Agreed. If anything antibiotics and vaccines have completely opposite mechanisms of action.

An antibiotic taken as a medication kills bacteria directly, assisting the immune system and making its job easier. In the case of bleaching every surface in your house, it means that the immune system never sees the bacteria in the first place. The same is true of other external use of antibiotics (killing of bacteria before it gets into your body).

A vaccine provokes your immune response against a pathogen without exposing you to the risk of developing the disease (or a greatly reduced risk). Your immune system does all the work, and as a result it is able to do the job entirely on its own much more effectively at a later time.

Comparing the approaches, the disinfectant approach is like bleaching your house 3x/day, and the vaccine approach is like rolling around in the mud and not washing before dinner. I'd be very hesitant to associate the problems of the one with the other.

I would object to both.

Somebody convicted of a crime is either a danger to society or they aren't. If they are dangerous to be allowed in public, then they shouldn't be allowed in public - full stop. If they aren't, then quite badgering about it for the rest of their life. Frankly our criminal justice system needs to be a lot less punitive and a lot more rehabilitative. I'm fine with deterring crime, but clearly that on its own doesn't work. If a criminal can't be rehabilitated then they should get a life sentence, even if all they did was beat somebody up. If they can be rehabilitated, then they should be released once they're able to function normally in society, even if they killed 35 people. As a citizen my concern is not whether the guy across the street was appropriately punished like a 12 year old, but rather whether they're capable of not acting like a 12 year old now.

Sure, the system will always be imperfect, but I don't really see much value in permanent sanctions. By all means use parole (and by that I mean an invasive probation where you actually help the parolee re-integrate over years with heavy contact), but once they're just an ordinary citizen, let them be an ordinary citizen (heaven forbid that criminals that rehabilitate have something to look forward to).

When you turn people into second-class citizens they'll start acting like second-class citizens.

Banning gun ownership by felons is also doubly silly. If you think they're not dangerous then why ban gun ownership? If you do think they have no regard for the law, then why do you think outlawing gun ownership will stop them when whatever law they previously broke failed to do so?

Imagine you step into a teleporter, in an atomic instant you disappear and an exact replica of you appears on the other side. In this hypothetical example the position and composition of every particle that composes you is perfectly replicated, momentum and all (no messy Uncertainty Principle issues).

In this highly idealized scenario, you could debate whether your consciousness really does teleport, or whether the guy who steps out the other side merely thinks that it does.

Of course, you could probably make the same argument with motion in general. When you move every particle in your body moves along, and at one point in time they are at one place, and at the next moment they are at another. I'm not sure how teleportation is any different beyond the distance being larger.

Of course, to the degree that teleportation is imperfect, then the matter is compounded.

I think another huge challenge is just going to be wiring them up correctly initially.

I used to think a brain was just a box full of neurons that had inputs on one side and outputs on the other and they were trained like any other simple neural network, but with far many nodes. As I've read up on things (and lived with somebody with anomic aphasia that has improved over time) I realized that nothing could be further from the truth.

There is very clearly some kind of basic architecture to the brain that involves incredibly intricate connections that are basically pre-wired but which evolve over time. There are specialized regions of the brain, and most operations involve many regions of the brain working together in various ways. There are both short- and long-distance connections all over the place.

My personal theory is that there are many building-blocks of functionality that are suited to particular purposes, and that as brains evolved these got stitched together in ways that led to all kinds of emergent properties. You have areas like the cerebellum which seem (to my poorly educated brain) to be a bit like the simplistic neural network model, and I suspect the rest of the brain uses it like a programmer might use a computer to automate certain types of operations (like feedback loops for balance and who knows what else). I suspect that different regions of the brain "use" each other in similar ways, almost symbiotically.

If I had the time to really study this stuff I'd probably start by trying to understand fundamental building blocks of neural networks. I figure that developmentally this stuff has to form in some kind of almost fractal pattern since embryonic cells really only can keep track of their immediate surroundings and cell division counts. What kinds of patterns lead to what kinds of processing abilities?

Really fascinating stuff - it will be truly amazing if we ever figure it out.

Yup. To the point where quantum effects impact a brain, it might be impossible to replicate a human mind. You could probably make a decent facsimile, but it could differ in subtle ways.

When you decide where to eat lunch, for all we know the decision was influenced by a cosmic ray that originated in a supernova halfway across the universe.

How do you know? You could only tell that you had respawned if your memories passed intact to your new self. Of course, if your memories don't pass intact then is it really your self? Oh, and if you go ahead and pass along your memories without you actually dying, which you is you?

And for that matter, when you step into a transporter, is the guy who comes out on the other side really you?

This is assuming that there is such a thing as a blank slate brain, or that any brain can be shaped in arbitrary ways.

Brains grow. In fact, learning to play an instrument at an early age can actually cause changes to the folds of the brain visible to the naked eye. That is a dramatic example, but I'm sure there are a bazillion subtle ways the physical wiring of the brain gets set in near-permanent ways as it is forming. Some of that might be the result of experience, but some is likely the result of genetics, or even just chance.

They fessed up to what? Handling Tea Party applications differently, or doing it for political reasons? It is the latter I'm concerned with - they handle various groups of organizations differently all the time so it isn't really news that the Tea Party is among them. Doing it for political rather than legal reasons is a different matter.

That would be a major omission. I was wondering how cloning an embryo would be news.

I'm sure it isn't done every day of the week due to the ethical concerns, but I couldn't see how cloning embryos would present any difficulty at all. You basically just have to pluck a cell off of it and you're done as long as it is done before differentiation. if you chop an embryo in two you end up with identical twins, which is exactly how it happens naturally.

Cloning an embryo from an adult cell (especially a skin cell) is DEFINITELY news. I figured it was just a matter of time - again the ethical issues are the biggest obstacle to doing it considering that we can already clone other mammals.

I haven't been following it closely, but has any evidence actually emerged that it was politically motivated?

It is pretty typical for it to take many years to get an IRS certification for an organization. It also appears for it to be typical for related organizations to get lumped together to see how things go with a common policy defined to govern all of them. I know that there are tons of FOSS organizations that are waiting in limbo for determinations, perhaps for the same reason.

It shouldn't take years for the IRS to determine if an org is legit, but that seems to be a matter of general inability to get things done. I'd need to see some specific evidence to confirm that the Tea Party was targeted any more than a collection of all the Bieber fan clubs.

I certainly can. There are a million ways that I could make my next door neighbor's life miserable that are completely legal. You can certainly blame me for employing any of those tactics if it was done simply to hurt somebody. Sure, if somebody doesn't like the sight of clothes lines I'm not going to refuse to hang up my laundry. However, if my next door neighbor just lost his job and needs to sell his home to reduce his expenses, I'm not going to go out and paint my house with perfectly legal polka dots and put 1k pink flamingos in my lawn just to knock 40% off of his home value, even if I could somehow make money off the deal.

That's a much bigger problem with Windows than with Linux. You can easily mount md-raid drives from linux booted from USB or CD. I don't believe Windows supports booting off of anything other than a hard drive.

I would not want a windows-only software hard drive.

Yup, my workplace has had small victories, but usually only once things get out of hand.

It was pretty typical when buying a piece of equipment for the vendor to bundle a PC controller and printer with it for $5k (the software alone was only a few hundred dollars). Once that got on the radar the procurement group was instructed to look for this and disallow this - the internal IT group would deliver a managed bare-bones PC with the required OS and only basic management/antivirus software, and a network printer would be used. 99% of the time the printer that was bought would just get installed in somebody's office anyway.

The forced move to network printers also helped people to kick the paper habit. At this point it is pretty rare for me to handle paper at all at work, even with numerous legal requirements for documentation, sign-offs, and so on. It just takes commitment and it is wonderful to be able to live out of little more than a backpack, or sign off on stuff on weekends with nothing more than a VPN connection.

Thanks - wasn't aware of that development. What is their noise output compared to nuclear subs operating at the same speeds? The article really only says that they're quiet, but all modern subs are quiet. I doubt that modern US anti-sub platforms were designed to only be able to detect WWII subs.

Liquid Oxygen is also not something that can be regenerated at sea, so for cruise across the Pacific I would imagine that they would still snorkel, or their range would be fairly compromised when they got to the US. They could also be tailed the entire way from their port of embarkation. Then again, if this were a one-way suicide trip planned out as such I imagine they could make it on their load of oxygen assuming the speed is decent.

Speaking of laws, what happens when food gets low and the biggest guy on the show murders the smallest one and cooks him up for dinner? Do we send up a one-way police ship to arrest him?