I find your.sig interesting, given that there were Jews in the Nazis who apparently couldn't distinguish between the positions either. Since this means illegal immigrants are now incapable of appealing to the law against forced labour (which is actually very common in the US), slavery hasn't ended either. Russia has reverted to communism because President Raygun failed to provide support for Gorbechev's reforms. And since American independence was founded on no taxation without representation, taxing these people whilst prohibiting them from enjoying any rights whatsoever is clearly a complete destruction of what American independence actually is.
In short, you're not just a fool, you're a damn fool.
That's a good point, as most companies rely on multiple studies to verify if a mutation applies or not. There is no test to see if the studies are using the same hardware, as far as I know, which means that identical results can be a result of identical database errors.
It also creates problems for things like the 1000 Genomes Project. How many of the thousands (they're already well over the 1000 mark) will have to be retested in order to be able to reliably subtract out the contamination?
It's not limited to genetic disease, however. Archaeological DNA results will be of questionable value. How do you know what is actually Neandertal or Denisovian DNA? And with the volume of material being extremely limited (we have one fingerbone for Denisovian DNA and a handful of teeth as the source for Neandertal data), retesting isn't really a serious option. From a scientific perspective, this is the more serious problem as finding people with Parkinson's or with Alzheimer's is easier than finding new Neandertal remains. It'll also be important to subtract out the duplicated errors from the DNA that appears to be in common between species, so all claims of a genetic link between humans and Neandertals (for example) have to be put on hold until the scientists can confirm how much of the contamination is being falsely read as duplication.
Given that the US appears to have a lawsuit-based economy, requiring cases to be sensible might push it further into recession. The UK is interesting in that in a few court cases, the judge has decided both parties to be in the wrong and split costs between them in proportion to their wrongness. I like the concept, as I dislike the absolutism involved in assigning one side absolute responsibility with no regard to how the responsiblity actually divides out. However, in a day and age where clear-cut rules and fixed, uniform penalties are the in-thing, it's not obvious how you'd codify such a scheme to meet modern sensibilities.
Also, other nations also have modest (though not great) legal aid schemes to ensure that defendents can actually afford to defend. This could (and probably should) be improved such that the state actively safeguards its citizenry against lawsuit trolls (if the costs are going to be reclaimed anyway, what's the cost to the state for doing this?) but that's not currently what is done anywhere as far as I know.
Unless the clients were running specialized hardware, the backup images can be thrown onto virtual machines in the interim. A dead site gathers no hits.
[Ritual burial theory][http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/08/otzi-ceremony/] [Rejection by the archaeologists at the Otzi museum][http://www.iceman.it/en/statement_burial_theory] [A more neutral POV article on Otzi in general and the theories of death][http://www.health.medicbd.com/wiki/%C3%96tzi_the_Iceman]
Basically, the claim of burial is "case unproven" but all other contending theories also have problems from lack of evidence. Since medical exams on mummies have invariably turned up injuries missed by prior exams, it's safe to assume that later research will have a more definitive answer.
Although rare, it is not unknown for someone to give up on life at the death of a close friend. It will never be possible to know what was in his mind, it's entirely likely it was just a very tragic accident, and it would be wrong to not mourn the loss of someone who was a friend to the community at large, but equally it would be wrong to assume that he didn't put the friendship at that high a value. That, of course, is the worst part of tragedies like this, we can never know his choices and therefore cannot know what it is we should be respecting.
The two meals prior to his last seemed to be fairly elaborate, suggesting that whatever chase or chases may have taken place it wasn't expected and wasn't until after the last meal.
The current theory seems to be that the un-plundered artifacts were a result of him being ritually buried in the Alps after death, on the grounds that although the blood on the knife proves he was in hand-to-hand combat (and must have won, since he survived that and was killed by an arrow), nothing from the attackers other than the blood on the knife (no arrowheads, no lost artifacts, nothing) has been found.
There's a difference between agreeing to the GPL and agrring on what it says. It is a little ambiguous on just what constitutes a derivative project, at least in v2, but the current case doesn't seem like it's an ambiguity issue. The fact that the defense keeps changing legal basis and the definition of their own work indicates that the defense knew in advance that they were violating any interpretation of the GPL.
There's claims that he may have been moved after death and that he may have been killed in or around a settlement off the Alps.
That aside, the continuing research is building up an amazing picture. I assume they've done the strontium isotope testing on the teeth to locate exactly where he was originally from.
What's more, glaciers in the Alps and across Scandanavia are releasing enormous amounts of organics, allowing for a much better picture of the time to be built. The main concern had by archaeologists is that the amount they're able to collect (due to really insignificant resources) is tiny compared to what's actually being released. Cloth and wood, when released by a glacier, will rot extremely quickly if efforts are not made to preserve it (not the seconds shown in Indiana Jones IV, but months to maybe a year or so) but may be removed and destroyed/buried by mud, animals, build-up of the terminal morraine, etc, long before that.
What we do have, though, is a picture of an era within that area that is incredibly comprehensive. We only know about the use of colour in early mediterranian clothes because X-Ray fluorescence on Greek and Roman sculptures reveals the paints used. We actually have dyed cloth from Otzi's time. We know the Romans loved wine and beer, from their writings and from residue in containers, but we've actually found seeds in the process of being malted in German and France again contemporary with Otzi along with other ingredients in their raw form. Also from that era, we have found doors that are painted and have latches, ropes, longbows, shoes and other artifacts, most of which are either completely or almost completely intact. That is impressive.
Provided more enthusiasts in Europe go out, find, salvage as necessary, and report organics to make up for the lack of archaeological resources, we are quite capable of building a picture of Bronze Age and Iron Age Europe that is more comprehensive than our knowledge of early-to-mid Medieval times.
Currency is basically a form of barter that avoids having to move physical goods around of a value equal to that of the currency. The earliest currencies - often things like the iron rings used by Celts in the early Iron Age - converted to a fixed amount of some physical goods. This evolved over time into the gold standard (instead of having different coinage equate to different physical goods, all currency equated to a single physical good - gold, in this case). After a while, currency was switched to a floating standard - essentially a stock market where the currency is worth what people are willing to pay for it. The result has been mixed, with considerable abuse by currency speculators syphoning off value but equally greater reliance on direct value since things like gold were also only worth what people were willing to pay for it. The fact that it was indirect didn't change the fundamental barter nature.
Bitcoins aren't really offering anything useful here as they stand. Barter only works if both sides agree on what is being exchanged and its value. What is exchanged doesn't matter. It's just a token. Any token would do. Sure, bitcoins are comparatively hard to forge relative to, say, an iron ring. (Play on words is unintentional, unless the etymology says it's where the term came from, in which case it's inspired.) However, if you're using an electronic system, you don't need individually-identifiable coins. Banks don't use identifiable coins, they store numbers and maybe an index number to identify what currency it is in. By having bitcoins work they way they do, fraud is inevitable since you still have a centralized guarantor and no central system is immune to being backdoored.
The Mondo cards operated by storing such a number in a highly encrypted form and using tamper-proof technology to ensure that the number could not be manipulated except via the authorized interface. You could then transfer currency digitally from any card to any card without the need of any central system. It wasn't perfect, sure, or you'd be using them and not debit cards. The hardware's pricier than a debit card but that's because you essentially become a bank.
Given modern memory chips are much larger, it would be theoretically possible to make a Mondo-type distributed system work using a bitcoin-like idea, where a system cracker couldn't place an arbitrary value onto the card but could, at worst, only create forgeries of coins they'd actually seen. As many of them as they wanted. This would limit the per-transaction fraud but not the total fraud.
The obvious answer would be to make each card an item on a stock exchange, essentially creating personal currencies. The value of what is on the card is then floating. Altering the value on the card would then be nothing more than printing more of your personal currency, which in turn would devalue your personal currency, so the net value on the card remains a constant. Obvious but flawed. It would introduce a new sort of centralized system - a central stock market rather than a central bank - but nonetheless a central component that all transactions would end up getting logged by. Which defeats the value of a distributed system. It would be arguably better than physical currency, as counterfeiting would become essentially impossible and inflation becomes highly localized and cannot spread like a contageon. However, it's the reverse of the direction you want for personal security, even if it has some value on a social level. It would also be a nightmare to use since you cannot know in advance the value of your personal currency with respect to someone else's. Your system would have to translate any price you saw from the vendor's personal cuurency into yours, making transactions much more complex. I actually quite like the theory of personal currency, but can't see any way to make it workable without forcing all online shopping to take place on a dedicated EAL-7 kiosk (goodbye universal computing devices) and turning bricks-and-morter shops into terrifying nightmares
Yes. We've had many cases of the Eath being cold that were not on minima (Snowball Earth wasn't because the Sun went into hibernation for a few hundred million years, for example, and the Younger Dryas lasted just a liiiitle longer than the so-called mini ice age) and we've had many cases of the Earth being hot that weren't on maxima (the Carboniferous Age was not due to the sun exploding).
The contemporal cool periods were WELL within statistical norms and are not, on a climatic scale, signficant whatsoever. To be climatically significant, it has to last more than a weekend.
My post was that climate can be modeled and predicted BECAUSE it is chaotic, that if it were not chaotic you couldn't model it, but weather CANNOT for the very same reason.
Christ! Do I have to get English 101 lessons for you guys?
$100 million on gadgets. How much has the GAO identified, over the same period, as having been misspent on military credit cards (such as on strip clubs), or having fallen off the books entirely and having no accountable use?
Yes, this is wastage*, but the question is whether this is a significant amount of wastage compared to other forms. Chasing down fraud is ultimately about ROI. You invest a certain amount on cleaning this up, but you want to deal with issues that give you the greatest returns first.
*XBoxes? They could at least have bought gaming PCs with Linux installed. XBoxes aren't CC-rated and therefore can't be legitimately used in a government setting, but Linux gaming machines are and can.
Slashdot Mirror
I find your .sig interesting, given that there were Jews in the Nazis who apparently couldn't distinguish between the positions either. Since this means illegal immigrants are now incapable of appealing to the law against forced labour (which is actually very common in the US), slavery hasn't ended either. Russia has reverted to communism because President Raygun failed to provide support for Gorbechev's reforms. And since American independence was founded on no taxation without representation, taxing these people whilst prohibiting them from enjoying any rights whatsoever is clearly a complete destruction of what American independence actually is.
In short, you're not just a fool, you're a damn fool.
You mean like this?
That's a good point, as most companies rely on multiple studies to verify if a mutation applies or not. There is no test to see if the studies are using the same hardware, as far as I know, which means that identical results can be a result of identical database errors.
It also creates problems for things like the 1000 Genomes Project. How many of the thousands (they're already well over the 1000 mark) will have to be retested in order to be able to reliably subtract out the contamination?
It's not limited to genetic disease, however. Archaeological DNA results will be of questionable value. How do you know what is actually Neandertal or Denisovian DNA? And with the volume of material being extremely limited (we have one fingerbone for Denisovian DNA and a handful of teeth as the source for Neandertal data), retesting isn't really a serious option. From a scientific perspective, this is the more serious problem as finding people with Parkinson's or with Alzheimer's is easier than finding new Neandertal remains. It'll also be important to subtract out the duplicated errors from the DNA that appears to be in common between species, so all claims of a genetic link between humans and Neandertals (for example) have to be put on hold until the scientists can confirm how much of the contamination is being falsely read as duplication.
Given that the US appears to have a lawsuit-based economy, requiring cases to be sensible might push it further into recession. The UK is interesting in that in a few court cases, the judge has decided both parties to be in the wrong and split costs between them in proportion to their wrongness. I like the concept, as I dislike the absolutism involved in assigning one side absolute responsibility with no regard to how the responsiblity actually divides out. However, in a day and age where clear-cut rules and fixed, uniform penalties are the in-thing, it's not obvious how you'd codify such a scheme to meet modern sensibilities.
Also, other nations also have modest (though not great) legal aid schemes to ensure that defendents can actually afford to defend. This could (and probably should) be improved such that the state actively safeguards its citizenry against lawsuit trolls (if the costs are going to be reclaimed anyway, what's the cost to the state for doing this?) but that's not currently what is done anywhere as far as I know.
Because that's no moon, that's a business group patent system proposal?
True, but no country does "first to invent", and the US often doesn't bother much with "first to (anything)".
The FBI can't seize it, but due to crap security, apparently everyone else can. Hmmm. Not a great swap.
Unless the clients were running specialized hardware, the backup images can be thrown onto virtual machines in the interim. A dead site gathers no hits.
[Ritual burial theory][http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/08/otzi-ceremony/]
[Rejection by the archaeologists at the Otzi museum][http://www.iceman.it/en/statement_burial_theory]
[A more neutral POV article on Otzi in general and the theories of death][http://www.health.medicbd.com/wiki/%C3%96tzi_the_Iceman]
Basically, the claim of burial is "case unproven" but all other contending theories also have problems from lack of evidence. Since medical exams on mummies have invariably turned up injuries missed by prior exams, it's safe to assume that later research will have a more definitive answer.
Although rare, it is not unknown for someone to give up on life at the death of a close friend. It will never be possible to know what was in his mind, it's entirely likely it was just a very tragic accident, and it would be wrong to not mourn the loss of someone who was a friend to the community at large, but equally it would be wrong to assume that he didn't put the friendship at that high a value. That, of course, is the worst part of tragedies like this, we can never know his choices and therefore cannot know what it is we should be respecting.
So was the Mini Metro, the Reliant Robin, and the Sinclair C5. All three were probably more dangerous than a VW Beetle.
Ah yes, and F1 cars place the engines at the back for amusement value? Rear engine cars tend to have better handling.
The two meals prior to his last seemed to be fairly elaborate, suggesting that whatever chase or chases may have taken place it wasn't expected and wasn't until after the last meal.
The current theory seems to be that the un-plundered artifacts were a result of him being ritually buried in the Alps after death, on the grounds that although the blood on the knife proves he was in hand-to-hand combat (and must have won, since he survived that and was killed by an arrow), nothing from the attackers other than the blood on the knife (no arrowheads, no lost artifacts, nothing) has been found.
There's a difference between agreeing to the GPL and agrring on what it says. It is a little ambiguous on just what constitutes a derivative project, at least in v2, but the current case doesn't seem like it's an ambiguity issue. The fact that the defense keeps changing legal basis and the definition of their own work indicates that the defense knew in advance that they were violating any interpretation of the GPL.
Shouldn't be hard. All that's needed is a Klokwork@Home project.
Sufficient duct tape should patch the developers just fine.
There's claims that he may have been moved after death and that he may have been killed in or around a settlement off the Alps.
That aside, the continuing research is building up an amazing picture. I assume they've done the strontium isotope testing on the teeth to locate exactly where he was originally from.
What's more, glaciers in the Alps and across Scandanavia are releasing enormous amounts of organics, allowing for a much better picture of the time to be built. The main concern had by archaeologists is that the amount they're able to collect (due to really insignificant resources) is tiny compared to what's actually being released. Cloth and wood, when released by a glacier, will rot extremely quickly if efforts are not made to preserve it (not the seconds shown in Indiana Jones IV, but months to maybe a year or so) but may be removed and destroyed/buried by mud, animals, build-up of the terminal morraine, etc, long before that.
What we do have, though, is a picture of an era within that area that is incredibly comprehensive. We only know about the use of colour in early mediterranian clothes because X-Ray fluorescence on Greek and Roman sculptures reveals the paints used. We actually have dyed cloth from Otzi's time. We know the Romans loved wine and beer, from their writings and from residue in containers, but we've actually found seeds in the process of being malted in German and France again contemporary with Otzi along with other ingredients in their raw form. Also from that era, we have found doors that are painted and have latches, ropes, longbows, shoes and other artifacts, most of which are either completely or almost completely intact. That is impressive.
Provided more enthusiasts in Europe go out, find, salvage as necessary, and report organics to make up for the lack of archaeological resources, we are quite capable of building a picture of Bronze Age and Iron Age Europe that is more comprehensive than our knowledge of early-to-mid Medieval times.
Currency is basically a form of barter that avoids having to move physical goods around of a value equal to that of the currency. The earliest currencies - often things like the iron rings used by Celts in the early Iron Age - converted to a fixed amount of some physical goods. This evolved over time into the gold standard (instead of having different coinage equate to different physical goods, all currency equated to a single physical good - gold, in this case). After a while, currency was switched to a floating standard - essentially a stock market where the currency is worth what people are willing to pay for it. The result has been mixed, with considerable abuse by currency speculators syphoning off value but equally greater reliance on direct value since things like gold were also only worth what people were willing to pay for it. The fact that it was indirect didn't change the fundamental barter nature.
Bitcoins aren't really offering anything useful here as they stand. Barter only works if both sides agree on what is being exchanged and its value. What is exchanged doesn't matter. It's just a token. Any token would do. Sure, bitcoins are comparatively hard to forge relative to, say, an iron ring. (Play on words is unintentional, unless the etymology says it's where the term came from, in which case it's inspired.) However, if you're using an electronic system, you don't need individually-identifiable coins. Banks don't use identifiable coins, they store numbers and maybe an index number to identify what currency it is in. By having bitcoins work they way they do, fraud is inevitable since you still have a centralized guarantor and no central system is immune to being backdoored.
The Mondo cards operated by storing such a number in a highly encrypted form and using tamper-proof technology to ensure that the number could not be manipulated except via the authorized interface. You could then transfer currency digitally from any card to any card without the need of any central system. It wasn't perfect, sure, or you'd be using them and not debit cards. The hardware's pricier than a debit card but that's because you essentially become a bank.
Given modern memory chips are much larger, it would be theoretically possible to make a Mondo-type distributed system work using a bitcoin-like idea, where a system cracker couldn't place an arbitrary value onto the card but could, at worst, only create forgeries of coins they'd actually seen. As many of them as they wanted. This would limit the per-transaction fraud but not the total fraud.
The obvious answer would be to make each card an item on a stock exchange, essentially creating personal currencies. The value of what is on the card is then floating. Altering the value on the card would then be nothing more than printing more of your personal currency, which in turn would devalue your personal currency, so the net value on the card remains a constant. Obvious but flawed. It would introduce a new sort of centralized system - a central stock market rather than a central bank - but nonetheless a central component that all transactions would end up getting logged by. Which defeats the value of a distributed system. It would be arguably better than physical currency, as counterfeiting would become essentially impossible and inflation becomes highly localized and cannot spread like a contageon. However, it's the reverse of the direction you want for personal security, even if it has some value on a social level. It would also be a nightmare to use since you cannot know in advance the value of your personal currency with respect to someone else's. Your system would have to translate any price you saw from the vendor's personal cuurency into yours, making transactions much more complex. I actually quite like the theory of personal currency, but can't see any way to make it workable without forcing all online shopping to take place on a dedicated EAL-7 kiosk (goodbye universal computing devices) and turning bricks-and-morter shops into terrifying nightmares
If we tax the wealthy enough, they'll stop being rich and then they won't get the exemptions.
I thought it was the union legislation that prevented strikes.
Go read up on chaos theory. Better still, take a long walk off a short plank.
Yes. We've had many cases of the Eath being cold that were not on minima (Snowball Earth wasn't because the Sun went into hibernation for a few hundred million years, for example, and the Younger Dryas lasted just a liiiitle longer than the so-called mini ice age) and we've had many cases of the Earth being hot that weren't on maxima (the Carboniferous Age was not due to the sun exploding).
The contemporal cool periods were WELL within statistical norms and are not, on a climatic scale, signficant whatsoever. To be climatically significant, it has to last more than a weekend.
My post was that climate can be modeled and predicted BECAUSE it is chaotic, that if it were not chaotic you couldn't model it, but weather CANNOT for the very same reason.
Christ! Do I have to get English 101 lessons for you guys?
Suggest you read the post you're replying to and then point out what in your post constitutes a reply to what, 'cos I see nothing that relates.
$100 million on gadgets. How much has the GAO identified, over the same period, as having been misspent on military credit cards (such as on strip clubs), or having fallen off the books entirely and having no accountable use?
Yes, this is wastage*, but the question is whether this is a significant amount of wastage compared to other forms. Chasing down fraud is ultimately about ROI. You invest a certain amount on cleaning this up, but you want to deal with issues that give you the greatest returns first.
*XBoxes? They could at least have bought gaming PCs with Linux installed. XBoxes aren't CC-rated and therefore can't be legitimately used in a government setting, but Linux gaming machines are and can.