Of course many species go extinct independent of human action (though with human action so pervasive, what species is entirely untouched by it?), but there's little we can do about them.
Finding quantum entanglement in photosynthetic systems demonstrates that we can learn quite a lot of what we're seeking when we look at existing features of living species. Making them extinct is a significant opportunity cost we must consider when accounting for the benefits of what we do that makes them extinct.
This research shows a broader point we should learn: every species that we extinct takes with it to oblivion some mechanisms for coping with the world that we could use ourselves. Not enough coping mechanisms to keep it fit to survive in the world we've made, but many mechanisms that go down with it.
Of course many species go extinct independent of human action (though with human action so pervasive, what species is entirely untouched by it?), but there's little we can do about them. The ones we make extinct through carelessness, wrong priorities and other waste are lost to us in our efforts to remain fit ourselves in the environment we're making.
Whatever happened to Machinima? I figured by now viral machinima movies would routinely sweep the Net, a plugin for it would run on most browsers, more kids would watch its movies than watch TV, people would routinely whip up new clips like email, live video would be ported into it automatically.
But it's still totally fringe, practically unheard of. If they'd called it "mechanime", would it have caught on more by now?
1. I don't care. And there are many millions, billions of people like me.
2. Most corporate computing also uses "netbook" type functionality that doesn't use a big CPU, but needs a bigger GPU. That's why there are CPUs like the Atom.
I want my CPU to be mostly GPU. Just enough CPU to run the apps. They don't need a lot of general purpose computation, but the graphics should be really fast. And a lot of IO among devices, especially among network, RAM and display.
Actually the $20 case has 12 drive bays, but 5 of them are 5 1/4", so I've got another 2 3.5" drives wedged in sideways. And I just screwed 6 more drives into the extra mobo mount holes left because I used a very small mobo in the very large case.
The PS has only 4 SATA power connectors, but I used 16 Y splitters I got in a bag for $20 that I forgot to mention.
I built it a couple of years ago, so I don't remember exactly where I got it. But two years later, it should be even cheaper.
I've got a $20 case, $50 500W power supply and $40 motherboard with SVGA and ethernet, its 5 PCI slots each stuffed with $25 4x SATA cards, 20 $100 1TB HDs. Running Linux, network mountable drives and ssh login.
That's $210 PC + $2000 HDs for 20TB. That's a lot of porn storage for you.
We also knew terrorists would planebomb buildings, and that offshore deepwater drilling is unsafe.
We just trust "the system", namely "it can't happen to us". And we spend $TRILLIONS a year on the people who run the system so it doesn't happen to us.
Those people have been largely Republicans, and the Democrats who go along with them.
I'm talking about the one in 2006 that was estimated to be somewhere close to a kiloton in power. That's kinda small for a nuke, but still gigantic for an explosion.
It's not at all clear N Korea doesn't want to fight "us" (whoever "we" are). Wanting to fight is a good explanation for maintaining a military in permanent deployment, especially to the border, for developing nukes and long range missiles (and shooting them over Japan towards California), and a steady stream of rhetorical attacks in every medium. It's not the only explanation, but there is certainly no clarity that N Korea doesn't want to fight, given all the prima facie evidence that it does.
A few years ago N Korea detonated a gigantic explosion that it claimed was nuclear (fission). Now it's claiming controlled fusion.
These claims are impossible to believe, since N Korea lies about so much. But it did demonstrate a gigantic explosion. What in fact is going on there in N Korea?
The PR only mentions that the process is "efficient", vague without some numbers. 1% efficient is "efficient", but not very. Electrical hydrolysis is already about 50% efficient, though the electrical power generation for it is (usually much) less than 50% efficient. So efficiencies over 25% are interesting, and over 50% are worth getting excited about. What is the actual efficiency of this new process?
Good thing we've got Clarence Thomas on the Court. He's asked a handful of questions in his whole Court career, even though the entire Court procedure is based on justices asking questions during the arguing of cases before them. He's the worst justice of your lifetime, and he's your gold standard.
Along with Roberts. Evidently, the more extreme Republican they are, the more you like them. Hardly an example of "real world" connectedness.
Patents are rationalized on the basis that protecting inventions from competition for "limited times" protects inventors from competitors who start competing with all their money intact, after inventors have spent their money inventing: disadvantage to inventors, who would be inhibited from inventing, interfering with the "progress in science and the useful arts" patents are instructed to promote.
Patents should file their auditable expenses with their application. Once an invention has taken in 10x its costs in revenues, it should no longer be protected. And indeed "10x" is just a threshold that no one should be able to argue with. It should be reviewed on an ongoing basis, and have tiers depending on the cost ($1K expenses might require 10x return, but $1M should require less, and $1B should probably require less than 2x return on investment).
Patents have no basis in guaranteed profits. Their only basis, all too often irrelevant in intellectual property commerce, rests in protecting breakeven. That is all that is necessary for inventors to risk spending their time and money on their idea.
Once a patented invention is specified in an industry standard, it is a very short time before its risked development cost is repaid several times over. So even in this case, only the fundamental reform to fairness is needed to fix what's gone so terribly wrong with patent overreach.
What about just identifying any DNA in the patient's blood that's not the patient's? There would have to be tolerance for the DNA of all the other organisms that live in human bodies without harm (intestine bacteria, etc), but that would seem to be a smaller task than 2000 species.
Such a device could answer thoroughly the question of whether there's any infection at all. If the answer is "yes", then further tests can be done to identify the infection's specific cause. If it's no, diagnosis can quickly move to consider other causes than infection. That kind of decision seems to map much closer to what's needed immediately on the scene than does a screen for only 2000 viruses and bacteria out of the many more that it can't identify, but which still need the same treatment.
Putting the invention in the public domain by publishing it with the statement "this invention is in the public domain" does everything these "defensive patents" claim to do. It does that without lawyers, without costs, without any doubt that the invention cannot be made a synthetic government-enforced monopoly ("patent").
Defensive patents are a scam. They are a way to reserve the right to stop someone else from making the invention. The public domain is what they'd do, if they weren't scamming.
'We're working on a new use of these robots -- robots to support human exploration,' Fong said. 'NASA is now thinking, "How do you go about sending humans to the moon or Mars or elsewhere? How can you use the combination of humans and robots to do exploration better?"
Actually, the most practical vision is the reverse: humans to support robot exploration of space. The main reason to send humans into space is simply to expand the range of our species beyond our planet. Not because we're better than robots in exploring and exploiting space, but because human achievement is the reason for even robots in space. And if we're to inspire humans on Earth to achieve, to include space as part of our "world", we need humans in space - even if we're just along for the ride.
Where humans exceed robots is in our flexibility and adaptability. Robots will get into trouble in space, trouble that robots can't always get them out of. Humans alongside them, or at least up there closer to them, can troubleshoot and devise new uses and missions for the robots. That kind of work justifies having humans working there.
Humans and robots are complementary in space. We should think of our role as making the robots do their job better. Which the robots can see as their expanding our human activities out there.
Except the facts show that Republicans, by a significant majority, want the country ruled by religious laws. Here's just a sample of their positions on issues ruled by what they think their bible says, rather than the Constitution:
Should openly gay men and women be allowed to serve in the military? Yes 26 No 55 Not Sure 19
Should same sex couples be allowed to marry? Yes 7 No 77 Not Sure 16
Should gay couples receive any state or federal benefits? Yes 11 No 68 Not Sure 21
Should openly gay men and women be allowed to teach in public schools? Yes 8 No 73 Not Sure 19
Should public school students be taught that the book of Genesis in the Bible explains how God created the world? Yes 77 No 15 Not Sure 8
Should contraceptive use be outlawed? Yes 31 No 56 Not Sure 13
Do you believe the birth control pill is abortion? Yes 34 No 48 Not Sure 18
Do you believe that the only way for an individual to go to heaven is though Jesus Christ, or can one make it to heaven through another faith? Christ 67 Other 15 Not Sure 18
But I wasn't even talking about Republican Party members, but Republican officials. If you read the many supporting pages to which I linked about "American Taliban", you'll see that those officials are theocrats.
False equivalence. There is nothing actually "Communist" about Democrats, nothing anywhere near as severe as the truth about the Republican Party and its actions. "They're both as bad" is a lazy judgment, when the facts show the difference between "bad" and "intolerable".
What false equivalence? Democrats can't stay out of your wallet and Republicans can't stay out of your bedroom.
That false equivalence. Republicans have spent much more of your money, and committed you to spend way more (in debt payments, in unfunded mandates, in catastrophic misadventures like wars and deregulation) than Democrats ever have. They continue to do so in their minority by obstructing government. And they invade your bedroom, too. Democrats are not at all equivalent, even if they do also waste your money - but not nearly the vast, crippling magnitude of Republicans.
That's real cute, linking to Google searches like that. Did you know that Barack Obama kicks puppies? It's true.
You give us just another Republican example of false equivalence. I linked to a simple Google search result that returned lots of verifiable sources, so you can read for yourself and see the facts - confirmed from many angles, and even with any defenses or contrary claims as published. What you linked to is a Google result list that is obviously unable to support any claim that Obama kicks puppies.
Thanks for perfectly confirming my point. You Republicans have wallowed in false equivalencies for so long, to the exclusion of any logic in favor of fallacies, that you can't even tell what it is. You just hear "Republican", and you shove out some package of nonsense about "Democrats, too!"
Fallacies. Republicans. You people never learn. But the rest of us have learned to spot your fallacies and reject them.
No, you're just wasting our time with the usual false equivalence between Democrats and Republicans, hyperbolically. Democrats (like all politicians) are bad, so Republicans, who are catastrophic, must be no worse than Democrats.
Republicans have indeed been working on a theocracy for years. It's a core value of their Party, and the core value of a large fraction of its remaining members. Their theocracy would indeed send you to Puritan style stocks for a whipping for downloading porn at work. Both for the "morality" of the act, and for wasting your employer's time on nonprofitable activity.
No, this is not really hyperbole. The Republican Party is America's Taliban. And fallacies like false equivalency is keeping them at work on their theocracy.
Bennett is a Republican. His Republican Party would send us all to jail for watching porn at our own jobs. Indeed, Florida Republicans would have us all locked in stocks and publicly flogged by some priest for it, if they got the theocracy they're working on.
Actually, a few minutes after I posted (so about 10 minutes after I'd rebooted into 2.6.33) GNOME crashed. I Ctrl-Alt-Delete rebooted, but after GNOME loaded, it put me right into my previous desktop state (no gdm login), with my apps reopened, as if I'd hibernated and restored. GNOME was still frozen, but I could switch to a console with F1 (which never worked before). The console had a line at the top saying "i915 hardware wedged", but that line wasn't in/var/log/messages . shutdown -rf now gave me gdm, and so far no crash. Pretty weird.
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Of course many species go extinct independent of human action (though with human action so pervasive, what species is entirely untouched by it?), but there's little we can do about them.
Finding quantum entanglement in photosynthetic systems demonstrates that we can learn quite a lot of what we're seeking when we look at existing features of living species. Making them extinct is a significant opportunity cost we must consider when accounting for the benefits of what we do that makes them extinct.
This research shows a broader point we should learn: every species that we extinct takes with it to oblivion some mechanisms for coping with the world that we could use ourselves. Not enough coping mechanisms to keep it fit to survive in the world we've made, but many mechanisms that go down with it.
Of course many species go extinct independent of human action (though with human action so pervasive, what species is entirely untouched by it?), but there's little we can do about them. The ones we make extinct through carelessness, wrong priorities and other waste are lost to us in our efforts to remain fit ourselves in the environment we're making.
Whatever happened to Machinima? I figured by now viral machinima movies would routinely sweep the Net, a plugin for it would run on most browsers, more kids would watch its movies than watch TV, people would routinely whip up new clips like email, live video would be ported into it automatically.
But it's still totally fringe, practically unheard of. If they'd called it "mechanime", would it have caught on more by now?
1. I don't care. And there are many millions, billions of people like me.
2. Most corporate computing also uses "netbook" type functionality that doesn't use a big CPU, but needs a bigger GPU. That's why there are CPUs like the Atom.
3. Sarcasm is just obnoxious when you're wrong.
I want my CPU to be mostly GPU. Just enough CPU to run the apps. They don't need a lot of general purpose computation, but the graphics should be really fast. And a lot of IO among devices, especially among network, RAM and display.
It works for me. The drives sound like they boot after the mobo.
Actually the $20 case has 12 drive bays, but 5 of them are 5 1/4", so I've got another 2 3.5" drives wedged in sideways. And I just screwed 6 more drives into the extra mobo mount holes left because I used a very small mobo in the very large case.
The PS has only 4 SATA power connectors, but I used 16 Y splitters I got in a bag for $20 that I forgot to mention.
I built it a couple of years ago, so I don't remember exactly where I got it. But two years later, it should be even cheaper.
I've got a $20 case, $50 500W power supply and $40 motherboard with SVGA and ethernet, its 5 PCI slots each stuffed with $25 4x SATA cards, 20 $100 1TB HDs. Running Linux, network mountable drives and ssh login.
That's $210 PC + $2000 HDs for 20TB. That's a lot of porn storage for you.
We also knew terrorists would planebomb buildings, and that offshore deepwater drilling is unsafe.
We just trust "the system", namely "it can't happen to us". And we spend $TRILLIONS a year on the people who run the system so it doesn't happen to us.
Those people have been largely Republicans, and the Democrats who go along with them.
Deepwater offshore drilling is safe.
And no one could have anticipated they'd fly planes into buildings, or the levees would break.
I'm talking about the one in 2006 that was estimated to be somewhere close to a kiloton in power. That's kinda small for a nuke, but still gigantic for an explosion.
It's not at all clear N Korea doesn't want to fight "us" (whoever "we" are). Wanting to fight is a good explanation for maintaining a military in permanent deployment, especially to the border, for developing nukes and long range missiles (and shooting them over Japan towards California), and a steady stream of rhetorical attacks in every medium. It's not the only explanation, but there is certainly no clarity that N Korea doesn't want to fight, given all the prima facie evidence that it does.
A few years ago N Korea detonated a gigantic explosion that it claimed was nuclear (fission). Now it's claiming controlled fusion.
These claims are impossible to believe, since N Korea lies about so much. But it did demonstrate a gigantic explosion. What in fact is going on there in N Korea?
The PR only mentions that the process is "efficient", vague without some numbers. 1% efficient is "efficient", but not very. Electrical hydrolysis is already about 50% efficient, though the electrical power generation for it is (usually much) less than 50% efficient. So efficiencies over 25% are interesting, and over 50% are worth getting excited about. What is the actual efficiency of this new process?
Good thing we've got Clarence Thomas on the Court. He's asked a handful of questions in his whole Court career, even though the entire Court procedure is based on justices asking questions during the arguing of cases before them. He's the worst justice of your lifetime, and he's your gold standard.
Along with Roberts. Evidently, the more extreme Republican they are, the more you like them. Hardly an example of "real world" connectedness.
Patents are rationalized on the basis that protecting inventions from competition for "limited times" protects inventors from competitors who start competing with all their money intact, after inventors have spent their money inventing: disadvantage to inventors, who would be inhibited from inventing, interfering with the "progress in science and the useful arts" patents are instructed to promote.
Patents should file their auditable expenses with their application. Once an invention has taken in 10x its costs in revenues, it should no longer be protected. And indeed "10x" is just a threshold that no one should be able to argue with. It should be reviewed on an ongoing basis, and have tiers depending on the cost ($1K expenses might require 10x return, but $1M should require less, and $1B should probably require less than 2x return on investment).
Patents have no basis in guaranteed profits. Their only basis, all too often irrelevant in intellectual property commerce, rests in protecting breakeven. That is all that is necessary for inventors to risk spending their time and money on their idea.
Once a patented invention is specified in an industry standard, it is a very short time before its risked development cost is repaid several times over. So even in this case, only the fundamental reform to fairness is needed to fix what's gone so terribly wrong with patent overreach.
What about just identifying any DNA in the patient's blood that's not the patient's? There would have to be tolerance for the DNA of all the other organisms that live in human bodies without harm (intestine bacteria, etc), but that would seem to be a smaller task than 2000 species.
Such a device could answer thoroughly the question of whether there's any infection at all. If the answer is "yes", then further tests can be done to identify the infection's specific cause. If it's no, diagnosis can quickly move to consider other causes than infection. That kind of decision seems to map much closer to what's needed immediately on the scene than does a screen for only 2000 viruses and bacteria out of the many more that it can't identify, but which still need the same treatment.
Putting the invention in the public domain by publishing it with the statement "this invention is in the public domain" does everything these "defensive patents" claim to do. It does that without lawyers, without costs, without any doubt that the invention cannot be made a synthetic government-enforced monopoly ("patent").
Defensive patents are a scam. They are a way to reserve the right to stop someone else from making the invention. The public domain is what they'd do, if they weren't scamming.
Actually, the most practical vision is the reverse: humans to support robot exploration of space. The main reason to send humans into space is simply to expand the range of our species beyond our planet. Not because we're better than robots in exploring and exploiting space, but because human achievement is the reason for even robots in space. And if we're to inspire humans on Earth to achieve, to include space as part of our "world", we need humans in space - even if we're just along for the ride.
Where humans exceed robots is in our flexibility and adaptability. Robots will get into trouble in space, trouble that robots can't always get them out of. Humans alongside them, or at least up there closer to them, can troubleshoot and devise new uses and missions for the robots. That kind of work justifies having humans working there.
Humans and robots are complementary in space. We should think of our role as making the robots do their job better. Which the robots can see as their expanding our human activities out there.
Except the facts show that Republicans, by a significant majority, want the country ruled by religious laws. Here's just a sample of their positions on issues ruled by what they think their bible says, rather than the Constitution:
But I wasn't even talking about Republican Party members, but Republican officials. If you read the many supporting pages to which I linked about "American Taliban", you'll see that those officials are theocrats.
False equivalence. There is nothing actually "Communist" about Democrats, nothing anywhere near as severe as the truth about the Republican Party and its actions. "They're both as bad" is a lazy judgment, when the facts show the difference between "bad" and "intolerable".
That false equivalence. Republicans have spent much more of your money, and committed you to spend way more (in debt payments, in unfunded mandates, in catastrophic misadventures like wars and deregulation) than Democrats ever have. They continue to do so in their minority by obstructing government. And they invade your bedroom, too. Democrats are not at all equivalent, even if they do also waste your money - but not nearly the vast, crippling magnitude of Republicans.
You give us just another Republican example of false equivalence. I linked to a simple Google search result that returned lots of verifiable sources, so you can read for yourself and see the facts - confirmed from many angles, and even with any defenses or contrary claims as published. What you linked to is a Google result list that is obviously unable to support any claim that Obama kicks puppies.
Thanks for perfectly confirming my point. You Republicans have wallowed in false equivalencies for so long, to the exclusion of any logic in favor of fallacies, that you can't even tell what it is. You just hear "Republican", and you shove out some package of nonsense about "Democrats, too!"
Fallacies. Republicans. You people never learn. But the rest of us have learned to spot your fallacies and reject them.
No, you're just wasting our time with the usual false equivalence between Democrats and Republicans, hyperbolically. Democrats (like all politicians) are bad, so Republicans, who are catastrophic, must be no worse than Democrats.
Republicans have indeed been working on a theocracy for years. It's a core value of their Party, and the core value of a large fraction of its remaining members. Their theocracy would indeed send you to Puritan style stocks for a whipping for downloading porn at work. Both for the "morality" of the act, and for wasting your employer's time on nonprofitable activity.
No, this is not really hyperbole. The Republican Party is America's Taliban. And fallacies like false equivalency is keeping them at work on their theocracy.
Bennett is a Republican. His Republican Party would send us all to jail for watching porn at our own jobs. Indeed, Florida Republicans would have us all locked in stocks and publicly flogged by some priest for it, if they got the theocracy they're working on.
Actually, a few minutes after I posted (so about 10 minutes after I'd rebooted into 2.6.33) GNOME crashed. I Ctrl-Alt-Delete rebooted, but after GNOME loaded, it put me right into my previous desktop state (no gdm login), with my apps reopened, as if I'd hibernated and restored. GNOME was still frozen, but I could switch to a console with F1 (which never worked before). The console had a line at the top saying "i915 hardware wedged", but that line wasn't in /var/log/messages . shutdown -rf now gave me gdm, and so far no crash. Pretty weird.
If it's not going to be 09.04, then I'm not going to bother paying attention.