As I understand it, from hearing about this type of thing from other sources, creating chimeras isn't just meant to provide a source of transplantable human organs. It enables researchers to study the effects of drugs (and whatever else) on human organs much better than using straight-animal analogs, without the kinds of ethical issues that make it tricky to impossible to do it in human clinical trials.

Dan Aris

Oh, for the love of Cthulhu; read the title of the post!

That's where the error was being propagated, which Opportunist corrected IN ALL CAPS and somehow you still missed it!

Dan Aris

"Boo hoo, my emotions are more important than the whole world's privacy."

Sorry, there is literally no way for Apple to build into a phone or an OS a way to unlock it for situations like this that won't also be vulnerable to governments and hackers.

If you never see your son's photos, that will be sad for you.

If Apple actually makes the changes required to make it possible for people like you to get in to phones like these regularly, that will be devastating for all iPhone users everywhere.

Dan Aris

That's fair.

However, I doubt that the Gates fortune and dynasty will last in the way that the Rockefeller has.

I would also say, though, that I wouldn't be at all surprised if John D. Rockefeller himself, if he were alive today, would react very similarly.

Dan Aris

Well, yeah. We all know that. Hell, it's in the story summary.

The point is, even Rockefeller is divesting from fossil fuels. It would be like Bill Gates saying, "Y'know, Windows really is pretty terrible, and is likely to get you infected and turned into a bot. Everyone should ditch it and use Linux."

And, frankly, about time, too.

Dan Aris

Well...it is, actually. It shouldn't be, but it is.

What it all comes down to is a question of the purpose of prison—and, indeed, of any court sentence.

As the excellent Illustrated Guide to Law lays out, any of our court sentences have five related purposes (and which purpose is most prioritized for a given sentence informs what the sentence is going to be like): Punishment, Deterrence, Rehabilitation, Removal and Retribution. At present, at least, America tends to focus heavily on Punishment and Retribution. That's what all the Tough On Crime laws are about: if you do something bad, you will be punished for it so that we feel like you've been hurt as much as the people you hurt. That's also partly about Deterrence.

Prison, specifically (and the death penalty, if you think about it), can usually serve the purpose of Removal—separating the criminal from the general population (aka "their potential victims," in many people's eyes, especially in the case of a registered sex offender). And, indeed, as some other people point out, if your real intention with a sex offender registry is to prevent them from coming into contact with potential victims, then the obvious solution is to just keep them locked up for life. Or kill them.

But I think most people would agree that, for most offenses that can land you on such a registry, that's too extreme. And all of this ignores the most utilitarian purpose of a court sentence for a crime: Rehabilitation. Helping the criminal to change whatever it is about themselves, or their life, that caused them to commit the crime in the first place. With a "classic" sex offender, this would have to include some kind of psychological component. Indeed, it might involve a lifetime of counseling, therapy, and/or drugs...but if we actually wanted to prevent people from committing these kinds of crimes again, rather than just hitting them on the head with the big freakin' hammer of the State from time to time when they reoffend (either in truth or merely by technicality, by breaking some condition of their registration), then we should pay a lot more attention to the mental health aspects of them than just thinking of the chiiiiiildren.

Dan Aris

You appear to have missed the part about the governments that attempt to enact such social engineering having tanks and planes to kill you with before your guns have a chance to mean a damn thing.

So it's more or less necessary, in such a situation, to have the army (or at least a substantial part of it) on your side. At which point having a lawfully armed populace becomes redundant, because you've got the bloody army on your side.

Dan Aris

The problem (or, if you prefer, great part) with this line of reasoning is that if you follow it to its logical conclusion, it strongly suggests that what you would need to submit as a "software patent" is, in fact, the source code, at least for the portion of the program that you wish to patent.

Of course, we already have intellectual property protection for source code: copyright. So should there be software patents at all? Or should software patents replace copyrightable source code? Or should there be some kind of hybrid system, where you can have your source code patented, or copyrighted, but not both...?

Dan Aris

Pascal used to be more widely used—it was the language of choice for the Mac in the early days. (Like, the really early days.)

It's not a language that's been underestimated and will someday find a way to blossom and become widespread. It's a language that has had its day, and will likely never be seen as more than a toy again.

Dan Aris

The question isn't just whether they'll be as efficient as LEDs. The question is whether they'll last as long and cost as little.

Frankly, for most people, what they liked about incandescents was their cost. I seriously doubt that anything that requires "nanoengineered mirrors" will cost $2.50 for a pack of 10.

Dan Aris

It's about more than "pleasant". It's about arranging your surroundings for health, wealth, and good luck, basically.

What you're thinking about is called "Interior Decorating."

Dan Aris

There's a huge difference between being deliberately deceptive, and spreading a belief that you yourself devoutly believe in, that happens to also be false.

And if you seriously believe that more than a tiny fraction of priests don't believe in the religion they preach (to the extent that it would be fair to call them deliberately deceptive) then you're an idiot, and probably waaaay too angry at the world in general.

Dan Aris

It's fairly well known that the cores of iOS and OS X (no slash, please! :-) ) are the same. That's not really the issue here—it's the problems with the differences between the optimal UI for a keyboard-and-mouse-based (or whatever pointing device you prefer) interface and the optimal UI for a touch-based interface.

But while I agree that it would be foolish to try to make a hybridized OS, I could see there being a device that works both ways, a few years from now, by being an iOS device when it's on its own, but when plugged into a special dock, it would become, essentially, the CPU for a monitor, keyboard, and mouse/trackpad/whatever that you have plugged into said dock...and the OS that displayed on that monitor would be OS X, not iOS.

Then you'd easily be able to access all the same documents, media, bookmarks, etc without even needing to sync them through iCloud, because they'd all literally be right on the device.

Now, I don't insist on this prediction by any means. I do think it would be a believable way to do some kind of convergence without the (IMNSHO) ugly compromises required of a convertible device like the Surface, though, and rather cool to boot.

Dan Aris

I'm not sure that either of those is actually a fair question to ask anyone.

Just as a thought experiment, imagine that there were several groups of militant atheists out bombing churches, mosques, and synagogues around the world, claiming that they were doing it because they were atheists, and all religious people needed to drop their delusions or die. How would you justify being "a member in the same club" as people like that? How would you answer, "How could you let this thing happen in your group?"

The former question is assuming that just because they happen to share some relatively broad affiliation (and yeah, "Muslim" is a truly absurdly broad affiliation; there are more Muslims than there are Chinese people in the world), they can somehow prevent these people from doing terrible things and claiming they're doing it in the name of that affiliation.

The second is assuming that because these things are being done by what are, if you do the numbers, really quite tiny splinter groups of the main affiliation, that all 1.6+ billion other Muslims would renounce their religion and...I dunno, turn atheist?

Basically, what, exactly, is it that you expect the 90+% of all Muslims who don't know any Islamist terrorists, and don't know anyone who knows one, to do about this that you or I couldn't do just as easily?

Dan Aris