"That's true, but this topic has nothing to do with antitrust rules."
What is with people on Slashdot today? Do they even read the things they're replying to anymore?
It's the part about carriers being content providers that invokes the antitrust concept. It was against FCC rules for many decades, and the rule was there for antitrust reasons.
Only recently have carriers (cable companies) been able to lobby Congress sufficiently to get exemptions from these rules. And one of the results you see -- right now -- is the United States having slower Internet service, for more money, than other countries that regulate it better.
That is not the only issue involved, but it sure as hell is one of them.
THE WHOLE POINT HERE was that monopoly, fascism, socialism, and "crony capitalism" are NOT capitalism. Government control of markets is NOT capitalism. This is NOT the stuff Adam Smith was talking about.
If you want to talk about "capitalism", then all of this stuff is breaking the rules. It is contrary to the system that made this country great. And -- just in case you hadn't noticed -- the more they have done it, the less "great" this country has become.
"1. They had problems with modern human DNA contamination (not sure why they couldn't get everything clean but since they're the leading edge lab in this sort of thing, it must be a real issue)."
Unlikely that there were not later visitors to the cave. Pissing in the corner is eventually going to contaminate the DNA. This is one of the things the "DNA Forensics" folks like to play down: it is ridiculously easy to contaminate DNA evidence.
"2. They had to limit analysis to fragment lengths around 45 base pairs to avoid this contamination. That's tiny compared to what one normally uses."
See my point above. But also: time damages DNA as well. You get more accurate fragments if you limit the size of the fragments. (I.e., statistically, you're less likely to see a fractured or contaminated chemical bond, the smaller the sample you take.)
"3. They only had enough to sequence the mitochondrial DNA."
The mitochondrial DNA may have been the best preserved, because it's inside walled micro-structures in the cell.
"Where are these official rules that determine what's allowed and what's cheating?"
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, by Dr. Adam Smith, 1776
"Lobbying" and "monopoly" are not "capitalism". Even Smith recognized that a capitalist economy must have a reasonable body of antitrust laws to keep everybody "playing within the rules".
"As I have already said, every citizen who was an able bodied male, between the ages of of 18 and 40 were by default members of the militia."
The fact that you already said it does not make it correct.
Repeat (and don't take my word for it, LOOK IT UP!): "well-regulated" meant TRAINED AND DISCIPLINED. The "citizen militia", which was every able-bodied male, is by definition NOT trained and disciplined.
Read some history, man. You're just wrong. Sorry if the canned explanation you got in government-run elementary school wasn't correct. That's what they taught me, too. But I learned by actually studying the history of this country that it is just plain wrong.
"No, you're wrong. The militia was not the standing army, it was to be the defense against the standing army."
Did you even read what I wrote? No, I am NOT wrong.
There is a difference between the "citizen militia" (every able-bodied male) and a "well-regulated militia". By the very definition (at the time), the "general" militia (i.e., everybody) was NOT "well-regulated". A well-regulated militia is a TRAINED AND DISCIPLINED militia, which the citizen militia is not. The "citizen militia" is precisely The People. The well-regulated militia is not. The second amendment CONTRASTS them: because we need the one, we will keep the other, just in case.
That's the entire point of that passage, and what makes it all make sense. Otherwise it's weirdly garbled nonsense... and nowhere else in the Constitution is there garbled nonsense. The Founders were terrified about the need to keep a standing army. Therefore The People have the right to bear arms.
"I did all the network support by myself back in the day when Ethernet was just being marketed" so in other words you had a totally flat network with no policies, vlans, firewall, application firewall, ids, redundancy, and well basically anything.
Nope. It was "before" none of those things. Wait... except redundancy.
When I started there, the whole office was on an arcnet-based network. And a bigger pain in the ass you probably never saw, especially for a growing company in which computers are being moved around and new ones acquired all the time.
But it did have (optional) firewalls. It did have vlans. It did have addresses. It did have policies.
Later, we moved the company to a new headquarters and I designed and built the new (ethernet!) network. Except for the wiring that is... new buildout so we paid somebody to cable up the whole place.
I designed and ran a network -- from arcnet to ethernet -- for a main branch of the company with 120 offices, with a dedicated T1 line to our other 2 regional branches. I didn't just "plug in a Linksys router", asshole.
Would you like to hear my scores on the MCSE exams? I'd have to go look up the exact scores but I am sure I still have them around here somewhere.
By the language of the time, "well-regulated" means "trained and disciplined". That meant an army.
The "citizen's militia" is indeed "every able-bodied man". But it isn't well-regulated. The the right to bear arms is an individual right, so that the citizen's militia can resist the "well-regulated militia" if need be.
"Which, by the way, is itself a misunderstanding about an amendment whose goal was to ensure a militia roughly in the same sense as the Swiss army."
Just no. As a student of our country's history I can tell you that you are simply wrong about this. That's a distortion -- a small but very important distortion -- of what the words mean.
The Second Amendment says that because a "well-regulated militia" is necessary for defense, the right of The People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed... so they can fight off the "well regulated" militia if need be.
The "people's militia" is not "well-regulated". Well-regulated means "trained, disciplined". That's an army. The "people's militia is not trained or disciplined.
That might seem like a small difference but it's very important, and that difference was recognized just a few years ago by the Supreme Court when it struck down D.C.'s gun ban. (As it had been recognized in previous SCOTUS decisions, as well.) The right to bear arms is an individual right, not one belonging to a "militia".
Your little misunderstanding about what the Second Amendment means is: a delusion.
The thing is though: under OUR law (but not necessarily yours), the fact that the government's actions have a "chilling effect" on free speech makes the government actions prima facie unconstitutional.
This is pretty much positive proof that free speech is being "chilled". Therefore it is unconstitutional. End of story.
"Continuing to believe that is a sign you're delusional, not 'free'."
Incorrect. They still "pride themselves" on being free. Priding themselves is fact, not delusion. The idea that they're the "most free" might be delusion, but that's not quite what the sentence was saying.
I should clarify what I was saying: if you're the top guy then some support questions will (and should) trickle up to you eventually. But the key words here are "trickle" and "eventually". You should have a layer or two of (again, relatively cheap) people under you to handle the more routine things.
No, it was done in some controlled blind studies. Separate studies have done but using the same methodologies. Aside from chimpanzees, other animals (that I know about) that were studied were dogs, cats, and ferrets.
You may or may not think this is funny, but nobody has been able to figure out whether cats understand or not, because they basically just don't respond consistently either way.
These were university studies, not some guys in a basement. The papers were published in respectable journals.
See? I remember you from before, and this is your basic argument technique. You take any mistake you can find (which I admitted to, earlier) and use that to try to make it look like somebody is deliberately trying to bullshit.
Makes you look like a big fucking man, does it?
Somehow I doubt most of the other readers here think so. But I won't pretend to speak for them.
No. I admitted that I had omitted a qualifier that should have been there in the first place. I was admitting to a mistake. Sorry if you don't like that.
"Now you invent a bullshit distinction between knowing something and knowing that you know it."
Um, no. I don't know where you made that "leap" but that isn't what I was saying at all.
Other than the mistake (which I admitted to) I wrote pretty much what I meant. Your strange interpretation of my meaning is hardly impressive. It's a classic philosophic question but I certainly did not imply its presence here.
And by the way: elephants are irrelevant to this discussion. Several animals that do not have the "native" intelligence of elephants, nevertheless "get" human communication better than elephants do, without prior training. Dogs and ferrets, in particular. Nobody can tell if cats understand, because they just don't care, whether they understand or not.
"Chimps can and do understand, they just have never been observed to understand it in the wild."
WILL YOU get it through your head that we're taking about different things? While this might seem a bit bizarre to you, the fact is that chimpanzee pointing is NOT the same as chimpanzees understanding HUMAN pointing, in conjunction with human association and communication with humans?
This whole thing is about whether chimpanzees are "human". The fact is that while they can be taught "verbal" (i.e., word-based, whether it's spoken or signs) language, they just don't communicate well with us. And HUMAN non-verbal communication seems beyond their ken. There have been LOTS of studies about this. But everybody keeps pointing at studies about completely different things.
"So, sure, chimps may not natively understand human pointing, but dogs only got that way because of thousands of years of selection of offspring that cohabit better with humans. Take a wolf and point, it won't understand."
Yes! So why don't you understand what *I* wrote? Studies showed that this wasn't "associative" (a matter of growing up to understand a "culture" or way of doing things), but rather probably a subtle genetic difference via Darwinist "natural selection".
But this natural selection has NOT taken place in chimpanzees. They haven't been domesticated for 2,500 years like dogs, and cats, and ferrets. They haven't been "bred" to understand human nonverbal communication as those other animals have... and they're NOT HUMAN. Not by a long shot.
I used to WRITE industry-leading ERP software, AND I used to manage 120 offices equipped with desktops at the same time, AND run the cable myself through the ceilings. And (other than writing the software) I did it entirely on my own, until I got overworked and hired an assistant.
That might be a bit less but look at the scale here: you have 4 programmers, programming shit the ERP company should be supplying you already (OUR customers didn't have to know how to program). You need 2 "network support" people although I did all the network support by myself back in the day when Ethernet was just being marketed. We didn't have it yet. It's so goddamned much simpler today I have to wonder what the problem is. If the 8 servers need a lot of maintenance then you didn't do it right in the first place.
Where your company sucks is help desk. Managers, engineers & other hands-on people should not be doing help desk in this day and age. That's just ridiculous. Tell your management to get some decent help-desk software (some good stuff is FREE!) and hire some (relatively cheap) clerical workers or PHONE JOCKEYS, for Christ's sake, and get that monkey off your back. It doesn't belong there.
That's cheaper (and often better) than trying to pay tech staff to handle support. You do need to set up a good Wiki (or similar) for FAQ and answered issues, but at least you have gatekeepers to keep people off your back all the time.
And honestly: if you need 4 programmers to do your ERP, you're buying it from the wrong people.
"Yeah, imagine if those chimps could learn something completely human, like maybe sign language. No way could they learn a human construct like language. Oh wait, they did. I didn't take your word for it, because your word, simply put, is wrong."
No. I am not wrong. They are not the same things.
You might be able to tell a chimp that has learned language to follow where you're pointing. But trying to get it to understand if it hasn't learned language is another matter altogether.
Repeat: read up on it. I'm not talking about chimps taught ASL or spoken language. Again, I am referring to human, non-verbal communication. Sign language, by the say, is a form of "verbal" language, even if it does not involve voice speech.
Slashdot Mirror
"That's true, but this topic has nothing to do with antitrust rules."
What is with people on Slashdot today? Do they even read the things they're replying to anymore?
It's the part about carriers being content providers that invokes the antitrust concept. It was against FCC rules for many decades, and the rule was there for antitrust reasons.
Only recently have carriers (cable companies) been able to lobby Congress sufficiently to get exemptions from these rules. And one of the results you see -- right now -- is the United States having slower Internet service, for more money, than other countries that regulate it better.
That is not the only issue involved, but it sure as hell is one of them.
Wow. Talk about WHOOSH.
THE WHOLE POINT HERE was that monopoly, fascism, socialism, and "crony capitalism" are NOT capitalism. Government control of markets is NOT capitalism. This is NOT the stuff Adam Smith was talking about.
If you want to talk about "capitalism", then all of this stuff is breaking the rules. It is contrary to the system that made this country great. And -- just in case you hadn't noticed -- the more they have done it, the less "great" this country has become.
"1. They had problems with modern human DNA contamination (not sure why they couldn't get everything clean but since they're the leading edge lab in this sort of thing, it must be a real issue)."
Unlikely that there were not later visitors to the cave. Pissing in the corner is eventually going to contaminate the DNA. This is one of the things the "DNA Forensics" folks like to play down: it is ridiculously easy to contaminate DNA evidence.
"2. They had to limit analysis to fragment lengths around 45 base pairs to avoid this contamination. That's tiny compared to what one normally uses."
See my point above. But also: time damages DNA as well. You get more accurate fragments if you limit the size of the fragments. (I.e., statistically, you're less likely to see a fractured or contaminated chemical bond, the smaller the sample you take.)
"3. They only had enough to sequence the mitochondrial DNA."
The mitochondrial DNA may have been the best preserved, because it's inside walled micro-structures in the cell.
"4. It's only one person."
Bingo.
"I'm trying to decide if I should give El Gran Hombre a luchador mask"
If you do, you MUST call him Strong Bad, or your audience will never forgive you.
"Where are these official rules that determine what's allowed and what's cheating?"
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, by Dr. Adam Smith, 1776
"Lobbying" and "monopoly" are not "capitalism". Even Smith recognized that a capitalist economy must have a reasonable body of antitrust laws to keep everybody "playing within the rules".
"As I have already said, every citizen who was an able bodied male, between the ages of of 18 and 40 were by default members of the militia."
The fact that you already said it does not make it correct.
Repeat (and don't take my word for it, LOOK IT UP!): "well-regulated" meant TRAINED AND DISCIPLINED. The "citizen militia", which was every able-bodied male, is by definition NOT trained and disciplined.
Read some history, man. You're just wrong. Sorry if the canned explanation you got in government-run elementary school wasn't correct. That's what they taught me, too. But I learned by actually studying the history of this country that it is just plain wrong.
"No, you're wrong. The militia was not the standing army, it was to be the defense against the standing army."
Did you even read what I wrote? No, I am NOT wrong.
There is a difference between the "citizen militia" (every able-bodied male) and a "well-regulated militia". By the very definition (at the time), the "general" militia (i.e., everybody) was NOT "well-regulated". A well-regulated militia is a TRAINED AND DISCIPLINED militia, which the citizen militia is not. The "citizen militia" is precisely The People. The well-regulated militia is not. The second amendment CONTRASTS them: because we need the one, we will keep the other, just in case.
That's the entire point of that passage, and what makes it all make sense. Otherwise it's weirdly garbled nonsense... and nowhere else in the Constitution is there garbled nonsense. The Founders were terrified about the need to keep a standing army. Therefore The People have the right to bear arms.
"Let's just acknowledge that things are slightly different from the 80's and 90's and the technology and problems are very much a different animal."
And the fact that things are somewhat different now was part of my point, jerk.
"I did all the network support by myself back in the day when Ethernet was just being marketed" so in other words you had a totally flat network with no policies, vlans, firewall, application firewall, ids, redundancy, and well basically anything.
Nope. It was "before" none of those things. Wait... except redundancy.
When I started there, the whole office was on an arcnet-based network. And a bigger pain in the ass you probably never saw, especially for a growing company in which computers are being moved around and new ones acquired all the time.
But it did have (optional) firewalls. It did have vlans. It did have addresses. It did have policies.
Later, we moved the company to a new headquarters and I designed and built the new (ethernet!) network. Except for the wiring that is... new buildout so we paid somebody to cable up the whole place.
I designed and ran a network -- from arcnet to ethernet -- for a main branch of the company with 120 offices, with a dedicated T1 line to our other 2 regional branches. I didn't just "plug in a Linksys router", asshole.
Would you like to hear my scores on the MCSE exams? I'd have to go look up the exact scores but I am sure I still have them around here somewhere.
"This has been a cat and mouse game for a long time now... and the cat is starting to be the one winning."
Gaming the political system is not "winning". It's cheating. There is a very big difference.
Both of you display common misunderstandings.
By the language of the time, "well-regulated" means "trained and disciplined". That meant an army.
The "citizen's militia" is indeed "every able-bodied man". But it isn't well-regulated. The the right to bear arms is an individual right, so that the citizen's militia can resist the "well-regulated militia" if need be.
"Which, by the way, is itself a misunderstanding about an amendment whose goal was to ensure a militia roughly in the same sense as the Swiss army."
Just no. As a student of our country's history I can tell you that you are simply wrong about this. That's a distortion -- a small but very important distortion -- of what the words mean.
The Second Amendment says that because a "well-regulated militia" is necessary for defense, the right of The People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed... so they can fight off the "well regulated" militia if need be.
The "people's militia" is not "well-regulated". Well-regulated means "trained, disciplined". That's an army. The "people's militia is not trained or disciplined.
That might seem like a small difference but it's very important, and that difference was recognized just a few years ago by the Supreme Court when it struck down D.C.'s gun ban. (As it had been recognized in previous SCOTUS decisions, as well.) The right to bear arms is an individual right, not one belonging to a "militia".
Your little misunderstanding about what the Second Amendment means is: a delusion.
"It's not just you Yanks, either."
The thing is though: under OUR law (but not necessarily yours), the fact that the government's actions have a "chilling effect" on free speech makes the government actions prima facie unconstitutional.
This is pretty much positive proof that free speech is being "chilled". Therefore it is unconstitutional. End of story.
"Continuing to believe that is a sign you're delusional, not 'free'."
Incorrect. They still "pride themselves" on being free. Priding themselves is fact, not delusion. The idea that they're the "most free" might be delusion, but that's not quite what the sentence was saying.
"Or we could just admit that all those chimps we sent into space came back super intelligent."
I think I might know some of them. But don't tell anybody.
I should clarify what I was saying: if you're the top guy then some support questions will (and should) trickle up to you eventually. But the key words here are "trickle" and "eventually". You should have a layer or two of (again, relatively cheap) people under you to handle the more routine things.
"The point is not whether chimps are human; it's whether they are persons."
If anything, you're shooting yourself in the foot my making that distinction. Hell, a lot of humans are deemed legally not "persons".
Haha. And in retrospect, most of them (as a whole) are pretty stupid.
I think parent should be a major mod up.
No, it was done in some controlled blind studies. Separate studies have done but using the same methodologies. Aside from chimpanzees, other animals (that I know about) that were studied were dogs, cats, and ferrets.
You may or may not think this is funny, but nobody has been able to figure out whether cats understand or not, because they basically just don't respond consistently either way.
These were university studies, not some guys in a basement. The papers were published in respectable journals.
"Then why didn't you write that, you drooler?"
See? I remember you from before, and this is your basic argument technique. You take any mistake you can find (which I admitted to, earlier) and use that to try to make it look like somebody is deliberately trying to bullshit.
Makes you look like a big fucking man, does it?
Somehow I doubt most of the other readers here think so. But I won't pretend to speak for them.
"First you add a qualifier, namely "human".
No. I admitted that I had omitted a qualifier that should have been there in the first place. I was admitting to a mistake. Sorry if you don't like that.
"Now you invent a bullshit distinction between knowing something and knowing that you know it."
Um, no. I don't know where you made that "leap" but that isn't what I was saying at all.
Other than the mistake (which I admitted to) I wrote pretty much what I meant. Your strange interpretation of my meaning is hardly impressive. It's a classic philosophic question but I certainly did not imply its presence here.
And by the way: elephants are irrelevant to this discussion. Several animals that do not have the "native" intelligence of elephants, nevertheless "get" human communication better than elephants do, without prior training. Dogs and ferrets, in particular. Nobody can tell if cats understand, because they just don't care, whether they understand or not.
"Chimps can and do understand, they just have never been observed to understand it in the wild."
WILL YOU get it through your head that we're taking about different things? While this might seem a bit bizarre to you, the fact is that chimpanzee pointing is NOT the same as chimpanzees understanding HUMAN pointing, in conjunction with human association and communication with humans?
This whole thing is about whether chimpanzees are "human". The fact is that while they can be taught "verbal" (i.e., word-based, whether it's spoken or signs) language, they just don't communicate well with us. And HUMAN non-verbal communication seems beyond their ken. There have been LOTS of studies about this. But everybody keeps pointing at studies about completely different things.
"So, sure, chimps may not natively understand human pointing, but dogs only got that way because of thousands of years of selection of offspring that cohabit better with humans. Take a wolf and point, it won't understand."
Yes! So why don't you understand what *I* wrote? Studies showed that this wasn't "associative" (a matter of growing up to understand a "culture" or way of doing things), but rather probably a subtle genetic difference via Darwinist "natural selection".
But this natural selection has NOT taken place in chimpanzees. They haven't been domesticated for 2,500 years like dogs, and cats, and ferrets. They haven't been "bred" to understand human nonverbal communication as those other animals have... and they're NOT HUMAN. Not by a long shot.
I used to WRITE industry-leading ERP software, AND I used to manage 120 offices equipped with desktops at the same time, AND run the cable myself through the ceilings. And (other than writing the software) I did it entirely on my own, until I got overworked and hired an assistant.
That might be a bit less but look at the scale here: you have 4 programmers, programming shit the ERP company should be supplying you already (OUR customers didn't have to know how to program). You need 2 "network support" people although I did all the network support by myself back in the day when Ethernet was just being marketed. We didn't have it yet. It's so goddamned much simpler today I have to wonder what the problem is. If the 8 servers need a lot of maintenance then you didn't do it right in the first place.
Where your company sucks is help desk. Managers, engineers & other hands-on people should not be doing help desk in this day and age. That's just ridiculous. Tell your management to get some decent help-desk software (some good stuff is FREE!) and hire some (relatively cheap) clerical workers or PHONE JOCKEYS, for Christ's sake, and get that monkey off your back. It doesn't belong there.
That's cheaper (and often better) than trying to pay tech staff to handle support. You do need to set up a good Wiki (or similar) for FAQ and answered issues, but at least you have gatekeepers to keep people off your back all the time.
And honestly: if you need 4 programmers to do your ERP, you're buying it from the wrong people.
"Yeah, imagine if those chimps could learn something completely human, like maybe sign language. No way could they learn a human construct like language. Oh wait, they did. I didn't take your word for it, because your word, simply put, is wrong."
No. I am not wrong. They are not the same things.
You might be able to tell a chimp that has learned language to follow where you're pointing. But trying to get it to understand if it hasn't learned language is another matter altogether.
Repeat: read up on it. I'm not talking about chimps taught ASL or spoken language. Again, I am referring to human, non-verbal communication. Sign language, by the say, is a form of "verbal" language, even if it does not involve voice speech.