It doesn't sound quite right, but it is true that oil that is repeatedly heated is bad nutritionally, though I'm not sure of the details. And I think the harm *is* related to the oil being oxidized.
But this just says don't fry your foods. And limit your use of cooking oil. Rephrased in that way it sounds just like obviously sensible advice.
OTOH, I've never heard it claimed that coconut oil was good for you, except as insulation. I guess that if you do a lot of swimming in cold water it would be good...
I believe that there is good evidence that too much lard and beef fat are bad for your arteries. Possibly not for everyone, because people *are* different, but that's the way to bet. I haven't heard anything specific about lamb fat.
OTOH, I tend to have low cholesterol. I enjoy eating 2-3 eggs a day, as my grandfather did before me. (OTOH, I don't milk the cows or raise the chickens... so I can't necessarily count on the same benefits.) But my cholesterol is low. Both kinds. Worrisomely. Medications don't seem to help, and neither does exercise. (Some people find that exercise raises their HDL levels.)
But I tend to feel that, for me at least, the main problem with the lamb fat is the calories. If you have high cholesterol, your situation might well be different. Claiming that all people have the same biochemistry is a fallacy that we are forced into by being forced to use an oversimplified model by lack of detailed individualized information. (Which doesn't mean that there aren't some true universals, but they don't tend to be properly reported by our current system, which focuses of "things which are generally true".)
But you can't do it for anti-oxidants. You can only do it for an anti-oxidant. And there are lots of them. And there's no particular reason to believe that they all act the same. (Unless you have a model of how things work that suggests that they would. And THAT model can be tested.)
But I don't think any scientist uses such a simple model. E.g., there has been a study that reported that a diet containing high levels of Co-enzyne Q10 and Alpha-lipoeic acid tended to reduce the loss of hair cells in rats exposed to environmental stresses. And loss of hair cells is one of the chief causes of hearing loss in elderly humans. From this, one can conclude... what?
Well, nothing really. What does "high levels" mean? Were there any other side effects? Does it apply to humans? Would other anti-oxidants work as well? Do you need both anti-oxidants? Since my family tends to loose hearing as we age, I've started taking those pills. It's a gamble. I don't know how much I should take, or what side effects could show up. But I have weak eyes, and I'd rather not be both deaf and blind, so I'm taking a gamble. I'm sure not going to say that scientists said I should do so, it's my decision, and it's a known gamble (with unknown risks).
The point is that some things are irreducibly complex. This means that there are lots of problems with trying so make predictions about what action will result in what result. Body chemistry is such a field. And different people have significantly different body chemistries. Standard medicines don't have the same effect on everyone who takes them. (Read the warning panels on a prescription drug.) People talk about personalized medicine, and I'm sure that would be a great breakthrough. In fact, it will probably require several great breakthroughs before it becomes practical.
There's no group of people who live on this kind of diet. It's not cheap, it's not satisfying. Etc. A rat who is a prisoner in a lab can be forced to live this way. People can't unless they are also prisoners in a lab. This is essentially a "perfectly balanced" starvation diet. (Well, we don't really know what "perfectly balanced" is, but for rats we have a pretty fair idea. And it's not standard lab chow.)
The "ideal diet" is probably closer to "The Zone" balance than to most diets that people actually use, but it needs significantly more bulk (brans, etc.), and a more careful balance of proteins. And it's a lot less in calories.
Also please note that on this diet you are significantly more vulnerable to cold, infections, and other environmental stresses. Secondary infections when you get something like the flu are significantly more likely, and more likely to be deadly. (OTOH, the flu itself, and many other viruses, would be milder.)
It's not the sort of diet that you can stick to of your own free will. I'm sure that there have been short term attempts. Long term attempts...I seriously doubt it. (Note that simple starvation won't do. You've got to have properly balanced starvation. And this *does* make you more susceptible to infections and diseases, so it needs to be in healthy circumstances. Can always get warm enough, etc.)
The limitations on this strategy are severe enough that I really doubt it could be done on/by anyone who wasn't a prisoner in a laboratory.
Oxalic acid should be "sort of" OK. It's supposed to be common in spinach. In fact it's supposed to be the reason that the iron in spinach is unavailable, unless you eat it with vinegar.
It's not just the tech. industry. We notice it more than most, because we're a recent industry. The problem is that the patent system doesn't scale nicely. Something that works great when there's 5 people doing development doesn't necessarily work so well when there's 500 people doing development, and can be catastrophically bad when there's 50,000 people doing development.
There are other effects, but let's just look at one, credit assignment. At any one time there are only a certain number of "optimally positioned problems" to be solved. When the number of problems is far larger than the number of developers, then each developer will probably be addressing a separate problem. When the ratio is inverted, however, you get a different effect. So if 10 people solve a problem independently at about the same time, why should only one of them get all the credit? It's unjust.
Another problem is that monopolies are intrinsically socially harmful. Sometimes they produce more social good, then harm, but they are always harmful, and often grossly dangerous. They create points of critical vulnerability. If all development along a particular line must funnel through one entity, whether group or individual, that entity can act to destroy future development along that line. And it's often, perhaps usually, to it's benefit to do so. (So that only it can take advantage of the developments currently possible.) Thus, e.g., AT&T stalled modem development for nearly a decade. They HAD faster modems than acoustic couplers, they called them DAAs, or Data Access Arrangements, but they saw no advantage in developing them to faster speeds. They could already charge as much as they could get away with. So development of modems stalled.
And patents are legal monopolies. Some better approach is needed. One that doesn't involve the grant of a monopoly.
Around a decade ago I had a job were I developed in MSAccess. Every upgrade broke backwards compatibility. (Forwards compatibility worked, but to export the database to the older version I had to export the data as text and re-import it. Otherwise in a month or so the database would become corrupt. OK, once I figured that out I could live with it. Then I caught it adding two numbers incorrectly. This is hard to notice, so I have no idea how often it did this without my noticing.
I dropped MSAccess as quickly as I could after that. Shortly afterwards I retired, so I don't know if there was any followup, and on my home systems I'd already switched to Linux. So, for various reasons, I haven't touched MSAccess for over a decade. But I think "toy system" overstates it's value. Yes, it's easy to use. That's the bait on the hook.
P.S.: Before I'd retired I'd already reached the point of being unwilling to agree to the MS EULA. (Read the hideous thing!) So there's no chance that I'll ever find out if MS has mended their ways. But I really doubt it.
O. Ok. I didn't take the Bible very seriously, so I never memorized the names of the Israeli tribes, or where each came from. Still didn't sound like they were punished.
I'm not at all convinced that Einstein was that spiritual. Turns of phrase like "Der Liebe Gott" are conventional patterns of speech, and do no indicate belief. Of course, this depends on exactly what you mean by "spiritual". (And in any case, I think Niels Bohr would be a better example.)
Spiritual is one of those words that each person seems to use in a different way. And literally it seems to mean "full of breath" or some such. Sort of like pneumatic, only from the Latin instead of from the Greek. But both languages conflated breath and ??? (something we don't have a good descriptive word for). Jung preferred to refer to pneuma rather than spirit, because if people recognized the word, they would misunderstand it, but if they didn't, he could explain what he meant. Both "sort of" mean "The breath of life", but in a vitalistic sense. Unless you accept Vitalism, then it's quite difficult to wrap your mind around what's being talked about. It's rather like trying to understand the meaning of "phlogiston".
But what do *you* mean by the term? Do you mean a person with insight into how his mind works? Do you mean a person inspired (breathe into) by some god or daemon? Both are legitimate interpretations. The second is the traditional interpretation, but has "sort of" fallen into disuse. It still seems to be the implicit meaning that many people use, however.
Personally, if someone claims to have true spiritual insight, I want him to put it to the test, and write a program that demonstrates that knowledge. Otherwise I tend to consider it fluff and hot air. Too many "obviously true" theories have fallen to their death when faced by experiment for me to put much trust in one that has no experimental backing.
P.S.: I do consider myself a spiritual person. I haven't yet been able to construct such a program, but it's a "work in progress", and has such has enlightened me in many ways as to just how incomplete my "spiritual insight" has been. I realize that I don't have enough computational power to create a true mind, but even so that hasn't been my limitation. (If I'd gone straight to trying to apply Bayesian statistics, then I would have hit that limit first, but that was obvious, so I've postponed dealing with those parts of the model.)
Yes, but the report says that Lot *did* offer his daughters to the mob. So maybe that's where the idea of sex got into it.
You believe as much as you choose of this. But the argument is about whether Amazon, to be consistent, should have also purged the Bible. Or whether it's being selective in a very PC way. (And on how much they should be trusted in the future.)
Lot's daughters? Punished? I don't remember reading that part. From this are descended the tribes of... They were the founding mothers (and father) of two of the twelve tribes of Israel.
If you mean being isolated in the wilderness with only their father, that was because YHVH, or something, destroyed the place where they used to live. (Given the story-line I favor a volcano over a meteor, because Lot's wife hung behind and got turned into "a pillar of salt". This sounds like entombed in volcanic ash, though I presume there are other explanations. [In high school Chemistry I re-read that section because of the joke about Lot's wife being named Ester, because she was an organic salt.])
OTOH, this is all assuming that there is any truth to be found there. A question I find somewhat dubious. Outside of the genealogies, much of the bible reads like a collection of fairy tales...as collected by the Grimm brothers. And slanted in a very self-righteous and jingoistic way. (Yes, I'm certain that there are some historic events recorded. Things weren't kept tightly partitioned. But not much attention was paid to what was true and what was fiction. If you want a similar point-of-view today, try to get into the head of someone who is not only a denier of global warming, but also of evolution and the moon landings.)
Sorry, but I can't figure out whether that's a joke, you're a troll, or you're really that stupid. (I figure that if you're on/., you can't really be too ignorant to just be uninformed.)
My bet is that it's a joke, but I sure wish the odds were better.
OK. I can see this being done by a virus that mutates the genes of a bacterium. That happens, and will create desired (by the virus) variants. And, if successful for other reasons, could maintain itself, re-infecting bacteria that mutated away from the modified form.
I'm still not convinced that it's practical, but this sounds much more feasible than your prior suggestions. (I'd expect a huge problem with viruses mutating to be forms that didn't do anything that benefited them, but there's no obvious cost driving them away from the action.)
N.B.: This ALL comes under the heading of plagues. My original assertion was that nanomachinery is unlikely to be any more dangerous than plagues, so the more dangerous you conceive plagues as being, the more true that statement is.
Nanomachinery distinct from plagues would have at least one of several characteristics: 1) it's hereditary material wouldn't be DNA or any close relative. 2) it's backbone structure would not be based around carbon 3) it would use wheels, gears, or ratchets 4) a significant proportion of its mass would be in the form or crystal matrices. 5) it's controlled from the outside by em or magnetic transmissions. 6) it maintains a web site. (OK, I'm being silly.But there are other things not listed that would qualify it, I just can't think of them right now.)
And of course there are things in between. So far, however, synthetic life doesn't come close to the boundary. (Though you could make a case about virus particles having most of their mass in crystaline form. I'd need to know more before I'd accept that, though. I think that when a virus is active it's not crystallized. Could be I'm wrong.)
This is irrelevant. You seem to misunderstand the nature of such competition. In the very long term, you are right, the modified bacteria will be out-competed by the more efficient one in many places. On the scale of maybe hundreds or thousands of years, if ever. More "efficient" organisms exist everywhere and yet older forms survive all over in various
That's not in accord with how I understand the evolutionary process. If a variation doesn't have an advantage, then it will never become a significant factor.
I took all this into consideration. That is why VX or other agent which only requires a very small amount of gas per cubic volume (and thus very slight amount to be produced by each bacteria) is perfect for the task of genocide. Even with very low efficiency of the whole process, the effect would be still deadly.
I disagree. You are still going to need to manufacture it more rapidly than it breaks down over whatever area that it has dispersed to. That means that something that disperses rapidly is insanely expensive for a bacterium, unless it has a local use.
Err no. e.coli is a bacterium that lives everywhere, the soil, ponds, etc. There many many strains of it that can be found in pretty much any place
OK. I have to give you this one. It's still not ideal from the bacterium's point of view, but evolution has no foresight.
A very, very small amount multiplied by trillions of trillions of cells of individual bacteria? As I said, even with efficiency far below 1% it would still mean the end of nearly all humanity on Earth within a few years.
There are a lot of cells of the bacterium, admittedly, but just how many will be sporting the modified genes. I'd bet the fraction would be immeasurably small. It require additional cellular machinery, it's energetically expensive, it requires extra raw materials, and it provides no advantage. This is not the recipe for a mutation that survives.
Additionally, I'm not even certain that it's safe for e-coli. It could be, I suppose. Not having nerves, however, doesn't mean that they aren't affected by similar molecular pathways.
It would certainly be more successful to engineer a bacterium to derive energy or resources from VX and have it succeed. That pathway needn't require any energy except when the appropriate chemical was around.
Taking your example: If it makes, as you suggest, VX nerve gas, then it need to pay for the excess production. The more the bacterium produces, the more it needs to pay. It's competition (other e-coli) don't need to pay that price, so they out-compete it.
Now if it's to the bacterium's advantage to make the poison, then it can do so. Even if it's to the advantage of it's cohort. But this wouldn't be. E-coli depends on having live hosts. Dead, or really sick, hosts don't help to spread it. (Dysentery is a special case here.)
Additionally, when bacteria make a chemical, they prefer to make do with VERY small amount. So they concentrate on exceedingly potent poisons that doen't spread easily. Other things aren't as advantageous to them.
So I think your proposed modified e-coli would end up being *less* dangerous than many naturally occurring plagues. It is, however, included in the term "plagues". When I said nano-machinery would be no more dangerous than plagues, I was including this kind of modified plague. (I can think of plausible modifications...this just isn't one.) As for the plague against blond people being fragile, this is because it would need a very selective attack vector. Otherwise it would quickly mutate into just another plague against people.
P.S.: I left out one major reason, because I'm largely ignorant of it. But it's already important, and is likely to be of increasing importance, so I should mention it.
Already most speakers of English don't have English as their first language. And the proportion is growing. To what extent this will change things is impossible to state, but I'm assured that it already has a great affect on the direction of the evolution of English. The guess is that the English of a century or so from now would be nigh unintelligible to a current native English speaker. Because of grammatical changes. Speculation is that the language is in the process of splitting into pieces, but that's only one alternative.
My Japanese is quite limited, but I'm informed that spoken Japanese is sufficiently vague that people frequently sketch out characters in the air to clarify exactly which meaning they mean.
And I still say that English is widely known as one of the more confusing languages. I can accept that even though, as a native speaker, it rarely confuses me. And in this I'm not even talking about the various dialects. In that context the clear winner is either China, or perhaps one of the South-Ease Asian countries. (Burma? Thiland?) This is because the tone structures are more variable so that people from one village have trouble understanding people in a nearby village. I'm really thinking more about word order, modifiers, parts of speech, etc. It doesn't really help that classically English grammars were based on Latin, a totally unsuitable match. So people practically ignored the grammar, and evolved the language free-form. Then there's all the borrowed constructions. Here I'm not talking so much about borrowed words (though that does interesting things to the spelling) but borrowed grammatical features. E.g. some words pluralize by adding an -en, because that was how it was done in Norse. So, oxen. Most of these have dropped away, so now one only encounters constructs like "shoen" in quotations from older times. (E.g., "Shoen" I got from the LykeWake Dirge.)
Every language has features of this sort, but English has gone through sufficient tumult in recent centuries that the language has changed to near unintelligiblity. Try to read Edmund Spenser's "Faerie Queen". He wrote in a deliberately archaic style at about the time of Shakespeare. Spanish, by contrast, has had only minor changes since the writing of El Cid, centuries before then. (I think it may have been around the time of Chaucer, but I've never checked to be certain.) Partially this was caused because the Norman-French (speaking a distorted form of French) conquered an Anglo-Saxon speaking country. But not thoroughly enough to impose their language on the peasantry. So, over the centuries, the country's "upper-crust" began to speak an Anglo-Saxonized French, and the common folk began to speak a Norman-Frenchified Anglo-Saxon. This continued until they were speaking about the same language. But the official grammar was that of Latin, because the schools were run by the clergy, who considered Latin to be the only worthy language. (It's more confusing than that, as I've left out the influence of the Gaelic languages. [Other languages, Brithonic, Pictish, etc. only came in via the modifications that they had already made to Anglo-Saxon].)
Anyway, because of it's recent history, when English went out into the international world (about the 1800's) it had no qualms about adopting forms and words from other languages. Some fit, some didn't. And there were also indigenous innovations, that were thrown into the mix. There was already such a swirling stew of changes, that a few more weren't resisted. But in any particular area there needs to be a critical proportion of people accepting a change. If they do, then there needs to be some reason for it to spread. Books will work. Radio shows. But they need to catch a popular fad, so most changes just die away. Others, however, linger. Words enter most easily, but turns of phrase can also enter. And occasionally a new grammatical construction will show up. Most die out quickly, but some are adopted.
And none of it is planned. It just evolves.
And that's why I believe it when people tell me that English is one of the world's most confusing languages.
I think that energetic considerations will limit the danger of "grey goo" to being no worse than other bacteria. The more specialized they are, the more of a "hot-house plant" that requires special conditions to flourish.
I *could* be wrong, but if so I'd find it quite surprising. (OTOH, there could be specially tailored plagues that only attacked, say, blonde people. But I think that they'd be quite fragile. And in this context I'm considering nano-mechanical plagues to be no different from ordinary plagues. This, however, could be wrong, because they can use materials other than proteins in their structure. But if they use any structural elements other than C, H, O, & N their ability to propagate within organic material will be quite limited.)
Two options to consider are Vala and Go. Neither is quite ripe yet, but both are quite interesting.
If you're doing a different kind of application, think about Python. But Python is slow compared to Java, while Vala is fast. Go... I'm not sure. The documentation is a bit impermeable. And the Vala documentation seems to assume that you already know all about using GObject. Sigh. Nothing's perfect.
Sorry, but you slightly misunderstand "Mitochondrial Eve". It doesn't prove that we can all trace our bloodline back to one female, but rather that along the ancestral line that has only females in it's component, all the ancestors at one point in time had identical (or almost identical) mitochondria. This could be a small group of closely related women as well as one woman. And it's quite possible that no other gene of that particular set of women survived to present day.
It's very close to what you interpret it as saying, but I think different. And significantly different.
Remember that the mitochondrial line has only two special features: 1) the genes mutate rapidly, and 2) it is only inherited along the female line. (I.e., sons don't pass on mitochondrial genes.)
The interesting thing is, if you count all genetic lines, then every person alive today is descended from every person alive at around the time of Julius Caesar (give or take a century) who has any remaining descendants. That's a lot shorter time line. (Personally, I find that one hard to swallow. But all it takes is one shipwrecked sailor and an otherwise isolated gene-pool becomes quickly merged.) (And note the caveat "who has any remaining descendants". A lot of lines were shuffled out of existence in recombination, even ignoring those who didn't leave any grandchildren.)
(Then, as mentioned, there are the studies of the y-chromosome. But that doesn't mutate as rapidly, so it provides a less satisfactory clock.)
No, it isn't. There are 5 or 6, rather likely points of origin, and several others only slightly less plausible. No one candidate gets more than 30% probability in my mind. And it's that much only because I'm counting them in all of the coalitions that they might be members of. I'd give the US and Israel each a 20% probability of acting almost independently, and those are the highest probabilities. 20% is only one chance out of five.
If you think it's obvious, then you need to explain your reasoning better. Otherwise it looks like prejudice.
I wouldn't go quite as far as he did. I'd say that if you boot your system from read only media, and mount the hard drives (and any other mountable or writeable media) as non-executable, then you would be relatively safe. Not quite as safe as with his approach, but I haven't yet heard of an attack that would work.
N.B.: This depends upon your initially having a good copy of the OS on the ReadOnly media. This is where things start breaking down. Getting an OS without holes which is also capable is quite difficult. (Which BSD claims to have that? Can't remember.) But if your system has no holes, then it should be secure even if you allow internet connections. But allowing them is false bravado. Don't do it.
The air gap between the system to be protected and the external universe is the basic security. ANYTHING which penetrates that must be suspect. This included USB drives as well as people. USB drives can generally be handled by mounting them as non-executable. The people are an area of vulnerability that is more difficult to handle.
What reports say it does is to vary the speed of the motor driving the centrifuge. In a manner totally not observable. The goal was that nobody should know it was happening, but the isotopes not be separated properly.
I imagine that it ran for a considerable time before anyone even detected it. Possibly only when a test of the output showed separation failure. Certainly that was the intent. Then they needed to figure out what was causing the problem...
OTOH, I haven't been following this. Maybe it was detected some other way. If so, then it hasn't been the success that it's designers hoped for.
P.S.: This is based on old news that I read when this first surfaced. It could have been superseded by updated reports, and it's no more reliable than the news on the internet. But it seems quite likely to me.
Slashdot Mirror
It doesn't sound quite right, but it is true that oil that is repeatedly heated is bad nutritionally, though I'm not sure of the details. And I think the harm *is* related to the oil being oxidized.
But this just says don't fry your foods. And limit your use of cooking oil. Rephrased in that way it sounds just like obviously sensible advice.
OTOH, I've never heard it claimed that coconut oil was good for you, except as insulation. I guess that if you do a lot of swimming in cold water it would be good...
I believe that there is good evidence that too much lard and beef fat are bad for your arteries. Possibly not for everyone, because people *are* different, but that's the way to bet. I haven't heard anything specific about lamb fat.
OTOH, I tend to have low cholesterol. I enjoy eating 2-3 eggs a day, as my grandfather did before me. (OTOH, I don't milk the cows or raise the chickens... so I can't necessarily count on the same benefits.) But my cholesterol is low. Both kinds. Worrisomely. Medications don't seem to help, and neither does exercise. (Some people find that exercise raises their HDL levels.)
But I tend to feel that, for me at least, the main problem with the lamb fat is the calories. If you have high cholesterol, your situation might well be different. Claiming that all people have the same biochemistry is a fallacy that we are forced into by being forced to use an oversimplified model by lack of detailed individualized information. (Which doesn't mean that there aren't some true universals, but they don't tend to be properly reported by our current system, which focuses of "things which are generally true".)
But you can't do it for anti-oxidants. You can only do it for an anti-oxidant. And there are lots of them. And there's no particular reason to believe that they all act the same. (Unless you have a model of how things work that suggests that they would. And THAT model can be tested.)
But I don't think any scientist uses such a simple model. E.g., there has been a study that reported that a diet containing high levels of Co-enzyne Q10 and Alpha-lipoeic acid tended to reduce the loss of hair cells in rats exposed to environmental stresses. And loss of hair cells is one of the chief causes of hearing loss in elderly humans. From this, one can conclude ... what?
Well, nothing really. What does "high levels" mean? Were there any other side effects? Does it apply to humans? Would other anti-oxidants work as well? Do you need both anti-oxidants? Since my family tends to loose hearing as we age, I've started taking those pills. It's a gamble. I don't know how much I should take, or what side effects could show up. But I have weak eyes, and I'd rather not be both deaf and blind, so I'm taking a gamble. I'm sure not going to say that scientists said I should do so, it's my decision, and it's a known gamble (with unknown risks).
The point is that some things are irreducibly complex. This means that there are lots of problems with trying so make predictions about what action will result in what result. Body chemistry is such a field. And different people have significantly different body chemistries. Standard medicines don't have the same effect on everyone who takes them. (Read the warning panels on a prescription drug.) People talk about personalized medicine, and I'm sure that would be a great breakthrough. In fact, it will probably require several great breakthroughs before it becomes practical.
There's no group of people who live on this kind of diet. It's not cheap, it's not satisfying. Etc. A rat who is a prisoner in a lab can be forced to live this way. People can't unless they are also prisoners in a lab. This is essentially a "perfectly balanced" starvation diet. (Well, we don't really know what "perfectly balanced" is, but for rats we have a pretty fair idea. And it's not standard lab chow.)
The "ideal diet" is probably closer to "The Zone" balance than to most diets that people actually use, but it needs significantly more bulk (brans, etc.), and a more careful balance of proteins. And it's a lot less in calories.
Also please note that on this diet you are significantly more vulnerable to cold, infections, and other environmental stresses. Secondary infections when you get something like the flu are significantly more likely, and more likely to be deadly. (OTOH, the flu itself, and many other viruses, would be milder.)
It's not the sort of diet that you can stick to of your own free will. I'm sure that there have been short term attempts. Long term attempts...I seriously doubt it. (Note that simple starvation won't do. You've got to have properly balanced starvation. And this *does* make you more susceptible to infections and diseases, so it needs to be in healthy circumstances. Can always get warm enough, etc.)
The limitations on this strategy are severe enough that I really doubt it could be done on/by anyone who wasn't a prisoner in a laboratory.
Oxalic acid should be "sort of" OK. It's supposed to be common in spinach. In fact it's supposed to be the reason that the iron in spinach is unavailable, unless you eat it with vinegar.
Not really, a large part of it maybe, but much of the debt has been translated into proper ownership.
It's not just the tech. industry. We notice it more than most, because we're a recent industry. The problem is that the patent system doesn't scale nicely. Something that works great when there's 5 people doing development doesn't necessarily work so well when there's 500 people doing development, and can be catastrophically bad when there's 50,000 people doing development.
There are other effects, but let's just look at one, credit assignment. At any one time there are only a certain number of "optimally positioned problems" to be solved. When the number of problems is far larger than the number of developers, then each developer will probably be addressing a separate problem. When the ratio is inverted, however, you get a different effect. So if 10 people solve a problem independently at about the same time, why should only one of them get all the credit? It's unjust.
Another problem is that monopolies are intrinsically socially harmful. Sometimes they produce more social good, then harm, but they are always harmful, and often grossly dangerous. They create points of critical vulnerability. If all development along a particular line must funnel through one entity, whether group or individual, that entity can act to destroy future development along that line. And it's often, perhaps usually, to it's benefit to do so. (So that only it can take advantage of the developments currently possible.) Thus, e.g., AT&T stalled modem development for nearly a decade. They HAD faster modems than acoustic couplers, they called them DAAs, or Data Access Arrangements, but they saw no advantage in developing them to faster speeds. They could already charge as much as they could get away with. So development of modems stalled.
And patents are legal monopolies. Some better approach is needed. One that doesn't involve the grant of a monopoly.
Around a decade ago I had a job were I developed in MSAccess. Every upgrade broke backwards compatibility. (Forwards compatibility worked, but to export the database to the older version I had to export the data as text and re-import it. Otherwise in a month or so the database would become corrupt. OK, once I figured that out I could live with it. Then I caught it adding two numbers incorrectly. This is hard to notice, so I have no idea how often it did this without my noticing.
I dropped MSAccess as quickly as I could after that. Shortly afterwards I retired, so I don't know if there was any followup, and on my home systems I'd already switched to Linux. So, for various reasons, I haven't touched MSAccess for over a decade. But I think "toy system" overstates it's value. Yes, it's easy to use. That's the bait on the hook.
P.S.: Before I'd retired I'd already reached the point of being unwilling to agree to the MS EULA. (Read the hideous thing!) So there's no chance that I'll ever find out if MS has mended their ways. But I really doubt it.
Well, the word "telefactor" could mean what you describe, but most telefactors are immobile.
O. Ok. I didn't take the Bible very seriously, so I never memorized the names of the Israeli tribes, or where each came from. Still didn't sound like they were punished.
I'm not at all convinced that Einstein was that spiritual. Turns of phrase like "Der Liebe Gott" are conventional patterns of speech, and do no indicate belief. Of course, this depends on exactly what you mean by "spiritual". (And in any case, I think Niels Bohr would be a better example.)
Spiritual is one of those words that each person seems to use in a different way. And literally it seems to mean "full of breath" or some such. Sort of like pneumatic, only from the Latin instead of from the Greek. But both languages conflated breath and ??? (something we don't have a good descriptive word for). Jung preferred to refer to pneuma rather than spirit, because if people recognized the word, they would misunderstand it, but if they didn't, he could explain what he meant. Both "sort of" mean "The breath of life", but in a vitalistic sense. Unless you accept Vitalism, then it's quite difficult to wrap your mind around what's being talked about. It's rather like trying to understand the meaning of "phlogiston".
But what do *you* mean by the term? Do you mean a person with insight into how his mind works? Do you mean a person inspired (breathe into) by some god or daemon? Both are legitimate interpretations. The second is the traditional interpretation, but has "sort of" fallen into disuse. It still seems to be the implicit meaning that many people use, however.
Personally, if someone claims to have true spiritual insight, I want him to put it to the test, and write a program that demonstrates that knowledge. Otherwise I tend to consider it fluff and hot air. Too many "obviously true" theories have fallen to their death when faced by experiment for me to put much trust in one that has no experimental backing.
P.S.: I do consider myself a spiritual person. I haven't yet been able to construct such a program, but it's a "work in progress", and has such has enlightened me in many ways as to just how incomplete my "spiritual insight" has been. I realize that I don't have enough computational power to create a true mind, but even so that hasn't been my limitation. (If I'd gone straight to trying to apply Bayesian statistics, then I would have hit that limit first, but that was obvious, so I've postponed dealing with those parts of the model.)
Yes, but the report says that Lot *did* offer his daughters to the mob. So maybe that's where the idea of sex got into it.
You believe as much as you choose of this. But the argument is about whether Amazon, to be consistent, should have also purged the Bible. Or whether it's being selective in a very PC way. (And on how much they should be trusted in the future.)
Lot's daughters? Punished? I don't remember reading that part. From this are descended the tribes of ... They were the founding mothers (and father) of two of the twelve tribes of Israel.
If you mean being isolated in the wilderness with only their father, that was because YHVH, or something, destroyed the place where they used to live. (Given the story-line I favor a volcano over a meteor, because Lot's wife hung behind and got turned into "a pillar of salt". This sounds like entombed in volcanic ash, though I presume there are other explanations. [In high school Chemistry I re-read that section because of the joke about Lot's wife being named Ester, because she was an organic salt.])
OTOH, this is all assuming that there is any truth to be found there. A question I find somewhat dubious. Outside of the genealogies, much of the bible reads like a collection of fairy tales...as collected by the Grimm brothers. And slanted in a very self-righteous and jingoistic way. (Yes, I'm certain that there are some historic events recorded. Things weren't kept tightly partitioned. But not much attention was paid to what was true and what was fiction. If you want a similar point-of-view today, try to get into the head of someone who is not only a denier of global warming, but also of evolution and the moon landings.)
Sorry, but I can't figure out whether that's a joke, you're a troll, or you're really that stupid. (I figure that if you're on /., you can't really be too ignorant to just be uninformed.)
My bet is that it's a joke, but I sure wish the odds were better.
OK. I can see this being done by a virus that mutates the genes of a bacterium. That happens, and will create desired (by the virus) variants. And, if successful for other reasons, could maintain itself, re-infecting bacteria that mutated away from the modified form.
I'm still not convinced that it's practical, but this sounds much more feasible than your prior suggestions. (I'd expect a huge problem with viruses mutating to be forms that didn't do anything that benefited them, but there's no obvious cost driving them away from the action.)
N.B.: This ALL comes under the heading of plagues. My original assertion was that nanomachinery is unlikely to be any more dangerous than plagues, so the more dangerous you conceive plagues as being, the more true that statement is.
Nanomachinery distinct from plagues would have at least one of several characteristics:
1) it's hereditary material wouldn't be DNA or any close relative.
2) it's backbone structure would not be based around carbon
3) it would use wheels, gears, or ratchets
4) a significant proportion of its mass would be in the form or crystal matrices.
5) it's controlled from the outside by em or magnetic transmissions.
6) it maintains a web site. (OK, I'm being silly.But there are other things not listed that would qualify it, I just can't think of them right now.)
And of course there are things in between. So far, however, synthetic life doesn't come close to the boundary. (Though you could make a case about virus particles having most of their mass in crystaline form. I'd need to know more before I'd accept that, though. I think that when a virus is active it's not crystallized. Could be I'm wrong.)
That's not in accord with how I understand the evolutionary process. If a variation doesn't have an advantage, then it will never become a significant factor.
I disagree. You are still going to need to manufacture it more rapidly than it breaks down over whatever area that it has dispersed to. That means that something that disperses rapidly is insanely expensive for a bacterium, unless it has a local use.
OK. I have to give you this one. It's still not ideal from the bacterium's point of view, but evolution has no foresight.
There are a lot of cells of the bacterium, admittedly, but just how many will be sporting the modified genes. I'd bet the fraction would be immeasurably small. It require additional cellular machinery, it's energetically expensive, it requires extra raw materials, and it provides no advantage. This is not the recipe for a mutation that survives.
Additionally, I'm not even certain that it's safe for e-coli. It could be, I suppose. Not having nerves, however, doesn't mean that they aren't affected by similar molecular pathways.
It would certainly be more successful to engineer a bacterium to derive energy or resources from VX and have it succeed. That pathway needn't require any energy except when the appropriate chemical was around.
Taking your example:
If it makes, as you suggest, VX nerve gas, then it need to pay for the excess production. The more the bacterium produces, the more it needs to pay. It's competition (other e-coli) don't need to pay that price, so they out-compete it.
Now if it's to the bacterium's advantage to make the poison, then it can do so. Even if it's to the advantage of it's cohort. But this wouldn't be. E-coli depends on having live hosts. Dead, or really sick, hosts don't help to spread it. (Dysentery is a special case here.)
Additionally, when bacteria make a chemical, they prefer to make do with VERY small amount. So they concentrate on exceedingly potent poisons that doen't spread easily. Other things aren't as advantageous to them.
So I think your proposed modified e-coli would end up being *less* dangerous than many naturally occurring plagues. It is, however, included in the term "plagues". When I said nano-machinery would be no more dangerous than plagues, I was including this kind of modified plague. (I can think of plausible modifications...this just isn't one.) As for the plague against blond people being fragile, this is because it would need a very selective attack vector. Otherwise it would quickly mutate into just another plague against people.
P.S.:
I left out one major reason, because I'm largely ignorant of it. But it's already important, and is likely to be of increasing importance, so I should mention it.
Already most speakers of English don't have English as their first language. And the proportion is growing. To what extent this will change things is impossible to state, but I'm assured that it already has a great affect on the direction of the evolution of English. The guess is that the English of a century or so from now would be nigh unintelligible to a current native English speaker. Because of grammatical changes. Speculation is that the language is in the process of splitting into pieces, but that's only one alternative.
My Japanese is quite limited, but I'm informed that spoken Japanese is sufficiently vague that people frequently sketch out characters in the air to clarify exactly which meaning they mean.
And I still say that English is widely known as one of the more confusing languages. I can accept that even though, as a native speaker, it rarely confuses me. And in this I'm not even talking about the various dialects. In that context the clear winner is either China, or perhaps one of the South-Ease Asian countries. (Burma? Thiland?) This is because the tone structures are more variable so that people from one village have trouble understanding people in a nearby village. I'm really thinking more about word order, modifiers, parts of speech, etc. It doesn't really help that classically English grammars were based on Latin, a totally unsuitable match. So people practically ignored the grammar, and evolved the language free-form. Then there's all the borrowed constructions. Here I'm not talking so much about borrowed words (though that does interesting things to the spelling) but borrowed grammatical features. E.g. some words pluralize by adding an -en, because that was how it was done in Norse. So, oxen. Most of these have dropped away, so now one only encounters constructs like "shoen" in quotations from older times. (E.g., "Shoen" I got from the LykeWake Dirge.)
Every language has features of this sort, but English has gone through sufficient tumult in recent centuries that the language has changed to near unintelligiblity. Try to read Edmund Spenser's "Faerie Queen". He wrote in a deliberately archaic style at about the time of Shakespeare. Spanish, by contrast, has had only minor changes since the writing of El Cid, centuries before then. (I think it may have been around the time of Chaucer, but I've never checked to be certain.) Partially this was caused because the Norman-French (speaking a distorted form of French) conquered an Anglo-Saxon speaking country. But not thoroughly enough to impose their language on the peasantry. So, over the centuries, the country's "upper-crust" began to speak an Anglo-Saxonized French, and the common folk began to speak a Norman-Frenchified Anglo-Saxon. This continued until they were speaking about the same language. But the official grammar was that of Latin, because the schools were run by the clergy, who considered Latin to be the only worthy language. (It's more confusing than that, as I've left out the influence of the Gaelic languages. [Other languages, Brithonic, Pictish, etc. only came in via the modifications that they had already made to Anglo-Saxon].)
Anyway, because of it's recent history, when English went out into the international world (about the 1800's) it had no qualms about adopting forms and words from other languages. Some fit, some didn't. And there were also indigenous innovations, that were thrown into the mix. There was already such a swirling stew of changes, that a few more weren't resisted. But in any particular area there needs to be a critical proportion of people accepting a change. If they do, then there needs to be some reason for it to spread. Books will work. Radio shows. But they need to catch a popular fad, so most changes just die away. Others, however, linger. Words enter most easily, but turns of phrase can also enter. And occasionally a new grammatical construction will show up. Most die out quickly, but some are adopted.
And none of it is planned. It just evolves.
And that's why I believe it when people tell me that English is one of the world's most confusing languages.
I think that energetic considerations will limit the danger of "grey goo" to being no worse than other bacteria. The more specialized they are, the more of a "hot-house plant" that requires special conditions to flourish.
I *could* be wrong, but if so I'd find it quite surprising. (OTOH, there could be specially tailored plagues that only attacked, say, blonde people. But I think that they'd be quite fragile. And in this context I'm considering nano-mechanical plagues to be no different from ordinary plagues. This, however, could be wrong, because they can use materials other than proteins in their structure. But if they use any structural elements other than C, H, O, & N their ability to propagate within organic material will be quite limited.)
Two options to consider are Vala and Go. Neither is quite ripe yet, but both are quite interesting.
If you're doing a different kind of application, think about Python. But Python is slow compared to Java, while Vala is fast. Go ... I'm not sure. The documentation is a bit impermeable. And the Vala documentation seems to assume that you already know all about using GObject. Sigh. Nothing's perfect.
Sorry, but you slightly misunderstand "Mitochondrial Eve". It doesn't prove that we can all trace our bloodline back to one female, but rather that along the ancestral line that has only females in it's component, all the ancestors at one point in time had identical (or almost identical) mitochondria. This could be a small group of closely related women as well as one woman. And it's quite possible that no other gene of that particular set of women survived to present day.
It's very close to what you interpret it as saying, but I think different. And significantly different.
Remember that the mitochondrial line has only two special features:
1) the genes mutate rapidly, and
2) it is only inherited along the female line. (I.e., sons don't pass on mitochondrial genes.)
The interesting thing is, if you count all genetic lines, then every person alive today is descended from every person alive at around the time of Julius Caesar (give or take a century) who has any remaining descendants. That's a lot shorter time line. (Personally, I find that one hard to swallow. But all it takes is one shipwrecked sailor and an otherwise isolated gene-pool becomes quickly merged.) (And note the caveat "who has any remaining descendants". A lot of lines were shuffled out of existence in recombination, even ignoring those who didn't leave any grandchildren.)
(Then, as mentioned, there are the studies of the y-chromosome. But that doesn't mutate as rapidly, so it provides a less satisfactory clock.)
No, it isn't. There are 5 or 6, rather likely points of origin, and several others only slightly less plausible. No one candidate gets more than 30% probability in my mind. And it's that much only because I'm counting them in all of the coalitions that they might be members of. I'd give the US and Israel each a 20% probability of acting almost independently, and those are the highest probabilities. 20% is only one chance out of five.
If you think it's obvious, then you need to explain your reasoning better. Otherwise it looks like prejudice.
Read his post again. He already answered that.
I wouldn't go quite as far as he did. I'd say that if you boot your system from read only media, and mount the hard drives (and any other mountable or writeable media) as non-executable, then you would be relatively safe. Not quite as safe as with his approach, but I haven't yet heard of an attack that would work.
N.B.: This depends upon your initially having a good copy of the OS on the ReadOnly media. This is where things start breaking down. Getting an OS without holes which is also capable is quite difficult. (Which BSD claims to have that? Can't remember.) But if your system has no holes, then it should be secure even if you allow internet connections. But allowing them is false bravado. Don't do it.
The air gap between the system to be protected and the external universe is the basic security. ANYTHING which penetrates that must be suspect. This included USB drives as well as people. USB drives can generally be handled by mounting them as non-executable. The people are an area of vulnerability that is more difficult to handle.
What reports say it does is to vary the speed of the motor driving the centrifuge. In a manner totally not observable. The goal was that nobody should know it was happening, but the isotopes not be separated properly.
I imagine that it ran for a considerable time before anyone even detected it. Possibly only when a test of the output showed separation failure. Certainly that was the intent. Then they needed to figure out what was causing the problem...
OTOH, I haven't been following this. Maybe it was detected some other way. If so, then it hasn't been the success that it's designers hoped for.
P.S.: This is based on old news that I read when this first surfaced. It could have been superseded by updated reports, and it's no more reliable than the news on the internet. But it seems quite likely to me.