>>It would make more sense to look at this system's cost/benefit in relation to *other* similar systems, not just by itself.
Yeah. Like the benefits gained from hiring more lifeguards. Especially since a lot of pool related problems are not like the one described here - they involve trying to keep kids from roughhousing around the pool, etc.
"No studio is going to finance a film if the point is reached where their possible profit margin goes straight into criminals' pockets."
Given the fraudulent bookkeeping practices used in Hollywood, it seems like studios are simply concerned about which criminal gets to pocket the profits.
Or in the immortal words from "The Princess Bride"
"You're trying to kidnap what I've rightfully stolen..."
I'm just saying it's highly likely that any philosophy or world-view a particular science-technique appears to imply at this point in time (with Evolution, a philosophy of No God, No Plan) is HIGHLY likely to be.... Dead wrong.
Not "dead wrong." Partially wrong. The world is less than totally deterministic, but it is not totally non-deterministic. Causes have reasonably predictable effects. A deterministic universe, while inaccurate, was more useful than the totally non-deterministic universe which existed before Newton, where anything could happen.
Asimov spoke brilliantly to this line of reasoning in his essay "the relativity of wrong." To quote him;
when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.
If atoms aren't billard balls, how can you be sure we're monkeys?
We're not monkies, but we share some characteristics with monkies. We're in the same phylogenetic family. Creatures evolve through variation and natural selection. The means of variation is not completely elucidated yet.
But, more to the point, should you be really drawing any conclusions?
Of course, but only predictive conclusions. And if you can give a more predictive explanation for events, then I'll be happy to listen. There's no way to test whether or not there is a 'plan for the universe.'
I'll agree that it's illogical to say "proof of evolution is proof that there is no 'plan' for the universe.
But it's just not possible to demonstrate a plan for the universe, except through irrefutably accurate prophecy. And almost all the prophecies I've seen are hopelessly vauge, only to be recognized as prophecy after an event has occured and not before it.
I don't think variation is a truly random process. Some areas of genetic code mutate far faster than others, for starters. Of course, I don't think that falling back on 'the hand of God' to explain this is the most rational thing to do. Creatures repair damaged genes faster than they should, statistically.
If Intelligent Design were simply setting itself up as Variation Through More Than Just Random Mutation I'd agree with it. But it's not.
For every problem, there's going to be some socialist proposing a solution. That shouldn't be a factor when we ask whether or not the problem itself exists.
First things first; We need to figure out the facts of the situation, without regard to the consequences of those facts.... Unless you're claiming that a worldwide socialist conspiracy is fudging scientific data, which is a whole 'nother story.
"Global Climate Change" is a scientific theory with good support.
Some of the reactions to those changes and anticipated changes might be described as "religious."
And incidentally, last century is replete with deaths from many forms of dictatorships gone out of control, both Communist and Facist. If you're refering to socialism within a functioning democracy when you tak about 'demonstratable tens of millions of deaths' then please let me know specifically what you're refering to. A little regulation of food and commerce seems to have increased health and prosperity rather than the opposite.
Which part of "variation and natural selection" is incorrect?
Darwin didn't propose a physical mechanism for genetic variation.
True, the process is not strictly random (certain portions of DNA mutate more frequently than other portions) and there's a difference between a process which contains randomness and a random process.
But I can't tell from what you've written what you're writing for or against.
Are you complaining that he didn't include things like kin selection or reflect on how social insects are genetically related? What are you arguing for or against? I can't tell from what you've written here.
The level of Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere has increased. That's demonstratable. Because CO2 holds in infrared and lets in visible light, it acts like a blanket, insulating the earth. You knew that. That means there's more energy somewhere in the earth's system. It doesn't mean that the climate will heat up uniformly, or that the energy will be stored as heat as opposed to chemical energy.
Some folks made the odd error of assuming that more CO2 would uniformly heat the globe, or that their environmental models were accurate, which they weren't.
The question is how and when these changes are going to manifest.
Legally, I believe that software manufacturers can limit their liability to the cost of the software via the shrinkwrap license.
Of course, with cars there are lemon laws even if the defects aren't lethal.
My problem is that software makers don't actually honor their licenses. They're legally obligated to give me a refund if I don't agree to the license, but neither Macromedia nor the store I purchased the software from would honor that obligation when it came to the Flash software.
In that case, I don't think I should be bound by any of the terms in the license. I'd like to see a person argue for the legality of reverse engineering on that basis.
Open source software can sometimes avoid this fate by offering its product for free and being able to produce product without requiring a profit.
Because of this, it can't be forced out of business the way closed source systems can, and it can effectively provide competition even when other companies can't.
I don't think that businesses are going to voluntarily open their standards. If we want open standards, we're going to have to fight for them. Though I would like to see the government restricted to using open standards in their document formats so that future generations would be able to open them, even if Micro-foo goes out of business or a copy of the appropriate reader can't be found... among other reasons.
I think there are a lot of people who agree with your position. But I don't think that any of the two major parties really have the will to make good on that proposal. It's hard to ask someone in power to give up a share of that power.
Republican rhetoric seemed to support this back before they had control of the gov. But right now, they seem to be heading in the opposite direction.
It's the opposition which opposes expanding government, and only for as long as they're the opposition.
You're not 'shouting in the wind' but the two party dictatorship which controls the US at the national level doesn't seem to want to hear it.
By the time we reach Pluto, it probably wont be a planet any more. Why can't we send our probes to some big name sattelite with staying power, and not just some 42,000,000-minutes-of-fame flash in the pan.
This is almost as bad as that 'timeshare on Phobos' idea a while back...
If I subsidize the cows, I get a say in how they're milked.
There isn't a form of transportation in this country which doesn't benefit from government subsidy. The government routinely pumps money into a variety of large businesses, by absorbing their research costs and picking up their slack if they encounter a disaster.
And whenever large businesses get powerful enough, they hire congressmen or pinkertons and work towards this end.
If corporations are going to talk free trade out of one side of their mouths, they need to stop asking for subsidies, protections, and special interest laws out of the other side.
Your first two paragraphs were essentially in agreement with what I said.
To clarify the rest;
True, a person may be able to get a student loan but not a business loan, and the skillset for medince might not transfer to business (at least directly.) But I don't know of anyone who was brilliant at medicine and totally stupid at everything else. A doctor's abilities would transfer to somthing worthwhile.
Similarly, a person could work for the time that they would have spent in medical school + the time that they would have spent paying off their student loans and then have a bundle of cash to invest.
I should have made my point about business clearer; that in terms of average risk and average reward for a student of a certain level of ability, a business career offers a better average return than a medical career.
It used to be that money alone was enough to attract the best and brightest into the medical field. But that's not true any more.
If you were an aspiring doctor with the intelligence and grades to make good on your ambitions, you would be better off investing your tuition and starting a business.
It's not a great way to make money. The HMOs and managed care have shifted a lot of profits into the hands of businessmen.
Doctors have to be close to 30 before they even break even and their hours are insane, most of the time.
Noone in their right mind would go into the profession just for the money.
You can increase the human life span with a very simple procedure; castration.
Rats have been shown to live longer when castrated, and this is possibly related to the activity of the pineal gland or by lowering testosterone, which is carcinogenic, as well as lowering the metabolic rate. Metabolic problems, in particular, are linked to aging. Resveratrol from red grape skins is a lipase inhibitor, helps prevent the body's absorption of fat. It effectivly reduces a person's calorie intake, and as long as food is held constant it has been linked to increased lifespan (as has good old fashioned starvation to the point that a person's reproductive system shuts down.)
Many human studies seek to explain the lifespan differences in people due to environmental factors such as reduced disease transmission.
While eunichs can still have sex, chronic low-level inflammation by pathogens like chlamydia have been strongly linked to atherosclerosis, as well as diabetes. Some oncogenic viruses have been linked to cancer.
I have to wonder just how well the rash of diabetes in a population correlates with mean and median number of sexual partners in that population.
>>Men, on the other hand, are programmed to disseminate their genes in the widest possible manner.
That's one strategy. But it's not the only male strategy. People as a whole aren't really 'programmed' to do anything, though some might tend very strongly in one direction or another. Some people can be convinced to do some pretty amazing tricks, even including lifelong celibacy, with the right social environment.
Perhaps you've been "programmed" to spread your seed. But it's not your genetic code, by itself, that's progrmmed you to do this (As opposed to just wanting to do this.)
Basically. I mean, technically it's not a violation. It's possible to use nuclear power to create foodlike products which could be fed to humans to create energy... but why not skip the whole human step, if you have nuclear power and you're already machines? These machines are obviously electrically based, or else an EM pulse wouldn't stop them. So why couldn't they use their energy directly?
You COULD pump your energy from a nuclear generator into various systems that would sustain human beings and then recover some small fraction of it afterwards, but it seems stupid to try and run your world that way.
For all the work they put into the series, why couldn't they come up with somthing more plausible?
I used to be a huge fan of ST TNG but the movies that they made after the series were sub par.
The thing that pisses me off most, is that they turned the Borg into frigging vampires. This, in my opinion (as an American) is the standard American moral cop out. The Borg were evil because of their evil queen leader. Kill the evil leader and the people are cured. The Nazis were evil because of Hitler. The Chinese were Communists because of Mao. At least the series had members of the Borg Collective in thrall to a fascist leader (lore) after their destruction, so it wasn't like everything was a-okay.
While I have my problems with The Matrix (I could believe in humans being enslaved in the Matrix in order to use their neural nets for the purpose of the Machines, but for energy? Too inefficient), it was one of the few films which didn't fall back on this cliched notion of evil. It showed people fighting because they were nations and because of economic reasons. It even had the guts to blame humans for the war. I wish Star Trek would have taken a similar tack, showing how the Borg were formed, not by some evil leader, but by economic conditions and competition, and by their own 'free' will.
After all, eventually Borg style networking will be more efficient than going to school for 16 years to learn what you need to know. It'll be like an instant college degree. Economics and the race to the bottom as people compete tends to compell certain life choices and the use of certain technology. And those choices change us as humans and as a society.
I suppose that's the theme of GATTACA, to a degree. I think Star Trek would have been better off using The Borg to the same effect.
You bomb the fuck out of their military structures, and you form a blockade around the country. You starve it.
I don't suppose you authored the policy on Cuba, huh?
If you took the time to do a proper blocade,
1. The Japanese Atomic bomb program, which was more advanced than the German Atomic bomb program, might have resulted in usable Japanese atomic weapon. Japan had bases on the Asian mainland free from the steady bombing that Germany was subjected to, which maked enrichment feasible.
2. China and Russia were waiting in the wings to invade, and get revenge on Japan for all the pain it had caused those countries. The US wanted to deal with postwar Japan. Things would have been worse for the Japanese if the Chinese and Russians had invaded instead of the Japanese surrenduring to the US.
You know what I want in my tombstone?
on
Video Tombstones
·
· Score: 1
I want one of those gold CDs that they sent up with one of the... I think it was voyager missions... with recordings of my life.
I mean, seriously, why not make your tomb into a time capsule of your life? Consider how much historical knowledge could be transmitted to the future that way, as long as you're digging a hole. And it could be part of the greiving process, too, considering it would help people to recall and discuss someone's life.
If we can appreciate how much we've learned from egyptian tombs, why not return the favor to our own future archeologists by recording our own views and thoughts in ways that are certain to last millenia.
But LCD screens? I can't see these lasting more than a generation, and that's very optomistic.
Of course, the whole 'viking funeral being cremated on a flaming boat' is cool, tool. Though kindof the opposite idea.
Yeah, and that whole Jewish war thing back around the first millenium when the Romans marched into Israel, crushed the Jews who lived there and renamed the land to Palestine... everyone knows that's just a zionist invention and that Jews didn't actually exist more than a hundred years ago. Silly historians.
Jews have lived in Israel before Islam was a religion and before the name "Palestine" was ever inveted by the Romans, and they have done everything in their power to live there since that time.
Nearly every other people on earth, with a few exceptions like the Kurds, have a nation. And even the Kurds have land.
The notion that you can steal land from Jews and it's legit, but the reverse is a horrible offense is just a pretention at morality.
Slashdot Mirror
>>It would make more sense to look at this system's cost/benefit in relation to *other* similar systems, not just by itself.
Yeah. Like the benefits gained from hiring more lifeguards. Especially since a lot of pool related problems are not like the one described here - they involve trying to keep kids from roughhousing around the pool, etc.
"No studio is going to finance a film if the point is reached where their possible profit margin goes straight into criminals' pockets."
Given the fraudulent bookkeeping practices used in Hollywood, it seems like studios are simply concerned about which criminal gets to pocket the profits.
Or in the immortal words from "The Princess Bride"
"You're trying to kidnap what I've rightfully stolen..."
I'm just saying it's highly likely that any philosophy or world-view a particular science-technique appears to imply at this point in time (with Evolution, a philosophy of No God, No Plan) is HIGHLY likely to be .... Dead wrong.
o fWrong.htm
Not "dead wrong." Partially wrong. The world is less than totally deterministic, but it is not totally non-deterministic. Causes have reasonably predictable effects. A deterministic universe, while inaccurate, was more useful than the totally non-deterministic universe which existed before Newton, where anything could happen.
Asimov spoke brilliantly to this line of reasoning in his essay "the relativity of wrong."
To quote him;
when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.
http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/Relativity
If atoms aren't billard balls, how can you be sure we're monkeys?
We're not monkies, but we share some characteristics with monkies. We're in the same phylogenetic family. Creatures evolve through variation and natural selection. The means of variation is not completely elucidated yet.
But, more to the point, should you be really drawing any conclusions?
Of course, but only predictive conclusions. And if you can give a more predictive explanation for events, then I'll be happy to listen. There's no way to test whether or not there is a 'plan for the universe.'
I'll agree that it's illogical to say "proof of evolution is proof that there is no 'plan' for the universe.
But it's just not possible to demonstrate a plan for the universe, except through irrefutably accurate prophecy. And almost all the prophecies I've seen are hopelessly vauge, only to be recognized as prophecy after an event has occured and not before it.
I don't think variation is a truly random process. Some areas of genetic code mutate far faster than others, for starters. Of course, I don't think that falling back on 'the hand of God' to explain this is the most rational thing to do. Creatures repair damaged genes faster than they should, statistically.
If Intelligent Design were simply setting itself up as Variation Through More Than Just Random Mutation I'd agree with it. But it's not.
For every problem, there's going to be some socialist proposing a solution. That shouldn't be a factor when we ask whether or not the problem itself exists.
... Unless you're claiming that a worldwide socialist conspiracy is fudging scientific data, which is a whole 'nother story.
First things first; We need to figure out the facts of the situation, without regard to the consequences of those facts.
"Global Climate Change" is a scientific theory with good support.
Some of the reactions to those changes and anticipated changes might be described as "religious."
And incidentally, last century is replete with deaths from many forms of dictatorships gone out of control, both Communist and Facist. If you're refering to socialism within a functioning democracy when you tak about 'demonstratable tens of millions of deaths' then please let me know specifically what you're refering to. A little regulation of food and commerce seems to have increased health and prosperity rather than the opposite.
Which part of "variation and natural selection" is incorrect?
Darwin didn't propose a physical mechanism for genetic variation.
True, the process is not strictly random (certain portions of DNA mutate more frequently than other portions) and there's a difference between a process which contains randomness and a random process.
But I can't tell from what you've written what you're writing for or against.
Are you complaining that he didn't include things like kin selection or reflect on how social insects are genetically related? What are you arguing for or against? I can't tell from what you've written here.
The level of Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere has increased. That's demonstratable. Because CO2 holds in infrared and lets in visible light, it acts like a blanket, insulating the earth. You knew that. That means there's more energy somewhere in the earth's system. It doesn't mean that the climate will heat up uniformly, or that the energy will be stored as heat as opposed to chemical energy.
Some folks made the odd error of assuming that more CO2 would uniformly heat the globe, or that their environmental models were accurate, which they weren't.
The question is how and when these changes are going to manifest.
Legally, I believe that software manufacturers can limit their liability to the cost of the software via the shrinkwrap license.
Of course, with cars there are lemon laws even if the defects aren't lethal.
My problem is that software makers don't actually honor their licenses. They're legally obligated to give me a refund if I don't agree to the license, but neither Macromedia nor the store I purchased the software from would honor that obligation when it came to the Flash software.
In that case, I don't think I should be bound by any of the terms in the license. I'd like to see a person argue for the legality of reverse engineering on that basis.
Software is a winner take all game.
Closed source software is a winner take all game.
Open source software can sometimes avoid this fate
by offering its product for free and being able to produce product without requiring a profit.
Because of this, it can't be forced out of business the way closed source systems can, and it can effectively provide competition even when other companies can't.
I don't think that businesses are going to voluntarily open their standards. If we want open standards, we're going to have to fight for them. Though I would like to see the government restricted to using open standards in their document formats so that future generations would be able to open them, even if Micro-foo goes out of business or a copy of the appropriate reader can't be found... among other reasons.
I think there are a lot of people who agree with your position. But I don't think that any of the two major parties really have the will to make good on that proposal. It's hard to ask someone in power to give up a share of that power.
Republican rhetoric seemed to support this back before they had control of the gov. But right now, they seem to be heading in the opposite direction.
It's the opposition which opposes expanding government, and only for as long as they're the opposition.
You're not 'shouting in the wind' but the two party dictatorship which controls the US at the national level doesn't seem to want to hear it.
By the time we reach Pluto, it probably wont be a planet any more. Why can't we send our probes to some big name sattelite with staying power, and not just some 42,000,000-minutes-of-fame flash in the pan.
This is almost as bad as that 'timeshare on Phobos' idea a while back...
If I subsidize the cows, I get a say in how they're milked.
There isn't a form of transportation in this country which doesn't benefit from government subsidy. The government routinely pumps money into a variety of large businesses, by absorbing their research costs and picking up their slack if they encounter a disaster.
And whenever large businesses get powerful enough, they hire congressmen or pinkertons and work towards this end.
If corporations are going to talk free trade out of one side of their mouths, they need to stop asking for subsidies, protections, and special interest laws out of the other side.
Your first two paragraphs were essentially in agreement with what I said.
To clarify the rest;
True, a person may be able to get a student loan but not a business loan, and the skillset for medince might not transfer to business (at least directly.) But I don't know of anyone who was brilliant at medicine and totally stupid at everything else. A doctor's abilities would transfer to somthing worthwhile.
Similarly, a person could work for the time that they would have spent in medical school + the time that they would have spent paying off their student loans and then have a bundle of cash to invest.
I should have made my point about business clearer; that in terms of average risk and average reward for a student of a certain level of ability, a business career offers a better average return than a medical career.
It used to be that money alone was enough to attract the best and brightest into the medical field. But that's not true any more.
If you were an aspiring doctor with the intelligence and grades to make good on your ambitions, you would be better off investing your tuition and starting a business.
It's not a great way to make money. The HMOs and managed care have shifted a lot of profits into the hands of businessmen.
Doctors have to be close to 30 before they even break even and their hours are insane, most of the time.
Noone in their right mind would go into the profession just for the money.
What specific changes do you want made?
You can increase the human life span with a very simple procedure; castration.
Rats have been shown to live longer when castrated,
and this is possibly related to the activity of the pineal gland or by lowering testosterone, which is carcinogenic, as well as lowering the metabolic rate. Metabolic problems, in particular, are linked to aging. Resveratrol from red grape skins is a lipase inhibitor, helps prevent the body's absorption of fat. It effectivly reduces a person's calorie intake, and as long as food is held constant it has been linked to increased lifespan (as has good old fashioned starvation to the point that a person's reproductive system shuts down.)
Many human studies seek to explain the lifespan differences in people due to environmental factors such as reduced disease transmission.
While eunichs can still have sex, chronic low-level inflammation by pathogens like chlamydia have been strongly linked to atherosclerosis, as well as diabetes. Some oncogenic viruses have been linked to cancer.
I have to wonder just how well the rash of diabetes in a population correlates with mean and median number of sexual partners in that population.
And she *still* doesn't appreciate it when you use the word "boobies" in a conversation.
Yeah, but she hangs around anyways.
Sometimes even cleans the dishes.
I live in Tucson...Housing is very cheap
Have you tried to buy housing in Tucson recently? The price has increased by about 50% or so in the past two years.
>>Men, on the other hand, are programmed to disseminate their genes in the widest possible manner.
That's one strategy. But it's not the only male strategy. People as a whole aren't really 'programmed' to do anything, though some might tend very strongly in one direction or another. Some people can be convinced to do some pretty amazing tricks, even including lifelong celibacy, with the right social environment.
Perhaps you've been "programmed" to spread your seed. But it's not your genetic code, by itself, that's progrmmed you to do this (As opposed to just wanting to do this.)
Perhaps you're confusing cause and effect? That was my argument. That people have some responsibility for the leaders that they follow.
Or as Voltaire (?) said, "every nation has the government it deserves."
Basically. I mean, technically it's not a violation. It's possible to use nuclear power to create foodlike products which could be fed to humans to create energy... but why not skip the whole human step, if you have nuclear power and you're already machines? These machines are obviously electrically based, or else an EM pulse wouldn't stop them. So why couldn't they use their energy directly?
You COULD pump your energy from a nuclear generator into various systems that would sustain human beings and then recover some small fraction of it afterwards, but it seems stupid to try and run your world that way.
For all the work they put into the series, why couldn't they come up with somthing more plausible?
I used to be a huge fan of ST TNG but the movies that they made after the series were sub par.
The thing that pisses me off most, is that they turned the Borg into frigging vampires. This, in my opinion (as an American) is the standard American moral cop out. The Borg were evil because of their evil queen leader. Kill the evil leader and the people are cured. The Nazis were evil because of Hitler. The Chinese were Communists because of Mao. At least the series had members of the Borg Collective in thrall to a fascist leader (lore) after their destruction, so it wasn't like everything was a-okay.
While I have my problems with The Matrix (I could believe in humans being enslaved in the Matrix in order to use their neural nets for the purpose of the Machines, but for energy? Too inefficient), it was one of the few films which didn't fall back on this cliched notion of evil. It showed people fighting because they were nations and because of economic reasons. It even had the guts to blame humans for the war. I wish Star Trek would have taken a similar tack, showing how the Borg were formed, not by some evil leader, but by economic conditions and competition, and by their own 'free' will.
After all, eventually Borg style networking will be more efficient than going to school for 16 years to learn what you need to know. It'll be like an instant college degree. Economics and the race to the bottom as people compete tends to compell certain life choices and the use of certain technology. And those choices change us as humans and as a society.
I suppose that's the theme of GATTACA, to a degree. I think Star Trek would have been better off using The Borg to the same effect.
You bomb the fuck out of their military structures, and you form a blockade around the country. You starve it.
I don't suppose you authored the policy on Cuba, huh?
If you took the time to do a proper blocade,
1. The Japanese Atomic bomb program, which was more advanced than the German Atomic bomb program, might have resulted in usable Japanese atomic weapon. Japan had bases on the Asian mainland free from the steady bombing that Germany was subjected to, which maked enrichment feasible.
2. China and Russia were waiting in the wings to invade, and get revenge on Japan for all the pain it had caused those countries. The US wanted to deal with postwar Japan. Things would have been worse for the Japanese if the Chinese and Russians had invaded instead of the Japanese surrenduring to the US.
I want one of those gold CDs that they sent up with one of the... I think it was voyager missions... with recordings of my life.
I mean, seriously, why not make your tomb into a time capsule of your life? Consider how much historical knowledge could be transmitted to the future that way, as long as you're digging a hole. And it could be part of the greiving process, too, considering it would help people to recall and discuss someone's life.
If we can appreciate how much we've learned from egyptian tombs, why not return the favor to our own future archeologists by recording our own views and thoughts in ways that are certain to last millenia.
But LCD screens? I can't see these lasting more than a generation, and that's very optomistic.
Of course, the whole 'viking funeral being cremated on a flaming boat' is cool, tool. Though kindof the opposite idea.
Yeah, and that whole Jewish war thing back around the first millenium when the Romans marched into Israel, crushed the Jews who lived there and renamed the land to Palestine... everyone knows that's just a zionist invention and that Jews didn't actually exist more than a hundred years ago. Silly historians.
Jews have lived in Israel before Islam was a religion and before the name "Palestine" was ever inveted by the Romans, and they have done everything in their power to live there since that time.
Nearly every other people on earth, with a few exceptions like the Kurds, have a nation. And even the Kurds have land.
The notion that you can steal land from Jews and it's legit, but the reverse is a horrible offense is just a pretention at morality.