If you're living under a really opressive government those things don't really help.
pass a law making it illegal to run a mesh network(leave it vague so you can enforce it against whoever you like) and kick down the doors of a few people running "illegal network points" and justify it with something about terrorism or whatever enemy you like.
I think terminator seeds were phased out after the massive public backlash and of course they were banned in the EU.
It's not regulation that keeps monsanto on top- it's largely patent law. If you engineer a new crop you are pretty much certain to have infringed anumber of their patents and they can keep you out of the market with the blunt club that is patent law.
In india a lot of farmers have been crossing GM cotton with their local varieties to create new breeds which can deal with the local conditions like the native breeds but have pest resistance genes from the GM crops.
Monsanto don't like this but patent law is a bitch to enforce in india.
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its people may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end."
also the problem with science is that it is normally baby steps all the way and someone somewhere will develop it anyway.
The same research can make it easy to develop cancer treatments or bioweapons, power stations or nuclear weapons, mining charges or missiles.
Small note: organisms are really surprisingly good at horizontal gene transfer. Bacteria are masters of it and some even have mechanisms like prophages in their genome to help them steal genes from bacteria around them while others will hook up with random neighbours and swap chunks of DNA.
Even in more complex organisms genes get transfered every now and then, especially if there's any virus which can infect both species.
chunks of source code do get copied in now and then naturally.
I simply cannot find any paper for the source of this: All the earlier mentioned hundreds of articles appear to be based on some email exchange with Alexey V. Surov.
To quote one such page:
"The study, jointly conducted by Surovâ(TM)s Institute of Ecology and Evolution of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the National Association for Gene Security, is expected to be published in three months (July 2010)â"so the technical details will have to wait."
yet I can't find anything published in the last year that matches. It's hard to examine papers which can't be found.
In reality the figures for what the rich donate are massively overinflated. Run a software company? well grant liscences to all your software to the charity and call it a "donation" at the retail price. give some unused office space to your "charity" then call not collecting rent a "donation" (at an insane rental rate of course). etc etc etc Hell people even claim that america sends far more private aid overseas than it ever really does then try to paint it as americas wealthy donating a lot while in reality they massively distort and inflate the figures by counting money sent home by poor imigrant workers to their families which accounts for the lions share.
taxing people even if they don't particularly want to be taxed is how just about all governments everywhere do it and it's not theft. Yes most people want someone else to pay for everything.
Personally I'm perfectly happy to pay my taxes as long as I get valuable services in return. Which I do. I get (good,ie non american)healthcare, transport, protection and a fairly stable environment in which to work or run a buisness.
I don't know. The legal system is almost ideal for expert systems- all the data is there, neatly recorded in extreme detail. It's even better than normal natural language in some ways since legalese is more strict.
it'll never take over the profession but it would help a cheap lawyer to compete with an expensive one on a more even footing.
Simply growing up in a family where it's just quietly expected that you should be perfectly capable of getting a college degree and a decent job and spending the first couple of decades of your life quietly absorbing the habbits of people who are themselves reasonably successful or at least frugal and sensible is going to make a big difference vs growing up in a house where it's expected you'll start drawing the dole as soon as possible, where "college boys" are mocked,anyone who gets a job is a sucker, dole day is drinking time and you spend the first couple of decades of your life quietly absorbing the habbits of people who are themselves terrible at running their own lives.
" A recent study based on many years of weather data found that a combination of wind and solar is base-load compatible with surprisingly small storage capability."
If it isn't published by the photovoltaics industry association of germany or similar I'd be very interested in seeing that study. Normally PV produces power at exactly the wrong points in the demand curve except in places where a lot of air conditioning is used and most power storage methods are hopelessly expensive and ineffecient for anything large scale.
Until recently 26.1% of germanys energy came from nuclear.
Now let's ignore that wind farms get built in the best locations first and assume they do even better over the next ten years with wind than they did in the last 10 years. lets say they build just as many extra wind farms. that still leaves them supplying only half the power they were getting from nuclear.
"fanboys insist 1970s crap is perfect thus the thorium research was cancelled and synroc had to struggle against idiots that insisted there was no such thing as nuclear waste."
You know I've never seen anyone claiming this. I've seen people justifiably argue that nuclear waste gets vastly over-weighted vs non-nuclear hazardous industrial waste and mutagens but never that it isn't an issue at all. I've yet to meet a "fanboy" who wouldn't be delighted to see older plants replaced with better, more efficient and reliable new designs.
You can be sure if Julian Assange visited the US now he'd be arrested and charged with breaking US laws(or at least pissing off powerful members of the US government which is basically the same thing) despite being in a different country at the time and not being a US citizen.
because ultimately "patriots" tend to believe that since their own country is the best it's laws are the best and since it's laws are the best they should apply to everyone, everywhere, always and it's only a matter of if you can get hold of people to punish them.
If you publish information no matter how legal it is to publish from where you live or where you're posting from- keep the hell away from any fascist governments which you may have offended for the rest of your life.
It may be the the Chinese government, it may be the government of Thailand or it may even be the US government but if you're smart just stay the hell away.
It isn't just the Liberals/Progressives, the conservatives/regressives are all about the authoritarianism and they're even more into the xenophobia and racism.
I'm curious why you point out code pink for "bigotry against Jews", the only recent event I can find on them re jews is a jewish member of code pink who got the shit beaten out of her (by some nice "patriots") for protesting the israeli PM's speach.
Believe it or not some jewish people see the dark road the state of israel has been going down and how it's treating the palestinians,they remember the stories their grandparents told them and say "Never again!"
cryptanalyst has fuck all to do with checking written signatures. Human beings naturally sign it slightly differently each time they sign their name and autopen is just a fancy version of the "signature" stamps that you'll see in many offices.
the fact that the president was verifiably nowhere near the document when it was signed would be better proof than any "cryptanalyst".
Could he simply have his signature cut into a stamp and ask someone to stamp things for him when he's not there to sign stuff personally? If not I can't see how autopen could be legal.
"that is 'cost' renewable sources don't have when they fail."
all in one go or in little bits? Is a destroyed city bellow a hydro dam a cost or the medical bills of the people hurt? Things like that could run into multiple billions easily.
The medical bills of people hurt if there's a leak of some toxic solvent at a plant making solar panels could be very very expensive, look at bhopal for what can happen when an ordinary chemical plant has an accident.
Hydro dams don't collapse every day, chemical plants don't suffer toxic leaks all the time etc but these things aren't as black and white as you make out.
spread across the entire world the cost of simply using a significantly more expensive source of power can quickly run into the hundreds of billions and that money could be spent elsewhere saving lives or making peoples lives better. there is an opportunity cost in human lives if you pick a power source which costs a lot per watt.
So you have to weigh it all against each other in terms of cash costs, risks in humans lives and financial risks- not just basing it on what makes headlines most often.
I linked to the article, and either way beyond a certain point it stops mattering. If we don't figure out fusion in a thousand years we deserve any problems we have.
there's also opportunity cost: coal kills 30K people per year but if you had the choice of replacing it with a power source which kills nobody and costs ten times as much you might see those same 30K deaths in people who can't afford medical insurance after the inflated monthly electricity bills
if it's the government paying for it you could also spend the money on other things, you might save more than 30K lives putting that same money into hospitals,shelters or some other safety measures.
So the cost per watt of a solution has to be factored in as well.
who said anything about caves? I've just been deeply disappointed by the hardline greens and organizations like greenpeace who pretty much just hate technology. They even object to golden rice because it's a gateway crop- none of the other normal objections to GM apply but it's just too good and might make people too accepting of GM crops. They hate fusion in advance because atoms.
there's the sane "lets not fuck up the planet too much to live on" greens and then there's the "fuck blind children" organizations like greenpeace and some green parties.
If you're talking about energy efficiency then no.
-You use a lot less energy living in a tower block with apartments on all sides such that waste heat from one cuts down on the heating bills of the others etc. -Transporting people a few miles on mas transport is a lot more efficient than getting too and from a little farmstead. -Distributing food and other essentials also takes energy and is far more efficient in a nice dense city.
if what you want isn't to be environmentally friendly but rather to feel like you're getting "back to nature" or some such then little cottages in the mountains win hands down.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're living under a really opressive government those things don't really help.
pass a law making it illegal to run a mesh network(leave it vague so you can enforce it against whoever you like) and kick down the doors of a few people running "illegal network points" and justify it with something about terrorism or whatever enemy you like.
I'm sure it'll go really well when buisness owners can't get email and have problems communicating with the outside world to sell their products.
" sterile seed "
I think terminator seeds were phased out after the massive public backlash and of course they were banned in the EU.
It's not regulation that keeps monsanto on top- it's largely patent law.
If you engineer a new crop you are pretty much certain to have infringed anumber of their patents and they can keep you out of the market with the blunt club that is patent law.
In india a lot of farmers have been crossing GM cotton with their local varieties to create new breeds which can deal with the local conditions like the native breeds but have pest resistance genes from the GM crops.
Monsanto don't like this but patent law is a bitch to enforce in india.
It's not just the alphas.
The most dangerous person can be one who honestly believes they're working for "the greater good" or something similar.
http://www.akimbocomics.com/?p=643
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its people may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end."
also the problem with science is that it is normally baby steps all the way and someone somewhere will develop it anyway.
The same research can make it easy to develop cancer treatments or bioweapons, power stations or nuclear weapons, mining charges or missiles.
Small note: organisms are really surprisingly good at horizontal gene transfer.
Bacteria are masters of it and some even have mechanisms like prophages in their genome to help them steal genes from bacteria around them while others will hook up with random neighbours and swap chunks of DNA.
Even in more complex organisms genes get transfered every now and then, especially if there's any virus which can infect both species.
chunks of source code do get copied in now and then naturally.
Might you have a better citation for that?
I want to check out the paper.
unfortunatly I can find nothing except hundreds and hundreds of sites parroting effectively your link over and over and over.
I did find one which actually gave a citation but it was for this:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/6566j50u18936604/fulltext.pdf
which is just a paper about ectopia in hamsters.
(that one is also the source for some of the images thrown into your link and the source of a number of partial quotes)
I simply cannot find any paper for the source of this:
All the earlier mentioned hundreds of articles appear to be based on some email exchange with Alexey V. Surov.
To quote one such page:
"The study, jointly conducted by Surovâ(TM)s Institute of Ecology and Evolution of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the National Association for Gene Security, is expected to be published in three months (July 2010)â"so the technical details will have to wait."
yet I can't find anything published in the last year that matches.
It's hard to examine papers which can't be found.
I'm faily libertarian yet even I can see they've got you hook line and sinker.
A lot of "charities" are barely worthy of the name and are nothing more than PR firms for their main donor.
http://blogs.forbes.com/erikkain/2011/04/06/non-profit-pays-bristol-palin-262500-donates-only-35000-to-charity/
In reality the figures for what the rich donate are massively overinflated.
Run a software company? well grant liscences to all your software to the charity and call it a "donation" at the retail price.
give some unused office space to your "charity" then call not collecting rent a "donation" (at an insane rental rate of course).
etc
etc
etc
Hell people even claim that america sends far more private aid overseas than it ever really does then try to paint it as americas wealthy donating a lot while in reality they massively distort and inflate the figures by counting money sent home by poor imigrant workers to their families which accounts for the lions share.
taxing people even if they don't particularly want to be taxed is how just about all governments everywhere do it and it's not theft.
Yes most people want someone else to pay for everything.
Personally I'm perfectly happy to pay my taxes as long as I get valuable services in return. ,ie non american)healthcare, transport, protection and a fairly stable environment in which to work or run a buisness.
Which I do.
I get (good
I don't know.
The legal system is almost ideal for expert systems- all the data is there, neatly recorded in extreme detail.
It's even better than normal natural language in some ways since legalese is more strict.
it'll never take over the profession but it would help a cheap lawyer to compete with an expensive one on a more even footing.
I think they're reading it differently.
born wealthier-> driven to succeed
vs
driven to suceed->far more likely to end up wealthier.
Forget maids.
Simply growing up in a family where it's just quietly expected that you should be perfectly capable of getting a college degree and a decent job and spending the first couple of decades of your life quietly absorbing the habbits of people who are themselves reasonably successful or at least frugal and sensible is going to make a big difference vs growing up in a house where it's expected you'll start drawing the dole as soon as possible, where "college boys" are mocked ,anyone who gets a job is a sucker, dole day is drinking time and you spend the first couple of decades of your life quietly absorbing the habbits of people who are themselves terrible at running their own lives.
" A recent study based on many years of weather data found that a combination of wind and solar is base-load compatible with surprisingly small storage capability."
If it isn't published by the photovoltaics industry association of germany or similar I'd be very interested in seeing that study.
Normally PV produces power at exactly the wrong points in the demand curve except in places where a lot of air conditioning is used and most power storage methods are hopelessly expensive and ineffecient for anything large scale.
"we're taking genes and modifying them without knowing the exact changes made. "
"and have no idea what they'll end up as"
You might have no idea, the geneticists tend to have a better idea what they're doing than you do.
you're just going with a genetic algorithm rather than straightforward design.
appologies, I misread the 37.8TWh bit- funny coincidence that it happens to be the same figure.
So scrub the first sentence but the rest remains the same.
in 2009 wind accounted for 6.5% of Germany energy.
etc
I wouldn't hold my breath for serious solar PV in germany- it's a bit far from the equator for anything but expensive vanity projects.
37.8 TWh is the figure I got for wind turbines in Germany in 2009.
Not all renewables in 2010.
http://www.germanenergyblog.de/?p=3063
For context that's 6.5% of Germany energy.
Until recently 26.1% of germanys energy came from nuclear.
Now let's ignore that wind farms get built in the best locations first and assume they do even better over the next ten years with wind than they did in the last 10 years.
lets say they build just as many extra wind farms.
that still leaves them supplying only half the power they were getting from nuclear.
On a side note:
http://xkcd.com/605/
"fanboys insist 1970s crap is perfect thus the thorium research was cancelled and synroc had to struggle against idiots that insisted there was no such thing as nuclear waste."
You know I've never seen anyone claiming this.
I've seen people justifiably argue that nuclear waste gets vastly over-weighted vs non-nuclear hazardous industrial waste and mutagens but never that it isn't an issue at all.
I've yet to meet a "fanboy" who wouldn't be delighted to see older plants replaced with better, more efficient and reliable new designs.
Side note: thorium is somewhat over hyped.
Hate?
I bare neither the person in the story nor the author of the book any ill will.
I'm simply saying beware of fascists and "patriots" wherever you go.
You can be sure if Julian Assange visited the US now he'd be arrested and charged with breaking US laws(or at least pissing off powerful members of the US government which is basically the same thing) despite being in a different country at the time and not being a US citizen.
because ultimately "patriots" tend to believe that since their own country is the best it's laws are the best and since it's laws are the best they should apply to everyone, everywhere, always and it's only a matter of if you can get hold of people to punish them.
If you publish information no matter how legal it is to publish from where you live or where you're posting from- keep the hell away from any fascist governments which you may have offended for the rest of your life.
It may be the the Chinese government, it may be the government of Thailand or it may even be the US government but if you're smart just stay the hell away.
It isn't just the Liberals/Progressives, the conservatives/regressives are all about the authoritarianism and they're even more into the xenophobia and racism.
I'm curious why you point out code pink for "bigotry against Jews", the only recent event I can find on them re jews is a jewish member of code pink who got the shit beaten out of her (by some nice "patriots") for protesting the israeli PM's speach.
Believe it or not some jewish people see the dark road the state of israel has been going down and how it's treating the palestinians ,they remember the stories their grandparents told them and say "Never again!"
cryptanalyst has fuck all to do with checking written signatures.
Human beings naturally sign it slightly differently each time they sign their name and autopen is just a fancy version of the "signature" stamps that you'll see in many offices.
the fact that the president was verifiably nowhere near the document when it was signed would be better proof than any "cryptanalyst".
Could he simply have his signature cut into a stamp and ask someone to stamp things for him when he's not there to sign stuff personally?
If not I can't see how autopen could be legal.
"that is 'cost' renewable sources don't have when they fail."
all in one go or in little bits?
Is a destroyed city bellow a hydro dam a cost or the medical bills of the people hurt?
Things like that could run into multiple billions easily.
The medical bills of people hurt if there's a leak of some toxic solvent at a plant making solar panels could be very very expensive, look at bhopal for what can happen when an ordinary chemical plant has an accident.
Hydro dams don't collapse every day, chemical plants don't suffer toxic leaks all the time etc but these things aren't as black and white as you make out.
spread across the entire world the cost of simply using a significantly more expensive source of power can quickly run into the hundreds of billions and that money could be spent elsewhere saving lives or making peoples lives better.
there is an opportunity cost in human lives if you pick a power source which costs a lot per watt.
So you have to weigh it all against each other in terms of cash costs, risks in humans lives and financial risks- not just basing it on what makes headlines most often.
For anyone wondering, here is an example of the kind of person I was talking about.
I linked to the article, and either way beyond a certain point it stops mattering.
If we don't figure out fusion in a thousand years we deserve any problems we have.
there's also opportunity cost: coal kills 30K people per year but if you had the choice of replacing it with a power source which kills nobody and costs ten times as much you might see those same 30K deaths in people who can't afford medical insurance after the inflated monthly electricity bills
if it's the government paying for it you could also spend the money on other things, you might save more than 30K lives putting that same money into hospitals,shelters or some other safety measures.
So the cost per watt of a solution has to be factored in as well.
who said anything about caves?
I've just been deeply disappointed by the hardline greens and organizations like greenpeace who pretty much just hate technology.
They even object to golden rice because it's a gateway crop- none of the other normal objections to GM apply but it's just too good and might make people too accepting of GM crops.
They hate fusion in advance because atoms.
there's the sane "lets not fuck up the planet too much to live on" greens and then there's the "fuck blind children" organizations like greenpeace and some green parties.
Depends.
If you're talking about energy efficiency then no.
-You use a lot less energy living in a tower block with apartments on all sides such that waste heat from one cuts down on the heating bills of the others etc.
-Transporting people a few miles on mas transport is a lot more efficient than getting too and from a little farmstead.
-Distributing food and other essentials also takes energy and is far more efficient in a nice dense city.
if what you want isn't to be environmentally friendly but rather to feel like you're getting "back to nature" or some such then little cottages in the mountains win hands down.