Even for the wealthy, this isn't a question of what you can afford, it's a question of how much you can profit from it. The rich won't hold on to a patent if it will cost them more money than they can gain to do so.
This was the specific part of your comment I was responding to and my response can be summed up like this. The rich might not hold onto patents that aren't profitable, but they will hold on to patents that will profitable tomorrow, which is something the poor (or merely less rich) won't be able to do. Imagine you've invented a fabulous device that will, without a doubt, make billions of dollars, lets say a battery powered single stage to orbit rocket. You know others are working on similar designs so you rush out to patent it, even though the battery tech isn't there yet to actually make your design work. You're confident that the batteries will be available in 10 years though.
If you're rich, or a large corporation, you can pay your renewal fees, eat the cost and in 10 years you will utterly dominate the market. You'll make 10000x the cost that those patent renewal fees ran you. If you're poor however, you're left with only a few choices. You can sell your patent to someone who can afford the upfront costs of the renewal fees. You can partner with someone, who will undoubtedly demand the lions share of your profits because without their money will will get next to nothing. Either way, you're buying the cheap, leaky boots. Either way, you won't see a fraction the profit off your invention that you would if you had the money to pay for the patent renewals.
Allow me to introduce to you the Sam Vimes Boot Theory of Economic Injustice
Samuel Vimes earned thirty-eight dollars a month as a Captain of the Watch, plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots, the sort that would last years and years, cost fifty dollars. This was beyond his pocket and the most he could hope for was an affordable pair of boots costing ten dollars, which might with luck last a year or so before he would need to resort to makeshift cardboard insoles so as to prolong the moment of shelling out another ten dollars.
Therefore over a period of ten years, he might have paid out a hundred dollars on boots, twice as much as the man who could afford fifty dollars up front ten years before. And he would still have wet feet.
Without any special rancour, Vimes stretched this theory to explain why Sybil Ramkin lived twice as comfortably as he did by spending about half as much every month.
A rich person will be able to spend the money upfront for future gain that a poor, or even upper middle class person has no chance or raising on their own. Poor people don't have investments because they cannot afford to have them, not because they don't understand the benefits of having a long term income.
I wonder what kind of fuel mileage cars would get if they had the same safety requirements as motorcycles (i.e. almost none). Not to mention stripping out a lot of other 'nice to haves' that are often not necessary on bikes. There are reasons that even small new cars weigh in at 2500 lbs, I just wonder how much trimming the fat would make a difference.
1) The idea that the denial of evolution is unique to the US - which I very much doubt, as both Christians and some other religions (Islam, in particular) tend to hold views that contradict with macro evolution.
Individuals not believing in evolution certainly isn't unique to the US, but the sheer number of such individuals is unusually high, especially for a wealthy, educated nation. The US is second only to Turkey in lack of acceptance of evolution. More importantly, the US is the only first world nation where we still have regular arguments about teaching creationism in school.
2) That not believing in evolution - which we cannot measure and observe in a lab - is comparable to not believing in plate tectonics (which we can observe and measure).
There are lots of other things that we can't easily observe in the lab do you doubt them too? For example, do you doubt how fossils form? You can't observe it happening, the process takes too long. You can, however, observe bits and pieces of it and from that extrapolate out the whole process. Similarly you can in fact see evolution working in the lab, the E. coli long-term evolution experiment is the prime example (where batches of e.coli unexpectedly developed the ability to metabolize citrate). But, and I mean as little disrespect as possible, you'll just claim that's 'micro' evolution, somehow not accepting of the fact that 1,000,000 micro-meters adds up to a full meter.
That we need good scientists and engineers, and therefore should not teach our children creationism. This in effect implies that someone cannot hold a creationist viewpoint and also contribute in those fields, which is preposterous (I personally know several scientists and engineers who hold beliefs similar to my own, and who are still very effective in their work - and I have read the works of many others who are much higher up in their respective fields).
I agree, the idea that individuals who hold creationist beliefs cannot advance science is incorrect. However, when you set up a system to constantly and relentlessly snipe at the largest, most well developed, most well researched, and most empirically verified theory in modern biology, you create an environment where kids are left very confused. They can choose to ignore the whole subject, despite the fact that it forms the underlying basis for all modern biological science. Or they can choose to look at the subject and reject the mountain of evidence that supports it. Well, the 3rd option is to walk away to one extent or another, from the faith their parents have taught them, which is why religious people feel under attack.
For what it's worth, I don't think you deserve the troll mod that you've been smacked with. I'm of the opinion that only abusive or flamebait comments should be modded down, and I don't think yours is either of those.
No one said you shouldn't believe in god, not even Bill Nye. He did say you shouldn't believe in creationism. If you've chosen to shoehorn your deity into the tiny niche of having created every form of life on the planet in 6 days despite a mountain of physical evidence to the contrary, that's your own issue.
Never understood people's tendency to believe in a god of the gaps... don't they realize that the gaps are always getting smaller?
Moving marijuana from something you get in the streets to something you get in the liquor store will have the effect of making it more difficult for minors to get. There have been several studies indicating that it's easier to minors to get access to marijuana, not to mention other more dangerous drugs, more easily than they can get access to alcohol or tobacco. Then there are countries that have ended drug prohibition completely, which have seen teen drug use plummet: see Portugal for an example.
For the record, I don't smoke pot or use any other illegal drugs. I rarely even drink alcohol. But I've yet to see a single argument against legalizing pot that doesn't also apply to alcohol and I've yet to see a single argument in favor of alcohol being legal that doesn't also apply to pot.
Small is a relative term. The L4 cache is almost 200 Mb on these. Of course, it all depends on the how the math works out. As long as it's faster than going to RAM there will be plenty of situations where it pays off.
Your points about the SSN and identify theft are spot on, but for the PC itself it just doesn't make sense in a risk/cost vs reward context for an amateur to try and salvage an infected PC. It'll take hours at least and most importantly, you'll never really know if the machine is clean or not. Any machine that I know has been compromised is treated as compromised until it gets a full wipe, no matter how much effort I put into clearing the infection.
For my 2 cents: Boot from disk into a flavor of Linux that allows you access to the windows partition. Use a freshly formatted USB key to pull whatever important data is on the machine. Wipe and reinstall windows. Boot back to Linux and replace the important files. Reformat the USB key. Reboot to windows.
To be fair, the phase response curve is well known and well understood. If 100% of your 13 people saw shifts in it, I think you could have a statistically significant result. You could for instance say that there's a 95% chance that at least 80% of people are so affected, assuming your sample was properly diversified. And of course it's not enough to say "proven beyond any shadow of a doubt" but it's certainly enough to say "that's funny..." which is the more interesting result to an experiment anyway.
This sentence puts rather silly images into the minds of Americans who read it. This side of a pond a torch is less a battery powered light and more a flaming stick.
Unless of course, that's what you meant. In which case all I can say is "NICE!"
Do you realize how fast you hop from tower to tower at 600 mph? I've heard that's one of the reasons cell phones in particular are a problem, millions of phones doing potentially dozens of tower hand offs per minute is enough to cause real problems with the cell phone infrastructure.
Imagine you're "invulnerably immortal" you cannot die under any circumstances. Now imagine you're spelunking and several million tons of rock caves in on you, burying you hopelessly under several hundred feet of rock. Oh, and you forgot to tell anyone which particular cave you were planning on visiting. Now imagine any number of other circumstances where you could be trapped, with no hope of rescue and no end to your torment.
Not sure you're actually listening to yourself. You say that by the time we can extend human life we'll have the technology to feed the planet. Then you say we have the technology to feed the planet now, presumably we lack the willpower as a civilization to get the job done. Hunger isn't a problem of technology, it's a problem of human nature, and while technology progresses with time as a matter of course, human nature does not. There's no guarantee that solving the technological problem of extending human life will necessarily come after solving the human nature problem of feeding the hungry.
Of course, you could mean that technology will push the price of fixing hunger so low that a relative minority of charitable individuals could solve it, which I would find believable.
He is arguably the most influential thinker of modern times. His accomplishments were in physics but his insight into other areas was acknowledged even while he was still alive. There's a reason it was his signature at the bottom of the letter in support of the Manhattan project. There's a reason he was asked to be the first prime minister of Israel. There's a reason that he's often listed as one of, if not the absolute, most intelligent person in history.
That's because it was established in 1934. Putting the same wording in a modern bill would be vilified as socialist, big government, anti-capitalism, and anti-freedom.
Question: Are there real situations in the field of biology where the a non-specialist would significantly benefit from having all the enzymes memorized? Understand that if it's your research field you should probably know them. And I understand that you should probably know where to look them up and how to interpret data about them. But is it really and absolutely necessary to have all the information available to memory? If it isn't, then who cares how you teach the list of enzymes? And if it is, I'd say the way to teach them would be to drop the students into the situations where the information is necessary and provide the information then.
I'd say the accuracy is more likely to be related to the number of qubits involved in the calculation. 4 qubits in this case gave an error of 4% (Shor's algorithm produces the correct result only 50% of the time so 1/25 times that the algorithm should run it is failing). That could imply that each qubit has an issue in ~1% of the runs, which would mean that 256 bit encryption can be solved 3.5% of the time, but it would arrive at the possible answer instantly. If you could do 10 runs a second, you'd have your answer in less than 5 seconds (remember, verifying a result is trivial). 2048 bit encryption would only produce the right answer.00000006% of the time. That's terrible right? Except again, 10 runs per second would give you the answer in matter of days.
The only students at risk are those who do not get vaccinated
False. Some number of children can't be vaccinated for legitimate medical reasons, usually allergic reaction to the vaccine ingredients. Then there's a certain number, ranging from 1-5+% that the vaccine simply doesn't take, they are not 100% effective. These two classes of people rely on the fact that the diseases they are vulnerable to aren't present in the general population, if there is an outbreak, the sick people don't come into contact with enough vulnerable people for the disease to spread at a rate that can sustain itself. The numbers necessary are different for each disease, but generally range from 90-99% need to be immune to prevent a wide scale outbreak. These people are harming more than their own children (which would be bad enough), they put everyone else at risk too.
Ok, look. Climate change happens naturally, no one is disputing that. The thing is, this particular climate change has a real possibility of being much more sudden than those natural variations. It takes thousands of years for the climate to change a few degrees C naturally, the rates we are seeing will have those changes in less than 100. Over 1000s of years, plants and animals can migrate, change behaviors, and even evolve, rapid change will make that much more difficult or impossible. Not to mention, this climate change is going to be laid over top of the natural changes, if the natural cycle goes up and down 4C, and we lay our 3 degree addition over top of it, all the sudden you've got a global climate that hasn't been seen since dinosaurs were the dominant life form.
But hey, lets just keep ignoring it. After all, I survived getting hit by several dodge balls as a kid, I'm sure I can take a hit from this wrecking ball too, it's essentially the same thing after all.
Once you throw in all the people who bought Xbox and PS3 versions of the game, the numbers get ridiculous again though. 9 million copies total, apparently 1 million of those are on PC + the 12 to 20 million alleged pirated copies. So, you're now saying that almost 30 million people were playing Assassins Creed II? I find that doubtful personally.
City Museum in St Louis manages to do a lot of things that you'd think their insurance company would have a heart attack (and I'm sure they get charged an arm and a leg for their coverage). Point being, it's doable if you create the right environment and get the right resources behind you.
I'd rather see them make a museum that's actually awesome. Not just "this is what he did and how he did it". I want Tesla coil demonstrations (the kind he used to do with electricity arcing all around the room). I want "build you own X" areas for kids to build cool things. I want smart, exciting people giving smart, exciting presentations about what engineering and technology makes possible. In short, I want a museum that will inspire some small number of kids to follow in Tesla's footsteps.
You do realize that, with continued research into sea water extraction, your first four objections go away? It could be extracted from anywhere with access to the sea, as safely as fishing, and there is enough to power all of humanity for thousands of years. As to the rest, proliferation is largely a political problem, one that can't be ignored no doubt but certainly not insurmountable. Waste is a larger issue of course, breeder reactors would help there but you've still got to put it somewhere. I'd say launch it into the sun once we get the rocket tech to do that efficiently but that seems awfully wasteful (after all, if it's energetic enough to be dangerous we can probably find a user for it somewhere in the long term).
Ok, fine, lets say there's only thousands of years of Uranium usable in today's reactors. You don't think that maybe, just maybe, reactor design would change over the next few thousand years?
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Even for the wealthy, this isn't a question of what you can afford, it's a question of how much you can profit from it. The rich won't hold on to a patent if it will cost them more money than they can gain to do so.
This was the specific part of your comment I was responding to and my response can be summed up like this. The rich might not hold onto patents that aren't profitable, but they will hold on to patents that will profitable tomorrow, which is something the poor (or merely less rich) won't be able to do. Imagine you've invented a fabulous device that will, without a doubt, make billions of dollars, lets say a battery powered single stage to orbit rocket. You know others are working on similar designs so you rush out to patent it, even though the battery tech isn't there yet to actually make your design work. You're confident that the batteries will be available in 10 years though.
If you're rich, or a large corporation, you can pay your renewal fees, eat the cost and in 10 years you will utterly dominate the market. You'll make 10000x the cost that those patent renewal fees ran you. If you're poor however, you're left with only a few choices. You can sell your patent to someone who can afford the upfront costs of the renewal fees. You can partner with someone, who will undoubtedly demand the lions share of your profits because without their money will will get next to nothing. Either way, you're buying the cheap, leaky boots. Either way, you won't see a fraction the profit off your invention that you would if you had the money to pay for the patent renewals.
Allow me to introduce to you the Sam Vimes Boot Theory of Economic Injustice
Samuel Vimes earned thirty-eight dollars a month as a Captain of the Watch, plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots, the sort that would last years and years, cost fifty dollars. This was beyond his pocket and the most he could hope for was an affordable pair of boots costing ten dollars, which might with luck last a year or so before he would need to resort to makeshift cardboard insoles so as to prolong the moment of shelling out another ten dollars.
Therefore over a period of ten years, he might have paid out a hundred dollars on boots, twice as much as the man who could afford fifty dollars up front ten years before. And he would still have wet feet.
Without any special rancour, Vimes stretched this theory to explain why Sybil Ramkin lived twice as comfortably as he did by spending about half as much every month.
A rich person will be able to spend the money upfront for future gain that a poor, or even upper middle class person has no chance or raising on their own. Poor people don't have investments because they cannot afford to have them, not because they don't understand the benefits of having a long term income.
I wonder what kind of fuel mileage cars would get if they had the same safety requirements as motorcycles (i.e. almost none). Not to mention stripping out a lot of other 'nice to haves' that are often not necessary on bikes. There are reasons that even small new cars weigh in at 2500 lbs, I just wonder how much trimming the fat would make a difference.
1) The idea that the denial of evolution is unique to the US - which I very much doubt, as both Christians and some other religions (Islam, in particular) tend to hold views that contradict with macro evolution.
Individuals not believing in evolution certainly isn't unique to the US, but the sheer number of such individuals is unusually high, especially for a wealthy, educated nation. The US is second only to Turkey in lack of acceptance of evolution. More importantly, the US is the only first world nation where we still have regular arguments about teaching creationism in school.
2) That not believing in evolution - which we cannot measure and observe in a lab - is comparable to not believing in plate tectonics (which we can observe and measure).
There are lots of other things that we can't easily observe in the lab do you doubt them too? For example, do you doubt how fossils form? You can't observe it happening, the process takes too long. You can, however, observe bits and pieces of it and from that extrapolate out the whole process. Similarly you can in fact see evolution working in the lab, the E. coli long-term evolution experiment is the prime example (where batches of e.coli unexpectedly developed the ability to metabolize citrate). But, and I mean as little disrespect as possible, you'll just claim that's 'micro' evolution, somehow not accepting of the fact that 1,000,000 micro-meters adds up to a full meter.
That we need good scientists and engineers, and therefore should not teach our children creationism. This in effect implies that someone cannot hold a creationist viewpoint and also contribute in those fields, which is preposterous (I personally know several scientists and engineers who hold beliefs similar to my own, and who are still very effective in their work - and I have read the works of many others who are much higher up in their respective fields).
I agree, the idea that individuals who hold creationist beliefs cannot advance science is incorrect. However, when you set up a system to constantly and relentlessly snipe at the largest, most well developed, most well researched, and most empirically verified theory in modern biology, you create an environment where kids are left very confused. They can choose to ignore the whole subject, despite the fact that it forms the underlying basis for all modern biological science. Or they can choose to look at the subject and reject the mountain of evidence that supports it. Well, the 3rd option is to walk away to one extent or another, from the faith their parents have taught them, which is why religious people feel under attack.
For what it's worth, I don't think you deserve the troll mod that you've been smacked with. I'm of the opinion that only abusive or flamebait comments should be modded down, and I don't think yours is either of those.
No one said you shouldn't believe in god, not even Bill Nye. He did say you shouldn't believe in creationism. If you've chosen to shoehorn your deity into the tiny niche of having created every form of life on the planet in 6 days despite a mountain of physical evidence to the contrary, that's your own issue.
Never understood people's tendency to believe in a god of the gaps... don't they realize that the gaps are always getting smaller?
Moving marijuana from something you get in the streets to something you get in the liquor store will have the effect of making it more difficult for minors to get. There have been several studies indicating that it's easier to minors to get access to marijuana, not to mention other more dangerous drugs, more easily than they can get access to alcohol or tobacco. Then there are countries that have ended drug prohibition completely, which have seen teen drug use plummet: see Portugal for an example.
For the record, I don't smoke pot or use any other illegal drugs. I rarely even drink alcohol. But I've yet to see a single argument against legalizing pot that doesn't also apply to alcohol and I've yet to see a single argument in favor of alcohol being legal that doesn't also apply to pot.
Small is a relative term. The L4 cache is almost 200 Mb on these. Of course, it all depends on the how the math works out. As long as it's faster than going to RAM there will be plenty of situations where it pays off.
Your points about the SSN and identify theft are spot on, but for the PC itself it just doesn't make sense in a risk/cost vs reward context for an amateur to try and salvage an infected PC. It'll take hours at least and most importantly, you'll never really know if the machine is clean or not. Any machine that I know has been compromised is treated as compromised until it gets a full wipe, no matter how much effort I put into clearing the infection.
For my 2 cents: Boot from disk into a flavor of Linux that allows you access to the windows partition. Use a freshly formatted USB key to pull whatever important data is on the machine. Wipe and reinstall windows. Boot back to Linux and replace the important files. Reformat the USB key. Reboot to windows.
To be fair, the phase response curve is well known and well understood. If 100% of your 13 people saw shifts in it, I think you could have a statistically significant result. You could for instance say that there's a 95% chance that at least 80% of people are so affected, assuming your sample was properly diversified. And of course it's not enough to say "proven beyond any shadow of a doubt" but it's certainly enough to say "that's funny..." which is the more interesting result to an experiment anyway.
This sentence puts rather silly images into the minds of Americans who read it. This side of a pond a torch is less a battery powered light and more a flaming stick.
Unless of course, that's what you meant. In which case all I can say is "NICE!"
Do you realize how fast you hop from tower to tower at 600 mph? I've heard that's one of the reasons cell phones in particular are a problem, millions of phones doing potentially dozens of tower hand offs per minute is enough to cause real problems with the cell phone infrastructure.
Imagine you're "invulnerably immortal" you cannot die under any circumstances. Now imagine you're spelunking and several million tons of rock caves in on you, burying you hopelessly under several hundred feet of rock. Oh, and you forgot to tell anyone which particular cave you were planning on visiting. Now imagine any number of other circumstances where you could be trapped, with no hope of rescue and no end to your torment.
Not sure you're actually listening to yourself. You say that by the time we can extend human life we'll have the technology to feed the planet. Then you say we have the technology to feed the planet now, presumably we lack the willpower as a civilization to get the job done. Hunger isn't a problem of technology, it's a problem of human nature, and while technology progresses with time as a matter of course, human nature does not. There's no guarantee that solving the technological problem of extending human life will necessarily come after solving the human nature problem of feeding the hungry.
Of course, you could mean that technology will push the price of fixing hunger so low that a relative minority of charitable individuals could solve it, which I would find believable.
He is arguably the most influential thinker of modern times. His accomplishments were in physics but his insight into other areas was acknowledged even while he was still alive. There's a reason it was his signature at the bottom of the letter in support of the Manhattan project. There's a reason he was asked to be the first prime minister of Israel. There's a reason that he's often listed as one of, if not the absolute, most intelligent person in history.
That's because it was established in 1934. Putting the same wording in a modern bill would be vilified as socialist, big government, anti-capitalism, and anti-freedom.
Question: Are there real situations in the field of biology where the a non-specialist would significantly benefit from having all the enzymes memorized? Understand that if it's your research field you should probably know them. And I understand that you should probably know where to look them up and how to interpret data about them. But is it really and absolutely necessary to have all the information available to memory? If it isn't, then who cares how you teach the list of enzymes? And if it is, I'd say the way to teach them would be to drop the students into the situations where the information is necessary and provide the information then.
I'd say the accuracy is more likely to be related to the number of qubits involved in the calculation. 4 qubits in this case gave an error of 4% (Shor's algorithm produces the correct result only 50% of the time so 1/25 times that the algorithm should run it is failing). That could imply that each qubit has an issue in ~1% of the runs, which would mean that 256 bit encryption can be solved 3.5% of the time, but it would arrive at the possible answer instantly. If you could do 10 runs a second, you'd have your answer in less than 5 seconds (remember, verifying a result is trivial). 2048 bit encryption would only produce the right answer .00000006% of the time. That's terrible right? Except again, 10 runs per second would give you the answer in matter of days.
Vaccines are not 100% effective. Modern vaccination efforts rely on the effects of herd immunity to prevent outbreaks.
The only students at risk are those who do not get vaccinated
False. Some number of children can't be vaccinated for legitimate medical reasons, usually allergic reaction to the vaccine ingredients. Then there's a certain number, ranging from 1-5+% that the vaccine simply doesn't take, they are not 100% effective. These two classes of people rely on the fact that the diseases they are vulnerable to aren't present in the general population, if there is an outbreak, the sick people don't come into contact with enough vulnerable people for the disease to spread at a rate that can sustain itself. The numbers necessary are different for each disease, but generally range from 90-99% need to be immune to prevent a wide scale outbreak. These people are harming more than their own children (which would be bad enough), they put everyone else at risk too.
Ok, look. Climate change happens naturally, no one is disputing that. The thing is, this particular climate change has a real possibility of being much more sudden than those natural variations. It takes thousands of years for the climate to change a few degrees C naturally, the rates we are seeing will have those changes in less than 100. Over 1000s of years, plants and animals can migrate, change behaviors, and even evolve, rapid change will make that much more difficult or impossible. Not to mention, this climate change is going to be laid over top of the natural changes, if the natural cycle goes up and down 4C, and we lay our 3 degree addition over top of it, all the sudden you've got a global climate that hasn't been seen since dinosaurs were the dominant life form.
But hey, lets just keep ignoring it. After all, I survived getting hit by several dodge balls as a kid, I'm sure I can take a hit from this wrecking ball too, it's essentially the same thing after all.
Once you throw in all the people who bought Xbox and PS3 versions of the game, the numbers get ridiculous again though. 9 million copies total, apparently 1 million of those are on PC + the 12 to 20 million alleged pirated copies. So, you're now saying that almost 30 million people were playing Assassins Creed II? I find that doubtful personally.
City Museum in St Louis manages to do a lot of things that you'd think their insurance company would have a heart attack (and I'm sure they get charged an arm and a leg for their coverage). Point being, it's doable if you create the right environment and get the right resources behind you.
I'd rather see them make a museum that's actually awesome. Not just "this is what he did and how he did it". I want Tesla coil demonstrations (the kind he used to do with electricity arcing all around the room). I want "build you own X" areas for kids to build cool things. I want smart, exciting people giving smart, exciting presentations about what engineering and technology makes possible. In short, I want a museum that will inspire some small number of kids to follow in Tesla's footsteps.
You do realize that, with continued research into sea water extraction, your first four objections go away? It could be extracted from anywhere with access to the sea, as safely as fishing, and there is enough to power all of humanity for thousands of years. As to the rest, proliferation is largely a political problem, one that can't be ignored no doubt but certainly not insurmountable. Waste is a larger issue of course, breeder reactors would help there but you've still got to put it somewhere. I'd say launch it into the sun once we get the rocket tech to do that efficiently but that seems awfully wasteful (after all, if it's energetic enough to be dangerous we can probably find a user for it somewhere in the long term).
Ok, fine, lets say there's only thousands of years of Uranium usable in today's reactors. You don't think that maybe, just maybe, reactor design would change over the next few thousand years?