Anyone following the links looking for a lawyer will never encounter these links. To me this looks like helpless anger and frustration finding *some* outlet, no matter how useless. The anger and frustration are quite reasonable. Thinking this approach does ANYTHING isn't.
Yeah, a citation *is* needed. Unfortunately, I can't supply it. I still believe it's true, but the only reference I HAD was an thing on yeast reproduction. And I don't have that now.
But what background did you THINK there was which allowed prion diseases to exist? It's one of the standard mechanisms used during cell metabolism gone astray. And prions are carried by the cytoplasm. Which means that they are inherited with the egg, but not carried by the sperm.
Again, sorry, no references. It's often mentioned within articles about something else. But I'm guessing as to the amount of information carried in this manner.
I'm not really certain that there is never a case for censorship. That would be quite difficult to prove. Merely saying "I've never seen a situation where it seemed to me that censorship was a reasonable response." doesn't prove the argument. Neither does saying "I can't imagine such a case."
E.g., I'm not sure I would want the complete genome of Ebola on the net. I'm not sure that there's a case for censoring it, but I'm not sure there isn't. Can you PROVE that there's no case for censoring that? (N.B.: A case does not require that you make a constructive proof that some course of action should be taken. It merely requires that you raise a line of argument that should be investigated thoroughly before further action is taken.)
That might be difficult, now that even rather elementary cartoons are considered child port. Like, say, a photoshopped image of a couple of the Simpson kids. (Sorry, I'm so distant from this scene that I can't even remember their names.)
OTOH, I also consider going after such individuals a total waste of time and resources. Unless someone wanted to prosecute them for copyright or trademark infringement. Otherwise it's totally absurd...but still quite sinister.
*Keeping* something at a particular temperature doesn't require much energy if you've got good insulation. It's true that higher temperatures require better insulation, and that 1500 C is pretty high. That just means that you need several layers of vacuum insulation. Make building the oven expensive, and getting it up to heat in the first place expensive, but not holding it at the right temperature.
At that temperature you need to worry about radiative losses as well as conductive losses, so vacuum alone isn't sufficient. You've got to polish the surfaces well, and carefully select the materials. But it should still be quite manageable. Just expensive to set up.
I may be cynical, but I think it more likely journalists writing what they think will sell. There is probably some kernel of truth under there somewhere... but finding it would require digging.
And the journalists don't get paid for digging anymore than I do. They get paid for writing interesting articles. Preferably with some actual basis somewhere, if only in misunderstanding. Better interesting misunderstanding than boring actuality.
That's probably about 1/2 of the information required to reproduce a horse. The genome isn't everything, even if it were complete (which I doubt, because repetitive segment of codons are beyond what I believe is our current ability to sequence).
But *if* you had the complete genome, including the mitochondiral sequences, etc. it still wouldn't be enough. You also need the environment to raise the genome, which includes not only mechanisms for feeding it, but an unknown but large number of prions which are required for proteins to fold correctly. Not all proteins require such assistance, but many do, and without them you can't create a live horse...or any other mammal, probably any other chordate.
I'm guessing that the genome is half the information needed. It could be considerably less than half. (Or, of course, more. I can't even tell if I'm being conservative.)
Note that the genome carries practically all the information for the variation between horses...or between horses and zebras. But this isn't at all the same as half the information.
I think that the govt. should sponsor selected Open Source projects. One to calculate income tax would be quite reasonable.
Any form that the govt. requires should be a reasonable project to be sponsored. And any application that the govt. needs for it's own internal use.
I'm against govt. money just being grants. That feels like a bad idea. But hiring people to build carefully selected Open Source projects should be a good thing. Probably the BSD or MIT license should be chosen, as companies should be able to take the developed source code and run with it.
The Earth is getting warmer and our ice is melting, and that's not in dispute.
Actually, that last bit is in dispute, if you RTFS.
OK. Not disputed by anyone reputable.
If the warming trend continues, all of the ice will melt eventually, this is dictated by physics.
If you feel comfortable doing linear extrapolations on a highly nonlinear system, anyway.
Climate models aren't linear extrapolations. Popularized explanations sometimes are, but such oversimplifications don't reflect back on the original model. They merely attempt to explain the results in terms that ordinary people (i.e., those who aren't mathematical climate modelers) can understand. They are oversimplifications.
I believe that DDT is still used in places where malaria is a problem...but mosquitos have become relatively immune to it. (I hear that a lot of the immunity is in the form of disliking it's smell and going elsewhere...but not all.)
No. I did hear it reported that way in the media. I also heard it reported other ways. I heard various stories that appeared to make it seem intentional sabotage of voting in poorer areas...and it may have been.
But I'm willing to presume that it was mechanical error. I know that some elderly people were confused, but it's also true that I know that some blacks had the polls shut early while they were standing in line to get in. I'm presuming that both problems were inadvertent and relatively localized. But I received more different reports of discrimination in poorer areas than I did of elderly people getting confused. If you want me to consider them as systematic problems, then would need to feel that the election was intentionally thrown to Bush.
You've gone to the original sources, which I haven't. But I still think that it's not appropriate for dense cities and a gross disparity between military power and civilian power. It assumes that an area is self-sufficient, and no city is. They could just cut off power and water, and the city would be destroyed as a habitable area within a week.
I'd replace it with an amendment that specifically authorized groups of citizens to gather and plot ways of overthrowing the government. NOTE: plot, not act on those plots. Not murder, steal, or otherwise commit criminal acts except as such might be necessary in order to plot. One would think that this was covered by free speech, but court decisions have occasionally seemed to indicate that it isn't.
P.S.: And another amendment, separate, that one cannot contractually waive constitutional protections or guarantees. I think this is still generally presumed, but given the way things have been going, lets make it explicit. There are a lot of rights that were taken for granted by our forefathers but which legal shenanigans have limited or removed. It should only be done by due process, meaning constitutional amendment. If they can't get the agreement required for a constitutional amendment, it shouldn't be changed. But repeatedly it has been, by shifting the interpretation of the words to something really unlikely.
P.P.S.: And another amendment should be that corporations are not persons and not citizens. That their charters to operate exist only so long as recognized by the governments in the places where they do business. (Not have business presence! A corporation's right to do business in, say, Kansas should be dependent on the government of Kansas. If a corporation has a web page that sells gizmos, its right to sell gizmos in Kansas should be dependent on it's being recognized as a legal corporation by Kansas. Otherwise it would need to sell gizmos via another company that was not a corporation (and where the owners did not enjoy the kind of legal immunity that the stockholders in a corporation enjoy). (This could get very messy, and needs to be stated VERY carefully, which I haven't done. Perhaps there isn't a good way to say it, and a fall-back position is necessary.)
Excellent point. I don't know whether the DOJ argument (if they decide to make one) will be just or not, reasonable or not. But when past executives make policy about the firm they worked for... it gives *at the very least* the appearance of corruption. It definitely decreases the level of trust in the government. (Which is already pretty low after two administrations of Bush.)
N.B.: I don't know whether Clinton was untrustworthy or not. To my mind what he was accused of was not comparable to starting a war for no good reason. And I believe that's what Bush did.
Objective journalism is impossible. The idea is a relict of a very outworn idea about how people think.
Try "fact based". Then it's possible to argue about the facts they include and those they choose to exclude. You KNOW they've got to exclude some. That they've got to trim their edition of the news to those facts they deem important. By seeing how close the facts they exclude match those you, also, consider unimportant you can get an idea as to how much to trust them.
That said, I prefer even biased fact-based journalism to ax-grinders who just make up what they think the news should say. (Except for the Weekly World News. I admire any publication that can put a picture of a chambered nautilus on it's cover and claim it's a picture of an invader from Mars.)
Do you mean tolerance of religions? Then you are right, but sorry, people are built to be religious.
I can wish it weren't so, but that doesn't change the facts. Actually, I just wish that people by and large had a better understanding of just what religion *is*. (Of course, I'm totally objective:-)
As I see it a god is a manifestation of an archetypal process into consciousness. There are lots of them and they ARE real. (I've encountered one a few times. They feel as real as the table in the dining room. More real, as just thinking about them brings back a stronger echo than I get from thinking about the table in the dining room.)
My suspicion is that if we ever succeed in designing an AI based around human thought processes, it, also, will be religious. And people won't be it's gods. People are physical objects, not archetypal processes. Different order of reality.
Note that I'm not claiming that gods are eternal. Not unless the species is eternal. But gods are genetically coded for, and are activated by thinking of them... so... "Whenever two or three are gathered together in my name, I am among them." is literally true, for the proper definition of the "my" of "my name". The speaker is claiming to be speaking as the voice of the archetype.
Note that archetypes are not memes, but can be activated by memes, so that contagious memes can result in increased activation of particular archetypes. Now we are approaching the heart of religion (as I see it). The remainder is left as an exercise for the student.
If I recall correctly the problem was that the ballots wouldn't fit correctly into the machines. This could have been a simple mechanical design problem. It could even have been intentional sabotage. Blaming it on "incompetent voters" sounds to me like careful buck passing.
Yeah, I've done a stint on Help Desk. And my wife it totally mechanically incompetent. (Well...not totally, but close.) And I still think that this kind of localized problem is more likely an indication of mechanical problems. If it were incompetent voters the distribution of errors wouldn't have been so geographically concentrated.
There's also the question as to exactly what is meant by the term "militia". I would suspect that at the time it referred to any group of citizens who gathered to practice group action at least occasionally of a military nature. As such I suspect that it would include any gun club. Given that definition, the right of individuals to own weapons would be required. And thus the rest of the amendment follows.
I'll admit that I'm not certain what the term "well-regulated" means. I'm fairly certain, however, that it didn't imply government sanctioned. These were people who were in revolt against their current government...well, who had been quite recently. And the "Bill of Rights" was included *because* many of the founders didn't trust the government they were about to establish. It's possible that they meant to imply that it (the militia) had a formal set of rules.
OTOH, I doubt that this is a reasonable item to have in our current constitution. My objection to those who override it is that they are just ignoring the constitutional mechanism for correction of obsolete portions. It should be done via constitutional amendment, not by this jimmying of various legal backdoors.
No. Sorry, but McCain was so much worse that Obama was, indeed, the better choice. Even though this (probable) action doesn't surprise me.
Anyone who bought the hype should, indeed, feel disappointed. Obama isn't what he promised to be. Why are you surprised? But he's an improvement over Bush.
I've never supported Obama. Well, not since the first three months of his campaign, as I saw his stance changing. But he's better than the alternatives were. Probably. Almost certainly. But only "almost".
FWIW, the Democrats may be better than the Republicans, but only in some ways. And neither have to good of the citizenry as their goal. This isn't a comment about Obama. He may, actually, have the good of the citizenry in mind. But he weights things differently than you do, so he won't reach the same conclusions, even with the same evidence. And he doesn't have the same evidence. He is given information that you don't see, and he is shielded from things that stare you in the face. There are probably at least five levels of intermediates between anything that you say and what he experiences. Only something that appears important enough to all five will even impinge on his perceptions. And he's running on overload...which always degrades one's performance. Expect things to get worse as time progresses, though he's likely to learn to avoid the most egregious errors. I.e., things he decides were errors.
Sorry, but a president can't be responsive to the citizenry. A simple systems analysis should tell you that. He can be responsive to polls...but every poll I've seen has been slanted in one way or another by the agenda of the preparer.
I think Obama is trying to invent an internet based substitute for political polling, but I'm not sure. And I have no idea if he realizes how easily internet polls can be manipulated.
Slashdot Mirror
Why?
Anyone following the links looking for a lawyer will never encounter these links. To me this looks like helpless anger and frustration finding *some* outlet, no matter how useless. The anger and frustration are quite reasonable. Thinking this approach does ANYTHING isn't.
For the slashdot effect to work people need to be interested in going to the link.
Maybe instead you should link them to, say, Natilie Portman, naked, petrified, and covered with hot grits. :-)
Yeah, a citation *is* needed. Unfortunately, I can't supply it. I still believe it's true, but the only reference I HAD was an thing on yeast reproduction. And I don't have that now.
But what background did you THINK there was which allowed prion diseases to exist? It's one of the standard mechanisms used during cell metabolism gone astray. And prions are carried by the cytoplasm. Which means that they are inherited with the egg, but not carried by the sperm.
Again, sorry, no references. It's often mentioned within articles about something else. But I'm guessing as to the amount of information carried in this manner.
I'm not really certain that there is never a case for censorship. That would be quite difficult to prove. Merely saying "I've never seen a situation where it seemed to me that censorship was a reasonable response." doesn't prove the argument. Neither does saying "I can't imagine such a case."
E.g., I'm not sure I would want the complete genome of Ebola on the net. I'm not sure that there's a case for censoring it, but I'm not sure there isn't. Can you PROVE that there's no case for censoring that? (N.B.: A case does not require that you make a constructive proof that some course of action should be taken. It merely requires that you raise a line of argument that should be investigated thoroughly before further action is taken.)
That might be difficult, now that even rather elementary cartoons are considered child port. Like, say, a photoshopped image of a couple of the Simpson kids. (Sorry, I'm so distant from this scene that I can't even remember their names.)
OTOH, I also consider going after such individuals a total waste of time and resources. Unless someone wanted to prosecute them for copyright or trademark infringement. Otherwise it's totally absurd...but still quite sinister.
How long is the hair?
*Keeping* something at a particular temperature doesn't require much energy if you've got good insulation. It's true that higher temperatures require better insulation, and that 1500 C is pretty high. That just means that you need several layers of vacuum insulation. Make building the oven expensive, and getting it up to heat in the first place expensive, but not holding it at the right temperature.
At that temperature you need to worry about radiative losses as well as conductive losses, so vacuum alone isn't sufficient. You've got to polish the surfaces well, and carefully select the materials. But it should still be quite manageable. Just expensive to set up.
Vacuumware? Vacuousware?
I may be cynical, but I think it more likely journalists writing what they think will sell. There is probably some kernel of truth under there somewhere... but finding it would require digging.
And the journalists don't get paid for digging anymore than I do. They get paid for writing interesting articles. Preferably with some actual basis somewhere, if only in misunderstanding. Better interesting misunderstanding than boring actuality.
That's probably about 1/2 of the information required to reproduce a horse. The genome isn't everything, even if it were complete (which I doubt, because repetitive segment of codons are beyond what I believe is our current ability to sequence).
But *if* you had the complete genome, including the mitochondiral sequences, etc. it still wouldn't be enough. You also need the environment to raise the genome, which includes not only mechanisms for feeding it, but an unknown but large number of prions which are required for proteins to fold correctly. Not all proteins require such assistance, but many do, and without them you can't create a live horse...or any other mammal, probably any other chordate.
I'm guessing that the genome is half the information needed. It could be considerably less than half. (Or, of course, more. I can't even tell if I'm being conservative.)
Note that the genome carries practically all the information for the variation between horses...or between horses and zebras. But this isn't at all the same as half the information.
I think that the govt. should sponsor selected Open Source projects. One to calculate income tax would be quite reasonable.
Any form that the govt. requires should be a reasonable project to be sponsored. And any application that the govt. needs for it's own internal use.
I'm against govt. money just being grants. That feels like a bad idea. But hiring people to build carefully selected Open Source projects should be a good thing. Probably the BSD or MIT license should be chosen, as companies should be able to take the developed source code and run with it.
People are generally pretty good at ranking what they like. That's all that's required of the voters for either Condorcet or IRV.
Actually, that last bit is in dispute, if you RTFS.
OK. Not disputed by anyone reputable.
If you feel comfortable doing linear extrapolations on a highly nonlinear system, anyway.
Climate models aren't linear extrapolations. Popularized explanations sometimes are, but such oversimplifications don't reflect back on the original model. They merely attempt to explain the results in terms that ordinary people (i.e., those who aren't mathematical climate modelers) can understand. They are oversimplifications.
So this explains why the middle class has shrunk more under recent Republican administrations than under prior Democratic administrations?
Silly me! And here I was blaming it on increased automation.
I believe that DDT is still used in places where malaria is a problem...but mosquitos have become relatively immune to it. (I hear that a lot of the immunity is in the form of disliking it's smell and going elsewhere...but not all.)
No. I did hear it reported that way in the media. I also heard it reported other ways. I heard various stories that appeared to make it seem intentional sabotage of voting in poorer areas...and it may have been.
But I'm willing to presume that it was mechanical error. I know that some elderly people were confused, but it's also true that I know that some blacks had the polls shut early while they were standing in line to get in. I'm presuming that both problems were inadvertent and relatively localized. But I received more different reports of discrimination in poorer areas than I did of elderly people getting confused. If you want me to consider them as systematic problems, then would need to feel that the election was intentionally thrown to Bush.
However mechanical errors are also a possibility.
You've gone to the original sources, which I haven't. But I still think that it's not appropriate for dense cities and a gross disparity between military power and civilian power. It assumes that an area is self-sufficient, and no city is. They could just cut off power and water, and the city would be destroyed as a habitable area within a week.
I'd replace it with an amendment that specifically authorized groups of citizens to gather and plot ways of overthrowing the government. NOTE: plot, not act on those plots. Not murder, steal, or otherwise commit criminal acts except as such might be necessary in order to plot. One would think that this was covered by free speech, but court decisions have occasionally seemed to indicate that it isn't.
P.S.: And another amendment, separate, that one cannot contractually waive constitutional protections or guarantees. I think this is still generally presumed, but given the way things have been going, lets make it explicit. There are a lot of rights that were taken for granted by our forefathers but which legal shenanigans have limited or removed. It should only be done by due process, meaning constitutional amendment. If they can't get the agreement required for a constitutional amendment, it shouldn't be changed. But repeatedly it has been, by shifting the interpretation of the words to something really unlikely.
P.P.S.: And another amendment should be that corporations are not persons and not citizens. That their charters to operate exist only so long as recognized by the governments in the places where they do business. (Not have business presence! A corporation's right to do business in, say, Kansas should be dependent on the government of Kansas. If a corporation has a web page that sells gizmos, its right to sell gizmos in Kansas should be dependent on it's being recognized as a legal corporation by Kansas. Otherwise it would need to sell gizmos via another company that was not a corporation (and where the owners did not enjoy the kind of legal immunity that the stockholders in a corporation enjoy).
(This could get very messy, and needs to be stated VERY carefully, which I haven't done. Perhaps there isn't a good way to say it, and a fall-back position is necessary.)
Excellent point. I don't know whether the DOJ argument (if they decide to make one) will be just or not, reasonable or not. But when past executives make policy about the firm they worked for ... it gives *at the very least* the appearance of corruption. It definitely decreases the level of trust in the government. (Which is already pretty low after two administrations of Bush.)
N.B.: I don't know whether Clinton was untrustworthy or not. To my mind what he was accused of was not comparable to starting a war for no good reason. And I believe that's what Bush did.
Objective journalism is impossible. The idea is a relict of a very outworn idea about how people think.
Try "fact based". Then it's possible to argue about the facts they include and those they choose to exclude. You KNOW they've got to exclude some. That they've got to trim their edition of the news to those facts they deem important. By seeing how close the facts they exclude match those you, also, consider unimportant you can get an idea as to how much to trust them.
That said, I prefer even biased fact-based journalism to ax-grinders who just make up what they think the news should say. (Except for the Weekly World News. I admire any publication that can put a picture of a chambered nautilus on it's cover and claim it's a picture of an invader from Mars.)
Do you mean tolerance of religions? Then you are right, but sorry, people are built to be religious.
I can wish it weren't so, but that doesn't change the facts. Actually, I just wish that people by and large had a better understanding of just what religion *is*. (Of course, I'm totally objective:-)
As I see it a god is a manifestation of an archetypal process into consciousness. There are lots of them and they ARE real. (I've encountered one a few times. They feel as real as the table in the dining room. More real, as just thinking about them brings back a stronger echo than I get from thinking about the table in the dining room.)
My suspicion is that if we ever succeed in designing an AI based around human thought processes, it, also, will be religious. And people won't be it's gods. People are physical objects, not archetypal processes. Different order of reality.
Note that I'm not claiming that gods are eternal. Not unless the species is eternal. But gods are genetically coded for, and are activated by thinking of them ... so ... "Whenever two or three are gathered together in my name, I am among them." is literally true, for the proper definition of the "my" of "my name". The speaker is claiming to be speaking as the voice of the archetype.
Note that archetypes are not memes, but can be activated by memes, so that contagious memes can result in increased activation of particular archetypes. Now we are approaching the heart of religion (as I see it). The remainder is left as an exercise for the student.
It's probably a result of the electoral process. In any case, it's certainly taken advantage of by various parties...not ALL unscrupulous.
If I recall correctly the problem was that the ballots wouldn't fit correctly into the machines. This could have been a simple mechanical design problem. It could even have been intentional sabotage. Blaming it on "incompetent voters" sounds to me like careful buck passing.
Yeah, I've done a stint on Help Desk. And my wife it totally mechanically incompetent. (Well...not totally, but close.) And I still think that this kind of localized problem is more likely an indication of mechanical problems. If it were incompetent voters the distribution of errors wouldn't have been so geographically concentrated.
IRV is better than the current system is damning with faint praise.
OTOH, I prefer Condorcet over either. Still, IRV is VASTLY superior to the current system.
There's also the question as to exactly what is meant by the term "militia". I would suspect that at the time it referred to any group of citizens who gathered to practice group action at least occasionally of a military nature. As such I suspect that it would include any gun club. Given that definition, the right of individuals to own weapons would be required. And thus the rest of the amendment follows.
I'll admit that I'm not certain what the term "well-regulated" means. I'm fairly certain, however, that it didn't imply government sanctioned. These were people who were in revolt against their current government...well, who had been quite recently. And the "Bill of Rights" was included *because* many of the founders didn't trust the government they were about to establish. It's possible that they meant to imply that it (the militia) had a formal set of rules.
OTOH, I doubt that this is a reasonable item to have in our current constitution. My objection to those who override it is that they are just ignoring the constitutional mechanism for correction of obsolete portions. It should be done via constitutional amendment, not by this jimmying of various legal backdoors.
No. Sorry, but McCain was so much worse that Obama was, indeed, the better choice. Even though this (probable) action doesn't surprise me.
Anyone who bought the hype should, indeed, feel disappointed. Obama isn't what he promised to be. Why are you surprised? But he's an improvement over Bush.
I've never supported Obama. Well, not since the first three months of his campaign, as I saw his stance changing. But he's better than the alternatives were. Probably. Almost certainly. But only "almost".
FWIW, the Democrats may be better than the Republicans, but only in some ways. And neither have to good of the citizenry as their goal. This isn't a comment about Obama. He may, actually, have the good of the citizenry in mind. But he weights things differently than you do, so he won't reach the same conclusions, even with the same evidence. And he doesn't have the same evidence. He is given information that you don't see, and he is shielded from things that stare you in the face. There are probably at least five levels of intermediates between anything that you say and what he experiences. Only something that appears important enough to all five will even impinge on his perceptions. And he's running on overload...which always degrades one's performance. Expect things to get worse as time progresses, though he's likely to learn to avoid the most egregious errors. I.e., things he decides were errors.
Sorry, but a president can't be responsive to the citizenry. A simple systems analysis should tell you that. He can be responsive to polls...but every poll I've seen has been slanted in one way or another by the agenda of the preparer.
I think Obama is trying to invent an internet based substitute for political polling, but I'm not sure. And I have no idea if he realizes how easily internet polls can be manipulated.