Yeah, the thing about the bank bailouts is that pretty much everyone who understands the issue agrees that they were more or less necessary. I think there is a lot of disagreement on the issue, actually outright nationalization of the banks is probably the more common solution globally to the problem. If you don't understand why, here's the deal (just a simplified overview as I understand it): Many banks were apparently not solvent. If the government did nothing and your bank went under, you may have essentially showed up at your bank one day to find your checking and savings accounts no longer existed. To this, many people respond, "But my money is FDIC insured!" However, the whole "FDIC insured" thing means that if the bank goes under, the government will take control of the bank, effectively socializing it completely, bail it out, and then sell it off. That's not really any better. It's much better. Small people (deposit holders) keep their money up to FDIC limits and investors and counter-parties are wiped out, as they should be for their stupid investment decisions thus avoiding moral hazard. Even better, bankruptcy cleans the slate so that losses are recognized immediately instead of put off indefinitely, like Japan did after its crash. There would be no need for changes in accounting rules (mark to fantasy) and quantitative easing. In any case, the bailout hasn't worked. Obama explicitly stated he was giving money to banks because they could use the multiplier effect to generate more money than they were given. However banks aren't making those loans, they are hoarding money to absorb future loses and because they can't find enough credit worthy people to loan to. So even though the money supply is going up, credit is going down which is why we are not seeing inflation. If Obama wants to stimulate the economy, he is better off spending the money on science R&D (to lay the ground for future industries) than in saving big banks. The only price to be paid for this approach is the loss of some large banks and a nastier (but shorter) crash. However Obama (like his predecessor) is tied tightly to big Wall Street banks and won't do what is required, preferring to take bank lobbyist money and to surround himself with former members of Goldman Sachs. The problem is going to get worse once the stimulus money runs out and banks are forced to deal with losses, particularly since government on all levels is now so hugely indebted. The only plus is that it exposed to a lot of people who the government takes care of first.
One could certainly be a competent physician, for example, and not believe in Darwinism (or neo-Darwinism). Depends on what you're doing, if you doing any genetics it is next to impossible. Physicians doing medically related genetic research use evolutionary models like Hardy-Weinburg to find drug targets. Even cancer treatment requires a pretty good understanding of evolution just to get a handle on what is going on. While creationists focus on "species creation" evolutionary theory works well (and faster) on a cellular level and is very useful in explaining drug resistance in malignant cells, bacteria and viruses. BTW is also works well for the human organism too, there is remarkable agreement between genetic and paleontological data. Bluntly put, evolutionary theory informs the whole of modern biological science.
Without God, you must explain moral codes in practical terms. You have to explain moral codes in practical terms anyway - at least for the rest of us. Assuming the existence of a powerful/all-powerful entity who created/may have created the universe doesn't make that entity a moral authority anybody has to listen to. The entity could be an asshole for instance or there may be rules or facts that entity is unaware of.
Religious rules have utility in social control all right - but that isn't a good thing. The world you describe is a pretty horrible one to me, where the ancients (prophets, believers, old social norms) have it figured it out as good as we are ever going to get. I see there is little or no room for social progress in your world.
The comments of Bill Gates may be derived from guilt and arrogance but to say that capitalism can't be "improved" (whatever that means) is just political posturing. That you believe the current economic system is the best of all possible economic systems (for all time?!) is equally arrogant.
What capitalism can't be improved? Capitalism like in the US, in Russia, in Saudi Arabia, in Congo? What sort of improvements work or don't work and why? I think it is more important to ask and answer those sorts of questions than offer up a sweeping defense of capitalism.
I also suspect that most people would agree that public ownership of the means of production in some industries (fire department, basic scientific research, health care, etc..) may not be such a bad idea after all.
In the next Sino-US war, just see who has the industrial capacity to out produce weapons to foresee the winner. Any real Sino-US war would last about half an hour (the flight-time of ICBMs) so I don't see industrial capacity being a big factor. It's easy to pick the winner though - nobody.
determined that a byproduct formed when sharks produce eggs, known as a sister polar body, had fused with an unfertilized egg to produce the baby shark, whose DNA had only half as much genetic variability as the mother.
You've misread the article (which in fairness was not precisely written) and you're misunderstanding how parthogenesis is working here. The article claims only that the offspring is a perfect genetic "match" for the mom, not that it is identical to the mom since it also says the offspring has half the variability. What this means is the genetic test they did not pick up any polymorphisms not found in the mother. That's what they mean by "identical match".
Also parthogenesis does not create homozygotic offspring (although given enough generations it will), the immediate offspring is a result of a fusion event between 2 products of meiosis - the egg and one of the polar bodies. Thus the offspring will have a different genetic makeup to the mother. In particular half (on average) of the mother's heterozygous loci will become homozygous in the offspring. Thus the offspring has half the genetic variability.
This has potentially bad consequences because of the # of recessive lethal alleles the average organisms carry. Think of parthogenesis as the worst form of incest possible.
Ten years ago, a typical job ad would say something like "C++ programmer needed, with 2 years experience". Today, a typical ad requires "6 years Java experience in a commercial environment, 3 years J2EE web-based development, Swing, JSP, Servlets, EJB, XML, DOM/SAX, advanced knowledge of application servers (primarily Weblogic and WebSphere), Advanced knowledge of database connectivity and integration. (Oracle, DB2 and SQL Server).
Let me explain the game to you. The way it works is this: 1)Management wants to renew a contract or get a raise for their de-facto employee 2)Management must satisfy HR or Homeland security that no-one else qualified is available for the position. (Or justify a higher salary). 3)The post a job requirements which matches the current employees skillset more or less exactly 4)No one is hired 5)The internal candiate is rehired/promoted/given a raise. 6)Everyone but the job applicants are satisfied with the outcome.
Overall CFLs generate less mercury over their life cycle than the equivalent incandescent (entirely due to coal being the major source of electricity for the bulbs in the US).
Actually the Canadian government (and northern US states) lobbied against this requirement, which was proposed by the US federal government. It is common practice to have the same entry requirements for border security among the countries sharing the border (tit for tat) but it is certainly not something the Canadian government or northern US states wanted for obvious economic reasons.
The teenage pregnancy problem is because of lack of sex education. Considering that teenage sex and pregancy was the norm for most of human history I'd say the problem has more to do with society being unable to turn teenagers into financially viable and independent adults until long after they are sexually mature.
It was copied. But the problem just isn't archaic copyright laws, the question is who should get the benefits of Internet and perfect, fast, copying of digital media.
None of the RIAA members funded the Internet or any of the technologies that make file sharing possible, yet they want to restrict the rest of the society from enjoying its benefits although we as taxpayers funded these innovations! That's why they are assholes!
Millions of people copy routinely digital media every day irrespective of copyright, rightly wanting to enjoy the fruits of technological innovation that they funded. It is not the responsibility of taxpayers to keep Sony's business model functional. Sony should be using this technology to create new cheaper distribution channels instead of creating artifical scarcity, burdening consumers with the pain of DRM, rooting their customers computers and sueing them.
they're collecting the fingerprints of non-citizens. I got no problem with this. You realize they are going to give the fingerprints to foreign countries right? So when say Canada decides to fingerprint non-citizens (likely if the US is doing it to its citizens) I'm sure they will pass those on to the FBI to reciprocate.
So either don't leave the US ever, or expect that some point the US government will have your fingerprint via another country.
Do you feel better because it wasn't the US government that took your fingerprints? The effect is the same, they are just outsourcing fingeprint taking.
Oh, you mean it's unlikely that the DoD can use this sequences as a viable weapon? I'd agree with that. There is however a long tradition of scientists taking money from the military to fund basic research whether it is a viable military application or not. Given the war in Iraq... I'm happy they are taking this money from the DoD. It is much better spent.
That is rear event given the fact that known cases of such post-translational modifications are N-terminal peptides needed for transportation of extracellular proteins to and through the cellular membrane
I agree it's likely a rare event. However there are likely other classes of post-translation modification that we haven't discovered, and the protein doesn't have to be extra-cellular.
Given all the excitement with RNAi over the last decade (which wasn't supposed to happen when I was in grad school) I'm much less likely now to rule out the functionality of smaller macromolecules.
To be translated it needs much more than coding sequence for those 10 residues.
A larger protein containing that sequence could be spliced after translation.
The point is that relating the absence of oliugopeptides or oligonucleotides in genomes to the "danger", "threat", etc. is redefining the phrase "long shot" for me. You're right, the absence itself doesn't prove anything, but it's a nice jumping off point to the followup study. I'm also not so sure it is a long shot.
Especially stupid are searches for amino-acid sequences. Some of the sequences do not make structural sense, obviously.
Wouldn't it be nice to know what these are? I'm not too sure how extensive or accurate the current list of structural improbabilities is.
And what about "dangerous"? Obviously, if the sequence is so crappy that it makes the working conformation of every structural RNA or protein disfunctional then it won't be reproduced. I don't think you meant to say that, reproducing organisms often code for nonfunctional RNA and proteins.
More interesting would be to find out why some sequences are not encountered also in non-coding areas. But "danger"??? More interesting would be to caluclate on a per organism basis at what frequency such sequences are expected to occur, so we at least know if we are seeing anything significant. The other problem is that sequences may be missing which are formerly lethal, but not currently to the organism.
Danger is certainly possible too. It is very easy to envision protein, RNA (maybe less so trans acting regulatory elements) that can induce lethality in an organism. Why do you not think this is possible? Knowing these sequences has obvious implications for both gene therapy and drug design. I don't think this research is worthless at all. Of course I work in the field, so perhaps I'm a litle biased.:)
The grant is for more than just the list of sequences as someone else mentions. Also 10K doesn't even come close to covering overhead on that kind of money.
Actually my ISP agreement doesn't say anything of the sort and I'm happy to share my network with others provided they dont' suck down too much bandwidth. If they do, perhaps I'll change my mind.
The point though (regardless of whatever legalities are currently present in Singapore) that it is not desirable for society to have laws which prohibit free communication.
Saying the GPL is "restrictive" is like saying emancipation is restrictive. Yes, emancipation does "restrict" you from owning slaves but the point is to maximize overall human freedom - which it suceeeds at.
The freedom the GPL is taking away is for someone to take source code that is GPL'd and then: 1) Take that code, bundle it into a restrictive (often commerical) license and give nothing back to the community 2) Put it into a BSD style or public domain which is fine - until somebody does 1)
That is YOUR morality. How dare you impose your morality on someone else? Please, using ANY license (including GPLv2, GPLv3, commerical, BSD, whatever) any moral implications. And he's not imposing "his morality" on anyone else, the GPLv3 license is just an option. He just stating his opinion.
My problem is all you people who want to impose your morality on others in a flurry of holier-than-thou richeousness. Didn't you just write, "How dare you"? I think it's obvious who the holier-than-thou type is.
"preserving freedom" by removing freedom is hypocritical of the FSF The GPLv3 exists to INCREASE freedom unlike DRM. Yes, it means that the freedom to use DRM is restricted but overall freedom is still increased because users and hackers alike have access to and can run more code. Your arguement reminds me of the old slave-owners complaint about taking away the "freedom to own slaves". America is not less free because slavery was abolished.
Pollution. Diesel is much worse emission wise than cleaner burning gasoline and still produces a lot of nasty particulate emissions, although it is getting better. Weirdly the US has some of the toughest regulations for cars (not trucks) making diesel cars hard an oddity in the US market. I think I did hear talk of diesel hybrids being produced though, but it was for the European market.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, the thing about the bank bailouts is that pretty much everyone who understands the issue agrees that they were more or less necessary.
I think there is a lot of disagreement on the issue, actually outright nationalization of the banks is probably the more common solution globally to the problem.
If you don't understand why, here's the deal (just a simplified overview as I understand it): Many banks were apparently not solvent. If the government did nothing and your bank went under, you may have essentially showed up at your bank one day to find your checking and savings accounts no longer existed. To this, many people respond, "But my money is FDIC insured!" However, the whole "FDIC insured" thing means that if the bank goes under, the government will take control of the bank, effectively socializing it completely, bail it out, and then sell it off. That's not really any better.
It's much better. Small people (deposit holders) keep their money up to FDIC limits and investors and counter-parties are wiped out, as they should be for their stupid investment decisions thus avoiding moral hazard. Even better, bankruptcy cleans the slate so that losses are recognized immediately instead of put off indefinitely, like Japan did after its crash. There would be no need for changes in accounting rules (mark to fantasy) and quantitative easing. In any case, the bailout hasn't worked. Obama explicitly stated he was giving money to banks because they could use the multiplier effect to generate more money than they were given. However banks aren't making those loans, they are hoarding money to absorb future loses and because they can't find enough credit worthy people to loan to. So even though the money supply is going up, credit is going down which is why we are not seeing inflation. If Obama wants to stimulate the economy, he is better off spending the money on science R&D (to lay the ground for future industries) than in saving big banks.
The only price to be paid for this approach is the loss of some large banks and a nastier (but shorter) crash. However Obama (like his predecessor) is tied tightly to big Wall Street banks and won't do what is required, preferring to take bank lobbyist money and to surround himself with former members of Goldman Sachs.
The problem is going to get worse once the stimulus money runs out and banks are forced to deal with losses, particularly since government on all levels is now so hugely indebted. The only plus is that it exposed to a lot of people who the government takes care of first.
One could certainly be a competent physician, for example, and not believe in Darwinism (or neo-Darwinism).
Depends on what you're doing, if you doing any genetics it is next to impossible. Physicians doing medically related genetic research use evolutionary models like Hardy-Weinburg to find drug targets. Even cancer treatment requires a pretty good understanding of evolution just to get a handle on what is going on. While creationists focus on "species creation" evolutionary theory works well (and faster) on a cellular level and is very useful in explaining drug resistance in malignant cells, bacteria and viruses.
BTW is also works well for the human organism too, there is remarkable agreement between genetic and paleontological data.
Bluntly put, evolutionary theory informs the whole of modern biological science.
Without God, you must explain moral codes in practical terms.
You have to explain moral codes in practical terms anyway - at least for the rest of us. Assuming the existence of a powerful/all-powerful entity who created/may have created the universe doesn't make that entity a moral authority anybody has to listen to. The entity could be an asshole for instance or there may be rules or facts that entity is unaware of.
Religious rules have utility in social control all right - but that isn't a good thing. The world you describe is a pretty horrible one to me, where the ancients (prophets, believers, old social norms) have it figured it out as good as we are ever going to get. I see there is little or no room for social progress in your world.
The comments of Bill Gates may be derived from guilt and arrogance but to say that capitalism can't be "improved" (whatever that means) is just political posturing. That you believe the current economic system is the best of all possible economic systems (for all time?!) is equally arrogant.
What capitalism can't be improved? Capitalism like in the US, in Russia, in Saudi Arabia, in Congo? What sort of improvements work or don't work and why? I think it is more important to ask and answer those sorts of questions than offer up a sweeping defense of capitalism.
I also suspect that most people would agree that public ownership of the means of production in some industries (fire department, basic scientific research, health care, etc..) may not be such a bad idea after all.
In the next Sino-US war, just see who has the industrial capacity to out produce weapons to foresee the winner.
Any real Sino-US war would last about half an hour (the flight-time of ICBMs) so I don't see industrial capacity being a big factor. It's easy to pick the winner though - nobody.
determined that a byproduct formed when sharks produce eggs, known as a sister polar body, had fused with an unfertilized egg to produce the baby shark, whose DNA had only half as much genetic variability as the mother.
You've misread the article (which in fairness was not precisely written) and you're misunderstanding how parthogenesis is working here. The article claims only that the offspring is a perfect genetic "match" for the mom, not that it is identical to the mom since it also says the offspring has half the variability. What this means is the genetic test they did not pick up any polymorphisms not found in the mother. That's what they mean by "identical match".
Also parthogenesis does not create homozygotic offspring (although given enough generations it will), the immediate offspring is a result of a fusion event between 2 products of meiosis - the egg and one of the polar bodies. Thus the offspring will have a different genetic makeup to the mother. In particular half (on average) of the mother's heterozygous loci will become homozygous in the offspring. Thus the offspring has half the genetic variability.
This has potentially bad consequences because of the # of recessive lethal alleles the average organisms carry. Think of parthogenesis as the worst form of incest possible.
Nice post, wish I had mod points today...
You know they are in trouble when they start calling "open source" a religion, it doesn't get much more bizarre.
Let me explain the game to you. The way it works is this:
1)Management wants to renew a contract or get a raise for their de-facto employee
2)Management must satisfy HR or Homeland security that no-one else qualified is available for the position. (Or justify a higher salary).
3)The post a job requirements which matches the current employees skillset more or less exactly
4)No one is hired
5)The internal candiate is rehired/promoted/given a raise.
6)Everyone but the job applicants are satisfied with the outcome.
Overall CFLs generate less mercury over their life cycle than the equivalent incandescent (entirely due to coal being the major source of electricity for the bulbs in the US).
Where's the contradiction?
Actually the Canadian government (and northern US states) lobbied against this requirement, which was proposed by the US federal government. It is common practice to have the same entry requirements for border security among the countries sharing the border (tit for tat) but it is certainly not something the Canadian government or northern US states wanted for obvious economic reasons.
The teenage pregnancy problem is because of lack of sex education.
Considering that teenage sex and pregancy was the norm for most of human history I'd say the problem has more to do with society being unable to turn teenagers into financially viable and independent adults until long after they are sexually mature.
It was copied. But the problem just isn't archaic copyright laws, the question is who should get the benefits of Internet and perfect, fast, copying of digital media.
None of the RIAA members funded the Internet or any of the technologies that make file sharing possible, yet they want to restrict the rest of the society from enjoying its benefits although we as taxpayers funded these innovations! That's why they are assholes!
Millions of people copy routinely digital media every day irrespective of copyright, rightly wanting to enjoy the fruits of technological innovation that they funded. It is not the responsibility of taxpayers to keep Sony's business model functional. Sony should be using this technology to create new cheaper distribution channels instead of creating artifical scarcity, burdening consumers with the pain of DRM, rooting their customers computers and sueing them.
they're collecting the fingerprints of non-citizens. I got no problem with this.
You realize they are going to give the fingerprints to foreign countries right? So when say Canada decides to fingerprint non-citizens (likely if the US is doing it to its citizens) I'm sure they will pass those on to the FBI to reciprocate.
So either don't leave the US ever, or expect that some point the US government will have your fingerprint via another country.
Do you feel better because it wasn't the US government that took your fingerprints? The effect is the same, they are just outsourcing fingeprint taking.
Oh, you mean it's unlikely that the DoD can use this sequences as a viable weapon? I'd agree with that. There is however a long tradition of scientists taking money from the military to fund basic research whether it is a viable military application or not. Given the war in Iraq... I'm happy they are taking this money from the DoD. It is much better spent.
That is rear event given the fact that known cases of such post-translational modifications are N-terminal peptides needed for transportation of extracellular proteins to and through the cellular membrane
I agree it's likely a rare event. However there are likely other classes of post-translation modification that we haven't discovered, and the protein doesn't have to be extra-cellular.
Given all the excitement with RNAi over the last decade (which wasn't supposed to happen when I was in grad school) I'm much less likely now to rule out the functionality of smaller macromolecules.
To be translated it needs much more than coding sequence for those 10 residues.
A larger protein containing that sequence could be spliced after translation.
The point is that relating the absence of oliugopeptides or oligonucleotides in genomes to the "danger", "threat", etc. is redefining the phrase "long shot" for me.
You're right, the absence itself doesn't prove anything, but it's a nice jumping off point to the followup study. I'm also not so sure it is a long shot.
Especially stupid are searches for amino-acid sequences. Some of the sequences do not make structural sense, obviously.
Wouldn't it be nice to know what these are? I'm not too sure how extensive or accurate the current list of structural improbabilities is.
And what about "dangerous"? Obviously, if the sequence is so crappy that it makes the working conformation of every structural RNA or protein disfunctional then it won't be reproduced.
I don't think you meant to say that, reproducing organisms often code for nonfunctional RNA and proteins.
More interesting would be to find out why some sequences are not encountered also in non-coding areas. But "danger"???
More interesting would be to caluclate on a per organism basis at what frequency such sequences are expected to occur, so we at least know if we are seeing anything significant. The other problem is that sequences may be missing which are formerly lethal, but not currently to the organism.
Danger is certainly possible too. It is very easy to envision protein, RNA (maybe less so trans acting regulatory elements) that can induce lethality in an organism. Why do you not think this is possible? Knowing these sequences has obvious implications for both gene therapy and drug design. I don't think this research is worthless at all. Of course I work in the field, so perhaps I'm a litle biased.
The grant is for more than just the list of sequences as someone else mentions. Also 10K doesn't even come close to covering overhead on that kind of money.
Actually my ISP agreement doesn't say anything of the sort and I'm happy to share my network with others provided they dont' suck down too much bandwidth. If they do, perhaps I'll change my mind.
The point though (regardless of whatever legalities are currently present in Singapore) that it is not desirable for society to have laws which prohibit free communication.
Saying the GPL is "restrictive" is like saying emancipation is restrictive. Yes, emancipation does "restrict" you from owning slaves but the point is to maximize overall human freedom - which it suceeeds at.
The freedom the GPL is taking away is for someone to take source code that is GPL'd and then:
1) Take that code, bundle it into a restrictive (often commerical) license and give nothing back to the community
2) Put it into a BSD style or public domain which is fine - until somebody does 1)
It wasn't choosen out of spite, see the other post on the Matt Groneig reference.
As far as maturity goes about the name, here are two words for you.
Yahoo
Google
That is YOUR morality. How dare you impose your morality on someone else?
Please, using ANY license (including GPLv2, GPLv3, commerical, BSD, whatever) any moral implications. And he's not imposing "his morality" on anyone else, the GPLv3 license is just an option. He just stating his opinion.
My problem is all you people who want to impose your morality on others in a flurry of holier-than-thou richeousness.
Didn't you just write, "How dare you"? I think it's obvious who the holier-than-thou type is.
"preserving freedom" by removing freedom is hypocritical of the FSF
The GPLv3 exists to INCREASE freedom unlike DRM. Yes, it means that the freedom to use DRM is restricted but overall freedom is still increased because users and hackers alike have access to and can run more code. Your arguement reminds me of the old slave-owners complaint about taking away the "freedom to own slaves". America is not less free because slavery was abolished.
Pollution. Diesel is much worse emission wise than cleaner burning gasoline and still produces a lot of nasty particulate emissions, although it is getting better. Weirdly the US has some of the toughest regulations for cars (not trucks) making diesel cars hard an oddity in the US market.
I think I did hear talk of diesel hybrids being produced though, but it was for the European market.
The correction is appreciated, the insult is not.