"We are nearing the technological capability to do this."
BS. The molecular biology is nowhere near there and is unlikely to be for decades if not centuries, especially considering that even routine sequence alignments constitute an NP complete problem for even modestly sized proteins and nucleic acids.
In contrast, what we do currently know about space biology strongly suggests that prolonged space travel is a contraindication for human life.
I can see it now either way you go: physical snail mail: "Sorry no one by this name at this address". Or email: "Mailer daemon unable to transmit your message, please resend".
I think humanity would be far better off studying space with probes, telescopes, and robots and forget the manned travel as pure fantasy. Better to put that kind of money into exploring our oceans, which are actually far more poorly studied than outer space, particularly in terms of funding, with a far greater likely payoff for humanity.
There simply is no such thing as the "cheapest way to travel between the stars".
It will be extremely hard to "look" if your eyeballs have deformed and your optic nerves have degenerated as the result of prolonged exposure to deep space. Even assuming we could chart such a course, virtually any trip in any direction would take generations, unless one were to accelerate to speeds that would probably shear living cellular material to shreds. Even if you could overcome these effects and could reach speeds 100 times faster than is currently possible, it would take 500 years just to reach the nearest star system. Think of the amount of fuel you would have to take with you just to stop once you got there, not to mention, who would want to get out for "pit stops" at a few ultracold refrigerators on the way there?
So what, it would hardly matter since a human arriving at even the first "stepping stone" is likely be totally blind as a result of prolonged exposure to deep space, which causes severe permanent deformation of the human eyeball and degeneration of the optic nerve. This effect begins to occur on even much shorter trips, much less one into interstellar space. Dyson is a physicist, so its not surprising he doesn't know much about space biology.
The problem with global warming isn't that people disagree concerning the methodology used to detect it. No one is concerned about that. The problem with global warming is how quickly the planet is heating. Personally, I don't have any problem with Al Gore profiting. After all given the current state of affairs the oil companies have been doing most of the profiting for years. I see no objecting to spreading the wealth and consequently I'm a big fan of getting rid of the oil depletion allowance that permits the oil companies to deduct enough from their taxes every year a higher and higher price for the oil still left in the ground, so they don't have to pay any taxes at all.
Alternatively lets have a depletion allowance for every company and hence every individual, since if corporations are people then people are corporations. After all, all commodities and services are finite. By the logic of oil company tax lobbyists I should be entitled to a tax deduction for all the ice cream cones I haven't eaten yet, since after all, ever time I eat one there are fewer left.
Yes, the entire idea of engineering humans to avoid raw meet would have significant political ramifications as well. Without a craving for raw meet the entire Tea Party could go extinct in just a few days. Just when the GOP has created the perfectly engineered voter, things could go very, very wrong. The republican controlled House must never allow this to happen!
What you don't see is what Google's "advertisers" are doing with your personal information beside putting it on webpages. Some are using it to profile citizens so that they know how best to influence markets and compete with other businesses, such as the one you might work for or soon not work for as the case may be.
Accurately measuring what you competition can do relative to you own efforts makes sense. Its really all about how many servers are put into indexing and monitoring webpage usage needed to prioritize around webpage "hits", under the assumption that a site with more "hits" is "more important" in some sense.
Searching yourself is a really stupid idea. It provides a key for advertisers and other scam artists to amass personalized information about you in one fell swoop and link it to your machine ID and IP addresses. Once these are sold, you are a sitting duck for identity theft.
All that your experiment says is that google is way ahead of bing in commoditizing your identity.
Isn't this just a function of the number of servers used for indexing? As they get more hits and become more popular, they will likely add more servers and hence the difference that may exist will largely be eliminated.
Which leads to the question, what if a bright FOSS programmer developed a peer to peer application that could use a small slice of millions of mostly idle PC's to conduct and index searches so that internet search wouldn't require commercial enterprises at all? Just think of how few ads we would have to be subjected to and how much it would lower the cost of advertising on the internet and hence contribute to FOSS development. You would think the business community would be happy with that as both google and bin are parasitic in this respect.
Obama didn't gut the space program. Bush decided we wouldn't replace the shuttle before having an alternative space vehicle in place to take its place. Bush destroyed the economy so Obama was left with no resources to fund NASA, whether he wanted to or not. Obama was handed a mess and he's had to deal with it. Under the circumstances, I think he has done pretty well and NASA is once again focusing on more relevant science rather than continue the Bush plan to build a moon base and go to mars, all without a budget, just like we went into Iraq without a budget, since of course the Iraq war would just pay for itself, just like Medicare Part D and tax cuts for billionaires and millionaires did.
"As to europe having a safety net, possibly but that has nothing to do with economic growth or the laffer curve. The taxes. Countries that eat up a larger percentage of GDP in taxes have lower economic growth."
BS. Look at Germany and Denmark.
"I want growth. I think growth makes us stronger as a species, "
"First you have to consider that the reason you get less revenue as you increase the tax rate is that you're depressing the economy."
BS. Taxes where higher under Clinton and the economy was much much better than it ever was under Bush, whose tax policies we are still basically living with since republicans have blocked virtually all efforts to change them.
"By refusing to either (a) collect revenues that cover the government's obligations, or (b) do the hard work to convince anyone to actually reduce those obligations, they sentence this nation to drown in a vast pit of debt."
Which of course is precisely what the GOP bankers want.
We may all hate bankers, but regardless of party they always seem to get what they want. You owing them money and you giving them your money to invest for you, paying you less than you could get investing elsewhere just as they do.
We may have adapted and in doing so stretched the limit of the environments which we have been able to live in. However, we are still constrained to rely on ecosystems to keep us alive by providing suitable conditions that permit us to grow the plants and animals that we eat and use for resources. As we alter global environments, most notably through habitat destruction and carbon dioxide pollution, we are reaching the limits beyond which many of these plants and animals we depend on can not survive and as a results imperil our own existence. Yes, a few will be able to weather these problems better than others, but the fact that most will not will force others to try to usurp what the wealthy few have saved for themselves and consequently all will be in peril. As the planet heats and environments degrade, there will be fewer and fewer sanctuaries.
They might include the Boy Scouts, but they certainly want to get rid of the Girl Scouts, which as one GOP candidate says encourages homosexuality, drug use, and radical Islam.
No, but Rick Santorum isn't talking about nanotechnology, or molecular biology, or soil science, since he knows absolutely zilch about any science at all, except that which he finds it politically useful to oppose.
It has little to do with proportion and everything to do with direction. If you sit in a closed garage with a running automobile you won't die all at once, but you surely will if you continue to do so. Global warming that results from carbon dioxide pollution is much the same. Humans won't happen die all at once, but as we continue to spew out carbon dioxide, physics tell us that in time the world will grow hotter and hotter. The atmosphere need not be 100% carbon dioxide before humans perish. Chances are the effects will be indirect, due to increased aridity and consequential losses of crop yields and the loss of biodiversity, which all indications are is being pushed toward extinction as the climate changes the world over are becoming too rapid to permit for evolution to mitigate, and the breakdown of civilizations unable to cope with the change will more than likely lead to human extinction.
You might do better to take a few course in the basic physics of global warming and biology rather than rely on the convictions of your ideology. As former UCLA coach John Wooden used to say "Its what you learn after you know it all that counts".
"I don't see how Santorum is any worse than any other politician out there, except that he is playing to a different base than you prefer personally."
For one Santorum is wrong both about the theory of evolution by means of natural selection and about modern climatology. Consequently, virtually all the rest of his ideas are destructive to planetary ecosystems. He is worse because he does not understand science and ignores the science about both and instead demands that US policy be based around his erroneous personal religious beliefs rather than what science is telling us will almost certainly happen in the relatively near future unless we dramatically and quickly alter our economy from a fossil fuels dependent one. Through his ignorance he literally poses a threat to human survival and the list of instances where that is true goes far beyond just his stand on the issue of global warming. That it what makes him worse, much, much worse.
As for reversing global warming, there is much we can do if the GOP would either start to help or at a minimum get out of the way of those who are advocating solutions. The reality is that they will likely do neither and so the sane element of the electorate has no recourse other than to vote against republicans.
Rest assured, when it comes to biologists, the block is practically monolithic. Creationism has no place in modern biological science. None. Creationism is the antithesis of biological science.
Slashdot Mirror
"We are nearing the technological capability to do this."
BS. The molecular biology is nowhere near there and is unlikely to be for decades if not centuries, especially considering that even routine sequence alignments constitute an NP complete problem for even modestly sized proteins and nucleic acids.
In contrast, what we do currently know about space biology strongly suggests that prolonged space travel is a contraindication for human life.
I can see it now either way you go: physical snail mail: "Sorry no one by this name at this address". Or email: "Mailer daemon unable to transmit your message, please resend".
I think humanity would be far better off studying space with probes, telescopes, and robots and forget the manned travel as pure fantasy. Better to put that kind of money into exploring our oceans, which are actually far more poorly studied than outer space, particularly in terms of funding, with a far greater likely payoff for humanity.
There simply is no such thing as the "cheapest way to travel between the stars".
A parsec is a measure of distance not of time.
It will be extremely hard to "look" if your eyeballs have deformed and your optic nerves have degenerated as the result of prolonged exposure to deep space. Even assuming we could chart such a course, virtually any trip in any direction would take generations, unless one were to accelerate to speeds that would probably shear living cellular material to shreds. Even if you could overcome these effects and could reach speeds 100 times faster than is currently possible, it would take 500 years just to reach the nearest star system. Think of the amount of fuel you would have to take with you just to stop once you got there, not to mention, who would want to get out for "pit stops" at a few ultracold refrigerators on the way there?
So what, it would hardly matter since a human arriving at even the first "stepping stone" is likely be totally blind as a result of prolonged exposure to deep space, which causes severe permanent deformation of the human eyeball and degeneration of the optic nerve. This effect begins to occur on even much shorter trips, much less one into interstellar space. Dyson is a physicist, so its not surprising he doesn't know much about space biology.
The problem with global warming isn't that people disagree concerning the methodology used to detect it. No one is concerned about that. The problem with global warming is how quickly the planet is heating. Personally, I don't have any problem with Al Gore profiting. After all given the current state of affairs the oil companies have been doing most of the profiting for years. I see no objecting to spreading the wealth and consequently I'm a big fan of getting rid of the oil depletion allowance that permits the oil companies to deduct enough from their taxes every year a higher and higher price for the oil still left in the ground, so they don't have to pay any taxes at all.
Alternatively lets have a depletion allowance for every company and hence every individual, since if corporations are people then people are corporations. After all, all commodities and services are finite. By the logic of oil company tax lobbyists I should be entitled to a tax deduction for all the ice cream cones I haven't eaten yet, since after all, ever time I eat one there are fewer left.
Yes, the entire idea of engineering humans to avoid raw meet would have significant political ramifications as well. Without a craving for raw meet the entire Tea Party could go extinct in just a few days. Just when the GOP has created the perfectly engineered voter, things could go very, very wrong. The republican controlled House must never allow this to happen!
What you don't see is what Google's "advertisers" are doing with your personal information beside putting it on webpages. Some are using it to profile citizens so that they know how best to influence markets and compete with other businesses, such as the one you might work for or soon not work for as the case may be.
Accurately measuring what you competition can do relative to you own efforts makes sense. Its really all about how many servers are put into indexing and monitoring webpage usage needed to prioritize around webpage "hits", under the assumption that a site with more "hits" is "more important" in some sense.
Searching yourself is a really stupid idea. It provides a key for advertisers and other scam artists to amass personalized information about you in one fell swoop and link it to your machine ID and IP addresses. Once these are sold, you are a sitting duck for identity theft.
All that your experiment says is that google is way ahead of bing in commoditizing your identity.
Isn't this just a function of the number of servers used for indexing? As they get more hits and become more popular, they will likely add more servers and hence the difference that may exist will largely be eliminated.
Which leads to the question, what if a bright FOSS programmer developed a peer to peer application that could use a small slice of millions of mostly idle PC's to conduct and index searches so that internet search wouldn't require commercial enterprises at all? Just think of how few ads we would have to be subjected to and how much it would lower the cost of advertising on the internet and hence contribute to FOSS development. You would think the business community would be happy with that as both google and bin are parasitic in this respect.
" Obama gutted the space program."
Obama didn't gut the space program. Bush decided we wouldn't replace the shuttle before having an alternative space vehicle in place to take its place. Bush destroyed the economy so Obama was left with no resources to fund NASA, whether he wanted to or not. Obama was handed a mess and he's had to deal with it. Under the circumstances, I think he has done pretty well and NASA is once again focusing on more relevant science rather than continue the Bush plan to build a moon base and go to mars, all without a budget, just like we went into Iraq without a budget, since of course the Iraq war would just pay for itself, just like Medicare Part D and tax cuts for billionaires and millionaires did.
"As to europe having a safety net, possibly but that has nothing to do with economic growth or the laffer curve. The taxes. Countries that eat up a larger percentage of GDP in taxes have lower economic growth."
BS. Look at Germany and Denmark.
"I want growth. I think growth makes us stronger as a species, "
In that case, you will just love cancer.
Like Bush and the GOP said, the war in Iraq didn't cost us anything right. It paid for itself.
"First you have to consider that the reason you get less revenue as you increase the tax rate is that you're depressing the economy."
BS. Taxes where higher under Clinton and the economy was much much better than it ever was under Bush, whose tax policies we are still basically living with since republicans have blocked virtually all efforts to change them.
"By refusing to either (a) collect revenues that cover the government's obligations, or (b) do the hard work to convince anyone to actually reduce those obligations, they sentence this nation to drown in a vast pit of debt."
Which of course is precisely what the GOP bankers want.
We may all hate bankers, but regardless of party they always seem to get what they want. You owing them money and you giving them your money to invest for you, paying you less than you could get investing elsewhere just as they do.
We may have adapted and in doing so stretched the limit of the environments which we have been able to live in. However, we are still constrained to rely on ecosystems to keep us alive by providing suitable conditions that permit us to grow the plants and animals that we eat and use for resources. As we alter global environments, most notably through habitat destruction and carbon dioxide pollution, we are reaching the limits beyond which many of these plants and animals we depend on can not survive and as a results imperil our own existence. Yes, a few will be able to weather these problems better than others, but the fact that most will not will force others to try to usurp what the wealthy few have saved for themselves and consequently all will be in peril. As the planet heats and environments degrade, there will be fewer and fewer sanctuaries.
"Cato says the UK is more capitalist than us"
because after all they have socialized medicine.
Have you thought about becoming a citizen of Lichtenstein?
They have a very small government that is pro-science. They are also very fiscally oriented, being primarily run by bankers.
They might include the Boy Scouts, but they certainly want to get rid of the Girl Scouts, which as one GOP candidate says encourages homosexuality, drug use, and radical Islam.
No, but Rick Santorum isn't talking about nanotechnology, or molecular biology, or soil science, since he knows absolutely zilch about any science at all, except that which he finds it politically useful to oppose.
Few hundred? More like a thousand or two.
It has little to do with proportion and everything to do with direction. If you sit in a closed garage with a running automobile you won't die all at once, but you surely will if you continue to do so. Global warming that results from carbon dioxide pollution is much the same. Humans won't happen die all at once, but as we continue to spew out carbon dioxide, physics tell us that in time the world will grow hotter and hotter. The atmosphere need not be 100% carbon dioxide before humans perish. Chances are the effects will be indirect, due to increased aridity and consequential losses of crop yields and the loss of biodiversity, which all indications are is being pushed toward extinction as the climate changes the world over are becoming too rapid to permit for evolution to mitigate, and the breakdown of civilizations unable to cope with the change will more than likely lead to human extinction.
You might do better to take a few course in the basic physics of global warming and biology rather than rely on the convictions of your ideology. As former UCLA coach John Wooden used to say "Its what you learn after you know it all that counts".
"I don't see how Santorum is any worse than any other politician out there, except that he is playing to a different base than you prefer personally."
For one Santorum is wrong both about the theory of evolution by means of natural selection and about modern climatology. Consequently, virtually all the rest of his ideas are destructive to planetary ecosystems. He is worse because he does not understand science and ignores the science about both and instead demands that US policy be based around his erroneous personal religious beliefs rather than what science is telling us will almost certainly happen in the relatively near future unless we dramatically and quickly alter our economy from a fossil fuels dependent one. Through his ignorance he literally poses a threat to human survival and the list of instances where that is true goes far beyond just his stand on the issue of global warming. That it what makes him worse, much, much worse.
As for reversing global warming, there is much we can do if the GOP would either start to help or at a minimum get out of the way of those who are advocating solutions. The reality is that they will likely do neither and so the sane element of the electorate has no recourse other than to vote against republicans.
Rest assured, when it comes to biologists, the block is practically monolithic. Creationism has no place in modern biological science. None. Creationism is the antithesis of biological science.