The quoted story sounds like it's full of spin. The way I read the story from the BBC was that there were several defendants, most got thrown out of court due to there being no actual evidence of guilt (IP addresses anyone?) and this guy was found against because he didn't bother turning up. Maybe I misread it though.
Why is this modded 5 insightful? There are thousands of public and corporate surveillence video cameras available for free on the internet for anyone to view - if you know the default name of the webpages for cameras, you can just Google up a huge list right now and watch to your heart's content. If there is a camera in a public place, then it is almost certain that its feed is either publicly available, or available to variable numbers of people, who have no or very little training in privacy law, physical barriers to unauthorised data removal, or supervision that prevents them removing data and doing these things with it. Everything this poster says about footage captured by private individuals applies equally to almost every camera in our streets, shops and other public places.
This assumes that there is such a path. I'll bet no private funders are rich enough to take a bet on whether it is possible or not. Wasting billions once to find out it isn't technically possible currently is one thing. Wasting the billions twice is just, well, a waste.
Google Venter and synthetic bacteria. They already made a synthetic genome from raw chemicals and created a new species by putting the genome into an empty cell. Does this not even create any doubt in your scientific mind that this is just as possible as curing cancer? My bet is we will create synthetic life from scratch a long time before we find a cure for cancer.
So the federal government has all this money in the bank waiting to be spent on the clean-up, or they have already spent it all and will be taxing future generations?
Why is this bad though? If a company has actual assets, then trading its shares seems unlikely to affect its real value long-term. If a company is basically worthless then let the gamblers gamble with the brakes off. Perhaps it would encourage people to be in shares for the long-term like they are meant to be.
I guess some people might want to record things but it's not like there isn't enough of it on all day every day, and then there's the internet where all the decent TV channels archive everything so you can watch it later anyway. I never record anything and never struggle to find something to watch. Paying money to record live TV seems like paying money for internet pr0n.
>And that he wasn't in the US when he commited a crime in the US is a weak argument too.
If you stand on the French-German border on the French side and I on the German side and I shoot you, wouldn't I have commited a crime in France (as well as in Germany, of course)?
I don't remember reading anywhere that he shot anyone, nor that he harmed anyone in any way. I thought he just looked at a few files on a publicly accessible server (i.e. the internet).
Consider that the citation value of a paper is variable on quite a fine scale, but that there are only a handful of possible places for it to be published. If the authors think the paper has a likely impact factor of 10, and they have a choice between journals with impact factors of 8 and 12, they will likely pick the 12 journal. If the 12 journal is doing its job it will get bounced and end up in the 8 journal, but outperform the other papers in the journal because it's inherently more citable.
Country seems such an arbitrary scale, especially since they vary in size so much. On larger scales this is nonsense, as Africa is the continent with highest human genetic diversity.
Cryogenics would pretty much stop most of the reactions that break the bonds, so half-life would be hugely increased, especially if material is properly dried first. Seeds can last for many decades and still grow if dried to 5% moisture content and frozen at -80. Not sure about animal embryos, but sperm and eggs also.
What makes you think they don't do this? In the UK, the main A-Z map makers have always done this - left out one or two small streets here or there to track imaginary property theft. Trap streets are a known thing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street
After taking a look at the original article (I know, I know) it has an interesting plot about the prevalence of particular browsers. It looks as though there is a clear dip in the use of the site at weekends (at least the two weekends shown), but what's more interesting is that the browser use proportions also seem to change at the weekends, with a drop in the proportion of IE users. Is this a known thing generally?
I hear you say that the only way to make food more available is to make it more expensive (increase price of water or use expensive solutions to irrigation). I don't see the practical difference between a food shortage and food being too expensive for people to afford. I guess we could say that the solution to the food shortage is to make everyone richer, but the real problem isn't price or distribution, I think, it is that the population is heading in one direction (upwards) and the availability of resources to make food is going the other (downwards/more expensive) and no matter how clever we get we can't magic up new resources for no cost, and we can't limit population, so I don't really see how we are going to prevent a food availability crisis. As you said, making fresh water from sea water has been solved, but to have enough energy to do it globally will mean nuclear reactors all over some of the most unstable parts of the world, so really, the problems have not been solved at all.
Computer SCIENCE is the science of computing - it is a useless indicator of whether anyone can effective use computers. Engineering disciplines are the ones which teach people to use and make tools properly. If you want someone who can do things hire an engineer. If you want someone who can understand the nature of things hire a scientist.
Salt eats through pipes, toxic shit pollutes sea, company covers it up so radioactive water gets used to irrigate crops, noone notices for ten years then suddenly out of nowhere rampant plague of cancer.
Slight correction. Yield potential has been increasing steadily for decades, but ISTR farm-gate yields (actual yield per unit land area) have been constant for a decade or so - there are only so many gains you can get from adding more fertiliser and water, we may have reached the limit of what we can achieve in practice.
A much more pressing limit than energy is fresh water. High productivity cropping relies on irrigation, and we are sucking up all the fresh water way faster than it is being replenished. The world is already running out of fresh water, so we have a few choices - we could invent a magic new technology that can extract H2O from the sea ior the air, develop the technology to the point it can be deployed, then deploy it all over the place, and also build giant pipes to pump the water from the sea to the fields, and develop another magic technology that can generate the energy to drive all those pumps. This one isn't going to happen in our lifetimes. Alternatively we could develop new crops that can tolerate salty water - new breeds of seaweed or salt tolerant grain crops - then breed enough of them to feed humanity, then sort out the pumping problem (or the equivalent if we move to eating seaweed - how to get the crops out of the sea to the people). This one again isn't going to be solved in our lifetimes. I'm sure Slashdot readers can imagine a whole range of other fanciful scenarios, but to face facts, within our lifetime there won't be enough water to grow crops to feed the world's population, and there won't be any alternative that is realistic. There will be an increasing amount of food riots in our lifetime.
Just to clarify, I don't think George was working for major corporations, more festivals, musicians and his own purposes. All the corps I knew were a bit stupid about telecommuting in the 90s, and only paid your invoices for when you were at their desk.
I used to be in contact with a guy who was doing this in the mid 90s with solar and wind power in a converted bus. His name was Dice George and I think he still has dicegeorge.com He might have a house now though.
Slashdot Mirror
The quoted story sounds like it's full of spin. The way I read the story from the BBC was that there were several defendants, most got thrown out of court due to there being no actual evidence of guilt (IP addresses anyone?) and this guy was found against because he didn't bother turning up. Maybe I misread it though.
There was discussion here before that Venter is planning the next bit - to try to amplify any DNA that is there and sequence it http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/10/20/1446244/craig-venter-wants-to-rebuild-martian-life-in-earth-lab That takes care of the what and how. Not sure about the other two.
Why is this modded 5 insightful? There are thousands of public and corporate surveillence video cameras available for free on the internet for anyone to view - if you know the default name of the webpages for cameras, you can just Google up a huge list right now and watch to your heart's content. If there is a camera in a public place, then it is almost certain that its feed is either publicly available, or available to variable numbers of people, who have no or very little training in privacy law, physical barriers to unauthorised data removal, or supervision that prevents them removing data and doing these things with it. Everything this poster says about footage captured by private individuals applies equally to almost every camera in our streets, shops and other public places.
This assumes that there is such a path. I'll bet no private funders are rich enough to take a bet on whether it is possible or not. Wasting billions once to find out it isn't technically possible currently is one thing. Wasting the billions twice is just, well, a waste.
to bury bad news, as someone once said http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jo_Moore
Didn't these guys check the pricing models of all the cloud hosts?
Google Venter and synthetic bacteria. They already made a synthetic genome from raw chemicals and created a new species by putting the genome into an empty cell. Does this not even create any doubt in your scientific mind that this is just as possible as curing cancer? My bet is we will create synthetic life from scratch a long time before we find a cure for cancer.
It seems like there is some international consensus emerging that it is a bad idea to tell the internet your presonal details http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-20082493
So the federal government has all this money in the bank waiting to be spent on the clean-up, or they have already spent it all and will be taxing future generations?
Why is this bad though? If a company has actual assets, then trading its shares seems unlikely to affect its real value long-term. If a company is basically worthless then let the gamblers gamble with the brakes off. Perhaps it would encourage people to be in shares for the long-term like they are meant to be.
I guess some people might want to record things but it's not like there isn't enough of it on all day every day, and then there's the internet where all the decent TV channels archive everything so you can watch it later anyway. I never record anything and never struggle to find something to watch. Paying money to record live TV seems like paying money for internet pr0n.
>And that he wasn't in the US when he commited a crime in the US is a weak argument too. If you stand on the French-German border on the French side and I on the German side and I shoot you, wouldn't I have commited a crime in France (as well as in Germany, of course)? I don't remember reading anywhere that he shot anyone, nor that he harmed anyone in any way. I thought he just looked at a few files on a publicly accessible server (i.e. the internet).
Consider that the citation value of a paper is variable on quite a fine scale, but that there are only a handful of possible places for it to be published. If the authors think the paper has a likely impact factor of 10, and they have a choice between journals with impact factors of 8 and 12, they will likely pick the 12 journal. If the 12 journal is doing its job it will get bounced and end up in the 8 journal, but outperform the other papers in the journal because it's inherently more citable.
Country seems such an arbitrary scale, especially since they vary in size so much. On larger scales this is nonsense, as Africa is the continent with highest human genetic diversity.
Cryogenics would pretty much stop most of the reactions that break the bonds, so half-life would be hugely increased, especially if material is properly dried first. Seeds can last for many decades and still grow if dried to 5% moisture content and frozen at -80. Not sure about animal embryos, but sperm and eggs also.
It is an English phrase meaning 'putting an end to' but using fewer words.
What makes you think they don't do this? In the UK, the main A-Z map makers have always done this - left out one or two small streets here or there to track imaginary property theft. Trap streets are a known thing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street
After taking a look at the original article (I know, I know) it has an interesting plot about the prevalence of particular browsers. It looks as though there is a clear dip in the use of the site at weekends (at least the two weekends shown), but what's more interesting is that the browser use proportions also seem to change at the weekends, with a drop in the proportion of IE users. Is this a known thing generally?
I hear you say that the only way to make food more available is to make it more expensive (increase price of water or use expensive solutions to irrigation). I don't see the practical difference between a food shortage and food being too expensive for people to afford. I guess we could say that the solution to the food shortage is to make everyone richer, but the real problem isn't price or distribution, I think, it is that the population is heading in one direction (upwards) and the availability of resources to make food is going the other (downwards/more expensive) and no matter how clever we get we can't magic up new resources for no cost, and we can't limit population, so I don't really see how we are going to prevent a food availability crisis. As you said, making fresh water from sea water has been solved, but to have enough energy to do it globally will mean nuclear reactors all over some of the most unstable parts of the world, so really, the problems have not been solved at all.
Computer SCIENCE is the science of computing - it is a useless indicator of whether anyone can effective use computers. Engineering disciplines are the ones which teach people to use and make tools properly. If you want someone who can do things hire an engineer. If you want someone who can understand the nature of things hire a scientist.
Salt eats through pipes, toxic shit pollutes sea, company covers it up so radioactive water gets used to irrigate crops, noone notices for ten years then suddenly out of nowhere rampant plague of cancer.
Slight correction. Yield potential has been increasing steadily for decades, but ISTR farm-gate yields (actual yield per unit land area) have been constant for a decade or so - there are only so many gains you can get from adding more fertiliser and water, we may have reached the limit of what we can achieve in practice.
A much more pressing limit than energy is fresh water. High productivity cropping relies on irrigation, and we are sucking up all the fresh water way faster than it is being replenished. The world is already running out of fresh water, so we have a few choices - we could invent a magic new technology that can extract H2O from the sea ior the air, develop the technology to the point it can be deployed, then deploy it all over the place, and also build giant pipes to pump the water from the sea to the fields, and develop another magic technology that can generate the energy to drive all those pumps. This one isn't going to happen in our lifetimes. Alternatively we could develop new crops that can tolerate salty water - new breeds of seaweed or salt tolerant grain crops - then breed enough of them to feed humanity, then sort out the pumping problem (or the equivalent if we move to eating seaweed - how to get the crops out of the sea to the people). This one again isn't going to be solved in our lifetimes. I'm sure Slashdot readers can imagine a whole range of other fanciful scenarios, but to face facts, within our lifetime there won't be enough water to grow crops to feed the world's population, and there won't be any alternative that is realistic. There will be an increasing amount of food riots in our lifetime.
Just to clarify, I don't think George was working for major corporations, more festivals, musicians and his own purposes. All the corps I knew were a bit stupid about telecommuting in the 90s, and only paid your invoices for when you were at their desk.
I used to be in contact with a guy who was doing this in the mid 90s with solar and wind power in a converted bus. His name was Dice George and I think he still has dicegeorge.com He might have a house now though.