It seems that you're misunderstanding the definition of a range datatype in this context. The data type of the column in the scheduling example would be defined as a timestamp range, and the constraint on the column would be that no timestamp range value can overlap with any other timestamp value in the table (or in the table for any rows that share a key value, such as user ID). There is no need to alter the column definition to accomodate changes to scheduling data.
While I understand (if not entirely agree with) the logic behind capital gains taxation, It's not that simple for Romney. There are smoking guns in the current returns he's released, such as the disclosure of a >$100m IRA. Given that contributions are limited to something around $50k/year (at most, assuming a self-directed IRA), that's the accounting fraud/tax evasion equivalent of having a body with a bullet hole in it. You still have to find the murder weapon to prove the crime, but there's no question that something went horribly wrong. The only way for that kind of IRA inflation to happen is if you misrepresent the value of assets you transfer through the accounting firewall into your IRA, or manipulate the value post-transfer.
There's also the question of whether he paid the proper gift tax on the transfer of $100m in assets to a trust for his sons (the existence of which is also revealed in his currently-released tax return). His own vague statements on his tax payments imply that he hasn't, because the tax resulting from that one action would have been >$30m. Gift tax is rarely audited aside from asset transfers shortly before death, so many people ignore it for both that reason and the reason that it has a statute of limitation of something like only 3 years.
Given the above, let alone the vagaries of complex and legitimately grey (as in not even the regulators know for sure whether it's OK, so no one can say for sure that they're illegal) tax avoidance strategies routinely employed in the management of that kind of accumulated wealth, it's mind-boggling why Romney released any tax returns at all. That being said, this extortion attempt is really a stroke of luck for him, as it will make the issue toxic and untouchable whereas it would probably have otherwise dogged him clear to election day.
Not sure if you're being serious, but no, stockpiling would not help to achieve the preconditions for socialism--only reinvestment to improve society's total productivity such that society can eventually be productive enough to provide a good standard of living for all members can do that.
That said, even if we assume that society actually can achieve that level of productivity, there is no guarantee that socialism will be a desirable outcome for the productive members of society. Convincing them that it is without resorting to coercion might be an even more difficult challenge than achieving the aforementioned level of productivity.
The problem with your argument, is that it fundamentally conflates gains in productivity with free productivity. If we used to accomplish X with N people, and we can now accomplish X + Y with N people, your assumption is that Y units are free, and therefore distributable to the general populace at no cost. This incorrect--the unit cost has been reduced, but each unit still requires investment of time and/or resources by the N people. Rather than supporting other people with their increased productivity, why should they not get to instead take an extra 2 weeks of vacation each year to produce the same X units?
Your argument is also blind to the nature of disruptive innovation, where you can have X units produced by N people suddenly becoming completely irrelevant (e.g., where X = units of buggy whips once cars became generally affordable). Presuming that buggy whip making employees owned the buggy whip workshops and companies, that does not help them at all. Their factories, tooling, processes, and skills are now largely worthless. Do the people working on cars now have an obligation to support the buggy whip makers?
Another major problem is that of control of the gains in productivity. To use your example, allowing the excess to support people who choose to indulge in sex and drugs means that the people who are still doing the work, propping the entire society up, don't get to reinvest those resources into further improving technology in order to increase their own personal leisure time and resources. Why should they do that? Even presuming the same situation in a socialist system, why should every member of society not demand an incremental increase in their standard of living rather than supporting non or negatively productive members of society? Should society provide resources to allow people to obtain drugs, or should it instead simply provide drug rehab?
Fundamentally, a socialist or communist system would not be desirable for productive members of society unless, at absolute minimum, the productivity of society is sufficient to sustain an high standard of living for every single individual. If this is not true, then universal socialism or communism would simply mean that everyone is poor/has a low standard of living. Let us call the theoretical level of societal production allowing a universally high standard of living the precondition to "desirable" socialism.
Looking at things from that perspective, let us consider the world today. There are too many people on the planet for society to provide a high standard of living for every single individual. It is arguable whether the earth actually has the resources to do so even in theory--but assuming that it does, there are only 2 ways to achieve the precondition to desirable socialism: 1) Eliminate the non/lower productivity individuals (i.e., genocide on an unimaginable scale--clearly unacceptable). 2) Foster technological advancement such that it improves the productivity of society at a greater rate than that of population growth.
Option 2 is clearly the only acceptable course of action (again, this is all assuming that socialism is the goal--this is definitely not a universal belief). This then leads us to the question of how to best increase the rate of technological advancement. Your own example cites leisure time and accumulated wealth/resources as driving incredible advances in human knowledge and therefore technology. Following this logic, then, the fastest way to achieve the preconditions for desirable socialism is to accumulate society's resources in a massively disproportionate amount in order to allow a relative few to drive technological advancement. In other words, the fastest way to achieve desirable socialism is to first organize society around technological advancement (roughly speaking, resources being allocated disproportionately towards productive individuals and institutions), and then transition to socialism once the requisite level of productivity has been achieved.
No problem. I was just going through the thread later to find opportunities to spread some good anti-disinformation:) (full disclaimer: I work in ag biotech R&D).
Regarding labeling for potential allergens, you would think so, but this is not the case. It is essentially left up to the producer and downstream processors to decide when the risk requires extra precautions.
Essentially, the point I was trying to make is that what many people think are safe and time-tested techniques actually have the potential to be quite dangerous, or are already incredibly dangerous. The debates in response to basically every/. article on biotech display a massive cognitive disconnect and double standard with respect to GM technology. Many foods that are produced without regulation are effectively deadly poison to a not-insignificant number of people due to allergies, regardless of method of production or cultivar development. Heck, ~10% of Japanese people are allergic to rice--some to the point that exposure will result in severe anaphylactic shock. Most estimates are that ~150-200 people die each year in the US due to food allergies. Body count due to GMO foods? 0 after nearly 20 years on the market. If you count the unnecessary starvation deaths due to activists convincing African nations to reject GMO food aid, anti-GMO activism has killed more people than actually eating GMO foods (which again, has yet to kill a single person).
There are definitely legitimate concerns regarding genetic engineering as a field. It should be regulated and products resulting from it tested (it is and they are, extensively, though whether it is sufficient is always up for debate). The public should be better informed and therefore be an active participant in the larger debate around food security. The problem is that anti-GMO groups are exactly that--against GMO technology. Not for the safe regulation and management of GMO technology. Not for improving public education and awareness. Not for improving food safety, security, and sustainability in general.
I can stick a branch from an lime tree on a lemon tree trunk and get both limes and lemons from the "same plant", but that doesn't yield any kind of a cross, like lemony limes.
Graft a tomato plant onto tobacco root stock and you'll get nicotine-laced tomatoes. In fact, grafting to infuse produce with anti-fungal, anti-bacterial, and even anti-viral compounds is an active area of plant research and commercial production (this article is a nice summary). As noted in the linked article, grafting to the wrong rootstock has yielded poisonous produce.
Now, should we subject grafting to the same regulations as GMOs? What about requiring labeling for produce yielded by grafted plants?
That conventionally-bred gene manipulation you mention, while resulting in similarly granular effects to that of the GE, has the benefit of using mechanisms and pathways which have stood the test of those 2 billion years without resulting in catastrophic species loss or damage - *that's* why it gets a free pass.... in my book, anyway.
What about chemical or radiation-induced mutagenesis? I work in the ag biotech industry and I can tell you with 100% certainty that at least some of the cultivars marketed as clearfield wheat were developed using at least the former technique*. Both techniques have been used to create new cultivars in practically all major crops (both food crops and ornamental crops) that can be sold as Organic. That being said, while you have made an appeal to authority as a scientist, the basis of the argument you've made above is completely non-scientific. That is not to say that your objection is illegitimate, but establishing that it is non-scientific is important (I'll explain why later).
Also, the "mechanisms and pathways which have stood the test of those 2 billion years" result in "catastrophic species loss or damage" all the time. Not all dinosaurs became birds--most just became fossils. Disruptive innovation (to use a less grim and more/.-friendly term) is the norm in the biological sphere, so you might need to revoke your free pass:).
There is no way we can possibly safely understand the full implications of inserting a fish gene into a tomato to improve shelf-life.
As a physicist, you should also know that there is no way we can possibly understand the full implications of moving my coffee mug to the other side of my desk because the n-body problem is unsolvable. We can only approximate the likely effect. Not trying to be glib, just pointing out that not being able to possibly understand the full implications of something is the definition of FUD, not a strong argument against a given action. To be useful in the real world, we have to start talking about probabilities, and how we can gain a working (if not absolute) understanding of the likely consequences of a given action or class of actions.
I hesitate to invoke Hawking style religiosity but I will: Genetic Engineering is "playing God" (no, I'm anything but Christian) when IMHO there is no way we are anywhere near competent yet to exercise such ability. We need to exercise more humility instead. This beautiful planet is the only one we have, or are likely to have for some considerable time to come, and it should be treated with kid gloves.
Funny you should say this, because this is the exact line of reasoning some of my Biologist colleagues use to argue objections to physics experiments being run at the LHC, Fermilab, etc. I try to tell them that while particle accelerators can theoretically produce "micro black holes", it is only true in the literal sense that they can compress mass into a volume smaller than the Schwarzchild radius for that mass. They do not understand that the probability that such a black hole would subsequently swallow the earth is like the probability that two mobsters separated by 100 meters, each emptying 100 drums of ammo at eachother via tommy guns, walk away completely unscathed because every single bullet from mobster A collided in mid-air with a bullet from mobster B. Some effectively think that by using the LHC we're likely to end up creating 'red matter' from the Star Trek reboot. Suffice it to say that quantum physics is a sufficiently advanced field such that otherwise brilliant biologists will not necessarily have even a basic working understanding of the field.
Getting back to biology, the same argument above is just as applicable to modern medicinal technologies, such as the use of synthetic antibiotics, as it is to GMOs. Every time we apply an antibiotic treatment, for example, we roll the di
It proves that we will break international extradition and asylum treaties on a political whim...
Both assertions are incorrect. No international extradition treaty would be broken by extraditing Assange to Sweden (in fact, they would probably be broken if Britain did not extradite at this point given that all options for legal challenge have been exhausted), and no "asylum treaties" would be broken by seizing Assange either.
Recognition of status as an asylum-seeker is done on a country-by-country basis. Ecuador's granting Assange asylum neither requires nor implies any special recognition of status by the UK. Granting of asylum by a given country is no more and no less than a statement that the country in question will use its sovereign status and resources to protect the individual in question. All the UK have done with their letter is point out that Ecuador cannot in fact protect Assange, even by granting him asylum as neither its sovereign status nor resources available can prevent the UK from detaining him in a legal manner.
Also, on a related note, revoking the embassy's diplomatic status in order to seize Assange also does not violate any treaty. The treaty in question does not state that the host nation shall not revoke diplomatic status--only that if that action is taken, none of the recognized and declared diplomatic staff will be harmed or detained, and must be allowed to leave the country. In addition, the common misconception among many people discussing this issue seems to be that Ecuador can unilaterally grant Assange status as a diplomat, with all the immunities that implies--this is wrong. Recognition of diplomatic status is granted by the host country. Ecuador could apply for Assange to be recognized as a diplomat, but the UK would undoubtedly refuse because it would be a blatant attempt to abuse diplomatic privilege.
With respect to your other point regarding Sweden's refusal to guarantee no further extradition to the US, this is a non-issue. No sovereign state would make such a guarantee regardless of its ultimate intent. If you have been served with a subpoena to appear in person (Assange is essentially subject to an international version of this), there is no expecation that you can impose conditions upon your compliance with that subpoena in any of the countries involved, and any requested conditions are simply going to be ignored out of principle.
According to my understanding of the article (IANAP), this has nothing to do with memory, and use of memory would not impact the system in any significant way in any case (the initial energy required to take the measurements to store into memory would offset the reduction in entropy during the experiment).
The fundamental issue with the classical scenario of Maxwell's Demon is that in order to know if/when to open/close the gate you need to measure each particle in the system at least once. The number of measurements >= The number of particles. The basic implication is that you introduce entropy via taking measurements at least as much as you reduce it via segregating particles according to energy differential.
If you consider quantum entanglement, however, the rule that number of measurement >= the number of particles is no longer necessarily true. E.g., if each particle in the system is entangled with another particle in the system, the number of measurements could be as low as 1/2 the number of particles since one measurement gives you information about both of the paired particles. It is also possible for more than 2 particles to be entangled, so to generalize, you could have N-way entanglement between sets of particles in the system, and the minimum number of measurements becomes number of particles / N.
The fundamental question I have is if it's possible to determine entanglement relationships between particles in the system for less energy than independently measuring each particle. If not, then you offset the entropy reduction of only measuring one particle from each entangled set by the energy required to identify entanglement relationships.
Personally the thing I like most about C is that it's not "safe". It doesn't take care of a lot of memory management for you and you can easily eat up all the memory or introduce a buffer overload vulnerability if you're not paying attention. It forces programmers to actually look at what they're doing and consider what it will do in the long run, and causes good coding habits to form.
Unfortunately, that's not how people work. C neither enforces diligence nor does it cause good habits to form. All it does is tend to make the consequences of laziness and bad habits more serious. This is analogous to how gun ownership requires good safety habits (given the underlying assumption that you want to avoid unintentional harm to yourself or others), but simply owning a gun doesn't force you to practice them.
As is often the case when presenting opposite extremes, you have created a false dichotomy. It'd be like saying "Either water is bad for your health and should be avoided or it is completely safe and you can just keep on drinking unlimited amounts". In fact, either of those extreme views will result in you being dead.
With respect to pesticide usage, what you have is a question of economic and energy efficiency in food production vs. environmental impact of the production process. In the extreme case of organic farming, it is almost always much less economically efficient--and often less energy efficient--than conventional farming. For those who minimize the impact of food price increases--that attitude is a privilege of the rich. Food prices rising marginally spark riots, revolutions, and mass starvation or malnutrition in poorer parts of the world. On the other extreme, abuse of pesticides and other production tools will either also be economically inefficient, or in worse cases damaging to the environment--possibly to the point of devastating an area over the long term.
A solution that allows improvements in yield and production efficiency while reducing the environmental footprint of agricultural operations is a good thing, hence the GPs statements are not logically inconsistent.
What the AC was saying, basically, is that loans could simply be pegged to the rate of inflation (which, in the case of a sufficiently deflationary currency, would actually result in a negative interest rate--e.g., if the rate of inflation is -5%, the loan interest rate might be -2.5%, which would still be profitable to the bank in real terms while keeping it possible to pay off the loan). I've worked on a number of contracts and other agreements effectively constituting a loan, and they are commonly pegged against an inflation index specified in the contract (usually a composite index of prices of key commodities that govern the production cost of a major asset--this was common when the price of steel was fluctuating wildly a couple of years ago, for example).
In essence, inflation or deflation can be compensated for if necessary, so there is no inherent economic benefit either way. In your earlier example, if your loan were properly pegged to a relevant index, the loan balance would drop in lockstep with deflation, or rise if everyone decided to dump their piggybank into the market. If the currency is sufficiently stable, both inflation and deflation would be ignored for minor transactions because the cost of accounting for currency valuation changes would outweigh the expected magnitude of the aforementioned changes. Extremes in either direction result in instabilities that drastically reduce the utility value of the currency as an economic exchange medium, and therefore cause the economy to grind to a halt if the currency is the only medium of exchange.
Given that, the whole assumption that inflation is good is really predicated on the underlying assumption that real value in the economy is always increasing. Even assuming you want to always incentivize investment, you would peg currency manipulations relative to real economic value (e.g., if half the real value in the economy were destroyed (e.g., by war), an inflation of -45% would still penalize mattress-stuffers in real terms).
The whole inflation/deflation debate really just obscures the true issue of the "hard" vs. fiat currency debate, which boils down to whether a central authority should have the ability to manipulate a currency (or more generally, whether or not it should even be possible to manipulate the currency aside from "natural" market valuation resulting from individual transactions). This is either a good or bad thing, depending on your points of view on both economic philosophy and also the proper role of currency within the economy.
The tendency of currency authorities towards inflation is simply a byproduct of the logistics of currency manipulation--a central authority can effect inflation by minting an unlimited amount of currency easily and unilaterally. Deflation, on the other hand, can only be actively effected by destroying the currency in the central authority's possession--which puts a hard ceiling on its ability to effect deflation. To effect a greater degree of deflation would require the central authority to destroy currency not under its possession, which cannot be done unilaterally, will not be painless, and may not even be possible--which raises the final point I'll mention in this post.
Currency manipulation always has side effects aside from changing the valuation of the currency vs. commodities and other assets or instruments. The side-effects are the inevitable repercussions of the means by which the manipulations are introduced into the economy. For example, in minting currency to effect inflation, the central authority is now sitting on a pile cash that will not actually have the desired inflationary impact until it is dispersed into the economy, where market forces then gradually react to the dispersal through market activity. There is no "neutral" way to do this. Institutions that become part of the channel between the currency authority and the market will profit from the activity, and will further try to manipulate policy (via lobbying or bribing, depending on your level of cyni
I actually have and enjoy a job somewhat like this, and I personally get paid well, but don't have much in terms of a discretionary budget. I'm also embedded in a Line-of-Business unit and often act essentially as a workaround to the IT/IS department. The latter is largely the reason I have an extremely limited discretionary budget--they've manged to enact policy limitations on any tech-related spend that does not originate from their department (that being said, I have a good relationship with the IS guys, and understand why they do what they do).
To illustrate how things work, it usually goes something like this (gory details provided to illustrate the insanity. Apologies in advance for the rambling that's likely to result.):
Business to IS: We have a process involving ~300 project managers performing moderately complex data input across the globe. This input must be sanity-checked, rolled into various reports, and revised multiple times per feedback from upper management. It is currently performed in email, is very error-prone, and it takes us 3 days to turn around reports after latest input. We want it locked down, with turn around in under 10 minutes after most recent input. How do we fix this? IS to Business: Give us $2M and 2 years, we'll have an enterprise system with ~$200k/annum operating cost that fits the critical requirements. We may also be able to accomodate some nice-to-haves. Business to IS: Great. Do it. Business to me: What do we do in the meantime? Me to Business:: Give me a spare workstation, I'll have something in 2 weeks .. 2 weeks later Me to Business: I've put together the following:
*) an Excel-based front-end for data input, using VBA for sanity checking, help, etc., packaged with screencast tutorials for end-users.
*) Version control is managed by having the authoritative current versions of each PM's files on this SharePoint library (SharePoint is essentially MS's CMS offering, and is very popular with many businesses). SharePoint manages version control and retention.
*) VBA in the Excel workbook notifies the server-side software whenever new data is input and confirmed with check-in via a web service.
*) That spare workstation now hosts a CentOS Linux VirtualBox VM. All server-side components reside on that instance and auto-start via init scripts. The VM instance itself auto-starts as a windows service when the physical box is powered up. If you want better fault tolerance, migrate the VM to our datacenter.
*) a node.js web service receives the notification from the excel workbook upon data update, scrapes the data from SharePoint*, normalizes it and puts it into a PostgreSQL database. The node.js server also checks SharePoint for any changes via web service on inital start and once every 2 hours just in case.
*) a separate node.js instance listens for updates and compiles the required reports from the information in PostgreSQL
*) Orchestration of node.js instances is accomplished over redis pub/sub. Business to Me: Uhh... does it work? Me to Business: Yes. Business to Me: What if your "server" crashes. Me to Business: Reboot it. If the VM image is corrupted, re-start it from this archived virtualbox image--it'll restore current state from the data on SharePoint. As an absolute doomsday-scenario backup--if I get hit by a bus, the system fails, and the IS guys who know VirtualBox are on vacation--this special Excel workbook will iterate through all of the data files in the SharePoint library and generate the same reports when you click this button, but it will probably take a couple of hours to do so given that there will be 300 files it has to open. Business to Me: Got it. Take it live.
Why did I do it that way? On the client side, while I don't like Excel as a development platform, all the business users are comfortable with it, and it was the most productive of all possible front-en
No, if you RTFA, you can see that the link to HFCS is prominently featured because it explains the lag between imidacloprid introduction (1990s) to widespread observance of CCD (2006) because feeding hives with HFCS was not a widespread practice until then. Because the corn from which it is produced is often sprayed with imidacloprid, the HFCS contains trace amounts of imidacloprid well below safe limits for humans, and even below LD50 for the bees, but apparently sufficient to incur CCD over time. A related study described in the second linked article suggests that the class of pesticides to which imidacloprid belongs (neonicotinoids) interfere with the bees' homing ability, which explains the characteristic lack of dead adults in a colony that has suffered CCD--the adults apparently get lost while foraging and can't find their way back to the hive.
What I find most striking is that CCD did not seem to be much of a problem in the 90s when imidacloprid was introduced, which implies that bees are fine with it being sprayed on crops, but cannot tolerate even minute (measured in double digit parts per billion) traces when it is fed to them (in this case, via HFCS).
The strain of corn being cited probably accounts for more than 60% of the corn grown in the US, and possibly 40% or more of the corn grown worldwide.
Just wanted to clarify a point here: bt11 is not a "strain of corn" any more than OnStar is a model of car. The bt11 gene is integrated into thousands of varieties of corn, from tropical sweet corns to Canadian flints, just as the OnStar system is integrated into many different models and makes of vehicles. These varieties of corn are developed first, without the bt11 gene, and then the gene is later bred into the line in what most companies call the trait conversion process just as base trim levels of cars are developed, and then add-on systems like OnStar and stereo systems are tacked on later as features and options.
Any type of monoculture weakness that could have the kind of impact you're describing would have to be a result of the bt11 gene itself. This kind of thing has happened before in corn, though no case of that has (so far) been associated with GM traits (e.g., T-cytoplasm, which was used to facilitate hybrid production in many different varieties caused susceptibility to gray leaf spot).
In car analogy terms, what you're afraid of would be like the OnStar system itself causing engine problems in every type of vehicle with which it is integrated due to a flaw in the remote engine ignition feature. This is in contrast to a true monoculture situation, which would be like if everyone drove a ford pinto and we suddenly found our highways clogged with burnt exploded wrecks every time an accident occurred. The first situation is easy to fix--just buy the base model instead--whereas the second is trickier if all every manufacturer makes and knows how to design anymore is a pinto.
Many if not most GM plants are rendered sterile so that you are forced to purchase new seeds from year to year, thus making further evolution impossible.
This is a common misconception. The technology exists to sterilize plants (both via genetic engineering and also through non-GM systems such as use of sterilizing cytoplasm), but to my knowledge there are no GM sterilization technologies used in products on the market today.
Farmers don't go back to purchase hybrid seed each year because they are forced to do so. There are non-GM foundation seed lines sold by smaller companies, as well as heirloom stocks maintained by universities and other private institutions. The reason is more that seed from GM seed companies like Monsanto, Pioneer Hi-Bred, and Syngenta is to publically available seed lines what Android is to OpenMoko. I say Android rather than iPhone because the PVPA (plant variety protection act--i.e., patents for plant varieties) allows the general public to use lines whose protections have expired, and the overall effect is somewhat analogous to how Google releases the source to Android on a periodic basis but controls current development.
People don't write that kind of stuff, it's still an issue from a VM design standpoint because in some cases code geneneration tools might. This can be frustrating and/or introduce extremely difficult-to-trace runtime bugs into your system if, for example, your framework du jour does runtime code generation/modification deep under the hood in order to implement AOP or a scripting language or something.
Based on my interactions with people from both groups, I gather that it mostly stems from the fact that the subjects of microscopic observations are, for most practical purposes, exclusive to a specific microscope--especially where dynamic (and sometimes interactive) systems or events are concerned. In the case of telescopes used for astronomy, they are all pointed at the same, largely static things. The data from major telescopes is often made widely available such that there is essentially no scientific value for anything other than the highest quality available data set.
In the astronomy world, one telescope's team could feasibly pull a douchebag maneuver like tracking the observations of another team's inferior telescope and essentially reducing the value of the second team's data to marginal at best, where this is impossible in the case of microscopes unless they are physically co-located. Because of this, the implication is that once a superior telescope comes on line, all lesser telescopes of its type only retain whatever value they have to the extent that the superior telescope's team suffers them to make exclusive observations. The fact that there is too much sky for any one (or really all telescopes in the world) to observe at any given time apparently isn't enough to stop the dick swinging that often goes on.
Do they charge for time, or storage and bandwidth?
All of the above. Processor time is ridiculously cheap nowadays though (e.g., Amazon EC2 rates vary from cents to dollars per hour for the range from modest virtual machines to virtual compute clusters with serious horsepower).
Diet and 'lifestyle' of the beef does make a difference in taste, but not always a difference that people enjoy. Purely grass-fed beef, without being heavily spiced to cover the flavor differences, is an acquired taste.
My father is a cowboy, and they regularly get to select cattle to butcher as a bonus of sorts. These are 100% grass-fed open range (as in mountain range, no pasture pens, no feed supplements) cattle. Most people I know (including on occasion my dad!) prefer corn-fatted beef from Costco for steaks.
Open range beef has a 'gamey' flavor that adds greatly to stews, chilis, burgers, etc., but most people in my experience dislike it for steaks or other preparations that showcase the flavors of the meat.
Living in a free speech society and subsequently using that freedom to shout "fire!" in a crowded theater will likely result in either court precedence being established or legislation being enacted that places conditions upon that freedom. Legislation is supposed to be a practical embodiment of the ideals of society that is updated to reflect contemporary reality. Where absolute adherence to a pure ideal is deemed to be harmful, placing practical restrictions on that ideal is a reasonable reaction to expect (not saying that compromise with reality is right or wrong, just that you should expect it).
In the case of Wikileaks, the issue is that they've chosen to release not only information which is defensible from the perspective of providing useful insight and transparency, but also information which serves no value to the public and actually endangers lives to no apparent or intended positive end. The latter provides leverage and justification to craft and enact broad legislation that will be used in practice to suppress the former.
For example, if there was a group that provided pamphlets detailing the correlation between campaign donations and introduction and adoption of legislation, but also decided that in the pursuit of absolute truth and disclosure as an ideal they would stand in graveyards and hand out pamphlets of the bad credit history, extramarital affairs, missed child support payments, etc. of people interred there, you can expect action to restrict distribution of pamphlets justified by the latter but broad enough to suppress the former as an intended side-effect.
Abrams' argument is that Ellsberg did not distract from or endanger his intended cause by publishing harmful and irrelevant information that could be used as a basis to justify suppression. Due to his insistence on doing the latter, Assange is, from Abrams' perspective, making himself a useful idiot for the opposing side. His actions are likely to greatly harm the cause of government transparency and disclosure. From my perspective this is made blatantly obvious by the fact that media coverage is dominated by the topic of the fact of disclosure and likely reactions to the leak as opposed to the contents of the leak. In contrast, society and media reaction to the Pentagon Papers was focused intensely on the contents of the information disclosed.
When it comes to software like Flash, AfterEffects, Illustrator, etc., becoming an expert user of the application software is orders of magnitude harder than learning a new OS.
Also, if you use any of the aforementioned software packages professionally, the value of time and money spent learning the software and developing a productive workflow is far in excess of hardware and OS costs. This becomes especially true as you integrate custom application-specific scripts into your workflow and build up a library of project templates and other application-specific assets.
Tape over the gap has nothing to do with altering the frequency response of the antenna or anything like that, but for providing an insulating layer so that your hand/clothes/other foreign object that may come into contact with the phone at that point does not.
The involvement of auto_increment may be your culprit. As another poster mentioned on a thread above, InnoDB auto_increment is implemented as roughly 'select max(t.col) + 1 from table t' rather than using an actual SQL sequence. This could mean one of 2 things (not familiar enough with InnoDB's inner workings to know which it is): either A) the concurrent write transactions are getting the same value for the auto_increment field, causing problems if the field is the pkey or an otherwise unique index, or B) transaction 1 locks its rows, transaction 2 locks its rows, transaction 1 tries to grab the next val for an auto_index column and deadlocks because the auto_increment select needs to grab rows locked by transaction 2.
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It seems that you're misunderstanding the definition of a range datatype in this context. The data type of the column in the scheduling example would be defined as a timestamp range, and the constraint on the column would be that no timestamp range value can overlap with any other timestamp value in the table (or in the table for any rows that share a key value, such as user ID). There is no need to alter the column definition to accomodate changes to scheduling data.
While I understand (if not entirely agree with) the logic behind capital gains taxation, It's not that simple for Romney. There are smoking guns in the current returns he's released, such as the disclosure of a >$100m IRA. Given that contributions are limited to something around $50k/year (at most, assuming a self-directed IRA), that's the accounting fraud/tax evasion equivalent of having a body with a bullet hole in it. You still have to find the murder weapon to prove the crime, but there's no question that something went horribly wrong. The only way for that kind of IRA inflation to happen is if you misrepresent the value of assets you transfer through the accounting firewall into your IRA, or manipulate the value post-transfer.
There's also the question of whether he paid the proper gift tax on the transfer of $100m in assets to a trust for his sons (the existence of which is also revealed in his currently-released tax return). His own vague statements on his tax payments imply that he hasn't, because the tax resulting from that one action would have been >$30m. Gift tax is rarely audited aside from asset transfers shortly before death, so many people ignore it for both that reason and the reason that it has a statute of limitation of something like only 3 years.
Given the above, let alone the vagaries of complex and legitimately grey (as in not even the regulators know for sure whether it's OK, so no one can say for sure that they're illegal) tax avoidance strategies routinely employed in the management of that kind of accumulated wealth, it's mind-boggling why Romney released any tax returns at all. That being said, this extortion attempt is really a stroke of luck for him, as it will make the issue toxic and untouchable whereas it would probably have otherwise dogged him clear to election day.
Not sure if you're being serious, but no, stockpiling would not help to achieve the preconditions for socialism--only reinvestment to improve society's total productivity such that society can eventually be productive enough to provide a good standard of living for all members can do that.
That said, even if we assume that society actually can achieve that level of productivity, there is no guarantee that socialism will be a desirable outcome for the productive members of society. Convincing them that it is without resorting to coercion might be an even more difficult challenge than achieving the aforementioned level of productivity.
The problem with your argument, is that it fundamentally conflates gains in productivity with free productivity. If we used to accomplish X with N people, and we can now accomplish X + Y with N people, your assumption is that Y units are free, and therefore distributable to the general populace at no cost. This incorrect--the unit cost has been reduced, but each unit still requires investment of time and/or resources by the N people. Rather than supporting other people with their increased productivity, why should they not get to instead take an extra 2 weeks of vacation each year to produce the same X units?
Your argument is also blind to the nature of disruptive innovation, where you can have X units produced by N people suddenly becoming completely irrelevant (e.g., where X = units of buggy whips once cars became generally affordable). Presuming that buggy whip making employees owned the buggy whip workshops and companies, that does not help them at all. Their factories, tooling, processes, and skills are now largely worthless. Do the people working on cars now have an obligation to support the buggy whip makers?
Another major problem is that of control of the gains in productivity. To use your example, allowing the excess to support people who choose to indulge in sex and drugs means that the people who are still doing the work, propping the entire society up, don't get to reinvest those resources into further improving technology in order to increase their own personal leisure time and resources. Why should they do that? Even presuming the same situation in a socialist system, why should every member of society not demand an incremental increase in their standard of living rather than supporting non or negatively productive members of society? Should society provide resources to allow people to obtain drugs, or should it instead simply provide drug rehab?
Fundamentally, a socialist or communist system would not be desirable for productive members of society unless, at absolute minimum, the productivity of society is sufficient to sustain an high standard of living for every single individual. If this is not true, then universal socialism or communism would simply mean that everyone is poor/has a low standard of living. Let us call the theoretical level of societal production allowing a universally high standard of living the precondition to "desirable" socialism.
Looking at things from that perspective, let us consider the world today. There are too many people on the planet for society to provide a high standard of living for every single individual. It is arguable whether the earth actually has the resources to do so even in theory--but assuming that it does, there are only 2 ways to achieve the precondition to desirable socialism: 1) Eliminate the non/lower productivity individuals (i.e., genocide on an unimaginable scale--clearly unacceptable). 2) Foster technological advancement such that it improves the productivity of society at a greater rate than that of population growth.
Option 2 is clearly the only acceptable course of action (again, this is all assuming that socialism is the goal--this is definitely not a universal belief). This then leads us to the question of how to best increase the rate of technological advancement. Your own example cites leisure time and accumulated wealth/resources as driving incredible advances in human knowledge and therefore technology. Following this logic, then, the fastest way to achieve the preconditions for desirable socialism is to accumulate society's resources in a massively disproportionate amount in order to allow a relative few to drive technological advancement. In other words, the fastest way to achieve desirable socialism is to first organize society around technological advancement (roughly speaking, resources being allocated disproportionately towards productive individuals and institutions), and then transition to socialism once the requisite level of productivity has been achieved.
At first glance
No problem. I was just going through the thread later to find opportunities to spread some good anti-disinformation :) (full disclaimer: I work in ag biotech R&D).
Regarding labeling for potential allergens, you would think so, but this is not the case. It is essentially left up to the producer and downstream processors to decide when the risk requires extra precautions.
Essentially, the point I was trying to make is that what many people think are safe and time-tested techniques actually have the potential to be quite dangerous, or are already incredibly dangerous. The debates in response to basically every /. article on biotech display a massive cognitive disconnect and double standard with respect to GM technology. Many foods that are produced without regulation are effectively deadly poison to a not-insignificant number of people due to allergies, regardless of method of production or cultivar development. Heck, ~10% of Japanese people are allergic to rice--some to the point that exposure will result in severe anaphylactic shock. Most estimates are that ~150-200 people die each year in the US due to food allergies. Body count due to GMO foods? 0 after nearly 20 years on the market. If you count the unnecessary starvation deaths due to activists convincing African nations to reject GMO food aid, anti-GMO activism has killed more people than actually eating GMO foods (which again, has yet to kill a single person).
There are definitely legitimate concerns regarding genetic engineering as a field. It should be regulated and products resulting from it tested (it is and they are, extensively, though whether it is sufficient is always up for debate). The public should be better informed and therefore be an active participant in the larger debate around food security. The problem is that anti-GMO groups are exactly that--against GMO technology. Not for the safe regulation and management of GMO technology. Not for improving public education and awareness. Not for improving food safety, security, and sustainability in general.
I can stick a branch from an lime tree on a lemon tree trunk and get both limes and lemons from the "same plant", but that doesn't yield any kind of a cross, like lemony limes.
Graft a tomato plant onto tobacco root stock and you'll get nicotine-laced tomatoes. In fact, grafting to infuse produce with anti-fungal, anti-bacterial, and even anti-viral compounds is an active area of plant research and commercial production (this article is a nice summary). As noted in the linked article, grafting to the wrong rootstock has yielded poisonous produce.
Now, should we subject grafting to the same regulations as GMOs? What about requiring labeling for produce yielded by grafted plants?
That conventionally-bred gene manipulation you mention, while resulting in similarly granular effects to that of the GE, has the benefit of using mechanisms and pathways which have stood the test of those 2 billion years without resulting in catastrophic species loss or damage - *that's* why it gets a free pass .... in my book, anyway.
What about chemical or radiation-induced mutagenesis? I work in the ag biotech industry and I can tell you with 100% certainty that at least some of the cultivars marketed as clearfield wheat were developed using at least the former technique*. Both techniques have been used to create new cultivars in practically all major crops (both food crops and ornamental crops) that can be sold as Organic. That being said, while you have made an appeal to authority as a scientist, the basis of the argument you've made above is completely non-scientific. That is not to say that your objection is illegitimate, but establishing that it is non-scientific is important (I'll explain why later).
Also, the "mechanisms and pathways which have stood the test of those 2 billion years" result in "catastrophic species loss or damage" all the time . Not all dinosaurs became birds--most just became fossils. Disruptive innovation (to use a less grim and more /.-friendly term) is the norm in the biological sphere, so you might need to revoke your free pass :).
There is no way we can possibly safely understand the full implications of inserting a fish gene into a tomato to improve shelf-life.
As a physicist, you should also know that there is no way we can possibly understand the full implications of moving my coffee mug to the other side of my desk because the n-body problem is unsolvable. We can only approximate the likely effect. Not trying to be glib, just pointing out that not being able to possibly understand the full implications of something is the definition of FUD, not a strong argument against a given action. To be useful in the real world, we have to start talking about probabilities, and how we can gain a working (if not absolute) understanding of the likely consequences of a given action or class of actions.
I hesitate to invoke Hawking style religiosity but I will: Genetic Engineering is "playing God" (no, I'm anything but Christian) when IMHO there is no way we are anywhere near competent yet to exercise such ability. We need to exercise more humility instead. This beautiful planet is the only one we have, or are likely to have for some considerable time to come, and it should be treated with kid gloves.
Funny you should say this, because this is the exact line of reasoning some of my Biologist colleagues use to argue objections to physics experiments being run at the LHC, Fermilab, etc. I try to tell them that while particle accelerators can theoretically produce "micro black holes", it is only true in the literal sense that they can compress mass into a volume smaller than the Schwarzchild radius for that mass. They do not understand that the probability that such a black hole would subsequently swallow the earth is like the probability that two mobsters separated by 100 meters, each emptying 100 drums of ammo at eachother via tommy guns, walk away completely unscathed because every single bullet from mobster A collided in mid-air with a bullet from mobster B. Some effectively think that by using the LHC we're likely to end up creating 'red matter' from the Star Trek reboot. Suffice it to say that quantum physics is a sufficiently advanced field such that otherwise brilliant biologists will not necessarily have even a basic working understanding of the field.
Getting back to biology, the same argument above is just as applicable to modern medicinal technologies, such as the use of synthetic antibiotics, as it is to GMOs. Every time we apply an antibiotic treatment, for example, we roll the di
It proves that we will break international extradition and asylum treaties on a political whim...
Both assertions are incorrect. No international extradition treaty would be broken by extraditing Assange to Sweden (in fact, they would probably be broken if Britain did not extradite at this point given that all options for legal challenge have been exhausted), and no "asylum treaties" would be broken by seizing Assange either.
Recognition of status as an asylum-seeker is done on a country-by-country basis. Ecuador's granting Assange asylum neither requires nor implies any special recognition of status by the UK. Granting of asylum by a given country is no more and no less than a statement that the country in question will use its sovereign status and resources to protect the individual in question. All the UK have done with their letter is point out that Ecuador cannot in fact protect Assange, even by granting him asylum as neither its sovereign status nor resources available can prevent the UK from detaining him in a legal manner.
Also, on a related note, revoking the embassy's diplomatic status in order to seize Assange also does not violate any treaty. The treaty in question does not state that the host nation shall not revoke diplomatic status--only that if that action is taken, none of the recognized and declared diplomatic staff will be harmed or detained, and must be allowed to leave the country. In addition, the common misconception among many people discussing this issue seems to be that Ecuador can unilaterally grant Assange status as a diplomat, with all the immunities that implies--this is wrong. Recognition of diplomatic status is granted by the host country. Ecuador could apply for Assange to be recognized as a diplomat, but the UK would undoubtedly refuse because it would be a blatant attempt to abuse diplomatic privilege.
With respect to your other point regarding Sweden's refusal to guarantee no further extradition to the US, this is a non-issue. No sovereign state would make such a guarantee regardless of its ultimate intent. If you have been served with a subpoena to appear in person (Assange is essentially subject to an international version of this), there is no expecation that you can impose conditions upon your compliance with that subpoena in any of the countries involved, and any requested conditions are simply going to be ignored out of principle.
Bootstrapping on another platform is done as follows:
Note that at no point does the target platform need some other way to compile gcc independently in order for the port to happen.
According to my understanding of the article (IANAP), this has nothing to do with memory, and use of memory would not impact the system in any significant way in any case (the initial energy required to take the measurements to store into memory would offset the reduction in entropy during the experiment).
The fundamental issue with the classical scenario of Maxwell's Demon is that in order to know if/when to open/close the gate you need to measure each particle in the system at least once. The number of measurements >= The number of particles. The basic implication is that you introduce entropy via taking measurements at least as much as you reduce it via segregating particles according to energy differential.
If you consider quantum entanglement, however, the rule that number of measurement >= the number of particles is no longer necessarily true. E.g., if each particle in the system is entangled with another particle in the system, the number of measurements could be as low as 1/2 the number of particles since one measurement gives you information about both of the paired particles. It is also possible for more than 2 particles to be entangled, so to generalize, you could have N-way entanglement between sets of particles in the system, and the minimum number of measurements becomes number of particles / N.
The fundamental question I have is if it's possible to determine entanglement relationships between particles in the system for less energy than independently measuring each particle. If not, then you offset the entropy reduction of only measuring one particle from each entangled set by the energy required to identify entanglement relationships.
Personally the thing I like most about C is that it's not "safe". It doesn't take care of a lot of memory management for you and you can easily eat up all the memory or introduce a buffer overload vulnerability if you're not paying attention. It forces programmers to actually look at what they're doing and consider what it will do in the long run, and causes good coding habits to form.
Unfortunately, that's not how people work. C neither enforces diligence nor does it cause good habits to form. All it does is tend to make the consequences of laziness and bad habits more serious. This is analogous to how gun ownership requires good safety habits (given the underlying assumption that you want to avoid unintentional harm to yourself or others), but simply owning a gun doesn't force you to practice them.
As is often the case when presenting opposite extremes, you have created a false dichotomy. It'd be like saying "Either water is bad for your health and should be avoided or it is completely safe and you can just keep on drinking unlimited amounts". In fact, either of those extreme views will result in you being dead.
With respect to pesticide usage, what you have is a question of economic and energy efficiency in food production vs. environmental impact of the production process. In the extreme case of organic farming, it is almost always much less economically efficient--and often less energy efficient--than conventional farming. For those who minimize the impact of food price increases--that attitude is a privilege of the rich. Food prices rising marginally spark riots, revolutions, and mass starvation or malnutrition in poorer parts of the world. On the other extreme, abuse of pesticides and other production tools will either also be economically inefficient, or in worse cases damaging to the environment--possibly to the point of devastating an area over the long term.
A solution that allows improvements in yield and production efficiency while reducing the environmental footprint of agricultural operations is a good thing, hence the GPs statements are not logically inconsistent.
What the AC was saying, basically, is that loans could simply be pegged to the rate of inflation (which, in the case of a sufficiently deflationary currency, would actually result in a negative interest rate--e.g., if the rate of inflation is -5%, the loan interest rate might be -2.5%, which would still be profitable to the bank in real terms while keeping it possible to pay off the loan). I've worked on a number of contracts and other agreements effectively constituting a loan, and they are commonly pegged against an inflation index specified in the contract (usually a composite index of prices of key commodities that govern the production cost of a major asset--this was common when the price of steel was fluctuating wildly a couple of years ago, for example).
In essence, inflation or deflation can be compensated for if necessary, so there is no inherent economic benefit either way. In your earlier example, if your loan were properly pegged to a relevant index, the loan balance would drop in lockstep with deflation, or rise if everyone decided to dump their piggybank into the market. If the currency is sufficiently stable, both inflation and deflation would be ignored for minor transactions because the cost of accounting for currency valuation changes would outweigh the expected magnitude of the aforementioned changes. Extremes in either direction result in instabilities that drastically reduce the utility value of the currency as an economic exchange medium, and therefore cause the economy to grind to a halt if the currency is the only medium of exchange.
Given that, the whole assumption that inflation is good is really predicated on the underlying assumption that real value in the economy is always increasing. Even assuming you want to always incentivize investment, you would peg currency manipulations relative to real economic value (e.g., if half the real value in the economy were destroyed (e.g., by war), an inflation of -45% would still penalize mattress-stuffers in real terms).
The whole inflation/deflation debate really just obscures the true issue of the "hard" vs. fiat currency debate, which boils down to whether a central authority should have the ability to manipulate a currency (or more generally, whether or not it should even be possible to manipulate the currency aside from "natural" market valuation resulting from individual transactions). This is either a good or bad thing, depending on your points of view on both economic philosophy and also the proper role of currency within the economy.
The tendency of currency authorities towards inflation is simply a byproduct of the logistics of currency manipulation--a central authority can effect inflation by minting an unlimited amount of currency easily and unilaterally. Deflation, on the other hand, can only be actively effected by destroying the currency in the central authority's possession--which puts a hard ceiling on its ability to effect deflation. To effect a greater degree of deflation would require the central authority to destroy currency not under its possession, which cannot be done unilaterally, will not be painless, and may not even be possible--which raises the final point I'll mention in this post.
Currency manipulation always has side effects aside from changing the valuation of the currency vs. commodities and other assets or instruments. The side-effects are the inevitable repercussions of the means by which the manipulations are introduced into the economy. For example, in minting currency to effect inflation, the central authority is now sitting on a pile cash that will not actually have the desired inflationary impact until it is dispersed into the economy, where market forces then gradually react to the dispersal through market activity. There is no "neutral" way to do this. Institutions that become part of the channel between the currency authority and the market will profit from the activity, and will further try to manipulate policy (via lobbying or bribing, depending on your level of cyni
I actually have and enjoy a job somewhat like this, and I personally get paid well, but don't have much in terms of a discretionary budget. I'm also embedded in a Line-of-Business unit and often act essentially as a workaround to the IT/IS department. The latter is largely the reason I have an extremely limited discretionary budget--they've manged to enact policy limitations on any tech-related spend that does not originate from their department (that being said, I have a good relationship with the IS guys, and understand why they do what they do).
To illustrate how things work, it usually goes something like this (gory details provided to illustrate the insanity. Apologies in advance for the rambling that's likely to result.):
Business to IS: We have a process involving ~300 project managers performing moderately complex data input across the globe. This input must be sanity-checked, rolled into various reports, and revised multiple times per feedback from upper management. It is currently performed in email, is very error-prone, and it takes us 3 days to turn around reports after latest input. We want it locked down, with turn around in under 10 minutes after most recent input. How do we fix this?
.. 2 weeks later
IS to Business: Give us $2M and 2 years, we'll have an enterprise system with ~$200k/annum operating cost that fits the critical requirements. We may also be able to accomodate some nice-to-haves.
Business to IS: Great. Do it.
Business to me: What do we do in the meantime?
Me to Business:: Give me a spare workstation, I'll have something in 2 weeks
Me to Business: I've put together the following:
*) an Excel-based front-end for data input, using VBA for sanity checking, help, etc., packaged with screencast tutorials for end-users.
*) Version control is managed by having the authoritative current versions of each PM's files on this SharePoint library (SharePoint is essentially MS's CMS offering, and is very popular with many businesses). SharePoint manages version control and retention.
*) VBA in the Excel workbook notifies the server-side software whenever new data is input and confirmed with check-in via a web service.
*) That spare workstation now hosts a CentOS Linux VirtualBox VM. All server-side components reside on that instance and auto-start via init scripts. The VM instance itself auto-starts as a windows service when the physical box is powered up. If you want better fault tolerance, migrate the VM to our datacenter.
*) a node.js web service receives the notification from the excel workbook upon data update, scrapes the data from SharePoint*, normalizes it and puts it into a PostgreSQL database. The node.js server also checks SharePoint for any changes via web service on inital start and once every 2 hours just in case.
*) a separate node.js instance listens for updates and compiles the required reports from the information in PostgreSQL
*) Orchestration of node.js instances is accomplished over redis pub/sub.
Business to Me: Uhh... does it work?
Me to Business: Yes.
Business to Me: What if your "server" crashes.
Me to Business: Reboot it. If the VM image is corrupted, re-start it from this archived virtualbox image--it'll restore current state from the data on SharePoint. As an absolute doomsday-scenario backup--if I get hit by a bus, the system fails, and the IS guys who know VirtualBox are on vacation--this special Excel workbook will iterate through all of the data files in the SharePoint library and generate the same reports when you click this button, but it will probably take a couple of hours to do so given that there will be 300 files it has to open.
Business to Me: Got it. Take it live.
Why did I do it that way? On the client side, while I don't like Excel as a development platform, all the business users are comfortable with it, and it was the most productive of all possible front-en
No, if you RTFA, you can see that the link to HFCS is prominently featured because it explains the lag between imidacloprid introduction (1990s) to widespread observance of CCD (2006) because feeding hives with HFCS was not a widespread practice until then. Because the corn from which it is produced is often sprayed with imidacloprid, the HFCS contains trace amounts of imidacloprid well below safe limits for humans, and even below LD50 for the bees, but apparently sufficient to incur CCD over time. A related study described in the second linked article suggests that the class of pesticides to which imidacloprid belongs (neonicotinoids) interfere with the bees' homing ability, which explains the characteristic lack of dead adults in a colony that has suffered CCD--the adults apparently get lost while foraging and can't find their way back to the hive.
What I find most striking is that CCD did not seem to be much of a problem in the 90s when imidacloprid was introduced, which implies that bees are fine with it being sprayed on crops, but cannot tolerate even minute (measured in double digit parts per billion) traces when it is fed to them (in this case, via HFCS).
The strain of corn being cited probably accounts for more than 60% of the corn grown in the US, and possibly 40% or more of the corn grown worldwide.
Just wanted to clarify a point here: bt11 is not a "strain of corn" any more than OnStar is a model of car. The bt11 gene is integrated into thousands of varieties of corn, from tropical sweet corns to Canadian flints, just as the OnStar system is integrated into many different models and makes of vehicles. These varieties of corn are developed first, without the bt11 gene, and then the gene is later bred into the line in what most companies call the trait conversion process just as base trim levels of cars are developed, and then add-on systems like OnStar and stereo systems are tacked on later as features and options.
Any type of monoculture weakness that could have the kind of impact you're describing would have to be a result of the bt11 gene itself. This kind of thing has happened before in corn, though no case of that has (so far) been associated with GM traits (e.g., T-cytoplasm, which was used to facilitate hybrid production in many different varieties caused susceptibility to gray leaf spot).
In car analogy terms, what you're afraid of would be like the OnStar system itself causing engine problems in every type of vehicle with which it is integrated due to a flaw in the remote engine ignition feature. This is in contrast to a true monoculture situation, which would be like if everyone drove a ford pinto and we suddenly found our highways clogged with burnt exploded wrecks every time an accident occurred. The first situation is easy to fix--just buy the base model instead--whereas the second is trickier if all every manufacturer makes and knows how to design anymore is a pinto.
Many if not most GM plants are rendered sterile so that you are forced to purchase new seeds from year to year, thus making further evolution impossible.
This is a common misconception. The technology exists to sterilize plants (both via genetic engineering and also through non-GM systems such as use of sterilizing cytoplasm), but to my knowledge there are no GM sterilization technologies used in products on the market today.
Farmers don't go back to purchase hybrid seed each year because they are forced to do so. There are non-GM foundation seed lines sold by smaller companies, as well as heirloom stocks maintained by universities and other private institutions. The reason is more that seed from GM seed companies like Monsanto, Pioneer Hi-Bred, and Syngenta is to publically available seed lines what Android is to OpenMoko. I say Android rather than iPhone because the PVPA (plant variety protection act--i.e., patents for plant varieties) allows the general public to use lines whose protections have expired, and the overall effect is somewhat analogous to how Google releases the source to Android on a periodic basis but controls current development.
People don't write that kind of stuff, it's still an issue from a VM design standpoint because in some cases code geneneration tools might. This can be frustrating and/or introduce extremely difficult-to-trace runtime bugs into your system if, for example, your framework du jour does runtime code generation/modification deep under the hood in order to implement AOP or a scripting language or something.
Based on my interactions with people from both groups, I gather that it mostly stems from the fact that the subjects of microscopic observations are, for most practical purposes, exclusive to a specific microscope--especially where dynamic (and sometimes interactive) systems or events are concerned. In the case of telescopes used for astronomy, they are all pointed at the same, largely static things. The data from major telescopes is often made widely available such that there is essentially no scientific value for anything other than the highest quality available data set.
In the astronomy world, one telescope's team could feasibly pull a douchebag maneuver like tracking the observations of another team's inferior telescope and essentially reducing the value of the second team's data to marginal at best, where this is impossible in the case of microscopes unless they are physically co-located. Because of this, the implication is that once a superior telescope comes on line, all lesser telescopes of its type only retain whatever value they have to the extent that the superior telescope's team suffers them to make exclusive observations. The fact that there is too much sky for any one (or really all telescopes in the world) to observe at any given time apparently isn't enough to stop the dick swinging that often goes on.
Do they charge for time, or storage and bandwidth?
All of the above. Processor time is ridiculously cheap nowadays though (e.g., Amazon EC2 rates vary from cents to dollars per hour for the range from modest virtual machines to virtual compute clusters with serious horsepower).
Diet and 'lifestyle' of the beef does make a difference in taste, but not always a difference that people enjoy. Purely grass-fed beef, without being heavily spiced to cover the flavor differences, is an acquired taste.
My father is a cowboy, and they regularly get to select cattle to butcher as a bonus of sorts. These are 100% grass-fed open range (as in mountain range, no pasture pens, no feed supplements) cattle. Most people I know (including on occasion my dad!) prefer corn-fatted beef from Costco for steaks.
Open range beef has a 'gamey' flavor that adds greatly to stews, chilis, burgers, etc., but most people in my experience dislike it for steaks or other preparations that showcase the flavors of the meat.
Living in a free speech society and subsequently using that freedom to shout "fire!" in a crowded theater will likely result in either court precedence being established or legislation being enacted that places conditions upon that freedom. Legislation is supposed to be a practical embodiment of the ideals of society that is updated to reflect contemporary reality. Where absolute adherence to a pure ideal is deemed to be harmful, placing practical restrictions on that ideal is a reasonable reaction to expect (not saying that compromise with reality is right or wrong, just that you should expect it).
In the case of Wikileaks, the issue is that they've chosen to release not only information which is defensible from the perspective of providing useful insight and transparency, but also information which serves no value to the public and actually endangers lives to no apparent or intended positive end. The latter provides leverage and justification to craft and enact broad legislation that will be used in practice to suppress the former.
For example, if there was a group that provided pamphlets detailing the correlation between campaign donations and introduction and adoption of legislation, but also decided that in the pursuit of absolute truth and disclosure as an ideal they would stand in graveyards and hand out pamphlets of the bad credit history, extramarital affairs, missed child support payments, etc. of people interred there, you can expect action to restrict distribution of pamphlets justified by the latter but broad enough to suppress the former as an intended side-effect.
Abrams' argument is that Ellsberg did not distract from or endanger his intended cause by publishing harmful and irrelevant information that could be used as a basis to justify suppression. Due to his insistence on doing the latter, Assange is, from Abrams' perspective, making himself a useful idiot for the opposing side. His actions are likely to greatly harm the cause of government transparency and disclosure. From my perspective this is made blatantly obvious by the fact that media coverage is dominated by the topic of the fact of disclosure and likely reactions to the leak as opposed to the contents of the leak. In contrast, society and media reaction to the Pentagon Papers was focused intensely on the contents of the information disclosed.
When it comes to software like Flash, AfterEffects, Illustrator, etc., becoming an expert user of the application software is orders of magnitude harder than learning a new OS.
Also, if you use any of the aforementioned software packages professionally, the value of time and money spent learning the software and developing a productive workflow is far in excess of hardware and OS costs. This becomes especially true as you integrate custom application-specific scripts into your workflow and build up a library of project templates and other application-specific assets.
Tape over the gap has nothing to do with altering the frequency response of the antenna or anything like that, but for providing an insulating layer so that your hand/clothes/other foreign object that may come into contact with the phone at that point does not.
The involvement of auto_increment may be your culprit. As another poster mentioned on a thread above, InnoDB auto_increment is implemented as roughly 'select max(t.col) + 1 from table t' rather than using an actual SQL sequence. This could mean one of 2 things (not familiar enough with InnoDB's inner workings to know which it is): either A) the concurrent write transactions are getting the same value for the auto_increment field, causing problems if the field is the pkey or an otherwise unique index, or B) transaction 1 locks its rows, transaction 2 locks its rows, transaction 1 tries to grab the next val for an auto_index column and deadlocks because the auto_increment select needs to grab rows locked by transaction 2.
As I said, there are quirks :P.