The US is still a country that isn't oppressive...not measured against a global average. It's just headed the wrong direction, and taking "not currently oppressive" steps that will make the slide into an oppressive state difficult to stop.

E.g., a database identifying everyone by photo and voiceprint isn't, in and of itself, oppressive. It's only when you mix it with authoritarian legislation that it becomes so. Alternatively it could be a database for ensuring that sick or injured people could be treated with due care to avoid medications that they were allergic to.

The problem is that the government is untrustworthy. You can't trust them to have good intentions, so when they do something that has multiple possible uses, you need to expect that they will abuse it. They may also use it beneficially, but here a kind of inequality rears its head: Any one act can do a lot more damage than good. So if you think something will be used for both good and bad, you need to expect that the bad will to a lot more damage than the good heals.

Sorry, but you have only identified a subset of prions. The larger number take raw materials put together by cells and fold them into images of themselves...which enables them to do the job needed by the cell. In doing this they are "taking an available resource" and transforming it into a copy of themselves.

Occasionally one will misfold...i.e. suffer a mutation during reproduction. This new copy will also take available resources and transform it into copies of itself. Often these new forms will be either useless or actively harmful to the cell that is building the proteins. Sort of destroying the environment that allowed them to floruish.

It's true I am specifically using words to describe the actions of the prion that are typically used for organisms, and I'm doing it with intent, but they are also accurate descriptions.

Someone else commented about this as an example of "the tyranny of the discontinuous mind", and they're probably exactly correct. This is a case where classifying something as either alive or not alive isn't helpful.

Yes, but if space and time are non-existant, then there's no time for a quantum transition to happen in. So it can't happen. And there's no place for it to happen. So it can't happen. So I feel that must be a mistake.

So space and time must pre-exist, even if there's nothing in them. And given that, there's little reason to presume that we live in the "first" universe to erupt. But if dark energy (or a Big Crunch) is a built in characteristic of erupting universes, and if they rarely happen, then we would see very little evidence of them. And that would imply that there should be traces of the prior universe at the time of the subsequent universe erupting. But the traces are likely to be minisicule even at the time of the new eruption. Because it's quite difficult to do a thorough cleaning job. This doesn't mean that there will be any way to detect their presence, however.

Unfortunately, this does raise the question of "What do you mean 'time passing' when there's noting present?". The best answer that I have is that if someone were there to measure it they could measure it by noticing virtual pair creation, but they couldn't be there to measure it without disrupting the state of the system. Still, it's a definition, and if space and time exist it should be valid. And it's required to be valid or you couldn't have the kind of large eruption that yields a universe.

There are a lot of things that fit that rather abstract description that I don't consider life, but which I do consider evolving. Stars for example. More recent generations of stars have evolved to consist of more heavy elements than did the earlier generations. (Granted parentage is a bit difficult to specify, as the parent is generally long dead before the descendant is born. And, of course, the Hydorgen involved is primordial, but then so are the elements of any life form, what matters is the organization...for some meaning of organization.)

I think you need to think more carefully about metabolism. If a virus not alive because it externalizes its metabolism? Many forms of life externalize, say, their digestion, and yet we still say they digest their food.

What do you mean "cheating"? Many parasites can only exist and reproduce in extremely specialized environments.

Are Prions a form of life? If not, why not?

They don't use DNA, they use proteins.

OTOH all known Prions are either symbiotes or parasites.

Whether we recognize any particular non-DNA using entity as a form of life is going to depend strongly on what definition we use for life.

There actually *is* a real problem here. At least if you consider space and time as parts of the universe. If there is no space and no time, then you can't have quantum fluctuations.

My guess is that the actual universe is eternal, and that space and time exist without (most?) of the other features of the universe. But that they can be distorted by mass and energy. This essentially solves the problem as I understand it. There is the question of size in the absence of matter and a few other problems.

If my guess is correct, any "universe" that's created by this process is temporary. (What are a few billion years to eternity?) What's not clear is what the constraints are. Can a new universe be caused (or happen) to erupt within an existing universe? The probability of each eruption at any one point would necessarily be extremely small (or it wouldn't match observations)...but this doesn't mean it couldn't happen, or that it couldn't be caused. What the effects would be are difficult to contemplate. Does the eruption cause new space and time to be created, pushing pre-existing stuff out of the way, or does it occur within the same space-time? Etc.

P.S.: Whenever you get a singularity you get the laws of physics breaking down because division by zero is an invalid operation. But if Heisenberg's uncertainty rules, then you will never actually get exactly onto the singularity, so the laws don't break down. (You can divide by arbitrarily small numbers, as long as they aren't actually zero.) Sometimes other tricks are used to avoid this problem (see renormalization), but that's the simple way to say it.

P.P.S.: If you actually read and understand Einstein's work you don't realize that ordinary linear time is an illusion, you realize instead that it's a pretty precise statement of the way things work at low energy levels. It just doesn't work as you approach certain boundaries (like the speed of light, Schwartzhild boundary strength gravity, etc.). This is predictable because we never experience those boundaries. If you want an actual illusion, think about the way electromagnetic waves are translated into color sensations.

P.P.S.: To reiterate, the laws of physics do not break down near the Big Bang, only *AT* it. And Heisenberg uncertainty offers a way to finesse that problem.

Well, since everything is marked either checked or don't use, that's not unreasonable. Granted a more accurate marking would be to just not mark it those two times. Also, with the rating given nobody who is serious about security would use skype, so it's not like they're actually misleading anyone.

In California the appear to have made things worse. This isn't certain, because lots of other things were happening at the same time, but they sure haven't made things better.

OTOH, time has clearly demonstrated that no small group of people is capable of policing their predatory behavior upon the non-members of the group. Or at least all attempts to date have been unsuccessful. Some of the attempts have lasted for decades before failure, and their modes of failure have lead me to develop a hypothesis (which I usually phrase as the following assertion):
When a centralized position of power is created it will over time come to be filled by people more interested in exercizing (and increasing) the power than in doing the task that the position was created so accomplish.

This doesn't imply that there aren't individuals who won't be majorly corrupted by such a post, merely that those given to corruption by power will be the ones most strongly incentivized to strive for it (the positon of power).

The problem is that universities should not be expected to be trade schools, and trade schools should not be expected to be universities. And there needs to be an additional category in the middle for things like chemists and doctors.

The trouble is, each of those kinds of school needs to have the classes that each of the others has, just with a different center. This used to be handled by the different colleges within the university, but they have become homogenized under the stress of an administration that wants to make administering them simpler, where what they really needed was to become more distinct.

But note that an artist who wants to learn metal welding shouldn't need to learn that in the art school, there should be a "transfer class" in a trade school that teaches welding. The art school should decide (in advance) whether to allow units to transfer for that class. (It should probably decide yes.)

Think of this proposal as splitting the university (plus the trade schools that have been killed off) into separately administered colleges that allow students to flow between them, but each one has its own requirements for what it takes to complete a major.

Now paying for this.... I think that student education should be totally subsidized. Not room and board. Not materials. But the education itself.

I also think that inventions developed with public funding should be available to the public, and free to use for any company chartered and paying taxes within the geographic area controlled by the particular government. This includes drugs. This doesn't mean that the government should pay for safety testing, but it means that no company should be able to prevent another from qualifying a drug that has been developed with public money. I know that this cuts off one major source of funding that has been developed by many universities, but my feeling is "This is a rip-off!", and they don't deserve to control the patents. If they pay for it, of course, it's a totally different matter. But universities that take federal money for non-teaching purposes should not then be able to claim the results other than prestige and copyrights. (And I'm even dubious about copyrights. That could grow into another area of corruption.)

A valid point. Consider it a criticism of the summary.

Fat is not harmless. It's just differently harmful than are carbohydrates or protein.

I'm told that vegetarians that allow themselves dairy products may be fat. Perhaps I haven't met many of them.

The real problem is that people like to eat, and they prefer to eat foods that are high in calories. Also, once they leave childhood they prefer to minimize exercise. This is a bad combination, but it isn't unique to humans. What's unique to humans is that they can usually find a lot of reasonably tasty food with minimal effort.

Go watch lions in a zoo, and see how much they sleep. This is normal. If you want an animal to be active, you limit its food supply, and arrange things so that activity is require to get anything that isn't dead boring to eat.
N.B.: This effect is less marked in smaller animals because:
1) It takes less effort to move, and
2) Smaller animals need to eat more often.
But humans count as larger animals.

This is oversimplified, of course, but there is no magic dietary food that you can eat or avoid to solve the problem. He's right that we have no real need for sugar, but we also only need a small amount of fat. But if we eliminate both we tend to OD on protein, which has its own problems.

I think the best fad diet of recent times was the oat bran diet. It still didn't solve the problem, of course, but it was minimally harmful.

FWIW, I tend to avoid sugar, and minimize fats (with some exceptions for olive oil...but even that only in moderation). But I like to eat, and I'm not active enough....and I weigh about twice what I should.

The only group of people I'm aware of that aren't *vigorous* exercisers and aren't overweight are strict vegetarians...or orientals who eat a traditional diet, which is nearly the same thing. (Or very young...though even there the percentage of overweight is increasing rapidly. Probably because their ability to run around has been sharply curtailed over the last several decades.)

Funny, I belong to a group that believes that the Bible is a bunch of rabble-rousing political propaganda and so out of context that most people either don't understand or misunderstand most of it. And that most invocations of God within the bible are as sincere as that made by Obama at his last speech. (Well, actually since those quoted in the Bible were usually out of power, by someone running against him.)