And the flipside to that, particularly where ISIS is concerned, is that horrific acts like the burning of the Jordanian fighter pilot to death, easily available online or via the nightly news, might actually serve to inflame the anger of the public in many countries, serving the purpose of creating more support for the anti-ISIS campaign.
This, of course, is likely FOX's intention. Nothing garners eyeballs like a good war against an inhuman enemy of amoral monsters. Some nice explosions, some touching stories of sacrifice by 'our boys,' and rapid, glorious territory gains. I'll bet FOX still has a lot of people who remember the glory days of Shock and Awe (tm), with people glued to their TVs and starving for FOX's nationalist jingoism. ISIL videos, like the Abu Ghraib videos, are the bass in the drum beat to war. They're the emotional fire that obliterates rational discussion.
To me, al Qaeda, ISIS and the other Islamist extremists are like a hyper-virulent virus.
You see how well it's already worked on you? There is no room for negotiation, reconciliation, or rehabilitation. The only good extremist is a dead extremist.
I prefer bomb squads that can still count to 10 on their hands, even if you think that makes them look like an idiot.
So do I. But let me ask you: how many of the suspicious packages that bomb squads across the country have investigated and blown up have actually been explosive? In Atlanta, they investigate about one "device," abandoned briefcase, or discarded shopping bag a month, but the last actual bomb was in 1996.
If you're in Kabul, and you find a thing duct taped to the inside of a wrecked car, that has high bomb probability. If you're in a US city, 3 blocks from a college campus, and you find a thing duct taped with a clear view of traffic and an explanatory note, that has a high goofy college student probability.
I know this may run counter to a lot of the propaganda you've been fed, but THE US IS NOT A WAR ZONE
I was a combat engineer in Iraq, and my job was disposing of roadside bombs.
It looks like it could be an explosive device. I would think that the guy who placed it was an idiot, as its too small to do much, and way to obvious. I still would have assumed it was such a device.
That sounds like an appropriate response, if one is in Iraq, Afghanistan, or any other conflict zone where IEDs are a regular, or even unusual occurrence. Here in the US, we seem to have about one bombing or bombing attempt every two years (half of which are FBI "sting" operations) despite having 10 times as many people. In that environment, it seems appropriate to put a little more credence in the note explaining the art project.
If you're out on the lake, and it quacks, it's probably a duck. If you're in a cubicle at the office and it quacks, someone probably farted.
"The heavy cast iron fry pan I use has a tough enamel surface that can be scrubbed hard with steel wool as often as you like."
That is probably not enamel. It is probably Powder coating.
No, almost certainly enamel. Powdered glass fused to the metal at around 2400 oF, rather than powdered polymer fused at 350 oF. True enamel is what powder coating aspires to. Also not "enamel" that you buy at the hardware store.
Imagine instead of playing a game of football, you just sat down the captain of the Seahawks at a table with a bunch of snacks in front of him. He starts off 2000 points, and each snack he eats makes the other team score a 100 points. If he eats more than 20 snacks, he loses. If he eats less than 20 snacks, he wins. That is literally the game we are discussing, and you're saying that he can't win that game.
Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. Because the game doesn't end today, it starts over again tomorrow. And the next day. And the day after that. It's a horribly monotonous game and no one cheers if he wins on any particular day. And while he's got the rule book in front of him saying that he's only got to stop eating snacks when he gets to 20, he's also got a whole team of sexy cheerleaders saying 'just one more.' Then lap dance for him when he loses. WTF wants to win that game?
Dieting is psychology, not biology. You may be able to use the biology to trick the psychology a little, but when you're talking about a person's voluntary decision to eat or not eat, you're absolutely in the realm of psychology. It's really hard to 1) do well controlled psychological studies that provide valid results and 2) communicate the constraints of those results to the popular press. This gets even harder if you think you're a nutrition scientist and not a psychologist.
Utter bullshit. The easiest way to control weight is to exactly follow the scientific advice. I lost a lot of weight (about 25 kg over 6 months) by a simple system:
(Change in Weight (kg))/7700 = Calories I ate - Calories I used
That's great, but you're either being naive or disingenuous if you think that's what "diet" advice is about.
Diet advice is psychology. People are used to their bodies 'just working.' They don't have to pay attention to their breathing, but automatic systems ensure they get just enough oxygen. They have an automatic system for nutrient detection, but many people think their system is miscalibrated. ie: they still want to eat even after they've consumed the necessary calories. Look at diet advice, and you'll see it's all about making you "feel" full (or increasing your basal metabolism).
There's substantial quackery around 'mobilizing fat.' There's a ton of people out there who offer little more than 'this worked for me' under the guise of some kind of professional title or credential. Including the people citing thermodynamics. eg, if you happen to be one of the people with low UCP1, then your calories used will be much less than the magical textbook formula. In fact, only about 2/3 people will fall within that range.
You do illustrate a good point, though: if you go to the trouble of actually learning the science, and accommodating the limitations (generally) stated with that science, then things usually work (unless you are an individual outside of a standard deviation). If you get your science 3rd hand from a 'counselor,' 4th hand from the popular press, or 5th hand from your coffee clatch, then you are destined to be disappointed.
GMOs usually need far fewer pesticides sprayed on them, that is pretty much the point of them most of the time.
This depends entirely on the modification. The two most popular GMOs are "roundup ready" and "Bt." Roundup-ready plants are resistant to glyphosate, which allows farmers to use higher amounts of the herbicide. "Bt" plants produce their own insecticide, which allows farmers to reduce their external application of such agents. As glyphosate resistance transfers to weed plants, biotech companies have begun developing resistance to other herbicides: the next step in the evolutionary arms race.
It may be safe to eat, but there are other issues with GMO food than that. Setting loose genes in the environment for other organisms to pick up for example.
No one has genomic techniques to successfully create a protein from whole cloth. All GMO techniques involve transferring an existing gene into a species that lacks that gene. eg, "Roundup ready" crops contain an Agrobacterium enzyme to supplement their own EPSPS (enolpyruvylshikimate-phosphate synthase). So if your concern is just that these genes are "in the environment," then they already were.
Their commercial use greatly increases the quantity of those genes in the environment, in the same way that commercial farming has greatly increased the number of cows and corn plants. And it's distinctly easier to transfer genes laterally among closely related species (say, wheat and grass) than less related species (say, bacteria and grass), although one of the attractive features of agrobacteria is that they have long been know to mediate lateral gene transfer (ie, tumor formation) into plants. A farmer purposefully planting and cultivating 1000 acres of any single species gives that species a massive advantage over any species dependent solely on birds and bees for propagation.
Modern, monoculture agriculture methods make us more susceptible to a potato-famine like event, regardless of whether the monoculture has been engineered or not.
I was refering to the media who is constantly bashing oil for their "profits" when they say nothing about apple
You do see that there's a fundamental difference in the business of oil and Apple, right?
The oil guys are, basically, taking stuff out of the ground and selling it to you. Their profits derive from carefully controlling the supply so that there is always a shortage. So that their customers are always competing for the privilege of giving them money. People give money to the oil companies because they have to.
Apple is in the business of creating technology that didn't exist before. They're moving society, if not culture, forward, and making the world different than it was before. Their profits derive from being more creative or more fashionable than other tech companies, not from artificially restricting supply (much). People give money to Apple because they want to.
Yeah, maybe. I'd think that if they wanted to do that, they'd have done it already. But maybe they just haven't had the opportunity. Seems to me the horse is out of the barn.
Seems to me that the CIA is not quite as omnipotent as their propaganda claims. Julian Assange has not had serious appendicitis, let alone a tragic heart attack nor freak accident, and we all know exactly where he is. How many years did it take to track down OBL, while he sat eating take-out in the suburbs?
No, I think it's pretty clear that the CIA have trouble finding their asses with both hands. Most of the time that doesn't matter too much, because the media is happy to believe without question that the identified bad guys were really bad, and the public would rather believe in James Bond than Maxwell Smart. I'm sure there are a few very clever and very capable people within CIA, NSA, etc, but I'm equally sure that they are, by and large, massive, hidebound bureaucracies employing legions of tenured civil servants whose sole goal is to get home in time to catch the evening weather report
When you walk the streets of your home town, do you wear a mask and costume to hide your identity? No -- your face is visible. You are a private citizen, you have the right to be left alone or to interact with others as you choose, but you are always identifiable by your face. I feel the internet should be the same way -- you should always be identifiable.
The problem with this analogy is that in the physical world I can arrange to have privacy. I can meet with other individuals outside of the public eye. I can whisper in their ear so that only they hear communication. I can go to remote places where there are no observers. The CIA and KGB developed excellent methods for completely anonymous communication in the physical world, almost all of it based on the economics of real world surveillance: it costs money to watch someone in the real world. On the internet, there is a record of everything, and that record lasts as long as someone else chooses. It costs almost nothing, per person, to surveil the internet, especially if you forbid encryption and anonymity. Do you really want prospective Singularity One clients to see drunken pictures from USask? Or to know that you're bipolar? I mean, that's stuff that you're proud enough to have voluntarily posted to public forums, but a lot of people would find it embarassing.
We all have stuff we're embarrassed by. That same CIA and KGB have a long history of using such embarrassing, not-quite-public information to manipulate people, even to making them violate their own ethical standards. Are you so anxious to give them that power over you? Are you so anxious to give that power to the North Korean government and to the Russian mafia?
Surveillance does not make people less free. Does an audience at a theater make an actor less free?
What? Are you seriously trying to suggest that the role of police/security forces is comparable to a theater audience? Because I'm pretty sure that the audience pays actors for the privilege of watching them, whereas I am paying the police. I talk about my boss, my wife or my mother very differently when they're standing next to me, so I claim that an observer absolutely does restrict my freedom.
If repressive things happen with the gathered data then that would be a problem but not the surveillance itself.
OK, so when it's a private citizen, we should watch them closely, all the time, in order to identify when they might be thinking about committing a crime, but when it's the police, we should have no restrictions or preventative measures unless someone can document that the police have committed a crime. The crime rate for police is similar to civilians: they're human beings, not gods. They should be held to standards at least as high as you're proposing for civilians, and probably higher, given the special powers we invest in them.
This, and studies like it, are used to impose diversity on groups that would otherwise not have it, whether by intentional exclusion or by unintentional "doesn't fit the organizational culture." It's not surprising to me that groups which are spontaneously diverse are productive, and I'm perfectly happy to go with the 'open minds accept diverse solutions and diverse people' argument. The question that interests me is whether you can impose social diversity on a group, force them to open their minds, and subsequently become more productive.
I can certainly see where putting a person of color, or a woman, in a group of racist, misogynist bigots would disrupt their happy groupthink and break up their productivity. Regardless of whether that productivity started out a little lower than an equivalent group of non bigots.
Its called the "commerce clause" and even "originalist" extraordinaire Anton Scalia has no problems with that (see his concurrence in Gonzales vs Rauch).
People buying their internet from a local municipal broadband service is about as far from "interstate" as you can get.
I didn't realize local, municipal broadband networks typically forbid out-of-state packet transmission. No wonder everyone hates them: it would absolutely suck to have some local-only network come in and block my access to actual inter-state and inter-national network access.
If they really are doing that, they should probably come up with a different description of their network: it's certainly not "internet." Maybe "cripplenet" or "inbrednet."
82% of households have access to two or more broadband providers:
This describes a pretty bogus form of "competition." This statistics means that 82% of households can choose between 4Mbps AT&T/DSL over twisted copper and 20 MBps Comcast/TW over coax. That's an extremely limited form of competition, similar to claiming that Tyson Chicken competes with Midwest Beef, or that Audi competes with Peterbilt.
There are limited regions where you can choose between multiple DSL providers (although this will usually require that you pay AT&T for dial tone and either AT&T or a second company for DSL). There are no regions where you can choose between coax providers.
I'm a bit confused. US law assigns no rights at all to inventors. How exactly is going abroad going to benefit Japanese inventors? Which countries are they supposed to go to?
In the US, you have some power to negotiate with your employer, or to choose among employers based on their patent assignment/reward policy. If you think your work is going to be very lucrative, you can ask for a share of the commercialization value.
Article 35 more or less does what a lot of people here are asking for: it requires companies to compensate the people actually responsible for an invention. The problem is that one has no idea whether an invention will actually be commercially successful or not, so Article 35 resulted in a standardized practice of paying inventors a fixed bonus (~$10,000) for an invention, regardless of whether that invention was worth $1,000 or $100,000,000.
It seems to me only logical that the entity that commissioned the work, invested the resources and made it happen ie the company should own the patent.
What you're proposing sounds like zero incentive to invent while being employed. Doesn't make much sense psychologically.
The guy was paid to invent stuff. It's not like he was a cashier or even a QA engineer who just happened across LED technology in his spare time. His employer gave him a salary, a staff, and a bunch of fancy equipment to play with, and (presumably) instructions somewhere between "make something cool" and "make us a blue LED." If he hadn't invented anything, he would (again, presumably) have been fired for failure.
Certainly, a rational company should offer some reward to their successful R&D teams. Some kind of bonus equivalent to what the executive team gets for profitable years. Failing to offer any kind of success incentive is going to encourage the better employees to leave (as happened in this case), and hurt long-term competitiveness.
The question is whether you want the government to mandate what share of an invention the responsible human gets and how to share that out across multiple involved parties. eg: presumably the project manager gets a share, but what about the guy running the chemistry lab that prepared the AlGaN? What about the tech who pipetted compound A into container B as instructed? Or the guy washing glassware? Should it be the same share for a guy who refines the blue LED as for a guy who bundles a flashlight in a key fob? Japan's article 35 seems to be just such a law.
I own your invention because if I didn't pay you to clean the toilets, you would be out in the streets. My warm building was a resource you used. You are okay with that argument?
Kind of a ridiculous argument. Cleaning toilets is not an explicitly creative job function
If your employer pays you to develop a blue LED, then they should own the rights to the thing you develop. I have no idea what the structure is in Japan, but in the US, employment contracts are generally quite clear on that. That contract may stipulate some share of royalties, but is more likely direct, royalty-free assignment. In fact, if "develop a blue LED" includes developing or improving a silicon doping process, or results in a turquoise LED instead, your employer will own that process and LED, too.
If your employer pays you to clean toilets, and you figure out that you can jam a toilet brush in a PVC pipe and not have to bend over so far, it'll be a lot harder for them to claim rights. Especially because your employment contract probably won't say anything about intellectual property.
I have noticed that on a lot of TV police programs, the cops start interrogating the suspect and he doesn't exercise his right to be silent. They treat it as if it's an intellectual game and the suspect has to convince the cops of his innocence. It's like TV cop programs are propaganda for the cops to convince people that the "right thing" to do is to convince the cop that you're innocent.
This is exactly it. People learn an awful lot about how to behave in unfamiliar situations from stories they've heard (fact or fiction), and we hear a lot of criminal investigation stories. Those have a long history of being pro-police propaganda: partly because they need to cooperation of police consultants; partly because most people want to see 'bad guys' punished and to believe that the police never get the wrong guy. The stories are driven by dialog, so if all you have is an interrogator and a guy refusing to speak, viewers change the channel.
You can't learn law by watching TV any more than you can learn brain surgery. The world does not work like Dragnet, CSI or Law and Order.
How much effort does it take to do some research and verify whether a 10 second political ad is truthful?
In politics, "truth" is very flexible. For example, it is true that the Obama administration has reduced the number of annual drone strikes by 80% (over the past five years, in Yemen). It is also true that the Obama administration has increased the number of annual drone strikes by tenfold (over GWB). Likewise, Obama has both increased deficit spending by $1.3T, and reduced deficit spending by $1.2T (although even these numbers are suspect, depending whether you consider 2008 spending to be "Bush's budget" or "Obama's budget." This is one of the reasons you'll hear a lot of percentages and deltas in political ads - they can avoid telling you the denominator or reference point. They can choose a reference that makes their point, regardless of whether that reference is reasonable or relevant, and technically be truthful.
This is the reason no one believes a politician, unless he's saying something they already thought was true.
That's the power of the new mathematical language, and that's also the reason that the old results, while mildly amusing to read about, are not important milestones for modern mathematics.
You need to be careful to distinguish between "inventing" and "popularizing." Developments in the renaissance, and particularly the printing press, made it much easier to communicate ideas of all sorts, but that doesn't mean I'm going to credit Gutenberg as the father of mathematics. Your "New" mathematical language is an extension of all the old mathematical languages, invented by people who had learned the mathematics of the day. If it really is easy to discover the old, solved problems in that "new" language, it is because those solutions were embodied in the creation of that language. If you think notions like the existence of Zero are not important to math, then you have a naive understanding.
If you want to talk about the clear expression of specific ideas, I will refer you to Hooke's Law of elasticity, as he expressed it, ca. 1650: ceiiinosssttuv.
That's exactly the problem, they shouldn't be monitoring tens of millions in the first place because there aren't tens of millions that are a threat. My point exactly was that they only need to monitor the few hundred or few thousand that match real actual threat criteria.
Really? Because your point seemed to be that they were already monitoring the perpetrators of these crimes, rather closely, and still failed to prevent them. The US no-fly list, for example, is supposed to be around 20,000 - that seems like a pretty manageable planet-wide number. I get that you are not arguing for expanding existing surveillance, but your original argument seemed to be more along the lines of "Lock up for life anyone with a criminal record and extremist sympathies." That is a recipe for witch hunts.
BTW, the vast majority of the victims of radical islam are themselves muslims. Maybe it is time for muslims to stand up and say, no, peeps, contrary to what political correctness suggest, we actually do have a problem in our religion, and here in the west it is actually possible to do something about it.
This sounds rather like asking all Christians to stand up and accept blame for the abortion clinic bombers and the systematic sexual abuse perpetrated by FLDS. Westerners seem very capable of recognizing that the existence of Christian Crazies does not mean Christianity is crazy; why is it so hard to accept that the existence of Islamic Crazies does not make Islam crazy?
So are you saying that a bot that ONLY looks at the visible cards and not at the actions of the other players, will beat human players? Because that's what you seem to be saying and it goes against everything I know about poker (which is, admittedely, not that much).
Yes, that's what they're saying, with the special caveats that you have to be willing to play an infinite number of hands, and you have to play with fixed wagers. You have to play enough hands that "luck" averages out, and you can't let your opponent have the advantage of making small bets on unfavorable hands. Strategy is basically going to be bet the maximum when odds favor you; fold when odds oppose you.
Presumably, the clever thing they've done is to abstract opponent behavior (or to assume that the opponent plays a similarly, statistically perfect game) in order to weight the draw probabilities by payout values. This robot would not be fun to play against: you would know from the very first wager (or possibly the wager after the flop) exactly what all subsequent wagers would be. ie, if it plays a hand, it bets the max and raises the max at every opportunity. It would completely ignore your behavior.
The goal shouldn't be to prevent your files from being seen by the NSA -- it should be to prevent your files from being seen by ANYONE.
That is the goal. Just up until a year ago, you could mostly make the assumption that you were not being targeted by the NSA. Because the NSA has rather vastly more resources available that anyone else, securing yourself against the NSA used to be an extra level of expense that might be omitted with little extra risk. "Everyone" was really "everyone smaller than the NSA or other state actor." Now that we know the NSA is actually snooping each of us all the time, it's appropriate to use them as the limiting example of "everyone."
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And the flipside to that, particularly where ISIS is concerned, is that horrific acts like the burning of the Jordanian fighter pilot to death, easily available online or via the nightly news, might actually serve to inflame the anger of the public in many countries, serving the purpose of creating more support for the anti-ISIS campaign.
This, of course, is likely FOX's intention. Nothing garners eyeballs like a good war against an inhuman enemy of amoral monsters. Some nice explosions, some touching stories of sacrifice by 'our boys,' and rapid, glorious territory gains. I'll bet FOX still has a lot of people who remember the glory days of Shock and Awe (tm), with people glued to their TVs and starving for FOX's nationalist jingoism. ISIL videos, like the Abu Ghraib videos, are the bass in the drum beat to war. They're the emotional fire that obliterates rational discussion.
To me, al Qaeda, ISIS and the other Islamist extremists are like a hyper-virulent virus.
You see how well it's already worked on you? There is no room for negotiation, reconciliation, or rehabilitation. The only good extremist is a dead extremist.
I prefer bomb squads that can still count to 10 on their hands, even if you think that makes them look like an idiot.
So do I. But let me ask you: how many of the suspicious packages that bomb squads across the country have investigated and blown up have actually been explosive? In Atlanta, they investigate about one "device," abandoned briefcase, or discarded shopping bag a month, but the last actual bomb was in 1996.
If you're in Kabul, and you find a thing duct taped to the inside of a wrecked car, that has high bomb probability. If you're in a US city, 3 blocks from a college campus, and you find a thing duct taped with a clear view of traffic and an explanatory note, that has a high goofy college student probability.
I know this may run counter to a lot of the propaganda you've been fed, but THE US IS NOT A WAR ZONE
I was a combat engineer in Iraq, and my job was disposing of roadside bombs.
It looks like it could be an explosive device. I would think that the guy who placed it was an idiot, as its too small to do much, and way to obvious. I still would have assumed it was such a device.
That sounds like an appropriate response, if one is in Iraq, Afghanistan, or any other conflict zone where IEDs are a regular, or even unusual occurrence. Here in the US, we seem to have about one bombing or bombing attempt every two years (half of which are FBI "sting" operations) despite having 10 times as many people. In that environment, it seems appropriate to put a little more credence in the note explaining the art project.
If you're out on the lake, and it quacks, it's probably a duck. If you're in a cubicle at the office and it quacks, someone probably farted.
"The heavy cast iron fry pan I use has a tough enamel surface that can be scrubbed hard with steel wool as often as you like."
That is probably not enamel. It is probably Powder coating.
No, almost certainly enamel. Powdered glass fused to the metal at around 2400 oF, rather than powdered polymer fused at 350 oF. True enamel is what powder coating aspires to. Also not "enamel" that you buy at the hardware store.
Imagine instead of playing a game of football, you just sat down the captain of the Seahawks at a table with a bunch of snacks in front of him. He starts off 2000 points, and each snack he eats makes the other team score a 100 points. If he eats more than 20 snacks, he loses. If he eats less than 20 snacks, he wins. That is literally the game we are discussing, and you're saying that he can't win that game.
Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. Because the game doesn't end today, it starts over again tomorrow. And the next day. And the day after that. It's a horribly monotonous game and no one cheers if he wins on any particular day. And while he's got the rule book in front of him saying that he's only got to stop eating snacks when he gets to 20, he's also got a whole team of sexy cheerleaders saying 'just one more.' Then lap dance for him when he loses. WTF wants to win that game?
Dieting is psychology, not biology. You may be able to use the biology to trick the psychology a little, but when you're talking about a person's voluntary decision to eat or not eat, you're absolutely in the realm of psychology. It's really hard to 1) do well controlled psychological studies that provide valid results and 2) communicate the constraints of those results to the popular press. This gets even harder if you think you're a nutrition scientist and not a psychologist.
Utter bullshit. The easiest way to control weight is to exactly follow the scientific advice. I lost a lot of weight (about 25 kg over 6 months) by a simple system: (Change in Weight (kg))/7700 = Calories I ate - Calories I used
That's great, but you're either being naive or disingenuous if you think that's what "diet" advice is about.
Diet advice is psychology. People are used to their bodies 'just working.' They don't have to pay attention to their breathing, but automatic systems ensure they get just enough oxygen. They have an automatic system for nutrient detection, but many people think their system is miscalibrated. ie: they still want to eat even after they've consumed the necessary calories. Look at diet advice, and you'll see it's all about making you "feel" full (or increasing your basal metabolism).
There's substantial quackery around 'mobilizing fat.' There's a ton of people out there who offer little more than 'this worked for me' under the guise of some kind of professional title or credential. Including the people citing thermodynamics. eg, if you happen to be one of the people with low UCP1, then your calories used will be much less than the magical textbook formula. In fact, only about 2/3 people will fall within that range.
You do illustrate a good point, though: if you go to the trouble of actually learning the science, and accommodating the limitations (generally) stated with that science, then things usually work (unless you are an individual outside of a standard deviation). If you get your science 3rd hand from a 'counselor,' 4th hand from the popular press, or 5th hand from your coffee clatch, then you are destined to be disappointed.
GMOs usually need far fewer pesticides sprayed on them, that is pretty much the point of them most of the time.
This depends entirely on the modification. The two most popular GMOs are "roundup ready" and "Bt." Roundup-ready plants are resistant to glyphosate, which allows farmers to use higher amounts of the herbicide. "Bt" plants produce their own insecticide, which allows farmers to reduce their external application of such agents. As glyphosate resistance transfers to weed plants, biotech companies have begun developing resistance to other herbicides: the next step in the evolutionary arms race.
It may be safe to eat, but there are other issues with GMO food than that. Setting loose genes in the environment for other organisms to pick up for example.
No one has genomic techniques to successfully create a protein from whole cloth. All GMO techniques involve transferring an existing gene into a species that lacks that gene. eg, "Roundup ready" crops contain an Agrobacterium enzyme to supplement their own EPSPS (enolpyruvylshikimate-phosphate synthase). So if your concern is just that these genes are "in the environment," then they already were.
Their commercial use greatly increases the quantity of those genes in the environment, in the same way that commercial farming has greatly increased the number of cows and corn plants. And it's distinctly easier to transfer genes laterally among closely related species (say, wheat and grass) than less related species (say, bacteria and grass), although one of the attractive features of agrobacteria is that they have long been know to mediate lateral gene transfer (ie, tumor formation) into plants. A farmer purposefully planting and cultivating 1000 acres of any single species gives that species a massive advantage over any species dependent solely on birds and bees for propagation.
Modern, monoculture agriculture methods make us more susceptible to a potato-famine like event, regardless of whether the monoculture has been engineered or not.
I was refering to the media who is constantly bashing oil for their "profits" when they say nothing about apple
You do see that there's a fundamental difference in the business of oil and Apple, right?
The oil guys are, basically, taking stuff out of the ground and selling it to you. Their profits derive from carefully controlling the supply so that there is always a shortage. So that their customers are always competing for the privilege of giving them money. People give money to the oil companies because they have to.
Apple is in the business of creating technology that didn't exist before. They're moving society, if not culture, forward, and making the world different than it was before. Their profits derive from being more creative or more fashionable than other tech companies, not from artificially restricting supply (much). People give money to Apple because they want to.
Yeah, maybe. I'd think that if they wanted to do that, they'd have done it already. But maybe they just haven't had the opportunity. Seems to me the horse is out of the barn.
Seems to me that the CIA is not quite as omnipotent as their propaganda claims. Julian Assange has not had serious appendicitis, let alone a tragic heart attack nor freak accident, and we all know exactly where he is. How many years did it take to track down OBL, while he sat eating take-out in the suburbs?
No, I think it's pretty clear that the CIA have trouble finding their asses with both hands. Most of the time that doesn't matter too much, because the media is happy to believe without question that the identified bad guys were really bad, and the public would rather believe in James Bond than Maxwell Smart. I'm sure there are a few very clever and very capable people within CIA, NSA, etc, but I'm equally sure that they are, by and large, massive, hidebound bureaucracies employing legions of tenured civil servants whose sole goal is to get home in time to catch the evening weather report
When you walk the streets of your home town, do you wear a mask and costume to hide your identity? No -- your face is visible. You are a private citizen, you have the right to be left alone or to interact with others as you choose, but you are always identifiable by your face. I feel the internet should be the same way -- you should always be identifiable.
The problem with this analogy is that in the physical world I can arrange to have privacy. I can meet with other individuals outside of the public eye. I can whisper in their ear so that only they hear communication. I can go to remote places where there are no observers. The CIA and KGB developed excellent methods for completely anonymous communication in the physical world, almost all of it based on the economics of real world surveillance: it costs money to watch someone in the real world. On the internet, there is a record of everything, and that record lasts as long as someone else chooses. It costs almost nothing, per person, to surveil the internet, especially if you forbid encryption and anonymity. Do you really want prospective Singularity One clients to see drunken pictures from USask? Or to know that you're bipolar? I mean, that's stuff that you're proud enough to have voluntarily posted to public forums, but a lot of people would find it embarassing.
We all have stuff we're embarrassed by. That same CIA and KGB have a long history of using such embarrassing, not-quite-public information to manipulate people, even to making them violate their own ethical standards. Are you so anxious to give them that power over you? Are you so anxious to give that power to the North Korean government and to the Russian mafia?
Surveillance does not make people less free. Does an audience at a theater make an actor less free?
What? Are you seriously trying to suggest that the role of police/security forces is comparable to a theater audience? Because I'm pretty sure that the audience pays actors for the privilege of watching them, whereas I am paying the police. I talk about my boss, my wife or my mother very differently when they're standing next to me, so I claim that an observer absolutely does restrict my freedom.
If repressive things happen with the gathered data then that would be a problem but not the surveillance itself.
OK, so when it's a private citizen, we should watch them closely, all the time, in order to identify when they might be thinking about committing a crime, but when it's the police, we should have no restrictions or preventative measures unless someone can document that the police have committed a crime. The crime rate for police is similar to civilians: they're human beings, not gods. They should be held to standards at least as high as you're proposing for civilians, and probably higher, given the special powers we invest in them.
This, and studies like it, are used to impose diversity on groups that would otherwise not have it, whether by intentional exclusion or by unintentional "doesn't fit the organizational culture." It's not surprising to me that groups which are spontaneously diverse are productive, and I'm perfectly happy to go with the 'open minds accept diverse solutions and diverse people' argument. The question that interests me is whether you can impose social diversity on a group, force them to open their minds, and subsequently become more productive.
I can certainly see where putting a person of color, or a woman, in a group of racist, misogynist bigots would disrupt their happy groupthink and break up their productivity. Regardless of whether that productivity started out a little lower than an equivalent group of non bigots.
Its called the "commerce clause" and even "originalist" extraordinaire Anton Scalia has no problems with that (see his concurrence in Gonzales vs Rauch).
People buying their internet from a local municipal broadband service is about as far from "interstate" as you can get.
I didn't realize local, municipal broadband networks typically forbid out-of-state packet transmission. No wonder everyone hates them: it would absolutely suck to have some local-only network come in and block my access to actual inter-state and inter-national network access.
If they really are doing that, they should probably come up with a different description of their network: it's certainly not "internet." Maybe "cripplenet" or "inbrednet."
82% of households have access to two or more broadband providers:
This describes a pretty bogus form of "competition." This statistics means that 82% of households can choose between 4Mbps AT&T/DSL over twisted copper and 20 MBps Comcast/TW over coax. That's an extremely limited form of competition, similar to claiming that Tyson Chicken competes with Midwest Beef, or that Audi competes with Peterbilt.
There are limited regions where you can choose between multiple DSL providers (although this will usually require that you pay AT&T for dial tone and either AT&T or a second company for DSL). There are no regions where you can choose between coax providers.
I'm a bit confused. US law assigns no rights at all to inventors. How exactly is going abroad going to benefit Japanese inventors? Which countries are they supposed to go to?
In the US, you have some power to negotiate with your employer, or to choose among employers based on their patent assignment/reward policy. If you think your work is going to be very lucrative, you can ask for a share of the commercialization value.
Article 35 more or less does what a lot of people here are asking for: it requires companies to compensate the people actually responsible for an invention. The problem is that one has no idea whether an invention will actually be commercially successful or not, so Article 35 resulted in a standardized practice of paying inventors a fixed bonus (~$10,000) for an invention, regardless of whether that invention was worth $1,000 or $100,000,000.
It seems to me only logical that the entity that commissioned the work, invested the resources and made it happen ie the company should own the patent.
What you're proposing sounds like zero incentive to invent while being employed. Doesn't make much sense psychologically.
The guy was paid to invent stuff. It's not like he was a cashier or even a QA engineer who just happened across LED technology in his spare time. His employer gave him a salary, a staff, and a bunch of fancy equipment to play with, and (presumably) instructions somewhere between "make something cool" and "make us a blue LED." If he hadn't invented anything, he would (again, presumably) have been fired for failure.
Certainly, a rational company should offer some reward to their successful R&D teams. Some kind of bonus equivalent to what the executive team gets for profitable years. Failing to offer any kind of success incentive is going to encourage the better employees to leave (as happened in this case), and hurt long-term competitiveness.
The question is whether you want the government to mandate what share of an invention the responsible human gets and how to share that out across multiple involved parties. eg: presumably the project manager gets a share, but what about the guy running the chemistry lab that prepared the AlGaN? What about the tech who pipetted compound A into container B as instructed? Or the guy washing glassware? Should it be the same share for a guy who refines the blue LED as for a guy who bundles a flashlight in a key fob? Japan's article 35 seems to be just such a law.
I own your invention because if I didn't pay you to clean the toilets, you would be out in the streets. My warm building was a resource you used. You are okay with that argument?
Kind of a ridiculous argument. Cleaning toilets is not an explicitly creative job function
If your employer pays you to develop a blue LED, then they should own the rights to the thing you develop. I have no idea what the structure is in Japan, but in the US, employment contracts are generally quite clear on that. That contract may stipulate some share of royalties, but is more likely direct, royalty-free assignment. In fact, if "develop a blue LED" includes developing or improving a silicon doping process, or results in a turquoise LED instead, your employer will own that process and LED, too.
If your employer pays you to clean toilets, and you figure out that you can jam a toilet brush in a PVC pipe and not have to bend over so far, it'll be a lot harder for them to claim rights. Especially because your employment contract probably won't say anything about intellectual property.
I have noticed that on a lot of TV police programs, the cops start interrogating the suspect and he doesn't exercise his right to be silent. They treat it as if it's an intellectual game and the suspect has to convince the cops of his innocence. It's like TV cop programs are propaganda for the cops to convince people that the "right thing" to do is to convince the cop that you're innocent.
This is exactly it. People learn an awful lot about how to behave in unfamiliar situations from stories they've heard (fact or fiction), and we hear a lot of criminal investigation stories. Those have a long history of being pro-police propaganda: partly because they need to cooperation of police consultants; partly because most people want to see 'bad guys' punished and to believe that the police never get the wrong guy. The stories are driven by dialog, so if all you have is an interrogator and a guy refusing to speak, viewers change the channel.
You can't learn law by watching TV any more than you can learn brain surgery. The world does not work like Dragnet, CSI or Law and Order.
How much effort does it take to do some research and verify whether a 10 second political ad is truthful?
In politics, "truth" is very flexible. For example, it is true that the Obama administration has reduced the number of annual drone strikes by 80% (over the past five years, in Yemen). It is also true that the Obama administration has increased the number of annual drone strikes by tenfold (over GWB). Likewise, Obama has both increased deficit spending by $1.3T, and reduced deficit spending by $1.2T (although even these numbers are suspect, depending whether you consider 2008 spending to be "Bush's budget" or "Obama's budget." This is one of the reasons you'll hear a lot of percentages and deltas in political ads - they can avoid telling you the denominator or reference point. They can choose a reference that makes their point, regardless of whether that reference is reasonable or relevant, and technically be truthful.
This is the reason no one believes a politician, unless he's saying something they already thought was true.
That's the power of the new mathematical language, and that's also the reason that the old results, while mildly amusing to read about, are not important milestones for modern mathematics.
You need to be careful to distinguish between "inventing" and "popularizing." Developments in the renaissance, and particularly the printing press, made it much easier to communicate ideas of all sorts, but that doesn't mean I'm going to credit Gutenberg as the father of mathematics. Your "New" mathematical language is an extension of all the old mathematical languages, invented by people who had learned the mathematics of the day. If it really is easy to discover the old, solved problems in that "new" language, it is because those solutions were embodied in the creation of that language. If you think notions like the existence of Zero are not important to math, then you have a naive understanding.
If you want to talk about the clear expression of specific ideas, I will refer you to Hooke's Law of elasticity, as he expressed it, ca. 1650: ceiiinosssttuv.
That's exactly the problem, they shouldn't be monitoring tens of millions in the first place because there aren't tens of millions that are a threat. My point exactly was that they only need to monitor the few hundred or few thousand that match real actual threat criteria.
Really? Because your point seemed to be that they were already monitoring the perpetrators of these crimes, rather closely, and still failed to prevent them. The US no-fly list, for example, is supposed to be around 20,000 - that seems like a pretty manageable planet-wide number. I get that you are not arguing for expanding existing surveillance, but your original argument seemed to be more along the lines of "Lock up for life anyone with a criminal record and extremist sympathies." That is a recipe for witch hunts.
BTW, the vast majority of the victims of radical islam are themselves muslims. Maybe it is time for muslims to stand up and say, no, peeps, contrary to what political correctness suggest, we actually do have a problem in our religion, and here in the west it is actually possible to do something about it.
This sounds rather like asking all Christians to stand up and accept blame for the abortion clinic bombers and the systematic sexual abuse perpetrated by FLDS. Westerners seem very capable of recognizing that the existence of Christian Crazies does not mean Christianity is crazy; why is it so hard to accept that the existence of Islamic Crazies does not make Islam crazy?
So are you saying that a bot that ONLY looks at the visible cards and not at the actions of the other players, will beat human players? Because that's what you seem to be saying and it goes against everything I know about poker (which is, admittedely, not that much).
Yes, that's what they're saying, with the special caveats that you have to be willing to play an infinite number of hands, and you have to play with fixed wagers. You have to play enough hands that "luck" averages out, and you can't let your opponent have the advantage of making small bets on unfavorable hands. Strategy is basically going to be bet the maximum when odds favor you; fold when odds oppose you.
Presumably, the clever thing they've done is to abstract opponent behavior (or to assume that the opponent plays a similarly, statistically perfect game) in order to weight the draw probabilities by payout values. This robot would not be fun to play against: you would know from the very first wager (or possibly the wager after the flop) exactly what all subsequent wagers would be. ie, if it plays a hand, it bets the max and raises the max at every opportunity. It would completely ignore your behavior.
The goal shouldn't be to prevent your files from being seen by the NSA -- it should be to prevent your files from being seen by ANYONE.
That is the goal. Just up until a year ago, you could mostly make the assumption that you were not being targeted by the NSA. Because the NSA has rather vastly more resources available that anyone else, securing yourself against the NSA used to be an extra level of expense that might be omitted with little extra risk. "Everyone" was really "everyone smaller than the NSA or other state actor." Now that we know the NSA is actually snooping each of us all the time, it's appropriate to use them as the limiting example of "everyone."