The fact that the supreme court said genomic DNA was not patentable but cDNA was means that the issue isn't resolved, but momentum is on the side of sanity. Had the supreme court said "No, neither are patentable because you didn't fucking make those sequences, and cDNA is just genomic DNA with parts taken out," then the issue would have been resolved, which would have been good, but we couldn't say "See, IP laws are holding back cancer research and are STILL not fixed."
Perhaps the SC's incompetence to realize that reverse transcriptase is a naturally occouring enzyme, and viruses make cDNA all the time, and your cells remove introns all the time, so there is absofuckinglutely nothing patentable about cDNA... perhaps that will actually be useful in the larger battle.
Why write for all three? In my limited experience, the people still running gingerbread, who have pressed "No, don't update" on their phones are the ones who use their phones for texting, e-mails, as a camera, facebook... and that's it. Maybe they'll download instagram or twitter, and play with angry birds for a while, but they're not downloading the hot new app all the kids are talking about wherever it is young people talk about phones. Just release it for the current one and let them update if they want it.
Whoa man, I'm completely opposed to the death penalty. I think you and the mods have missed my point.
You point out one reason why death penalty is not in practice a deterrent. There are other reasons as well, but my point was that the IDEA behind the death penalty was deterrence. While the delay might mean it's not deterring anyone from crime, that doesn't mean that death penalty proponents have given up on deterrence as the goal and admitted it's just about killing people.
I also never said "China never executes anyone," I said "even if China never executes anyone..." It would have been better phrased "Were China to never actually execute anyone by this law over pollution..." And I should have made it clear that I'm not suggesting this will work in practice, just playing devil's advocate that they don't need to actually kill any polluting executives for it to work in theory.
I think the idea with the death penalty is pretty much always not that you actually kill everyone who would break the law, but you have it as a deterrent. In this case, even if China never executes anyone, everyone making the decision to save money by polluting will have to weigh costs not just their conscience but their conscience AND the chance that they'll personally be killed. It could tip a few people onto the "Maybe don't bury that plutonium in a child's sandbox." Could also make competing easier. If your coal mine is competing against another coal mine, and they stop dumping their mercury into a nearby river, you won't have to also dump yours into a river in order to keep open.
At any rate, there's no magic solution the government could take which would eliminate pollution with no negative effects.
Hey now, look at it from their perspective. There's a magic computer box and a magic internet box which talk to each other through magic. Google is a wizard that seems to have the answer to any question they ask of it. But sometimes, the wizard is an asshole. Why can't it find that picture of that cat my friend sent me the other day? IT'S ON THE INTERNET! So Google wizard is evil. AND NOW google wizard appears to be STEALING magic from one or both of their magic boxes. What would you do in that situation?
More to the point, by focusing the whole intelligence network so much on cultists with boxcutters, we're diverting attention from real national security matters (though still nothing to freak out about.) Such as cybersecurity, getting off oil dependence, and biosecurity. Preventing terrorists from killing more civilians than golf cart accidents is not a priority, preventing a nasty bout of influenza from spreading through the airports, or oil shocks, or infrastructure being shut down due to cyber attacks, that's much more worthy of tax dollars.
Again, nothing to panic about, so don't vote for someone who says we should require blood samples to fly...
I thought their writer left like a year into it. When I came across it, there was a huge archive. I started reading at the beginning, it was pretty hilarious, and thought "Okay, this is going to keep me busy and unproductive for a while." But not too long into it, there was no humor, so I had to find other excuses to be unproductive.
Hey man, not all research is immediately useful, but can lead to other things. One day, this research might lead to better speakers that take up a whole wall. Or better acoustics in concert halls. Maybe even walls that allow not just sound to pass through, but people and light and everything else as well. They might call that last one "there is no wall here." How crazy would that be?
Slashdot has research from Japan flagged for some reason? I haven't noticed any other countries represented in flag form, for instance, the south korean flag too.
A team of Japanese and South Korean researchers has devised a means of making solid walls virtually transparent to sound.
Perhaps the best way to get society to demand the war on drugs end is to prosecute the middle and upper class like we do the lower class. Lock up people who abuse prescription drugs, and lawyers who do coke, and throw away the key. The public is slowly admitting that maybe pot isn't that bad, but they don't feel strongly enough about it because no one they know is fucked over for victimless crimes.
Decades of prohibition against relatively harmless drugs, and preferentially the ones that poor minorities use, but no, I'm the hateful one here for pointing it out...
At least it sounds like he's focusing on drug abuse that traditionally gets ignored.
"Pot and crack? Yes, lock all of them up, those criminal scum.
Oxycodone and hydrocodone? Hey man, sitting on your fat ass in a chair and blabbing about how liberals are destroying society all day is tough. Rush NEEDS those pain pills. That shouldn't be jail time!"
No, the kinect is attached to the xbox one and you can't remove it. MS has allowed that you will be able to put it to "sleep," and promises cross their hearts hope to die that it won't still collect data, but we the consumers cannot take off the kinect without breaking the machine.
Just to be clear, that was an honest "good luck with that" right?
Why would they "get blown out of" court exactly? Do most federal judges enjoy things which, to me, seem to intentionally violate the constitution? Does google lack the funds to hire lawyers who would be competent enough to point out how idiotic these things are? I'm not a lawyer, as most slashdotters are not.
There are far too many monopolies in Americas internet connections and THATS the problem, no competition means they can do whatever the hell they want!
Which may be his point when he said we're "leading."
THEY made the decision to collect live search, THEY made the decision to track search history per IP. By collecting that data, THEY made a honey pot waiting for an NSA warrant.
Seems a bit like saying "You chose to have nice stuff, it's partly your fault that someone stole it." Unless they offered it to the NSA, simply collecting the data isn't exactly inviting the NSA to shit all over the constitution.
The timescale is pretty short though. We're not talking about a natural food source that has been around forever, we're talking about something that has been around in mass quantities for, what, a century?
We know that changes in ecology are often boom bust cycles that eventually find an equilibrium from which it will, over time, move away from into a new boom bust cycle. "Punctuated Equilibrium" - nice name for it.
Punctuated Equalibrium, the theory, applies to evolution really, not ecology. And in one of his books at least, Gould points out it's really only talking about multicellular evolution. Bacteria don't do sex, they don't have "species" in the same sense that we do. "Species" often means something close to "organisms which can breed together." Asexual division obviously makes that not an issue. So bacteria aren't really constrained to punctated equalibrium.
He also pointed out in that same chapter that since bacteria dramatically outnumber eukarya, anytime some creationist starts yapping about how macroevolution is "unproven" despite microevolution, you could point out that microevolution is really the big picture that they've granted, and macroevolution is just a small, trivial detail.
The only specific microbes mentioned in the abstract is the genus vibrio. The vast majority of microbes are uncharacterized, which is not surprising given the sheer number of branches in archea and eubacteria. Bacteria, for example, it's estimated that there are 10 million to a billion species. It would be surprising, to say the least, if there is only one microbe out there that eats petroleum or it's byproducts.
He's not perfect in "The Dark Knight Returns" comic books if I remember correctly. He's a stupid tool for a tyrannical government who gets beat up by batman with kryptonite gloves and then comes around. Or something, it's been about a decade since I read it. At any rate, he can be a more interesting character, and "should" be for it to be an interesting movie. Jerry Siegel might say he's all around perfect, I don't know, but I do know that rules of interesting characters don't make an exception just because someone said that superman was "supposed" to be perfect."
Slashdot Mirror
The fact that the supreme court said genomic DNA was not patentable but cDNA was means that the issue isn't resolved, but momentum is on the side of sanity. Had the supreme court said "No, neither are patentable because you didn't fucking make those sequences, and cDNA is just genomic DNA with parts taken out," then the issue would have been resolved, which would have been good, but we couldn't say "See, IP laws are holding back cancer research and are STILL not fixed."
Perhaps the SC's incompetence to realize that reverse transcriptase is a naturally occouring enzyme, and viruses make cDNA all the time, and your cells remove introns all the time, so there is absofuckinglutely nothing patentable about cDNA... perhaps that will actually be useful in the larger battle.
Why write for all three? In my limited experience, the people still running gingerbread, who have pressed "No, don't update" on their phones are the ones who use their phones for texting, e-mails, as a camera, facebook... and that's it. Maybe they'll download instagram or twitter, and play with angry birds for a while, but they're not downloading the hot new app all the kids are talking about wherever it is young people talk about phones. Just release it for the current one and let them update if they want it.
Whoa man, I'm completely opposed to the death penalty. I think you and the mods have missed my point.
You point out one reason why death penalty is not in practice a deterrent. There are other reasons as well, but my point was that the IDEA behind the death penalty was deterrence. While the delay might mean it's not deterring anyone from crime, that doesn't mean that death penalty proponents have given up on deterrence as the goal and admitted it's just about killing people.
I also never said "China never executes anyone," I said "even if China never executes anyone..." It would have been better phrased "Were China to never actually execute anyone by this law over pollution..." And I should have made it clear that I'm not suggesting this will work in practice, just playing devil's advocate that they don't need to actually kill any polluting executives for it to work in theory.
I think the idea with the death penalty is pretty much always not that you actually kill everyone who would break the law, but you have it as a deterrent. In this case, even if China never executes anyone, everyone making the decision to save money by polluting will have to weigh costs not just their conscience but their conscience AND the chance that they'll personally be killed. It could tip a few people onto the "Maybe don't bury that plutonium in a child's sandbox." Could also make competing easier. If your coal mine is competing against another coal mine, and they stop dumping their mercury into a nearby river, you won't have to also dump yours into a river in order to keep open.
At any rate, there's no magic solution the government could take which would eliminate pollution with no negative effects.
Has that ever happened? (Honest question)
Hey now, look at it from their perspective. There's a magic computer box and a magic internet box which talk to each other through magic. Google is a wizard that seems to have the answer to any question they ask of it. But sometimes, the wizard is an asshole. Why can't it find that picture of that cat my friend sent me the other day? IT'S ON THE INTERNET! So Google wizard is evil. AND NOW google wizard appears to be STEALING magic from one or both of their magic boxes. What would you do in that situation?
(I never said it was a good perspective.)
More to the point, by focusing the whole intelligence network so much on cultists with boxcutters, we're diverting attention from real national security matters (though still nothing to freak out about.) Such as cybersecurity, getting off oil dependence, and biosecurity. Preventing terrorists from killing more civilians than golf cart accidents is not a priority, preventing a nasty bout of influenza from spreading through the airports, or oil shocks, or infrastructure being shut down due to cyber attacks, that's much more worthy of tax dollars.
Again, nothing to panic about, so don't vote for someone who says we should require blood samples to fly...
That would have been a woosh, but there was a normal, low-tech wall in the way.
I thought their writer left like a year into it. When I came across it, there was a huge archive. I started reading at the beginning, it was pretty hilarious, and thought "Okay, this is going to keep me busy and unproductive for a while." But not too long into it, there was no humor, so I had to find other excuses to be unproductive.
Hey man, not all research is immediately useful, but can lead to other things. One day, this research might lead to better speakers that take up a whole wall. Or better acoustics in concert halls. Maybe even walls that allow not just sound to pass through, but people and light and everything else as well. They might call that last one "there is no wall here." How crazy would that be?
A team of Japanese and South Korean researchers has devised a means of making solid walls virtually transparent to sound.
Perhaps the best way to get society to demand the war on drugs end is to prosecute the middle and upper class like we do the lower class. Lock up people who abuse prescription drugs, and lawyers who do coke, and throw away the key. The public is slowly admitting that maybe pot isn't that bad, but they don't feel strongly enough about it because no one they know is fucked over for victimless crimes.
Decades of prohibition against relatively harmless drugs, and preferentially the ones that poor minorities use, but no, I'm the hateful one here for pointing it out...
At least it sounds like he's focusing on drug abuse that traditionally gets ignored.
"Pot and crack? Yes, lock all of them up, those criminal scum.
Oxycodone and hydrocodone? Hey man, sitting on your fat ass in a chair and blabbing about how liberals are destroying society all day is tough. Rush NEEDS those pain pills. That shouldn't be jail time!"
Well, I was going to invite you to my annual "worldwide slashdotter tug of war" competition, but now I'm not sure I'll even host it again this year.
No, the kinect is attached to the xbox one and you can't remove it. MS has allowed that you will be able to put it to "sleep," and promises cross their hearts hope to die that it won't still collect data, but we the consumers cannot take off the kinect without breaking the machine.
That article discusses the kinect being labeled a security risk. They haven't taken the kinect out.
The currency of deluded people and unicorns.
Just to be clear, that was an honest "good luck with that" right?
Why would they "get blown out of" court exactly? Do most federal judges enjoy things which, to me, seem to intentionally violate the constitution? Does google lack the funds to hire lawyers who would be competent enough to point out how idiotic these things are? I'm not a lawyer, as most slashdotters are not.
There are far too many monopolies in Americas internet connections and THATS the problem, no competition means they can do whatever the hell they want!
Which may be his point when he said we're "leading."
THEY made the decision to collect live search, THEY made the decision to track search history per IP. By collecting that data, THEY made a honey pot waiting for an NSA warrant.
Seems a bit like saying "You chose to have nice stuff, it's partly your fault that someone stole it." Unless they offered it to the NSA, simply collecting the data isn't exactly inviting the NSA to shit all over the constitution.
You SPEAK a language? Like as in using your mouth with other people? You must be new here.
We know that changes in ecology are often boom bust cycles that eventually find an equilibrium from which it will, over time, move away from into a new boom bust cycle. "Punctuated Equilibrium" - nice name for it.
Punctuated Equalibrium, the theory, applies to evolution really, not ecology. And in one of his books at least, Gould points out it's really only talking about multicellular evolution. Bacteria don't do sex, they don't have "species" in the same sense that we do. "Species" often means something close to "organisms which can breed together." Asexual division obviously makes that not an issue. So bacteria aren't really constrained to punctated equalibrium.
He also pointed out in that same chapter that since bacteria dramatically outnumber eukarya, anytime some creationist starts yapping about how macroevolution is "unproven" despite microevolution, you could point out that microevolution is really the big picture that they've granted, and macroevolution is just a small, trivial detail.
The only specific microbes mentioned in the abstract is the genus vibrio. The vast majority of microbes are uncharacterized, which is not surprising given the sheer number of branches in archea and eubacteria. Bacteria, for example, it's estimated that there are 10 million to a billion species. It would be surprising, to say the least, if there is only one microbe out there that eats petroleum or it's byproducts.
He's not perfect in "The Dark Knight Returns" comic books if I remember correctly. He's a stupid tool for a tyrannical government who gets beat up by batman with kryptonite gloves and then comes around. Or something, it's been about a decade since I read it. At any rate, he can be a more interesting character, and "should" be for it to be an interesting movie. Jerry Siegel might say he's all around perfect, I don't know, but I do know that rules of interesting characters don't make an exception just because someone said that superman was "supposed" to be perfect."