It seems to me it should be possible to stop people (the vast majority at any rate) from deeplinking to the ad-free/print-friendly versions.
Just check the http-referer tag in the http header, if someone isn't coming from your site then just redirect them to the non-print-friendly/ad-rich version of the page with a note about why that happend.
For me a huge use for this would be for babies born premature.
My kids (twins) were born 8 weeks prem, my wife just got too sick (toximia) for her to continue, her life and therefore the kids was endangered. With this tech the kids could have been transplanted and gone to term rather than having the stress of having to breath, eat etc before they were realy ready.
That said we were realy lucky and from about 12 months there were within normal size and normal or above for other development. Even so I'd have given alot not to have had to go through that experiance.
As a father a a geek I couldn't disagree with you more!
If the code does not run then it's not supposed to.
You seem to be coming from a religious view point ok that's your perogative but concider this (and work out who decided what was supposed to happen)
A normal, reasonably healthy, teenage girl gets ill (or hurt), and gets an infection in her abdominal cavity, not her fault. Later she dicovers that she is infertile as a result, a blockage caused by the infection prevents the eggs from folowing thier normal path.
Let me preface this with 2 things one "Been there done that" (I have 4yo twins via IVF) and I"m writing from an Australian perspective)
I agree that most (if not all) of the reasons for wanting your own child are selfish (although I don's see the status symbol thing), this is independent of the fertility status of the parents, and I'm wholely unapologetic about that. You could just as well say that continuing to live whiles not activly working to lift the majority of the world up from hunger etc is selfish. Just because it's selfish doesn't mean it's wrong.
Interestingly you missed a *huge* reason as to why infertile couples don't adopt. It's not easy to do. We looked into it and were told our chances were slim to none. The view for adoption agencies is to find the best home for a child not to provide a child for a family (as it should be).
Why not an overseas adoption? Well the murk gets thicker here.
OK special needs kids are easier to adopt but while I think I could go through the pain a heartache associated with it if I was dealt that hand, I don't think I could knowingly choose it.
You also missed one point: the desire to procreate is built into us, hard wired at the level of our genes at about the same level as survival (the latter being pointless, evolutionally speaking, with out the first)
I'm wondering just how pervasive the US computer caffine cluture is internationally. I've been in the industry to 10 years here in Australia and my current project is the only one where not drinking coffee has been considered unusual.
If I were to work in the US what reation would not drinking Coffee (or some other caffine product) have? Or would it just be a social disadvantage?
Don't get me wrong, I like coffee, it's just that caffine doesn't keep me awake or make me more alert, if I drink too much I just get jittery/nervous. (BTW too much for me is probably 2 regular strangth cups in one day, or a few days of ahving one cup each day).
I, for one, would jump at having GM caffine free coffee.
You'd be hard pressed to find any natural varieties in cash crops. Cross breading is little different from genetic engineering...
But that's it precisely...
With the comparison of cross-breading and genetic engineering, yes there is little difference, but that little difference is important: I can, with little if any equipment or training, cross-bread two plants, it's unlikely that I'll ever be able to do any genetic engineering in my back yard.
Another thing, if I do cross bread I have no idea what genes I'm messing with. I could produce a new type of, say, strawberry I bread it to be sweater and cope with dry conditions, now unbeknownst to me some bio-tech company owns patents on some new combination I bread into my plant. I get hit with a patent infringement suit. Surely that must indicate re-invention, I can't have stolen their ideas if I've never sequenced a gene or seen one of their engineered plants.
I have no problem, in principle, with genetic engineering, however I do have a problem with the licensing lock-in factor. You buy a crop resistant to a particular herbicide, you get locked in to the herbicide, you may not be able to keep seed from year to year you have to keep paying the licence. In non-first world countries this added expense has got to be hurting, to say nothing about what it's doing for bio-diversity. About patents in general.
It seems to me that the whole patent idea is based on industries that develop very slowly. In tech and biotech things move so quickly that 20 years is a joke. OK at the moment the biotech side of things is a bit slower, however I remember an article (sorry can't remember where) that talked of replacing a lab with a bio-chip reducing the required space from tens of square meters to a few square cm allowing work to develop in parallel.
The other side is the current population (6 billion) compared to (1.5 billion) in the late 19th century, so many more people to do the independent invention.
Sometimes I think the only hope is for the whole patent system to collapse under it's own absurdity.
Re:It's sad to see so few comments.
on
Teranesia
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· Score: 1
I have to agree, much better than Bear. I don't think I've read any thing of his that I didn't spend more time thinking about than actually reading. The tech he comes up with is amazing and then his ability to extrapolate some of their impact on people is fantastic.
I would have thought he was more popular on slashdot, particularly 'Distress'. It seems to me that the idea of Stateless would really appeal to the open source community. (Stateless is an island grown from a seed appropriated from a gen-engineering firm. It declared it's own independence, but isn't generally recognised as a country in it's own right. Also no real system of government)
I have to disagree about 'Permutation City' though. I think it's an excellent treatment of a community of scanned in people (and some of the philosophical implications). I also liked the whole idea of processing power being treated as a commodity for exchange, kind of a capitalistic extension of distributed.net. The 'launching' of the virtual worlds might seem a bit abstract to some though.
Check out his home page, last time I checked there were links to some of his work online.
The trouble with Pascal's wager is that it sees the space as binary.
I'll agree that the first choice is God Exists or not. If you follow the "not" branch the tree ends, otherwise you then have a huge choice, some (but not all) are mutually exclusive, believe in God "A" and are wrong you might burn in God "B"'s hell.
As an athiest, I'll admit I'm biased, but I think Pascal had his money on the wrong horse.
I always prefered Ockham's Razor to Pascals wager in any case.
OK I agree with you on cosmetic surgery and I'll add non-essential surgury (heathy tonsels, circumsision etc) but two points I can't ignore (sorry if this gets a bit off topic):
Nature's Way of thinning the herd
The whole point of this is to improve the over all genetic base of the species the genetic engineering is just (see below) jumping the gun with nature.
People who spend thousands of dollars trying to have kids piss me off. You don't have such special 'genes' that you can't adopt some kid who needs a home and give them your precious family name.
First off I am one of these people, I have 21 month old IVF twins, so I'll address that part first. Deciding to have a child is saying that you think your genes are special enough to pass on (also based on your own idea of your parenting skills), at least it should be. Yes this is selfish I'll admit it, but who has the right to tell me my genes aren't special enough to pass on (now that is eugenics)
Secondly do you have any idea how hard it is to adopt? When my wife and I found out about our fertility problems we looked into it. The result: not likely. Very few children and many potential parents. The kids get the pick of the bunch (as they should) and there are plenty of good homes. There is more stress and heart ache involved than we thought we could stand. it realy pisses me off when some one throws in adoption so casually with so little knowledge. (sorry but you realy touched a nerve there)
More on genetic engineerng I'm not saying it's a good idea, I think it's a fair way off, or alteast it should be messing with the gene pool could dangerous at least until we know a bit more. But once our knowledge is up it'd be almost irisopnsible not to.
(still take a look at Greg Egan's short story "Euginie" in Axiomatic) Well I've ranted enough.
3. Say good-bye to the camcorder. Particularly useful for journalists. This idea was used a bit in Greg Egan's "Distress" an excellent book, fantastic author.
With better resolution, no need for a camera crew, although you'd need a mirror for shots of your self:-)
BTW anyone know the max resolution we could get with a human eye?
Slashdot Mirror
It seems to me it should be possible to stop people (the vast majority at any rate) from deeplinking to the ad-free/print-friendly versions. Just check the http-referer tag in the http header, if someone isn't coming from your site then just redirect them to the non-print-friendly/ad-rich version of the page with a note about why that happend.
My kids (twins) were born 8 weeks prem, my wife just got too sick (toximia) for her to continue, her life and therefore the kids was endangered. With this tech the kids could have been transplanted and gone to term rather than having the stress of having to breath, eat etc before they were realy ready.
That said we were realy lucky and from about 12 months there were within normal size and normal or above for other development. Even so I'd have given alot not to have had to go through that experiance.
If the code does not run then it's not supposed to.
You seem to be coming from a religious view point ok that's your perogative but concider this (and work out who decided what was supposed to happen)
A normal, reasonably healthy, teenage girl gets ill (or hurt), and gets an infection in her abdominal cavity, not her fault. Later she dicovers that she is infertile as a result, a blockage caused by the infection prevents the eggs from folowing thier normal path.
Absolutes are fine until real life happens.
If it is broke then fix it.
I agree that most (if not all) of the reasons for wanting your own child are selfish (although I don's see the status symbol thing), this is independent of the fertility status of the parents, and I'm wholely unapologetic about that. You could just as well say that continuing to live whiles not activly working to lift the majority of the world up from hunger etc is selfish. Just because it's selfish doesn't mean it's wrong.
Interestingly you missed a *huge* reason as to why infertile couples don't adopt. It's not easy to do. We looked into it and were told our chances were slim to none. The view for adoption agencies is to find the best home for a child not to provide a child for a family (as it should be).
Why not an overseas adoption? Well the murk gets thicker here.
OK special needs kids are easier to adopt but while I think I could go through the pain a heartache associated with it if I was dealt that hand, I don't think I could knowingly choose it.
You also missed one point: the desire to procreate is built into us, hard wired at the level of our genes at about the same level as survival (the latter being pointless, evolutionally speaking, with out the first)
I'm wondering just how pervasive the US computer caffine cluture is internationally. I've been in the industry to 10 years here in Australia and my current project is the only one where not drinking coffee has been considered unusual.
If I were to work in the US what reation would not drinking Coffee (or some other caffine product) have? Or would it just be a social disadvantage?
Don't get me wrong, I like coffee, it's just that caffine doesn't keep me awake or make me more alert, if I drink too much I just get jittery/nervous. (BTW too much for me is probably 2 regular strangth cups in one day, or a few days of ahving one cup each day).
I, for one, would jump at having GM caffine free coffee.
You'd be hard pressed to find any natural varieties in cash crops. Cross breading is little different from genetic engineering...
But that's it precisely...
With the comparison of cross-breading and genetic engineering, yes there is little difference, but that little difference is important: I can, with little if any equipment or training, cross-bread two plants, it's unlikely that I'll ever be able to do any genetic engineering in my back yard.
Another thing, if I do cross bread I have no idea what genes I'm messing with. I could produce a new type of, say, strawberry I bread it to be sweater and cope with dry conditions, now unbeknownst to me some bio-tech company owns patents on some new combination I bread into my plant. I get hit with a patent infringement suit. Surely that must indicate re-invention, I can't have stolen their ideas if I've never sequenced a gene or seen one of their engineered plants.
I have no problem, in principle, with genetic engineering, however I do have a problem with the licensing lock-in factor. You buy a crop resistant to a particular herbicide, you get locked in to the herbicide, you may not be able to keep seed from year to year you have to keep paying the licence. In non-first world countries this added expense has got to be hurting, to say nothing about what it's doing for bio-diversity. About patents in general.
It seems to me that the whole patent idea is based on industries that develop very slowly. In tech and biotech things move so quickly that 20 years is a joke. OK at the moment the biotech side of things is a bit slower, however I remember an article (sorry can't remember where) that talked of replacing a lab with a bio-chip reducing the required space from tens of square meters to a few square cm allowing work to develop in parallel.
The other side is the current population (6 billion) compared to (1.5 billion) in the late 19th century, so many more people to do the independent invention.
Sometimes I think the only hope is for the whole patent system to collapse under it's own absurdity.
I have to agree, much better than Bear. I don't think I've read any thing of his that I didn't spend more time thinking about than actually reading. The tech he comes up with is amazing and then his ability to extrapolate some of their impact on people is fantastic.
I would have thought he was more popular on slashdot, particularly 'Distress'. It seems to me that the idea of Stateless would really appeal to the open source community. (Stateless is an island grown from a seed appropriated from a gen-engineering firm. It declared it's own independence, but isn't generally recognised as a country in it's own right. Also no real system of government)
I have to disagree about 'Permutation City' though. I think it's an excellent treatment of a community of scanned in people (and some of the philosophical implications). I also liked the whole idea of processing power being treated as a commodity for exchange, kind of a capitalistic extension of distributed.net. The 'launching' of the virtual worlds might seem a bit abstract to some though.
Check out his home page, last time I checked there were links to some of his work online.
The trouble with Pascal's wager is that it sees the space as binary.
I'll agree that the first choice is God Exists or not. If you follow the "not" branch the tree ends, otherwise you then have a huge choice, some (but not all) are mutually exclusive, believe in God "A" and are wrong you might burn in God "B"'s hell.
As an athiest, I'll admit I'm biased, but I think Pascal had his money on the wrong horse.
I always prefered Ockham's Razor to Pascals wager in any case.
OK I agree with you on cosmetic surgery and I'll add non-essential surgury (heathy tonsels, circumsision etc) but two points I can't ignore (sorry if this gets a bit off topic):
Nature's Way of thinning the herd
The whole point of this is to improve the over all genetic base of the species the genetic engineering is just (see below) jumping the gun with nature.
People who spend thousands of dollars trying to have kids piss me off. You don't have such special 'genes' that you can't adopt some kid who needs a home and give them your precious family name.
First off I am one of these people, I have 21 month old IVF twins, so I'll address that part first. Deciding to have a child is saying that you think your genes are special enough to pass on (also based on your own idea of your parenting skills), at least it should be. Yes this is selfish I'll admit it, but who has the right to tell me my genes aren't special enough to pass on (now that is eugenics)
Secondly do you have any idea how hard it is to adopt? When my wife and I found out about our fertility problems we looked into it. The result: not likely. Very few children and many potential parents. The kids get the pick of the bunch (as they should) and there are plenty of good homes. There is more stress and heart ache involved than we thought we could stand. it realy pisses me off when some one throws in adoption so casually with so little knowledge. (sorry but you realy touched a nerve there)
More on genetic engineerng I'm not saying it's a good idea, I think it's a fair way off, or alteast it should be messing with the gene pool could dangerous at least until we know a bit more. But once our knowledge is up it'd be almost irisopnsible not to.
(still take a look at Greg Egan's short story "Euginie" in Axiomatic) Well I've ranted enough.
How about:
3. Say good-bye to the camcorder. Particularly useful for journalists. This idea was used a bit in Greg Egan's "Distress" an excellent book, fantastic author.
With better resolution, no need for a camera crew, although you'd need a mirror for shots of your self :-)
BTW anyone know the max resolution we could get with a human eye?