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Comment Re:Moral? (Score 1) 299

by iter8 (#41188561) Attached to: If Extinct Species Can Be Brought Back... Should We?

I want my Dodo-burger and my Moa-burger too.

They can wait with the elephant bird and the terror bird until I get peckish again.

Gastornis parisiensis they can keep, I don't want them to tread on my feet.

But more seriously, instead of editing the genes so that Californian Grizzly doesn't eat people, they could do some editing so that they can be employed to pick oranges, that would be the day.

I don't know about bears picking oranges. Next, they'll discover fire and then it's just trouble after that. See this story.

Comment Re:Vaccines should be mandatory. (Score 1) 1025

by iter8 (#41118835) Attached to: Study Finds Unvaccinated Students Putting Other Students At Risk
We were directed by the physicians not to vaccinate. This was 20 years ago, so I think the anti-vaccine movement wasn't as strong and immunosuppression wasn 't as advanced. Someone above mentioned that non-vaccinated kids were not the risk, but that the condition that required the transplant was the risk factor. Of course, it was, but childhood disease can kill or cripple seemingly healthy kids, if you can't be vaccinated against things like measles, having almost everyone around you vaccinated is the next best thing. Lowering the accumulated risk seems like a good thing. As you say, when dealing with a chronic condition, you're always making those kinds of risk/reward judgments.

Comment Re:Vaccines should be mandatory. (Score 1) 1025

by iter8 (#41109551) Attached to: Study Finds Unvaccinated Students Putting Other Students At Risk

And what if I don't want to live in society? Will society let me independently exist, or will they force my participation, through such means as property taxes? And if I'm not given a choice, who's the parasite?

Born, never asked, eh? I think the choices then are be dead or live on an isolated island in the remote Pacific. With rising sea levels, the second choice may not be the better option. With the human population spread across the globe the way it is, it's getting pretty hard not to be part of some sort of society.

Comment Re:Vaccines should be mandatory. (Score 4, Interesting) 1025

by iter8 (#41108831) Attached to: Study Finds Unvaccinated Students Putting Other Students At Risk
My son was immunosuppressed because of a kidney transplant when he was an infant so he couldn't be vaccinated. We depended on herd-immunity. It was always scary to run into someone who was anti-vaccine. I thought "It's bad enough that you're putting your own kid at risk, but you're seriously endangering mine." The anti-vaccine people aren't always uneducated, many of the ones that I encountered were college grads. I guess they slept through biology class. Many seemed to think vaccination was some sort of plot by "The Man".

Comment Re:Here's how it works. (Score 1) 420

by iter8 (#41054031) Attached to: Where the Candidates Stand On Net Neutrality

It's a way to get their foot in the door. They will either make a new agency, or expand the FCC to essentially police the internet. You'll need someone to check up on ISPs to make sure they're staying neutral, and a bunch of new regulations that define exactly what neutral is. ISPs will probably need a license to operate which can be revoked in the event an ISP is found not to be neutral. From there, they can probably add new regulations to prevent sharing copyrighted materials without even passing new legislation. Since its already illegal, all they'd need to do is expand the meaning of net neutrality as necessary.

And net-neutrality advocates really need to get real about this. The Internet is moving away from preferred content, not toward it, and users would perceive blocked content as "broken links." Customers would have a shit fit, and probably sue their ISP for false advertising if that happened (not to mention the Feds could bring antitrust charges). Net neutrality legislation is an unnecessary opportunity for the government to break the Internet. Don't fall for it.

You are assuming that competition exists among ISPs. This is not the case in many parts of the US. Where I live there is one choice, excluding satellite which is a lousy solution. Without local competition, a monopoly can do whatever they want in the absence of regulation. By the time customers get together and sue an ISP for throttling or blocking sites, the damage is done. A net startup would be out of business before folks realized it was gone. Monopolies have to be regulated. Net neutrality is minimal regulation. It says keep your hands off content. If there were any real competition, it wouldn't be necessary.

Comment Re: Maybe (Score 1) 840

by iter8 (#41036233) Attached to: Genetically Engineering Babies a Moral Obligation, Says Ethicist
This seems like one of those "what could possibly go wrong" scenarios. Genetic and epigenetic interactions are complex. Even simple genetic defects like the defect that causes sickle cell anemia can have a positive genetic benefit like conferring resistance to malaria. Maybe by eliminating something like alcoholism in a population, we eliminate some necessary positive trait. Sorting out how much of a particular complex trait like alcoholism or psychopathy is genetic, epigenetic, or environmental isn't easy. In general, when it comes to messing with our heredity, I think extreme caution is in order. I don't think we're as smart in this area as we think we are.

Comment Re:Here's a video released by Anon about surveilla (Score 4, Informative) 149

by iter8 (#40976491) Attached to: Leaked Emails Allegedly Tell of Global "Trapwire" Spy Network

If you'd like to see the extent of surveillance in US, watch this video released by anon:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKaG9pfEFSQ

Scary to say the least. 1984 is already here.

Isn't this convenient, the video has been deleted from YouTube. That is doubleplusungood.

Comment Re:I for one (Score 1) 228

by iter8 (#40637485) Attached to: Rethinking How Congress Pushes Copyright Laws
think if people actually went and read the CONSTITUTION they would see that copyright exists for a reason - to protect the creator, to make it profitable to create, and to enbiggen a vibrant creative economy.

Article 1 Section 8
To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;

Doesn't say anything about making it profitable or about the economy, rather congress may make laws granting exclusive rights for a limited time to promote progress in the arts and sciences. If you want to try and profit, that's your business not congress's. Maybe our current congress has it backwards.

Comment Re:This is stupid. How easy is it for Al Qaeda or (Score 1) 78

Something similar to that experiment is done every year. In many parts of the world people live in crowded conditions with close contact to pigs and chickens. A small number of people become infected with H5N1. A few die, most don't. If you did the experiment that you describe, you will probably end up with results similar those in the paper - people would get ill; maybe a few would die, probably from Al Qaeda medical care. If you want to be a terrorist, cheap explosives are more cost effective.

Comment Re:Young listeners? (Score 1) 390

by iter8 (#40372829) Attached to: Young Listeners Opt For Streaming Over Owning

Well, for the most part...the music being produced today, just isn't worth keeping, and owning to replay over and over again in the coming years.

That's not just my "get off my lawn" mentality either...I hear it from younger people today. They go through tons of music, but it is quite often disposable, I've heard them say.

I think the problem is just the opposite. There is so much great music, from all time periods, available right now that we're in some sort of golden age of music. There's always something new and exciting to discover, so why limit yourself. I listen to everything from Gregorian chants to hip-hop and my personal opinion is that the stuff being produced right now in any genre that you can name is as good and as anything from any past period. It's just different because it's built on what came before. Of course, there are giants like Coltrane or Beethoven, but new giants will always come along and revolutionize music.

Comment Re:Young listeners? (Score 1) 390

by iter8 (#40372543) Attached to: Young Listeners Opt For Streaming Over Owning
Me too. I'm an old geezer and I mostly listen to streaming rather than stuff I own. I subscribe to a couple of streaming services and usually listen to radio streams like WFMU while working. My main complaint against the commercial streaming services like Rhapsody is that tracks will disappear. You can create a playlist and tracks will occasionally become unavailable because the music company has pulled the songs from the service.

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