Yeah, prions are almost like really complex poisons that can replicate themselves. IIRC, when they encounter a normal protein, they're able to twist it into a copy of themselves. Eventually the host body is damaged from having a significant amount of their normal protein turned into prions, and dies.
Oh, and if anyone's interested: bacteriophage. I've seen these before, but didn't know the name of them. Vaguely reminiscent of some sort of satellite or space probe.
Ah, OK, so flip #2 and #3. But you're still not going to get something smaller than an individual prion - these things are basically just molecules.
Re:Difference Between Nanobacteria and Prions?
on
Nanobacteria Discovered?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I think these nanobacteria are just smaller than bacteria (and larger than viruses), not actually smaller than prions, which still hold the title as the smallest.
Bacteria - full-size living organisms with DNA and organelles and everything.
My mistake, it's a little bit more complex than I originally explained. Here's a quote from the Wikipedia dolphin intelligence entry:
The standard test for self-awareness in animals is the mirror recognition test, developed by Gallup in the seventies, in which a temporary dye is placed on an animal's body, and the animal is then presented with a mirror. Most animals react to a mirror as if it is another animal. However, like great apes, dolphins have been shown to recognise the mirror image as themselves, by examining the marking on their body. Evidence for mirror recognition by dolphins was anecdotal until the nineties, but the scientific studies carried out by researchers Marten and Psarakos (1994, 1995) and Reiss and Marino (1998) confirmed it.
Actually, there's actually quite a bit of evidence that dolphins are intelligent. To summarize, they seem to have a pretty complex language, they've been observed communicating with each other and working in groups like humans, and, IIRC, they've passed the self-awareness mirror test (they can recognize "themselves" in a mirror, as opposed to believing it's another animal, like regular animals do).
It's a typical American way of thinking. See, America does what it wants -- America is always Right, after all -- and if you try to defend yourself against it, you're the one who is, in fact, committing an offensive attack. You're probably a terrorist, too.
So, America wants to spy on you? You better let them, and you might even want to thank them kindly for going to all the trouble, otherwise it's you who is "causing a rift" or increasing "diplomatic tensions."
America invades your country and you decide to defend yourself against them? Well, now you're a "terrorist" or a "dead-ender" for the former regime.
Fortunately, America is kind -- they don't reserve this torturous logic just for themselves, they occasionally let their really close allies in on it, too. In October, 2003, Israel launched an airstrike against Syria, violating a sovereign country's terroritial borders, all because they claimed there was a "terrorist camp" somewhere in Syria. America's response? Syria had best not respond, and it was their fault anyway for making Israel's actions "necessary" in the first place!
A similar problem exists in American adoption of the format: people here are perfectly used to saying "March 14th," except they're used to saying "March 14th, 2004" instead of "2004, March 14th." So each country has their own problems with getting used to the new format, which, despite that fact that it's in the same largest-to-smallest order as everyone already write times, is novel to everyone.
The exemption wasn't defined here; it's part of the actual FairTax bill (S.1493, HR.25). I also don't think a sales tax system could ever get as complicated as the current system. According to this article from the FairTax site, it's 1.6 million words long, and incomprehensible. Even in the unlikely event that a sales tax system were to grow to that size, it's still better than the system we have now - with a sales tax, the only people who have to worry about doing the calculations are the people selling those taxable goods, not every single citizen.
It also means that no private citizen has to divulge private financial information to the government - again, only businesses engaged in selling taxable goods would have any interaction with whatever tax agency would replace the IRS.
Speaking of government waste, the IRS would be eliminated by the passage of the FairTax, an act that would alone save billions of dollars.
The outward ripple effect of this would also be huge -- imagine companies not having to have full-time tax lawyers or an entire tax department on their payroll. No more wasting money paying H&R Block to figure out your taxes for you, either.
The FairTax would be a 23% sales tax. Yes, it's a lot more than the typical state sales taxes you're used to (usually 2-10%), but this is comparable to the VAT taxes they have in Europe, and would still be a smaller percentage than a lot of people pay in income taxes. The FairTax advocates predict that prices would be able to come down, as a significant portion of the price of every product is to cover the producer's own taxes (payroll, income, whatever), so it's not as if the price of products are going to go up 23%. Now, sure, it's true that producers would like to collect the money they save as new profit, but they would have to pass some or most of those savings onto their consumers or people would go to their competitors, because no one is going to want to pay a full 23% more for things.
Yeah, DeLay and related neocons are getting behind this because they see it as useful for their own ends. But if they get the FairTax pushed through Congress finally, good for them. At least some good will come from this, unlike most of the rest of the policies originating from their crackpot ideology.
Lovely, absolutely lovely. So the federal government mandates the states spend all this money, and at the same time the feds have been reducing the amount of money they distribute to the states (something that has precipitated budget crises in a number of other states).
Seems I learn something new about the insanity of the US Government almost every day.
Very quickly, the choices for cutting significant amounts of spending come down to things like letting violent criminals out of prison early...
A huge percentage -- more than half -- of the 2.2 million people in prison in the US are in fact nonviolent offenders (e.g., victims of the war on drugs) so they could cut their prison expenditures drastically without letting the rapists and murders out. In fact, some states and localities are, finally, in light of these budget crises, starting to take a hard look at their drug policies.
As the FairTax site makes quite clear, you can spend up to the poverty line tax-free. You file to get a tax "prebate," as they call it, which is basically a rebate before the fact. They explain the details of this on the site, and the entire bill is available at thomas.loc.gov (look up HR.25 and S.1493); if I understand it correctly, it's as simple as filing your SSN with the government - no invasive forms declaring income or anything like that.
And yes, it would "retard commerce" in a way - encouraging saving, instead of massive consuming, is one of its goals, besides the obvious goals of simplifying the tax code, and putting the IRS out of business.
Well, Bush and his people seem to support the FairTax, so it might end up going somewhere. There are a bunch of articles under the FairTax site's news section about DeLay throwing his support behind it. What I worry about, though, is that with Bush and the neo-cons pushing for it, it's going to get mischaracterized as yet another of their self-serving, ideologically-driven insanities, and end up going down in flames, especially if it becomes an election issue, and Bush doesn't get reelected this year.
As for the poor paying taxes under the FairTax system, actually, there's a kind of tax rebate that everyone can get, for tax-free spending up to the poverty line. This means that hopefully a lot of progressives would support it.
If this government is in such dire financial straits, has the thought ever crossed his mind to cut down on whatever the hell it is they're spending so much money on?
There've been cases of automated cease-and-desist letters having been sent out based merely on filenames, but I don't think they've actually tried to sue someone with that as their only evidence. If they were doing the latter, then yeah, creating and allowing to be distributed spoofed files would only undermine their efforts.
Interesting thought: A P2P worm that distributes (actual) copyrighted music files from one P2P user to another. If they come after you, even if you have the real, bona fide MP3s, you could get away with it. The Trojan defense isn't exactly an original idea, I'm just extending it to a new realm.
Read the article; they're already "working with the university to commercialize the invention and market it to record labels, movie studios and software companies." No, these two belong up against the wall along with the rest of the IP cartel.
No, you would argue that your intent was to set up a node to foster free communication and that someone abused it without your knowledge, and since you had no way of knowing what they were doing, that the software prevents you from knowing what they were doing, you're not liable. This is a reasonable argument.
Saying one knows or "should have known" the software could be abused in such a way isn't sufficient to shoot down this argument.
Someone in England was recently acquitted of child pornography charges because they claimed it was put on their computer by some kind of malware, or spammed to them and they downloaded it before they knew what it was (I don't remember the exact details). So, because of this, everyone now knows or "should know" their computer could end up with kiddie porn on it if they download email from spammers, or if they visit sites with malware. Does this mean that someone should now be held liable if such a thing were to happen again?
And as for the "insane legal system" comments I've been bringing up, those were intended more for a political debate than for use as a legal defense -- however, now that I think about it, arguing the law is wrong is supposed to be a valid defense, even though most courts don't allow it anymore.
Except that isn't necessarily your intent, and if I were to set something like this up, it wouldn't be my intent. The intent of Freenet is to allow and protect the free flow of information, any information -- the fact that something objectionable or illegal might flow through it is the "price of freedom," so to speak. I think if you take the free-speech implications of Freenet into account, and you didn't set a node up for the express purpose of allowing people to trade infringing or illegal content, you do have a situation where someone shouldn't reasonably be held liable for that infringing or illegal content.
And yes, I know that if your property gets used in connection with drugs or drug-related crime (the "crackhouse" analogy you made), you're going to be held liable. However, the entire drug war is the case-in-point of an insane legal debacle.
The Freenet author Ian Clarke addresses this in the FAQ:
Can I get trouble if I run a node?
This is related to the previous question. We have done everything we can to make it extremely difficult for any sane legal system to justify punishing someone for running a Freenet node, and there is little precedent for such action in today's developed countries.
The idea behind Freenet is that you literally cannot know what is being stored in your Freenet node, nor can you know who's really uploading to or downloading from you. The program encrypts connections, encrypts your node storage space, and uses other nodes as proxies to prevent you from discovering the true origin of any request. Thus, he says, any "sane" (so, OK, maybe not the US') legal system can't hold someone liable for it.
Exactly. Anyone who answers this is as dumb as people who participated in the RIAA's "Clean Slate" program. For those who don't know, this was where you would admit guilt -- to criminal charges -- to the RIAA, and they would grant you "amnesty" if you promised not to do it again and signed some sort of contract. Small problem with this is that private entities can't immunize someone against criminal charges; a prosecutor is free to bring charges if he so desires, and all you've accomplished is creating a signed admission of guilt.
If you're a Comcast customer and get threatened, I'd suggest just switching to another company and ignoring their threats. If you're going to respond to them, write them a letter explaining that one of their paying customers is cancelling their service and going with one of their competitors because of their threats. It wouldn't hurt to let them know you'll be recommending Verizon or SpeakEasy or someone else to your friends and family from now on, instead of Comcast. When they eventually connect the dots that "threatening our customers on behalf of the IP cartel = less customers = less money," maybe they'll take a stand like Verizon did and protect their customers.
This also sounds like another good reason to switch to an encrypted P2P architecture like Freenet.
It's not an area code, it's the section of the legal code, as the page you linked to even points out:
A Five Billion US$ (as of 1996, much more now) worldwide Scam which has run since the early 1980's under Successive Governments of Nigeria. It is also referred to as "Advance Fee Fraud",
"419 Fraud" (Four-One-Nine) after the relevant section of the Criminal Code of Nigeria, and "The Nigerian Connection" (mostly in Europe). However, it is usually called plain old "419" even by the Nigerians themselves.
Yeah, I know. More of a commentary on the sloppiness of the Slashdot article than the original story.
But The Tribune need not hand over any documents it already has published on its Web site, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Dzintra Janavs ruled, nor is it precluded from writing further stories about the documents.
Lesson to be learnt -- publish them all at the same time next time, on the Internet. The judge obviously recognizes here that once something's published on the Internet, it's never going to go back in the bottle, so to speak, and there's no point in trying (unlike, for example, the judge in the DeCSS cases).
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, prions are almost like really complex poisons that can replicate themselves. IIRC, when they encounter a normal protein, they're able to twist it into a copy of themselves. Eventually the host body is damaged from having a significant amount of their normal protein turned into prions, and dies.
Oh, and if anyone's interested: bacteriophage. I've seen these before, but didn't know the name of them. Vaguely reminiscent of some sort of satellite or space probe.
Ah, OK, so flip #2 and #3. But you're still not going to get something smaller than an individual prion - these things are basically just molecules.
Actually, there's actually quite a bit of evidence that dolphins are intelligent. To summarize, they seem to have a pretty complex language, they've been observed communicating with each other and working in groups like humans, and, IIRC, they've passed the self-awareness mirror test (they can recognize "themselves" in a mirror, as opposed to believing it's another animal, like regular animals do).
Rats are, well, rats.
It's a typical American way of thinking. See, America does what it wants -- America is always Right, after all -- and if you try to defend yourself against it, you're the one who is, in fact, committing an offensive attack. You're probably a terrorist, too.
So, America wants to spy on you? You better let them, and you might even want to thank them kindly for going to all the trouble, otherwise it's you who is "causing a rift" or increasing "diplomatic tensions."
America invades your country and you decide to defend yourself against them? Well, now you're a "terrorist" or a "dead-ender" for the former regime.
Fortunately, America is kind -- they don't reserve this torturous logic just for themselves, they occasionally let their really close allies in on it, too. In October, 2003, Israel launched an airstrike against Syria, violating a sovereign country's terroritial borders, all because they claimed there was a "terrorist camp" somewhere in Syria. America's response? Syria had best not respond, and it was their fault anyway for making Israel's actions "necessary" in the first place!
A similar problem exists in American adoption of the format: people here are perfectly used to saying "March 14th," except they're used to saying "March 14th, 2004" instead of "2004, March 14th." So each country has their own problems with getting used to the new format, which, despite that fact that it's in the same largest-to-smallest order as everyone already write times, is novel to everyone.
Date.
British: 14/5/2004
American: 5/14/2004
ISO8601: 2004-05-14
(Incidentally, the ISO8601 page is maintained by the same author as this Metric paper page.)
The exemption wasn't defined here; it's part of the actual FairTax bill (S.1493, HR.25). I also don't think a sales tax system could ever get as complicated as the current system. According to this article from the FairTax site, it's 1.6 million words long, and incomprehensible. Even in the unlikely event that a sales tax system were to grow to that size, it's still better than the system we have now - with a sales tax, the only people who have to worry about doing the calculations are the people selling those taxable goods, not every single citizen.
It also means that no private citizen has to divulge private financial information to the government - again, only businesses engaged in selling taxable goods would have any interaction with whatever tax agency would replace the IRS.
Heh, you want to talk about road construction waste, come on over to my home state, Massachusetts. We got you beat by a long shot.
Speaking of government waste, the IRS would be eliminated by the passage of the FairTax, an act that would alone save billions of dollars.
The outward ripple effect of this would also be huge -- imagine companies not having to have full-time tax lawyers or an entire tax department on their payroll. No more wasting money paying H&R Block to figure out your taxes for you, either.
The FairTax would be a 23% sales tax. Yes, it's a lot more than the typical state sales taxes you're used to (usually 2-10%), but this is comparable to the VAT taxes they have in Europe, and would still be a smaller percentage than a lot of people pay in income taxes. The FairTax advocates predict that prices would be able to come down, as a significant portion of the price of every product is to cover the producer's own taxes (payroll, income, whatever), so it's not as if the price of products are going to go up 23%. Now, sure, it's true that producers would like to collect the money they save as new profit, but they would have to pass some or most of those savings onto their consumers or people would go to their competitors, because no one is going to want to pay a full 23% more for things.
Yeah, DeLay and related neocons are getting behind this because they see it as useful for their own ends. But if they get the FairTax pushed through Congress finally, good for them. At least some good will come from this, unlike most of the rest of the policies originating from their crackpot ideology.
Lovely, absolutely lovely. So the federal government mandates the states spend all this money, and at the same time the feds have been reducing the amount of money they distribute to the states (something that has precipitated budget crises in a number of other states).
...
Seems I learn something new about the insanity of the US Government almost every day.
Very quickly, the choices for cutting significant amounts of spending come down to things like letting violent criminals out of prison early
A huge percentage -- more than half -- of the 2.2 million people in prison in the US are in fact nonviolent offenders (e.g., victims of the war on drugs) so they could cut their prison expenditures drastically without letting the rapists and murders out. In fact, some states and localities are, finally, in light of these budget crises, starting to take a hard look at their drug policies.
As the FairTax site makes quite clear, you can spend up to the poverty line tax-free. You file to get a tax "prebate," as they call it, which is basically a rebate before the fact. They explain the details of this on the site, and the entire bill is available at thomas.loc.gov (look up HR.25 and S.1493); if I understand it correctly, it's as simple as filing your SSN with the government - no invasive forms declaring income or anything like that.
And yes, it would "retard commerce" in a way - encouraging saving, instead of massive consuming, is one of its goals, besides the obvious goals of simplifying the tax code, and putting the IRS out of business.
Well, Bush and his people seem to support the FairTax, so it might end up going somewhere. There are a bunch of articles under the FairTax site's news section about DeLay throwing his support behind it. What I worry about, though, is that with Bush and the neo-cons pushing for it, it's going to get mischaracterized as yet another of their self-serving, ideologically-driven insanities, and end up going down in flames, especially if it becomes an election issue, and Bush doesn't get reelected this year.
As for the poor paying taxes under the FairTax system, actually, there's a kind of tax rebate that everyone can get, for tax-free spending up to the poverty line. This means that hopefully a lot of progressives would support it.
If this government is in such dire financial straits, has the thought ever crossed his mind to cut down on whatever the hell it is they're spending so much money on?
Fortunately, there's a movement to completely throw the whole federal income tax code out and replace it with a national sales tax.
There've been cases of automated cease-and-desist letters having been sent out based merely on filenames, but I don't think they've actually tried to sue someone with that as their only evidence. If they were doing the latter, then yeah, creating and allowing to be distributed spoofed files would only undermine their efforts.
Interesting thought: A P2P worm that distributes (actual) copyrighted music files from one P2P user to another. If they come after you, even if you have the real, bona fide MP3s, you could get away with it. The Trojan defense isn't exactly an original idea, I'm just extending it to a new realm.
Read the article; they're already "working with the university to commercialize the invention and market it to record labels, movie studios and software companies." No, these two belong up against the wall along with the rest of the IP cartel.
No, you would argue that your intent was to set up a node to foster free communication and that someone abused it without your knowledge, and since you had no way of knowing what they were doing, that the software prevents you from knowing what they were doing, you're not liable. This is a reasonable argument.
Saying one knows or "should have known" the software could be abused in such a way isn't sufficient to shoot down this argument.
Someone in England was recently acquitted of child pornography charges because they claimed it was put on their computer by some kind of malware, or spammed to them and they downloaded it before they knew what it was (I don't remember the exact details). So, because of this, everyone now knows or "should know" their computer could end up with kiddie porn on it if they download email from spammers, or if they visit sites with malware. Does this mean that someone should now be held liable if such a thing were to happen again?
And as for the "insane legal system" comments I've been bringing up, those were intended more for a political debate than for use as a legal defense -- however, now that I think about it, arguing the law is wrong is supposed to be a valid defense, even though most courts don't allow it anymore.
Except that isn't necessarily your intent, and if I were to set something like this up, it wouldn't be my intent. The intent of Freenet is to allow and protect the free flow of information, any information -- the fact that something objectionable or illegal might flow through it is the "price of freedom," so to speak. I think if you take the free-speech implications of Freenet into account, and you didn't set a node up for the express purpose of allowing people to trade infringing or illegal content, you do have a situation where someone shouldn't reasonably be held liable for that infringing or illegal content.
And yes, I know that if your property gets used in connection with drugs or drug-related crime (the "crackhouse" analogy you made), you're going to be held liable. However, the entire drug war is the case-in-point of an insane legal debacle.
Exactly. Anyone who answers this is as dumb as people who participated in the RIAA's "Clean Slate" program. For those who don't know, this was where you would admit guilt -- to criminal charges -- to the RIAA, and they would grant you "amnesty" if you promised not to do it again and signed some sort of contract. Small problem with this is that private entities can't immunize someone against criminal charges; a prosecutor is free to bring charges if he so desires, and all you've accomplished is creating a signed admission of guilt.
If you're a Comcast customer and get threatened, I'd suggest just switching to another company and ignoring their threats. If you're going to respond to them, write them a letter explaining that one of their paying customers is cancelling their service and going with one of their competitors because of their threats. It wouldn't hurt to let them know you'll be recommending Verizon or SpeakEasy or someone else to your friends and family from now on, instead of Comcast. When they eventually connect the dots that "threatening our customers on behalf of the IP cartel = less customers = less money," maybe they'll take a stand like Verizon did and protect their customers.
This also sounds like another good reason to switch to an encrypted P2P architecture like Freenet.