Soylent green was 100% algae until Hollywood got hold of it.

So clearly, Hollywood is the enemy.

Read "Make Room, Make Room" to learn all about Soylent, and for that matter catch a great story that was muddled into unrecoverability by pinheaded filmmakers.

If robots are built from standard parts -- as surely they will be -- then a maintenance robot can fix either your household robot, or another maintenance robot. Just as a doctor can fix you, or another doctor, with equal competence (not saying it's high competence, but it is the same, nonetheless.)

There's absolutely no question that the advent of general purpose robotics would drastically shift our economy around. How well we manage that shift would be the fulcrum from which we tilt forward, or backward. Add AI to the equation, and things might go entirely another way, however. Clever functional programming is one thing; an intelligent, independent entity is another. I think it really comes down to AI, or no AI; the latter will work out well for us, the former... unknown.

I guess we'll have to disagree since our arguments have conflicting premises.

1) You are still not giving up your definition of "functional" which I still contend is circular reasoning.

2) You've characterized my argument as an anthropomorphization of nature which is not my intent at all. I am merely refusing to accept a dubious categorization. The burden of proof is on those who would make this categorization, and I find their arguments very unconvincing.

3) You've discounted my point regarding the B&N Nobel Prize by saying they created a valid theory to explain their empirical results - this is not true. The prize was for "their important breakthrough in the discovery of superconductivity in ceramic materials" (direct quote) which was not adequately explained by any theory at that time. According to Wikipedia, there's still no scientific consensus on why it works.

My hypotheses is that "there is no such thing as nonfunctional DNA, every byte of it functions to some purpose" and mainstream science is already testing this idea (by continuing to find additional functions). The fact that we have not uncovered every purpose in the brief period we've even known about DNA is expected; humans do not normally exhaust the interesting characteristics of even simple elemental substances (like lead, for example, or carbon) when they've been known for centuries. You're aware of carbon nanotubules and buckyballs? Aerosolized lead influence on crime rates? These are new discoveries of properties of substances we've known of for a thousand years or more.

To believe we know enough about DNA to categorize any part as "nonfunctional" is hubris. As you mentioned, the concept of "junk DNA" has already been partially disproven over the last ten years, and I'm fairly confident that more remains to be discovered.

âoe...the scientific community will need to rethink some long-held views about what genes are and what they do, as well as how the genomeâ(TM)s functional elements have evolved." -- Francis S. Collins, 2007

Just thought I'd let you know the three I just tested all still worked fine.

What SDR software is that?

SdrDx

Did I say I was condemning white people for Tuskegee? Maybe I'm talking about doctors. Or maybe about government employees. Or maybe about carbon based life forms. If having one thing in common with someone who commits atrocities makes you a party to those atrocities, then sharing skin color or profession or employer seems like fair grounds for equally nasty bigotry and hate-mongering. Shall we burn all doctors at the stake for Tuskegee?

And many people don't get to choose their belief systems, anyway - do you think an impoverished Saudi woman in Jazan or an abused Haredi child in Jerusalem will ever be allowed to leave the faith? They are kept in total ignorance of any other options; essentially they are sequestered and groomed psychologically by their own families, conditioned like Soviet children were during the glory days of the Stalinism and the New Soviet Man.

And speaking of Uncle Joe, the only two atheist regimes with any staying power (China and the USSR) did a pretty good job of showing that evil and atrocity occur with tedious frequency both within and outside of religions. There have clearly been plenty of anti-religious bigots who were just as brutal and antihuman as any religious bigot - who was the better man, Laurenti Beria or Teilhard de Chardin? Felix Dzerzinsky or Theodore Parker?

You can't condemn all Muslims for the actions of some Muslims without abandoning reason and decency for bigotry and hatred. It's a logical impossibility that was codified as far back as Aristotle. The characteristics of some parts of a whole are not always the characteristics of all parts of that whole, and to over-categorize is the fallacy of bigotry.

The s-meter in my SDR software has native Klingon support. It's one of the easter eggs. I'm imagining people finding it, then actually translating the s-meter readout by going to Bing. Having a little trouble with how they'll encode the input font, but I'm sure MS has it all figured out. Perhaps it's OCR.

I dunno if it's just me, because I'm wacky that way, but... lol.

BES is a closed source app running on a windows server, so your use of the word "theoretically" is extremely appropriate here. It might provide secure encryption, but it'll be pretty hard to tell for certain.

Bestiality is soft porn? Those green alien women Kirk bangs aren't human, you know.

They're not beasts, either, though. Seems like "bestiality" isn't really a term developed with sexually compatible sentients in mind. What about sex with an artificially intelligent sexbot? Bestiality? I don't think so. Both would be consensual, informed... Seems like eventually, at least if these things arise in other than fictional venues, we'll have to expand our outlooks a bit. Even in fiction, you need a way to look at it that makes sense. Bestiality doesn't qualify.

Yeah, you're right, but don't forget Pennsylvania, where a crooked state senator supposedly tried to run over a drug-addled supreme court justice right in the middle of Philadephia.

Idiot. How many hideous acts does one group have to commit to get moved from the "racist slur" pile to the "enemy of civilization" pile?

I don't know, I'm not a piler. Help me out. Does the Tuskegee Syphilis Study count as just one hideous act, or should it be one for each infected black man who was given fake treatments? What about all the children born with congenital syphilis, do they count extra since their damage is incurable? Do all forty years of the study count, or just the 30 years when syphilis was routinely treated successfully for white men in the same geographic area?

Your logic seems circular to me. You've stated the conclusion as a premise ("evolution works just the other side around") and you've used your definition of what you expect to happen as the means of evaluating what has happened ("do something useful" = "the only function of DNA we have so far discovered"). It's not possible to repeatably test your argument; so even if it's correct it's not really science, it's philosophy (or possibly religion).

Supposing there are additional functions of DNA other than coding proteins is a much simpler explanation, and furthermore it's never wise to create dogmas that blockade avenues for research. Bednorz and Muller (the guys who invented theoretically impossible high temperature superconductors) won the Nobel Prize and made a lot of money by keeping both their minds and their options open.

The voters elect people to represent their interests in government. These representatives are accountable via the means of regular elections, by which unpopular actions on their part will result in their not being re-elected.

What you're missing here is that should representative Doe fail to be re-elected, then candidates Smith and Williams, one of whom will replace Doe as the new representative, will both have been pre-selected by the power brokers to have whatever characteristics they require at the moment. These may be exactly the same as rep. Doe. Depriving an individual of the job is not effective in altering the system when each replacement individual is pre-selected.

The basic problem is that the power brokers - political parties, driven by moneyed and powerful interests - are not accountable. But they are the ones actually controlling the precise selection of the representatives.

It's as if you go to the only store there is, intending to buy yogurt, because you don't like cheese. But they don't offer yogurt. They offer cheese. They offer you a choice of two types of cheese. You pick the cheese that seems least offensive to you. But it's not yogurt. It will never be yogurt. And you will keep buying cheese. Furthermore, it turns out that it's the same cheese either way. They just change the labels. You cannot resolve your preference for yogurt, because its a situation that only offers cheese. Suggestions that you switch to a new cheese don't really address the problem.

I dunno. When I was having this argument 20 years ago all the geneticists I was working with at the time were insisting that "junk DNA" was literally leftovers with no purpose.

As an information scientist, though, I knew this had to be incorrect. Absent a really strongly supported, well understood mechanism it's illogical to suppose that natural selection would overwhelmingly favor massive storage abuse. It's more reasonable to suppose that there's something going on that's completely off the radar. Remember the presence of any number of understood mechanisms - such as DNA coding proteins, for one - does not in any way prove there's no further function of DNA that you don't know about yet.

To once again resort to car analogies, motor oil serves as a lubricant, a corrosion preventative, and a means of heat transfer. All these functions are critically important, and discovering any one of them would not mean the others do not exist. If 98% of human DNA does not code for protein, that's a very strong indication that DNA serves additional unknown function(s). It's best to keep an open mind.

It's like this: If you have a big enough ego, everything you don't understand must be unimportant junk.

Putting this in perspective with the traditional slashdot car analogy: all parts of your car that are not also part of a bicycle are just junk. This bladderwort's a bicycle, a honey badger is a car, see?

I'm here to help.