If you're applying religion to science, you can't act as if doing the reverse is wrong. Prove to me when the soul starts using science, or keep your beliefs about when in embryogenesis the soul starts to yourself.
Exactly when did I apply religion to the argument? I said that science can't answer the question of when life begins. I'm not even talking about whether or not a collection of cells has a soul, religion doesn't really answer that either.
My argument is from a moral perspective. It is simply that the only clear point at which things change markedly is when two zygotes combine. After that point you are splitting hairs - is a baby still 1mm in the birth canal a viable human being? How about just the head? Or go down the road of a fertilized zygote, does it become a human life at 5 cells, 10, 100, 1000?
It seems that since there is only one clear point at which the system makes a dramatic state change, it would be better to err on the side of assuming life at that point rather than going the other way and saying that it is not life and then at some vague undefined point that I move around whenever I want, we'll call it life. I would argue the second standard is very arbitrary, while the first is quite clear and unambiguous. Oddly enough, it is the religious crowd that seems to want clear and unambiguous while the researchers want arbitrary and vague.
Find me a population of adult stem cells that can repair a human spinal cord, without blending up the patient's brain first, and we'll talk
Find me an embryonic stem cell that has been used in the same manner successfully and then we can have a real comparison as opposed to talking about unrealized potential. The treatment you are speaking of is this one. Note:
These are not the same stem cells as the controversial human embryonic stem cells, which destroy the embryo when the stem cells are removed.
As for adult stem cells only being in the brain, that's not correct. Here's the wiki article and if you are willing to search around on IPS, you'll find that some of the problems mentioned in the wiki article have already been solved. This is an area of active research around the world that is showing results, moving forward, and not mired in any debate about whether or not it is moral. It seems we should be focusing our efforts here until the research stops producing further breakthroughs.
No, you suffer from ignorance, misinformation, and insufferable intolerance of the beliefs of over 70% of America.
Adult stem cells have already been shown to be capable of pluripotency to the same extent as a embryonic stem cells. Adult stem cells do not have any of the possible moral implications of embryonic stem cells, yet you are advocating that your quality and length of life should trump moral implications when there is an alternative that would work just as well.
Since your stance is obviously flawed, I have to assume that you didn't know that adult stem cells are already as powerful as embryonic and that this entire conversation is a result of poor reportage, irresponsible politics, and illegal policies - as determined by a judge. That still leaves the misguided intolerance....oh yeah, the lawsuit was brought by researchers afraid of losing funding, not religiously motivated people. Glad to see your misguided and unprovoked attack on that count too.
My question to such people is how do you know the soul is started at conception?
The same question could be posed as how do you know it doesn't? It's as poor an argument to base opposition to a religious belief on a question that science is completely unable to answer in the first place.
The real question that should be posed in this is, what is the possible harm done under either assumption, and which is worse? Under the assumption that life starts at conception, then the harm done is tantamount to murder, however someone else's life might be saved by doing so. Under the assumption that these are just genetic material and don't have any moral implications to their use, then obviously the medical breakthroughs would be preferable. The point is to have the discussion without falling into religious fervor or scientific elitism (which it is since science is necessarily mute on the question of when life begins)
My personal opinion is that breakthroughs from adult stem cells have easily eclipsed the promise of embryonic stem cells Pluripotent Adult Stem Cells. We could simply avoid any moral hazards by continuing research on those since there are no objections from any side on their use.
Didn't they just fool the students with odd / non-standard use of symbols?
That's the entire point of the study. They put a non-standard notation up there with a very standard use of the equals sign. Virtually all Chinese students figured it out, 70% of US students did not. They were unable to adapt to something slightly different and apply the proper meaning of the equality to a new situation.
Thus what we need is network transparency: ISPs must disclose what their policies are: how they shape and manipulate traffic in ways that may benefit or may damage users. And we need active verification of such policies, because although most ISPs will be honest, some won't be.
Because the average consumer actually understands and/or cares about how their traffic is shaped? I'm still trying to get my parents to stop referring to their hard drive as memory.
When you say "exploits the weaknesses of the fitness function" it sounds like you really mean "exploits the weaknesses of the game rules"
Actually, that's exactly the type of thing a fitness function must incorporate. You can either constraint your population to only those members that encode a valid solution (i.e. one that follows all the rules), or you can encode the rules into a mathematical function that evaluates to a higher number if the solution is better.
The problem with the former is that if solutions lie close to the constraint boundaries (which they frequently do), you will usually get a better solution if you take some of the encoding of a member that fails to meet the constraints but has a higher overall fitness. So to make this work, you either settle for a worse solution (by constraining population members) or you use a far more complex fitness function.
Another major area of concern is how you measure success. If you use a single variable for success (e.g. number of wins), then you may end up with a solution that wins eventually but takes hours to do so. If you want to make that tighter, now you have to incorporate wins and time, which means you need to figure out which is more important to you If you extend this into n dimensions, you start having to worry about Pareto optimality and things get even more complicated.
All that to say - it's not as easy as hitting the run button with a bunch of random binary strings.
Take exponential time to build the table. Decryption is constant time. In other words, you are doing all the work once for all passwords as opposed to doing the work over and over again for each password, but fundamentally, O(10*98^n) isn't any different than O(98^n) when n is big enough.
if you have a useful bit-string encoding and crossover operator that results in the mashing operating on nice units. The vast majority of published successful GA results I've seen have quite heroically engineered encodings that include a lot of human domain knowledge. If you just take some random data structure and serialize it to bits directly, and use a crossover operator of "break the bitstring anywhere", you're not likely to get good results.
In fact, if you have a search space with the optimum values on or near constraint boundaries that can't be allowed in the solution, without the proper crossover and mutation operators as well as a few other tweaks to manage constraints in your fitness function, you very likely will not get a good result.
Basically, if you have a bunch of random individuals, and the 'evolution' just mashes a bunch of the better ones together, you'll see the increase in fitness occurring.
Funny, I did my Masters degree in 2003 on GAs and the major finding is that, while the system finds novel solutions, it also exploits the weaknesses of the fitness function very easily. In other words, if you wanted to get a particular result, you had to put most of your effort into the fitness function that describes the desired result. This doesn't work without said function, ergo, design is the key, not simply mashing things together. In fact, if you run a GA without a fitness function, you get a random walk, aka monkeys on a typewriter.
It's foolish to conflate computational optimization methods with biological evolution. While the mechanisms are similar, the means by which it occurs is about as closely related as AI is to human thought
Aside from an RC plane of some sort, all you need is about $100 in parts and some electronics know-how to build your own (basic) UAV.
While the FAA has recognized that most of these toy UAVs still qualify as RC aircraft (as long as they stay below 400 and fly within line of sight), it is illegal in the United States for a corporation or government entity to purchase or build a UAV for commercial or public use without completing an airworthiness certificate and obtaining a Certificate of Authorization from the FAA.
Per the FAA:
Currently, civilian companies may not operate a UAS as part of a business without obtaining a Special Airworthiness Certificate - Experimental Category (SAC-EC). However, this SAC-EC is very limited in scope of operational use. Contact FAA for details or see FAA Order 8130.34.
So don't expect Google to be flying this over populated areas for quite a long time. Current estimates are about 2030 or later before UAVs are fully integrated in the national airspace, and they very likely will seldom be allowed over densely populated areas without some major public good justification
I'm going to have to call you on this. I'm in the military, and there is no such policy. There is a gentleman's agreement that what happens on TDY stays on TDY, but that's about secure as the agreement about Vegas. If you want to keep secrets and act badly, don't expect the US government to feel obligated to keep it from anyone.
The San Francisco Bay Area was also duly noted by Retrevo for being the greenest region with the most energy-efficient consumer electronics.
Which explains why my lifestyle reverted to 1999 post-tech bubble standards as soon as I moved from Colorado to here. Of course, it's easy to recycle when you get a 70 gallon recycling bin and a 20 gallon trash bin from WM. Suddenly a lot more trash looks recyclable....
A more realistic option would be to have companies bid on providing the infrastructure for a period of time, including the cost of maintenance and capacity build outs as needed. They should be barred from buying or selling capacity in a way which picks winners and losers.
Ding ding ding, We have a winner! It's an approach that generally keeps taxpayer funding out of it, allows businesses to compete, and keeps the copper evenly accessible. I'm all for solutions like this.
You mean the system where each state has to pay the bulk of the maintenance and many can't even keep the roads to a state that won't rip the undercarriage out from under you? Sounds like a great idea!
Except that the people suggesting that the big bang happened are saying "Based on the physical evidence, we think this happened." Creationists (because, well, ID == Creationism plus a layer of BS) say that there IS GOD, PERIOD.
One's a hypothesis, the other's a declaration of faith. One is appropriate in a science class, the other in a church.
Actually, ID holds that there is a designer (yes, a God). That doesn't preclude the big bang, nor repudiate any of the facts that appear to support a big bang hypothesis.
I do agree that many IDers out there have much more wacky and unsupportable ideas. I think that there has to be a maturing of that thinking before it can be presented as science, and I don't know that it's possible for ID to mature to that point. The point I'm making above is that it is not intellectual suicide to believe in God. In fact, it is as intellectually robust as believing in an infinite universe. The break-down comes when you use belief in God as a crutch instead of looking to science as means of discovering the nature of God. In other words, religion should never be used to "disprove" science, just as science can never disprove the existence or lack of existence of God.
As you say, one belongs in a science class, the other in church, but they should not be mutually exclusive either.
They can still enter an agreement with Microsoft to give them 10x faster speeds than Google, suffocating Google on that service network.
Absolutely true. That's where I think regulation is a necessity. I'm simply reacting to the seemingly general call to have gov't take over all last mile infrastructure as part of net neutrality. I think that's a dangerous move, but I certainly think regulation is needed.
I asked her "What about the dinosaurs?" and she nervously answered something like "Well, if it's not in the Bible, it didn't happen."
I'm not saying this is what is intended in this passage, but check out Job 41 and tell me what the behemoth and leviathan are. From the description, I'm pretty sure you can't arrive crocodile and hippopotamus (that's what some bible scholars try to interpret). Much of the misinformation about what's in the bible comes from those who haven't read it carefully. Also, check out Gen 1 and 2 in the NASB translation (it's much more literal translation than others). Note the inconsistent timeline. There's a lot more being said than most moder christians believe. I don't know what is true at this point, but I'm open to figuring it out.
Discussing ethics and morality is obviously of paramount importance
But whose ethics and morality? There is no agreement on a universal set of ethics. There is no agreement on what measure of morality to use. Religion informs this discussion because every religion addresses ethics and morality. Most of what you think is right or wrong is covered by various religions. It is informative to understand the roots of where right and wrong come from. That is why the founding fathers thought religion in the schools was a good thing.
We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." --John Adams, October 11, 1798
We can certainly debate whether or not religion should be in a science classroom (I'm against it in that setting), but if you want morals, then you have to include religion.
I think they should be allowed to teach "Intelligent Design" after they explain where their hypothesized Intelligent Designer was intelligently designed --their entire point, after all, is the claim that the complexity of life and intelligence is beyond the abilities of evolution to accomplish. Therefore, since their proposed Intelligent Designer is by-definition intelligent and complex....
As long as you can tell me when the universe began, or if you state that it is infinite, always existed and always will exist, then what's the difference between that and an infinite, uncreated God? Or if you prefer to say the big bang was the start, then you are stating "in the beginning there was nothing, then it blew up". Again, I find it to be no more fantastical than an infinite, uncreated God - a no more provable. So really we're splitting hairs on which unprovable hypothesis we think is most likely.
The obvious solution is for the local government to sunset the monopoly, buy back the infrastructure, and lease it to whomever wants to use it.
That solution may be the obvious one, but is it the right one?
Suppose the telcos are allowed to keep their infrastructure, but get out of the ISP business, or stay in the ISP business and give up their infrastructure. If the data delivery vs. service delivery are separate (which is what you are proposing), then everything is fair, right?
The only thing I disagree with here is the gov't owning the infrastructure. We've already seen how badly they manage spectrum (selling huge chunks to those nasty telcos you love to hate). Why not simply make it illegal for a company to provide both infrastructure and data delivery? That ensures that there are companies who own the infrastructure (and lease it at a fair, published price), and companies who provide services (data, phone, etc.). Both can be profitable, and the infrastructure can be more easily managed through lawmaking without the need for a bureaucracy that manages the local data lines. If you put gov't in charge of the lines, then you will see those lines go for the next 50 years without a single upgrade in speed because they will raise your taxes to pay for it, then spend the extra revenue on new services that have nothing to do with managing the infrastructure.
The point is to ensure fairness while keeping the gov't out of the ownership/maintenance business. If gov't owns it, then they can do things like cut essential services (fire, police) while still paying hundreds of thousands for a fountain http://www.michigancapitolconfidential.com/13219. If you complain about the service, they'll just raise your taxes and buy a bigger fountain while never improving the infrastructure.
For the sake of argument, why should a company be forced to allow you to communicate as you please?
On principle, I agree with the idea of letting companies impose whatever rules on their customers that they want. The problem here is that I don't have the option to "vote with my feet" by moving to another provider.
I've lived in two different states in the last year. In both of those, Comcast was my only available service provider. When they throttled my netflix downloads, I screamed at them on the phone for a few minutes, but other than that, the only choice I had was either to continue getting internet service through them, or get dial-up service from some other company (precious few choices these days)
My fear on the FCC imposing net neutrality is that there is a historical precedent for forcing companies to then provide "more neutrality" for some than others. A quick look at college admissions and a Princeton study on racial bias in the process http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/07/how_diversity_punishes_asians.html is an appropriate example of how "fairness" can become a skewed goal.
Perhaps a better solution to this problem would be for the gov't to mandate that last-mile infrastructure must be leased competitively to all comers by the holders of that infrastructure. In other words, Qwest owns a lot of fiber - they should be statutorily required to allow others to use those lines at a published rate determined by Qwest. If Qwest charges high enough rates, then it would become feasible for another company to invest the capital to lay their own fiber and undercut Qwest, so there is some self-regulation on price point.
Additionaly, ISPs should be separated from the data carriers themselves. That eliminates problems of those holding infrastructure from charging others exorbitant fees to lease it while offering services to users on their own infrastructure for significantly less.
Admittedly, this is a quick idea that I haven't tried to flesh out, so I welcome anyone who wants to set me straight, but the best role for government is one in which it ensure a fair playing field, not one in which it puts its own team on the field along with its own refs.
The programming language has nothing to do with the security of the system it's the quality of the programmers.
I agree with you that better programmers yield better security, and I also agree that no language has built in security to a point. However, a collegue of mine did an analysis of the administrative policies in place for the US ATC system and found that of over 200 rules, all of them were things you can do with the language, but for this program you shouldn't do them. Of those 200+ rules, only 2 of them were necessary in Ada if you use the spark code checker (which technically is just an automated method of enforcing rules, but even then, the subset of the language that is ruled out is about 10 rules, not 200). Unfortunately, his work is not published, so I can't post a link to it....
I don't know a lot about ADA, but I do hear that it is better suited for embedded systems, and (as you mentioned) is more proven in those scenarios. It also has a lot of built in checking which would probably make securing it easier.
Ada enforces strict typing, strict bounds checking on arrays, strings, etc, strict pointer types (yes, a pointer to a certain string type is different than a pointer to a different string type). It does not allow things like arbitrary pointer arithmetic. Any type casts must be explicitly made, and therefore the programmer has to justify it (policy, not program issue, but very easy to find and check). It is really a very secure language in many respects. That's not to say it can't behave badly, it is just much harder to make it behave badly, and you have to really think about it to get there.
It doesn't mean it's the only choice however.
Agreed. I'm not trying to be a language nazi, just advocating for a tool that is far better for the given application.
There must be a reason for them to decide on C++ (I hope).
The only reason I know of is that Ada programmers cost more because there are far fewer of them. Of course, there are also many studies showing Ada development takes about half the time of equivalent C++ development due to fewer upfront bugs and many fewer things to check in debugging, so a behind schedule and over-budget project may have been avoidable using slightly more expensive programmers.
Windows btw is written mostly in C.
Right you are. I'm not much of a C fan, so I usually wrongly conflate C and C++ even though I know they are as different as night and day in many respects.
Just imagine how much less national debt we would have if religions had to pay taxes.
I'm all for that as long you lump in greenpeace, the sierra club, planned parenthood, ACORN, and every other non-profit organization you can think of. In reality, it would be much better if we cut government mandated spending on social problems (talking welfare, not SS or medical) and expected that the churches do what they are supposed to be doing and provide welfare. That would instantly eliminate $888 billion in FY 2010 http://www.heritage.org/Research/Reports/2009/09/Obama-to-Spend-103-Trillion-on-Welfare-Uncovering-the-Full-Cost-of-Means-Tested-Welfare-or-Aid-to-the-Poor - far more than you'd ever raise in taxes from churches. Meanwhile Joel Osteen and his flock could stop buying huge globes for him to talk in front of and paying him hundreds of thousands of dollars telling people "don't worry, be happy" and could actually get to the part of the bible that tells them to help the poor, widowed, and sick.
Safety control systems, especially those where life and limb, as well as massive amounts of money, are at steak aren't the places to be cutting corners and using commodity products rather than purpose-built and well-tested systems.
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If you're applying religion to science, you can't act as if doing the reverse is wrong. Prove to me when the soul starts using science, or keep your beliefs about when in embryogenesis the soul starts to yourself.
Exactly when did I apply religion to the argument? I said that science can't answer the question of when life begins. I'm not even talking about whether or not a collection of cells has a soul, religion doesn't really answer that either.
My argument is from a moral perspective. It is simply that the only clear point at which things change markedly is when two zygotes combine. After that point you are splitting hairs - is a baby still 1mm in the birth canal a viable human being? How about just the head? Or go down the road of a fertilized zygote, does it become a human life at 5 cells, 10, 100, 1000?
It seems that since there is only one clear point at which the system makes a dramatic state change, it would be better to err on the side of assuming life at that point rather than going the other way and saying that it is not life and then at some vague undefined point that I move around whenever I want, we'll call it life. I would argue the second standard is very arbitrary, while the first is quite clear and unambiguous. Oddly enough, it is the religious crowd that seems to want clear and unambiguous while the researchers want arbitrary and vague.
Find me a population of adult stem cells that can repair a human spinal cord, without blending up the patient's brain first, and we'll talk
Find me an embryonic stem cell that has been used in the same manner successfully and then we can have a real comparison as opposed to talking about unrealized potential. The treatment you are speaking of is this one. Note:
These are not the same stem cells as the controversial human embryonic stem cells, which destroy the embryo when the stem cells are removed.
As for adult stem cells only being in the brain, that's not correct. Here's the wiki article and if you are willing to search around on IPS, you'll find that some of the problems mentioned in the wiki article have already been solved. This is an area of active research around the world that is showing results, moving forward, and not mired in any debate about whether or not it is moral. It seems we should be focusing our efforts here until the research stops producing further breakthroughs.
Because we suffer from some bozo's religion.
No, you suffer from ignorance, misinformation, and insufferable intolerance of the beliefs of over 70% of America.
Adult stem cells have already been shown to be capable of pluripotency to the same extent as a embryonic stem cells. Adult stem cells do not have any of the possible moral implications of embryonic stem cells, yet you are advocating that your quality and length of life should trump moral implications when there is an alternative that would work just as well.
Since your stance is obviously flawed, I have to assume that you didn't know that adult stem cells are already as powerful as embryonic and that this entire conversation is a result of poor reportage, irresponsible politics, and illegal policies - as determined by a judge. That still leaves the misguided intolerance....oh yeah, the lawsuit was brought by researchers afraid of losing funding, not religiously motivated people. Glad to see your misguided and unprovoked attack on that count too.
My question to such people is how do you know the soul is started at conception?
The same question could be posed as how do you know it doesn't? It's as poor an argument to base opposition to a religious belief on a question that science is completely unable to answer in the first place.
The real question that should be posed in this is, what is the possible harm done under either assumption, and which is worse? Under the assumption that life starts at conception, then the harm done is tantamount to murder, however someone else's life might be saved by doing so. Under the assumption that these are just genetic material and don't have any moral implications to their use, then obviously the medical breakthroughs would be preferable. The point is to have the discussion without falling into religious fervor or scientific elitism (which it is since science is necessarily mute on the question of when life begins)
My personal opinion is that breakthroughs from adult stem cells have easily eclipsed the promise of embryonic stem cells Pluripotent Adult Stem Cells. We could simply avoid any moral hazards by continuing research on those since there are no objections from any side on their use.
Didn't they just fool the students with odd / non-standard use of symbols?
That's the entire point of the study. They put a non-standard notation up there with a very standard use of the equals sign. Virtually all Chinese students figured it out, 70% of US students did not. They were unable to adapt to something slightly different and apply the proper meaning of the equality to a new situation.
Thus what we need is network transparency: ISPs must disclose what their policies are: how they shape and manipulate traffic in ways that may benefit or may damage users. And we need active verification of such policies, because although most ISPs will be honest, some won't be.
Because the average consumer actually understands and/or cares about how their traffic is shaped? I'm still trying to get my parents to stop referring to their hard drive as memory.
But we have to pass the bill before we can know what's in it.....
When you say "exploits the weaknesses of the fitness function" it sounds like you really mean "exploits the weaknesses of the game rules"
Actually, that's exactly the type of thing a fitness function must incorporate. You can either constraint your population to only those members that encode a valid solution (i.e. one that follows all the rules), or you can encode the rules into a mathematical function that evaluates to a higher number if the solution is better.
The problem with the former is that if solutions lie close to the constraint boundaries (which they frequently do), you will usually get a better solution if you take some of the encoding of a member that fails to meet the constraints but has a higher overall fitness. So to make this work, you either settle for a worse solution (by constraining population members) or you use a far more complex fitness function.
Another major area of concern is how you measure success. If you use a single variable for success (e.g. number of wins), then you may end up with a solution that wins eventually but takes hours to do so. If you want to make that tighter, now you have to incorporate wins and time, which means you need to figure out which is more important to you If you extend this into n dimensions, you start having to worry about Pareto optimality and things get even more complicated.
All that to say - it's not as easy as hitting the run button with a bunch of random binary strings.
err.. rainbow tables??
Take exponential time to build the table. Decryption is constant time. In other words, you are doing all the work once for all passwords as opposed to doing the work over and over again for each password, but fundamentally, O(10*98^n) isn't any different than O(98^n) when n is big enough.
if you have a useful bit-string encoding and crossover operator that results in the mashing operating on nice units. The vast majority of published successful GA results I've seen have quite heroically engineered encodings that include a lot of human domain knowledge. If you just take some random data structure and serialize it to bits directly, and use a crossover operator of "break the bitstring anywhere", you're not likely to get good results.
In fact, if you have a search space with the optimum values on or near constraint boundaries that can't be allowed in the solution, without the proper crossover and mutation operators as well as a few other tweaks to manage constraints in your fitness function, you very likely will not get a good result.
Basically, if you have a bunch of random individuals, and the 'evolution' just mashes a bunch of the better ones together, you'll see the increase in fitness occurring.
Funny, I did my Masters degree in 2003 on GAs and the major finding is that, while the system finds novel solutions, it also exploits the weaknesses of the fitness function very easily. In other words, if you wanted to get a particular result, you had to put most of your effort into the fitness function that describes the desired result. This doesn't work without said function, ergo, design is the key, not simply mashing things together. In fact, if you run a GA without a fitness function, you get a random walk, aka monkeys on a typewriter.
It's foolish to conflate computational optimization methods with biological evolution. While the mechanisms are similar, the means by which it occurs is about as closely related as AI is to human thought
Aside from an RC plane of some sort, all you need is about $100 in parts and some electronics know-how to build your own (basic) UAV.
While the FAA has recognized that most of these toy UAVs still qualify as RC aircraft (as long as they stay below 400 and fly within line of sight), it is illegal in the United States for a corporation or government entity to purchase or build a UAV for commercial or public use without completing an airworthiness certificate and obtaining a Certificate of Authorization from the FAA.
Per the FAA:
Currently, civilian companies may not operate a UAS as part of a business without obtaining a Special Airworthiness Certificate - Experimental Category (SAC-EC). However, this SAC-EC is very limited in scope of operational use. Contact FAA for details or see FAA Order 8130.34.
So don't expect Google to be flying this over populated areas for quite a long time. Current estimates are about 2030 or later before UAVs are fully integrated in the national airspace, and they very likely will seldom be allowed over densely populated areas without some major public good justification
I'm going to have to call you on this. I'm in the military, and there is no such policy. There is a gentleman's agreement that what happens on TDY stays on TDY, but that's about secure as the agreement about Vegas. If you want to keep secrets and act badly, don't expect the US government to feel obligated to keep it from anyone.
The San Francisco Bay Area was also duly noted by Retrevo for being the greenest region with the most energy-efficient consumer electronics.
Which explains why my lifestyle reverted to 1999 post-tech bubble standards as soon as I moved from Colorado to here. Of course, it's easy to recycle when you get a 70 gallon recycling bin and a 20 gallon trash bin from WM. Suddenly a lot more trash looks recyclable....
A more realistic option would be to have companies bid on providing the infrastructure for a period of time, including the cost of maintenance and capacity build outs as needed. They should be barred from buying or selling capacity in a way which picks winners and losers.
Ding ding ding, We have a winner! It's an approach that generally keeps taxpayer funding out of it, allows businesses to compete, and keeps the copper evenly accessible. I'm all for solutions like this.
Kind of like our national highway system...
You mean the system where each state has to pay the bulk of the maintenance and many can't even keep the roads to a state that won't rip the undercarriage out from under you? Sounds like a great idea!
Except that the people suggesting that the big bang happened are saying "Based on the physical evidence, we think this happened." Creationists (because, well, ID == Creationism plus a layer of BS) say that there IS GOD, PERIOD.
One's a hypothesis, the other's a declaration of faith. One is appropriate in a science class, the other in a church.
Actually, ID holds that there is a designer (yes, a God). That doesn't preclude the big bang, nor repudiate any of the facts that appear to support a big bang hypothesis.
I do agree that many IDers out there have much more wacky and unsupportable ideas. I think that there has to be a maturing of that thinking before it can be presented as science, and I don't know that it's possible for ID to mature to that point. The point I'm making above is that it is not intellectual suicide to believe in God. In fact, it is as intellectually robust as believing in an infinite universe. The break-down comes when you use belief in God as a crutch instead of looking to science as means of discovering the nature of God. In other words, religion should never be used to "disprove" science, just as science can never disprove the existence or lack of existence of God.
As you say, one belongs in a science class, the other in church, but they should not be mutually exclusive either.
They can still enter an agreement with Microsoft to give them 10x faster speeds than Google, suffocating Google on that service network.
Absolutely true. That's where I think regulation is a necessity. I'm simply reacting to the seemingly general call to have gov't take over all last mile infrastructure as part of net neutrality. I think that's a dangerous move, but I certainly think regulation is needed.
I asked her "What about the dinosaurs?" and she nervously answered something like "Well, if it's not in the Bible, it didn't happen."
I'm not saying this is what is intended in this passage, but check out Job 41 and tell me what the behemoth and leviathan are. From the description, I'm pretty sure you can't arrive crocodile and hippopotamus (that's what some bible scholars try to interpret). Much of the misinformation about what's in the bible comes from those who haven't read it carefully. Also, check out Gen 1 and 2 in the NASB translation (it's much more literal translation than others). Note the inconsistent timeline. There's a lot more being said than most moder christians believe. I don't know what is true at this point, but I'm open to figuring it out.
Discussing ethics and morality is obviously of paramount importance
But whose ethics and morality? There is no agreement on a universal set of ethics. There is no agreement on what measure of morality to use. Religion informs this discussion because every religion addresses ethics and morality. Most of what you think is right or wrong is covered by various religions. It is informative to understand the roots of where right and wrong come from. That is why the founding fathers thought religion in the schools was a good thing.
We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." --John Adams, October 11, 1798
We can certainly debate whether or not religion should be in a science classroom (I'm against it in that setting), but if you want morals, then you have to include religion.
I think they should be allowed to teach "Intelligent Design" after they explain where their hypothesized Intelligent Designer was intelligently designed --their entire point, after all, is the claim that the complexity of life and intelligence is beyond the abilities of evolution to accomplish. Therefore, since their proposed Intelligent Designer is by-definition intelligent and complex....
As long as you can tell me when the universe began, or if you state that it is infinite, always existed and always will exist, then what's the difference between that and an infinite, uncreated God? Or if you prefer to say the big bang was the start, then you are stating "in the beginning there was nothing, then it blew up". Again, I find it to be no more fantastical than an infinite, uncreated God - a no more provable. So really we're splitting hairs on which unprovable hypothesis we think is most likely.
The obvious solution is for the local government to sunset the monopoly, buy back the infrastructure, and lease it to whomever wants to use it.
That solution may be the obvious one, but is it the right one?
Suppose the telcos are allowed to keep their infrastructure, but get out of the ISP business, or stay in the ISP business and give up their infrastructure. If the data delivery vs. service delivery are separate (which is what you are proposing), then everything is fair, right?
The only thing I disagree with here is the gov't owning the infrastructure. We've already seen how badly they manage spectrum (selling huge chunks to those nasty telcos you love to hate). Why not simply make it illegal for a company to provide both infrastructure and data delivery? That ensures that there are companies who own the infrastructure (and lease it at a fair, published price), and companies who provide services (data, phone, etc.). Both can be profitable, and the infrastructure can be more easily managed through lawmaking without the need for a bureaucracy that manages the local data lines. If you put gov't in charge of the lines, then you will see those lines go for the next 50 years without a single upgrade in speed because they will raise your taxes to pay for it, then spend the extra revenue on new services that have nothing to do with managing the infrastructure.
The point is to ensure fairness while keeping the gov't out of the ownership/maintenance business. If gov't owns it, then they can do things like cut essential services (fire, police) while still paying hundreds of thousands for a fountain http://www.michigancapitolconfidential.com/13219. If you complain about the service, they'll just raise your taxes and buy a bigger fountain while never improving the infrastructure.
For the sake of argument, why should a company be forced to allow you to communicate as you please?
On principle, I agree with the idea of letting companies impose whatever rules on their customers that they want. The problem here is that I don't have the option to "vote with my feet" by moving to another provider.
I've lived in two different states in the last year. In both of those, Comcast was my only available service provider. When they throttled my netflix downloads, I screamed at them on the phone for a few minutes, but other than that, the only choice I had was either to continue getting internet service through them, or get dial-up service from some other company (precious few choices these days)
My fear on the FCC imposing net neutrality is that there is a historical precedent for forcing companies to then provide "more neutrality" for some than others. A quick look at college admissions and a Princeton study on racial bias in the process http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/07/how_diversity_punishes_asians.html is an appropriate example of how "fairness" can become a skewed goal.
Perhaps a better solution to this problem would be for the gov't to mandate that last-mile infrastructure must be leased competitively to all comers by the holders of that infrastructure. In other words, Qwest owns a lot of fiber - they should be statutorily required to allow others to use those lines at a published rate determined by Qwest. If Qwest charges high enough rates, then it would become feasible for another company to invest the capital to lay their own fiber and undercut Qwest, so there is some self-regulation on price point.
Additionaly, ISPs should be separated from the data carriers themselves. That eliminates problems of those holding infrastructure from charging others exorbitant fees to lease it while offering services to users on their own infrastructure for significantly less.
Admittedly, this is a quick idea that I haven't tried to flesh out, so I welcome anyone who wants to set me straight, but the best role for government is one in which it ensure a fair playing field, not one in which it puts its own team on the field along with its own refs.
The programming language has nothing to do with the security of the system it's the quality of the programmers.
I agree with you that better programmers yield better security, and I also agree that no language has built in security to a point. However, a collegue of mine did an analysis of the administrative policies in place for the US ATC system and found that of over 200 rules, all of them were things you can do with the language, but for this program you shouldn't do them. Of those 200+ rules, only 2 of them were necessary in Ada if you use the spark code checker (which technically is just an automated method of enforcing rules, but even then, the subset of the language that is ruled out is about 10 rules, not 200). Unfortunately, his work is not published, so I can't post a link to it....
I don't know a lot about ADA, but I do hear that it is better suited for embedded systems, and (as you mentioned) is more proven in those scenarios. It also has a lot of built in checking which would probably make securing it easier.
Ada enforces strict typing, strict bounds checking on arrays, strings, etc, strict pointer types (yes, a pointer to a certain string type is different than a pointer to a different string type). It does not allow things like arbitrary pointer arithmetic. Any type casts must be explicitly made, and therefore the programmer has to justify it (policy, not program issue, but very easy to find and check). It is really a very secure language in many respects. That's not to say it can't behave badly, it is just much harder to make it behave badly, and you have to really think about it to get there.
It doesn't mean it's the only choice however.
Agreed. I'm not trying to be a language nazi, just advocating for a tool that is far better for the given application.
There must be a reason for them to decide on C++ (I hope).
The only reason I know of is that Ada programmers cost more because there are far fewer of them. Of course, there are also many studies showing Ada development takes about half the time of equivalent C++ development due to fewer upfront bugs and many fewer things to check in debugging, so a behind schedule and over-budget project may have been avoidable using slightly more expensive programmers.
Windows btw is written mostly in C.
Right you are. I'm not much of a C fan, so I usually wrongly conflate C and C++ even though I know they are as different as night and day in many respects.
Just imagine how much less national debt we would have if religions had to pay taxes.
I'm all for that as long you lump in greenpeace, the sierra club, planned parenthood, ACORN, and every other non-profit organization you can think of. In reality, it would be much better if we cut government mandated spending on social problems (talking welfare, not SS or medical) and expected that the churches do what they are supposed to be doing and provide welfare. That would instantly eliminate $888 billion in FY 2010 http://www.heritage.org/Research/Reports/2009/09/Obama-to-Spend-103-Trillion-on-Welfare-Uncovering-the-Full-Cost-of-Means-Tested-Welfare-or-Aid-to-the-Poor - far more than you'd ever raise in taxes from churches. Meanwhile Joel Osteen and his flock could stop buying huge globes for him to talk in front of and paying him hundreds of thousands of dollars telling people "don't worry, be happy" and could actually get to the part of the bible that tells them to help the poor, widowed, and sick.
Safety control systems, especially those where life and limb, as well as massive amounts of money, are at steak aren't the places to be cutting corners and using commodity products rather than purpose-built and well-tested systems.
Yes, that's why the nextgen ATC system for the US is being written in C++ (secure if you know how to herd cats effectively) (http://blog.seattlepi.com/aerospace/archives/202907.asp), instead of Ada (secure unless you ask a bunch of C++ programmers to write in Ada), whilst the UK is writing theirs using Ada (http://www.drdobbs.com/embedded-systems/199905389;jsessionid=QQKCSEKZREME5QE1GHPSKH4ATMY32JVN) . One of those two is well proven in safety-critical systems. The other is used to write Windows. I wonder which was used for the Deepwater Horizon?