Life in general finds a way, but that doesn't mean that specific species find a way. If it did then T-Rexes would be walking around today. Instead, we have birds which evolved from dinosaurs.
That's the beauty of this. While the anti-GMO folks are railing on about imagined long-term consequences, this shows that there really aren't any. It takes out a vast majority of the population for one generation. If you run this program for one year and then stop, these mosquitoes will either come back on their own or their niche will be taken over by other mosquito species. (Remember that not all mosquitoes are the same. There are 80 different mosquito species in Florida. This program is only targeting one of them.) Either way, the ecosystem survives even if this particular species doesn't and if this species survives, the GMO gene doesn't.
The problem is that people see "GMO", think "what's the worst thing that could happen" (whether or not that outcome is likely or even possible), and then assume that this has a strong chance of happening. At the vary least, they assume that scientists haven't ruled it out because the article they are reading online didn't specifically address what they thought of.
For example:
If a female mosquito mates with a GMO mosquito the genetic reactions could cause the next generation of mosquitoes to be twice as big!!!! (You need to include many exclamation points to make it scarier.) Now, the article doesn't specifically say that this can't happen so this means that it's not only possible but likely. If they release these GMO mosquitoes, we'll be overrun with giant, blood-sucking mosquitoes!!!!!!
(Never mind that this isn't genetically possible. It's likely because someone somewhere thought of it.)
Actually, Google has shown that you need to have deep pockets to get over incumbant efforts to keep you out. Many municipal broadband efforts have fizzled because the incumbents muscled them out (sometimes without even serving the area that the municipal broadband network would have covered).
I'd raise the question of price. Just because you have a 25 Mbps option doesn't mean it is priced in an affordable fashion. If your local ISP offers 25 Mbps a month for $300 a month it is available but not affordable. I'm not saying that it needs to be extremely inexpensive, but merely rolling out an "option" and then pricing it such that you know you'll rarely need to deploy it shouldn't give the ISPs the right to claim all of those users have this as an option.
Do you know how much tax payer money has been given to the telecoms for the very purpose of implementing broadband nationwide? We've already paid them and so far got very little in return.
We got exactly what they promised us*.
* Promises retroactively changed after the telecoms lobbied the government to declare the promises retroactively fulfilled even when they weren't really.
In many cases, these government sanctioned monopolies are the result of the dominant corporation buying influence in the local or state government and getting a law passed that outlaws competition (or places so many hurdles in front of it that it might as well be outlawed). For example, the state laws that say that local governments can't launch their own municipal broadband initiatives even if the big corporations don't serve these local areas. The state laws were bought and paid for by the corporations who simply don't want to compete against anyone else (especially not municipal broadband) even if "compete against" means the municipal broadband serves and area that they don't serve. (If they ever decide to one day serve that area then they'll have to compete and that can't be allowed!)
Either that or they'll add "Broadband Improvement Tax" to their below the fold charges. Of course, it won't really be a tax and the money won't really go to improving their broadband access. You can rest assured, though, that your price won't go up!*
* The advertised price, that is. Not counting all of the below the fold "taxes" and fees that they add in.
True. As much as people like knocking PHB's and management in general, there are some problems where a technological solution isn't appropriate and a management solution is.
If you're locked up for years, despite having done nothing wrong, I'm not sure I see much difference.
And that doesn't even get into how your life could be ruined after the "oops, sorry about the imprisonment. You're free to go." Your old job definitely won't be available and new job opportunities might be skittish about hiring someone who went to prison. Even if they've expunged your record, people might still know you went to prison, might still think of you as guilty, and treat you as such. In short, your suffering might not end once you get out of jail.
There's a good reason that our justice system is supposed to be stacked in favor of the defendant.
If the employees are turning on their personal hotspots and using that, you don't have a security problem. If they are both connecting to the hotspot and to your network, you can stop this by booting them off your network. What you can't do, though, is put a hotspot jamming device in place to knock out all personal hotspots.
Step 1. Don't complete repairs you are required to do. Pocket $X that you would have spent making the repairs. Step 2. Get Fined $Y (where $Y $X). Step 3. Pay fine. Step 4. Add a below-the-fold "Rural Phone Investigation Tax" onto everyone's bill such that the incoming money from this is more than $X + $Y. Step 5. Profit many times over!
All too true. I should have said "traditionally, if Americans wanted video entertainment..." I can already see this with my kids. When they want entertainment, they turn to (generally in this order):
1) Video games (this includes WiiU and games on their tablets).
2) Netflix, Amazon Prime, YouTube, or other online sources.
3) Cable TV shows that have been DVRed.
4) Live cable TV.
Live cable TV is a last resort and is often used as background noise while they do something else. My generation (born in the late 70's/early 80's) is the tipping point. We still turn to cable TV but are finding we're just as comfortable without it and using online sources. The generation before us mostly turns to cable TV but the cable companies can't bet on that group supporting them indefinitely. Unfortunately, a combination of short-term thinking (plan for next quarter, not ten years from now) and attempting to keep their status quo power will ensure that the cable companies will do everything they can to slow down Internet Videos takeover.
This is precisely why all of those people who bray about deregulation and the free market are either deluded, or in on the scam
In many cases, the free market approach works in theory, but not in practice because theory little things like buying influence, gobbling up companies to make local monopolies, dividing territory to make local monopolies, etc don't exist. The folks who keep saying "the market will fix everything" look at the theory and ignore that the theory also includes a public with access to enough data to make an informed decision (no hiding charges below the fold - i.e. advertising $50 a month and then adding in $30 in "fees and taxes") and with enough choices to be able to vote with their wallets.
I would love for the free market approach to work with Comcast. Really, I would. Sadly, Comcast has taken the free market, bent it over, and is currently doing some unspeakable things to it while saying they need to buy out Time Warner Cable so they can "serve the customer better." (I think "serve the customer" is cable-speak and I don't think I want what they really plan on "serving" us!)
They can also promise a nice, cushy lobbyist position after the Congressman retires from public office. So you act like a good little politician and parrot just what your corporate masters tell you to say so that when you decide to step down you will be paid a good wage to sit around doing nothing with the occasional passing corporate "requests" on to your old colleagues.
It might seem like nitpicking, but "guess" to me always implies taking a stab in the dark with little to no evidence and ending there. A scientific hypothesis, meanwhile, usually starts with some data, builds an argument that X should be true because of the initial data, and is subjected to testing to either confirm it or disprove it.
To give an example, you are presented with a clear cube filled with gumballs. A guess would be glancing at it and saying "600?" A hypothesis would be measuring the sides, estimating the size of each gumball, figuring out that there should be 1,000 gumballs, and then opening up the cube and counting the gumballs.
How are you going to watch HD Netflix? Let alone 4K. Forget about it.
We won't and this is by design. Right now, if Americans want video entertainment, we mostly turn to cable TV companies. These companies have monopolies in their areas. Like a group of rival mobs, they've carved up the territory so that they don't compete with each other. They also have bribed... I mean lobbied politicians to pass laws to benefit themselves (the cable TV companies) at the local, state, and national level.
Now, with this level of control, the cable companies have enjoyed an almost unimpeded ability to charge whatever they decide and to offer services however they like. If you didn't like this, you had virtually nobody to go to. You could get TV from a satellite TV provider, but Internet was likely just the cable company or the phone company and the latter was increasingly going the high-priced mobile route.
Enter the Internet and high speed access. Now, consumers started realizing they don't need the high priced cable service. They just need a fast Internet connection. The cable companies are scared (though they won't admit it publicly - can't spook the shareholders) so they are trying to keep speeds slow, institute caps "to manage network traffic", and take other measures (such as messing with connections to Netflix) to minimize how many customers flee to Internet video solutions.
So not being able to watch HD Netflix or 4K? That's a cable company feature, not a bug.
Also remember that cable companies don't want faster Internet speeds because faster speeds means it's easier to get your video entertainment from the Internet instead of from cable TV. If you decide to stream Netflix and are stuck at 3 Mbps, you might have problems. If you try to stream Netflix and are on 25 Mbps, you won't have any problems. (At least none arising from how much bandwidth you have, at least.)
Cable companies aren't going to publicly admit it, but they're scared that the American consumer will realize that they don't *need* to pay their cable TV provider $150+ a month for the privilege of receiving a few decent channels and tons of garbage. Instead, the American consumer (given enough bandwidth) could stream everything they want from various online providers for much less. Maybe cable companies will survive when more people discover this by morphing into Internet Cable Companies (streaming their offerings online) and offering competitive packages, but the cable companies would rather keep the local monopolies with high prices and no incentive to improve. (You can file bandwidth caps under this heading as well.)
Best use of Jar-Jar I've ever seen was in the Clone Wars TV show. The clone troopers needed to get by some enemy soldiers so they let Jar-Jar talk to them to "negotiate." Jar-Jar's clumsiness winds up taking out every single enemy soldier. Jar-Jar is weaponized clumsiness. (Unfortunately, weaponizing his clumsiness also makes him extremely annoying.)
I had the same experience with Voltron. As a kid, I was a huge fan - five lions combining into one giant robot that beats up space monsters? YEAH! When I came on Netflix, I decided to watch it again to relive how wonderful it was. I got a couple of episodes in before I couldn't take it anymore. The plot was horrible, dialog cheesy, and characters barely thicker than cardboard. As a kid, I might be able to overlook a group of kids on the run being somehow able to make their way from the enemy's planet to their own with no explanation (they didn't have or acquire a ship at any point), but as an adult that's a plot hole big enough for Voltron to fly through. Some shows should just be left in the fog of memory.
A few years back, my family got H1N1. They each were in bed for a week (too weak to get up) before they began to recover. My wife's breathing took months to fully recover due to asthma. (Somehow I escaped despite my son coughing in my face repeatedly.) I'd say the flu is a lot worse than "sniffles for a few days."
The problem is that a lot of these diseases can spread before you see the symptoms. If you are a Disney worker and are spreading a vaccine-preventable disease without having any symptoms (yet), how are sick days helping?
Slashdot Mirror
Life in general finds a way, but that doesn't mean that specific species find a way. If it did then T-Rexes would be walking around today. Instead, we have birds which evolved from dinosaurs.
Great. Now we have GMO Cyborg Mosquitoes.
Thanks, scientists!
That's the beauty of this. While the anti-GMO folks are railing on about imagined long-term consequences, this shows that there really aren't any. It takes out a vast majority of the population for one generation. If you run this program for one year and then stop, these mosquitoes will either come back on their own or their niche will be taken over by other mosquito species. (Remember that not all mosquitoes are the same. There are 80 different mosquito species in Florida. This program is only targeting one of them.) Either way, the ecosystem survives even if this particular species doesn't and if this species survives, the GMO gene doesn't.
The problem is that people see "GMO", think "what's the worst thing that could happen" (whether or not that outcome is likely or even possible), and then assume that this has a strong chance of happening. At the vary least, they assume that scientists haven't ruled it out because the article they are reading online didn't specifically address what they thought of.
For example:
If a female mosquito mates with a GMO mosquito the genetic reactions could cause the next generation of mosquitoes to be twice as big!!!! (You need to include many exclamation points to make it scarier.) Now, the article doesn't specifically say that this can't happen so this means that it's not only possible but likely. If they release these GMO mosquitoes, we'll be overrun with giant, blood-sucking mosquitoes!!!!!!
(Never mind that this isn't genetically possible. It's likely because someone somewhere thought of it.)
Actually, Google has shown that you need to have deep pockets to get over incumbant efforts to keep you out. Many municipal broadband efforts have fizzled because the incumbents muscled them out (sometimes without even serving the area that the municipal broadband network would have covered).
I'd raise the question of price. Just because you have a 25 Mbps option doesn't mean it is priced in an affordable fashion. If your local ISP offers 25 Mbps a month for $300 a month it is available but not affordable. I'm not saying that it needs to be extremely inexpensive, but merely rolling out an "option" and then pricing it such that you know you'll rarely need to deploy it shouldn't give the ISPs the right to claim all of those users have this as an option.
We got exactly what they promised us*.
* Promises retroactively changed after the telecoms lobbied the government to declare the promises retroactively fulfilled even when they weren't really.
In many cases, these government sanctioned monopolies are the result of the dominant corporation buying influence in the local or state government and getting a law passed that outlaws competition (or places so many hurdles in front of it that it might as well be outlawed). For example, the state laws that say that local governments can't launch their own municipal broadband initiatives even if the big corporations don't serve these local areas. The state laws were bought and paid for by the corporations who simply don't want to compete against anyone else (especially not municipal broadband) even if "compete against" means the municipal broadband serves and area that they don't serve. (If they ever decide to one day serve that area then they'll have to compete and that can't be allowed!)
Either that or they'll add "Broadband Improvement Tax" to their below the fold charges. Of course, it won't really be a tax and the money won't really go to improving their broadband access. You can rest assured, though, that your price won't go up!*
* The advertised price, that is. Not counting all of the below the fold "taxes" and fees that they add in.
True. As much as people like knocking PHB's and management in general, there are some problems where a technological solution isn't appropriate and a management solution is.
And that doesn't even get into how your life could be ruined after the "oops, sorry about the imprisonment. You're free to go." Your old job definitely won't be available and new job opportunities might be skittish about hiring someone who went to prison. Even if they've expunged your record, people might still know you went to prison, might still think of you as guilty, and treat you as such. In short, your suffering might not end once you get out of jail.
There's a good reason that our justice system is supposed to be stacked in favor of the defendant.
If the employees are turning on their personal hotspots and using that, you don't have a security problem. If they are both connecting to the hotspot and to your network, you can stop this by booting them off your network. What you can't do, though, is put a hotspot jamming device in place to knock out all personal hotspots.
Step 1. Don't complete repairs you are required to do. Pocket $X that you would have spent making the repairs.
Step 2. Get Fined $Y (where $Y $X).
Step 3. Pay fine.
Step 4. Add a below-the-fold "Rural Phone Investigation Tax" onto everyone's bill such that the incoming money from this is more than $X + $Y.
Step 5. Profit many times over!
(Actually making the repairs is optional.)
Corporations are people.
All people are equal.
Some people are more equal than others.
All too true. I should have said "traditionally, if Americans wanted video entertainment..." I can already see this with my kids. When they want entertainment, they turn to (generally in this order):
1) Video games (this includes WiiU and games on their tablets).
2) Netflix, Amazon Prime, YouTube, or other online sources.
3) Cable TV shows that have been DVRed.
4) Live cable TV.
Live cable TV is a last resort and is often used as background noise while they do something else. My generation (born in the late 70's/early 80's) is the tipping point. We still turn to cable TV but are finding we're just as comfortable without it and using online sources. The generation before us mostly turns to cable TV but the cable companies can't bet on that group supporting them indefinitely. Unfortunately, a combination of short-term thinking (plan for next quarter, not ten years from now) and attempting to keep their status quo power will ensure that the cable companies will do everything they can to slow down Internet Videos takeover.
In many cases, the free market approach works in theory, but not in practice because theory little things like buying influence, gobbling up companies to make local monopolies, dividing territory to make local monopolies, etc don't exist. The folks who keep saying "the market will fix everything" look at the theory and ignore that the theory also includes a public with access to enough data to make an informed decision (no hiding charges below the fold - i.e. advertising $50 a month and then adding in $30 in "fees and taxes") and with enough choices to be able to vote with their wallets.
I would love for the free market approach to work with Comcast. Really, I would. Sadly, Comcast has taken the free market, bent it over, and is currently doing some unspeakable things to it while saying they need to buy out Time Warner Cable so they can "serve the customer better." (I think "serve the customer" is cable-speak and I don't think I want what they really plan on "serving" us!)
They can also promise a nice, cushy lobbyist position after the Congressman retires from public office. So you act like a good little politician and parrot just what your corporate masters tell you to say so that when you decide to step down you will be paid a good wage to sit around doing nothing with the occasional passing corporate "requests" on to your old colleagues.
"The best chance for viewing will be from 8 p.m. ET Monday to 1 a.m. ET Tuesday."
Or, when the big winter storm slams my area making it impossible to see anything in the sky except falling snow.
Thanks, Mother Nature!
It might seem like nitpicking, but "guess" to me always implies taking a stab in the dark with little to no evidence and ending there. A scientific hypothesis, meanwhile, usually starts with some data, builds an argument that X should be true because of the initial data, and is subjected to testing to either confirm it or disprove it.
To give an example, you are presented with a clear cube filled with gumballs. A guess would be glancing at it and saying "600?" A hypothesis would be measuring the sides, estimating the size of each gumball, figuring out that there should be 1,000 gumballs, and then opening up the cube and counting the gumballs.
We won't and this is by design. Right now, if Americans want video entertainment, we mostly turn to cable TV companies. These companies have monopolies in their areas. Like a group of rival mobs, they've carved up the territory so that they don't compete with each other. They also have bribed... I mean lobbied politicians to pass laws to benefit themselves (the cable TV companies) at the local, state, and national level.
Now, with this level of control, the cable companies have enjoyed an almost unimpeded ability to charge whatever they decide and to offer services however they like. If you didn't like this, you had virtually nobody to go to. You could get TV from a satellite TV provider, but Internet was likely just the cable company or the phone company and the latter was increasingly going the high-priced mobile route.
Enter the Internet and high speed access. Now, consumers started realizing they don't need the high priced cable service. They just need a fast Internet connection. The cable companies are scared (though they won't admit it publicly - can't spook the shareholders) so they are trying to keep speeds slow, institute caps "to manage network traffic", and take other measures (such as messing with connections to Netflix) to minimize how many customers flee to Internet video solutions.
So not being able to watch HD Netflix or 4K? That's a cable company feature, not a bug.
Also remember that cable companies don't want faster Internet speeds because faster speeds means it's easier to get your video entertainment from the Internet instead of from cable TV. If you decide to stream Netflix and are stuck at 3 Mbps, you might have problems. If you try to stream Netflix and are on 25 Mbps, you won't have any problems. (At least none arising from how much bandwidth you have, at least.)
Cable companies aren't going to publicly admit it, but they're scared that the American consumer will realize that they don't *need* to pay their cable TV provider $150+ a month for the privilege of receiving a few decent channels and tons of garbage. Instead, the American consumer (given enough bandwidth) could stream everything they want from various online providers for much less. Maybe cable companies will survive when more people discover this by morphing into Internet Cable Companies (streaming their offerings online) and offering competitive packages, but the cable companies would rather keep the local monopolies with high prices and no incentive to improve. (You can file bandwidth caps under this heading as well.)
Best use of Jar-Jar I've ever seen was in the Clone Wars TV show. The clone troopers needed to get by some enemy soldiers so they let Jar-Jar talk to them to "negotiate." Jar-Jar's clumsiness winds up taking out every single enemy soldier. Jar-Jar is weaponized clumsiness. (Unfortunately, weaponizing his clumsiness also makes him extremely annoying.)
I had the same experience with Voltron. As a kid, I was a huge fan - five lions combining into one giant robot that beats up space monsters? YEAH! When I came on Netflix, I decided to watch it again to relive how wonderful it was. I got a couple of episodes in before I couldn't take it anymore. The plot was horrible, dialog cheesy, and characters barely thicker than cardboard. As a kid, I might be able to overlook a group of kids on the run being somehow able to make their way from the enemy's planet to their own with no explanation (they didn't have or acquire a ship at any point), but as an adult that's a plot hole big enough for Voltron to fly through. Some shows should just be left in the fog of memory.
A few years back, my family got H1N1. They each were in bed for a week (too weak to get up) before they began to recover. My wife's breathing took months to fully recover due to asthma. (Somehow I escaped despite my son coughing in my face repeatedly.) I'd say the flu is a lot worse than "sniffles for a few days."
The problem is that a lot of these diseases can spread before you see the symptoms. If you are a Disney worker and are spreading a vaccine-preventable disease without having any symptoms (yet), how are sick days helping?