Excellent points, and I think you're dead on about the stability of our Constitution. But it's a mistake to feel appointed officials don't hold debts and allegiances, and it's a mistake to have too much contempt for "the public mob".
So many people feel that everyone but them wanted PATRIOT type legislation in the aftermath if 9/11, but I don't feel the public was truly consulted. Congress passed things so quickly, with their established corporate interests riding along, that they set the political mood instead of reading it. We never saw what the "mob" would do if it was left with the choice.
Judges are theoretically free of both organized lobbying and the fickle public, but they are also humans with their own idealogical axes to grind. Appointment allows people with political motives (the Executive) to suggest which idealogical motives receive power. Judicial isolation is a vital patch, but the closest thing to a solution is more representation.
Still works, but stretched to the breaking point. I don't like the idea that 9 appointed judges are the last thing left between me and tyrannical laws. So many of the freedoms I'm most greatful for seem to have been handed down by the Supreme Court... why aren't our elected legislative and executive officials doing a good job of upholding constitutional rights in the first place?
If we could get "freedom" to be more than a catch-phrase in election politics, we could prevent laws like this from being signed into law and used to threaten and abuse groups in the first place.
Yeah but the frail appearance of some of the characters, especially the kids, was really important to the presentation. Rei was supposed to look like she was barely there, and in spite of her fiery personality, Asuka was anorexic.
These are just concept sketches, but to me the figures and faces make me feel like they missed the important parts of the characters. If Shinji shows up as some well-built, brooding abercrombie model, it'll be pathetic. The whole point was to have a space opera where the heroes were desperate, neurotic kids.
I mean, I hate to chime in on the "it'll never be as good as the sacred original" threads, but did anyone watch EVA and say, "Man, I wish this was live action!"? So much attention already went into the visual, even a successful project would just be a rehash.
Gotta say, though, I love all the landscape scenes they've got up...
The thin trading volume is really interesting! Does anybody know if there are laws against artificially altering the price of a stock WITHOUT insider information?
That is, could a bunch of people get together and agree to start selling stock to each other at ever increasing prices, for no factual reason at all?
Heh no shit -- trickle down was bull even during biggest booms in the USA. I just thought noone had bothered to explain to the grandparent poster WHY it doesn't work, ESPECIALLY in developing nations.
So, does the "specifically identified in the attached notification letter" code give us any information we didn't have about which code they're claiming as theirs?
The reason money doesn't trickle down in developing nations is that wealthy people spend their money outside the country. That yacht or jet the executive buys comes is built by well paid engineers in the USA.
In order for money coming into a country to benefit that country, it has to bounce around inside the country, generating motivation with each transaction, rather than coming in and out immediately.
We can argue about whether money EVER trickles down sufficiently some other time.
Yah! This practice is called steganography and has been used in a variety of media since ancient times. A good example is encoding a message in the low-order bits of a digitized picture. The colors will change minutely, and you can slip 1 bit per word into a message that appears to have a legitimate meaning. Especially useful in cases where the act of sending a message itself, regardless of decipherable content, is dangerous. There's even a website that does steganography into spam for you: spammimic.
Contrary to some people's assumptions, there is a science of combatting stenography... but it understandable demands more resources, particularly when stenography is combined with traditional cryptographic techniques that mask the organization of the message.
I agree that patents can help the process -- they attract capital to research by making it a worthwhile investment. But some parts of this process need more capital than others.
A lot of the sequence analysis we need to do right now can be studied on inexpensive equipment. You need bright, tech-savvy people working on it, but there are a lot of these people at universities, research institutions, and open-source groups. Governments do fund these groups (um, NCBI ?). They get a lot of bang for their buck, motivating and releasing research without giving away restrictive patents. Corporations doing research often benefit from the open standards and published methods they create.
Writing sequence analysis algorithms is one thing, but verifying your work experimentally is another. You need thousands or millions of dollars of specialized equipment and lab labor to do wet work. For that, we need pharmas, and the pharmas need patents.
But maybe we can make intellectual property laws that protect their contribution to the process, while encouraging different incentive schemes for work that can be developed more efficiently by a more open community?
Umberto Eco might have different goals in his communication. He's not just making an argument or disseminating information. He's layering ideas about history, society, and information. He's trying to make a piece of text with a certain aesthetic, and something that can lead to further thought when contemplated on.
Your guidelines are good for practical communication like business or debate. But sometimes it's ok to ask the reader to think between words.
Eh, for what it's worth I think the issue is that the government is actively supporting the practice by paying for the equipment. First amendment applies to what you do with your own mouth 'n dough, not what the gov't pays you for. Not that this makes the whole thing any less stupid / depressing / damaging to language and society...
For what it's worth, I think marketing and informal price-fixing have as much to do with making people tolerate huge soda prices as the real value of convenience. The bandwidth market is probably a lot more rational, since a lot of people are paid by their employers to make the correct purchasing decision!
Another cool fact about convenience: A study was done on how far people would drive for a discount. They were willing to drive an extra 20 minutes to get a $5 discount on a single $20 purchase, but they wouldn't dive those same 20 minutes to get a $5 discount on a $100 purchase. The markets would be a lot more rational if people were!
Right... most viruses include a special reverse transcriptase to turn their RNA from a form that can be turned into proteins into a more stable form DNA that can be copied multipled times and duplicated in the nucleus.
Also, most viruses need to create proteins that act as shells for their DNA, which allow them to bind to the outside of a host cell and inject their DNA. The researchers could escape this in the first generation, since they injected the DNA manually.
At that point, the virus could reproduce itself, but if its code doesn't create that structure, it would not be able to infect other cells. It's not clear from the article whether the replicated viruses were capable of infecting new cells without assistance.
Lots of new research that's affecting our lives has to do with leveraging the power of "network effects". Peer-to-peer sharing, distributed processing, dna sequencing, nano-fabrication, and countless other technologies depend on systems that harness new resources without the operator putting in extra effort. This is the next "simple machine" for us to master -- the use of self replicating systems. And it's going on in many feelds besides virology.
What's crucial is that the same effort be applied to the study of replication-resistant systems -- Biological, chemical, social and informational barriers that have sufficient functional diversity to resist infections that take advantage of systematic weakness.
This probably sounds like a crackpot unification theory, but I think a lot of the same types of analyses could be applied to studying all of these systems.
I don't think it'll be so hard on the telcos. Seems to me a major reason people switch carriers is for better signal in the places they spend their time... So for each disgruntled customer they lose, they have a chance to pick up a customer who'll be easier to please with their infrastructure. Different companies offer advantages to different users, so there's a chance for a win-win.
Only monkeywrench could be gimmicky marketing plans to attract switchers, like those used by long distance companies. IMHO, those never helped anyone, since the companies ultimately have to find a way to screw their customer base to make up for rediculous promotion costs and an expensively unstable user base. Has anyone really benefitted from that kind of competition?
Claiming the "inherent difficulty" of the problem is a bit of a cop-out. One of the reasons looking for cures is more difficult than looking for treatments is the design of our drug discovery pipelines.
Working the past 2 years in bioinformatics, I was surprised to discover that a number of major treatments are still not thoroughly understood by the companies that sell them. Modern pharmas use high-throughput screening to search an enormous search space: Producable Chemicals * Possible Drug Targets. Companies try to outdo each other in using biological knowledge to predict which regions of that search space will be profitable (i.e. I know that chemicals of a certain shape tend to interfere with immune proteins, so maybe these are more likely to yeild a Multiple Schlerosis drug). But after that knowledge is used to guide the search, the sense of causality can be abandoned. Drugs can be discovered, tested, approved and sold with only a general understanding of their effects. In fact, a major amount of the work being done by biotech start-ups is to determine the real method by which existing drugs work, in hopes of generating more effecient forms of those drugs.
I think there are both historical and economical reasons for this. A lot of medical data is generated by population studies rather than controlled experiments, which I think leads to a greater tendency in the field to trust correlation without proving causation. Litigation plays a roll in this, too -- if you will have to do exhaustive trials for your new drug to prove its harmlessness, the only reason to examine the workings of the drug beforehand is to screen it out and prevent that cost. If you're pretty confident, you'll bite the bullet and skip that extra 4 years of research. Besides, detailed biological research requires great expense with unpredictable results. High throughput screening gives at least the appearance of a balanced enterprise for which you can judge the probability and profitability of success.
I don't think there's anything terribly wrong with this, but it underscores the need to find ways to fund more long-term research. Free-market entrepreneurs will never take the risk of more esoteric projects when modern screening methods offer a less risky way of making a buck in pharma. But both should be going on if we ever want to find more elegant and permanent solutions to medical problems.
Can anyone who reads Dutch tell if they controlled the study with people who were exposed to 3G but don't actually use it? Seems to me 3G was probably installed mainly in areas where people are: busy -> stressed -> headachy, nauseous, and pretty organized and with good memory.
He may be short on datapoints, but I think this gives a great illustration of how intrusive even a fraction of TIA's capabilities would be. This locational data could point probibalistically to hobbies, spending habits, sexual habits, organization membership and plenty of other things your employer / insurer / unfriendly regime (not talking just about USA) / local con artist / direct marketer / stalker would love to know. These systems will be made and abused, so if you care about any of the above, you should join efforts to condemn them socially wherever you are. I'm relieved the US Congress seems to be doing this by reconsidering funding TIA with taxes!
If you live outside the USA, you should take special interest in [former TIA chief] [and felon] John Poindexter's recent open letter in the New York Times.
It's pretty handwavy, but he makes a couple of interesting claims:
He says military research is free of moral content. His scientists are responsible for discovering what is possible; other agencies will be responsible for determining its correct use. I'm all for free exploration, but this is calculatedly naive. I think this project in particular was created with use in mind, and I think tax funded research should reflect what taxpayers feel is in their best interest.
He says TIA is aimed exclusively at foreign surveillance (and zeroes in on an American hotspot, claiming that American financial data isn't analyzed). I doubt this*, but even if it's true, citizens abroad should be letting their governments know about how they feel about the US accessing their data.
*: DARPA funds a lot of research into how to appease American privacy laws while conducting surveillance.
There's real value in attacking the RIAA lawsuits from a lot of different angles. Policy makers don't examine cases of moral black and whites. They have to balance a complicated set of consequences and hope to build the sort of social system they think their constituants want to live in.
The "mob opinion" you described shows that in order to prohibit file sharing you would have to:
Instill a sense of moral responsibility about computer files that's not obvious to a lot of people.
Artificially handicap the music market by making a potentially profitable method of distribution illegal.
Prohibit a much larger array of uses by making file sharing services illegal.
Eliminate protections of confidentiality and privacy in online interactions.
Different people care about each of these consequences, and a lot of people legitimately care about all of them.
John Ashcroft has been touring to gain popular support for Patriot Act II. Nevermind that his speeches are invitation-only, to "safe" crowds of police officers in order to avoid inevitable protests... is anyone else creeped out that the executive branch has so many characters making such public efforts at lawmaking rather than just the execution of law?
Services provided by the government affect standard of living too. I don't know much about public services in Australia, but I do know colleges are heavily subsidized. Here a parent can spend a significant portion of their income saving for kids' educations. So: comparing after-tax income definitely doesn't make sense, and comparing before-tax income makes only slight moreso.
Slashdot Mirror
Although I admit: I'm glad Aston Martins exist, even if I can't afford one.
So many people feel that everyone but them wanted PATRIOT type legislation in the aftermath if 9/11, but I don't feel the public was truly consulted. Congress passed things so quickly, with their established corporate interests riding along, that they set the political mood instead of reading it. We never saw what the "mob" would do if it was left with the choice.
Judges are theoretically free of both organized lobbying and the fickle public, but they are also humans with their own idealogical axes to grind. Appointment allows people with political motives (the Executive) to suggest which idealogical motives receive power. Judicial isolation is a vital patch, but the closest thing to a solution is more representation.
Still works, but stretched to the breaking point. I don't like the idea that 9 appointed judges are the last thing left between me and tyrannical laws. So many of the freedoms I'm most greatful for seem to have been handed down by the Supreme Court... why aren't our elected legislative and executive officials doing a good job of upholding constitutional rights in the first place?
If we could get "freedom" to be more than a catch-phrase in election politics, we could prevent laws like this from being signed into law and used to threaten and abuse groups in the first place.
Yeah but the frail appearance of some of the characters, especially the kids, was really important to the presentation. Rei was supposed to look like she was barely there, and in spite of her fiery personality, Asuka was anorexic.
These are just concept sketches, but to me the figures and faces make me feel like they missed the important parts of the characters. If Shinji shows up as some well-built, brooding abercrombie model, it'll be pathetic. The whole point was to have a space opera where the heroes were desperate, neurotic kids.
I mean, I hate to chime in on the "it'll never be as good as the sacred original" threads, but did anyone watch EVA and say, "Man, I wish this was live action!"? So much attention already went into the visual, even a successful project would just be a rehash.
Gotta say, though, I love all the landscape scenes they've got up...
That is, could a bunch of people get together and agree to start selling stock to each other at ever increasing prices, for no factual reason at all?
Heh no shit -- trickle down was bull even during biggest booms in the USA. I just thought noone had bothered to explain to the grandparent poster WHY it doesn't work, ESPECIALLY in developing nations.
So, does the "specifically identified in the attached notification letter" code give us any information we didn't have about which code they're claiming as theirs?
In order for money coming into a country to benefit that country, it has to bounce around inside the country, generating motivation with each transaction, rather than coming in and out immediately.
We can argue about whether money EVER trickles down sufficiently some other time.
Contrary to some people's assumptions, there is a science of combatting stenography... but it understandable demands more resources, particularly when stenography is combined with traditional cryptographic techniques that mask the organization of the message.
I agree that patents can help the process -- they attract capital to research by making it a worthwhile investment. But some parts of this process need more capital than others.
A lot of the sequence analysis we need to do right now can be studied on inexpensive equipment. You need bright, tech-savvy people working on it, but there are a lot of these people at universities, research institutions, and open-source groups. Governments do fund these groups (um, NCBI ?). They get a lot of bang for their buck, motivating and releasing research without giving away restrictive patents. Corporations doing research often benefit from the open standards and published methods they create.
Writing sequence analysis algorithms is one thing, but verifying your work experimentally is another. You need thousands or millions of dollars of specialized equipment and lab labor to do wet work. For that, we need pharmas, and the pharmas need patents.
But maybe we can make intellectual property laws that protect their contribution to the process, while encouraging different incentive schemes for work that can be developed more efficiently by a more open community?
Umberto Eco might have different goals in his communication. He's not just making an argument or disseminating information. He's layering ideas about history, society, and information. He's trying to make a piece of text with a certain aesthetic, and something that can lead to further thought when contemplated on.
Your guidelines are good for practical communication like business or debate. But sometimes it's ok to ask the reader to think between words.
Eh, for what it's worth I think the issue is that the government is actively supporting the practice by paying for the equipment. First amendment applies to what you do with your own mouth 'n dough, not what the gov't pays you for. Not that this makes the whole thing any less stupid / depressing / damaging to language and society...
For what it's worth, I think marketing and informal price-fixing have as much to do with making people tolerate huge soda prices as the real value of convenience. The bandwidth market is probably a lot more rational, since a lot of people are paid by their employers to make the correct purchasing decision!
Another cool fact about convenience: A study was done on how far people would drive for a discount. They were willing to drive an extra 20 minutes to get a $5 discount on a single $20 purchase, but they wouldn't dive those same 20 minutes to get a $5 discount on a $100 purchase. The markets would be a lot more rational if people were!
Right... most viruses include a special reverse transcriptase to turn their RNA from a form that can be turned into proteins into a more stable form DNA that can be copied multipled times and duplicated in the nucleus.
Also, most viruses need to create proteins that act as shells for their DNA, which allow them to bind to the outside of a host cell and inject their DNA. The researchers could escape this in the first generation, since they injected the DNA manually.
At that point, the virus could reproduce itself, but if its code doesn't create that structure, it would not be able to infect other cells. It's not clear from the article whether the replicated viruses were capable of infecting new cells without assistance.
Google News rocks! Here's some better articles about the same thing:
New Scientist
Nature
The Economist
Lots of new research that's affecting our lives has to do with leveraging the power of "network effects". Peer-to-peer sharing, distributed processing, dna sequencing, nano-fabrication, and countless other technologies depend on systems that harness new resources without the operator putting in extra effort. This is the next "simple machine" for us to master -- the use of self replicating systems. And it's going on in many feelds besides virology.
What's crucial is that the same effort be applied to the study of replication-resistant systems -- Biological, chemical, social and informational barriers that have sufficient functional diversity to resist infections that take advantage of systematic weakness.
This probably sounds like a crackpot unification theory, but I think a lot of the same types of analyses could be applied to studying all of these systems.
I don't think it'll be so hard on the telcos. Seems to me a major reason people switch carriers is for better signal in the places they spend their time... So for each disgruntled customer they lose, they have a chance to pick up a customer who'll be easier to please with their infrastructure. Different companies offer advantages to different users, so there's a chance for a win-win.
Only monkeywrench could be gimmicky marketing plans to attract switchers, like those used by long distance companies. IMHO, those never helped anyone, since the companies ultimately have to find a way to screw their customer base to make up for rediculous promotion costs and an expensively unstable user base. Has anyone really benefitted from that kind of competition?
Working the past 2 years in bioinformatics, I was surprised to discover that a number of major treatments are still not thoroughly understood by the companies that sell them. Modern pharmas use high-throughput screening to search an enormous search space: Producable Chemicals * Possible Drug Targets. Companies try to outdo each other in using biological knowledge to predict which regions of that search space will be profitable (i.e. I know that chemicals of a certain shape tend to interfere with immune proteins, so maybe these are more likely to yeild a Multiple Schlerosis drug). But after that knowledge is used to guide the search, the sense of causality can be abandoned. Drugs can be discovered, tested, approved and sold with only a general understanding of their effects. In fact, a major amount of the work being done by biotech start-ups is to determine the real method by which existing drugs work, in hopes of generating more effecient forms of those drugs.
I think there are both historical and economical reasons for this. A lot of medical data is generated by population studies rather than controlled experiments, which I think leads to a greater tendency in the field to trust correlation without proving causation. Litigation plays a roll in this, too -- if you will have to do exhaustive trials for your new drug to prove its harmlessness, the only reason to examine the workings of the drug beforehand is to screen it out and prevent that cost. If you're pretty confident, you'll bite the bullet and skip that extra 4 years of research. Besides, detailed biological research requires great expense with unpredictable results. High throughput screening gives at least the appearance of a balanced enterprise for which you can judge the probability and profitability of success.
I don't think there's anything terribly wrong with this, but it underscores the need to find ways to fund more long-term research. Free-market entrepreneurs will never take the risk of more esoteric projects when modern screening methods offer a less risky way of making a buck in pharma. But both should be going on if we ever want to find more elegant and permanent solutions to medical problems.
duh.. the wired article says it was a double blind lab experiment. nevermind!
Can anyone who reads Dutch tell if they controlled the study with people who were exposed to 3G but don't actually use it? Seems to me 3G was probably installed mainly in areas where people are: busy -> stressed -> headachy, nauseous, and pretty organized and with good memory.
If you live outside the USA, you should take special interest in [former TIA chief] [and felon] John Poindexter's recent open letter in the New York Times.
It's pretty handwavy, but he makes a couple of interesting claims:
responsible for discovering what is possible; other agencies will be
responsible for determining its correct use. I'm all for free exploration,
but this is calculatedly naive. I think this project in particular was
created with use in mind, and I think tax funded research should reflect
what taxpayers feel is in their best interest.
American hotspot, claiming that American financial data isn't analyzed).
I doubt this*, but even if it's true, citizens abroad should be letting their governments know about how they feel about the US accessing their data.
*: DARPA funds a lot of research into how to appease American privacy laws while conducting surveillance.
The "mob opinion" you described shows that in order to prohibit file sharing you would have to:
Different people care about each of these consequences, and a lot of people legitimately care about all of them.
hmm I didn't think it worked at all. maybe i need word length as well?
John Ashcroft has been touring to gain popular support for Patriot Act II. Nevermind that his speeches are invitation-only, to "safe" crowds of police officers in order to avoid inevitable protests... is anyone else creeped out that the executive branch has so many characters making such public efforts at lawmaking rather than just the execution of law?
Services provided by the government affect standard of living too. I don't know much about public services in Australia, but I do know colleges are heavily subsidized. Here a parent can spend a significant portion of their income saving for kids' educations. So: comparing after-tax income definitely doesn't make sense, and comparing before-tax income makes only slight moreso.