Before you get worried, keep in mind there's little danger here even if you are in China. There have been 1500 injuries, but keep in mind this is a country of 1.3 billion people. That's 0.0011% of the population. 5.1 people per 100,000 in china die from traffic related accidents, which comes to 0.0051%.
You are five times more likely to be killed by a car than you are to get STUNG by one of these things, assuming you are in China.
Don't panic. Unless my numbers are off, which is entirely possible... wait, carry the seven...
It's like the saying "The road to hell is paved with good intentions." Yes, I get the point that meaning well =/= doing well, but 1. I don't think you need some stupid saying to communicate that and 2. the road paved with bad intentions doesn't have a better destination.
You always trade some privacy and security in exchange for being social and active. The terms of the compromise are up to the individual. If you're insisting your family should get end to end encryption and they don't want it, YOU'RE the brainless one for not realizing your preferences are not their preferences.
"Judging by every metric, decriminalization in Portugal has been a resounding success," says Glenn Greenwald, an attorney, author and fluent Portuguese speaker, who conducted the research. "It has enabled the Portuguese government to manage and control the drug problem far better than virtually every other Western country does."
It's fine to hypothesize whatever, but from what I can tell, hard evidence suggests there are easy solutions. I have yet to see any case studies that show prohibition working, in contrast.
I'd argue that's a problem caused by prohibition in general, and that revenue from silkroad is probably insignificant compared to more traditional drug trade routes.
Then again, given how much money we waste fighting the war on drugs, how much they spent on silkroad might be a gigantic number but could still be proportional. We've spent 30 billion on fighting drugs this year, if silk road was 1% of the drug trade, $300 million spent on busting it would still be proportional.
Assuming that's the case, can anyone venture a ballpark estimate as to how much taxpayer money went into breaking the scourge of Tor and Silkroad? How many dollars were used to make sure I was safe from roaming crackheads on their smartphones trying to loot USBs with bitcoins from corpses to save up for their next fix?
Still news actually. It's a glimpse into what is going on at MS. The investors, who likely haven't accomplished what Gates has accomplished and probably care less about MS in the long run, want him gone. To me that suggests that these investors (and probably more than 3), want to do the usual "cash out now by running the company into the dust" type thing.
But I'm not an investor in anything. Still, interesting to me.
That's the chicken and egg argument, yes. The other part is "why would you develop a cheap method of producing hydrogen when there's nothing that uses it." Solving one won't, obviously, magically solve the other, but it will make it much more likely to BE solved.
Thank you for immediately hijacking the conversation away from anything useful and steering it towards partisan politics. This is, of course, by design. Still, without people like you, the plan would fail from time to time, and real change might happen. Wouldn't want that! Divide and conquer works best when there is a innate DESIRE to be divided, when the subject WANTS to fight itself rather uniting to do anything productive. We really appreciate your efforts to keep our program safe. Keep up the good work!
The government funds most of the cutting edge medical research in this country. New grants to advance medical research are not being given out. Pubmed is a indexing service for basically all biomedical publications, run by the NCBI which is part of the NIH, which is basically shut down. It's being operated on existing funds. Were it to shut down, biomedical research worldwide would be hindered in a very real way.
It's fun to talk about how we don't need government, we're independent, etc in general terms. Bonus points for pointing to specific porkbarrel spending. But people engaging in such bluster rarely talk about BIG specific cuts, the ones that are actually going to make a difference, both in terms of spending and in terms of affecting quality of life. We're delaying finding a cure to cancer, alzheimers, diabetes, paralysis... everything. A few days won't matter to you personally or anyone you know, sure. However, if you say we don't need what is shut down, you're either not looking very hard, you're thinking very short term, or you're not really thinking at all.
I do like Clarke. He stood up to the Bush administration about Iraq. But we shouldn't mistake that to mean he's a saint. There are no saints, anywhere, and definitely not in Washington. It's also noteworthy that he's been out of government for a while, on paper anyway. But he still does come from the intelligence community. He is likely biased in favor of security over freedom. From that wikipedia article:
In April 2012, Clarke wrote an op-ed in the New York Times addressing cyberattacks. In stemming cyberattacks carried out by foreign governments and foreign hackers, particularly from China, Clarke opines that the U.S. government should be authorized to "create a major program to grab stolen data leaving the country" in a fashion similar to how the U.S. Department of Homeland Security currently searches for child pornography that crosses America's "virtual borders." Moreover, he suggests that the president of the United States could authorize agencies to scan Internet traffic outside the United States and seize sensitive files stolen from within the United States. Clarke then states that such a policy would not endanger privacy rights through the institution of a privacy advocate who could stop abuses or any activity that went beyond halting the theft of important files. The op-ed did not offer any evidence that finding and blocking sensitive files while they are being transmitted is technically feasible
I don't know if Clarke was being naive there or if it was just lip service, but I suspect he's working for interests that are more interested in controlling the internet and don't really care about our rights.
He also endorsed Obama, so he's definitely on the "friend" list, which is also suspicious.
So yeah, I think he's done good things in the past, he might be the best member of the panel, but he's still not someone I'd want on a panel charged with upholding our right to privacy.
This is a trivial tangent, but you seem to place more emphasis on not angering people than I do. Assange, Snowden, and Manning did upset a lot of Americans who thought they were traitors. I'm not sure how that matters. It wasn't a popularity contest, it was telling us our rights were being trampled on, and that we were doing ugly things.
How the message was delivered is less important as well. Manning couldn't exactly form a team to manage the data better without arousing some suspicions and shutting it down before it got anywhere. Lamo stabbed him in the back after all. And Assange may be an egomaniac, but people who do unusual things often are. Anyway, if the messenger is annoying, that may make you want to shoot him more if you already wanted to shoot someone for the message, but you should resist that temptation.
CEO: "Gentlemen, google's competitive service challenges our freedom, our very way of life, our absurd profits. No longer will we be able to abuse customers and laugh as they threaten to leave us for better competitors, because there WILL BE a better option"
All: "GASP!"
CEO: "We have only one option. Stop them in Austin Texas. Throw everything we've got there. Be better than google."
Member of the audience: "But Sir, how can we keep getting monopoly-level profits for doing very little if we do that?"
CEO : (closes eyes) "We... can't."
All: "NNOOOO!!"
CEO: "But fear not! If we stop them in Austin Texas, they will give up expanding elsewhere!... Probably? They'll just assume we're going to do it anywhere they announce next and will all hang themselves, at which point we can quadruple the costs for the austin fiber and everywhere else."
All: "AMAZING!!!"
Ah, so I'm basically wrong. I'm trying to make a joke about inaccurate GPS and making uninformed posts to slashdot, but I've got nothing. So I'm just going to say "Good to know, thank you!"
Demand is pretty low I guess. When I was playing ingress and my GPS signal was bouncing away from what I was trying to capture, I sometimes feverishly thought "I'm going to look up how to get MILITARY GRADE GPS on my phone! Then I'll be unstoppable!" But even if someone offered a phone with that, and even if it did improve ingress, and even if I did still play, I'd only be willing to pay an extra $30 for it. That's the only use I'd have for unlocked GPS, and I don't even currently have it. Non-nerds don't even realize the GPS we civilians use is limited.
For that matter, I was talking to a friend who is in the marines and who... er... does stuff with maps for driving humvees. She didn't know if she used the military GPS, she didn't even know her iphone GPS was limited.
What seems strange to me is that they do limit GPS in the first place. Seems like anything where military level GPS could be used dangerously, it's not that high of a barrier. You don't need super accurate GPS to make a car bomb, and if you're competent to make your own attack drone, you probably know how to bypass the restrictions.
(Hi, NSA. Congrats on keeping your jobs when government workers who DON'T shit on the constitution aren't being paid.)
Yes, they oppose themselves on most issues, limiting the damage that they do somewhat. The opposite of partisan politics is NOT "the government harmoniously works for the good of the people."
Another good thing congress hopefully is doing is giving the voters incentive to become informed and less apathetic on issues that affect them. A government shutdown is no one's worst case scenario, but it's a warning sign that hopefully few people will be able to continue to ignore.
This government mandate does absolutely nothing for personal responsibility because no one has to change their ways.
GP meant personal responsibility in terms of having insurance and not skipping out on the bill, which was a major problem before the mandate, driving everyone's healthcare costs up.
He didn't mean personal responsibility in general.
The obesity epidemic has nothing to do with health insurance. People clearly don't make choices as to what they eat based on whether it's going to give them health problems, it's even more ludicrous to think they will change their eating habits based on health insurance premiums.
For that matter, people aren't skipping healthcare based on not having insurance. They might skip preventative care, raising healthcare costs in general, but if they have a heart attack, they go to the hospital. If they have your insurance, your premiums go up to cover it. If they don't, they likely don't have assets to cover it, they go into bankrupcy, the hospital raises its fees to cover the lost money, your insurance premiums go up to cover paying those increased fees. You pay for it either way, everyone having insurance is just more efficient and avoids people losing their houses, which is good for no one besides banks.
Perhaps, but the fact that the administrator guy was recommending Los Angeles Unified School District make changes to their policy suggests that they do have control. Wouldn't make much sense for him to advise that if it wasn't something they could do.
You're making a lot of straw man arguments there. I'm only saying that their reasoning is stupid, not that whatever the kids do with the ipads is just fine and dandy.
Not by the bacteria themselves. I don't think E.Coli do carbon fixation, not yet, anyway. From my understanding, E.coli get their carbon from eating stuff like glucose, rather than from the atmosphere.
You would be making glucose through photosynthesis in plants or algae or cyanobacteria (I guess?) and THAT would pull carbon from the atmosphere. So yeah, I'm guessing this would still be carbon neutral unless you were somehow getting glucose from something you dug up.
Slashdot Mirror
You're only 50 times less likely to be stung by a fist-sized wasp than to be killed in a car crash? And you consider those good odds!?!
Well, neither is really good if it's more than zero, but I'd consider being stung by an insect to be at least 50 times better than being killed.
Before you get worried, keep in mind there's little danger here even if you are in China. There have been 1500 injuries, but keep in mind this is a country of 1.3 billion people. That's 0.0011% of the population. 5.1 people per 100,000 in china die from traffic related accidents, which comes to 0.0051%.
You are five times more likely to be killed by a car than you are to get STUNG by one of these things, assuming you are in China.
Don't panic. Unless my numbers are off, which is entirely possible... wait, carry the seven...
It's like the saying "The road to hell is paved with good intentions." Yes, I get the point that meaning well =/= doing well, but 1. I don't think you need some stupid saying to communicate that and 2. the road paved with bad intentions doesn't have a better destination.
You always trade some privacy and security in exchange for being social and active. The terms of the compromise are up to the individual. If you're insisting your family should get end to end encryption and they don't want it, YOU'RE the brainless one for not realizing your preferences are not their preferences.
"Judging by every metric, decriminalization in Portugal has been a resounding success," says Glenn Greenwald, an attorney, author and fluent Portuguese speaker, who conducted the research. "It has enabled the Portuguese government to manage and control the drug problem far better than virtually every other Western country does."
It's fine to hypothesize whatever, but from what I can tell, hard evidence suggests there are easy solutions. I have yet to see any case studies that show prohibition working, in contrast.
I'd argue that's a problem caused by prohibition in general, and that revenue from silkroad is probably insignificant compared to more traditional drug trade routes.
Then again, given how much money we waste fighting the war on drugs, how much they spent on silkroad might be a gigantic number but could still be proportional. We've spent 30 billion on fighting drugs this year, if silk road was 1% of the drug trade, $300 million spent on busting it would still be proportional.
Assuming that's the case, can anyone venture a ballpark estimate as to how much taxpayer money went into breaking the scourge of Tor and Silkroad? How many dollars were used to make sure I was safe from roaming crackheads on their smartphones trying to loot USBs with bitcoins from corpses to save up for their next fix?
Still news actually. It's a glimpse into what is going on at MS. The investors, who likely haven't accomplished what Gates has accomplished and probably care less about MS in the long run, want him gone. To me that suggests that these investors (and probably more than 3), want to do the usual "cash out now by running the company into the dust" type thing.
But I'm not an investor in anything. Still, interesting to me.
That's the chicken and egg argument, yes. The other part is "why would you develop a cheap method of producing hydrogen when there's nothing that uses it." Solving one won't, obviously, magically solve the other, but it will make it much more likely to BE solved.
Less temptation to drink it though.
You'll have to forgive us for automatically assume the worst of our government: they've earned it again and again, and recently.
Dear AC,
Thank you for immediately hijacking the conversation away from anything useful and steering it towards partisan politics. This is, of course, by design. Still, without people like you, the plan would fail from time to time, and real change might happen. Wouldn't want that! Divide and conquer works best when there is a innate DESIRE to be divided, when the subject WANTS to fight itself rather uniting to do anything productive. We really appreciate your efforts to keep our program safe. Keep up the good work!
Reguards,
The NSA
The government funds most of the cutting edge medical research in this country. New grants to advance medical research are not being given out. Pubmed is a indexing service for basically all biomedical publications, run by the NCBI which is part of the NIH, which is basically shut down. It's being operated on existing funds. Were it to shut down, biomedical research worldwide would be hindered in a very real way.
It's fun to talk about how we don't need government, we're independent, etc in general terms. Bonus points for pointing to specific porkbarrel spending. But people engaging in such bluster rarely talk about BIG specific cuts, the ones that are actually going to make a difference, both in terms of spending and in terms of affecting quality of life. We're delaying finding a cure to cancer, alzheimers, diabetes, paralysis... everything. A few days won't matter to you personally or anyone you know, sure. However, if you say we don't need what is shut down, you're either not looking very hard, you're thinking very short term, or you're not really thinking at all.
In April 2012, Clarke wrote an op-ed in the New York Times addressing cyberattacks. In stemming cyberattacks carried out by foreign governments and foreign hackers, particularly from China, Clarke opines that the U.S. government should be authorized to "create a major program to grab stolen data leaving the country" in a fashion similar to how the U.S. Department of Homeland Security currently searches for child pornography that crosses America's "virtual borders." Moreover, he suggests that the president of the United States could authorize agencies to scan Internet traffic outside the United States and seize sensitive files stolen from within the United States. Clarke then states that such a policy would not endanger privacy rights through the institution of a privacy advocate who could stop abuses or any activity that went beyond halting the theft of important files. The op-ed did not offer any evidence that finding and blocking sensitive files while they are being transmitted is technically feasible
I don't know if Clarke was being naive there or if it was just lip service, but I suspect he's working for interests that are more interested in controlling the internet and don't really care about our rights.
He also endorsed Obama, so he's definitely on the "friend" list, which is also suspicious.
So yeah, I think he's done good things in the past, he might be the best member of the panel, but he's still not someone I'd want on a panel charged with upholding our right to privacy.
This is a trivial tangent, but you seem to place more emphasis on not angering people than I do. Assange, Snowden, and Manning did upset a lot of Americans who thought they were traitors. I'm not sure how that matters. It wasn't a popularity contest, it was telling us our rights were being trampled on, and that we were doing ugly things.
How the message was delivered is less important as well. Manning couldn't exactly form a team to manage the data better without arousing some suspicions and shutting it down before it got anywhere. Lamo stabbed him in the back after all. And Assange may be an egomaniac, but people who do unusual things often are. Anyway, if the messenger is annoying, that may make you want to shoot him more if you already wanted to shoot someone for the message, but you should resist that temptation.
What is AT&T's plan here?
... Probably? They'll just assume we're going to do it anywhere they announce next and will all hang themselves, at which point we can quadruple the costs for the austin fiber and everywhere else."
CEO: "Gentlemen, google's competitive service challenges our freedom, our very way of life, our absurd profits. No longer will we be able to abuse customers and laugh as they threaten to leave us for better competitors, because there WILL BE a better option"
All: "GASP!"
CEO: "We have only one option. Stop them in Austin Texas. Throw everything we've got there. Be better than google."
Member of the audience: "But Sir, how can we keep getting monopoly-level profits for doing very little if we do that?"
CEO : (closes eyes) "We... can't."
All: "NNOOOO!!"
CEO: "But fear not! If we stop them in Austin Texas, they will give up expanding elsewhere!
All: "AMAZING!!!"
Ah, so I'm basically wrong. I'm trying to make a joke about inaccurate GPS and making uninformed posts to slashdot, but I've got nothing. So I'm just going to say "Good to know, thank you!"
Demand is pretty low I guess. When I was playing ingress and my GPS signal was bouncing away from what I was trying to capture, I sometimes feverishly thought "I'm going to look up how to get MILITARY GRADE GPS on my phone! Then I'll be unstoppable!" But even if someone offered a phone with that, and even if it did improve ingress, and even if I did still play, I'd only be willing to pay an extra $30 for it. That's the only use I'd have for unlocked GPS, and I don't even currently have it. Non-nerds don't even realize the GPS we civilians use is limited.
For that matter, I was talking to a friend who is in the marines and who... er... does stuff with maps for driving humvees. She didn't know if she used the military GPS, she didn't even know her iphone GPS was limited.
What seems strange to me is that they do limit GPS in the first place. Seems like anything where military level GPS could be used dangerously, it's not that high of a barrier. You don't need super accurate GPS to make a car bomb, and if you're competent to make your own attack drone, you probably know how to bypass the restrictions.
(Hi, NSA. Congrats on keeping your jobs when government workers who DON'T shit on the constitution aren't being paid.)
Yes, they oppose themselves on most issues, limiting the damage that they do somewhat. The opposite of partisan politics is NOT "the government harmoniously works for the good of the people."
Another good thing congress hopefully is doing is giving the voters incentive to become informed and less apathetic on issues that affect them. A government shutdown is no one's worst case scenario, but it's a warning sign that hopefully few people will be able to continue to ignore.
You're honestly blaming the victim and saying he or she "deserved" it? Jesus, that's some just world fallacy you've got there.
This government mandate does absolutely nothing for personal responsibility because no one has to change their ways.
GP meant personal responsibility in terms of having insurance and not skipping out on the bill, which was a major problem before the mandate, driving everyone's healthcare costs up.
He didn't mean personal responsibility in general.
The obesity epidemic has nothing to do with health insurance. People clearly don't make choices as to what they eat based on whether it's going to give them health problems, it's even more ludicrous to think they will change their eating habits based on health insurance premiums.
For that matter, people aren't skipping healthcare based on not having insurance. They might skip preventative care, raising healthcare costs in general, but if they have a heart attack, they go to the hospital. If they have your insurance, your premiums go up to cover it. If they don't, they likely don't have assets to cover it, they go into bankrupcy, the hospital raises its fees to cover the lost money, your insurance premiums go up to cover paying those increased fees. You pay for it either way, everyone having insurance is just more efficient and avoids people losing their houses, which is good for no one besides banks.
"Informative" and "Useful information" are not exactly the same thing.
Perhaps, but the fact that the administrator guy was recommending Los Angeles Unified School District make changes to their policy suggests that they do have control. Wouldn't make much sense for him to advise that if it wasn't something they could do.
You're making a lot of straw man arguments there. I'm only saying that their reasoning is stupid, not that whatever the kids do with the ipads is just fine and dandy.
Not by the bacteria themselves. I don't think E.Coli do carbon fixation, not yet, anyway. From my understanding, E.coli get their carbon from eating stuff like glucose, rather than from the atmosphere.
I don't have access to the full figures on the paper, but this preview figure seems to show glucose going into the cell
You would be making glucose through photosynthesis in plants or algae or cyanobacteria (I guess?) and THAT would pull carbon from the atmosphere. So yeah, I'm guessing this would still be carbon neutral unless you were somehow getting glucose from something you dug up.