If you could have only one news source and that was it, the BBC's news would be the one to have.
BBC Britcoms (Dad's Army, Some Mothers Do Have 'Em, The Goodies, The Young Ones, and so on), crafts shows (Vision On, Why Don't You...?) and intellectual game shows (Mastermind, The Adventure Game, The Great Egg Race, Now Get Out Of That) are/were brilliant. Some of their radio presenters (John Peel, for example) are also legends for good reason.
It is a gestalt, the apparent product of genetic engineers combining the Good Twin with the Evil Twin, or some monstrous Dr Jeckyl and Mr Hyde experiment. How else to explain the impossibly conflicting and self-destructive behaviours?
It was nearly canceled during the Colin Baker era (twice) and then actually canceled at the end of the Sylvester McCoy era after a very concerted effort by the BBC to harass and abuse Dr Who fans. (And by "harass and abuse", I mean that quite literally. This was a time when they were hostile to an extreme. How many series can you name when the TV station has actually recorded and transmitted justifications for why fans should be treated with such contempt?) An effort to revive the series on one anniversary was vetoed without explanation by the BBC despite the company involved having purchased the rights to continue the series. A second attempt to revive the series, via a joint Fox/BBC project, resulted in a production that was heavily censored by the BBC before airing, resulting in an impossible-to-watch production that - quite naturally - bombed as a result of being unwatchable. Efforts by BBV to revive the series were subject to lawsuits and harassment.
That was not a "cancellation", that was a deliberate campaign of hostility and wanton destruction.
It should be noted that during this time that attempts to put the Five Doctors special onto video were nearly foiled because of extreme water damage to the master tapes and that attempts to put special effects from the Radiophonics Workshop onto CD suffered due to other such damage*. (*This was reported by members of the Dr Who Team through the Dr Who recovery journal "The Disused Yeti".)
It should further be noted that several of the episodes now missing were NOT junked in the Great Junking of the Black/White footage held by the BBC in the 1980s. A second round of junking that seems to have targeted specific series (Doctor Who included) is now generally accepted to have occurred about 5 years later.
That isn't a cancellation. When a TV company actually attempts to erase the entire record of a show having ever existed - well, genocide refers to people rather than property or history, but there is absolutely no question in my mind that this was the ultimate objective of the BBC Executive at that time. To utterly obliterate the show from history itself.
I'll be able to tell you if IBM is willing to ship me 256 free sample motherboards with the new processor. And a very very fast switch. Oh, and a power station.
Bursty, yes, but there's a reason for it being bursty. In the case of 7-11, for example, there's going to be a correlation between queue sizes and opportunities for people to join a queue. (The middle of the night and times when corporations are at their busiest are probably going to be times when the fewest people have opportunities to join a 7-11 queue.)
Oil rigs exploding may indicate that a common supplier has skimped on QA. It may indicate that there is a common managerial perception that has nothing to do with reality. There may be a common official (or three) that were involved in the political approval process. But you can be certain that there will be something in common between the failures.
In the case where said explosions occur within a short proximity in time, then any other rig that was approved by the same people and/or constructed using parts from the same batch may be vulnerable. Once you have identified a burst and the underlying mechanisms behind it, then things that have that same key ingredients need to be evaluated as being at risk of becoming a part of that same burst.
There are such things as coincidences, but genuine coincidences are going to be randomly distributed (there is nothing to correlate them with each other or with some common third parameter). What we appear to be seeing is something that is not randomly distributed, but we cannot know that until someone looks to see if there is a connection - be it direct or indirect.
What we can say is that, in general, oil rigs are extremely well designed, all things considered. Between the Piper Alpha disaster and the BP rig exploding off the Australian coast this year, I can't think of a single accident on this kind of scale. That's over how many decades? If that is the expected frequency and you get a cluster of three over a very short timeframe (ie: not just one or two standard deviations from the expected, but maybe dozens), then it would require willful blindness to not do an in-depth analysis. That analysis may turn up nothing - even the most improbable of events WILL happen. If the probability is strictly greater than zero, it is not a case of if but when. However, it would be sheer folly to assume that the most improbable of events could only be occurring by chance. Only by looking at the problem can that be determined, and nobody on Slashdot is going to be privy to the kind of information needed to do that evaluation.
Mind you, given the money involved - by both those determined not to be found guilty and by their competitors who would profit from such a conclusion - I'm not sure I entirely trust those who are privy to that information to reach a sensible conclusion. Way, way too many interested parties with reasons to want specific conclusions published (truth be damned), where different groups want different conclusions. Even if the "correct" result is given (ie: the actual culprit is identified), we'll never know if it was reached for the right reasons or the wrong ones. I don't like that. I far prefer the "quaint" notion in the UK that it's no good justice being done if it is not also seen to be done. ("Quaint" in this case meaning that everybody in the UK knows that that used to be the ideal - albeit never one actually achieved - but that the ideal has since been thrown onto the scrap-heap we call history books.)
In principle, nothing prevents a pressure group from actually speccing out what they are trying to achieve overall, in relation to the system overall, then debugging that spec. Mind you, coders don't do that most of the time and they have the best tools and the best training for precisely such work.
Ideally, or at least "ideal" from my perception of things, pressure groups would be looking for actual bugs to be fixed or optimizations to be made in the way things are done and then pressuring society to fix those accordingly. For example, a company that pollutes has to pay for the materials they are polluting with. That is money spent with no return to show for it (and potentially fines if there's too much). There will always be pollution, so pressuring for its elimination is doing harm. Pressuring for improvements in the processes involved, to reduce wastage and maybe - just maybe - actually have the company get an extra source of revenue -- that's another matter. That would benefit everyone.
Now, there will be cases where industry does something very stupid. The Luddites were not protesting technology, they were protesting technology being used as an excuse to sacrifice skilled workers. (A lesson so badly learned that the term is grotesquely misunderstood by most.) In some cases, the industries could have scaled up production. Keep the same number of workers but have a greater amount of output, using scale efficiency and greater sales to cover the costs and boost the profits. In other cases, they might have found ways to get those workers to train the next generation (untrained workers at that time had hellish death and injury rates) or found ways to rechannel those skills into other activities. Yes, it wouldn't have saved everyone's jobs. It might not even have saved the majority of people's jobs. But showing willing would almost certainly have avoided the riots and destruction that did happen. This is not to excuse the destruction the Luddites did inflict, they could have handled things better too, but it was nowhere near the one-sided deal that the corporations insist. A pressure group capable of tempering both sides would have been the smarter solution, it didn't happen.
You are right in saying that most/all pressure groups today don't do any of this. Which, to me, is stupid. To me, pressure groups have one reason and one reason alone for existing, which is to rebalance things when there is a total breakdown in communication and understanding. They should never exist to unbalance things. (Groups do that far too well on their own, they don't need help.)
Corporate media is also very much opposed to state-run media (which is why Sky TV is trying to get the UK Government to kill off the BBC via death by a thousand cuts), so anything corporate media says about state-run media (or, indeed, vice versa) should be taken with vast quantities of sodium chloride. Those not familiar with "Max Headroom: 20 Minutes Into The Future" (the UK movie, not the US miniseries) are advised =strongly= to watch it repeatedly until they understand why profit-driven information delivery is a very, very, very bad idea.
(Indeed, the BBC is a good example of how state-run media can be done in a reasonable way. I won't say perfect - they killed Dr Who, Blake's 7 and The Tripods, all unforgivable crimes against propeller-heads - but I can't honestly name a single commercial channel in the US that I'd even rank close in quality. I won't even say that the BBC is a model the US should follow, though it would be an improvement on what's left of PBS. It is merely a proof-of-existence, evidence that a solution can exist that would be acceptable to the majority within any given political allegiance that would also be outside of the control of individuals who are answerable to nobody.)
The OED has a hell of a lot of entries. The second edition had three times as many entries as the Webster Dictionary and included the etymology for many of the words back to the 12th century. The third edition has double that number of entries at present - and that number will grow considerably between now and publication. I would not be at all surprised if the current estimate of double the number of entries swells to three times by the time it hits the press. And you want to know why it takes so long?
(The OED doesn't even have "every word in English" according to their own disclaimer. If the English language has so many additional extra words that it is beyond the capacity for the OED to maintain a dictionary of that size, it becomes fairly easy to see that the language is incredibly complex. I pity those fools who think the OED is snobbish for taking so long, especially as Americans are only getting to experience 5-10% of their own language because Webster is incapable to detailing more than that.)
One suggestion for "practical unbreakable OTPs" was to gather noise from live radio astronomical observations. Alice sends to Bob the pseudo-random radio source location and the precise time to start gathering the OTP. This information need only be secure until that start time plus the baseline for the observers. After that, the pad is no longer retrievable by any third party. Since the pad itself is never transmitted, the risk of the OTP falling into the wrong hands is greatly reduced.
This is, admittedly, much harder to set up, but I can easily imagine that this would be preferred at a listening post (especially remote ones) over quantum cryptography because it'll work over any distance provided the radio source is above the horizon to both observers at the time of interest.
There may be other ways of independently synthesizing identical OTPs with minimal information needing to be exchanged to do so. Quantum Cryptography will, doubtless, eventually exceed even the theoretical best of such methods but at present I'm getting the feeling that QC is still too new and that there are too many glitches that haven't been ironed out.
It depends on how the online data is presented. If you could write a harvesting engine to pull in the entire dictionary, convert it to TeX for typesetting, then get it professionally printed and hard-bound, you'd not only have a paper edition but you'd also have a guaranteed unique paper edition unless someone used identical software. Given enough time, so that the online edition you scraped no longer exists or is no longer readable by any hardware/software of the time, you'd have a collector's item whose value far exceeded the value of the definitions themselves. Consider this an opportunity that you can exploit.
Assuming it does disappear. The Oxford Press hasn't made a final decision and won't until much closer to the time of publication. It might well be that they're deliberately stoking the fires so that they can start putting out requests for "advance orders". If they sold just as many copies but got the cash 10-20 years earlier than they otherwise would have, they've 10-20 years worth of interest they can collect for extra profit. That would be a big difference.
I'm positive. If the brain's gender is determined by non-genetic means, then genetic tests won't be capable of determining the brain's gender. There may be other tests that can be performed early on - I'm unsure just how visible the structural differences would be at an early stage of development and 9.2T MRI scans are probably inadvisable - but genetic tests won't be amongst them. Notice I said "if" both here and in my prior post. This is all conditional on this being the mechanism. If it is not the mechanism, then clearly all that follows does not apply.
Designer babies already exist to some extent and this trend looks set to continue. It is way, way too late to stop that train. At this point, the smart thing to do would be to tackle ignorance and prejudice. Even if you could legislate for or against specific types of manipulation or test, someone will find a loophole. To block the abuse of this sort of biotechnology through legislation is pointless. It's like trying to stamp out a forest fire - the most you'll do is temporarily put out a small branch before getting incinerated. Undercutting the attitudes which create the demand in the first place - that's where extremists are the most vulnerable and that is the only place any real answer will be found.
They're 20 years into this new edition already but are reportedly only 27% complete. They say they'll release in another decade but unless they're planning on buying some illegal substances for accelerating the staff working on the project, the numbers simply do not add up.
Coreboot or OpenBIOS will let you boot multiple OS' without having to worry about the MBR. Ok, they do have certain disadvantages (though reportedly causing Windows to morph into a cockroach is not really that much of a disadvantage), but they do solve the problem.
So someone with a lot of money and clout got on a philosophical bent. (Dunno if the judge is one who has to be re-elected, but enough are that all decisions should be regarded as suspect. Besides, it's obvious what would happen if this got to the Supreme Court.) Does it really matter that much, though, as to who did what? In the end, what matters is surely that expensive research is going to have to be junked (costing the taxpayer - ie: you) and that other nations with active stem-cell research programs may use this opportunity to drain the US of skilled researchers (who will be fed up with this on-again/off-again deal) and take the lead. There are plenty of places that researchers can go, and stability in employment is very attractive at the moment.
All it would take is a few well-placed patents on key stem-cell therapies and you could see some serious money changing hands in a direction that the US is really not going to like. Sure, that's not something that a judge should consider, but it most certainly is something that pressure groups should consider. The work will get done regardless, it will now simply be done elsewhere by people not necessarily friendly to the US and certainly not under US regulation. All the objectors have done is reduced both their own and anyone else's power to moderate the situation.
That would work, except you're assuming those watching C-SPAN are the intelligent ones. (The ones who are actually intelligent are too busy watching Doctor Who or Star Trek re-runs.)
Research currently indicates that the brain's gender is determined chemically and the body's gender is determined genetically. Assuming that this is a factor in homosexuality, no genetic test will ever exist because although it is biological in nature it is not genetic in nature.
Politicians pay bloggers these days, not only for fake positive opinions of themselves but for fake negative opinions of others. Companies routinely pay for positive articles in newspapers. Medical companies are currently under investigation for pressuring journals to only accept positive results from studies of their drugs (though it's unlikely the practice will change or be restricted). In the end, parasitic opinion pieces are a major problem in many, many different arenas. And that's just what these are - parasites. And given the efforts by the US to restrict lawsuits from countries with stricter rules on publishing, it's clear that these parasites won't be dealt with at any kind of systemic level any time soon - if at all.
Some might argue this is a good thing, some might argue it is a bad thing. I'm not sure it matters nearly as much as the willful blindness to the fact that it happens at all, or the fact that an informed opinion is impossible when you cannot identify what is information. (This could involve requiring that externally-imposed biases are identified, but it could equally well involve some sort of certification system whereby the reliability of information is evaluated and graded - much as Wikipedia's articles are, but you'd want this to be a little more independent and verifiably neutral. There are probably yet other alternatives. Picking one matters more than which one is picked.)
And since most businesses have their central office (usually totaling a coke machine and a janitor) located in States with no corporate State tax - or have even off-shored said office to tax havens and pay no Federal taxes either (ie: virtually all the top 10% of companies that are nominally American*), these "tax" things the Senator collects aren't taxes the IRS knows anything about.
*In all fairness, most countries are like this. Which is why most are reviewing tax codes and/or threatening to invade Switzerland.
Slashdot Mirror
If you could have only one news source and that was it, the BBC's news would be the one to have.
BBC Britcoms (Dad's Army, Some Mothers Do Have 'Em, The Goodies, The Young Ones, and so on), crafts shows (Vision On, Why Don't You...?) and intellectual game shows (Mastermind, The Adventure Game, The Great Egg Race, Now Get Out Of That) are/were brilliant. Some of their radio presenters (John Peel, for example) are also legends for good reason.
It is a gestalt, the apparent product of genetic engineers combining the Good Twin with the Evil Twin, or some monstrous Dr Jeckyl and Mr Hyde experiment. How else to explain the impossibly conflicting and self-destructive behaviours?
It was nearly canceled during the Colin Baker era (twice) and then actually canceled at the end of the Sylvester McCoy era after a very concerted effort by the BBC to harass and abuse Dr Who fans. (And by "harass and abuse", I mean that quite literally. This was a time when they were hostile to an extreme. How many series can you name when the TV station has actually recorded and transmitted justifications for why fans should be treated with such contempt?) An effort to revive the series on one anniversary was vetoed without explanation by the BBC despite the company involved having purchased the rights to continue the series. A second attempt to revive the series, via a joint Fox/BBC project, resulted in a production that was heavily censored by the BBC before airing, resulting in an impossible-to-watch production that - quite naturally - bombed as a result of being unwatchable. Efforts by BBV to revive the series were subject to lawsuits and harassment.
That was not a "cancellation", that was a deliberate campaign of hostility and wanton destruction.
It should be noted that during this time that attempts to put the Five Doctors special onto video were nearly foiled because of extreme water damage to the master tapes and that attempts to put special effects from the Radiophonics Workshop onto CD suffered due to other such damage*. (*This was reported by members of the Dr Who Team through the Dr Who recovery journal "The Disused Yeti".)
It should further be noted that several of the episodes now missing were NOT junked in the Great Junking of the Black/White footage held by the BBC in the 1980s. A second round of junking that seems to have targeted specific series (Doctor Who included) is now generally accepted to have occurred about 5 years later.
That isn't a cancellation. When a TV company actually attempts to erase the entire record of a show having ever existed - well, genocide refers to people rather than property or history, but there is absolutely no question in my mind that this was the ultimate objective of the BBC Executive at that time. To utterly obliterate the show from history itself.
I'll be able to tell you if IBM is willing to ship me 256 free sample motherboards with the new processor. And a very very fast switch. Oh, and a power station.
Bursty, yes, but there's a reason for it being bursty. In the case of 7-11, for example, there's going to be a correlation between queue sizes and opportunities for people to join a queue. (The middle of the night and times when corporations are at their busiest are probably going to be times when the fewest people have opportunities to join a 7-11 queue.)
Oil rigs exploding may indicate that a common supplier has skimped on QA. It may indicate that there is a common managerial perception that has nothing to do with reality. There may be a common official (or three) that were involved in the political approval process. But you can be certain that there will be something in common between the failures.
In the case where said explosions occur within a short proximity in time, then any other rig that was approved by the same people and/or constructed using parts from the same batch may be vulnerable. Once you have identified a burst and the underlying mechanisms behind it, then things that have that same key ingredients need to be evaluated as being at risk of becoming a part of that same burst.
There are such things as coincidences, but genuine coincidences are going to be randomly distributed (there is nothing to correlate them with each other or with some common third parameter). What we appear to be seeing is something that is not randomly distributed, but we cannot know that until someone looks to see if there is a connection - be it direct or indirect.
What we can say is that, in general, oil rigs are extremely well designed, all things considered. Between the Piper Alpha disaster and the BP rig exploding off the Australian coast this year, I can't think of a single accident on this kind of scale. That's over how many decades? If that is the expected frequency and you get a cluster of three over a very short timeframe (ie: not just one or two standard deviations from the expected, but maybe dozens), then it would require willful blindness to not do an in-depth analysis. That analysis may turn up nothing - even the most improbable of events WILL happen. If the probability is strictly greater than zero, it is not a case of if but when. However, it would be sheer folly to assume that the most improbable of events could only be occurring by chance. Only by looking at the problem can that be determined, and nobody on Slashdot is going to be privy to the kind of information needed to do that evaluation.
Mind you, given the money involved - by both those determined not to be found guilty and by their competitors who would profit from such a conclusion - I'm not sure I entirely trust those who are privy to that information to reach a sensible conclusion. Way, way too many interested parties with reasons to want specific conclusions published (truth be damned), where different groups want different conclusions. Even if the "correct" result is given (ie: the actual culprit is identified), we'll never know if it was reached for the right reasons or the wrong ones. I don't like that. I far prefer the "quaint" notion in the UK that it's no good justice being done if it is not also seen to be done. ("Quaint" in this case meaning that everybody in the UK knows that that used to be the ideal - albeit never one actually achieved - but that the ideal has since been thrown onto the scrap-heap we call history books.)
In principle, nothing prevents a pressure group from actually speccing out what they are trying to achieve overall, in relation to the system overall, then debugging that spec. Mind you, coders don't do that most of the time and they have the best tools and the best training for precisely such work.
Ideally, or at least "ideal" from my perception of things, pressure groups would be looking for actual bugs to be fixed or optimizations to be made in the way things are done and then pressuring society to fix those accordingly. For example, a company that pollutes has to pay for the materials they are polluting with. That is money spent with no return to show for it (and potentially fines if there's too much). There will always be pollution, so pressuring for its elimination is doing harm. Pressuring for improvements in the processes involved, to reduce wastage and maybe - just maybe - actually have the company get an extra source of revenue -- that's another matter. That would benefit everyone.
Now, there will be cases where industry does something very stupid. The Luddites were not protesting technology, they were protesting technology being used as an excuse to sacrifice skilled workers. (A lesson so badly learned that the term is grotesquely misunderstood by most.) In some cases, the industries could have scaled up production. Keep the same number of workers but have a greater amount of output, using scale efficiency and greater sales to cover the costs and boost the profits. In other cases, they might have found ways to get those workers to train the next generation (untrained workers at that time had hellish death and injury rates) or found ways to rechannel those skills into other activities. Yes, it wouldn't have saved everyone's jobs. It might not even have saved the majority of people's jobs. But showing willing would almost certainly have avoided the riots and destruction that did happen. This is not to excuse the destruction the Luddites did inflict, they could have handled things better too, but it was nowhere near the one-sided deal that the corporations insist. A pressure group capable of tempering both sides would have been the smarter solution, it didn't happen.
You are right in saying that most/all pressure groups today don't do any of this. Which, to me, is stupid. To me, pressure groups have one reason and one reason alone for existing, which is to rebalance things when there is a total breakdown in communication and understanding. They should never exist to unbalance things. (Groups do that far too well on their own, they don't need help.)
Nothing wrong with fetishes, and those leather-bound volumes.... ohhhhhhh.
Corporate media is also very much opposed to state-run media (which is why Sky TV is trying to get the UK Government to kill off the BBC via death by a thousand cuts), so anything corporate media says about state-run media (or, indeed, vice versa) should be taken with vast quantities of sodium chloride. Those not familiar with "Max Headroom: 20 Minutes Into The Future" (the UK movie, not the US miniseries) are advised =strongly= to watch it repeatedly until they understand why profit-driven information delivery is a very, very, very bad idea.
(Indeed, the BBC is a good example of how state-run media can be done in a reasonable way. I won't say perfect - they killed Dr Who, Blake's 7 and The Tripods, all unforgivable crimes against propeller-heads - but I can't honestly name a single commercial channel in the US that I'd even rank close in quality. I won't even say that the BBC is a model the US should follow, though it would be an improvement on what's left of PBS. It is merely a proof-of-existence, evidence that a solution can exist that would be acceptable to the majority within any given political allegiance that would also be outside of the control of individuals who are answerable to nobody.)
Understanding the rewrite doesn't help if the margin of error means that 73% == 76% three-quarters of the time.
Nonono. We had the Russian Station transmit secret numbers recently, this is clearly a response from agents in the field.
The OED has a hell of a lot of entries. The second edition had three times as many entries as the Webster Dictionary and included the etymology for many of the words back to the 12th century. The third edition has double that number of entries at present - and that number will grow considerably between now and publication. I would not be at all surprised if the current estimate of double the number of entries swells to three times by the time it hits the press. And you want to know why it takes so long?
(The OED doesn't even have "every word in English" according to their own disclaimer. If the English language has so many additional extra words that it is beyond the capacity for the OED to maintain a dictionary of that size, it becomes fairly easy to see that the language is incredibly complex. I pity those fools who think the OED is snobbish for taking so long, especially as Americans are only getting to experience 5-10% of their own language because Webster is incapable to detailing more than that.)
One suggestion for "practical unbreakable OTPs" was to gather noise from live radio astronomical observations. Alice sends to Bob the pseudo-random radio source location and the precise time to start gathering the OTP. This information need only be secure until that start time plus the baseline for the observers. After that, the pad is no longer retrievable by any third party. Since the pad itself is never transmitted, the risk of the OTP falling into the wrong hands is greatly reduced.
This is, admittedly, much harder to set up, but I can easily imagine that this would be preferred at a listening post (especially remote ones) over quantum cryptography because it'll work over any distance provided the radio source is above the horizon to both observers at the time of interest.
There may be other ways of independently synthesizing identical OTPs with minimal information needing to be exchanged to do so. Quantum Cryptography will, doubtless, eventually exceed even the theoretical best of such methods but at present I'm getting the feeling that QC is still too new and that there are too many glitches that haven't been ironed out.
And that is what makes the undead so dangerous.
It depends on how the online data is presented. If you could write a harvesting engine to pull in the entire dictionary, convert it to TeX for typesetting, then get it professionally printed and hard-bound, you'd not only have a paper edition but you'd also have a guaranteed unique paper edition unless someone used identical software. Given enough time, so that the online edition you scraped no longer exists or is no longer readable by any hardware/software of the time, you'd have a collector's item whose value far exceeded the value of the definitions themselves. Consider this an opportunity that you can exploit.
Assuming it does disappear. The Oxford Press hasn't made a final decision and won't until much closer to the time of publication. It might well be that they're deliberately stoking the fires so that they can start putting out requests for "advance orders". If they sold just as many copies but got the cash 10-20 years earlier than they otherwise would have, they've 10-20 years worth of interest they can collect for extra profit. That would be a big difference.
I'm positive. If the brain's gender is determined by non-genetic means, then genetic tests won't be capable of determining the brain's gender. There may be other tests that can be performed early on - I'm unsure just how visible the structural differences would be at an early stage of development and 9.2T MRI scans are probably inadvisable - but genetic tests won't be amongst them. Notice I said "if" both here and in my prior post. This is all conditional on this being the mechanism. If it is not the mechanism, then clearly all that follows does not apply.
Designer babies already exist to some extent and this trend looks set to continue. It is way, way too late to stop that train. At this point, the smart thing to do would be to tackle ignorance and prejudice. Even if you could legislate for or against specific types of manipulation or test, someone will find a loophole. To block the abuse of this sort of biotechnology through legislation is pointless. It's like trying to stamp out a forest fire - the most you'll do is temporarily put out a small branch before getting incinerated. Undercutting the attitudes which create the demand in the first place - that's where extremists are the most vulnerable and that is the only place any real answer will be found.
They're 20 years into this new edition already but are reportedly only 27% complete. They say they'll release in another decade but unless they're planning on buying some illegal substances for accelerating the staff working on the project, the numbers simply do not add up.
Coreboot or OpenBIOS will let you boot multiple OS' without having to worry about the MBR. Ok, they do have certain disadvantages (though reportedly causing Windows to morph into a cockroach is not really that much of a disadvantage), but they do solve the problem.
I beg to differ. A lot of people found SATAN, and recent derivatives, very useful.
So someone with a lot of money and clout got on a philosophical bent. (Dunno if the judge is one who has to be re-elected, but enough are that all decisions should be regarded as suspect. Besides, it's obvious what would happen if this got to the Supreme Court.) Does it really matter that much, though, as to who did what? In the end, what matters is surely that expensive research is going to have to be junked (costing the taxpayer - ie: you) and that other nations with active stem-cell research programs may use this opportunity to drain the US of skilled researchers (who will be fed up with this on-again/off-again deal) and take the lead. There are plenty of places that researchers can go, and stability in employment is very attractive at the moment.
All it would take is a few well-placed patents on key stem-cell therapies and you could see some serious money changing hands in a direction that the US is really not going to like. Sure, that's not something that a judge should consider, but it most certainly is something that pressure groups should consider. The work will get done regardless, it will now simply be done elsewhere by people not necessarily friendly to the US and certainly not under US regulation. All the objectors have done is reduced both their own and anyone else's power to moderate the situation.
That would work, except you're assuming those watching C-SPAN are the intelligent ones. (The ones who are actually intelligent are too busy watching Doctor Who or Star Trek re-runs.)
Research currently indicates that the brain's gender is determined chemically and the body's gender is determined genetically. Assuming that this is a factor in homosexuality, no genetic test will ever exist because although it is biological in nature it is not genetic in nature.
Politicians pay bloggers these days, not only for fake positive opinions of themselves but for fake negative opinions of others. Companies routinely pay for positive articles in newspapers. Medical companies are currently under investigation for pressuring journals to only accept positive results from studies of their drugs (though it's unlikely the practice will change or be restricted). In the end, parasitic opinion pieces are a major problem in many, many different arenas. And that's just what these are - parasites. And given the efforts by the US to restrict lawsuits from countries with stricter rules on publishing, it's clear that these parasites won't be dealt with at any kind of systemic level any time soon - if at all.
Some might argue this is a good thing, some might argue it is a bad thing. I'm not sure it matters nearly as much as the willful blindness to the fact that it happens at all, or the fact that an informed opinion is impossible when you cannot identify what is information. (This could involve requiring that externally-imposed biases are identified, but it could equally well involve some sort of certification system whereby the reliability of information is evaluated and graded - much as Wikipedia's articles are, but you'd want this to be a little more independent and verifiably neutral. There are probably yet other alternatives. Picking one matters more than which one is picked.)
"There's a word I've never used before... and hopefully never will again." (The Doctor)
Microsoft will doubtless send an engineer so that the malware authors can reserve the bandwidth they need for all those coredumps mentioned earlier.
And since most businesses have their central office (usually totaling a coke machine and a janitor) located in States with no corporate State tax - or have even off-shored said office to tax havens and pay no Federal taxes either (ie: virtually all the top 10% of companies that are nominally American*), these "tax" things the Senator collects aren't taxes the IRS knows anything about.
*In all fairness, most countries are like this. Which is why most are reviewing tax codes and/or threatening to invade Switzerland.