I figure the first step would be to patent the idea so that I am protected from it being stolen,...
Also, there are going to be a TON of people here that tell you NOT to file. Don't listen to them. This is your only way of protecting your idea that has legit legal recourse if someone infringes.
One problem with using language for physical property for ideas is that introduces considerable ambiguity. When physical property is "stolen", two things happen: the owner no longer has the property and the thief now has the property. Because ideas can be shared, these are separate: there is the issue of being able to use your idea yourself and there is the issue of preventing other people from using it.
If all you want to do is make sure that you can still use your own idea then a patent is not the way to go. Instead, you just need to tell as many people about the idea as possible in contexts where it is clear that you are the one telling people about the idea (that is, don't do it anonymously). Ideally you would publish it in a major journal but even just putting up a website precisely describing the idea would be a good start.
On the other hand, if your goal is to prevent other people from using your idea because you want to make money by leveraging a monopoly on your idea then a patent is the way to go.
It sounds like you are hoping to make money so patenting is the way to go for you but, particularly for scientist who are motivated by a desire to improve the world, this is a distinction that is important to be aware of.
I think what you mean to say is that the definition of "life" is subjective. All that stuff about "binary" and "fractional" is besides the point, and not necessarily even true.
The ability of an entity to make copies of itself is not really all the subjective. The ability of an entity to respond to its environment has varying degrees but that really isn't all that subjective either. The ability of an organism to maintain a self-sustaining symbiosis between it's various parts (eg. organs) is really not all that subjective either. Finally, being self-aware is not something that humans really understand but that doesn't mean that it is subjective.
Different entities have these characterisics to varying degrees. Any distinction between life and not life is not so much subjective as it is arbitrary.
To get on-topic, I think that humans constantly categorize and assign labels to things as either a member of a group or outside it, which IS binary.
My definition of science would be that it is an attempt to organize and summarize mutually agreed upon factual observations. In that sense, categorizing and assigning labels is very important. On the other hand, the organization and summarizing must be in agreement with the factual observations. If one had a collection of rational numbers (eg. floating point) and one categorized them as either binary 0 or 1, such a categorization would not be particularly accurate.
Language is digital (as opposed to analog) in the sense that you either use a word in a sentence or you don't. You can either use the word "life" in a sentence or not but you can't use a fraction of the word ("li" or "fe" don't mean fractional life - or anything at all for that matter). This creates (willful?) confusion in the minds of people who are very focused on a literal interprtation of language based laws and moral codes that "life" is a binary distinction.
The reality, however, is that the word "life" refers to a whole variety of concepts. There are all different ways of being alive and there are all different levels of being alive. Certainly we can find examples of things that are very "alive" just as we can find examples of colors that are very "blue" - but that doesn't mean every color is either pure blue not blue at all and it doesn't mean that something is either completely alive or not alive at all.
Going way off topic, the whole "life begins at conception" is what we in the sciences refer to as "not even wrong". After all, it's kind of hard for dead people to have children. If you really want to talk about when life began it would be at the big bang when matter developed the properties that cause it to form into complex self-replicating patterns over very long time scales.
If there was no poverty what would be the incentive to work?
Yes, but only for jobs that payed more than the government subsidies.
Suppose the government provided everyone in the United States with all the vitamin fortified rice and beans they wanted and a free ten foot by ten foot apartment with a shared bathroom and kitchen at the end of the hall. Would someone working 14 hour days at WalMart for minimum wage just to have enough to eat and a place live continue to work? Maybe not. Would a CEO making 20 million dollars continue to work? Absolutely. Would a technical professional making 60 thousand a year continue to work? Probably.
Goverment subsidies don't make everyone give up their jobs - just the people with the very low paying jobs.
Too many people will either object because its Bush...
Just because Bush has consistantly done things that a substantial fraction of the US population (and an even more substantial faction of the world population) has disagreed with, it doesn't mean that people are disagreeing because it's Bush.
Going to war without a clear justification, holding people without trial and torturing them, eroding civil liberties including the separation of church and state, and running up massive deficits are things that many people will object to regardless of who is doing it. It's just that Bush has done them all.
For the record, I don't really object the free trade stuff Bush is advocating although Bush's assurance that these are good things doesn't carry much weight after he has been so wrong about so many other things.
Actually, that depends on what the Chinese want. Personally, I think that countries are able to reach better decisions when all points of view are considered but if the Chinese do not want freedom of speech then it is not my place, as an American, to force it on them.
On the other hand, when the United States government undermines freedom of speech then I have a right and a responsibility to try to prevent it.
But if fundamentalist religious zealots threaten us with violence for exercising free speech, we're okay with that.
Would that be the right-wing Christian fundamentalist zealots who threaten to beat up people who are critical of the US military?
While I have been in many situations where I've had to supress my views about the US military to avoid violence, I have yet to be in a situation where I had to supress my views on Muslims in order to avoid violence. Then again, as an American, I am responsible for the behavior of the United States military so I tend to think much more carefully about what the US military is doing wrong than what Muslims are doing wrong.
I wouldn't say that it's OK for Muslims to riot about some cartoons but I would also say that it doesn't really matter. It is not clear whether the riots are really about the cartoons or whether there is major resentment against the western world for other reasons. It may be that opportunistic leaders in Muslim communities are channeling other reentments into the cartoon riots.
If there is major resentment, as an American I have a responsibility to think hard about whether some of the resentment is an indication that the United States is perpetrating injustice against parts of the world that are predominantly Muslim.
In conclusion, Chinese censorship and the Muslim cartoon riots aren't OK but, being an American, they're not really my problem either. What is my problem is American censorship and American mistreatment of people in Muslim parts of the world.
Put aside your hatred of Bush and judge on the merits. I don't agree with the position but it is a defendable position ethically.
Bush's position is compatible with some people's moral values and incompatible with other people's moral values. Putting aside a hatred of Bush does not suddenly change a person's moral values such that those values are compatible with Bush's opinion.
And there is a lot there I can agree with.
Well, there is a lot there that I disagree with. Let's have a look at the actual quote:
Tonight I ask you to pass legislation to prohibit the most egregious abuses of medical research, human cloning in all its forms, creating or implanting embryos for experiments, creating human-animal hybrids, and buying, selling or patenting human embryos
Human cloning is basically creating an identical twin that is not the same age as the original. Creating and implanting embryos is a routine fertility procedure. Human-animal hybrids would be something like growing a human liver in a pig for a subequent liver transplant. Buying selling and patenting human embryos is an economic question. By my standards there are much more egregious abuses of medical research than these activities. In particular, these areas of medical research do not necessitate severe suffering by the research subjects and the knowledge generated by these areas of research is not particularly likely to be used to cause severe suffering.
If Bush wanted to take a stand against animal (or human) testing that resulted in severe suffering of research subjects or if Bush wanted to take a stand against research designed to develop pathogens capable of causing massive epidemics or if Bush wanted to take a stand against pharmaceutical companies that twist the results of scientitific studies to hide the dangerous side effects of their drugs, then he could use phrases like "egregious abuse" but, as it is, about all that's justified is a call for the same level of oversight that other areas of medical research receive.
Any democrat will tell you the republicans ignore the facts. Any republican will tell you the democrats ignore the facts.
I agree that one of the major problems in politics is that observable facts are not used in the decisions making process. The root of the problem is not that the facts are ignored but that no one actually knows what the facts are and the party that controls the US government is not interested in finding them out.
Take the decision to go to war with Iraq, for example. We had the "fact" that Iraq was involved in 9/11, the "fact" that Iraq had WMD, the "fact" that Iraq intended to give these WMD to Al Qaeda to be used against the USA, the "fact" that the USA would be welcomed as liberators, the "fact" that as soon as Saddam Hussien was out of power Iraq would become a prosperous and stable democracy, the "fact" that democracy would ooze across the borders of Iraq and cause the entire Middle East to become stable and properous and democratic, etc.
The problem, as I see it, is that one party (the Republicans) controls at least two of the three branches of government and that the leaders of that party (Bush, Cheney, etc.) have no interest in using government resources to actually find out what the facts are. In the lead-up to the Iraq war, the Bush administration devoted no resources to providing the American people with a careful fact based analysis of what WMD Iraq actually had. Instead, the American people had to decide, based only on raw emotion, whether they trusted the Bush administration's "secret" evidence that Iraq had WMD along with the Bush administrations other claims.
This is still the situation. For example, when it comes to the decision of how long the USA should maintain troops in Iraq, the American people are faced with a similar dilemna. The Bush administration claims that 100,000+ troops are needed in Iraq to prevent the "terrorists" from "winning". The Bush administration has not provided any scientific proof based on obserable facts as to what effect the American troops are having in Iraq or what effects decreasing troop levels would have. There are reasons why having maintaining troop levels would be beneficial and there are reasons why decreasing troop levels would be beneficial.
Without a detailed study it is not possible to know what outcomes would be observed with a substantial reduction in troop levels. The Bush administration has not, however, shown any interest in actually doing such a fact based scientific study and, as a result, the American people are still put in a situation where they have to evaluate possible outcomes based only on whether they trust the Bush administration at a raw emotional level.
There are reports that it will happily take as 'news' press releases from the BNP in Britain, which is a little like giving news releases from the Ku Klux Klan the same prominance as the NYT.
Actually, that's something I like about Google news - you get to hear the other side of the story. Now, I already have a pretty good idea what the KKK believes (and I don't agree) so that's not particularly useful. On the other hand, Google News is very useful when it comes to understanding something like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict where there are wildly divergent viewpoints and where the US media is afraid to present anything other than consensus viewpoint in the US.
From the summary: ...violating the journal's guidelines. Examples included... use of the contrast tool to hide data...
The actual article is a bit more nuanced:
To prohibit such manipulations, Dr. Rossner and Dr. Mellman published guidelines saying, in effect, that nothing should be done to any part of an illustration that did not affect all other parts equally. In other words, it is all right to adjust the brightness or color balance of the whole photo, but not to obscure, move or introduce an element.
If a researcher manipulates only part of an image then the researcher is implicitly admitting that there was something in the image that they chose to ignore. On the other hand, if a researcher changes the contrast of the whole image to make it easier to see the patterns they are drawing their conclusions from, then they can always claim they really didn't notice the other stuff. Essentially, researchers have to avoid doing things that prove that they were deliberately dishonest.
Why spend all the money developing a new drug, when any possible profits will be eaten up by numerous lawsuits,...
I, for one, will cry myself to sleep tonight thinking about all those pharmaceutical company executives who are consigned to lives of dire poverty by their pitifully small $10 million/year compensation packages. Thank goodness they continue to manage their pharmaeuctical companies out of the goodness of their hearts because they certainly don't do it for the money.
Why is it wrong for our government to be able to know which of us to protect and who to protect us from?
Not so long ago, I moved from Michigan to California because of the weather and because the job opportunities in California were a better fit for my training (bio-tech). Basically, I just decided that I wanted to live in California and I moved there. Eventually I had to get a California driver's license and the California DMV is understaffed, inefficient and bureaucratic but on the whole it was an easy process.
The assumption seemed to be that whatever reasons I had for wanting to live in California were valid reasons. I didn't have to fill out endless paperwork proving that I thought that the State of California had a superior form of government or that I was of desirable minority status or that I would not be a drain on the state's resources or that I was favorably disposed toward the people of California or anything.
Furthermore, I wasn't stopped at the border of California to have all my possessions inspected for drugs or bombs. I didn't even have to stop at the California border to prove my identity and that I wasn't on some terrorist watch list.
Now, if California did carefully control its borders and if it carefully screened people to determine who was allowed to live in California then that would probably lead to at least a small decrease in crime and other social problems.
Personally, though, I'm glad I wasn't stopped at the California border and I'm glad I didn't have to prove to some California bureaucrat that I had the right reasons for moving to California. But that's just me. I personally value individual freedom more than the incremental increase in safety.
In fact, I would go even further and say that I would like to live in a world where anyone can live where ever they want and cross any border without restriction. The United States would probably see an increase in terrorism (more large buildings getting knocked down, etc.) but I would personally be willing to accept that in exchange for the freedom to travel and live anywhere in the world without government interference.
Obviously if every border in the world was opened all at once that could create some problems but there is no reason the United States couldn't open its borders gradually: first Canada, then Mexico, etc. Some people think that closing the borders protects US jobs but the reality is that, since corporations can cross borders with ease, if the cheap workers don't come to the corporations then the corporations will go to the cheap workers with the same loss of US jobs. Furthermore, most of the people in the world have never even used a telephone and it will be a long time before they have the resources for the intercontinental travel that it would take to get them to the USA.
Anyway, there really isn't a right answer to how controlling a government should be. It just depends where the people's values are. Each level of government control will results in certain levels of freedom and certain levels of security. Sometimes there is a trade off between freedom and security and sometimes there isn't. When there is a trade off, the people need to decide which is more important to them.
Not directly relevent to the question of warrentless searches but...
Carter was facing total nuclear annihilation of the USA by the USSR. Bush is facing the collapse of a couple large buildings.
If 9/11 had happened when [Clinton] still held office, even he could not have avoided taking military action...
While it is likely that Clinton would have taken military action against Afghanistan, the assertion that occupying Iraq will decrease terrorism is highly speculative and unsupported by objective factual analysis. It is by no means certain that Clinton would have taken military action against Iraq.
The point is, 4 years ago the intel agencies and the executive branch finally shifted into a necessarily more pro-active, war-like mode, as such conflicts demand.
The thing is, if democracy is going to be informed democrcay rather than a popularity contest (or a dictatorship) then the general public needs to know whats going on (and ideally, on important issues they should decide directly).
If Bush had admitted that he was disregarding the constitutional requirement for warrentless searches in the last presidential election and let the people decide whether to vote for him with full knowledge of his policies that would have been OK. Of course, it would have been even better if Bush had let the American people decide for themselves, in a constitutional referendum, whether to repeal the constitutional prohibition against warrentless searches.
Capitalism may be good at motivating people to work but the idea that it provides the best allocation of scarce resources is sloppy generalization.
When a person is born, they have nothing. Some people are given a bunch of stuff for free and other people are not. There is nothing fair about that.
When a person is born all the land is already owned. Some people are given land for free by the people who own it or they are given resources to purchase land but others are not.
Essentially what exists under capitalism is a situation where some people have land (and other scarce resources) that they keep for themselves and occasionally give to other people of their choosing. If a person is not born lucky then they find themselves in a situation where some other group of people is hogging all the resources for themselves. When one group of people prevents other people from accessing land (or other scarce resources) that is inherently coercive.
The only domain where freedom is really meaningful is where there is no scarcity (such as ideas). On the other hand, what would be fair would be if everyone was given an equal share of all scarce resources when they were born and anyone who used a resource exclusively for themselves would have to pay rent to everyone else in the world.
A crop duster full of anthrax would cause some serious mayhem in the US, or anywhere else for that matter, think about it.
People exposed (eg. people who were outside when the crop duster flew over) would have to take antibiotics within a couple days of exposure. A lot of people would be scared and making sure everyone had access to antibiotics would present logistical challenges - but I guess that's what you meant by "serious mayhem".
For the amount that Bush is spending on his charity project of bringing democracy to Iraq (roughly 100 billion) he could give each of the people trapped in New Orleans (roughly 100,000) a million dollars. That would be enough to house them in thousand dollar a night hotels for a year and still have enough left to provide them with half million dollar houses.
The problem is that the people trapped in New Orleans are poor people and Republicans believe that one of the worst sins that can be committed (right up there with seeing naked people) is to provide poor people with the basic necessities of life (food, shelter, etc.).
Bush isn't dragging his heels because he doesn't have the resources. He is dragging his heels because he can't stand helping poor people.
It is unfortunate that slogans like "Freedom isn't free." and "Live free or die." are most commonly used to justify the deaths of other people rather than to justify a personal desire to risk death in terrorist attacks in order to preserve civil liberties.
Of course, the best way to deter terrorism is to be meticulous in preserving liberty and justice. The idea that freedom and security are mutually exclusive is merely a convenient way for politicians to justify taking more power for themselves.
I am tired of these namby pamby arm chair quarterbacks talking tough but scared to put on a uniform
The problem here is that participation in the US military is coercive and that the US military is being used to fight wars that are not absolutely necessary.
Think of welfare. US citizens are forced to pay taxes to support poor people but only to the extent necessary to maintain a minimum standard of living. Any additional support is purely voluntary through private contributions.
What needs to happen is that the wars that the US military fights get classified as "absolutely necessary" (World War II), "discretionary" (Vietnam and the current Iraq war), and "sort of necessary" (borderline cases like the first Iraq war).
Wars classified as "absolutely necessary" and "sort of necessary" could be funded with tax dollars but "descretionary" wars could only be funded with private donations.
Furthermore, members of the US military would only be required to fight in "absolutely necessary" wars. They would be allowed to resign with an honorable discharge in order to avoid fighting in "sort of necessary" wars and fighting in "discretionary" wars would be purely voluntary with those who chose not to volunteer allowed to continue to serve in the military in good standing.
Wow! Impressive responses. Sometimes Slashdot is pretty cool.
After thinking about it most of the evening (I just hate being wrong). I think that what my original post was trying to get at is that the number of studies that were found to be wrong by the current study is much higher than what would be predicted based on the confidence levels presented in the studies under investigation. This would mean that the confidence levels were not calculated correctly.
However, not having gone through and looked up the confidence levels for all the papers under investigation, I have to admit that this all is pure speculation on my part.
Furthermore, mapping the effectiveness of a medication to a single "effectiveness" parameter is quite arbitrary. For example, a particular antibiotic will sometimes cause bacteria to grow more slowly, sometimes have no effect (antibiotic resistant bacteria), and sometimes kill the patient due to an allergic reaction.
Depending on the (arbitrary) mapping that is chosen, the effectiveness probability distribution could be discontinuous and also undefined for some intervals. For example, under a certain mapping, "negative effectiveness" could be undefined and the probability an effectiveness between 0.50 and 0.60 could be 90% while the probability of exactly zero effectiveness could be 5%.
Now suppose, for example, that a study reports an effectiveness of 0.30 with a 95% confidence interval of 0.25 to 0.35. Further, suppose that it turns out that the actual effectiveness is exactly zero. Just how wrong was the study? In a continuous distribution the probability of specific value is infinitely small. So was the study infinitely wrong?
I don't know but I still think most of the statistics in scientific papers is bogus.
there is a 95% chance that the true value lies within the interval quoted
Presumbly the "true value" is outside the "confidence interval" for 1 in 3 of the studies investigated which is a whole lot worse than 1 in 20 implied by a 95% confidence level.
Most published studies include statistics claiming something like a 95% (or higher) chance of being correct. I've always thought that was bogus and it looks like someone finally got around to proving it.
L4 and L5 are stable, they are like being in a valley.
More like those jet ski's that move forward when they idle but always turn in one direction so they come back to you eventually when you fall off (unless some other force overwhelms the turning).
As long as a satellite is close enough to L4 or L5 then it will follow a looping orbit relative to a frame of reference in which the earth and sun are fixed in position.
Slashdot Mirror
One problem with using language for physical property for ideas is that introduces considerable ambiguity. When physical property is "stolen", two things happen: the owner no longer has the property and the thief now has the property. Because ideas can be shared, these are separate: there is the issue of being able to use your idea yourself and there is the issue of preventing other people from using it.
If all you want to do is make sure that you can still use your own idea then a patent is not the way to go. Instead, you just need to tell as many people about the idea as possible in contexts where it is clear that you are the one telling people about the idea (that is, don't do it anonymously). Ideally you would publish it in a major journal but even just putting up a website precisely describing the idea would be a good start.
On the other hand, if your goal is to prevent other people from using your idea because you want to make money by leveraging a monopoly on your idea then a patent is the way to go.
It sounds like you are hoping to make money so patenting is the way to go for you but, particularly for scientist who are motivated by a desire to improve the world, this is a distinction that is important to be aware of.
The ability of an entity to make copies of itself is not really all the subjective. The ability of an entity to respond to its environment has varying degrees but that really isn't all that subjective either. The ability of an organism to maintain a self-sustaining symbiosis between it's various parts (eg. organs) is really not all that subjective either. Finally, being self-aware is not something that humans really understand but that doesn't mean that it is subjective.
Different entities have these characterisics to varying degrees. Any distinction between life and not life is not so much subjective as it is arbitrary.
My definition of science would be that it is an attempt to organize and summarize mutually agreed upon factual observations. In that sense, categorizing and assigning labels is very important. On the other hand, the organization and summarizing must be in agreement with the factual observations. If one had a collection of rational numbers (eg. floating point) and one categorized them as either binary 0 or 1, such a categorization would not be particularly accurate.
Language is digital (as opposed to analog) in the sense that you either use a word in a sentence or you don't. You can either use the word "life" in a sentence or not but you can't use a fraction of the word ("li" or "fe" don't mean fractional life - or anything at all for that matter). This creates (willful?) confusion in the minds of people who are very focused on a literal interprtation of language based laws and moral codes that "life" is a binary distinction.
The reality, however, is that the word "life" refers to a whole variety of concepts. There are all different ways of being alive and there are all different levels of being alive. Certainly we can find examples of things that are very "alive" just as we can find examples of colors that are very "blue" - but that doesn't mean every color is either pure blue not blue at all and it doesn't mean that something is either completely alive or not alive at all.
Going way off topic, the whole "life begins at conception" is what we in the sciences refer to as "not even wrong". After all, it's kind of hard for dead people to have children. If you really want to talk about when life began it would be at the big bang when matter developed the properties that cause it to form into complex self-replicating patterns over very long time scales.
It's not clear that it's relevant to the experiment described in the article but magnetic levitation is already possible.
Yes, but only for jobs that payed more than the government subsidies.
Suppose the government provided everyone in the United States with all the vitamin fortified rice and beans they wanted and a free ten foot by ten foot apartment with a shared bathroom and kitchen at the end of the hall. Would someone working 14 hour days at WalMart for minimum wage just to have enough to eat and a place live continue to work? Maybe not. Would a CEO making 20 million dollars continue to work? Absolutely. Would a technical professional making 60 thousand a year continue to work? Probably.
Goverment subsidies don't make everyone give up their jobs - just the people with the very low paying jobs.
Just because Bush has consistantly done things that a substantial fraction of the US population (and an even more substantial faction of the world population) has disagreed with, it doesn't mean that people are disagreeing because it's Bush.
Going to war without a clear justification, holding people without trial and torturing them, eroding civil liberties including the separation of church and state, and running up massive deficits are things that many people will object to regardless of who is doing it. It's just that Bush has done them all.
For the record, I don't really object the free trade stuff Bush is advocating although Bush's assurance that these are good things doesn't carry much weight after he has been so wrong about so many other things.
Actually, that depends on what the Chinese want. Personally, I think that countries are able to reach better decisions when all points of view are considered but if the Chinese do not want freedom of speech then it is not my place, as an American, to force it on them.
On the other hand, when the United States government undermines freedom of speech then I have a right and a responsibility to try to prevent it.
But if fundamentalist religious zealots threaten us with violence for exercising free speech, we're okay with that.
Would that be the right-wing Christian fundamentalist zealots who threaten to beat up people who are critical of the US military?
While I have been in many situations where I've had to supress my views about the US military to avoid violence, I have yet to be in a situation where I had to supress my views on Muslims in order to avoid violence. Then again, as an American, I am responsible for the behavior of the United States military so I tend to think much more carefully about what the US military is doing wrong than what Muslims are doing wrong.
I wouldn't say that it's OK for Muslims to riot about some cartoons but I would also say that it doesn't really matter. It is not clear whether the riots are really about the cartoons or whether there is major resentment against the western world for other reasons. It may be that opportunistic leaders in Muslim communities are channeling other reentments into the cartoon riots.
If there is major resentment, as an American I have a responsibility to think hard about whether some of the resentment is an indication that the United States is perpetrating injustice against parts of the world that are predominantly Muslim.
In conclusion, Chinese censorship and the Muslim cartoon riots aren't OK but, being an American, they're not really my problem either. What is my problem is American censorship and American mistreatment of people in Muslim parts of the world.
Bush's position is compatible with some people's moral values and incompatible with other people's moral values. Putting aside a hatred of Bush does not suddenly change a person's moral values such that those values are compatible with Bush's opinion.
And there is a lot there I can agree with.
Well, there is a lot there that I disagree with. Let's have a look at the actual quote:
Human cloning is basically creating an identical twin that is not the same age as the original. Creating and implanting embryos is a routine fertility procedure. Human-animal hybrids would be something like growing a human liver in a pig for a subequent liver transplant. Buying selling and patenting human embryos is an economic question. By my standards there are much more egregious abuses of medical research than these activities. In particular, these areas of medical research do not necessitate severe suffering by the research subjects and the knowledge generated by these areas of research is not particularly likely to be used to cause severe suffering.If Bush wanted to take a stand against animal (or human) testing that resulted in severe suffering of research subjects or if Bush wanted to take a stand against research designed to develop pathogens capable of causing massive epidemics or if Bush wanted to take a stand against pharmaceutical companies that twist the results of scientitific studies to hide the dangerous side effects of their drugs, then he could use phrases like "egregious abuse" but, as it is, about all that's justified is a call for the same level of oversight that other areas of medical research receive.
I agree that one of the major problems in politics is that observable facts are not used in the decisions making process. The root of the problem is not that the facts are ignored but that no one actually knows what the facts are and the party that controls the US government is not interested in finding them out.
Take the decision to go to war with Iraq, for example. We had the "fact" that Iraq was involved in 9/11, the "fact" that Iraq had WMD, the "fact" that Iraq intended to give these WMD to Al Qaeda to be used against the USA, the "fact" that the USA would be welcomed as liberators, the "fact" that as soon as Saddam Hussien was out of power Iraq would become a prosperous and stable democracy, the "fact" that democracy would ooze across the borders of Iraq and cause the entire Middle East to become stable and properous and democratic, etc.
The problem, as I see it, is that one party (the Republicans) controls at least two of the three branches of government and that the leaders of that party (Bush, Cheney, etc.) have no interest in using government resources to actually find out what the facts are. In the lead-up to the Iraq war, the Bush administration devoted no resources to providing the American people with a careful fact based analysis of what WMD Iraq actually had. Instead, the American people had to decide, based only on raw emotion, whether they trusted the Bush administration's "secret" evidence that Iraq had WMD along with the Bush administrations other claims.
This is still the situation. For example, when it comes to the decision of how long the USA should maintain troops in Iraq, the American people are faced with a similar dilemna. The Bush administration claims that 100,000+ troops are needed in Iraq to prevent the "terrorists" from "winning". The Bush administration has not provided any scientific proof based on obserable facts as to what effect the American troops are having in Iraq or what effects decreasing troop levels would have. There are reasons why having maintaining troop levels would be beneficial and there are reasons why decreasing troop levels would be beneficial.
Without a detailed study it is not possible to know what outcomes would be observed with a substantial reduction in troop levels. The Bush administration has not, however, shown any interest in actually doing such a fact based scientific study and, as a result, the American people are still put in a situation where they have to evaluate possible outcomes based only on whether they trust the Bush administration at a raw emotional level.
Actually, that's something I like about Google news - you get to hear the other side of the story. Now, I already have a pretty good idea what the KKK believes (and I don't agree) so that's not particularly useful. On the other hand, Google News is very useful when it comes to understanding something like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict where there are wildly divergent viewpoints and where the US media is afraid to present anything other than consensus viewpoint in the US.
The actual article is a bit more nuanced:
If a researcher manipulates only part of an image then the researcher is implicitly admitting that there was something in the image that they chose to ignore. On the other hand, if a researcher changes the contrast of the whole image to make it easier to see the patterns they are drawing their conclusions from, then they can always claim they really didn't notice the other stuff. Essentially, researchers have to avoid doing things that prove that they were deliberately dishonest.
I, for one, will cry myself to sleep tonight thinking about all those pharmaceutical company executives who are consigned to lives of dire poverty by their pitifully small $10 million/year compensation packages. Thank goodness they continue to manage their pharmaeuctical companies out of the goodness of their hearts because they certainly don't do it for the money.
Not so long ago, I moved from Michigan to California because of the weather and because the job opportunities in California were a better fit for my training (bio-tech). Basically, I just decided that I wanted to live in California and I moved there. Eventually I had to get a California driver's license and the California DMV is understaffed, inefficient and bureaucratic but on the whole it was an easy process.
The assumption seemed to be that whatever reasons I had for wanting to live in California were valid reasons. I didn't have to fill out endless paperwork proving that I thought that the State of California had a superior form of government or that I was of desirable minority status or that I would not be a drain on the state's resources or that I was favorably disposed toward the people of California or anything.
Furthermore, I wasn't stopped at the border of California to have all my possessions inspected for drugs or bombs. I didn't even have to stop at the California border to prove my identity and that I wasn't on some terrorist watch list.
Now, if California did carefully control its borders and if it carefully screened people to determine who was allowed to live in California then that would probably lead to at least a small decrease in crime and other social problems.
Personally, though, I'm glad I wasn't stopped at the California border and I'm glad I didn't have to prove to some California bureaucrat that I had the right reasons for moving to California. But that's just me. I personally value individual freedom more than the incremental increase in safety.
In fact, I would go even further and say that I would like to live in a world where anyone can live where ever they want and cross any border without restriction. The United States would probably see an increase in terrorism (more large buildings getting knocked down, etc.) but I would personally be willing to accept that in exchange for the freedom to travel and live anywhere in the world without government interference.
Obviously if every border in the world was opened all at once that could create some problems but there is no reason the United States couldn't open its borders gradually: first Canada, then Mexico, etc. Some people think that closing the borders protects US jobs but the reality is that, since corporations can cross borders with ease, if the cheap workers don't come to the corporations then the corporations will go to the cheap workers with the same loss of US jobs. Furthermore, most of the people in the world have never even used a telephone and it will be a long time before they have the resources for the intercontinental travel that it would take to get them to the USA.
Anyway, there really isn't a right answer to how controlling a government should be. It just depends where the people's values are. Each level of government control will results in certain levels of freedom and certain levels of security. Sometimes there is a trade off between freedom and security and sometimes there isn't. When there is a trade off, the people need to decide which is more important to them.
Not directly relevent to the question of warrentless searches but...
Carter was facing total nuclear annihilation of the USA by the USSR. Bush is facing the collapse of a couple large buildings.
If 9/11 had happened when [Clinton] still held office, even he could not have avoided taking military action...
While it is likely that Clinton would have taken military action against Afghanistan, the assertion that occupying Iraq will decrease terrorism is highly speculative and unsupported by objective factual analysis. It is by no means certain that Clinton would have taken military action against Iraq.
The point is, 4 years ago the intel agencies and the executive branch finally shifted into a necessarily more pro-active, war-like mode, as such conflicts demand.
The thing is, if democracy is going to be informed democrcay rather than a popularity contest (or a dictatorship) then the general public needs to know whats going on (and ideally, on important issues they should decide directly).
If Bush had admitted that he was disregarding the constitutional requirement for warrentless searches in the last presidential election and let the people decide whether to vote for him with full knowledge of his policies that would have been OK. Of course, it would have been even better if Bush had let the American people decide for themselves, in a constitutional referendum, whether to repeal the constitutional prohibition against warrentless searches.
Brilliant analysis! IMHO, anyway.
When a person is born, they have nothing. Some people are given a bunch of stuff for free and other people are not. There is nothing fair about that.
When a person is born all the land is already owned. Some people are given land for free by the people who own it or they are given resources to purchase land but others are not.
Essentially what exists under capitalism is a situation where some people have land (and other scarce resources) that they keep for themselves and occasionally give to other people of their choosing. If a person is not born lucky then they find themselves in a situation where some other group of people is hogging all the resources for themselves. When one group of people prevents other people from accessing land (or other scarce resources) that is inherently coercive.
The only domain where freedom is really meaningful is where there is no scarcity (such as ideas). On the other hand, what would be fair would be if everyone was given an equal share of all scarce resources when they were born and anyone who used a resource exclusively for themselves would have to pay rent to everyone else in the world.
People exposed (eg. people who were outside when the crop duster flew over) would have to take antibiotics within a couple days of exposure. A lot of people would be scared and making sure everyone had access to antibiotics would present logistical challenges - but I guess that's what you meant by "serious mayhem".
For the amount that Bush is spending on his charity project of bringing democracy to Iraq (roughly 100 billion) he could give each of the people trapped in New Orleans (roughly 100,000) a million dollars. That would be enough to house them in thousand dollar a night hotels for a year and still have enough left to provide them with half million dollar houses.
The problem is that the people trapped in New Orleans are poor people and Republicans believe that one of the worst sins that can be committed (right up there with seeing naked people) is to provide poor people with the basic necessities of life (food, shelter, etc.).
Bush isn't dragging his heels because he doesn't have the resources. He is dragging his heels because he can't stand helping poor people.
It is unfortunate that slogans like "Freedom isn't free." and "Live free or die." are most commonly used to justify the deaths of other people rather than to justify a personal desire to risk death in terrorist attacks in order to preserve civil liberties.
Of course, the best way to deter terrorism is to be meticulous in preserving liberty and justice. The idea that freedom and security are mutually exclusive is merely a convenient way for politicians to justify taking more power for themselves.
The problem here is that participation in the US military is coercive and that the US military is being used to fight wars that are not absolutely necessary.
Think of welfare. US citizens are forced to pay taxes to support poor people but only to the extent necessary to maintain a minimum standard of living. Any additional support is purely voluntary through private contributions.
What needs to happen is that the wars that the US military fights get classified as "absolutely necessary" (World War II), "discretionary" (Vietnam and the current Iraq war), and "sort of necessary" (borderline cases like the first Iraq war).
Wars classified as "absolutely necessary" and "sort of necessary" could be funded with tax dollars but "descretionary" wars could only be funded with private donations.
Furthermore, members of the US military would only be required to fight in "absolutely necessary" wars. They would be allowed to resign with an honorable discharge in order to avoid fighting in "sort of necessary" wars and fighting in "discretionary" wars would be purely voluntary with those who chose not to volunteer allowed to continue to serve in the military in good standing.
After thinking about it most of the evening (I just hate being wrong). I think that what my original post was trying to get at is that the number of studies that were found to be wrong by the current study is much higher than what would be predicted based on the confidence levels presented in the studies under investigation. This would mean that the confidence levels were not calculated correctly.
However, not having gone through and looked up the confidence levels for all the papers under investigation, I have to admit that this all is pure speculation on my part.
Furthermore, mapping the effectiveness of a medication to a single "effectiveness" parameter is quite arbitrary. For example, a particular antibiotic will sometimes cause bacteria to grow more slowly, sometimes have no effect (antibiotic resistant bacteria), and sometimes kill the patient due to an allergic reaction.
Depending on the (arbitrary) mapping that is chosen, the effectiveness probability distribution could be discontinuous and also undefined for some intervals. For example, under a certain mapping, "negative effectiveness" could be undefined and the probability an effectiveness between 0.50 and 0.60 could be 90% while the probability of exactly zero effectiveness could be 5%.
Now suppose, for example, that a study reports an effectiveness of 0.30 with a 95% confidence interval of 0.25 to 0.35. Further, suppose that it turns out that the actual effectiveness is exactly zero. Just how wrong was the study? In a continuous distribution the probability of specific value is infinitely small. So was the study infinitely wrong?
I don't know but I still think most of the statistics in scientific papers is bogus.
Presumbly the "true value" is outside the "confidence interval" for 1 in 3 of the studies investigated which is a whole lot worse than 1 in 20 implied by a 95% confidence level.
Most published studies include statistics claiming something like a 95% (or higher) chance of being correct. I've always thought that was bogus and it looks like someone finally got around to proving it.
More like those jet ski's that move forward when they idle but always turn in one direction so they come back to you eventually when you fall off (unless some other force overwhelms the turning).
As long as a satellite is close enough to L4 or L5 then it will follow a looping orbit relative to a frame of reference in which the earth and sun are fixed in position.