I have to assume that bank routing information is public, or else banks wouldn't print it in clear text on every single check, along with full address. Is there anything evil I can do to you if I had your bank routing information?
In Germany many people put their bank routing information on their letter head, so that people can easily transfer money to them.
Has anyone anywhere in the world ever been sued in civil or criminal court for privately sharing music or video files via torrent? Didn't think so. Until that happens, it is safe to say that the worldwide legal system does not treat private torrent sharing as an illegal activity.
Cite your sources so that other people can evaluate them, and do a good job of interpreting those sources for the layman when you edit an article
How does the layman know that the cited source was properly interpreted?
How does the layman know that the cited source has not been discredited by later research?
How does the layman know that there does not exist an important source out there whose conclusions are missing from the article, thereby turning the article into a misleading mockery of the full truth?
you can't just pump regular air into the tank time and time again because the water will precipitate out and sit in your tank
The article described a little electrical compressor that comes with the car and can be used at home for refilling the air tank. I assume that compressor uses regular air. How do they deal with the moisture problem?
It seems to me that nobody has ever been sued for sharing movies or music using Bittorrent; the worst that happens is that RIAA may send an inconsequential letter to one's ISP. I think we need to evangelize more for Azureus+transport encryption+SafePeer, to defend everybody's educational fair-use private sharing rights.
Is it just me, or is it ironic that people are advocating the blocking of ads on Slashdot, which is quite clearly (at least in part) supported by banner advertising?
It is just you. In capitalism everybody is supposed to act egotistically. You are not supposed to feel the pain of other players, you are supposed to harm them with everything you've got. They will try to extract as much money/attention out of you as they can, and you will try to give them as little money/attention as you can get away with.
Furthermore, ads increase demand and therefore increase everybody's prices, so ad blocking is clearly the ethical thing to do.
I'm not seeing a huge problem here for the existing theory.
The huge problem is that after more than 100 years you still cannot explain the fundamental law of anesthetics, Overton-Meyer. Anesthetics following this law, which is the vast majority of them, cannot act by binding to proteins; they clearly act by dissolving in the membrane and changing its properties. How or why does dissolving diverse substances such as xenon, nitrous oxide, ether, ethanol or thiomethoxyflurane in the membrane affect ion channels in exactly the same way?
The authors of the soliton model have a quantitative explanation: dissolving of anything lowers the membrane's melting point, which prevents solitons from passing through.
(Yes, I'm yet another neuroscientist.)
Then you must be aware of the experiments showing that the axon's membrane temporarily thickens and exerts a force, and that its temperature temporarily increases and then decreases as the action potential travels through. This is nicely consistent with the soliton model. How does HH theory explain this? The fact that the temperature decrease is inconsistent with HH was already acknowledged by HH themselves. Charges passing through a resistor always create heat and never remove it.
some neurologist stick needles into your arms and hands to measure the electrical potential traveling along the nerves of the arm from shoulder to hand.
They postulate that the nerve signal travels as a soliton sound wave along the nerve's membrane. Such a soliton changes density and thickness locally, and since the membrane contains lots of polar and electrically charged particles, it will create an electric signal that's measurable. That doesn't mean that the signal was transmitted electrically though.
So somebody said nerve signals are sent by sound and not electrical impulses? Tell that to the people who regain hearing thanks to cochlear implants
The authors propose that the solitons carrying the signal in the nerve cell's membrane are created and detected piezo-electrically. Here's a better writeup.
how come some anesthetics (eg. pentobarbital) can act only on certain neurotransmitter systems, such as GABA?
Those few anesthetics must obviously work by a different mechanism, probably by interfering with some protein needed to produce or detect said neurotransmitter.
conductances across neurons (and cellular function in general) is dependent on temperature, pH, and mechanical strain
Yes, in a general qualitative manner. The authors are able to quantitatively predict how much pressure you need to reverse the effect of an anesthetic with a given membrane solubility.
we listen to brain waves with an EEG or MEG, which measure minute electrical or magnetic impulses.
As a soliton travels down a membrane, the density and thickness change. Since the membrane is full of charged and polar molecules, changing its density and thickness will generate an electric signal that can be detected.
If sound propagation were the key, all that sodium and potassium gating to change the local membrane charge would be useless,
No, because the sound wave is assumed to be created piezo-electrically. But it's true, in a sound model the cell has to do a lot less ion pumping; it's much more energy efficient.
Did you know that it has been observed that the thickness of the axon's membrane changes as the nerve impulse moves through? This is a nice writeup.
... you can surely explain how anesthetics work, why the strengths of vastly different anesthetics seem to be solely determined by their membrane solubility (Meyer-Overton law), and why the effects of vastly different anesthetics can all be reversed by applying pressure, by lowering the temperature, or by lowering the pH?
Because all of that is explained by their model, as outlined in their first and second articles.
In short, it goes like this: by dissolving in the membrane, anesthetics lower the melting point of the membrane, thereby affecting its sound propagation properties. The lowering of the melting-point can be reversed by applying pressure, lowering temperature, or by lowering pH. So by assuming that the nerve impulse is transmitted by a soliton in the membrane, everything is explained.
But firms that enter the market cause a shift in the supply curve
I think you are talking about the short-term supply curve and I'm talking about the long-term supply curve. The long-term supply curve already takes into account the fact that new firms will enter the market as demand goes up; the short-term supply curve doesn't.
are free-riding on the work and financial support of those that do provide it.
They freely take what others freely give; a beautiful system. Quite unlike the ugly advertiser-supported system that makes unwilling parties pay.
dwarfed by the general benefits of a successful Wikipedia
For that argument to work you first have to show that an advertising-sponsored Wikipedia would be significantly more successful than a donor-sponsored one. Many people argue that it would be significantly less successful, simply because people are put off by the ugliness of the idea of ads and aren't as enthusiastic in their contributions anymore.
So we just learned that you cannot trust anything in Wikipedia (old news) and you also cannot trust anything written in the New Yorker. Wikipedia teaches important lessons.
Yes, in most cases. The bottleneck of a connection is usually near the downloader's end. If such a bottleneck segment is shared by several people, then downloading in parallel (from several servers or even from the same server) helps: the downloader will receive a bigger share of the bottleneck segment.
See here for a little experiment that illustrates the point and that you can reproduce easily.
All ads, whether opt-in or not, increase the price of the advertised good, which is unfair towards those who have to pay the higher prices yet don't benefit from Wikipedia. (It's not a "short run" vs. "long run" issue either; the supply curve already takes into account the fact that supply increases as demand goes up; the overall result of increased demand is still an increase in price (and in supply and in profits). It's the familiar picture of intersecting demand and supply lines, with the demand curve moving.)
What possible reason could you have to oppose opt out ads for wikipedia?
Ads raise the demand for the advertised goods, that's what they are designed to do. Increased demand results in increased prices, by the law of supply and demand. All consumers pay those increased prices, not just Wikipedia's readers. So by selling ad space on Wikipedia, Wikipedia would in essence be financed through a general tax on all consumers of the advertised goods. I prefer the status quo: Wikipedia should be financed only by those who like the site enough to donate.
You sure can. The term "Wikipedia" is a trademark owned by the Wikimedia Foundation, and that foundation could in principle sell the trademark. Once you have the trademark, you just download the content, which is free, and then you're running the show.
I find it extremely unlikely that the foundation would ever willingly sell the trademark, but they could be sued into bankruptcy and then they have to sell.
You seem to somehow think that ads serve to increase market efficiency (and thereby to bring about pareto optimality) by increasing consumers' information. In fact ads are neither designed to nor have the effect of informing consumers.
No supermarket, airline or car dealership will advertise correct and up to date pricing information. Businesses have no interest in supplying correct information to consumers; quite the opposite in fact: allowing customers to compare prices is bad for business, obscuring is called for. Ads mainly serve to connect psychological needs to boring goods, in order to artificially raise demand. Every human being on the globe knows that Coca Cola exists, all potential consumers are informed, yet Coca Cola keeps advertising. Why don't they save the money? Because they need to work hard to associate their sugar water with sexiness, youth and sports in your brain, as ridiculous as it sounds.
Science teaches us that once the sperm penetrates the egg, all that is necessary for the birth of a human baby is food and shelter. All of the genetic information is present at conception, and there is no scientifically identifiable magic moment when a fetus "becomes" a person.
And therefore the fetus has all the rights of a person? There is also no scientifically identifiable moment when a teenager becomes an adult, so teenagers have the same rights as adults?
Suppose you observe a sperm swimming towards an egg, under a microscope. Just before it enters, you zap the sperm with a laser pointer. Was that murder? After all, had you waited a second longer, then placed the fertilized egg into a receptive uterus and fed the mother well, with a good bit of luck a person would have resulted. What if the sperm had already entered the egg, but not yet reached the nucleus, so that the genetic information of the new individual had not yet formed. A murder? Are you only a murderer if your destruction happens after the genetic merging has already happened? Well, you have a problem there too, because we can produce (or will soon be able to produce) persons without any genetic merging, simply by taking one of your skin cells, treating it with a couple of chemicals and electric current, and it will start to divide and become a clone of you. Which interruptions of this process count as murder in your opinion?
If my parents had decided to abort me, I would never have felt pain, would never have a thought or an emotion, for all practical purposes I would never have existed as a person. If my parents had decided to not have sex that night, I would also never have existed as a person. The two scenarios are completely equivalent to me, and I'm morally indifferent. Obviously they had the right not to have sex, so I'm willing to give them the right to have me aborted.
for industries showing economy of scale(Many of them), increased demand decreases price.
As an industry produces more, the cost per item goes down, obviously. That doesn't mean that the price per item goes down; it just means that profit goes up. No rational business (and certainly not the market as a whole) will lower prices in the face of increased demand. Increased demand means: consumers are willing to buy more items at a given price. The rational (i.e. profit-maximizing) answer to increased demand is to increase price.
"dead weight loss"
That's a loss of the business, not of the consumer. Advertising harms the consumer.
I see a little unobtrusive text ad in the bottom quarter of the page, leading me to buy a pogo-stick, what is wrong with this?
The ad just increased the price of pogo-sticks for the rest of us.
Slashdot Mirror
In Germany many people put their bank routing information on their letter head, so that people can easily transfer money to them.
Has anyone anywhere in the world ever been sued in civil or criminal court for privately sharing music or video files via torrent? Didn't think so. Until that happens, it is safe to say that the worldwide legal system does not treat private torrent sharing as an illegal activity.
- How does the layman know that the cited source was properly interpreted?
- How does the layman know that the cited source has not been discredited by later research?
- How does the layman know that there does not exist an important source out there whose conclusions are missing from the article, thereby turning the article into a misleading mockery of the full truth?
Evaluating sources involves research skills that laymen often cannot be expected to have.Adding sources does not increase the reliability of Wikipedia.It seems to me that nobody has ever been sued for sharing movies or music using Bittorrent; the worst that happens is that RIAA may send an inconsequential letter to one's ISP. I think we need to evangelize more for Azureus+transport encryption+SafePeer, to defend everybody's educational fair-use private sharing rights.
Furthermore, ads increase demand and therefore increase everybody's prices, so ad blocking is clearly the ethical thing to do.
Ads increase demand and therefore increase everybody's prices. Using adblock is the ethical thing to do.
Did you know that it has been observed that the thickness of the axon's membrane changes as the nerve impulse moves through? This is a nice writeup.
Because all of that is explained by their model, as outlined in their first and second articles.
In short, it goes like this: by dissolving in the membrane, anesthetics lower the melting point of the membrane, thereby affecting its sound propagation properties. The lowering of the melting-point can be reversed by applying pressure, lowering temperature, or by lowering pH. So by assuming that the nerve impulse is transmitted by a soliton in the membrane, everything is explained.
So we just learned that you cannot trust anything in Wikipedia (old news) and you also cannot trust anything written in the New Yorker. Wikipedia teaches important lessons.
See here for a little experiment that illustrates the point and that you can reproduce easily.
I find it extremely unlikely that the foundation would ever willingly sell the trademark, but they could be sued into bankruptcy and then they have to sell.
"PogoStickExcellence.com - the cheapest and best Pogo Sticks."
No supermarket, airline or car dealership will advertise correct and up to date pricing information. Businesses have no interest in supplying correct information to consumers; quite the opposite in fact: allowing customers to compare prices is bad for business, obscuring is called for. Ads mainly serve to connect psychological needs to boring goods, in order to artificially raise demand. Every human being on the globe knows that Coca Cola exists, all potential consumers are informed, yet Coca Cola keeps advertising. Why don't they save the money? Because they need to work hard to associate their sugar water with sexiness, youth and sports in your brain, as ridiculous as it sounds.
Suppose you observe a sperm swimming towards an egg, under a microscope. Just before it enters, you zap the sperm with a laser pointer. Was that murder? After all, had you waited a second longer, then placed the fertilized egg into a receptive uterus and fed the mother well, with a good bit of luck a person would have resulted. What if the sperm had already entered the egg, but not yet reached the nucleus, so that the genetic information of the new individual had not yet formed. A murder? Are you only a murderer if your destruction happens after the genetic merging has already happened? Well, you have a problem there too, because we can produce (or will soon be able to produce) persons without any genetic merging, simply by taking one of your skin cells, treating it with a couple of chemicals and electric current, and it will start to divide and become a clone of you. Which interruptions of this process count as murder in your opinion?
If my parents had decided to abort me, I would never have felt pain, would never have a thought or an emotion, for all practical purposes I would never have existed as a person. If my parents had decided to not have sex that night, I would also never have existed as a person. The two scenarios are completely equivalent to me, and I'm morally indifferent. Obviously they had the right not to have sex, so I'm willing to give them the right to have me aborted.