I'm sure that aggravates things. As does building a wall through where people's houses used to be. But if you go back before that, you don't find peace.
I'm quite certain that there are large segments on both sides that really DO want peace. Unfortunately, there are also sizable segments on both sides that don't. And one act of violence is a lot more noticeable than 1000 acts of peace.
While I'm not saying you're wrong, there's a lot of evidence that there are a lot of Palestinians who don't want peace either. And many Israelis do want peace.
Israel is pretty small, and I don't really see how two groups of people, each of which have large sub-populations who want to exterminate the other, can live together in peace. Every way I've thought of (bar two) looks infeasible. And one of those would be denounced by people from every country in the world. (Collect all children under 5 years of age, and raise them collectively, under new names. As new children are born, collect them. ALL! If any religious indoctrination is done, require that equal amounts be done by every religion, and if any religion refuses, that prevents indoctrination by ALL the others. After 20 years, rethink things.) But I think it would work. Sort of like a super Kibbutz, but without allowing any parents to either know or have contact with their children...at least for 20 years.
The other way is for one side to just kill everyone on the other side. That would only get about half the world upset with them.
IIRC, there's a place in your account configuration where you specify how many posts you want to see. And at the bottom there's usually a "more comments" link.
Hey you anti-Chinese posters! *THIS* (the parent) is what a useful post looks like.
The parent was informative and useful. It gave reasons to not use one of the companies, and offered an alternative. (As well as admitting the real defect in the offering...price. But a good trade-off for reasonable quality.)
Do you know of any US companies that are operating in this space?
Personally, I'd always prefer to deal locally. For one thing, if you have a problem you can go visit them. But sometimes that's not an option. Or not a viable option. OTOH, this isn't my area of interest, so it's possible that there *IS* US competition. People have mentioned Adafruit, and I don't know what or where that's about.
It would be more useful if you pointed out alternatives than just complaining. (Again, I'm a pure software guy, so I don't know the field...but I can tell that much.)
You could, you know. Granted the project to create immunity to prions would require modifying all the proteins to use different amino acids...
I think that the project as stated is already too ambitious to succeed. What you're proposing would be an order or two of magnitude more difficult.... But probably not much more than that.
Also, I'm not sure just how much bacteria use prions. Mammals use lots of them, so we are subject to prion diseases, but bacteria use many fewer...I'm not certain they use any. So that may not be a consideration.
P.S.: They aren't even talking about modifying a mouse or a fruit-fly. They're talking about modifying bacteria.
IIUC they are planning a much stronger modification of the genetic code. This puzzles me, as I don't believe that you can get there by evolutionary changes. OTOH, I didn't believe that we understood the ribosome well enough that we could even change the mapping of DNA to protein. And it would need to be a strong enough change to be totally immune to viruses, because even one that could use it as a host would soon undo their work.
On the third hand, a change in the DNA/RNA to protein mapping would probably do the job just by itself. You could leave the non-mapped genes alone, so they wouldn't need to be changed. But again I don't see how you could get there by evolutionary changes. Adding a new code is trivial by comparison. (Yeah, that was successful. But this project is a long step more ambitious, and uses a different approach. But I think the local optimum that the ribosome is at is too high for it to succeed via evolutionary changes. If I'm wrong, it would be quite interesting.)
So they *did* mean that! I don't think you can get a new DNA via evolution. Not starting from an existing sample. The local peak is too high.
OTOH, if they *are* successful, while viruses will eventually show up, I wouldn't expect them in the current century (unless someone creates them on purpose). Or in the next century. And I'd consider seeing them in the current millennium to be grossly unexpected. Sufficiently so to suspect intelligent involvement. (I.e., people, computers, aliens, uplifted animals, SOME intelligence.) Of course, this depends on the genetic code actually having changed enough that no current virus will affect the results. If even one will, then rapid adaptive radiation can be expected.
Yes, you can. (Metaphorically speaking.) To read an extended explanation, read "Gödel, Escher, Bach, An Eternal Golden Braid" by Douglas Hofstadter, where the metaphor is extensively developed and justified.
Well, if they meant all current viruses, then there's not a real problem. (Just change the letters of the DNA/RNA code.) It's complicated, and I don't think you could get there by evolving from the current state, but there's no theoretic problem. (You could even just switch them around. Use the same letters, but have a different trigram to amino-acid mapping.) (I don't really think we currently know enough about the ribosome to do this, but I could be wrong.)
If they mean no virus is possible, then I agree with you.
So either they mean something reasonable, or they don't. I'm presuming that they do (without reading the article). ISTM that what they're after would be useful, even if limited. (As opposed to a "giant leap" which probably can't be done via evolutionary methods. And would have really limited utility, being likely to require exotic food-stuffs, or to have high energetic requirements in processing it's food.)
And the kicker is, they collected the money, and then refused to deliver it. (Granted, it's probably being held in the accounts of the individuals who donated...but they don't dare spend it, so it's effectively available to the banks...and it may not be even that honest.)
Please state the ethical or moral principle that justifies your footnote. Without the footnote I found your position repugnant, but logically consistent. With it, it becomes BOTH repugnant AND inconsistent under my default assumptions. So you are presuming some moral axiom that I am not presuming. What is it?
It seems to me that corporations are senior to most people in US law. They are potentially immortal. They cannot be convicted of most felonies. They are effectively immune to most misdemeanors. They have specially favorable tax laws.
We've come a long way from the days when corporations were barely tolerated, and only allowed to exist for short periods of time. Whether it's an improvement is extremely questionable, but the distance is far. (When is the last time you heard of a corporation's charter being dissolved?)
Well, yes, they would. But I defy you to state a consistent moral position (other than "Black people are inferior") that justifies discriminating against Wikileaks and forbids discriminating by race. Or the contrapositive. (I.e., I assert that either A & B or ~A & ~B is valid, but neither A & ~B nor ~A & B.)
Well.... there is one possibility. You could deny that collective entities have any right at all. But then neither Visa nor MasterCard (nor Wikileaks) have any rights, so there's nobody being injured. That kind of reductionism is technically valid, but it makes the world too complex to deal with. And you can take it further so that people don't have any rights either, only the molecules of which they are composed. And the molecules don't have any rights, only the atoms of which they are composed. And clearly the atoms aren't being injured. So while I don't guarantee that you can't find an acceptable statement along those lines, I've never seen one, except the declaration that "rights" a a fiction, and all that exists is power politics. (Acceptable here means logically acceptable, not morally acceptable.)
Actually, the red ones were the ones I was thinking of. I find them excruciating to see in a dark room. And when I glance away I see spots in front of my eyes. I can believe that other colors would be worse, but that doesn't make the red ones acceptable.
I *have* seen them, I just have a hard time imagining anyone wanting them. If you plug it in, LCD with a backlight is much easier on the eyes. Even if you don't I think that illuminated LCDs should use less power and be easier to read. (Not *all* means of illumination, of course. A few low-power LEDs focused on reflective LCDs is what I have in mind...though as I don't have that kind of use, I haven't gone looking. But I have looked at LED clocks in a dark room, and the experience was...uncomfortable.)
The last two clocks I've bought were both battery powered without any power grid connections. Admittedly, they were LCD rather than LED, but I think that's what you meant anyway. (I have a hard time imagining anyone wanting a clock with a large LED display.)
I haven't checked, but I presume they use a crystal oscillator.
Propose something practical. Public domain is, apparently, not being protected.
What it looks like to me is that GPL and Creative Commons are the correct approaches. That way the stuff is being continually "broadcast" with a (reasonably) permissive license. BSD, another approach, doesn't seem to have fared as well. Neither has the GFDL.
But do note that it's unwise to put all your eggs in one basket. Any license can be overturned by legislative corruption. So another approach is also advisable. Defense in depth, etc.
That's one point. But I don't know why you consider it more important than all the others.
Personally I consider two points crucial: 1) The Civil War, when BOTH sides centralized control of the government over the populace. 2) The Union Pacific addendum, which got corporations to be considered legal persons.
Basically, though, when the frontier closed, increased governmental control over the citizenry started ramping up immediately. The increase was slow at first. But you could also pick the Constitution giving the feds control over the currency. Or the suppression of Lysander Spooner's currency. Or lots of other points. Each is just one data point along a curve.
Personally, when I survey the current landscape the point that stands out to me is the granting of corporate personhood via an addendum made on his own authority to a lawsuit by a legal clerk. Be interesting to know if he was paid extra to do that, but it wouldn't have mattered if the courts hadn't allowed that addendum to stand.
The way it normally works is, "If you have enough political support you can get away with murder.". This has been experimentally proven several times. Only if the opposition is angry with you for some other reason do you have anything to fear, and even then not much. (Impeachment is a very high bar. And that's just making the charge. Making it stick (i.e., the Senate agrees with the House) is even harder.)
There's a good reason that only two presidents have ever been impeached. And it has nothing to do with their being honorable law-abiding people.
I can't believe that anyone even vaguely serious about anonymity would use any word processor, much less MSWord. A text editor is the correct solution. If you must, you can create an html file, but I'd think that simple text would suffice.
Now as for the original documents...that's a whole 'nother problem.
P.S.: They may, indeed, have video monitors in place, but those are frequently more designed to keep the staff honest than for any other purpose. If it worries you, use one that you bought a year ago. Or get one that's handed out as a PR gimic. Or swipe one from someone else (that didn't have access to those documents). But doing video recognition from a security monitor of a stranger is a non-trivial task, even if the appropriate tape still exists.
You're going to need to explain why you think Biginteger satisfies the requirements of a Range type. It seems to have neither a settable lower bound nor a settable upper bound. You can't say "This represents the integers -7 through 13." in any way that is obvious to me. (Yeah, you can program it. That's what a Range type is supposed to eliminate the need for.)
Unsigned integers isn't the point. What's needed is Range types, where one can specify both the lowest and the greatest value. Optionally also specify the increment, but that's just icing.
My wife shares a name with a guy who ran up hospital bills, and then carelessly dropped dead. She's spent MONTHS trying to clear things up. Every time she clears it up with one group, they sell the account to someone else, who then starts the procedure all over.
The internet isn't involved. They didn't live in the same city. They've never lived in the same zip code. The phone numbers aren't the same. They don't have my wife's date of birth. But we still keep getting calls.
Personally, I think it's an intentional scam. They know the data's bad, so rather than take a loss they sell it to someone else, who then trys again, with the company, if possibly not the individual agent, knowing that it's a debt not owed by the person they're trying to collect from.
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I'm sure that aggravates things. As does building a wall through where people's houses used to be. But if you go back before that, you don't find peace.
I'm quite certain that there are large segments on both sides that really DO want peace. Unfortunately, there are also sizable segments on both sides that don't. And one act of violence is a lot more noticeable than 1000 acts of peace.
While I'm not saying you're wrong, there's a lot of evidence that there are a lot of Palestinians who don't want peace either. And many Israelis do want peace.
Israel is pretty small, and I don't really see how two groups of people, each of which have large sub-populations who want to exterminate the other, can live together in peace. Every way I've thought of (bar two) looks infeasible. And one of those would be denounced by people from every country in the world. (Collect all children under 5 years of age, and raise them collectively, under new names. As new children are born, collect them. ALL! If any religious indoctrination is done, require that equal amounts be done by every religion, and if any religion refuses, that prevents indoctrination by ALL the others. After 20 years, rethink things.) But I think it would work. Sort of like a super Kibbutz, but without allowing any parents to either know or have contact with their children...at least for 20 years.
The other way is for one side to just kill everyone on the other side. That would only get about half the world upset with them.
IIRC, there's a place in your account configuration where you specify how many posts you want to see. And at the bottom there's usually a "more comments" link.
Hey you anti-Chinese posters! *THIS* (the parent) is what a useful post looks like.
The parent was informative and useful. It gave reasons to not use one of the companies, and offered an alternative. (As well as admitting the real defect in the offering...price. But a good trade-off for reasonable quality.)
Do you know of any US companies that are operating in this space?
Personally, I'd always prefer to deal locally. For one thing, if you have a problem you can go visit them. But sometimes that's not an option. Or not a viable option. OTOH, this isn't my area of interest, so it's possible that there *IS* US competition. People have mentioned Adafruit, and I don't know what or where that's about.
It would be more useful if you pointed out alternatives than just complaining. (Again, I'm a pure software guy, so I don't know the field...but I can tell that much.)
You could, you know. Granted the project to create immunity to prions would require modifying all the proteins to use different amino acids...
I think that the project as stated is already too ambitious to succeed. What you're proposing would be an order or two of magnitude more difficult. ... But probably not much more than that.
Also, I'm not sure just how much bacteria use prions. Mammals use lots of them, so we are subject to prion diseases, but bacteria use many fewer...I'm not certain they use any. So that may not be a consideration.
P.S.: They aren't even talking about modifying a mouse or a fruit-fly. They're talking about modifying bacteria.
IIUC they are planning a much stronger modification of the genetic code. This puzzles me, as I don't believe that you can get there by evolutionary changes. OTOH, I didn't believe that we understood the ribosome well enough that we could even change the mapping of DNA to protein. And it would need to be a strong enough change to be totally immune to viruses, because even one that could use it as a host would soon undo their work.
On the third hand, a change in the DNA/RNA to protein mapping would probably do the job just by itself. You could leave the non-mapped genes alone, so they wouldn't need to be changed. But again I don't see how you could get there by evolutionary changes. Adding a new code is trivial by comparison. (Yeah, that was successful. But this project is a long step more ambitious, and uses a different approach. But I think the local optimum that the ribosome is at is too high for it to succeed via evolutionary changes. If I'm wrong, it would be quite interesting.)
Well, that explains everything.
Intelligent design is correct. And God is dead. He created a virus that killed him, and went on to populate the world.
This tells you something about the nature of God... He had clumsy lab protocols.
So they *did* mean that! I don't think you can get a new DNA via evolution. Not starting from an existing sample. The local peak is too high.
OTOH, if they *are* successful, while viruses will eventually show up, I wouldn't expect them in the current century (unless someone creates them on purpose). Or in the next century. And I'd consider seeing them in the current millennium to be grossly unexpected. Sufficiently so to suspect intelligent involvement. (I.e., people, computers, aliens, uplifted animals, SOME intelligence.) Of course, this depends on the genetic code actually having changed enough that no current virus will affect the results. If even one will, then rapid adaptive radiation can be expected.
Yes, you can. (Metaphorically speaking.) To read an extended explanation, read "Gödel, Escher, Bach, An Eternal Golden Braid" by Douglas Hofstadter, where the metaphor is extensively developed and justified.
Well, if they meant all current viruses, then there's not a real problem. (Just change the letters of the DNA/RNA code.) It's complicated, and I don't think you could get there by evolving from the current state, but there's no theoretic problem. (You could even just switch them around. Use the same letters, but have a different trigram to amino-acid mapping.) (I don't really think we currently know enough about the ribosome to do this, but I could be wrong.)
If they mean no virus is possible, then I agree with you.
So either they mean something reasonable, or they don't. I'm presuming that they do (without reading the article). ISTM that what they're after would be useful, even if limited. (As opposed to a "giant leap" which probably can't be done via evolutionary methods. And would have really limited utility, being likely to require exotic food-stuffs, or to have high energetic requirements in processing it's food.)
And the kicker is, they collected the money, and then refused to deliver it. (Granted, it's probably being held in the accounts of the individuals who donated...but they don't dare spend it, so it's effectively available to the banks...and it may not be even that honest.)
Please state the ethical or moral principle that justifies your footnote. Without the footnote I found your position repugnant, but logically consistent. With it, it becomes BOTH repugnant AND inconsistent under my default assumptions. So you are presuming some moral axiom that I am not presuming. What is it?
It seems to me that corporations are senior to most people in US law. They are potentially immortal. They cannot be convicted of most felonies. They are effectively immune to most misdemeanors. They have specially favorable tax laws.
We've come a long way from the days when corporations were barely tolerated, and only allowed to exist for short periods of time. Whether it's an improvement is extremely questionable, but the distance is far. (When is the last time you heard of a corporation's charter being dissolved?)
Well, yes, they would. But I defy you to state a consistent moral position (other than "Black people are inferior") that justifies discriminating against Wikileaks and forbids discriminating by race. Or the contrapositive. (I.e., I assert that either A & B or ~A & ~B is valid, but neither A & ~B nor ~A & B.)
Well.... there is one possibility. You could deny that collective entities have any right at all. But then neither Visa nor MasterCard (nor Wikileaks) have any rights, so there's nobody being injured. That kind of reductionism is technically valid, but it makes the world too complex to deal with. And you can take it further so that people don't have any rights either, only the molecules of which they are composed. And the molecules don't have any rights, only the atoms of which they are composed. And clearly the atoms aren't being injured. So while I don't guarantee that you can't find an acceptable statement along those lines, I've never seen one, except the declaration that "rights" a a fiction, and all that exists is power politics. (Acceptable here means logically acceptable, not morally acceptable.)
Actually, the red ones were the ones I was thinking of. I find them excruciating to see in a dark room. And when I glance away I see spots in front of my eyes. I can believe that other colors would be worse, but that doesn't make the red ones acceptable.
I *have* seen them, I just have a hard time imagining anyone wanting them. If you plug it in, LCD with a backlight is much easier on the eyes. Even if you don't I think that illuminated LCDs should use less power and be easier to read. (Not *all* means of illumination, of course. A few low-power LEDs focused on reflective LCDs is what I have in mind...though as I don't have that kind of use, I haven't gone looking. But I have looked at LED clocks in a dark room, and the experience was...uncomfortable.)
The last two clocks I've bought were both battery powered without any power grid connections. Admittedly, they were LCD rather than LED, but I think that's what you meant anyway. (I have a hard time imagining anyone wanting a clock with a large LED display.)
I haven't checked, but I presume they use a crystal oscillator.
Propose something practical. Public domain is, apparently, not being protected.
What it looks like to me is that GPL and Creative Commons are the correct approaches. That way the stuff is being continually "broadcast" with a (reasonably) permissive license. BSD, another approach, doesn't seem to have fared as well. Neither has the GFDL.
But do note that it's unwise to put all your eggs in one basket. Any license can be overturned by legislative corruption. So another approach is also advisable. Defense in depth, etc.
That's one point. But I don't know why you consider it more important than all the others.
Personally I consider two points crucial:
1) The Civil War, when BOTH sides centralized control of the government over the populace.
2) The Union Pacific addendum, which got corporations to be considered legal persons.
Basically, though, when the frontier closed, increased governmental control over the citizenry started ramping up immediately. The increase was slow at first. But you could also pick the Constitution giving the feds control over the currency. Or the suppression of Lysander Spooner's currency. Or lots of other points. Each is just one data point along a curve.
Personally, when I survey the current landscape the point that stands out to me is the granting of corporate personhood via an addendum made on his own authority to a lawsuit by a legal clerk. Be interesting to know if he was paid extra to do that, but it wouldn't have mattered if the courts hadn't allowed that addendum to stand.
The way it normally works is, "If you have enough political support you can get away with murder.". This has been experimentally proven several times. Only if the opposition is angry with you for some other reason do you have anything to fear, and even then not much. (Impeachment is a very high bar. And that's just making the charge. Making it stick (i.e., the Senate agrees with the House) is even harder.)
There's a good reason that only two presidents have ever been impeached. And it has nothing to do with their being honorable law-abiding people.
I can't believe that anyone even vaguely serious about anonymity would use any word processor, much less MSWord.
A text editor is the correct solution. If you must, you can create an html file, but I'd think that simple text would suffice.
Now as for the original documents...that's a whole 'nother problem.
P.S.: They may, indeed, have video monitors in place, but those are frequently more designed to keep the staff honest than for any other purpose. If it worries you, use one that you bought a year ago. Or get one that's handed out as a PR gimic. Or swipe one from someone else (that didn't have access to those documents). But doing video recognition from a security monitor of a stranger is a non-trivial task, even if the appropriate tape still exists.
You're going to need to explain why you think Biginteger satisfies the requirements of a Range type. It seems to have neither a settable lower bound nor a settable upper bound. You can't say "This represents the integers -7 through 13." in any way that is obvious to me. (Yeah, you can program it. That's what a Range type is supposed to eliminate the need for.)
Unsigned integers isn't the point. What's needed is Range types, where one can specify both the lowest and the greatest value. Optionally also specify the increment, but that's just icing.
My wife shares a name with a guy who ran up hospital bills, and then carelessly dropped dead. She's spent MONTHS trying to clear things up. Every time she clears it up with one group, they sell the account to someone else, who then starts the procedure all over.
The internet isn't involved. They didn't live in the same city. They've never lived in the same zip code. The phone numbers aren't the same. They don't have my wife's date of birth. But we still keep getting calls.
Personally, I think it's an intentional scam. They know the data's bad, so rather than take a loss they sell it to someone else, who then trys again, with the company, if possibly not the individual agent, knowing that it's a debt not owed by the person they're trying to collect from.