To be far I've had some CDs with pretty crappy audio quality, in some cases so bad I was tempted to just throw away the CD in disgust. Without knowing the quality of the input audio those MP3s were ripped from you can't be a judge of them. A more valid experiment would be to take a CD, rip some of it's tracks to 320 bit MP3, and play the CD and ripped tracks through the same speaker system. It's important not to burn those MP3s back to CD because now you've done two conversions (CD->MP3->CD) and added more entropy to the data in so doing.
He's wrong because he's against something that could prove his beliefs wrong for no other reason then because it could prove them wrong. It's not that he doesn't believe in cloning, as it's clearly demonstrable that it works and it's doable therefor it exists, and if after seeing proof of it he doesn't believe in it, then he's clearly irrational and probably needs psychological counseling. If he could give even one single remotely reasoned argument, even if it relies on something the majority of people can agree on but not prove (such as wiping out the human race for instance) he might have a point, but in a debate, because I say so is never a valid argument, as it violates the entire principle of a debate. It's true that if A->B and A is false then B is not automatically false, but by the same token if A is your only argument in favor B, then it sure seems like B is false, particularly if you can show C->!B and that C is provably true.
The majority of people don't care one way or another about cloning. As for why he's wrong, he's wrong because he has no reason to be against cloning other then it threatens his world outlook. If he had even one reason other then "because it contradicts my religious belief" he might have a point, but he doesn't, therefor he has nothing to say on the issue of what others do. He has every right to say he doesn't want to be cloned, but that's the extent of his rights. Actually let me clarify, he can of course say he doesn't think people should be cloned, but of course it's everybody else's right to laugh at him and go about our business, which is exactly what I plan on doing.
In that case he's still wrong, as he does not represent my opinion or my conscience, nor does he represent even a majority of the Earth's populations opinion or conscience. I'm not even sure he represents a majority of the USA's opinion or conscience. I'll take a well reasoned argument backed by a little gut feeling over no reason at all backed by some hand waving and a book written by committee a couple thousand years ago. Morality is not the same thing as Religion.
There is no rational scientific reason for not doing ANYTHING. Nuking the entire crust of the planet to see if you can get it to liquefy and join with the mantle is a valid scientific experiment. It's an extreme example, but that's the point: science has no morals whatsoever, its only pursuit is knowledge. Sure there is. If you nuked the mantle it would in addition to killing lots of people and therefore reducing that countries productivity, also tend to cause all kinds of environmental destruction which has the potential to destroy the biosphere.
At the bare minimum you could use economic and social theories to show why murdering people is wrong and leads to unsustainable societies. It's possible to argue against things scientifically it's just a lot harder then just saying "because I say so".
Well, I didn't necessarily mean only scientists working together closely, rather everyone in the science field with at least a moderate understanding of the issue being decided on. Basically my objection is to someone without a reasonable understanding of the facts, and who clearly has a religious bias making decisions about a non-religious issue.
Well, that might work except this situation isn't really comparable to that. People aren't being selected in cloning, their being duplicated, they already exist as it were, so I don't see how you can claim that someone is being prevented from being born, quite the opposite. Also, with regard to screening children, that doesn't really make much sense either. In the ideal case we forgo the entire biological process and custom tailor the genetics prior to injection into the egg. For those concerned that this will lead to a mono-culture that's a valid worry, but I don't think it's one that will really pan out as there's info variation in tastes to keep a fairly diverse gene pool. Of course, some of the cultures that have biases for males over females may have a problem, but they have that problem now, and frankly choosing to have a male child, rather then aborting or killing a female child seems preferable no matter how you look at it.
I wouldn't have been able to keep a straight face if someone told me that. I used to have fun with those sorts of people by getting them to contradict themselves using logic, but it got old after I realized that no matter how blatantly stupid or contradictory their statements they'll never change them. For something along the same vein, check out the movie Inherit the Wind.
The problem with that is that he's blatantly biased to a particular outlook that a not insignificant portion of the world doesn't share. He cannot possibly understand fully all the implications for cloning and as such is making a knee-jerk reaction to it based on the fact that it contradicts his world outlook. If we had followed the same reasoning in the past telescopes and orbital physics would be banned because astronomy contradicted the world outlook of the church at the time. Now, if he can come up with a rational scientific reason for not cloning, fine, we'll hear him out, but if all he can come up with is "because it makes me scared" then he needs to stay out of it.
I think his point is that human beings shouldn't be made in labs, as if they were bacteria cultures or something like that. In Vitro fertilization basically already does that. Yes at some point the fetus is re-implanted, but initially it starts development in a petri-dish.
Ethics? We don't need no steenkin' ethics! Sure we do, I just don't think that the pope is in a position to judge the ethics of science. That's a job for the scientists that actually understand what they're doing.
If it's too expensive to roof the entire stadium, they could just make hundreds of thousands of tiny roofs, and maybe put them on top of sticks. Then all they do is handle these little portable roofs out to all the people attending. The athletes of course might have a problem, but the actual area they compete in is much smaller and it should be much cheaper to build a roof there. Hey, someone call Bezos, maybe he can patent that portable roof idea.
Yeah, my first reaction was "WTF!?!?" so I went and checked some other articles to see if it was a new site design or something, but it looks like it's just this article.
You have a Cold War propaganda perspective on the functionality of the Russian government. Actually I have no perspective on the functionality of the Russian government. My statement was based on the article. The article speculates that the people responsible are known to reside in Russia, but that the Russian police are refusing to help with the investigation.
What I do have a perspective on is the relative difference in impact between Storm, and Nigerian scammers, and I stated as much in the second part of my post. Also having read articles in the past about how the scammers and police in Nigeria function I have some idea as to their capabilities, and think they have very limited ability to track those responsible. I have no idea about the Russians, but I suppose it's possible that their police are incapable of tracking down individuals on their networks, although I would be very surprised to hear that.
open your eyes, everything uses torrents these days, game demo's/patches for everything and they are as big as a gig each. Yep, World of Warcraft, one of the most popular games in the world uses a customized bittorrent client to distribute patches. Most distros, and often creative commons or public domain videos are also distributed via bittorrent. On occasion I've even see new movie trailers being distributed with bittorrent, although admittedly that's pretty rare considering the MPAAs rocky relations with P2P.
The reason this is news worthy is it appears to be more of a willful act to block prosecution, where as the ones over in Nigeria (although probably not China) are more a case of the local infrastructure and police not being capable of tracking these people. The other factor is one of organization and impact. Sure, a few Nigerians spam the hell out of people and manage to do some 419 scams, but all in all it's a few individuals doing it and they don't get all that many hits. The Russian group behind Storm on the other hand is a well organized group not random individuals, and they impact hundreds of thousands (millions?) of individuals.
To me, the internet looks like a big ecosystem. Things have become overpopulated, and as a result, the storm disease is keeping the population in check. It should kill off a chunk of the population, and then it will disappear. Unfortunately it's not actually keeping the population in check as that would imply those infected with it are somehow killed off at some point which they aren't. Now, if ISPs started reacting to systems infected with storm by cutting their internet connection, then yes, it might function to keep the population in check. As it is, it's a bit more like the common cold, a major nuisance for those infected, but not really anything major otherwise, and serves very little purpose (except perhaps to encourage better "immune systems").
I don't blame you, or them for that matter, but it is accurate. They are acting based on race. Actually, it's a fine distinction, but I differentiate actions taken based on race versus those taken based on culture. To me, racism would be making a decision about someone based on a physical property, or perceived physical property of that person, where as to make a decision based on the persons culture would not be racism. It's perfectly possible that someone could be racially anglo-saxon, but be from China, and therefore part of the group and culture that the one's you were talking about were associating with. This is clearly not racism, as the race of the individual doesn't matter, rather it's a cultural preference.
Try letting the Chinese take over 1/3 of your entire city, ie Vancouver, and see what happens. Outright refusal to learn English, contempt for non-Chinese (particulary Indians/Pakistanis, for some reason), massive corruption, etc. Basically a wholesale import of modern China. Canadian multiculturalism = failure.
I hate to say it, but the Americans got immigration right, aside from the whole illegals thing.
Not to feed trolls or anything, but you see something very similar with other cultures as well, particularly the Spanish ones. Ask anyone that's ever been to Miami Florida about what happens when a particular foreign culture dominates an area. That being said, part of the reason Americans have gotten such a bad rap in the rest of the world is because of the tendency to go vacationing outside the US, but no bother to do any sort of research or even attempt to learn the language or the customs of the place they're going to, so it cuts both ways. At least in the case of Americans they're only visiting, not living there.
I'd hesitate to use the term racism in this context. It probably has a lot more to do with culture and mindset, as well as comfort level when dealing with people of a common background. One of the primary differences between the stereotypical eastern vs. western mindsets is that westerners tend to value self-sufficiency and the individual, where as easterners tend to favor selflessness and groups. Part of the reason they tend to group together, aside from sharing a common background and therefore being easier to relate with could be this cultural focus on belonging to a group. Western cultures, being more individualistic would tend to have less problem interacting with many different groups.
Thanks for the correction. It's been a little while since I saw the article (and I skimmed it at the time) and all I remembered was I read about it on the BBC site, so I rather stupidly assumed it had happened on England.
Slight clarification about that last point. We do in fact seem to hear a lot about "Inept Terrorists" in the news, although the news never reports them as inept, rather they spin it as the brave efforts of the police narrowly avoiding massive catastrophe. Never mind the fact that the plan the morons had concocted was so bad they would at most hurt (or kill) themselves, and if they got really lucky a few bystanders. Good example was a recent case where some "terrorists" had loaded their cars up with cans of gasoline and then planned on lighting them on fire believing this would lead to massive explosions (this happened over in England btw). Anyone who knows about these types of things knows all you're going to get is a big hot fireball as the car burns down, and that's about it (might work if you had a proper fuel air mixture, but just dumping containers of gas in a car isn't going to cut it). So yeah, plenty of inept to go around.
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To be far I've had some CDs with pretty crappy audio quality, in some cases so bad I was tempted to just throw away the CD in disgust. Without knowing the quality of the input audio those MP3s were ripped from you can't be a judge of them. A more valid experiment would be to take a CD, rip some of it's tracks to 320 bit MP3, and play the CD and ripped tracks through the same speaker system. It's important not to burn those MP3s back to CD because now you've done two conversions (CD->MP3->CD) and added more entropy to the data in so doing.
He's wrong because he's against something that could prove his beliefs wrong for no other reason then because it could prove them wrong. It's not that he doesn't believe in cloning, as it's clearly demonstrable that it works and it's doable therefor it exists, and if after seeing proof of it he doesn't believe in it, then he's clearly irrational and probably needs psychological counseling. If he could give even one single remotely reasoned argument, even if it relies on something the majority of people can agree on but not prove (such as wiping out the human race for instance) he might have a point, but in a debate, because I say so is never a valid argument, as it violates the entire principle of a debate. It's true that if A->B and A is false then B is not automatically false, but by the same token if A is your only argument in favor B, then it sure seems like B is false, particularly if you can show C->!B and that C is provably true.
The majority of people don't care one way or another about cloning. As for why he's wrong, he's wrong because he has no reason to be against cloning other then it threatens his world outlook. If he had even one reason other then "because it contradicts my religious belief" he might have a point, but he doesn't, therefor he has nothing to say on the issue of what others do. He has every right to say he doesn't want to be cloned, but that's the extent of his rights. Actually let me clarify, he can of course say he doesn't think people should be cloned, but of course it's everybody else's right to laugh at him and go about our business, which is exactly what I plan on doing.
In that case he's still wrong, as he does not represent my opinion or my conscience, nor does he represent even a majority of the Earth's populations opinion or conscience. I'm not even sure he represents a majority of the USA's opinion or conscience. I'll take a well reasoned argument backed by a little gut feeling over no reason at all backed by some hand waving and a book written by committee a couple thousand years ago. Morality is not the same thing as Religion.
Thank you captain obvious, glad you got at least part of the joke.
At the bare minimum you could use economic and social theories to show why murdering people is wrong and leads to unsustainable societies. It's possible to argue against things scientifically it's just a lot harder then just saying "because I say so".
Well, I didn't necessarily mean only scientists working together closely, rather everyone in the science field with at least a moderate understanding of the issue being decided on. Basically my objection is to someone without a reasonable understanding of the facts, and who clearly has a religious bias making decisions about a non-religious issue.
Well, that might work except this situation isn't really comparable to that. People aren't being selected in cloning, their being duplicated, they already exist as it were, so I don't see how you can claim that someone is being prevented from being born, quite the opposite. Also, with regard to screening children, that doesn't really make much sense either. In the ideal case we forgo the entire biological process and custom tailor the genetics prior to injection into the egg. For those concerned that this will lead to a mono-culture that's a valid worry, but I don't think it's one that will really pan out as there's info variation in tastes to keep a fairly diverse gene pool. Of course, some of the cultures that have biases for males over females may have a problem, but they have that problem now, and frankly choosing to have a male child, rather then aborting or killing a female child seems preferable no matter how you look at it.
I wouldn't have been able to keep a straight face if someone told me that. I used to have fun with those sorts of people by getting them to contradict themselves using logic, but it got old after I realized that no matter how blatantly stupid or contradictory their statements they'll never change them. For something along the same vein, check out the movie Inherit the Wind.
The problem with that is that he's blatantly biased to a particular outlook that a not insignificant portion of the world doesn't share. He cannot possibly understand fully all the implications for cloning and as such is making a knee-jerk reaction to it based on the fact that it contradicts his world outlook. If we had followed the same reasoning in the past telescopes and orbital physics would be banned because astronomy contradicted the world outlook of the church at the time. Now, if he can come up with a rational scientific reason for not cloning, fine, we'll hear him out, but if all he can come up with is "because it makes me scared" then he needs to stay out of it.
I wonder how he comes around to call cloning an 'affront to human dignity'. Exactly who's dignity is being affronted, the clones?
If it's too expensive to roof the entire stadium, they could just make hundreds of thousands of tiny roofs, and maybe put them on top of sticks. Then all they do is handle these little portable roofs out to all the people attending. The athletes of course might have a problem, but the actual area they compete in is much smaller and it should be much cheaper to build a roof there. Hey, someone call Bezos, maybe he can patent that portable roof idea.
Yeah, my first reaction was "WTF!?!?" so I went and checked some other articles to see if it was a new site design or something, but it looks like it's just this article.
What I do have a perspective on is the relative difference in impact between Storm, and Nigerian scammers, and I stated as much in the second part of my post. Also having read articles in the past about how the scammers and police in Nigeria function I have some idea as to their capabilities, and think they have very limited ability to track those responsible. I have no idea about the Russians, but I suppose it's possible that their police are incapable of tracking down individuals on their networks, although I would be very surprised to hear that.
The reason this is news worthy is it appears to be more of a willful act to block prosecution, where as the ones over in Nigeria (although probably not China) are more a case of the local infrastructure and police not being capable of tracking these people. The other factor is one of organization and impact. Sure, a few Nigerians spam the hell out of people and manage to do some 419 scams, but all in all it's a few individuals doing it and they don't get all that many hits. The Russian group behind Storm on the other hand is a well organized group not random individuals, and they impact hundreds of thousands (millions?) of individuals.
I hate to say it, but the Americans got immigration right, aside from the whole illegals thing.
Not to feed trolls or anything, but you see something very similar with other cultures as well, particularly the Spanish ones. Ask anyone that's ever been to Miami Florida about what happens when a particular foreign culture dominates an area. That being said, part of the reason Americans have gotten such a bad rap in the rest of the world is because of the tendency to go vacationing outside the US, but no bother to do any sort of research or even attempt to learn the language or the customs of the place they're going to, so it cuts both ways. At least in the case of Americans they're only visiting, not living there.
I'd hesitate to use the term racism in this context. It probably has a lot more to do with culture and mindset, as well as comfort level when dealing with people of a common background. One of the primary differences between the stereotypical eastern vs. western mindsets is that westerners tend to value self-sufficiency and the individual, where as easterners tend to favor selflessness and groups. Part of the reason they tend to group together, aside from sharing a common background and therefore being easier to relate with could be this cultural focus on belonging to a group. Western cultures, being more individualistic would tend to have less problem interacting with many different groups.
It's even worse in the CS department.
Thanks for the correction. It's been a little while since I saw the article (and I skimmed it at the time) and all I remembered was I read about it on the BBC site, so I rather stupidly assumed it had happened on England.
Slight clarification about that last point. We do in fact seem to hear a lot about "Inept Terrorists" in the news, although the news never reports them as inept, rather they spin it as the brave efforts of the police narrowly avoiding massive catastrophe. Never mind the fact that the plan the morons had concocted was so bad they would at most hurt (or kill) themselves, and if they got really lucky a few bystanders. Good example was a recent case where some "terrorists" had loaded their cars up with cans of gasoline and then planned on lighting them on fire believing this would lead to massive explosions (this happened over in England btw). Anyone who knows about these types of things knows all you're going to get is a big hot fireball as the car burns down, and that's about it (might work if you had a proper fuel air mixture, but just dumping containers of gas in a car isn't going to cut it). So yeah, plenty of inept to go around.