I think theres a problem in that a lot of current thought is based on Burnette and White's view of the Evolution of Infectious diseases (from the 70s) which states that disease epidemics come when a pathogen moves from a population where it is relativly benign to one which is unprotected, becomes endemic in the new population, and evolves towards benign coexistance with their new host over time. The CDC has even fudged their data (the def. of AIDS) to mimic the spike and decline expected of an epidemic that's become endemic.
The problem is that Burnette and White's views are based on airborne diseases which are frequently transmitted one strain at a time and require the host to be fit enough to walk around in order to pass on the disease, thus selecting against very deadly diseases in most circumstances.
Ewald's theories on the Evolution of Infectious disease differentiates between airborne and bloodborne diseases and more accuratly describes epidemics. Bloodborne diseases increase in virulence when passed rapidly from host to host. If you take a benign pathogen, inject it into a rabbit, remove some blood from the infected rabbit and inject it into a second rabbit... and repeat this for 10 rabbits, allowing time for the virus to propigate in each host but not for the host to become immune, then the pathogen will rapidly evolve to become extremly virulent.
Many sexually transmitted epidemics can be traced to a change in social organization. Syphyllis followed the rise of cities in Europe, for example. Before that, the Palladium pathogen was a relativly benign skin infection.
Also, (on a related note), keep in mind that any statistics for Africa are based entirely on symptoms. They don't do tests for viruses or antibodies, since they don't have the cash. And immune deficiency can be caused by things other than HIV. I'm sure the incidence of AIDS in Africa is high, but you have to be careful when making conclusions based on very tenuous statistics gathered in third world countries.
The 90% success rate you quote is not for a single use. Often it's for a year of use, and with training in the proper use of prophylactics, success goes up to ~98%/year.
The US is not Uganda. In the US, people can afford condoms. In Uganda, they can't.
Further, the cardinal's critics have to explain why three countries where condoms are readily available and their use vigorously promoted - Zimbabwe, Botswana, and South Africa - have the world's highest rates of HIV infection.
Prostitution and rape. S. Africa is the rape capitol of the world.
Of course, I'm not arguing with fidelity since there are plenty of sub-lethal diseases transmitted orally. A lot of the girls I know who sleep around constantly complain about stomach pain.
But the report that you're quoting from is heavily biased in order to influence US policy based on religious beliefs.
I'm sick and tired of this 'gotta send a message' shit that lawyers use to dole out disproportionate punishment.
As soon as anyone with a law degree uses the phrase 'gotta send a message' you know that any standards of justice, proportionality or even-handedness are about to be flushed down the toilet.
Well, folks can try breeding in prison, but since they usually segregate the sexes, attempts at breeding rarely work. Doesnt stop some folks from trying, though.
I don't know about Texas, though. Kindof like shutting the barn door after the horse is loose.
I think a fence around D.C. would be much more appropriate. That seems to be the soure of a lot of our problems and they already have the high crime rate.
We need Texas for... what? They have one of the worst educational systems in the country, but because they unify book purchasing for all their schools statewide they create such a big market that many book publishers provide for the Texas school book market. This insures that the standards for US educational materials are set by the state with one of the worst standards.
I say we invade Texas and take their oil. Sure, there are a lot of people with weapons there, but we can probably use that as justification.
We've had folks 3-4 times stronger than other folks for generations and nobody asked whether one or the other might not be human... okay so maybe they have, but they shouldn't have.
The questions for whether someone is human include; can they interbreed with humans? Are they sentinent? Are they responsible to themselves and a threat to others. If so, they should be legally and biologically be considered humans. Driving a car doesn't make you less human. Having an artificial heart doesn't make you less human. Having a bionic adaptation shouldn't either.
If you're going to exclude someone from the category of human you should have a functional moral, ethical, legal or biological reason for doing so, and your categorical exclusion would only be as broad as your reason was.
My question (borrowed from the X-Men) is; when should enhanced abilities be considered weapons or threats, in the same class as firearms or knives? Do you not let certain people into an area because they're unusually strong or capable?
Considering that there are tetrachromats who can see in 4 channels of color (their red cones absorb in slightly different parts of the spectrum and their nervous system adapts just fine) I'd say that there's at least a little room for improvement if we start before someone is born.
I'm not sure that strain is the same as overload. We didn't evolve to spend all our time reading and staring at computer screens, true. But we lose certain abilities as we age because we age and not because we wouldn't rather have those abilities.
And 'vision loss' is too general to be described so generally. We may strain our eyes staring at things close to the screen and thus become nearsighted, but problems like floaters, macular degeneration, etc. are not caused by sensory overload.
The point the parent made is valid. Humans see in three (or in the case of tetrachromats, four) channels of color. Some animals see in as many as 16.
Evolution is adaptive. It does enough to let us get by, but if there isn't much selective pressure to develop an ability (and the capacity to reach it in small steps) evolution just isn't going to improve us. Bacteria which are only exposed to 70 degree temperatures will die if exposed to sudden temperature chages. Bacteria routinely exposed to temperature changes will be able to endure them. Animals which don't require good vision to survive won't get it.
If the neurons are wired incorrectly, how well could the brain adapt. I know it can adapt to basic mix ups like field inversion.
What do you mean implement cortically? Wire somthing directly into our cortex? Why our cortex and not our occipital lobe? Or is there another meaning to cortically as in corticosteriods etc?
I guess the big question is how close are we to creating machines that can interface directly with our nervous system? And how directly is directly?
Yup. You can conference several people with the most recent version. The limit is around 5 or so people, I think.
There's a thing you can turn off... qos packets or somthing like that, which speeds up your connection if you use windows since downloads usually optimize for video rather than sound.
Or at last chance you could be like my girlfriend, loose the recipt and just dress in a miniskirt and a tight shirt and act dingy to the pimply faced associate.
It's the job of the gov. to demonstrate that an election is legitamate and promote transparency if it wants the benefit of being considered legitamate.
It's a fact that many diebold voting machines had no paper trail and are unverifiable. It's insane for a company involved with making voting machines to be affiliated with either party as Diebold was. Even the appearance of impropriety is unacceptable. It's wrong for a plaintiff to give money to a judge, regardless of what the ruling is. The same standards regarding conflict of interest SHOULD apply to elected officials.
Republicans have always demanded recounts in close elections, at least for the past decade or so. This isn't 'whining' or 'unfairness.' It's Democracy, dammit, and there's not a thing wrong with it. There should be recounts and checks and balances in all elections, whatever it costs. Whoever wins.
And if you're going to rig an election, you make the irregularities as unnoticable as possible but still effective. The larger the irregularities, the more likely someone gets caught.
Republicans have set up a drumbeat about the 'liberal media.' But by all measures, the major media is economically conservative, has been for a while, and is growing more so. That's the truth, and it's logical since most major media outlets are just wings of large corporate conglomerates with their own vested interests.
You think people didn't make jokes about the Dems when the Dems were in office? Bush did cocaine but he didn't get nearly the hell that Clinton got for using pot (not to claim that Clinton is a liberal or anything. At best he had a moderate conservative presidency, which I'm fine with ). Gore made a mistake about classroom capacity and got nailed but Bush claimed that a murderer in Texas was given the death penalty when he was given a life sentance and noone sneezed. Republicans don't have it nearly as bad as they like to say they do.
And economically conservative institutions bankroled both parties for the past 3 or 4 presidential elections, Republican and Democrat alike.
Socialy, there is still be a liberal/conservative dichotomy, with the media leaning in the liberal direction. Comics are usually hardcore in this direction.
Economically, the point isn't even under debate. To give one example; my insurance holds me at fault for an incident unless it's caused by 'deliberate negligence' on the part of the other party. What this means is that when my upstairs neighibor's washing machine dumped a few hundred gallons of water into my house, its a mark against ME on my insurance record, with my insurance paying out rather than his. This, and similar laws which will never come under debate are what's so screwy about the American political system.
You haven't even tried to have a rational discussion, and your logic doesn't really hold. I don't think you're part of any consipiracy. I also don't care who you voted for since you don't make any rational points. Emotional invective is not persuasive.
It's the job of the gov. to demonstrate that an election is legitamate and promote transparency if it wants the benefit of being considered legitamate.
It's a fact that many diebold voting machines had no paper trail and are unverifiable. It's insane for a company involved with making voting machines to be affiliated with either party as Diebold was. Even the appearance of impropriety is unacceptable. It's wrong for a plaintiff to give money to a judge, regardless of what the ruling is. The same standards regarding conflict of interest SHOULD apply to elected officials.
There have been plenty of times when Republicans have contested close elections. Nobody accused them of whining, because close elections deserve verification, always. It's the Republicans who have whined and gone against standards that they helped put in place whenever it was in their benefit to do so.
It would be different if Republicans didn't always throw such a fit and demand recounts when close elections are decided in their opponents favor. Either push for the same standards to be applied equally regardless of which candidates are in the winner's circle or shut the hell up.
It's fact that there's no way to confirm the votes on a diebold machine. It's the job of the gov. to prove that the election is legitamate if it wants to have the . It's not the job of outsiders to prove that it's illegitamate.
Your argument really doesn't make much sense. I don't think you're part of any 'conspiracy.'
Republicans have 'whined' about plenty when they lost close races, and demanded recounts. Bush signed a law into effect as governor of Texas saying that hand recounts were more reliable, and should be used in close elections and then went against that standard when it could have hurt him. Accept the same standards when the situation is reversed or shut the hell up.
What worries me is the collapse of things like peer review.
In the past, if you wanted to get somthing into a scientific journal, you had to pass through 'security' in the form of peer review.
The notion of fact checking has been fading from our society. While I personally favor the ability to query a variety of sources and tell fact from fiction myself, at the risk of sounding arrogant I worry that some others might be less adept. Far be it from me to actually argue for the centralization of power, but I worry about our changing standards.
Back in the 1970s, the NYT had a sign up saying "There are two sides to every story. How many did you get?"
A reporter went back to the building a little while ago, and the sign had been replaced with another that said "Do you have your beeper? Is it on?"
Really speaks to a shifting in priorities.
In a course on advertising and mass manipulation I took one time, it talked about reaction formation. If you can concentrate on a topic, you critically analyze it. If you only pay partial attention, don't hear trigger words, etc. you'll be less critical. It's like the drug commercials that have distracting images and music as they read the list of side effects. The result of paying less attention to things is that people will think less critically, because that requires more mental energy.
I think that sites like Slashdot and snopes are important to at least provie a modicium of peer review and balance information when so many people just don't have the time or mental energy to fact check.
This is nothing more than an urban legend. It's kindof like saying "most people only use 1% of their hard drive" because you have this empty space that is used as a swap file, only a small portion is written to or read from at time, etc.
The human brain is a huge energy suck and if we didn't need it, it would be got rid of very quickly. True, there are some parts which can be electrically stimulated which don't produce hallucinations, but what does that prove?
Slashdot Mirror
I think theres a problem in that a lot of current thought is based on Burnette and White's view of the Evolution of Infectious diseases (from the 70s) which states that disease epidemics come when a pathogen moves from a population where it is relativly benign to one which is unprotected, becomes endemic in the new population, and evolves towards benign coexistance with their new host over time. The CDC has even fudged their data (the def. of AIDS) to mimic the spike and decline expected of an epidemic that's become endemic.
The problem is that Burnette and White's views are based on airborne diseases which are frequently transmitted one strain at a time and require the host to be fit enough to walk around in order to pass on the disease, thus selecting against very deadly diseases in most circumstances.
Ewald's theories on the Evolution of Infectious disease differentiates between airborne and bloodborne diseases and more accuratly describes epidemics. Bloodborne diseases increase in virulence when passed rapidly from host to host. If you take a benign pathogen, inject it into a rabbit, remove some blood from the infected rabbit and inject it into a second rabbit... and repeat this for 10 rabbits, allowing time for the virus to propigate in each host but not for the host to become immune, then the pathogen will rapidly evolve to become extremly virulent.
Many sexually transmitted epidemics can be traced to a change in social organization. Syphyllis followed the rise of cities in Europe, for example. Before that, the Palladium pathogen was a relativly benign skin infection.
Also, (on a related note), keep in mind that any statistics for Africa are based entirely on symptoms. They don't do tests for viruses or antibodies, since they don't have the cash. And immune deficiency can be caused by things other than HIV. I'm sure the incidence of AIDS in Africa is high, but you have to be careful when making conclusions based on very tenuous statistics gathered in third world countries.
The 90% success rate you quote is not for a single use. Often it's for a year of use, and with training in the proper use of prophylactics, success goes up to ~98%/year.
The US is not Uganda. In the US, people can afford condoms. In Uganda, they can't.
Further, the cardinal's critics have to explain why three countries where condoms are readily available and their use vigorously promoted - Zimbabwe, Botswana, and South Africa - have the world's highest rates of HIV infection.
Prostitution and rape. S. Africa is the rape capitol of the world.
Of course, I'm not arguing with fidelity since there are plenty of sub-lethal diseases transmitted orally. A lot of the girls I know who sleep around constantly complain about stomach pain.
But the report that you're quoting from is heavily biased in order to influence US policy based on religious beliefs.
...is Rhesus peices.
Heck, I'm still looking for a good FOSS replacement for the GIMP.
I'm sick and tired of this 'gotta send a message' shit that lawyers use to dole out disproportionate punishment.
As soon as anyone with a law degree uses the phrase 'gotta send a message' you know that any standards of justice, proportionality or even-handedness are about to be flushed down the toilet.
After all, they should have had a warning saying pointing the label at airplanes was illegal under the PATRIOT act.
Well, folks can try breeding in prison, but since they usually segregate the sexes, attempts at breeding rarely work. Doesnt stop some folks from trying, though.
I don't know about Texas, though. Kindof like shutting the barn door after the horse is loose.
I think a fence around D.C. would be much more appropriate. That seems to be the soure of a lot of our problems and they already have the high crime rate.
We need Texas for... what? They have one of the worst educational systems in the country, but because they unify book purchasing for all their schools statewide they create such a big market that many book publishers provide for the Texas school book market. This insures that the standards for US educational materials are set by the state with one of the worst standards.
I say we invade Texas and take their oil. Sure, there are a lot of people with weapons there, but we can probably use that as justification.
Well, we have that now. It's called wind.
I don't think you could stop the wind, but if you did affect them, you'd have cooler poles and a hotter equator.
Helium? Hot air?
We've had folks 3-4 times stronger than other folks for generations and nobody asked whether one or the other might not be human... okay so maybe they have, but they shouldn't have.
The questions for whether someone is human include; can they interbreed with humans? Are they sentinent? Are they responsible to themselves and a threat to others. If so, they should be legally and biologically be considered humans. Driving a car doesn't make you less human. Having an artificial heart doesn't make you less human. Having a bionic adaptation shouldn't either.
If you're going to exclude someone from the category of human you should have a functional moral, ethical, legal or biological reason for doing so, and your categorical exclusion would only be as broad as your reason was.
My question (borrowed from the X-Men) is; when should enhanced abilities be considered weapons or threats, in the same class as firearms or knives? Do you not let certain people into an area because they're unusually strong or capable?
Considering that there are tetrachromats who can see in 4 channels of color (their red cones absorb in slightly different parts of the spectrum and their nervous system adapts just fine) I'd say that there's at least a little room for improvement if we start before someone is born.
I'm not sure that strain is the same as overload. We didn't evolve to spend all our time reading and staring at computer screens, true. But we lose certain abilities as we age because we age and not because we wouldn't rather have those abilities.
And 'vision loss' is too general to be described so generally. We may strain our eyes staring at things close to the screen and thus become nearsighted, but problems like floaters, macular degeneration, etc. are not caused by sensory overload.
The point the parent made is valid. Humans see in three (or in the case of tetrachromats, four) channels of color. Some animals see in as many as 16.
Evolution is adaptive. It does enough to let us get by, but if there isn't much selective pressure to develop an ability (and the capacity to reach it in small steps) evolution just isn't going to improve us. Bacteria which are only exposed to 70 degree temperatures will die if exposed to sudden temperature chages. Bacteria routinely exposed to temperature changes will be able to endure them. Animals which don't require good vision to survive won't get it.
If the neurons are wired incorrectly, how well could the brain adapt. I know it can adapt to basic mix ups like field inversion.
What do you mean implement cortically? Wire somthing directly into our cortex? Why our cortex and not our occipital lobe? Or is there another meaning to cortically as in corticosteriods etc?
I guess the big question is how close are we to creating machines that can interface directly with our nervous system? And how directly is directly?
Next On Ask Slashdot:
How do you go to the bathroom?
The same way I call internationally. IP.
Yup. You can conference several people with the most recent version. The limit is around 5 or so people, I think.
There's a thing you can turn off... qos packets or somthing like that, which speeds up your connection if you use windows since downloads usually optimize for video rather than sound.
Or at last chance you could be like my girlfriend, loose the recipt and just dress in a miniskirt and a tight shirt and act dingy to the pimply faced associate.
No. No I don't think that'd work for me.
It's the job of the gov. to demonstrate that an election is legitamate and promote transparency if it wants the benefit of being considered legitamate.
It's a fact that many diebold voting machines had no paper trail and are unverifiable. It's insane for a company involved with making voting machines to be affiliated with either party as Diebold was. Even the appearance of impropriety is unacceptable. It's wrong for a plaintiff to give money to a judge, regardless of what the ruling is. The same standards regarding conflict of interest SHOULD apply to elected officials.
Republicans have always demanded recounts in close elections, at least for the past decade or so. This isn't 'whining' or 'unfairness.' It's Democracy, dammit, and there's not a thing wrong with it. There should be recounts and checks and balances in all elections, whatever it costs. Whoever wins.
And if you're going to rig an election, you make the irregularities as unnoticable as possible but still effective. The larger the irregularities, the more likely someone gets caught.
Republicans have set up a drumbeat about the 'liberal media.' But by all measures, the major media is economically conservative, has been for a while, and is growing more so. That's the truth, and it's logical since most major media outlets are just wings of large corporate conglomerates with their own vested interests.
You think people didn't make jokes about the Dems when the Dems were in office? Bush did cocaine but he didn't get nearly the hell that Clinton got for using pot (not to claim that Clinton is a liberal or anything. At best he had a moderate conservative presidency, which I'm fine with ). Gore made a mistake about classroom capacity and got nailed but Bush claimed that a murderer in Texas was given the death penalty when he was given a life sentance and noone sneezed. Republicans don't have it nearly as bad as they like to say they do.
And economically conservative institutions bankroled both parties for the past 3 or 4 presidential elections, Republican and Democrat alike.
Socialy, there is still be a liberal/conservative dichotomy, with the media leaning in the liberal direction. Comics are usually hardcore in this direction.
Economically, the point isn't even under debate.
To give one example; my insurance holds me at fault for an incident unless it's caused by 'deliberate negligence' on the part of the other party. What this means is that when my upstairs neighibor's washing machine dumped a few hundred gallons of water into my house, its a mark against ME on my insurance record, with my insurance paying out rather than his. This, and similar laws which will never come under debate are what's so screwy about the American political system.
Wonder how hard it is to print those.
THe cops always do this. It's deliberate. Run up cost of damages as much as possible
You haven't even tried to have a rational discussion, and your logic doesn't really hold. I don't think you're part of any consipiracy. I also don't care who you voted for since you don't make any rational points. Emotional invective is not persuasive.
It's the job of the gov. to demonstrate that an election is legitamate and promote transparency if it wants the benefit of being considered legitamate.
It's a fact that many diebold voting machines had no paper trail and are unverifiable. It's insane for a company involved with making voting machines to be affiliated with either party as Diebold was. Even the appearance of impropriety is unacceptable. It's wrong for a plaintiff to give money to a judge, regardless of what the ruling is. The same standards regarding conflict of interest SHOULD apply to elected officials.
There have been plenty of times when Republicans have contested close elections. Nobody accused them of whining, because close elections deserve verification, always. It's the Republicans who have whined and gone against standards that they helped put in place whenever it was in their benefit to do so.
It would be different if Republicans didn't always throw such a fit and demand recounts when close elections are decided in their opponents favor. Either push for the same standards to be applied equally regardless of which candidates are in the winner's circle or shut the hell up.
It's fact that there's no way to confirm the votes on a diebold machine. It's the job of the gov. to prove that the election is legitamate if it wants to have the . It's not the job of outsiders to prove that it's illegitamate.
Your argument really doesn't make much sense. I don't think you're part of any 'conspiracy.'
Republicans have 'whined' about plenty when they lost close races, and demanded recounts. Bush signed a law into effect as governor of Texas saying that hand recounts were more reliable, and should be used in close elections and then went against that standard when it could have hurt him. Accept the same standards when the situation is reversed or shut the hell up.
What worries me is the collapse of things like peer review.
In the past, if you wanted to get somthing into a scientific journal, you had to pass through 'security' in the form of peer review.
The notion of fact checking has been fading from our society. While I personally favor the ability to query a variety of sources and tell fact from fiction myself, at the risk of sounding arrogant I worry that some others might be less adept. Far be it from me to actually argue for the centralization of power, but I worry about our changing standards.
Back in the 1970s, the NYT had a sign up saying "There are two sides to every story. How many did you get?"
A reporter went back to the building a little while ago, and the sign had been replaced with another that said "Do you have your beeper? Is it on?"
Really speaks to a shifting in priorities.
In a course on advertising and mass manipulation I took one time, it talked about reaction formation. If you can concentrate on a topic, you critically analyze it. If you only pay partial attention, don't hear trigger words, etc. you'll be less critical. It's like the drug commercials that have distracting images and music as they read the list of side effects. The result of paying less attention to things is that people will think less critically, because that requires more mental energy.
I think that sites like Slashdot and snopes are important to at least provie a modicium of peer review and balance information when so many people just don't have the time or mental energy to fact check.
This is nothing more than an urban legend. It's kindof like saying "most people only use 1% of their hard drive" because you have this empty space that is used as a swap file, only a small portion is written to or read from at time, etc.
The human brain is a huge energy suck and if we didn't need it, it would be got rid of very quickly. True, there are some parts which can be electrically stimulated which don't produce hallucinations, but what does that prove?