always be fucked.
Solutions are not simple. They require big-time revolution and reform. Thomas Jefferson was of the opinion that a government needs to be knocked down every twenty to fifty years to prevent stagnation. I think we're overdue for one of these.
I'm sure you've heard the following quote (of Nehru, I think):
"I may not agree with what you say, but I defend to the death your right to say it."
This is the point, see. You may disagree with Singer, but you disagree with his idea, and expression of an idea should not make you label him as immoral. If you do this, you are ensuring that no one will dare to express ideas contrary to that which you believe, and therefore asserting your moral superiority through brute-force intellectual terrorism. I don't object to your lambasting Singer's opinion - I object to your lambasting Singer for holding this opinion.
I respond to you to say that you have completely understood the point of free speech. You suggest that by denying your right to lambast and shut down Singer, JonKatz is denying free speech. Perhaps in the literal sense this is true. But a qualifier is necessary here, perhaps one that wasn't clear to you.
Free speech is supposed to advance the expression of ideas. John Stuart Mill presented the thesis that in an ideal society, ANY idea can be aired without fear of being stifled. That is, if you have an objection to an idea, you do not shut it down purely because you find it anathema. This is tantamount to assuming your infallibility, and that is perhaps the greatest mistake anyone can make.
There is, of course, perfect justification for this. After all, if you find Singer offensive, so what? Is the expression of his offensive idea going to somehow sour the world? Hardly. Why do you find it so galling that someone might have a thought contrary to yours? After all, if your idea is the truth, then how can it suffer when held up against a false idea?
The actual answer, I believe, is that people do NOT know the truth. They hold a comfortable stance because they can understand it and deal with it, but challenges to this stance therefore become vexing, uncomfortable - and thus, you reason, wrong. You are unwilling to change, even though you are not necessarily right. This is flat out wrong. This is dogmatism at its worst.
Why do people poke fun at the Catholic Church for its calls for censorship? Because it's inherently ridiculous for any body claiming to know the truth to fear challenges to it. Can you explain for us, Mr. noeld, why you don't want Singer to say what he says? Why do you fear an idea?
Slashdot Mirror
Wait, what? Why can't the brain produce energy anaerobically? Every cell can produce energy anaerobically, it's a prerequisite to producing energy aerobically. Maybe you meant the brain can't produce *enough* energy aerobically, since aerobic respiration produces about 20 times as much energy as anaerobic?
So you're suggesting that Ubisoft is releasing this game and assuming they're going to lose scads of money, just to provide them with a datapoint in a grand experiment of some sort? In the end Ubisoft wants to make money, not install DRM whenever and wherever they can. They'll do what seems to support that end. Don't assume conspiracies unnecessarily.
Moderate this man up - the Prisoner's Dilemna and Game Theory is EXACTLY how we, as a society, should view cooperation, and it is exactly what is wrong with conventional corporate and capitalistic models. So long as you have competition instead of cooperation, you're going to end up with either a) some people get stiffed and others win (America and Latin America) or b) everyone gets stiffed (say, DHTML, crippled by lack of standards)
Anyone who says competition is better is correct: as long as you have a fall-guy to pay the price for you, competition is better. I don't think this is the sort of world-model to advance. (Hah! I didn't say paradigm.. ah, fuck)
SA
Uh, sorry to tell you this, but that's never going to happen - evolution stopped happening in humans about 50,000 years ago, and in fact can't happen anymore, because the basic mechanism of evolution (survival of the fittest, death of the weakest) can't happen anymore, since we support each other and keep even the weak/crippled/retarded alive.
SA
Would anyone object if there were simply a prohibition on registering a domain name exclusively for resale purposes?
I should think you have to demonstrate a legitimate interest in the domain (i.e., be using it, and not put up a squat site) - and should it be demonstrated that you are a squatter, the domain name is revoked. This is conceptually simple, since the distinction between legitimate use and a squat is pretty clear...
Of course the chances of this happening are slim, since it means less money/more work for whatever registrar takes up this policy. I fear only a legislative solution will repair this... if only Clinton wasn't such a dumb shit about this.
SA
Some examples:
Ideal facial characteristics for women:
Ideal Characteristics for men:
Etc, etc. The point is, you can't assume that there's no genetic determination for preference. What IS unclear is if there's genetic determination for features, or if they are merely byproducts of healthy development (i.e., low testosterone levels in women results in small jaws, high testosterone levels in men results in large jaws). So don't assume that there's no agreement on what constitutes 'beautiful'. There probably is. I just don't think 1) everyone will agree on enforcing it and 2) it will result in genes being bred out of the population.
This is only with respect to beauty, of course, I might agree on intelligence/personality, where it's much more subjective.
SA
This article is meaningless, and this is why:
First of all, Katz fails to qualify WHY exactly he is afraid of genetic selection - does he fear that everyone will, amazingly, select for the same thing? I don't agree. First of all, even when the HG is decoded, people won't agree on what's the 'better' standard - everyone doesn't go out and say, "Hey, let me go marry a blonde, so I can have blonde babies, because blonde babies are better!" - so why would they when they can choose it genetically?
And if you're going to debate things like intelligence, it's unclear, even, how much they are genetically determined. Idiosyncracies of personality seem to have reasonably high heritability, but intelligence estimates vary drastically (read the Bell Curve by Herrnstein and Murray for pro-inherited intelligence, search PubMed for hundreds of journal rebuttals of their dubious conclusions). Science isn't even close to agreeing on the genetic nature of intelligence.
And, assuming in the future that they do find that intelligence is genetically determined, would Katz contend that genetic enhancement of intelligence is evil? That it's more 'human' and 'natural' to have stupider kids? I fail to see the meaning of such sentiments - they're simply vacuuous blubbering and fear of change.
Finally, any sort of eugenics is impossible. First, there's no one to enforce any standard - who will decide, with an open Human Genome, what's good and what's bad? Not the government, certainly. No matter what, people will always have the right to normal children, and so it's impossible for the government to try and restrict genomic choice. GATTACA, fine, maybe. Nice dream. Not going to happen. There's nothing inherently evil in the knowledge of the Human Genome - if the government was going to pursue eugenics in a socially dominating manner, it would have done it already. The Nazis tried, certainly. We can see how well they did.
I agree with those who say that the Human Genome is going to be mostly positive. Genetic profiling may happen, I agree. It's likely that even with legislation against it you'll see genetic discrimination - but against what characteristics? Has anyone ever agreed on what makes a better human being? Why do you assume that, once we know the DNA code for the genome, everyone suddenly will?
Sorry, i'm not buying it.
SA
For those who are claiming that corporations opening factories overseas will NOT be damaging, I fail to see how this follows...
Labor is directed away from local industry. This should be fairly obvious - Nike can easily out-pay any local industry and still do much better than they would operating out of America. So I don't see how local industry can develop with a labor sink - and an increasingly strong one, as they globalize more and more. (Then again.. there's hundreds of millions of potential workers in Bangladesh)
Of course, if one does NOT allow corporations to invest/export factories overseas, one wonders how small, third-world nations are supposed to start developing global economies. Maybe WB loans.. this is questionable at best, although I am by no means informed on this point.
But, at the same time, I'm wondering how, exactly, does money flood in, when, say, Nike builds a Thai factory? Nike products are being exported and profits retained in America... What do the Thai folk get out of it, other than a pittance? Nike products? My ass.
Obviously, though, the 3WCs must have SOME reason to admit American corporations - other than maybe Nike slipping a few million into the pockets of some Thai government official, which, despite my cynicism, I doubt is what happens. So what do they get out of it?
Note that I am not condemning anyone yet: I am uneducated. I am asking for a brief tutorial, here. (Email would be appreciated.)
SA
God, how the hell can you DARE to call those 'thoughts', you self-centered, complacent piece of shit!
Just because everything is OK for you, Mr. Hoity-toity "Hey, Look, I'm Gainfully Employed" Motherfuck, doesn't mean it's OK for the rest of the world or even the rest of the nation.
I am so SICK of people like you, who live in their own sense of contentment and assume that the rest of the world must be getting along well, and if someone is complaining they're just whiners busting a gut without any cause. It's people like you who kept black people enslaved for generations.. "Aw, fuck, whining niggers.. they don' t have it so bad!" FUCK YOU!
I wish there was something I could do to remove the bullet from your brain that keeps you from identifying with people in need, people with problems. But unfortunately, I can't, because you're secure in your job and maybe your wife and 2 kids and Ford Windstar minivan. I can only hope that someday, all this comes and bites you in the ass, and then you'll realize what those 'whiney, spoiled' people are 'bitching' about.
As to your complaints, HELL YES this decade is worse than the 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s. Because if anything, there are even MORE fucks like you who think everything is A-ok, who are ignorant to the plight of the vast majority of humanity, and don't give a fuck about improving their lot, either. You conveniently pigeonhole all protestors into the category of ignorant whiners, but some of the most educated people in the WORLD are 'ignorant whiners'. Far smarter than you. The leading intellectual in America is one such man. Get off your high horse and EDUCATE yourself, before you post such complacent garbage.
And as to the Romans, Greeks and Persians and their perfect systems? You're even MORE of an ignorant fuck, because anyone who has studied any amount of history knows that the famous democracy of Athens and the Republic of Rome were FABULOUSLY corrupt and wrought with murder, ballot-rigging and scandal to top ANYTHING we've seen today.
Just.. just shut up, damnit, i'm sick of dealing with people like you. You want us to go away? Well, we want you to go away too.
SA
Forget about sawed-offs and other restrictions. The second amendment says unambiguously that the right of the people to keep and bear arms SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED, period, with no exceptions, and this has not been amended at all, as far as i'm aware. But you still have: the ATF. Which does what? regulates firearms. Well, damn. I don't care if you support gun control or not, but this sort of blatant unconstitutionality is RAMPANT and EVIL. If we can't even be assured of basic rights granted to us in the constitution (free speech, right to bear arms, etc.), then what do we have?
Hey, look, our civil rights are being air-lifted away! Bye-bye! bye!
SA
Why is oxygen such a big deal? Life isn't dependent on atmospheric oxygen.. observe the plethora of anaerobic bacteria. Also oxygen doesn't mean diatomic oxygen - for all we know the atmosphere could be gaseous glass. Plus the environment is SO different from Earth, who knows what sort of life would develop? Obviously not like on earth, although I wouldn't rule out autonomous replication completely.
Anyway, me, I think it's all just hooey until they find a class-M planet, which they never will until we develop IST. So everyone mail their congressman to pursue fusion research! (also it will solve problems like having to burn petroleum for making fertilizers and other heinous things).
SA
As a sometimes graphic-artist (read: I doodle on PS in my spare time), I think this is a kickass innovation. The mouse, as a drawing tool, frankly, sucks ass. I can render a human figure in perhaps three minutes with a pen, but with a mouse it takes endless hours of correction to get it right. Forget about subtle things like shading/cross-hatching or anything remotely artistically complex. Mice STINK for drawing.
Also lightpens are just as irritating, because if you don't maintain contact with the surface properly, you're screwed. I'd like to see something that's easy to control the motion of, like a pen. For most of you, precise control isn't that important - just gotta center the mouse on the button/url/whatever and click. If you want to draw a nice curve, though, mice are horrid and disgusting. I, for one, will buy this pen ASAP.
SA
You know, i hate insulting someone who writes so much better than I do, and can even use words like 'perspicacious' without having to look them up, but YOU ARE AN IDIOT.
The point your attacker was making was that the Gregorian/Julian calendar is a CONVENTION, which is NOT BASED ON HARD MATHEMATICS, YOU MORON. It's just decided based on what most people use. Like positive charge flow, you dickhead. Everyone knows that electrons are the units of charge, yet we all persist in using positive charge flow as the convention. Why? BECAUSE IT'S A CONVENTION, YOU SCHLEP.
Galileo wasn't a convention. The setup of the universe wasn't a convenience decided on by the masses to make life easier for themselves. It was a fact of science which could be proved or disproved. The gregorian calendar, on the other hand, is NOT based on any falsifiable facts. It's purely arbitrary. There's no principle which dictates that 2000 MUST be in the 20th century, there's only the axioms that set up the calendar, which can be changed as we deem fit. It's exactly like a software standard. You don't HAVE to say true = 1 and false = 0, you could just as well have it the other way around. But for convenience, the majority have agreed to this standard.. If we felt like, we could change it. Like we did with the calendar, albeit tacitly.
How the hell can you read slashdot and not understand what a standard is, you ignorant slime? How can you be SO DENSE? Don't pretend superiority, you arrogant little puss!
Whatever people decide is most convenient for representing the desired goes. In this case, deciding what year a century falls in goes according to the same convention: this would be, century = (int)(year/100) + 1. If you don't like this, go screw yourself, and you and the five other people who are quibbling about how the Gregorian calendar says it won't be the 21st century till 2001 can throw a party a year from now. Dumbass.
Note: all bile and venom in this post is exaggerated. I only think you're slightly dumb.
SA
This might be insane, but instead of being subjective, it might behoove pen devils who like to debate this sort of thing to actually, you know, put some money into researching this, instead of pundit-ing their asses off.
As far as I've read, viewing violent scenarios does tip you towards violence. There's papers out there justifying this fact. However, they all occur in the short-term - there's not much evidence, mostly because of lack of easy experimental verifiability, for viewing violence having long-term effects on your psyche. It would be much better for all of this if someone did this study and shut the fuckers up one way or the other.
On another note, the effect of 'good parenting' which I noticed a lot of people like to tout is questionable - or being questioned, anyway. Read 'The Nurture Assumption' for the full foul on this subject - it claims peers are a bigger influence on kids' development/socialization than parents are. Credible? maybe not. But evolutionary psychology does a fairly good job of dissecting issues like this, and it's sort of irritating that none of these things show up in media articles about the relative merits of games.
If you're going to write like you're informed, it usually makes sense to inform yourself completely, instead of just faking it. Why do we bother debating articles written by people who have NO CLUE what they're talking about, and don't even investigate the facts?
SA
My guess would be that you don't try to defeat the size requirement.. you just use different computational methods. The human brain works quite well, and that's just a big parallel/threshold logic gate setup. Computationally the brain does things that would bog down the best of machines today (like visual processing) just using massive parallelism. I'd guess processors, once they hit the ultimate limit, will basically have to change to more parallel models (this doesn't mean Beowulf) in order to perform faster computation.
You have to wonder how suitable current circuit design (i mean in terms of the basic building blocks, i.e., binary logic gates and binary states) is for pushing speed barriers - I mean you lend yourself to easy duplication and brute-force speed, but I don't think it's the best schema in terms of fast computing - as maybe evidenced by the necessity for hardware specialization. But who knows, not like I know what i'm talking about.
SA
Needless to say, this is bad news. At least assuming from the story if this is being used to protect American business interests, this is the worst sort of nationalism. Geez.. they should rename it from NSA to NZI. Too bad we can't, uh, vote the NSA out of office. Who the fuck comes up with things like that? Democracy, my ass.
SA
Not to defend Gould completely, who maybe has some problems in his logic, but there ARE literal explosions of new species. There are at least two specific points in time that it happened - one, when life first developed (no competition, or little competition for resources) - and 65 million years ago when mammals evolved and dinosaurs went poof. I don't know if you'd consider the last an 'explosion' because only a small subset of life changed character, but evolutionarily speaking a line that had previously remained relatively constant (the dinosaurs) evolved into bizarre new forms.
I don't really understand Bear's point from the review - is he saying that nature forces evolutionary events, or that wide, catastrophic events crop up every so often and force a change? The former smacks of anthropomorphism... the latter I can buy.
SA
Once we are able to design a micro-machine capable to recognising a disease carrying agent, and physically tearing it apart from the inside, resistance via natural selection ceases to be a factor.
The problem is you're basically describing, ah, the human immune system. This is what the immune system does, it recognizes a bug as foreign and zaps it, killing it dead (tm). It's got an elaborate and complex mechanism for recognizing existing bugs and learning new ones. The problem, usually, is bugs don't conveniently remain constant, i.e., if Mr. T-cell is killing off all the cells with o-antigen on their surface, some bacteria will evolve with an o-antigen that will avoid it. I doubt nanotech would be a good antibiotic.
Now what it WOULD be good for is going into human cells, snipping retroviral inserts (like HIV) from the human genome, and thus curing people of HIV efficiently.
SA
Sorry to bust your bubble, but this is frankly bullshit. There's no such thing as proper administration of antibiotics - it's impossible to administer them in a manner that will prevent a resistant form from eventually evolving. Sure, if you use it judiciously you can maybe prolong your use of it. But it's always inevitable that it'll evolve resistance - this is how life is.
Also the argument that vanc resistance is a result of farmers feeding antibiotics to cattle is bullshit, because vanc resistant strains develop and thrive in hospitals far earlier than they do agriculturally simply because 'magic bullet' drugs are reserved for clinical use. Vancomycin hasn't been used in agriculture, actually, as far as I know. It's ONLY used for human therapy. There's a ton of antibiotic drugs out there, and resistance to each one is different.
And, as someone else pointed out, there's no way around it - even if you use antibiotics judiciously, they only have a limited lifespan. It's impossible to make them last forever, because selective pressure forces bacteria to develop around them (especially in hospitals, where they're used most and transmission is easy). If you want to stay ahead of the curve you have to find a new 'magic bullet' before your old one goes bad. There are some current favorites - I forget the name, Strathosomething or Sicosomething. This is not a mistake on anyone's part - it's a simple fact of nature.
SA
Exactly. The key point about the Diamond Age being, of course, that we're centuries away from developing nanotechnology. Building these things involves molecular engineering on a vast scale, and a knowledge of biology so precise that you can reduce it to basic simple machines. If you want to produce an autonomous unit capable of reproducing and carrying out a specific function, as well as producing it's own energy, you're essentially talking about a cell.
Obviously research into developing nanotechnology won't start off so sophisticated - you've no doubt heard tales of bugs that can be injected into the bloodstream. But the Diamond Age kind of nanotechnology - nanosites so small and ubiquitous they can interact with individual cells, but so powerful they can produce individual fabrics and computational behavior - this is years away. We need to distill the principles of biology out before we can reproduce them mechanically.
SA
Not to bust your bubble or anything, but the Neanderthals were not our ancestors, they were our contemporaries, probably driven to extinction by war/competition with homo sapiens or maybe homo sapiens sapiens, depending on what you believe.
As to mammoths, most theories hold that we (homo sapiens) chased them into North America and finished them off here.
SA
Ideally a free market represents total absence of any government control. You seem to be of the opinion that this is a two-way street, and that as good capitalists, businessmen should fold over and stay out of politics. This is flawed, because America clearly isn't an ideal free market. The government is already doing a great deal of 'dabbling.' Separation of economics and politics is a fiction, and has been since Alexander Hamilton created the Bank. I don't find it contradictory that a good capitalist would try to control politics - he's merely trying to restore his own control over the market by reducing the role of government.
As far as American individualism goes, you seem to be living in some sort of dream-world. You can take your enlightened self-interest to the American Indians, amongst others.
Second, as with any generalization, I don't apply it to individuals. Your insinuation that I am being bigoted by making any sort of generalization is, frankly, stupid. There most certainly is such a thing as national character, and from my experience with the people of this and other nations, this is a fair assessment of America in general. You may take issue with it, but don't call me bigoted until I start judging individuals based on my generalizations. Or learn what bigoted means.
As far as so-called American humanitarianism, you are again living in a dream world. I suggest you read some American post-WWII history on the activities of the US State Department. Americans police the world only to maintain their own vested interests. To suggest otherwise is naive in the extreme. Please inform yourself a little further about how American foreign policy really works. It's not motivated by any such thing as 'noble sentiment,' as is befitting of a superpower. US policy clearly states maintenance of the appearance of nobility and morality for the sake of public sentiment, but never the exercise of such in foreign policy except where American interests are protected. This is why we ignore Rwandas and East Timors.
SA
Noble sentiment. I agree with a lot of what you're saying. Unfortunately I think you're being a bit naive about the way democracy works in this country. The reason it fails is because the main avenues of control are corrupted. Observe:
/. is one such example - reporting of things the public (or one segment of it) wants to hear about, not what a corporation feels will market well. I.e., no Diana or Junior stories here.
i. Informationbr> Any good democracy requires a well-informed public. If the public is going to decide what's right and what's wrong, they need to know all the facts from an unbiased source. This is impossible in America, because media is a big business. The media outlets that will succeed best are those that are most corporate in nature. Everyone won't listen to NPR, because NPR is a poor marketer.
Therefore everyone will get the tainted information peddled by the bastard child of GE, NBC, and the bastard child of tabloid merchant Rupert Murdoch, Fox, and the bastard child of Disney, ABC, and the bastard child of Warner Brothers, Time/Newsweek/CNN. Reporting is not objective or interested in disseminating relevant information. Information flow is fundamentally flawed.
The internet has the power to change such things. Maybe
ii. Expertise
The public no longer has anywhere near the expertise necessary to know what's in their best interest. Even basic economic principles like flat-taxes have to be digested by commentators and explained to the masses to tell them what the effects are. Forget about complex issues like research biology funding/free speech and censorship/separation of church and state. The public is wholly unable to, for the most part, comprehend all the factors involved.
Before you go jumping in about how you disagree, recognize that you are a select minority and you're not representative of how most people think.
iii. Capitalism
Not to fault free markets in general, but when you have a society built on money, as ours is, it's inevitable that those with more money will control everything. I don't find it surprising that someone like GE can have such an influence on politics, or that health care reform is so difficult to move along, because damnit, we created the beast that's controlling us. We allow a free market to develop giant corporations with tons of resources and very strong vested interest. Isn't it inevitable that they attempt to exercise their considerable power to protect those vested interests? Certainly. Especially since capitalism is probably good at getting unscrupulous people on top. No one got rich feeding orphans.
The solution, of course, is put in controls on how much corporations can influence government, via controlling contributions, etc. Of course, since they're the puppetmasters right now, this is somewhat more difficult than saying "Let's change it."
iv. Individualism
Fundamentally American culture is selfish and egocentric. Few individuals are motivated by notions of higher societal good, as is quite common in other nations (like our close neighbor Canada). It's inevitable that in such a situation corruption develops. Until such a fundamental aspect of Americana changes, we'll always be fucked.
Solutions are not simple. They require big-time revolution and reform. Thomas Jefferson was of the opinion that a government needs to be knocked down every twenty to fifty years to prevent stagnation. I think we're overdue for one of these.
SA
I'm sure you've heard the following quote (of Nehru, I think):
"I may not agree with what you say, but I defend to the death your right to say it."
This is the point, see. You may disagree with Singer, but you disagree with his idea, and expression of an idea should not make you label him as immoral. If you do this, you are ensuring that no one will dare to express ideas contrary to that which you believe, and therefore asserting your moral superiority through brute-force intellectual terrorism. I don't object to your lambasting Singer's opinion - I object to your lambasting Singer for holding this opinion.
SA
Dear noeld,
I respond to you to say that you have completely understood the point of free speech. You suggest that by denying your right to lambast and shut down Singer, JonKatz is denying free speech. Perhaps in the literal sense this is true. But a qualifier is necessary here, perhaps one that wasn't clear to you.
Free speech is supposed to advance the expression of ideas. John Stuart Mill presented the thesis that in an ideal society, ANY idea can be aired without fear of being stifled. That is, if you have an objection to an idea, you do not shut it down purely because you find it anathema. This is tantamount to assuming your infallibility, and that is perhaps the greatest mistake anyone can make.
There is, of course, perfect justification for this. After all, if you find Singer offensive, so what? Is the expression of his offensive idea going to somehow sour the world? Hardly. Why do you find it so galling that someone might have a thought contrary to yours? After all, if your idea is the truth, then how can it suffer when held up against a false idea?
The actual answer, I believe, is that people do NOT know the truth. They hold a comfortable stance because they can understand it and deal with it, but challenges to this stance therefore become vexing, uncomfortable - and thus, you reason, wrong. You are unwilling to change, even though you are not necessarily right. This is flat out wrong. This is dogmatism at its worst.
Why do people poke fun at the Catholic Church for its calls for censorship? Because it's inherently ridiculous for any body claiming to know the truth to fear challenges to it. Can you explain for us, Mr. noeld, why you don't want Singer to say what he says? Why do you fear an idea?
SA