In regards to #3: EA damages the industry by buying up smaller studios and diverting their profits into non-innovative game designs and rehashed sequels. They consume talented developers who could be working on titles that are more friendly to enlightened gamers—and, as Synerg1y said, they make other publishers want to copy them, further reducing the amount of money and talent invested into friendly games.
In regards to #2: Spore is a prominent example of a game that had many people excited when it was first announced. It was (almost?) entirely because of EA's DRM and business practices that it fell flat.
In regards to #1: EA may choose to buy out those companies or inspire them to lose interest in serving enlightened gamers. (See above.)
Then you fall back on some of the other big sticks you're carrying—you twist China's ear, economically, until they do the hard work for you. North Korea does not have any brilliant generals and it does not have any resources. Attacking South Korea wouldn't even give them any direct benefits, unlike Hitler's expansions; it's only a threat of doing something dangerous and hurtful. Even if they decimate Seoul, they won't have anything to show for it.
I don't really think the Obama Administration has that power, sorry; otherwise Guantanimo Bay would have been closed like Obama promised in his first campaign. The list of agencies involved is just a rollcall of big defence institutions, and that makes me think they ran up against a lot of hard limits in terms of what the military was willing to accept. You may faintly recall the last time a Democrat president tried to make sweeping changes in the US government—Jimmy Carter, who got little or nothing done.
And that, really, is the problem: the chorus of voices isn't really the administration itself, but the jingoists and bureacrats whose budgets and egos are directly in the line of fire. Obama and his people have no ability to fix the mess they've been elected to amend.
Most of them were smaller in yield and, much more importantly, they weren't all detonated at once. Nature's capacity to handle radioactive contaminants is non-linear, which is why no one has ever gotten cancer from eating too many bananas.
I am pretty sure that if some nukes in the stockpile had defects, it would be better to make new ones than to risk the fallbacks going the same way. Quite possibly cheaper, too.
Although the document offers various options for Obama, his top advisers reached their consensus position last year, after a review that included the State Department, the Defense Department, the National Security Council, the intelligence community, the U.S. Strategic Command, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the office of Vice President Joseph Biden, according to the sources.
a) Russia's retaliatory capacity would render a carpet-bombing strategy completely irrelevant. You don't have enough tubes to launch that many warheads at once.
b) Afterwards, even with launching a thousand nukes, the planet would be uninhabitable. MAD isn't even required; that kind of strategy is suicidal.
c) Both China and Russia are economically dependent on the US and would never let things get anywhere near that far. This isn't the Cold War any more. People have lives they actually want to defend.
d) North Korea is fibbing, makes threats regularly, and always backs down once they're offered what they want.
e) Iran can't even thwart Stuxnet and is essentially at the CIA's whim.
...So basically, the US is defending itself from rebels and religious extremists. That doesn't require nukes; drones have proven themselves.
If 1000 to 1100 warheads is sufficient for the most paranoid people on the planet who are fully informed about the situation, then doesn't that mean the proposed cuts are still leaving way too many?
If that sort of thing could stop low-end science fiction writers, people might not have the irrational fear of robots they do. Sensationalism in sci-fi has seriously set us back, y'know.
It's true that it does require more expertise to quality-control this kind of meat, but the prices for doing that (mostly the occasional whole-genome sequencing) adequately are rapidly dropping. Given the number of current problems plaguing the meat industry (as GrumpySteen outlined), it's definitely a much better bet to go with cloned tissue.
This is not the first time a "GMO panic" story has fallen flat on the ears of Slashdot. The media keeps trying to stir up paranoia about in vitro meat, and I haven't met a single person who finds it anything other than ethically unimpeachable.
Limiting the powers of politicians is not going to help. The friends of politicians you describe will just find a new exploit, and manipulate the legislative process until the political apparatus is strong enough to achieve whatever they wish. That's how the system got into its present state. Today's successful capitalists are tomorrow's lobbyists.
If you really want to stop people from doing anything they can to be more successful than everyone else, you need to destroy their motivation to succeed in the first place. A new game must be invented, one where people are not told that being rich is the key to happiness. I couldn't tell you what that is, but it's obvious that the way things are going is inherently unstable.
Oh no, I do. The abstract for the actual Science article says: "Caffeine concentrations in nectar did not exceed the bees' bitter taste threshold, implying that pollinators impose selection for nectar that is pharmacologically active but not repellent."
Caffeine is actually toxic to many arthropods, and may actually be a defence mechanism for plants. I propose that by being immune to it, bees could potentially make their honey less attractive to other insects; similarly, by putting it in their nectar, plants are defended against unwanted non-pollinators. The plant's mechanism would have evolved first, then grown exaggerated when bees made those variants more successful.
If you scrutinize the article, Sergei Bulat is quoted as saying the organism has less than 86% "DNA similarity" to other species. Taken at face value, this means that the entire genome of the bacterium is less than 86% similar, which (a) requires isolating it first and months of work, and (b) would not be impressive at all, since Escherichia coli genomes have much higher variety.
He then goes on to say that 90% is the threshold beyond which a species is considered completely unknown. This is an appropriate figure to give when discussing the evolution of one particular gene called the 16S ribosomal RNA, which is very important to cellular function and changes very slowly. It's also a standard test to use in the analysis of bacterial communities, and one of the core tools in metagenomics, because it's very unique to species and hence an excellent fingerprint. If you need citations to back up this claim, I can give you oceans of them. This is my actual day job.
So how divergent is 100 – 86 = 14%? This article references a standard 1% every 50 million years. 14 * 50 = 700 million years. This figure is quite possibly too low in this case, since evolution has a non-linear effect on sequences—eventually mutations flip multiple times, and so large numbers of changes get masked. This rate of change can be sped to 2% every 50 million years if the environment is exceptionally rich and predator-free, like inside certain cells in insects—but that's largely because the host cell is available to a degree to provide nutrients, so proper ribosomal function isn't as important.
This doesn't mean necessarily that this species has been completely isolated the whole time, just that we haven't found any surviving links. If it previously existed in a cave system, for example, that entire community could have been wiped out when Antarctica froze, leaving behind only a stub of organisms that were sheltered by the heat (and food chain) emanating from the thermal vent. Cave ecosystems often contain numerous species that have adapted so tightly to their niche that they are unable to survive outside.
That being said, this expedition has already made crap up for publicity stunts. As this hasn't been published in any journals yet and was instead released to the press first, it's entirely possible that no such species exists. Nevertheless, the claim of 14% divergence will be interpreted by other experts as more than half a billion years.
Archaeans and obligate parasites are as close as it gets. Archaeans are ancient and only found in bizarre environments (like acid mines, where the pH is below zero) because they were driven out by their more successful offspring, vowing one day to retake the crown and reclaim Earth for themselves. (Not really, but it sounds good.) Obligate parasites like Cryptosporidium have wildly strange genomes, spending millions of years festering in the flesh of others, finding new ways to ditch seemingly-vital functions by bolting themselves, Frankensteinishly, onto their hosts... also they're basically chest bursters writ small. Our immune system's response to all of this is to devour and melt it with macrophages (white blood cells)—and if that doesn't work, multiple macrophages combine into super-cells to consume even larger particles, before disintegrating in a kamikaze blaze of glory to protect the rest of the body. And if one of our own cells goes bad, killer T cells pump them full of holes and pour in a bunch of knives.
...basically, biology is horrific enough without invoking H. P. Lovecraft, Ridley Scott, or H. G. Wells. Evolution has a much deeper imagination than any one author could hope to possess. Some day a parasitologist will come up with a new entry in the "insect-inspired alien hive mind" science fiction horror genre, and no person on the entire planet will be able to sleep for, like, a year.
Slashdot Mirror
In regards to #3: EA damages the industry by buying up smaller studios and diverting their profits into non-innovative game designs and rehashed sequels. They consume talented developers who could be working on titles that are more friendly to enlightened gamers—and, as Synerg1y said, they make other publishers want to copy them, further reducing the amount of money and talent invested into friendly games.
In regards to #2: Spore is a prominent example of a game that had many people excited when it was first announced. It was (almost?) entirely because of EA's DRM and business practices that it fell flat.
In regards to #1: EA may choose to buy out those companies or inspire them to lose interest in serving enlightened gamers. (See above.)
Then you fall back on some of the other big sticks you're carrying—you twist China's ear, economically, until they do the hard work for you. North Korea does not have any brilliant generals and it does not have any resources. Attacking South Korea wouldn't even give them any direct benefits, unlike Hitler's expansions; it's only a threat of doing something dangerous and hurtful. Even if they decimate Seoul, they won't have anything to show for it.
I don't really think the Obama Administration has that power, sorry; otherwise Guantanimo Bay would have been closed like Obama promised in his first campaign. The list of agencies involved is just a rollcall of big defence institutions, and that makes me think they ran up against a lot of hard limits in terms of what the military was willing to accept. You may faintly recall the last time a Democrat president tried to make sweeping changes in the US government—Jimmy Carter, who got little or nothing done.
And that, really, is the problem: the chorus of voices isn't really the administration itself, but the jingoists and bureacrats whose budgets and egos are directly in the line of fire. Obama and his people have no ability to fix the mess they've been elected to amend.
Most of them were smaller in yield and, much more importantly, they weren't all detonated at once. Nature's capacity to handle radioactive contaminants is non-linear, which is why no one has ever gotten cancer from eating too many bananas.
I am pretty sure that if some nukes in the stockpile had defects, it would be better to make new ones than to risk the fallbacks going the same way. Quite possibly cheaper, too.
Not the administration—the people they consulted:
Although the document offers various options for Obama, his top advisers reached their consensus position last year, after a review that included the State Department, the Defense Department, the National Security Council, the intelligence community, the U.S. Strategic Command, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the office of Vice President Joseph Biden, according to the sources.
Let's review:
a) Russia's retaliatory capacity would render a carpet-bombing strategy completely irrelevant. You don't have enough tubes to launch that many warheads at once.
b) Afterwards, even with launching a thousand nukes, the planet would be uninhabitable. MAD isn't even required; that kind of strategy is suicidal.
c) Both China and Russia are economically dependent on the US and would never let things get anywhere near that far. This isn't the Cold War any more. People have lives they actually want to defend.
d) North Korea is fibbing, makes threats regularly, and always backs down once they're offered what they want.
e) Iran can't even thwart Stuxnet and is essentially at the CIA's whim.
...So basically, the US is defending itself from rebels and religious extremists. That doesn't require nukes; drones have proven themselves.
If 1000 to 1100 warheads is sufficient for the most paranoid people on the planet who are fully informed about the situation, then doesn't that mean the proposed cuts are still leaving way too many?
If that sort of thing could stop low-end science fiction writers, people might not have the irrational fear of robots they do. Sensationalism in sci-fi has seriously set us back, y'know.
It's true that it does require more expertise to quality-control this kind of meat, but the prices for doing that (mostly the occasional whole-genome sequencing) adequately are rapidly dropping. Given the number of current problems plaguing the meat industry (as GrumpySteen outlined), it's definitely a much better bet to go with cloned tissue.
This is not the first time a "GMO panic" story has fallen flat on the ears of Slashdot. The media keeps trying to stir up paranoia about in vitro meat, and I haven't met a single person who finds it anything other than ethically unimpeachable.
...tragically, she choked, and the skies are now permanently o-range.
(Oh snap.)
Hey! Be nice. During his service in the United States Congress, he took the initiative in creating the Simpsons.
Limiting the powers of politicians is not going to help. The friends of politicians you describe will just find a new exploit, and manipulate the legislative process until the political apparatus is strong enough to achieve whatever they wish. That's how the system got into its present state. Today's successful capitalists are tomorrow's lobbyists.
If you really want to stop people from doing anything they can to be more successful than everyone else, you need to destroy their motivation to succeed in the first place. A new game must be invented, one where people are not told that being rich is the key to happiness. I couldn't tell you what that is, but it's obvious that the way things are going is inherently unstable.
Axiomatically works pretty well. "Analytically" might be more typical.
Nope. Acid mines are weird.
Oh no, I do. The abstract for the actual Science article says: "Caffeine concentrations in nectar did not exceed the bees' bitter taste threshold, implying that pollinators impose selection for nectar that is pharmacologically active but not repellent."
Alright! Time to start the Journal of Validated Armchair Hypotheses.
I feel like I should tell you that doesn't require esoteric organisms.
Half-baked hypothesis time.
Caffeine is actually toxic to many arthropods, and may actually be a defence mechanism for plants. I propose that by being immune to it, bees could potentially make their honey less attractive to other insects; similarly, by putting it in their nectar, plants are defended against unwanted non-pollinators. The plant's mechanism would have evolved first, then grown exaggerated when bees made those variants more successful.
The Internet is very adamant that bees are the good guys, actually.
The critics think that Congress deserves a lot of blame for not even trying to hold presidents accountable for that.
You're also probably too cold, if that helps any.
If you scrutinize the article, Sergei Bulat is quoted as saying the organism has less than 86% "DNA similarity" to other species. Taken at face value, this means that the entire genome of the bacterium is less than 86% similar, which (a) requires isolating it first and months of work, and (b) would not be impressive at all, since Escherichia coli genomes have much higher variety.
He then goes on to say that 90% is the threshold beyond which a species is considered completely unknown. This is an appropriate figure to give when discussing the evolution of one particular gene called the 16S ribosomal RNA, which is very important to cellular function and changes very slowly. It's also a standard test to use in the analysis of bacterial communities, and one of the core tools in metagenomics, because it's very unique to species and hence an excellent fingerprint. If you need citations to back up this claim, I can give you oceans of them. This is my actual day job.
So how divergent is 100 – 86 = 14%? This article references a standard 1% every 50 million years. 14 * 50 = 700 million years. This figure is quite possibly too low in this case, since evolution has a non-linear effect on sequences—eventually mutations flip multiple times, and so large numbers of changes get masked. This rate of change can be sped to 2% every 50 million years if the environment is exceptionally rich and predator-free, like inside certain cells in insects—but that's largely because the host cell is available to a degree to provide nutrients, so proper ribosomal function isn't as important.
This doesn't mean necessarily that this species has been completely isolated the whole time, just that we haven't found any surviving links. If it previously existed in a cave system, for example, that entire community could have been wiped out when Antarctica froze, leaving behind only a stub of organisms that were sheltered by the heat (and food chain) emanating from the thermal vent. Cave ecosystems often contain numerous species that have adapted so tightly to their niche that they are unable to survive outside.
That being said, this expedition has already made crap up for publicity stunts. As this hasn't been published in any journals yet and was instead released to the press first, it's entirely possible that no such species exists. Nevertheless, the claim of 14% divergence will be interpreted by other experts as more than half a billion years.
Archaeans and obligate parasites are as close as it gets. Archaeans are ancient and only found in bizarre environments (like acid mines, where the pH is below zero) because they were driven out by their more successful offspring, vowing one day to retake the crown and reclaim Earth for themselves. (Not really, but it sounds good.) Obligate parasites like Cryptosporidium have wildly strange genomes, spending millions of years festering in the flesh of others, finding new ways to ditch seemingly-vital functions by bolting themselves, Frankensteinishly, onto their hosts... also they're basically chest bursters writ small. Our immune system's response to all of this is to devour and melt it with macrophages (white blood cells)—and if that doesn't work, multiple macrophages combine into super-cells to consume even larger particles, before disintegrating in a kamikaze blaze of glory to protect the rest of the body. And if one of our own cells goes bad, killer T cells pump them full of holes and pour in a bunch of knives.
...basically, biology is horrific enough without invoking H. P. Lovecraft, Ridley Scott, or H. G. Wells. Evolution has a much deeper imagination than any one author could hope to possess. Some day a parasitologist will come up with a new entry in the "insect-inspired alien hive mind" science fiction horror genre, and no person on the entire planet will be able to sleep for, like, a year.