My source was Groklaw, and they referenced an original source, though I don't remember what it was. It was in yesterday's posts. Search for "Sun" + "Motorola".
If the intent is to prevent crimes, you don't need to arrest someone, only to, *IF* they were planning to commit a crime, discourage them. Discourage them for awhile, and they'll form a different habit patten, and no crimes occurred.
FWIW, this is a one sentence summary of an analysis of New York's, apparently working, crime reduction strategy. My summary of an article from a recent Scientific American. Is it working? Apparently statistics from several sources say that it is.
This year the city I live in is broke, and struggling not to lose police officers. A couple of years ago we had 35 openings that we couldn't get recruits for even after trying for over a year. We voted in a special bond issue, and then actually had to struggle not to lose police officers faster than we could hire them.
OTOH, if *I* were a police officer, this is one of the last cities that I'd want to work in. There've been several scandals, and large segments of the populace don't trust the police to be fair or honest, and with good reason. Still, hiring more cops is more easily said than done.
FWIW, see the Scientific American recently on how New York dealt with the crime problem, and how it has reduced crime without increasing incarceration. The key appears to be intensive surveillance of "hot spots". This sounds like another version of the same thing.
Anybody lives in New York want to comment on that Scientific American article?
Well, it's not *just* patents. Motorola also had a special Java license. That might well be nice insurance against Oracle. (We don't really know, because the details of the license aren't public. Which, itself, is interesting.)
Actually, it's not clear that Google has much interest in the "Motorola Mobility" division that it just bought, except for the patents. Well, that's not quite right. I should have said "in the current products of"... As has been previously mentioned, Google is interested in their patent holdings, and it generally prefers to innovate where there isn't a lot of competition. So the current employees are probably going to find themelves busily engaged in the design of something new. Someone mentioned "Google TV", and I suppose that's a possibility. But others have looked more towards an electronic wallet that will replace credit and debit cards. (Personally I'd be leery of that one, but it could be *very* convenient.) Or it could be a game machine. (Probably not, as that's an area that already has lots of competition...but maybe, if they've got a good enough new idea.) Or maybe a phone with a "virtual you" that can take messages for you, and deliver prerecorded messages to pre-defined callers. (Google would need an breakthrough in artificial speech recognition to do what I'm thinking, but perhaps...)
Anyway, you get the idea I have of what they're up to. And it's not the standard smartphone market. The question is, how could they fund it? Their clear preference is for soft-sell ads, so that's probably the area to look, but I'm no salesman.
I approve of the GPL, but the copyright period is FAR too long. Of course, that's not the doing of the FSF, so don't blame them, but they could have thrown the code into public domain after five years. Or maybe ten.
I *KNOW* there is evidence. I just don't find it *enough* evidence. Yes, there's clearly something there that needs explaining. And I don't have a better explanation. But I don't need an explanation in anything I'm doing, so I'd rather wait a bit and see if something better shows up. And, yes, I've been waiting for decades now. So? I'm not in any hurry. If I were working in the field, then I'd be wondering about what better explanation was possible, but I'm a retired programmer. If I have to wait the rest of my life, that's no problem.
FWIW, I don't like the "cosmic inflation" theory either. That's another one that I expect to eventually be replaced. But I have no idea by what, and it does fit the current evidence. (And there's a lot more evidence for it to fit.) So maybe it will stand. But I still don't like it. That "phase change" thing bothers me, as it was just dragged in, and I don't know of any evidence in favor of it that wasn't known before it was proposed. (There could be lots, but I don't know it.) OTOH, the general theory fits a LOT of evidence. So something with a whole bunch of the same effects is going to be needed. This isn't true of dark matter/dark energy. There's evidence, and it's been accumulating slowly. But it's still too thin for me to accept the theories.
And, yes, I know of the Bullet Cluster. I didn't recall it when the post was originally made, but I remember it now. And yes, it's going to be difficult for something else to explain. But I need better evidence than that. Better characterization of what dark matter is would be a good start. I don't know what the "better evidence" for dark energy would look like. Intuitively it should tie dark energy into the big bang, but that's just a guess.
Well, there's also a lot of: You're assuming that 90% of the universe is invisible on the basis of *what* evidence? I'd like a bit of better evidence, please, before I swallow something like that.
It's something that *could* be true, but the evidence is pretty thin for the size of the hypothesis. Maybe it's the best we can do, and maybe it isn't. For a while longer I'm going to presume that eventually we'll come up with either a better answer, or more convincing evidence. The current evidence is proof of something, but it's not clear that what it's a proof of is the current best theory. Maybe it would be better to suspend premature certainty.
N.B.: I, and many others, aren't active physicists, so we don't NEED to decide what things mean right now. It's ok for us to suspend belief, and not be certain which theory is correct. Start making predictions that directly affect us, and this will change. I believe that the previous sentence also applies to most active physicists. And even to many cosmologists.
But I admit to being skeptical about dark matter and dark energy. They're explaining something, but I doubt that they are the correct explanation. What I see them as being is something that's good enough to allow the equations to balance right now. But given the paucity of evidence, I'm not convinced that they're the right shape for an explanation.
It's sort of strange. I'm rather attached to the multi-world interpretation of quantum theory, and that also has no effect on what I see or do. It could be Copenhagen and it wouldn't make any practical difference to me. But I dislike the Copenhagen interpretation. And there is *NO* evidence to allow one to choose between them.
IIRC, phlogiston was one of the theories that lead to the atomic theory. In fact I seem to recall the Priestly (Lavoisier?) first called Oxygen "de-phlogistonated air" or some such. It was wrong, but a vital step along the way to a better theory.
I've heard marvelous things about golden rice. The others I don't know about. I'd like to taste a "rainbow papaya". I have my doubts that it's taste would be up to that of a ripe Hawaiian papaya, but as I no longer live in Hawaii, I no longer taste those anyway. (The stuff you can buy in the stores here doesn't even seem to be the same fruit. And I mean the ones imported from Hawaii. The Mexican papaya are clearly quite different, but, if they were picked ripe, they might actually turn out to be edible. As it is, frozen papaya chunks are closer than any fresh fruit I can buy. Sorry for the digression.)
The Honeysweet plum sounds interesting, but as I said, I don't know anything about it. The biocassava sounds useful rather than interesting. (I'm not a big tapioca fan, but I know that in many places cassava is a staple starch.)
But: Who holds the patents? Are the farmers allowed to harvest the seed for replanting? Those are the first two questions I look at.
Benefits to who and costs to who? Frequently those are differing "who"'s with differing amounts of political power.
Don't expect this to self-correct without a lot of public pressure. Even that might be optimistic.
I don't really know about Britain, but in the US we seem to have been on a one-way trip towards a dictatorship since Nixon. What Nixon got impeached for wouldn't even make headlines today.
This is, at least often, the problem. OTOH, it's also occasionally true that there *IS* a shortfall in production. But it's not generally clear that GMO foods would solve the problem.
E.G.: In northern India the farmers are depleting the water table faster that it is replenished. If they grew wheat instead of rice this would be less of a problem, as wheat requires a lot less water. What's actually being done is improvements in techniques for monitoring soil moisture, so they won't water quite as much.
Still, "Golden rice" is a good answer to a real problem. If it weren't for the legal complications I'd consider GMO foods to be a reasonable bet. As it is, however, they look like a tool whose main effect will be to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of people who historically have shown little or no interest in bettering the human condition. (This doesn't inherently mean that they're opposed to it, merely that they don't count it on their balance sheets at all.)
It's not even that unexpectable. When plants & animals have their genomes streamlined, and are designed to grow faster, one thing that's often removed is some of the vitamins traditionally made by the plant. This is often well known. (E.g., there are reports that the GM salmon being proposed are skimpy in some of the omega oils. Vital? No. Important? Yes.) But a real problem is that often a complete analysis isn't done, and we don't yet know what is needed to keep people healthy.
Now this wouldn't necessarily be all that bad, but the corporations have lobbied to get requirements that GM foods be so labeled forbidden. So you can't necessarily tell what you're getting. And this is already the current state. If GM foods become more prevalent, one can expect it to become more extensive. After all, it is to the benefit of those who control wealth and power.
As a result of this (and of patent law) I am generally opposed to GM foods. The technical capability is there to produce wonders, but those who control the decisions seem to generally have other interests in mind.
I *am* opposed ot GM foods, but largely because of patent law. Most of the technical problems encountered so have easy technical solutions. Legal problems are something else. The laws might have been specially designed to allow corporations to commit any evil they choose and escape from paying for the damage caused. This coupled with patent laws causes me to be strongly opposed to GM foods, and to many other GM products.
War has been an economic disaster, even for the winning side, and even if that side was never invaded, since around 1700. Possibly earlier. If you go much further back, however, the winning side was often able to gain sufficient booty to make it profitable.
Being an economic disaster, however, doesn't seem to have stopped them. For one thing, the disaster isn't evenly spread, and some small groups have benefited from wars. Generally either politicians or military suppliers, and a very few soldiers. (Almost all generals or higher.) N.B.: I'm not including quartermasters, etc. who often transplant criminal activities into the military with even a slight gain in profitability, and with reduced risk of getting caught (though the penalties if they are caught are often harsher). These folk, I feel, were criminal in any event, and war is just another background against which to carry on business as usual.
I think you're believing a simplified history. There have been "civil rights movements" since long before the civil war. Rosa Parks was one person, but she wasn't acting alone, either.
This is not to say that it would be an easy modeling job. But if you accept that it will be probabilistic, then it may not be impossible. Anything better than probabilistic is probably impossible because of chaotic interactions, though. But an objective (i.e. non-mammalian) observer might find it easier than weather prediction. (I think we have biases that tend to blind us to things we don't want to see. [For a peculiar meaning of "want". I'm simply implying that our event recognition system has attractors and repulsors. We tend to ignore things near repulsors and to notice things near attractors. We want to see a predator stalking us, even though we don't desire that one be there.])
Given "I could train anyone in three months", I would guess that he's a lawyer, and he would charge you his normal rates. And that he would bill 24 hours/day. And that you would be constrained to not do anything but train (and a minimum of feeding and hygiene).
Also that you would only learn how to pass the bar exam. He didn't promise anything else. E.g., he didn't promise to make you a decent lawyer, and in fact indicated that this wasn't required to pass the bar exam. This is known as teaching to the test, not quite common in the public school system. It teaches you to pass the test, and nothing else. And passing the test is generally useless for any other purpose. The idea of a test is that it's supposed to be a random sampling of the things that you would learn in the process of becoming skilled. If all you learn is the isolated facts that you are tested upon, it's generally quite useless.
For that matter you can construct a digital computer out of jujubes and matchboxes. Following a Scientific American article I once built one that was base three, and could learn to play flawless tic-tac-toe.
Of course, it was also analog, as every computer it when it interfaces with the human sensoria. You don't really see the picture of a penguin on the screen. You see an analogy-image built out of colored pixels. The jujube computer, requiring a lot more in-depth interaction by the user, had that kind of analogy deeply embedded in it. And it was specialized...it could only learn a game that was played on the tic-tac-toe board, and only involved making one indelible mark on the board at each turn, and where the game was turn oriented, and there was one other opponent...probably a few more restrictions. Some, involving symmetry, were just there so that the number of matchboxes (and jujubes) could be reduced.
So. The line between analog and digital isn't that clearly drawn. But the memory of the computer was digital base three. (Each matchbox started off with equal numbers of three colors of jujube. A color was drawn at random, and each color corresponded to a move. If it won the game, you returned the jujubes to the matchbox. Otherwise you ate them (or otherwise removed them from play). (I may be misremembering. It might have been base four. One color per possible move, anyway.)
But it was digital because the memory was stored as discrete items, and it was analog because it was constructed in analogy to a game like tic-tac-toe. (Not necessarily the same game, mind you. There were some different games that it could learn, but they were all quite similar to tic-tac-toe. And it could only learn one.)
A ceiling mount probably isn't needed. You could probably substitute a mirror, with the transmitter somewhere else in the room. Given the summary, I don't think this is point-to-point, but rather broadcast within a small volume. And the signaling system probably *would* be Ethernet, just not over cable.
The data have been fudged. There are many minor incidents that are never reported, so the don't appear in the records. There have been safety violations that have gone unfixed for years. Were they important? I have no way of judging.
Also plants are in the process of being re-licensed which have known safety problems, which are beyond their design life, and to operate at levels of power beyond what was specified for their safe operation when they were new. Some of them are the same model as that used in Fukishima. (Which the Japanese were readying for retirement as obsolete.) AFAIK the plants haven't yet been re-licensed, but it is apparently expected that they will be.
As for the "100 year storm", yes, everyone understands that this means a storm that occurs in the area once in 100 years. (This is generally a lie, but that's what it means anyway.) But storms have only a local effect.
I happen to live in an area that is marked on the map as flooded once every 100 years. It's clearly wrong. Perhaps engineering has changed the terrain (it has). Perhaps for other reasons. At this point I'd call it a "flooded once in 1000 year" area, but I really doubt that it will remain significantly unchanged for even 100 years. In the last 100 years a creek has been rechanneled, catchbasins have been reshaped. Etc. So in the biggest rainstorm in the last 40 years, the street was less than tennis shoe high in water. (It's on a hillside, though not on a cliff. And the houses on either side of the street are at least a foot above the street. On the side that I live on they are about 15 feet above the street.) I think that at one point there was a creek that ran down where the street is now.
So what does a "100 year storm" mean? The area isn't at all like what it was 100 years ago. And I doubt that it will be more similar in the next 100 years. That's locally. More generally, 100 years ago there weren't weather measurements being taken around here. The area was forested (an oak forest, mainly). So the temperatures were different. The evaporation rates were different. And the weather patterns were different.
If weather models were accurate enough it might mean "a storm that has a chance of 1 in 100 of occurring next year.", or exactly 10 years from now. Or something like that. But they aren't that accurate.
So if a 100 year storm doesn't refer to conditions on the ground, and doesn't refer to weather patterns, what does it refer to? What it really means is only "This is an extremely unusual storm in its intensity, and I want to sound precise." (They're probably a bit more precise in their meaning that that, but it's hard to be sure.)
Fine, I'll consider trusting coal plants when they stop requiring that the government exempt them from the damage caused every single freaking day as normal business.
An excellent point, and one that I agree with. For the same reason I *don't* trust coal plants, and prefer solar, geothermal, wind, etc. And I definitely don't trust plans to put the CO2 back underground without chemically altering it to a solid. I look at those plans and stand amazed that anyone can seriously consider them. We aren't putting the CO2 back under an unbroken cap of rock, as we need to drill through any such in order to get it down there. I expect that it's storage that's probably good for a few decades, or maybe a century or two.
OTOH, we *don't* have enough of the plants that I can trust. So your point stands. But it stands on a weak foundation. Yes, we have to continue to build unsafe plants. But we should minimize the number of them that we build. And the government should limit the amount that it is willing to indemnify the companies against damages that they cause in accidents. And we can best minimize the number of unsafe plants by building safe plants as feasible. I prefer solar, but wind has reasonable adherents. So do geothermal and tide plants. (Geothermal only works in some places, ditto for tide engines. But there are places where they are optimal.) Each of these has its problems, but none of them cause widespread damage. (The solar plant that seems to me most promising involves using mirrors to melt salts in an insulated container, so that heat can be extracted over a period of less than sunny days. Clearly this would work better in the Mojave Desert or in the Sahara than in Maine or Germany. This means we probably continue to need centralized power generation and long distance transport of power. Unfortunate. Solar cells are getting better, and so is battery technology, so it may be that these won't be permanent requirements, but I'm talking about things that can be done with only development, no research needed.)
Yes, but even though I *know* the they mean "reactor-years" in the same way as man-years, when they just say years I automatically read it as chronological years. And that's the proper way to read it. They say it that way because that's how they want you to read it.
If they wanted you to understand reactor-years, that's what they'd say. They don't. They want you to think of it as a lot safer than it really is. Which is why I distrust their "revised report". It *may* actually be more accurate, but they may also be playing this same kind of word game. (Or, of course, they could be lying, but I generally exclude that when I know that they could effectively mislead you by just playing word games.)
So. There's a chance that the report is honest. But internal evidence leads one to suspect that they have an agenda of convincing people that things are safer than they really are. How much should I trust them?
I understand their argument, and it would be reasonable if these were people that were trustworthy. They demonstrably aren't. So is it a true report being issued by untrustworthy people, or is it untrustworthy people trying to mislead me again?
Whatever. I don't want nuclear plants, even nominally safe ones, built around me because the area is riddled with active earthquake faults. The last time they built a plant around here they built it below a cliff on an active fault. Somehow this left me with a lot of distrust for them. They had to shut it down before they put the fuel in, but we're still paying for it on the electric bill. No more of that, please. And what's worse the company was informed of the problem before they started construction. But they didn't care. It wasn't until a site inspection by an independent evaluator was forced by the state...which wasn't until LOTS of money was sunk into the project...that they even admitted that they had a problem.
I'll consider trusting nuclear plants when they stop requiring that the government exempt them from damage caused if they have an accident. Even then past history is going to make me very skeptical of them. It's not the plants themselves, it's the organizations that run them that are the problem. But it's such a VERY large problem.
Last time I checked the Makerbot could only print part of itself. It couldn't handle metal. (There are fancier 3-D printers that can, but not the Makerbot.)
I haven't yet heard of a 3-D printer that could print a motor. (I think I heard of one that could print a battery, though. Just not a very good one. And it may have been on paper.)
Still, things have been progressing fairly rapidly. Just not as rapidly as people clamor for them to.
But do remember. These things *AREN'T* assemblers. They are just printers. They work with chemicals and heat. Their only advantage over traditional methods is that advantage of dot-matrix printers over daisywheels. And remember that daisywheels were dominant for a long time. Even after dot-matrix became cheaper, daisywheels could produce better appearing letters. They didn't disappear until laser-printers (assemblers in this metaphor) became common.
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My source was Groklaw, and they referenced an original source, though I don't remember what it was. It was in yesterday's posts. Search for "Sun" + "Motorola".
If the intent is to prevent crimes, you don't need to arrest someone, only to, *IF* they were planning to commit a crime, discourage them. Discourage them for awhile, and they'll form a different habit patten, and no crimes occurred.
FWIW, this is a one sentence summary of an analysis of New York's, apparently working, crime reduction strategy. My summary of an article from a recent Scientific American. Is it working? Apparently statistics from several sources say that it is.
This year the city I live in is broke, and struggling not to lose police officers. A couple of years ago we had 35 openings that we couldn't get recruits for even after trying for over a year. We voted in a special bond issue, and then actually had to struggle not to lose police officers faster than we could hire them.
OTOH, if *I* were a police officer, this is one of the last cities that I'd want to work in. There've been several scandals, and large segments of the populace don't trust the police to be fair or honest, and with good reason. Still, hiring more cops is more easily said than done.
FWIW, see the Scientific American recently on how New York dealt with the crime problem, and how it has reduced crime without increasing incarceration. The key appears to be intensive surveillance of "hot spots". This sounds like another version of the same thing.
Anybody lives in New York want to comment on that Scientific American article?
Well, it's not *just* patents. Motorola also had a special Java license. That might well be nice insurance against Oracle. (We don't really know, because the details of the license aren't public. Which, itself, is interesting.)
Actually, it's not clear that Google has much interest in the "Motorola Mobility" division that it just bought, except for the patents. Well, that's not quite right. I should have said "in the current products of"... As has been previously mentioned, Google is interested in their patent holdings, and it generally prefers to innovate where there isn't a lot of competition. So the current employees are probably going to find themelves busily engaged in the design of something new. Someone mentioned "Google TV", and I suppose that's a possibility. But others have looked more towards an electronic wallet that will replace credit and debit cards. (Personally I'd be leery of that one, but it could be *very* convenient.) Or it could be a game machine. (Probably not, as that's an area that already has lots of competition...but maybe, if they've got a good enough new idea.) Or maybe a phone with a "virtual you" that can take messages for you, and deliver prerecorded messages to pre-defined callers. (Google would need an breakthrough in artificial speech recognition to do what I'm thinking, but perhaps...)
Anyway, you get the idea I have of what they're up to. And it's not the standard smartphone market. The question is, how could they fund it? Their clear preference is for soft-sell ads, so that's probably the area to look, but I'm no salesman.
Except that now that Google has purchased Motorola Mobility (for patents?), Motorola may no longer have "special access".
I approve of the GPL, but the copyright period is FAR too long. Of course, that's not the doing of the FSF, so don't blame them, but they could have thrown the code into public domain after five years. Or maybe ten.
I *KNOW* there is evidence. I just don't find it *enough* evidence. Yes, there's clearly something there that needs explaining. And I don't have a better explanation. But I don't need an explanation in anything I'm doing, so I'd rather wait a bit and see if something better shows up. And, yes, I've been waiting for decades now. So? I'm not in any hurry. If I were working in the field, then I'd be wondering about what better explanation was possible, but I'm a retired programmer. If I have to wait the rest of my life, that's no problem.
FWIW, I don't like the "cosmic inflation" theory either. That's another one that I expect to eventually be replaced. But I have no idea by what, and it does fit the current evidence. (And there's a lot more evidence for it to fit.) So maybe it will stand. But I still don't like it. That "phase change" thing bothers me, as it was just dragged in, and I don't know of any evidence in favor of it that wasn't known before it was proposed. (There could be lots, but I don't know it.) OTOH, the general theory fits a LOT of evidence. So something with a whole bunch of the same effects is going to be needed. This isn't true of dark matter/dark energy. There's evidence, and it's been accumulating slowly. But it's still too thin for me to accept the theories.
And, yes, I know of the Bullet Cluster. I didn't recall it when the post was originally made, but I remember it now. And yes, it's going to be difficult for something else to explain. But I need better evidence than that. Better characterization of what dark matter is would be a good start. I don't know what the "better evidence" for dark energy would look like. Intuitively it should tie dark energy into the big bang, but that's just a guess.
Well, there's also a lot of:
You're assuming that 90% of the universe is invisible on the basis of *what* evidence? I'd like a bit of better evidence, please, before I swallow something like that.
It's something that *could* be true, but the evidence is pretty thin for the size of the hypothesis. Maybe it's the best we can do, and maybe it isn't. For a while longer I'm going to presume that eventually we'll come up with either a better answer, or more convincing evidence. The current evidence is proof of something, but it's not clear that what it's a proof of is the current best theory. Maybe it would be better to suspend premature certainty.
N.B.: I, and many others, aren't active physicists, so we don't NEED to decide what things mean right now. It's ok for us to suspend belief, and not be certain which theory is correct. Start making predictions that directly affect us, and this will change. I believe that the previous sentence also applies to most active physicists. And even to many cosmologists.
But I admit to being skeptical about dark matter and dark energy. They're explaining something, but I doubt that they are the correct explanation. What I see them as being is something that's good enough to allow the equations to balance right now. But given the paucity of evidence, I'm not convinced that they're the right shape for an explanation.
It's sort of strange. I'm rather attached to the multi-world interpretation of quantum theory, and that also has no effect on what I see or do. It could be Copenhagen and it wouldn't make any practical difference to me. But I dislike the Copenhagen interpretation. And there is *NO* evidence to allow one to choose between them.
IIRC, phlogiston was one of the theories that lead to the atomic theory. In fact I seem to recall the Priestly (Lavoisier?) first called Oxygen "de-phlogistonated air" or some such. It was wrong, but a vital step along the way to a better theory.
I've heard marvelous things about golden rice. The others I don't know about. I'd like to taste a "rainbow papaya". I have my doubts that it's taste would be up to that of a ripe Hawaiian papaya, but as I no longer live in Hawaii, I no longer taste those anyway. (The stuff you can buy in the stores here doesn't even seem to be the same fruit. And I mean the ones imported from Hawaii. The Mexican papaya are clearly quite different, but, if they were picked ripe, they might actually turn out to be edible. As it is, frozen papaya chunks are closer than any fresh fruit I can buy. Sorry for the digression.)
The Honeysweet plum sounds interesting, but as I said, I don't know anything about it. The biocassava sounds useful rather than interesting. (I'm not a big tapioca fan, but I know that in many places cassava is a staple starch.)
But: Who holds the patents? Are the farmers allowed to harvest the seed for replanting? Those are the first two questions I look at.
Benefits to who and costs to who? Frequently those are differing "who"'s with differing amounts of political power.
Don't expect this to self-correct without a lot of public pressure. Even that might be optimistic.
I don't really know about Britain, but in the US we seem to have been on a one-way trip towards a dictatorship since Nixon. What Nixon got impeached for wouldn't even make headlines today.
This is, at least often, the problem. OTOH, it's also occasionally true that there *IS* a shortfall in production. But it's not generally clear that GMO foods would solve the problem.
E.G.: In northern India the farmers are depleting the water table faster that it is replenished. If they grew wheat instead of rice this would be less of a problem, as wheat requires a lot less water. What's actually being done is improvements in techniques for monitoring soil moisture, so they won't water quite as much.
Still, "Golden rice" is a good answer to a real problem. If it weren't for the legal complications I'd consider GMO foods to be a reasonable bet. As it is, however, they look like a tool whose main effect will be to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of people who historically have shown little or no interest in bettering the human condition. (This doesn't inherently mean that they're opposed to it, merely that they don't count it on their balance sheets at all.)
It's not even that unexpectable. When plants & animals have their genomes streamlined, and are designed to grow faster, one thing that's often removed is some of the vitamins traditionally made by the plant. This is often well known. (E.g., there are reports that the GM salmon being proposed are skimpy in some of the omega oils. Vital? No. Important? Yes.) But a real problem is that often a complete analysis isn't done, and we don't yet know what is needed to keep people healthy.
Now this wouldn't necessarily be all that bad, but the corporations have lobbied to get requirements that GM foods be so labeled forbidden. So you can't necessarily tell what you're getting. And this is already the current state. If GM foods become more prevalent, one can expect it to become more extensive. After all, it is to the benefit of those who control wealth and power.
As a result of this (and of patent law) I am generally opposed to GM foods. The technical capability is there to produce wonders, but those who control the decisions seem to generally have other interests in mind.
I *am* opposed ot GM foods, but largely because of patent law. Most of the technical problems encountered so have easy technical solutions. Legal problems are something else. The laws might have been specially designed to allow corporations to commit any evil they choose and escape from paying for the damage caused. This coupled with patent laws causes me to be strongly opposed to GM foods, and to many other GM products.
War has been an economic disaster, even for the winning side, and even if that side was never invaded, since around 1700. Possibly earlier. If you go much further back, however, the winning side was often able to gain sufficient booty to make it profitable.
Being an economic disaster, however, doesn't seem to have stopped them. For one thing, the disaster isn't evenly spread, and some small groups have benefited from wars. Generally either politicians or military suppliers, and a very few soldiers. (Almost all generals or higher.)
N.B.: I'm not including quartermasters, etc. who often transplant criminal activities into the military with even a slight gain in profitability, and with reduced risk of getting caught (though the penalties if they are caught are often harsher). These folk, I feel, were criminal in any event, and war is just another background against which to carry on business as usual.
I think you're believing a simplified history. There have been "civil rights movements" since long before the civil war. Rosa Parks was one person, but she wasn't acting alone, either.
This is not to say that it would be an easy modeling job. But if you accept that it will be probabilistic, then it may not be impossible. Anything better than probabilistic is probably impossible because of chaotic interactions, though. But an objective (i.e. non-mammalian) observer might find it easier than weather prediction. (I think we have biases that tend to blind us to things we don't want to see. [For a peculiar meaning of "want". I'm simply implying that our event recognition system has attractors and repulsors. We tend to ignore things near repulsors and to notice things near attractors. We want to see a predator stalking us, even though we don't desire that one be there.])
Given "I could train anyone in three months", I would guess that he's a lawyer, and he would charge you his normal rates. And that he would bill 24 hours/day. And that you would be constrained to not do anything but train (and a minimum of feeding and hygiene).
Also that you would only learn how to pass the bar exam. He didn't promise anything else. E.g., he didn't promise to make you a decent lawyer, and in fact indicated that this wasn't required to pass the bar exam. This is known as teaching to the test, not quite common in the public school system. It teaches you to pass the test, and nothing else. And passing the test is generally useless for any other purpose. The idea of a test is that it's supposed to be a random sampling of the things that you would learn in the process of becoming skilled. If all you learn is the isolated facts that you are tested upon, it's generally quite useless.
Yes, but *do* consider why this is news. I.e., it almost never happens.
If this starts happening regularly, *then* I will be encouraged. As it is...
For that matter you can construct a digital computer out of jujubes and matchboxes. Following a Scientific American article I once built one that was base three, and could learn to play flawless tic-tac-toe.
Of course, it was also analog, as every computer it when it interfaces with the human sensoria. You don't really see the picture of a penguin on the screen. You see an analogy-image built out of colored pixels. The jujube computer, requiring a lot more in-depth interaction by the user, had that kind of analogy deeply embedded in it. And it was specialized...it could only learn a game that was played on the tic-tac-toe board, and only involved making one indelible mark on the board at each turn, and where the game was turn oriented, and there was one other opponent...probably a few more restrictions. Some, involving symmetry, were just there so that the number of matchboxes (and jujubes) could be reduced.
So. The line between analog and digital isn't that clearly drawn. But the memory of the computer was digital base three. (Each matchbox started off with equal numbers of three colors of jujube. A color was drawn at random, and each color corresponded to a move. If it won the game, you returned the jujubes to the matchbox. Otherwise you ate them (or otherwise removed them from play). (I may be misremembering. It might have been base four. One color per possible move, anyway.)
But it was digital because the memory was stored as discrete items, and it was analog because it was constructed in analogy to a game like tic-tac-toe. (Not necessarily the same game, mind you. There were some different games that it could learn, but they were all quite similar to tic-tac-toe. And it could only learn one.)
A ceiling mount probably isn't needed. You could probably substitute a mirror, with the transmitter somewhere else in the room. Given the summary, I don't think this is point-to-point, but rather broadcast within a small volume. And the signaling system probably *would* be Ethernet, just not over cable.
The data have been fudged. There are many minor incidents that are never reported, so the don't appear in the records. There have been safety violations that have gone unfixed for years. Were they important? I have no way of judging.
Also plants are in the process of being re-licensed which have known safety problems, which are beyond their design life, and to operate at levels of power beyond what was specified for their safe operation when they were new. Some of them are the same model as that used in Fukishima. (Which the Japanese were readying for retirement as obsolete.) AFAIK the plants haven't yet been re-licensed, but it is apparently expected that they will be.
As for the "100 year storm", yes, everyone understands that this means a storm that occurs in the area once in 100 years. (This is generally a lie, but that's what it means anyway.) But storms have only a local effect.
I happen to live in an area that is marked on the map as flooded once every 100 years. It's clearly wrong. Perhaps engineering has changed the terrain (it has). Perhaps for other reasons. At this point I'd call it a "flooded once in 1000 year" area, but I really doubt that it will remain significantly unchanged for even 100 years. In the last 100 years a creek has been rechanneled, catchbasins have been reshaped. Etc. So in the biggest rainstorm in the last 40 years, the street was less than tennis shoe high in water. (It's on a hillside, though not on a cliff. And the houses on either side of the street are at least a foot above the street. On the side that I live on they are about 15 feet above the street.) I think that at one point there was a creek that ran down where the street is now.
So what does a "100 year storm" mean? The area isn't at all like what it was 100 years ago. And I doubt that it will be more similar in the next 100 years. That's locally. More generally, 100 years ago there weren't weather measurements being taken around here. The area was forested (an oak forest, mainly). So the temperatures were different. The evaporation rates were different. And the weather patterns were different.
If weather models were accurate enough it might mean "a storm that has a chance of 1 in 100 of occurring next year.", or exactly 10 years from now. Or something like that. But they aren't that accurate.
So if a 100 year storm doesn't refer to conditions on the ground, and doesn't refer to weather patterns, what does it refer to? What it really means is only "This is an extremely unusual storm in its intensity, and I want to sound precise." (They're probably a bit more precise in their meaning that that, but it's hard to be sure.)
An excellent point, and one that I agree with. For the same reason I *don't* trust coal plants, and prefer solar, geothermal, wind, etc. And I definitely don't trust plans to put the CO2 back underground without chemically altering it to a solid. I look at those plans and stand amazed that anyone can seriously consider them. We aren't putting the CO2 back under an unbroken cap of rock, as we need to drill through any such in order to get it down there. I expect that it's storage that's probably good for a few decades, or maybe a century or two.
OTOH, we *don't* have enough of the plants that I can trust. So your point stands. But it stands on a weak foundation. Yes, we have to continue to build unsafe plants. But we should minimize the number of them that we build. And the government should limit the amount that it is willing to indemnify the companies against damages that they cause in accidents. And we can best minimize the number of unsafe plants by building safe plants as feasible. I prefer solar, but wind has reasonable adherents. So do geothermal and tide plants. (Geothermal only works in some places, ditto for tide engines. But there are places where they are optimal.) Each of these has its problems, but none of them cause widespread damage. (The solar plant that seems to me most promising involves using mirrors to melt salts in an insulated container, so that heat can be extracted over a period of less than sunny days. Clearly this would work better in the Mojave Desert or in the Sahara than in Maine or Germany. This means we probably continue to need centralized power generation and long distance transport of power. Unfortunate. Solar cells are getting better, and so is battery technology, so it may be that these won't be permanent requirements, but I'm talking about things that can be done with only development, no research needed.)
Yes, but even though I *know* the they mean "reactor-years" in the same way as man-years, when they just say years I automatically read it as chronological years. And that's the proper way to read it. They say it that way because that's how they want you to read it.
If they wanted you to understand reactor-years, that's what they'd say. They don't. They want you to think of it as a lot safer than it really is. Which is why I distrust their "revised report". It *may* actually be more accurate, but they may also be playing this same kind of word game. (Or, of course, they could be lying, but I generally exclude that when I know that they could effectively mislead you by just playing word games.)
So. There's a chance that the report is honest. But internal evidence leads one to suspect that they have an agenda of convincing people that things are safer than they really are. How much should I trust them?
I understand their argument, and it would be reasonable if these were people that were trustworthy. They demonstrably aren't. So is it a true report being issued by untrustworthy people, or is it untrustworthy people trying to mislead me again?
Whatever. I don't want nuclear plants, even nominally safe ones, built around me because the area is riddled with active earthquake faults. The last time they built a plant around here they built it below a cliff on an active fault. Somehow this left me with a lot of distrust for them. They had to shut it down before they put the fuel in, but we're still paying for it on the electric bill. No more of that, please.
And what's worse the company was informed of the problem before they started construction. But they didn't care. It wasn't until a site inspection by an independent evaluator was forced by the state...which wasn't until LOTS of money was sunk into the project...that they even admitted that they had a problem.
I'll consider trusting nuclear plants when they stop requiring that the government exempt them from damage caused if they have an accident. Even then past history is going to make me very skeptical of them. It's not the plants themselves, it's the organizations that run them that are the problem. But it's such a VERY large problem.
Last time I checked the Makerbot could only print part of itself. It couldn't handle metal. (There are fancier 3-D printers that can, but not the Makerbot.)
I haven't yet heard of a 3-D printer that could print a motor. (I think I heard of one that could print a battery, though. Just not a very good one. And it may have been on paper.)
Still, things have been progressing fairly rapidly. Just not as rapidly as people clamor for them to.
But do remember. These things *AREN'T* assemblers. They are just printers. They work with chemicals and heat. Their only advantage over traditional methods is that advantage of dot-matrix printers over daisywheels. And remember that daisywheels were dominant for a long time. Even after dot-matrix became cheaper, daisywheels could produce better appearing letters. They didn't disappear until laser-printers (assemblers in this metaphor) became common.