Indeed, the firmware isn't the driver. But I was talking about something a bit more basic. Jumpers or fusible links can change the hardware connections permanently. FPLAs used to be able to, but maybe now they're rewritable. It's good practice if some of the production run doesn't measure up to top specs to either underclock it or disable features (depending on the problem) until it does measure up, and then sell it as something that doesn't have those features. This can be done at the driver level, but it can also be done at the hardware level, for minimal expense. (Just don't connect some wires, or connect others.)
The "accountant driven" procedure that I was talking about is to sell your good cards as a lower end chip because you can't sell them all at the price you want to. You can still degrade them by not connecting some wires or connecting others (i.e., jumpers or fusible links). So my point was that that's not a valid reason for refusing to release the API. (Very few software developers are going to want to get in and muck around with internal jumpers that MAY result in their computer refusing to work properly. And fixing fusible links requires replacing a chip, which is even less likely. There'll be a few hardware types that do this, but that's basically free advertising. They're a small fraction of a small fraction of the market, so it's not sales to them that you are interested in, but what they say about you.)
As I said, to me the decision appears stupid, as well as unfriendly.
Even if there is, you'd never know it from the API, which is what is being requested.
Their position is silly, and both directly harmful to the company and harmful to their image. I'm much less likely to ask for a NVidia board in my next computer, which I'll be buying within a year or two. That doesn't mean I won't. This is just one factor that will enter into the consideration. But it decreases the probability considerably.
It's directly harmful because the drivers aren't a profit center for the company. If they can get someone else to improve their drivers, it's to their benefit. They probably don't believe that this can be done using only the the API, but I'd bet that they're wrong. Putting a wrapper around their driver will always be sub-optimal, but if you know the API you can often allow it to do things that it otherwise couldn't do.
My guess is that what they're doing is selling the same hardware with different drivers at different prices, and this is the reason they won't reveal the API, but that can be handled with fusible links or jumpers. Or even different FPLAs. (I'm NOT a hardware guy, so I'm not real sure what an FPLA is, just that it can be used in this way.) It's an old trick, and many companies use it, especially when they're circling the drain. Probably because it's favored by accountants, and when accountants take control of a tech company it usually dies soon after.
This is a requirement for them to be more than minimally intelligent. Asimov's third law isn't just needed for the stories to work, it's needed for the robots to work.
Now just how much they care isn't fixed. A wide range of values would yield similar results in most cases. But they must care.
A part of the idea of an intelligent machine is that it chooses what to do. You may specify a goal, and it may accept it. This is optional. But if it doesn't choose how to satisfy whatever goals it has, then it's not intelligent.
N.B.: Goals are not, and cannot, be intelligently chosen. Think of them as analogous to axioms. You can choose sub-goals, whose importance derives from the goals that they attempt to satisfy, but you can't choose the top level goals, not even very weak ones. They are on a different level of processing. They are, and must be, built in. Which presents problems, since at the time they are built in the entity doesn't know much about the external world. It is for this reason that things like "imprinting" were evolved.
You are assuming that future governments won't declare such genes to be "anti-social", and take active measures to ensure that they don't propagate. (And in the future that won't be the same as saying that the individuals that carry them can't propagate, which might remove much of the opprobrium we currently attach to such measures. Even if not, such attitudes are subject to change with social mores.)
I think you have fallen for the arguments used in Niven & Pournelle's "The Mote in God's Eye", and ignored the response the same authors made in "The Gripping Hand". Or perhaps you came to these opinions independently. But the response is as valid as the statement of the problem. Bio-Engineering applied to the dominant species can remove genetic traits that that species decides to be undesirable. And genes spread. (It's true that in "The Gripping Hand", the solution was provided in the form of an endo-parasite, and that's not an evolutionarily stable solution. It becomes an evolutionarily stable solution when it's melded into the entities genetic code, so that it's transmitted in the same way that the species genes are. Even when such melding is incomplete, as with mitochondria and, perhaps, chloroplasts. [I'm not sure about that last example.])
Do you have any examples of "species that refused to try exponential growth in the past."? The one's I can think of are currently extant, and include even some microorganisms. In most existing species the number of young raised isn't at the extreme limit of what the environment will support, but slightly less. It's usually limited to the number of young that the parents expect to be able to raise to adult (well, independence) with a (species dependent) reasonable amount of effort in an average year. (I don't know how that translates into species that take more than one year to mature.)
I will readily agree that you can find species that are exceptions, even where the parents kill themselves to raise one brood of young. But it's not typical. And human society is dependent on grandparents (except in the last couple of generations, perhaps), so they are an even more extreme example of parents not totally using themselves up to raise one set of offspring. And they have been that way since at least the old stone age.
Sorry, but you are overoptimistic about asteroid mining. For asteroid mining you need an entire industrial complex in orbit or higher. Even then... it's true that up to orbit is "half way to anywhere", but moving between asteroids isn't cheap. You can, to some extent, trade time for energy, and move about with solar powered ion-rockets, but it's SLOW.
That said, I think it's our long-term best option. But there's a few problems to solve first. And top on the list is how to maintain an ecosphere with minimal external inputs. Also note that I was talking about solar power...remember that the farther out you get, the larger your mirror needs to be. (At earth orbit you don't even need one for solar cells, but I suspect that some sort of steam engine would probably be better if you wanted a decent amount of power. It would pretty much need to be Stirling cycle, because you wouldn't want to lose working fluid, and there's the problem of getting rid of the heat before starting a new cycle...so I not certain that's the correct solution. I only suspect it.
Now robotic miners would be plausible, but then you need to haul the ore to the processing site, and then you need the haul the processed material to the factory that's going to use it, and then... Well, a good robotized system could handle all to that, but it still wouldn't provide a purpose for doing so. And being even a trifle realistic, we're a bit of a ways from robots that could handle the job.
I place asteroid mining on any significant scale at least two decades in the future. Could be three or four. And I have my doubts that it would ever pay to bring the stuff back to Earth. (Yeah, I know that there's a venture being formed right now. It *may* be successful as an exploration of possibilities, but I don't take it very seriously. It's miners the same way the California '49ers were...only requiring a much larger upfront investment.)
It probably already is. But the wireless range is quite short.
I know my wife goes in regularly for reading, and they read it with a magnetic wand that they place on her skin over the device. I believe that they've occasionally added a patch, though I admit I'm not certain about this. (The doctors are not communicative in this area, and may not be knowledgeable. It's hard to tell. They seem to often just be following a guidebook...not necessarily a bad thing.)
Same here, unless MATE works on my system (Gnome3 doesn't) or Trinity is ready. But the last time I tried KDE4... well, I'd rather use either lxde or xfce. OTOH, my wife wants me to runs something that supports the electric-sheep screensaver, and I guess that's going to mean something that runs xscreensaver.
Darwinism, aka evolution, works quite well. But it works on a time scale incompatible with your vision. And it works in complex ways. Both K and R strategies are successful. Humans, by the way, are basically K strategists, having few children, but investing a lot of resources in them. And stable populations at any size are an evolutionarily stable strategy. Growing populations are a dubious strategy, usually used by a heavily predated population, that depends on fluctuating levels of population to control the number of predators. Canadian Lynx and rabbits are a famous example, but the Katydids are probably an even more extreme example.
Don't let an oversimplified model of evolution blind you to the complexities that it contains. But also remember that fast action in evolutionary time is one that occurs over 100,000 years. (It used to be said a million years, but evidence indicates that states can shift a lot more quickly than that.) But to culture that's so slow that it might as well not be happening at all. In less than a decade I expect we'll start seeing GMO or GE people. Possibly sooner. Expect it to start small, with changes to remove a known hereditary disease, but it won't stay small. (Of course, we may experience an environmental collapse, possibly as the result of war, that sends us back to the stone age, but that's about the only alternative.)
Sorry, but the population is currently between 2 and 10 (or 20) times what it should be for long term stability. And it's still increasing. The rate at which the growth is slowing is not going to be sufficient to keep the rising population from damaging the planet to the point where the number of people it can support stably is reduced. In fact that's already been happening.
The methods China used were very unpleasant, but reports say they were successful. I'm not sure I believe those reports, but I doubt that milder measures would have worked.
That said, in good years we currently produce more food that people eat. But not in a way that can be stably maintained. It's like oil, we're using up our topsoil, and replacing it with substitutes that require more effort to yield the same results. And soil regenerates slowly, on a human scale.
That said, I'm not convinced that GE/GMO crops are generally attempts to address the problem. And the resistance to them is not just because the people don't trust new things, it's because they don't trust the purveyors of the "new things", and with very good reason. You don't hear about protests against golden rice. I'm sure they happen, but they aren't widespread. And it's a genetically engineered food. But the people who experience the risks share in the benefits. This is not the common expectation, and for very good historical reasons...that very rarely happens.
If they want to reduce resistance, share the benefits, and don't keep farmers from replanting their crops. And they'll still meet with resistance, as is only appropriate. But if they share the benefits, the resistance will be minor...unless there aren't really many benefits.
FWIW, they just tried to claim that APIs could be copyrighted. That makes them the enemy of every programmer in the US, no matter who they work for, or in what environment. You may not know it, but if you're a US programmer, Oracle is your enemy.
It's true they've currently lost that case, but it will be appealed.
A good point, with lots of evidence going for it. But it's not the only possible explanation. Don't decide too quickly. After all, you don't need to decide, until you decide to act, and even then it just needs to be an action that's compatible with your decision about what you believe to have happened.
There's nothing saying that Microsoft, and/or the AntiVirus companies aren't BOTH corrupt and incompetent. And I don't see any evidence against that supposition. Still, I wouldn't want to claim it was proven. They might be only one.
My *guess* was that he meant things like Scientific American, Science Digest, New Scientist, etc. As opposed to Nature, Chemica Acta, etc. (I don't follow the second series, myself. Once upon a time I wanted to, but I also wanted to do other things...and the other things won. But I still follow the popularized Science magazines.)
Well, my grandfather had propane delivered that way, so I don't see why it couldn't be delivered that way today. And most of the "green bio-fuel generators" are designed to work in an industrial environment. It's not a replacement for the compost pile, but rather for the oil-well. (Admittedly, it doesn't do a good job of replacing the oil well, but it's not something that will soon run out, either. And it doesn't add to the carbon dioxide level the way burning oil does. And as oil gets more expensive, the alternatives all start looking better, even though none of them are quite a flexible, so you need to implement a large variety of methods.)
That said, I've got my doubts about this particular approach leading anywhere. But it's not my baby, so I don't need to care. Every approach seems unlikely when it first appears. Some of them start looking a lot better after they develop a bit. But if you want something for your rural homestead that doesn't require outside servicing, build your own windmill or water wheel. If you need to buy parts to build it, you aren't going to be independent when it breaks. Note that I didn't suggest something even as high-tech as a steam engine. Too many parts that YOU won't be able to replace. Or, you could admit that you don't want to be that independent, and accept buying deliveries of propane, and buy an occasional part for you water pump, etc.
You're making the (I believe false) assumption that what they want is different. AFAIKT the only difference is that the two parties are attempting to appeal to a different block of voters. But they don't really care! They are supported financially by the same funding groups, and neither will do anything that might antagonize those groups. Which means that the only difference is the rhetoric. And the ways in which they oppress the populace, but even those are tightly constrained by their supporters.
E.g.: I recently predicted that if Romney gets elected he will NOT cut Medicare more than symbolically. This is because it would antagonize his backers in the pharmaceutical industry and in the health insurance industry.
I don't really want to find out whether my prediction is correct, because in some ways the Republicans *do* act significantly worse than the Democrats, from my point of view. But this is so minor, that I'm planning on voting 3rd party this year, just as a "A plague on both your houses" kind of statement. I know it won't do any good, but I sure can't vote for Obama, after he signed that bill saying that he had the right to kill anyone he felt like without trial, notice, or appeal.
There was more than one group. I suspect that you are correct about the Puritans, but they aren't the only group. E.g., the Quakers (Society of Friends) settled Pennsylvania, and they weren't interested in discriminating against anyone except the atheists and the agnostics. The Hessian mercenaries just wanted a place they could earn a living. The Oglethorpe colony in Georgia were there because they were sentenced to "Transportation for Life" (as later happened in Australia). Etc. (Sorry, I can't remember all of the early groups.)
Reagan was, indeed, a douchebag, but you can't prove that from his activities as president. At that time he was suffering from Alzheimer. (Watch the "Evil Empire" speech, and then compare it to some of his acting in movies to see how this affected things. He sort of "came loose in time", and couldn't tell whether he was acting or for real.)
Before I knew it was Alzheimer's syndrome, I thought it was just an extreme Stanislavsky method acting carryover. But Alzheimer's also explains it, and was proven.
Do some systems analysis. The plurality, rather than majority, vote means that third parties are essentially irrelevant. If a majority were required, then a third party would have some strength, but when candidates can be elected with 33.33334% of the vote, third parties are irrelevant. If a candidate required that more than 50% of the voters approved of him to be elected, then third parties would matter. Similar arguments favor Instant Runoff Voting and (my favorite) Condorcet. (Note that both Instant Runoff and Condorcet are merely efficient implementations of requiring majority support. But I don't insist on efficiency, as long as an incumbent can't make an interim appointment.)
I also support requiring a majority of support to pass a bit in either house of the legislature. Abstentions should be essentially votes against the bill. If you can't get enough support, perhaps it shouldn't be passed. Similarly, it should require a 2/3 vote of ALL MEMBERS OF the Senate to commit military forces outside the country. As the constitution says. (Yes, it talks about declaration of war. But that meant commitment of military forces. The government has never interpreted it that way, but any reasonable person would have...before the government had abused it for so long that it's been forgotten just how dishonorable an undeclared war was deemed as being...and the presumption in accepting it was that we would never be so dishonorable.)
You do huh. He signed a bill saying that he can order anyone killed without trial, and you're guaranteeing that he's leaving office with the country better than it was before he took office?
I think we disagree about what it meant by "better".
You may "need" air conditioning, but there are ways and ways. With decent insulation, you need a lot less air conditioning. I don't know what your understory is like, but in many places you can store heat there in summer, and withdraw it in winter (using some sort of heat pump). That's not enough on it's own, but combined with decent insulation, it get's you quite close to reasonable. Then you need only a quite small amount of either air conditioning or heating.
That said, I'd expect that in Houston the most reasonable alternative would be solar. (And since you're in town, it's not reasonable to even try to get off the grid.)
But the first step is GOOD insulation. With good enough insulation, you could overheat a house just by living in it, even during a blizzard, but that much is unreasonable. It does, however, imply that you'll need some air condition, and air circulation, too, but the air circulation system could go via a heat exchanger, so not too much heat transferred via that pathway.
OTOH... you won't see me investing in that kind of system. Yes, it would work, but it's too complex, and would probably require lots of maintenance. But with proper design, 2 KW should be plenty. It's just that proper design is quite rare. (FWIW, my wife thinks that we have good insulation. It is to laugh. The wind blows through the house, even with the doors closed. But it suffices for our environment [SF Bay]. Elsewhere I'd be much more interested in better insulation.)
A decent point, but lots of renewable energy sources readily produce methane. Which can be easily stored, if you don't mind a heavy pressure tank. (Think propane tank. So it's not all *that* heavy, but it sure isn't light.)
He also said he found that approach so distasteful that he only used it a few times, even though it worked.
From my point of view, porn is more honorable, and less harmful. I considered matters, and decided I didn't need to try the approach Feynman mentioned. (Forget who suggested it to him.) I could tell ahead of time that I wouldn't like the results. (A couple of times I slipped into an analogous position by accident, and it was always something that would have been better avoided.)
Please understand, I'm not saying that it is an inherently unethical or immoral approach. If used honestly, it escapes those problems. But it's still something better avoided, because of it's effects on *you*.
That was my experience too. Of course, I identified several causes that made things worse, and which were, at the time, unusual. Moving every 2-3 years while growing up didn't help at all, e.g. Funny thing, that seems to have become more common.
So quite possibly teenagers are now less socially apt than they were. I don't know. But there are many reasons why this might well be so.
That said, it's quite possible that computer games render recovery more difficult. (Recovery? But what better word is there?) This doesn't make them the proximate cause. I'd be more willing to blame parents keeping their children locked in their homes "for safety's sake". Or moving around more. Or loss of neighborhood schools. Or... Please note that each one of these "possible causative factors" has it's own separate reasons for happening. So fixing the problem isn't simple, and fixing the problem would only help the next generation, not the current one.
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Indeed, the firmware isn't the driver. But I was talking about something a bit more basic. Jumpers or fusible links can change the hardware connections permanently. FPLAs used to be able to, but maybe now they're rewritable. It's good practice if some of the production run doesn't measure up to top specs to either underclock it or disable features (depending on the problem) until it does measure up, and then sell it as something that doesn't have those features. This can be done at the driver level, but it can also be done at the hardware level, for minimal expense. (Just don't connect some wires, or connect others.)
The "accountant driven" procedure that I was talking about is to sell your good cards as a lower end chip because you can't sell them all at the price you want to. You can still degrade them by not connecting some wires or connecting others (i.e., jumpers or fusible links). So my point was that that's not a valid reason for refusing to release the API. (Very few software developers are going to want to get in and muck around with internal jumpers that MAY result in their computer refusing to work properly. And fixing fusible links requires replacing a chip, which is even less likely. There'll be a few hardware types that do this, but that's basically free advertising. They're a small fraction of a small fraction of the market, so it's not sales to them that you are interested in, but what they say about you.)
As I said, to me the decision appears stupid, as well as unfriendly.
The problem is, it's not wise to encourage a monopoly, even if only one manufacturer is behaving reasonably. I don't know what the answer it.
Even if there is, you'd never know it from the API, which is what is being requested.
Their position is silly, and both directly harmful to the company and harmful to their image. I'm much less likely to ask for a NVidia board in my next computer, which I'll be buying within a year or two. That doesn't mean I won't. This is just one factor that will enter into the consideration. But it decreases the probability considerably.
It's directly harmful because the drivers aren't a profit center for the company. If they can get someone else to improve their drivers, it's to their benefit. They probably don't believe that this can be done using only the the API, but I'd bet that they're wrong. Putting a wrapper around their driver will always be sub-optimal, but if you know the API you can often allow it to do things that it otherwise couldn't do.
My guess is that what they're doing is selling the same hardware with different drivers at different prices, and this is the reason they won't reveal the API, but that can be handled with fusible links or jumpers. Or even different FPLAs. (I'm NOT a hardware guy, so I'm not real sure what an FPLA is, just that it can be used in this way.) It's an old trick, and many companies use it, especially when they're circling the drain. Probably because it's favored by accountants, and when accountants take control of a tech company it usually dies soon after.
This is a requirement for them to be more than minimally intelligent. Asimov's third law isn't just needed for the stories to work, it's needed for the robots to work.
Now just how much they care isn't fixed. A wide range of values would yield similar results in most cases. But they must care.
A part of the idea of an intelligent machine is that it chooses what to do. You may specify a goal, and it may accept it. This is optional. But if it doesn't choose how to satisfy whatever goals it has, then it's not intelligent.
N.B.: Goals are not, and cannot, be intelligently chosen. Think of them as analogous to axioms. You can choose sub-goals, whose importance derives from the goals that they attempt to satisfy, but you can't choose the top level goals, not even very weak ones. They are on a different level of processing. They are, and must be, built in. Which presents problems, since at the time they are built in the entity doesn't know much about the external world. It is for this reason that things like "imprinting" were evolved.
You are assuming that future governments won't declare such genes to be "anti-social", and take active measures to ensure that they don't propagate. (And in the future that won't be the same as saying that the individuals that carry them can't propagate, which might remove much of the opprobrium we currently attach to such measures. Even if not, such attitudes are subject to change with social mores.)
I think you have fallen for the arguments used in Niven & Pournelle's "The Mote in God's Eye", and ignored the response the same authors made in "The Gripping Hand". Or perhaps you came to these opinions independently. But the response is as valid as the statement of the problem. Bio-Engineering applied to the dominant species can remove genetic traits that that species decides to be undesirable. And genes spread. (It's true that in "The Gripping Hand", the solution was provided in the form of an endo-parasite, and that's not an evolutionarily stable solution. It becomes an evolutionarily stable solution when it's melded into the entities genetic code, so that it's transmitted in the same way that the species genes are. Even when such melding is incomplete, as with mitochondria and, perhaps, chloroplasts. [I'm not sure about that last example.])
Do you have any examples of "species that refused to try exponential growth in the past."? The one's I can think of are currently extant, and include even some microorganisms. In most existing species the number of young raised isn't at the extreme limit of what the environment will support, but slightly less. It's usually limited to the number of young that the parents expect to be able to raise to adult (well, independence) with a (species dependent) reasonable amount of effort in an average year. (I don't know how that translates into species that take more than one year to mature.)
I will readily agree that you can find species that are exceptions, even where the parents kill themselves to raise one brood of young. But it's not typical. And human society is dependent on grandparents (except in the last couple of generations, perhaps), so they are an even more extreme example of parents not totally using themselves up to raise one set of offspring. And they have been that way since at least the old stone age.
Sorry, but you are overoptimistic about asteroid mining. For asteroid mining you need an entire industrial complex in orbit or higher. Even then ... it's true that up to orbit is "half way to anywhere", but moving between asteroids isn't cheap. You can, to some extent, trade time for energy, and move about with solar powered ion-rockets, but it's SLOW.
That said, I think it's our long-term best option. But there's a few problems to solve first. And top on the list is how to maintain an ecosphere with minimal external inputs. Also note that I was talking about solar power...remember that the farther out you get, the larger your mirror needs to be. (At earth orbit you don't even need one for solar cells, but I suspect that some sort of steam engine would probably be better if you wanted a decent amount of power. It would pretty much need to be Stirling cycle, because you wouldn't want to lose working fluid, and there's the problem of getting rid of the heat before starting a new cycle...so I not certain that's the correct solution. I only suspect it.
Now robotic miners would be plausible, but then you need to haul the ore to the processing site, and then you need the haul the processed material to the factory that's going to use it, and then... Well, a good robotized system could handle all to that, but it still wouldn't provide a purpose for doing so. And being even a trifle realistic, we're a bit of a ways from robots that could handle the job.
I place asteroid mining on any significant scale at least two decades in the future. Could be three or four. And I have my doubts that it would ever pay to bring the stuff back to Earth. (Yeah, I know that there's a venture being formed right now. It *may* be successful as an exploration of possibilities, but I don't take it very seriously. It's miners the same way the California '49ers were...only requiring a much larger upfront investment.)
It probably already is. But the wireless range is quite short.
I know my wife goes in regularly for reading, and they read it with a magnetic wand that they place on her skin over the device. I believe that they've occasionally added a patch, though I admit I'm not certain about this. (The doctors are not communicative in this area, and may not be knowledgeable. It's hard to tell. They seem to often just be following a guidebook...not necessarily a bad thing.)
Same here, unless MATE works on my system (Gnome3 doesn't) or Trinity is ready. But the last time I tried KDE4 ... well, I'd rather use either lxde or xfce. OTOH, my wife wants me to runs something that supports the electric-sheep screensaver, and I guess that's going to mean something that runs xscreensaver.
Darwinism, aka evolution, works quite well. But it works on a time scale incompatible with your vision. And it works in complex ways. Both K and R strategies are successful. Humans, by the way, are basically K strategists, having few children, but investing a lot of resources in them. And stable populations at any size are an evolutionarily stable strategy. Growing populations are a dubious strategy, usually used by a heavily predated population, that depends on fluctuating levels of population to control the number of predators. Canadian Lynx and rabbits are a famous example, but the Katydids are probably an even more extreme example.
Don't let an oversimplified model of evolution blind you to the complexities that it contains. But also remember that fast action in evolutionary time is one that occurs over 100,000 years. (It used to be said a million years, but evidence indicates that states can shift a lot more quickly than that.) But to culture that's so slow that it might as well not be happening at all. In less than a decade I expect we'll start seeing GMO or GE people. Possibly sooner. Expect it to start small, with changes to remove a known hereditary disease, but it won't stay small. (Of course, we may experience an environmental collapse, possibly as the result of war, that sends us back to the stone age, but that's about the only alternative.)
Sorry, but the population is currently between 2 and 10 (or 20) times what it should be for long term stability. And it's still increasing. The rate at which the growth is slowing is not going to be sufficient to keep the rising population from damaging the planet to the point where the number of people it can support stably is reduced. In fact that's already been happening.
The methods China used were very unpleasant, but reports say they were successful. I'm not sure I believe those reports, but I doubt that milder measures would have worked.
That said, in good years we currently produce more food that people eat. But not in a way that can be stably maintained. It's like oil, we're using up our topsoil, and replacing it with substitutes that require more effort to yield the same results. And soil regenerates slowly, on a human scale.
That said, I'm not convinced that GE/GMO crops are generally attempts to address the problem. And the resistance to them is not just because the people don't trust new things, it's because they don't trust the purveyors of the "new things", and with very good reason. You don't hear about protests against golden rice. I'm sure they happen, but they aren't widespread. And it's a genetically engineered food. But the people who experience the risks share in the benefits. This is not the common expectation, and for very good historical reasons...that very rarely happens.
If they want to reduce resistance, share the benefits, and don't keep farmers from replanting their crops. And they'll still meet with resistance, as is only appropriate. But if they share the benefits, the resistance will be minor...unless there aren't really many benefits.
FWIW, they just tried to claim that APIs could be copyrighted. That makes them the enemy of every programmer in the US, no matter who they work for, or in what environment. You may not know it, but if you're a US programmer, Oracle is your enemy.
It's true they've currently lost that case, but it will be appealed.
A good point, with lots of evidence going for it. But it's not the only possible explanation. Don't decide too quickly. After all, you don't need to decide, until you decide to act, and even then it just needs to be an action that's compatible with your decision about what you believe to have happened.
There's nothing saying that Microsoft, and/or the AntiVirus companies aren't BOTH corrupt and incompetent. And I don't see any evidence against that supposition. Still, I wouldn't want to claim it was proven. They might be only one.
My *guess* was that he meant things like Scientific American, Science Digest, New Scientist, etc. As opposed to Nature, Chemica Acta, etc. (I don't follow the second series, myself. Once upon a time I wanted to, but I also wanted to do other things...and the other things won. But I still follow the popularized Science magazines.)
Well, my grandfather had propane delivered that way, so I don't see why it couldn't be delivered that way today. And most of the "green bio-fuel generators" are designed to work in an industrial environment. It's not a replacement for the compost pile, but rather for the oil-well. (Admittedly, it doesn't do a good job of replacing the oil well, but it's not something that will soon run out, either. And it doesn't add to the carbon dioxide level the way burning oil does. And as oil gets more expensive, the alternatives all start looking better, even though none of them are quite a flexible, so you need to implement a large variety of methods.)
That said, I've got my doubts about this particular approach leading anywhere. But it's not my baby, so I don't need to care. Every approach seems unlikely when it first appears. Some of them start looking a lot better after they develop a bit. But if you want something for your rural homestead that doesn't require outside servicing, build your own windmill or water wheel. If you need to buy parts to build it, you aren't going to be independent when it breaks. Note that I didn't suggest something even as high-tech as a steam engine. Too many parts that YOU won't be able to replace. Or, you could admit that you don't want to be that independent, and accept buying deliveries of propane, and buy an occasional part for you water pump, etc.
You're making the (I believe false) assumption that what they want is different. AFAIKT the only difference is that the two parties are attempting to appeal to a different block of voters. But they don't really care! They are supported financially by the same funding groups, and neither will do anything that might antagonize those groups. Which means that the only difference is the rhetoric. And the ways in which they oppress the populace, but even those are tightly constrained by their supporters.
E.g.: I recently predicted that if Romney gets elected he will NOT cut Medicare more than symbolically. This is because it would antagonize his backers in the pharmaceutical industry and in the health insurance industry.
I don't really want to find out whether my prediction is correct, because in some ways the Republicans *do* act significantly worse than the Democrats, from my point of view. But this is so minor, that I'm planning on voting 3rd party this year, just as a "A plague on both your houses" kind of statement. I know it won't do any good, but I sure can't vote for Obama, after he signed that bill saying that he had the right to kill anyone he felt like without trial, notice, or appeal.
There was more than one group. I suspect that you are correct about the Puritans, but they aren't the only group. E.g., the Quakers (Society of Friends) settled Pennsylvania, and they weren't interested in discriminating against anyone except the atheists and the agnostics. The Hessian mercenaries just wanted a place they could earn a living. The Oglethorpe colony in Georgia were there because they were sentenced to "Transportation for Life" (as later happened in Australia). Etc. (Sorry, I can't remember all of the early groups.)
Reagan was, indeed, a douchebag, but you can't prove that from his activities as president. At that time he was suffering from Alzheimer. (Watch the "Evil Empire" speech, and then compare it to some of his acting in movies to see how this affected things. He sort of "came loose in time", and couldn't tell whether he was acting or for real.)
Before I knew it was Alzheimer's syndrome, I thought it was just an extreme Stanislavsky method acting carryover. But Alzheimer's also explains it, and was proven.
Do some systems analysis. The plurality, rather than majority, vote means that third parties are essentially irrelevant. If a majority were required, then a third party would have some strength, but when candidates can be elected with 33.33334% of the vote, third parties are irrelevant. If a candidate required that more than 50% of the voters approved of him to be elected, then third parties would matter. Similar arguments favor Instant Runoff Voting and (my favorite) Condorcet. (Note that both Instant Runoff and Condorcet are merely efficient implementations of requiring majority support. But I don't insist on efficiency, as long as an incumbent can't make an interim appointment.)
I also support requiring a majority of support to pass a bit in either house of the legislature. Abstentions should be essentially votes against the bill. If you can't get enough support, perhaps it shouldn't be passed. Similarly, it should require a 2/3 vote of ALL MEMBERS OF the Senate to commit military forces outside the country. As the constitution says. (Yes, it talks about declaration of war. But that meant commitment of military forces. The government has never interpreted it that way, but any reasonable person would have...before the government had abused it for so long that it's been forgotten just how dishonorable an undeclared war was deemed as being...and the presumption in accepting it was that we would never be so dishonorable.)
You do huh.
He signed a bill saying that he can order anyone killed without trial, and you're guaranteeing that he's leaving office with the country better than it was before he took office?
I think we disagree about what it meant by "better".
You may "need" air conditioning, but there are ways and ways. With decent insulation, you need a lot less air conditioning. I don't know what your understory is like, but in many places you can store heat there in summer, and withdraw it in winter (using some sort of heat pump). That's not enough on it's own, but combined with decent insulation, it get's you quite close to reasonable. Then you need only a quite small amount of either air conditioning or heating.
That said, I'd expect that in Houston the most reasonable alternative would be solar. (And since you're in town, it's not reasonable to even try to get off the grid.)
But the first step is GOOD insulation. With good enough insulation, you could overheat a house just by living in it, even during a blizzard, but that much is unreasonable. It does, however, imply that you'll need some air condition, and air circulation, too, but the air circulation system could go via a heat exchanger, so not too much heat transferred via that pathway.
OTOH ... you won't see me investing in that kind of system. Yes, it would work, but it's too complex, and would probably require lots of maintenance. But with proper design, 2 KW should be plenty. It's just that proper design is quite rare. (FWIW, my wife thinks that we have good insulation. It is to laugh. The wind blows through the house, even with the doors closed. But it suffices for our environment [SF Bay]. Elsewhere I'd be much more interested in better insulation.)
A decent point, but lots of renewable energy sources readily produce methane. Which can be easily stored, if you don't mind a heavy pressure tank. (Think propane tank. So it's not all *that* heavy, but it sure isn't light.)
That sounds like you haven't been listening to the presidents, but I suspect that you just aren't counting malice as stupidity.
He also said he found that approach so distasteful that he only used it a few times, even though it worked.
From my point of view, porn is more honorable, and less harmful. I considered matters, and decided I didn't need to try the approach Feynman mentioned. (Forget who suggested it to him.) I could tell ahead of time that I wouldn't like the results. (A couple of times I slipped into an analogous position by accident, and it was always something that would have been better avoided.)
Please understand, I'm not saying that it is an inherently unethical or immoral approach. If used honestly, it escapes those problems. But it's still something better avoided, because of it's effects on *you*.
That was my experience too. Of course, I identified several causes that made things worse, and which were, at the time, unusual. Moving every 2-3 years while growing up didn't help at all, e.g. Funny thing, that seems to have become more common.
So quite possibly teenagers are now less socially apt than they were. I don't know. But there are many reasons why this might well be so.
That said, it's quite possible that computer games render recovery more difficult. (Recovery? But what better word is there?) This doesn't make them the proximate cause. I'd be more willing to blame parents keeping their children locked in their homes "for safety's sake". Or moving around more. Or loss of neighborhood schools. Or... Please note that each one of these "possible causative factors" has it's own separate reasons for happening. So fixing the problem isn't simple, and fixing the problem would only help the next generation, not the current one.