Slashdot Mirror

Not to disparage anyone's work, these are all cool projects. Regarding your contenders:

The Festo eMotionButterflies fly, are wireless (battery powered), but have 50 cm wingspan (roughly twice that of the largest bio-butterfly). Insect-inspired, but a bit of a stretch to call it an "insect".

The Harvard hawkmoth is in the size range of bio-moths, but requires a launcher. That makes it more "falling with style" than "flying". It is also battery powered.

The Festo SmartBird) is a robotic bird, not insect.

RoboFly itself needs to do more than what is shown in the video for me to call it "flying". It could then clearly claim First Wirelessly-Powered Flying Robotic Insect. I think it will get there.

Try $18,461, all in.

https://research.hks.harvard.e...

Well, thank you Uncle Sam for spending $18,461 that I don't have and can't afford. Make that $73,844 since I'm the sole support for a family of 4.

Yeah, no problem, right? Making me and mine suffer for their stupidity is just roses and rainbows all around.

Try $18,461, all in.

https://research.hks.harvard.e...

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/n...

The most cited paper in Mathematics is over half a century old.

http://math.harvard.edu/~ctm/h...

The most cited work in optics is several centuries old.

https://www.gutenberg.org/file...

I'll speak from experience as the engineer discovering abuse, and as the manager compelled to handle complaints about such harassment. Depending on the exact behavior, it can violate not only state law but federal law. See US Criminal Code section 223 for examples of relevant federal law. There is a short summary at https://cyber.harvard.edu/vaw0... which is also useful.

https://journalistsresource.org/studies/government/criminal-justice/legal-prostitution-reduce-rape-holland

Here's another take on that Dutch study

The authors provide “causal evidence” of a 32 to 40 percent reduction in rape and sexual abuse within two years of a city opening a tippelzone. The higher number is for cities that license sex work in the tippelzone; the lower figure is for cities without a licensing process. “The decreases in sexual abuse are stronger in cities with licensed tippelzones.”
These gains fade over time.
Without precise data on the victims of sexual violence, it is not possible to determine exactly how the number of rapes and cases of sexual abuse fall in the population at large. Some victims are sex workers. But the authors believe the tippelzones lead “to a decrease in sexual violence on women more generally by providing an anonymous, appealing and easily accessible outlet for sex to otherwise violent individuals.”
When licensing is introduced after a tippelzone is established, it increases instances of sexual abuse and rape. This happens because, at first, the tippelzone attracts foreign prostitutes with dubious legal status. When they suddenly need licensing, many leave for “less controlled environments.”
Still, in a survey the authors cite, “95 percent of the interviewed prostitutes report feeling safer within the tippelzone.”
In cities with both a tippelzone and a licensing requirement, the authors find a 25 percent reduction in drug-related crimes within two years. That result persists beyond two years.
The authors do not find a relationship between tippelzones and weapons crimes or violent assaults.
As for perceptions, residents living near a tippelzone without a licensing system believe the tippelzone increases drug-related crime by 6 percent.
In cities where licensing requirements for sex workers are introduced at the same time as tippelzones, perceptions of drug-related crime fall across the city as a whole, though the perceptions rise slightly in areas near the tippelzones.

Seems like a mixed bag and certainly not definitive with "casual evidence".

https://orgs.law.harvard.edu/lids/2014/06/12/does-legalized-prostitution-increase-human-trafficking/

A 2012 study published in World Development, “Does Legalized Prostitution Increase Human Trafficking?” investigates the effect of legalized prostitution on human trafficking inflows into high-income countries. The researchers — Seo-Yeong Cho of the German Institute for Economic Research, Axel Dreher of the University of Heidelberg and Eric Neumayer of the London School of Economics and Political Science — analyzed cross-sectional data of 116 countries to determine the effect of legalized prostitution on human trafficking inflows. In addition, they reviewed case studies of Denmark, Germany and Switzerland to examine the longitudinal effects of legalizing or criminalizing prostitution.

The study’s findings include:

Countries with legalized prostitution are associated with higher human trafficking inflows than countries where prostitution is prohibited. The scale effect of legalizing prostitution, i.e. expansion of the market, outweighs the substitution effect, where legal sex workers are favored over illegal workers. On average, countries with legalized prostitution report a greater incidence of human trafficking inflows.

I was having troubles seeing how this could work. Unless you are very close indeed, a 5 solar mass black hole interacts with other stars in exactly the same way as a 5 solar mass star, as the only force in action is gravity. So how can these stellar mass black holes gather near the galactic core?

The first sentence of the paper is: "The existence of a ‘density cusp’—a localized increase in number—of stellar-mass black holes near a supermassive black hole is a fundamental prediction of galactic stellar dynamics".

I looked up the reference for this (Bahcall and Wolf, http://adsabs.harvard.edu/doi/...). It is late at night and decades since I studied stuff like this, so mostly I'm going on that paper's abstract plus a bit of background knowledge.

The important assumption of Bahcall and Wolf is that the stars are much less massive than the small black holes (SBH), which are much less massive than the galactic black hole (GBH). (My error was in not considering this.) Now when you have a mixture of stars and SBHs near the GBH, they are zipping around and sometimes have close encounters where they gravitationally interact. These interactions on average will shift kinetic energy from the higher energy object to the lower energy object. Due to the mass difference, this means in a SBH/star interaction, the SBH will (more often than not) transfer energy to the star, so it will slow and fall deeper into the gravitational well of the GBH.

A good analogy is a gas with heavy and light molecules. The heavy molecules will move more slowly and at the bottom of the container the gas will be richer in heavy molecules compared to at the top of the container.

which in turn gets substituted into suicides by other methods if you reduce access to guns

That's mostly untrue. Don't buy into the gun runners' talking points. Suicide is primarily an impulsive act, committed at a moment of mental and emotional weakness - often under the influence of alcohol which is a disihibitor. 9 out of 10 people who survive a suicide attempt do not die from a repeated suicide attempt. Firearms are by far the most effective form of suicide because they are handy, require no preplanning and are the most lethal means of killing. The more time and effort required to commit suicide, the more time a person has to pull out of the funk that led them to try.

It also helps that what any sane person is trying to reduce is homicides in general.

Spare us your rationalizations for shitty statistics.

For every criminal killed in self-defense, 34 innocent people die

Your own quoted study says "could not determine causation". That's because most firearm-related homicides occur where the crime rate is high

Its funny you think that when the study authors could not determine causation, YOU could. Sounds like you don't understand science nor statistics. Lemee guess, you also believe that global warming is just a 'theory' and therefore carries no significant evidentiary weight. To be more specific you've misunderstood a standard term of art and tried to misuse it for your own agenda.

He actually only links to one study there, that's the first link, and it does claim that a decent number of people voted illegally and probably swung North Carolina for Obama in 2008. The problem is that the study authors didn't account for error. Here's a response to that study.

Isn't this something that has been reasonably well understood for some time?

For example, see here:-

http://neuro.hms.harvard.edu/h...

IIRC, the brain is pretty much the only organ in the body able to directly ingest and consume glucose from the blood stream; all the other parts of the body have to wait for glucose to be broken down into simpler compounds which they can then use. However, it's also been widely known that an overdose of glucose in the blood can be unhelpful/harmful. But it's one of the reason that people who conduct intellectually demanding work - i.e. work with a dependency on lots of cognitive processing - have a sweet tooth.

In countries were prostitution is legal or decriminalized, it is extremely rare to find anybody forced into prostitution

The data doesn't seem to support that assertation.

The studyâ(TM)s findings include:

• Countries with legalized prostitution are associated with higher human trafficking inflows than countries where prostitution is prohibited. The scale effect of legalizing prostitution, i.e. expansion of the market, outweighs the substitution effect, where legal sex workers are favored over illegal workers. On average, countries with legalized prostitution report a greater incidence of human trafficking inflows.
• The effect of legal prostitution on human trafficking inflows is stronger in high-income countries than middle-income countries. Because trafficking for the purpose of sexual exploitation requires that clients in a potential destination country have sufficient purchasing power, domestic supply acts as a constraint.
• Criminalization of prostitution in Sweden resulted in the shrinking of the prostitution market and the decline of human trafficking inflows. Cross-country comparisons of Sweden with Denmark (where prostitution is decriminalized) and Germany (expanded legalization of prostitution) are consistent with the quantitative analysis, showing that trafficking inflows decreased with criminalization and increased with legalization.
• The type of legalization of prostitution does not matter â" it only matters whether prostitution is legal or not. Whether third-party involvement (persons who facilitate the prostitution businesses, i.e, âoepimpsâ) is allowed or not does not have an effect on human trafficking inflows into a country. Legalization of prostitution itself is more important in explaining human trafficking than the type of legalization.
• Democracies have a higher probability of increased human-trafficking inflows than non-democratic countries. There is a 13.4% higher probability of receiving higher inflows in a democratic country than otherwise.

I should remind Slashdot readers that we already have a cometary probe planned, funded and soon to be launched I think: OSIRIS-rex. While I really like comets and would love to get samples back, we've (sort of) been there done that.

OSIRIS -REx is an asteroid sample retrieval mission. https://www.asteroidmission.or...
Similar, but we would learn very different things from a comet sample.

...

(While we're dreaming, a submersible probe to Titan would also be cool.

Yes!! Let's do it!

  https://www.nasa.gov/content/t...

http://geology.com/articles/titan-submarine/

(full disclosure: ok, I worked on that one: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/...

By the way, ARE there any short wavelengths that would be transparent to the hydrocarbon seas of Titan? Otherwise, just sonar.)

Turns out that liquid methane and ethane are moderately transparent to radio frequency.

How about if it was something that the customers needed anyway, and the choice was between a product with most of its costs up-front, and a cheaper-looking but dirtier product that cost consumers and society a lot more in the longer term? Obviously the first is a better investment overall, but the second would still look attractive to many, unless a way was found to make the greater costs more obvious.

I'm not a fan of heavy-handed legislation either, but when the current alternative is a product that is popular only because its hundreds of billions of annual external health costs (in the US alone) are not being factored into the sticker price, then it seems obvious to me that leaving it solely up the free market is clearly not in our best interest.

First- It was CRY protein allergy- not gluten allergy. Sorry about that- it was late.

Second "allergic taco shells" turns up dozens of pages of responses so I don't think you googled very hard.

Here are a couple.

http://www.culinarylore.com/fo...

http://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/fl...

As I said, LABEL IT.

Then people can make an educated choice. If you sell GMO food at a slightly lower price people will buy it.

Stop trying to force them to eat it. Stop trying to hide it.

Ads don't need web sockets, for example. Or file I/O. They most definitely shouldn't have access to parent document.

What benefit does the viewer derive from an ad having absolutely no access to the parent document? I understand your objection to write access to the parent document. But without read-only access to the parent document, the ad code cannot determine the page's topic and therefore cannot select an ad that is relevant to the page's topic. Without access to the page's topic, the ad has no way to determine the viewer's interests and must instead use an interest dossier derived by tracking the user across multiple websites to log his browsing history. And the "retargeting" technique associated with such fine-grained interest dossiers is a large part of what led to ad blocking in the first place.

The full paper (or at least some version of it) is available online here:

  https://nocklab.fas.harvard.edu/files/nocklab/files/just_2017_machlearn_suicide_emotion_youth.pdf

It's probably a preprint without the last-minute changes, but it should be good enough to understand the research.

More accurately, CO2 is plant junk food. Higher CO2 levels produce less nutritious crops

Not sure why you provided a paywalled link when there are alternatives like this one.

You might read the actual study if you haven't -- the details suggest a lot less of a clear-cut situation even for the single variable the authors are trying to isolate. The generally single-digit decreases in zinc and iron varied widely per cultivar of a given crop, and some cultivars had little decrease or even had an increase in nutrient content when grown under elevated CO2.

So stack up a negligible decrease in certain nutrients, most of which likely could be avoided via cultivar selection and breeding, against likely double-digit increases in both gross yield and yield per unit of water.

Would that we had more "junk food" like that.

found online, not vouching for its accuracy

Independent verification of FBI Anon claims

1995: Martin Indyk, Dennis Ross, Izaac Herzog, and an unidentified Israeli representative meet to discuss the possibility of Bill Clinton pardoning Marc Rich in exchange for Rich funding the PLO, a Muslim terrorist organization committed to Israel's destruction.
http://www.judicialwatch.org/p...

Qatar would buy a stake in Marc Rich's company Glencore after his death, and Qatar and Glencore would operate in concert afterwards.

2000: Marc Rich associate Michael Steinhardt controls the DLC and Progressive Policy Institute.
http://www.deepcapture.com/200...

2003: George Soros and Morton Halperin placed John Podesta as founding head of the Center for American Progress.
http://www.discoverthenetworks... https://archive.is/Gb2FV

Under Podesta's watch, unknown persons placed accused Hamas fundraiser Faiz Shakir as Vice President of the Center for American Progress and chief editor of Think Progress. In 2011 Faiz Shakir and Wajahat Ali produced the report "Fear Inc." smearing national security analysts and political activists who oppose the Muslim Brotherhood, including liberal Muslims.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/fp... https://archive.is/tOxwC

Online rumors have attempted to connect the art trading of John Podesta's brother Tony Podesta with Qatari art purchases of works by Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons who have been hosted by Qatar Museums.
http://qz.com/764975/qatars-oi...

The Podesta Group lobbyied for Qatar Petroleum in 2013.
https://www.desmogblog.com/201...

2004: The Awan brothers begin employment in the US Congress and will work under Robert Wexler, Xavier Becerra, Gregory Meeks, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and others before they are exposed as a spy ring in 2017.
http://www.politico.com/story/...

2005: Unknown persons placed Emad Shahin and Juliette Kayyem in the Dubai Initiative which produced propaganda to promote the Muslim Brotherhood using the name and reputation of Harvard University.
http://belfercenter.ksg.harvar...
Emad Shahin was convincted in absentia of aiding Hamas and Iran to overthrow the Egyptian government.
http://emadshahin.com/?p=1839
https://news.vice.com/article/...
Juliette Kayyem advocated for Qatari state television network Al-Jazeera and wrote "The War On Terror Is Over" to discourage continued resistance to al-Qaeda.
https://www.boston.com/bostong...
https://www.boston.com/bostong...

2005: Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal paid Georgetown University $20 million to continue hosting John Esposito's Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, which was originally founded in 1993 with a grant from PLO board member Hasib Sabagh

Indeed, most Harvard students do not pay tuition at all, because they are minorities or minority women.

Well, that is a load of crap. Roughly 50% of the Harvard student population is white. An additional 22% are Asian-American, who generally don't get classified as underpriviliged minority.

https://college.harvard.edu/ad...

Also, "minorities or minority women"?! Like the latter group magically doesn't get included in the former?

We have no specific biological adaptations to eating meat. Our teeth are those of herbivores, and our digestive system is that of a frugivore. Based on dental calculus analysis and corprolite data, our ancestors ate shit-loads of plants.

But we do have at least one specific biological adaptation that is a result of eating meat. Our intestinal system and muscle mass as evolved to much smaller than equivalent animals that are pure herbivores.

http://time.com/4252373/meat-e...
http://news.harvard.edu/gazett...

Some folks think that these adaptations allowed us the luxury of evolving larger brains...

Gorillas may be a better example. They do have MASSIVE canines and aren't known for eating meat.

As I recall, since Gorilla canine teeth have a large sexual dimorphism (difference between male and female) the are likely used as part of dominance rituals among male Gorillas competing for mates (for deterrence, defense, attack, etc). However since humans have very limited dimorphic differentiation in canine size, they probably serve a different purpose or are simply vestigial.

In any case, there is a case to be made that humans are built to be omnivores. The basic argument is advanced by the Expensive Tissue Hypothesis (ETH) which argues that eating meat led to smaller stomachs and in conjunction with smaller muscle mass allowed for larger brains (relative to our prehistoric predecessors).

Of course we can argue about "why" till the cows come home, since "why" is really an unknown quantity that is basically all speculation.

Claim is bunk. Speak with A Geek never publish research paper, data,methods and worst of all they tested more than one independent variable at a time. Name,gender,school were all removed and maybe more they didn't tell any more what they did, for all we know they had a calculation error.. It would be really funny if the underlying data was 50/50 ratio and it ended up with a 50% ratio. Finally it is more than 5x increase compared to the blind orchestra study that compared more than 30 years of data. https://dash.harvard.edu/bitst...

Also important to remember that he was a computer scientist addressing the "science" behind an issue outside his area of expertise.

He isn't a computer scientist, although he was working as a software engineer. His BS was in Molecular Biology and his Master's and (uncompleted) PhD work was in Systems Biology.

Not all experts agree on this matter.

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/cat...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

While both of those books accept that there is some biological element, they state that it is overblown and largely based on poor science. Results that are not reproducible, use too small sample sizes, inadequate controls and extravagant conclusions.

Were you hoping people wouldn't follow your links? Because one book has already been thoroughly discredited (see below) and the other doesn't actually support "all brains are alike".

The second one (wikipedia) is debunked in the very page you linked to by a few respectable journals, notably Biology of Sex Differences and Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.

In the page you link to a fairly prolific and respected scientist says this about the first book:

"strongest in exposing research conclusions that are closer to fiction than science...and weakest in failing to also point out differences that are supported by a body of carefully conducted and well-replicated research."

There is a body of carefully conducted and well-replicated research for the assertions of the fired googler. The conclusions that are closer to fiction than to science are not any that he made.

Not all experts agree on this matter.

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/cat...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

While both of those books accept that there is some biological element, they state that it is overblown and largely based on poor science. Results that are not reproducible, use too small sample sizes, inadequate controls and extravagant conclusions.

Prior to 1970 most symphony orchestra musicians were men. Then around 1970 blind auditions (when you don't know who is playing or their gender) started to become common, and are now nearly universal. As a result, symphony musicians today are nearly evenly split between genders. See: http://gap.hks.harvard.edu/orc...

I have interviewed prospective software developers in my career, and know that it was very difficult, if not impossible, to counteract my own prejudices even when I wanted to be fair. To be a woman interviewed for a job by someone with the views of the Google employee who believed women are genetically inferior for engineering would be devastating. Even someone with more even handed views undoubtedly harbors some bias.

I don't know if "blind interviews" for engineers will ever be practical, so maybe we are stuck with perpetuating our prejudices on hiring decisions indefinitely.

No, I have an event backed up by plenty of studies.

http://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/fl...

GMOS are allergens.

And worse...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...

"GM potatoes
Feeding mice with potatoes transformed with a Bacillus thuringiensis var.kurstaki Cry1 toxin gene or the toxin itself was shown to have caused villus epithelial cell hypertrophy and multinucleation, disrupted microvilli, mitochondrial degeneration, increased numbers of lysosomes and autophagic vacuoles and activation of crypt Paneth cells (Fares and El-Sayed 1998). "

"
Allergenicity studies

When the gene is from a crop of known allergenicity, it is easy to establish whether the GM food is allergenic using in vitro tests, such as RAST or immunoblotting, with sera from individuals sensitised to the original crop. This was demonstrated in GM soybeans expressing the brasil nut 2S proteins (Nordlee et al. 1996) or in GM potatoes expressing cod protein genes (Noteborn et al. 1995). It is also relatively easy to assess whether genetic engineering affected the potency of endogenous allergens (Burks and Fuchs 1995). Farm workers exposed to B. thuringiensis pesticide were shown to have developed skin sensitization and IgE antibodies to the Bt spore extract. With their sera it may now therefore be possible to test for the allergenic potential of GM crops expressing Bt toxin (Bernstein et al. 1999). It is all the more important because Bt toxin Cry1Ac has been shown to be a potent oral/nasal antigen and adjuvant (Vazquez-Padron et al. 2000).

The decision-tree type of indirect approach based on factors such as size and stability of the transgenically expressed protein (Oâ(TM)Neil et al. 1998) is even more unsound, particularly as its stability to gut proteolysis is assessed by an in vitro (simulated) testing (Metcalf et al. 1996) instead of in vivo (human/animal) testing and this is fundamentally wrong. The concept that most allergens are abundant proteins may be misleading because, for example, Gad c 1, the major allergen in codfish, is not a predominant protein (Vazquez-Padron et al. 2000). However, when the gene responsible for the allergenicity is known, such as the gene of the alpha-amylase/trypsin inhibitors/allergens in rice, cloning and sequencing opens the way for reducing their level by antisense RNA strategy (Nakamura and Matsuda 1996).

It is known that the main concerns about adverse effects of GM foods on health are the transfer of antibiotic resistance, toxicity and allergenicity. There are two issues from an allergic standpoint. These are the transfer of a known allergen that may occur from a crop into a non-allergenic target crop and the creation of a neo-allergen where de novo sensitisation occurs in the population. Patients allergic to Brazil nuts and not to soy bean then showed an IgE mediated response towards GM soy bean. Lack (2002) argued that it is possible to prevent such occurrences by doing IgE-binding studies and taking into account physico-chemical characteristics of proteins and referring to known allergen databases. The second possible scenario of de novo sensitisation does not easily lend itself to risk assessment. He reports that evidence that the technology used for the production of GM foods poses an allergic threat per se is lacking very much compared to other methodologies widely accepted in the food industry."

So, you are saying the decommissioning process is going well?

No, I'm saying you attempt to falsify reality in pursuit of your idealogy.

I'm saying TEPCO are clearly not capable, willfully and criminally negligent. I'm saying the sooner this is resolved with an international effort the lower the overall impact will be.

They have no sign of uncontrolled release of radiation, and the exploratory robots are working well. I didn't look at all the photos in detail, is there a North Korean spy that was caught in one of the frames or something?

Everytime you tout your zealotry more of the truth you seek to conceal emerges. Everytime you boast of your ignorance, more fact emerges for everyone else to see. Everytime you fail to acknowledge the situation, more consequences are revealed. Over eight hundred thousand tons of highly radio active water in uncontrolled releases *so far*.

I'm not sure what you think I'm supposed to take away from this.

It's clear you see this as a political issue and not a radiological issue that will affect the genome of every species on the planet for the forseeable future. It's clear you are not stupid but willfully ignorant and actively deny fact placed before you. Your comments are so dogmatically skeptical the only logical conclusion to draw is that you are either a paid troll with an adgenda or a useful idiot prepared to pathologize your own perception of reality in pursuit of your idealogy.

Take away that your trolling is so obviously professional it's unlikeley I'm the only one who can see through the bullshit of your agenda.

I am ignorant because I am an idealogue. I am an idealogue because I am ignorant.

You are an enemy of freedom because you are an enemy of truth. You are an enemy of truth because you are an enemy of freedom.

I meant to point that out to you last time we conversed however something more important came up. I appreciate you delivering an opportunity to excoriate you and once again be entertained by your display of mental gymnastics around the facts.

There were several years when the most common predicted effect of carbon warming was drought - endless drought, in every possible place, and there's nothing we can do about it! (Muahahahaha!). Articles like these have been typical:

https://www.theguardian.com/en...
https://www.theguardian.com/en...
https://www.theatlantic.com/sc...
http://news.mit.edu/2017/clima...
http://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/fl...
http://news.nationalgeographic...
http://www.slate.com/articles/...
http://www.slate.com/blogs/fut...
https://www.theguardian.com/wo...
http://www.salon.com/2015/07/0...
http://www.salon.com/2013/08/0...
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the...
http://www.salon.com/2014/08/0...

Let's just say that if you sell stock photos of dry lake beds, you're probably a millionaire by now.

There it is. We follow this long path to find, as expected, it ends in a basement blog. Information Clearing house is not exactly what many call a credible source. IN fact, Harvard goes out of its way to list it as an unreliable new source.

http://guides.library.harvard....

So, understandably you have the opinions you do because of your sources. They are both limited and conspiratorial.

The memo is interesting. Maybe it's real, maybe its not. Sourcing does matter, and with Bush era stuff, it is especially hard since there was so much character assassination going on. Bush was by no means a great president, but he was also not the cartoon villain that the popular media painted him to be. Much like Obama was not the anti-christ that some right wing sources claimed, but his administration was very far from the saintly image the leftish press portrayed. In both cases and i would argue today as well, blatant mischaracterizations diluted honest policy discussions. The losers of this whole thing are the average people.

If the memo is real, this is what makes the study of the pathway to war interesting. As you look into it more, there were many viewpoints and forces advocating many things. By all accounts, Rumsfeld was a warhawk. So, this fits within the narrative. However, not everyone inside the administration was. Like most of life, it is pretty nuanced.

When you look at many sources, the bulk of administration started toward peace and a more isolationist stance. After September 11th, the pro-war end of the administration won out. This is what makes the various conspiracy theories about 9/11 so intriguing. Without the twin towers falling, it was going to be a much more peaceful world.

What is really interesting to ask is, as President, what would you have done? Keep in mind that the arguments (not necessarily the conclusions) of the Rumsfeld memo you linked are essentially true. The policies dealing with Iraq in the Clinton era were not working terribly well either, so the status quo was not a real solution.

That rather begs the question. Can point us to established precedent, or are you engaging in conjecture here.

There's plenty of precedent that licenses require some sort of conspicuous click through to be binding. Specht v. Netscape , for example.

It makes the content available to those who visit the site, Zillow would assert, by agreeing to the Terms of Use. I'm not completely sure what you mean by "de facto rights" here. Are you claiming it is a right (such as would allow you to seek a remedy from a court of law were it to be infringed) to view any website on the internet?

I am saying that it is a right to view any website that is not protected by a password or other authentication mechanism. Any legal theory that assumes anything else would pretty much destroy the very foundation upon which world-wide web is based.

Again Zillow would assert that use of the site implicitly constitutes the acceptance of the Terms of Service. Outside the internet terms and conditions such as these are routinely incorporated by the behaviour of parties. Although a tick box might remove any ambiguity, I wonder if on-line acceptance in particular needs to be explicit. Do you have any authority speaking to this?

Yeah. In re Zappos.com, Inc., Customer Data Security Breach Litigation basically held that browsewrap licenses are unenforceable. What's funny is that this had been the general consensus of every lawyer I talked to on the subject since Specht—a good decade prior to that case going to court. That any company's legal team would still assume otherwise in this day and age borders on bizarre. :-)

Why would you need actually to read terms to agree to them? (You're not a lawyer, are you?)

A contract requires a meeting of the minds. In the absence of that, there's wiggle room for arguing that no contract exists. This is why the general recommendation has been (again for many years) to require customers to at least scroll through the terms of service before clicking "I Agree" so that they cannot claim to have not been at least presented with the entire document. You can't force them to read it, obviously, but if they never even clicked the link, that's a totally different matter.

(You're not a lawyer, are you?)

No, but I play one on Slashdot. :-D

But what is the relevance of the lack of "actual harm?" This is a not a claim in tort law, but a claim in contract law.

You're correct, but as I understand it, outside the context of tort, damage awards arising out of breach of contract actions are almost invariably compensatory, not punitive, so if there's no actual harm, then the judge is probably going to throw them out of the court for wasting his/her time. I mean, what are they doing, suing to recuperate their lawyer fees for suing?

Again I think the more dangerous point for Zillow is one of consideration. My questions would be: what legal detriment does Zillow suffer by permitting users to view their site?

Yes, that's what I was alluding to with my comment about it being a right to view a public website. There's no obvious consideration above the right that one would presume to have by virtue of the page being posted publicly. And that right is fundamental to the functioning of the web, because without the right to load a page, there's no way to see the terms of service that would grant you the rights to see a page. So again, any legal theory that presumes the lack of the right to merely load and look at a page would be nonsensical at best, and at worst would mean the end

No kidding: actually the title of this post has zero to do with the study that it links to (which was published in 2013, by the way). The article has nothing to do with fabricating fake social media posts as a distraction: it's entirely about backing out the Chinese government's intentions by looking at what they care about censoring. It concludes that criticism isn't a problem, but rather any posting on events that might spur citizens to take action (even posts that aren't critical of the government).

There's also a follow-up publication from Science in 2014: Reverse-engineering censorship in China: Randomized experimentation and participant observation.

It's almost as though slashdot was conducting an experiment on it's users: how random can the title be without people commenting noticing?

By comparison, there is no amount of alcohol that has been proven to be of benefit, even with moderation. It is quite clearly, a poison.

Stop lying. You're basing your statements on one flawed study. Notice the amounts consumed by the participants. They're way over what any reasonable person would call "moderate".

Also, this: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/n...

The only lie is thinking there has only been one damn study done on the effects of alcohol consumption over the last half century. I wasn't even talking about the flawed study in TFS, which is quite obviously showcasing more of an excessive or high consumption.

As I stated, newer evidence tends to highlight the fact that even moderation is not good for you when consuming a poison.

Even one drink a day can harm you.

By comparison, there is no amount of alcohol that has been proven to be of benefit, even with moderation. It is quite clearly, a poison.

Stop lying. You're basing your statements on one flawed study. Notice the amounts consumed by the participants. They're way over what any reasonable person would call "moderate".

Also, this:
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/n...

This comparison is stupid.

Contrary to popular belief: Harvard's true tuition is based on your family's income/assets, it's not fixed like standard schools. I get that the "list price" is $69K, but that's not the "cost" if your family isn't earning ~$250K/year. Harvard has "need-based" scholarship programs that can reduce the true cost to zero or near zero. The point is, if your academics can get you into Harvard College, they don't want you to worry about the price, they want you to attend. Oh, and they disallow student loans. https://college.harvard.edu/fi...

From the Harvard site (linked): "In fact, approximately 70 percent of our students receive some form of aid, and about 60 percent receive need–based scholarships and pay an average of $12,000 per year. Twenty percent of parents pay nothing. No loans required."

Here's a calculator: https://college.harvard.edu/fi...

In other words, the "genius" who made this comparison isn't Harvard material - and is trying to say "it's expensive to house our inmates" by assuming Harvard is expensive. The truth is, it's not.

If s/he had done some research, s/he could should have said "Cost of a Porsche Boxster S", or something else that is actually "expensive" instead of making the poor people think they've got no chance of affording Harvard if they can get in.

Sloppy journalism.

-SM

Go Crimson!

This comparison is stupid.

Contrary to popular belief: Harvard's true tuition is based on your family's income/assets, it's not fixed like standard schools. I get that the "list price" is $69K, but that's not the "cost" if your family isn't earning ~$250K/year. Harvard has "need-based" scholarship programs that can reduce the true cost to zero or near zero. The point is, if your academics can get you into Harvard College, they don't want you to worry about the price, they want you to attend. Oh, and they disallow student loans. https://college.harvard.edu/fi...

From the Harvard site (linked): "In fact, approximately 70 percent of our students receive some form of aid, and about 60 percent receive need–based scholarships and pay an average of $12,000 per year. Twenty percent of parents pay nothing. No loans required."

Here's a calculator: https://college.harvard.edu/fi...

In other words, the "genius" who made this comparison isn't Harvard material - and is trying to say "it's expensive to house our inmates" by assuming Harvard is expensive. The truth is, it's not.

If s/he had done some research, s/he could should have said "Cost of a Porsche Boxster S", or something else that is actually "expensive" instead of making the poor people think they've got no chance of affording Harvard if they can get in.

Sloppy journalism.

-SM

Go Crimson!

Harward University's definition of "asshole" evidently includes people mocking sexual assault, the Holocaust and racial minorities... and that's the only definition which matters when discussion Harward University's decision to revoke these admission.

You are still entitled to your own definition of "asshole", which might differ: just don't expect it to have any weight whatsoever on Harward University's.

Just an off topic reply to your post. You may need to be more careful with the name. There is no Harward university. There are Harvard University and Howard University. They are 2 different universities in 2 different cities. Both aren't related though.

While it doesn't go into quite that detail, some basic information is available on their revenue:

http://www.harvard.edu/about-h...

36% from their endowment, 21% from tuition, 17% from sponsors, and 9% from gifts. That leaves 17% "other", which they don't break down (at least on that page).

This does place an upper cap on public funding, however: it must be somewhere between 0% and 17%. In other words, the vast majority of the funding is of the "private" variety.

But then you have a minority (15) who will not like at all your attitude and will look for a different alternative; they might even talk bad about you and make you lose much more than what you would be earning if they would view yours ad.

Where has "talk[ing] bad about you" actually mattered? The 15 percent who run into problems viewing WIRED, the INQUIRER, and The Atlantic with tracking protection turned on haven't yet caused enough bad press to shut down those publications. These publications have been able to get away with not only demanding to show ads but also demanding to track the user from one site to another.

Apropos super capacitors - one of the problems with capacitors lies in having to keep the opposite charges apart, which is exactly what the membrane surrounding the mitochondria does, and very well. According to this: http://bionumbers.hms.harvard...., the field strength across that membrane is some 30 MV/m (that's Mega-Volt, yes) - IOW, a lot.

Here is a good example, where a parody was found not to be a valid parody, but instead a satire. If that case seems to be some satire you'd read in Kafka making the case a parody of itself, you are correct.

For all of us who feel only the deepest love and affection for the way computers have enhanced our lives, read on. At a recent computer expo (COMDEX), Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated, "If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25.00 cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon."

In response to Bill's comments, General Motors issued a press release stating: If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:

1. For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash twice a day.

2. Every time they repainted the lines in the road, you would have to buy a new car.

3. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue.

For some reason you would simply accept this.

4. Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to reinstall the engine.

5. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times as fast and twice as easy to drive - but would run on only five percent of the roads.

6. The oil, water temperature, and alternator warning lights would all be replaced by a single "This Car Has Performed An Illegal Operation" warning light.

7. The airbag system would ask "Are you sure?" before deploying.

8. Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key and grabbed hold of the radio antenna.

9. Every time a new car was introduced car buyers would have to learn how to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.

10. You'd have to press the "Start" button to turn the engine off."

You throw that 15% around like it was a big number.
The entire undergrad enrollment at Harvard is about 6700[1]. If most of those who take CS50 take it in their freshman/first year, that 15% is only about 100 people in any given semester or term.
I dare say you could take any intro CS course at a school like University of Michigan, or UC Berkeley, and sit in an auditorium filled with over 100 people. And that'd be for just one of several of those classes.

And no, I'm not defending Harvard, or cheating.

[1] http://www.harvard.edu/about-h...

Okay, first link

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/n...

Whole wheat breads and pastas coming in better than the garbage you describe.

Now I'm not saying low carb and avoiding most of that shit isnt better for people with blood sugar issues. What I am saying is that you're wrong.

For someone that has a "real doctorate" you are misinformed.

A JD is a graduate degree. So are medical degrees.

They are both graduate degrees, in that you are normally required to have an undergraduate degree before going to law school/med school, but despite that, JD and MD are undergraduate degrees.

JD and MD are not doctorate degrees.

Law & med schools often have real masters/doctorate programs.

For example, here is Harvard: http://hls.harvard.edu/dept/gr...

Note that only LL.M (Master of Laws) and S.J.D (Doctor of Juridical Science) are referred to as graduate degrees - the JD degree is an undergraduate degree.

Taste is a sensation that serves a specific purpose, there is absolutely no reason to believe that other organs need "taste buds" as well in order to serve entirely different functions.

Here's a Harvard article about it, with links. Prepare to be shocked.

I wonder if this is part of the "reduce blue light at night" idea that somehow had a runaway...
http://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/blue-light-has-a-dark-side

Note: Check Blue Blocking Devs for color blindness.

One time I took the 7AM class for Harvard Calculus in 1994. If you're not familiar with Harvard Calculus, the textbook was all word problems and no mathematical symbols. I bailed out after the first week.Harvard Calculus never caught on. Thank God.

Harvard has a good Financial Aid Program https://college.harvard.edu/fi...