On the contrary, he had assembled the pieces of a small and subcritical but reasonably efficient 232Th-fuel-cycle reactor that was happily, if slowly, breeding 233U.
With some attention to geometry, which is suggested by his parcelling of ash, his 232Th had a reasonable probability of capturing slow neutrons from his small emitter, becoming 233Th, which quickly beta decays into 233Pa which in some days beta decays into 233U . His neutron spectrum was sufficiently fast that more 233U fission than actinide production is plausible. Apart from the low neutron flux of his initiating neutron source, nowhere near enough neutrons are produced in this Thorium cycle to maintain a fast neutron chain reaction, so his reactor would have remained subcritical while still breeding 233U.
His apparatus was not particularly conventional, but was clearly a breeder reactor, in the form: Th-232+n -> Th-233 (22 m) -> Pa-233 (27 d) -> U-233 (1.6*10^5 a).
Incidentally, breeding 233U from 232Th is the long term strategy for India, and some small experimental piles there (and in the West in the 50s and 60s) may have looked much like Hahn's description of his own.
What he might have done next is anybody's guess, but he may have made some gains making a powdered mixture of his 9Be with his 241Am or his 226Ra as is done in some conventional neutron generators.
He was clearly pretty bright (no pun intended), and good at learning and improvising as he went along.
Unfortunately for him, Uranium in general is chemically hazardous, and he is also likely to have been accumulating some 232U which has many alpha and gamma emitters in its decay chain. These were obvious and dangerous environmental hazards (not just to him), not least of which is the reactivity surge from 233U production after shutting down and dismantling his reactor, thanks to the relatively long half-life of 233Pa.
More to the point, a legislature can only petition for impeachment; charges transmitted by a state legislature to the House of Representatives will be referred to a committee for study, just as if they were raised by an indiviual Representative. Only a resolution of the House of Representatives to Impeach the President of the United States can begin the removal of the President -- if the House passes articles of impeachment, only then does a trial begin in the Senate. Two-thirds of the Senators present may convict the President, removing him from office.
Constitutional convention would not be tantamount to civil war, because there is almost no liklihood that an Article V convention would result in any sort of consensus among the requisite 3/4 states on any issue. Indeed, just getting 2/3 of the states to apply to the Congress for such a convention seems unlikely at this time (and has never happened).
The wording of Article V leaves Congress with enormous latitude to game the process and procedures. While it would be the states doing all the voting, it is clearly Congress's show. The Executive and Judicial branches do not have a constitutionally-defined role in such a convention any more than they have a role in amendments proposed directly by Congress. The latter process has not so far led to civil war.
There is uncertainty which cuts both ways, however: the Congress and the states face substantially the same electors and opposing one's electorate openly is politically unsafe. Moreover, if there were opposition between the Congress and a 3/4 majority of the states, both "sides" could propose constitutional amendments until the situation is resolved (perhaps by an election). Although Congress has an edge with respect to the procedural aspects of a convention (e.g., it could slow a convention down enough that it could make its own proposals first, however any such proposals would require state ratification), Congress has no power to block any amendments proposed by 3/4 of the states. The Senate relented in its opposition to the House of Representative's initiations of what ultimately became the Seventeenth Amendment because of this.
Decree any results as illegal and refuse
The federal Executive has no constitutional role in the federal amendments process, as recognized by Hollingsworth v. Virginia, 3 U.S. (3 Dall.) 378 (1798). By inference, no state Executive has a constitutional role in the federal amendments process. Hollingsworth did not precisely address the question of a veto, however it would be very difficult to retain the ruling as stare decisis while allowing a veto. Moreover, Immigration and Naturalization Service v. Chadha, 462 U.S. 919 (1983) [footnote 21] read the Hollingsworth case to explictly exclude a Presidential veto.
Chadha argues that the Article I veto is essentially meaningless because of the numbers required to propose and ratify an amendment in the first place. The most wriggle room would revolve around the question of a sort of "suspensive" veto, wherein the President might be able to require a second vote, although this was directly addressed in Hollingsworth ("[Since] two thirds of both Houses are required to originate the proposition, it would be nugatory to return it with the President's negative, to be repassed by the same number"). Arguing that a delay would not be nugatory in a particular case might be successful, however the Executive is on very shaky ground with respect to this, and the Courts (even the current SCOTUS) are likely to rule that the Executive really has no constitutional role whatsoever with respect to Article V.
Assuming that the Congress sides with the states, open conflict between the federal Executive and the legislators cannot be won in a constitutional way by the Executive, as Congress (particularly the House of Representatives) could easily starve the Executive of supply (i.e., no money to spend on continuing the conflict)
Pregnant women who are around allergens sometimes pass those allergens through to the developing embryo, which spontaneously aborts if it can't handle it
It's unlikely.
The developing embryo takes a few days from fertilization to implantation. This sometimes leads to light bleeding or minor cramping, and is often read as a pregnancy marker. Before this time, there is little contact between the developing embryo and the mother. Moreover, there is essentially no active/adaptive immune system in the embryo, as there is little cell differentiation. An allergic response requires mast cells or basophils.
After implantation, a placenta is formed. The placental barrier is selectively permeable, and uses active transport to move large molecules across the barrier. The molecules involved in active transport are very protein-specific, even to the point of rejecting similar immunoglobins, most notably IgE which activates the allergic response in mast cells and basophils.
(Rhesus incompatibility is a much more common problem and does more or less what you suggest: there can be a leakage of blood in the foetus->mother direction (ONLY!) that given an Rh+ foetus and an Rh- mother, can lead to an IgG response; immunoglobin G can cross the placental barrier and attack the Rh sites on the surfaces of foetal blood cells. Result: anaemia, jaundice, and possibly death of the foetus. Rhesus haemolytic disease was commonplace, but since the 70s an injection of passive antibodies (Rh immune globulin) into an Rh- mother quickly and throughly destroys Rh+ foetal blood cells before they can elicit an IgG response. Standard western postnatal care also involves administering RhIG to Rh- mothers after the birth of a child, to eliminate the risk of training her adaptive immune system with spillover blood from her baby (and the placenta. It is worth noting that the vast majority of sensitizing events in Rh haemolytic disease generally occur after the 28th week of pregnancy, and that the dangerous allergic response is that of the mother. So this does not really fit your hypothesis well at all.)
Some small molecules (like ethanol) cross the barrier via diffusion; some viral particles (like CMV) actively "tunnel" through the barrier in a variety of ways. These can be dangerous to even a young foetus.
Spontaneous abortions are sadly commonplace, and some studies using very sensitive early pregnancy tests show an incidence of 25% of fertilizations resulting in miscarriage before the 6th week.
A great deal of study has gone into early spontaneous abortions, and about half of the embryos studied have shown chromosomal aberrations including outright misarrangements. These are thought to be caused by a fertilization involving one or two damaged gametes, rather than a structural, repeatable genetic defect in either parent. These embryos stop developing on their own most of the time, and are sometimes called "blighted ova".
Obesity, use of NSAIDs, alcohol consumption and high caffeine intake are also associated with higher than average miscarriage rates.
It is certainly plausible that a response to an allergen by the mother could lead to an early spontaneous abortion. This has been seen in Rh haemolytic syndrome, and other allergic repsonses could similarly attack an implanted embryo with the mother's antibodies.
However, your hypothesis that young embryos might self-terminate in the face of an allergen is unlikely, largely because young embryos lack an active/adaptive immune system. Moreover, most of the allergens in question are highly unlikely to reach a young embryo at all because of physical disconnectedness or the filtering done by the placenta (and the rest of the mother's body too, which is an imposing physical barrier armed with its own immune system).
Sweden and many other OECD countries make substantial foreign aid donations geared towards saving lives from preventable disease, among other things. This would be similar, with the added advantage of cheaper pharmaceuticals within Sweden (possibly via imports from the aforementioned Indias and Chinas) and fewer diseased people needing expensive medical attention or palliative care abroad.
Socializing the returns on investment in pharmaceutical research is a smart idea, as long as the investments themselves are made. These can be socialized too, via direct funding grants for applied research, or they can be pirated, or they can be left as they are wherein grants of monopoly rents are made.
The problem with the first approach is that granting agencies cannot be expected to make very accurate predictions of the utility or success of the work early in the funding process. This can lead to serious risk-aversion, wherein only formerly successful researchers are given grants, which can be between merely inefficient in the sense of missing out on radical new ideas from bright young researchers, or to an old-boy network wherein who you know or who you work for is more important than what you know or how you work.
The problem with the third is the status quo, which results not only in high prices thanks to monopolies, but also biases research in favour of treatments for rich people's diseases (a drug which has to be taken regularly and which costs thousands per year) rather than one-shot, inexpensive cures.
The "pirate it" path has problems you are well aware of, but also has the disadvantage that it is unlikely to convince the researchers to change their focus from drugs producing high cost recurring income to drugs which are cheap, permanent solutions.
Multicast technology has advanced considerably since the days of MBONE.
David Meyer, University of Oregon, and at various times with Sprint and Cisco, and on the Internet Architecture Board, spent a considerable amount of time herding cats in the development and deployment of scalable native multicast forwarding across large-scale ISP infrastructure.
Currently most multicast deployment favours large dynamic groups of listeners subscribing and unsubscribing to traffic originated from a relatively small set of sources, rather than generalized many-to-many conversations. With current technology many-to-many "oligocasting" is most efficiently emulated by a single sender receiving (via unicast) messages which are then multicast to a tree of subscribers. This is generally referred to as SSM, Single-Sender Multicasting, which is suitable for the modern Internet in which switching equipment performance (or cost, if you will) is bounded by dynamic adaptiveness (control messaging, routing) rather than the amount of traffic being switched. SSM is also a good fit for applications similar to cable-TV-like broadcasts or distribution of large sets of data from a primary centre to subsidiary or replica centres.
MBONE's performance was bounded by the tunnelling and especially replication performance of the UNIX workstations that were the majority of MBONE's routers, as well as by the obsolete DVMRP and MOSPF multicast WAN routing protocols which were used even across ISP and other network boundaries.
not every institution looking at the data will be interested in the same data at the same time
You could combine SSM with a "TIVO-like" function, saving the multicasted data locally and extracting what you want, when you want it, from your local copy. If your shared multicast distribution tree significantly reduces the sender's bandwidth by moving your 100x duplication into "the network" such that you approach only one copy of a given datum sent once from the sender to the sender's ISP, it's a win. If you also approach one copy of a given datum sent once down any given branch of the tree rooted at the sender and branching at Internet routers between the sender and every receiver, you make a good trade-off, as the cost of small numbers of copies performed in routers (possibly one per interface) distributes well and for heavily-subscribed Single Sources the cost is likely to be smaller than the cost of carrying multiple copies of the same traffic.
With your example the question is whether the cost of locally recording likely-to-be-interesting data received via multicast is greater than the cost of smearing out any duplicate requests (from you or any of the other 100 sites) over time. Most of the cost in the latter "video-on-demand" style approach is borne by the primary sender.
Hyenas are at a disadvantage to humans who wash, cook and otherwise prepare their food.
Cooking inactivates or kills harmful organisms such as amoeba, bacteria or viruses. It also denatures proteins, some of which are toxic to humans. Most of the interesting toxins produced by the flora and fauna found in the digestive systems of carrion eaters are essentially rendered harmless at temperatures above 60 degC.
Cooking tends to destroy many other toxins, as well, but not all -- several steroid alkaloids survive high temperature cooking or drying. Most of these are produced by plants.
Most of the order Carnivora have strong enough gastric acids and pepsins to inactivate most of the organisms and toxins they are likely to eat, particularly those species which consume large prey over the course of several days after a kill. Humans have decent stomachs too, but cooking is useful for eliminating acid-tolerant sporulating and encapsulating microbes and larger animals (such as many types of worm) whose eggs also survive a trip through a human or feline stomach.
Jackals, Order Carnivora, Family Canidae, do occasionally scavenge carcasses, however they normally hunt live prey alone or in pairs. Several much larger obligate carnivores such as hyenas and lions will also scavenge relatively fresh corpses if given a chance. Most opportunistic scavengers have strong vomit reflexes.
Turkey vultures have especially acidic gastric secretions, which is an advantage in eliminating the microbes and eggs found on decaying meat. Vulture vomit can be dangerous, and vulture poop is acidic enough to inhibit bacterial growth on their feet, which are used to rip into rotting carcasses.
Turkey vultures would be as edible as pigeons or chickens provided they were well-prepared (so as to remove the contents of the digestive system and wash away the strong acids) and thoroughly cooked. Hyenas do neither of these things, and would risk injury and illness if they tried to eat a turkey vulture. How an old-world hyena would come to prey upon a new-world vulture is anyone's guess, however.
Old-world vultures, which are not closely related to turkey vultures, have a somewhat different digestion strategy, involving the aggressive turnover of gastric acids closer to that found in mammals and a strong emetic response. Unfortunately this leaves them at the mercy of prostaglandin cyclooxygenase inhibitors like the veterinary NSAID diclofenac which in small doses causes severe gastric ulceration (which impairs digestion) and kidney problems in Asian vultures. Moreover, these birds do not quickly eliminate diclofenac, so it tends to accumulate even when consumed irregularly in tiny doses found in the bodies of animals treated with the drug. Some 90% of the Asian vulture population in the Indian subcontinent have been wiped out by chronic renal impairment associated with veterinary NSAID use.
Diclofenac-contaminated Asian vulture meat is much more dangerous to other Asian vultures and animals who have adverse reactions to NSAIDs in general than to human beings.
If (spotted) hyenas, which are primarily predators, are not eating Asian vultures for reasons other than being fussy eaters who do not wash, trim and cook their prey, or because there are fewer old world vultures around than there used to be, it may also be that old world vultures arrive on the ground mainly at kills, and in large cooperating groups which are aggressive towards other scavengers. Spotted hyenas do not fly.
Finally, brown hyenas and striped hyenas are principally scavengers themselves (and also do not fly).
We should build fast reactors to burn up the spent fuel that's now piling up. Once that's gone, we can build heavy water (CANDU) or graphite-moderated (pebble bed) reactors, which can run on natural; un-enriched uranium.
You can skip the expensive and dangerous fast neutron reactors -- current designs are liquid metal or molten salt cooled and require a relatively highly enriched fissile source (i.e., not spent fuel) -- and start with CANDU. The operating geometry of a mixed-fuel CANDU reactor pile is a well-researched and demonstrated aspect of the design.
With respect to fast neutron reactors, Phénix (and EBR-II, precursor of the IFR) also transmute(d) nuclear waste in experimental quantities. The proposed Generation IV Gas-cooled Fast Reactor design also would be able to burn actinides, possibly economically.
Pebble bed reactor designs usually involve some cycling and shuffling of the pebbles in the reactor pile. Given that this is how CANDU works (the pressurized fuel tubes are rearranged in the various holes in the calandria), mixing pebbles with traditional enriched uranium fuel and other fissiles is plausible, but a mixed-fuel-cycle PBR presents several engineering challenges. The primary difficulty is that this is not a well-researched or demonstrated aspect of the fundamental design (CANDU evolved from an experimental reactor which was built to breed various isotopes, irradiate various materials, and operate a mixed-fuel-cycle; pebble bed designs trace their ancestry to Schulzen who wanted a simple, safe power generating reactor using commoditized fuel and the AVR which was originally an inefficient 232Th->233U breeder). The very low defect construction of pebbles is critical to the safety of pebble bed reactor designs (and there are occasional problems in this area that the different chemistry of other fissiles may exacerbate), and the design of the beds themselves usually make mechanical opitimization of the pile geometry difficult to dangerous. The tools used to shuffle CANDU assemblies around have damaged both tubes and calandrias in accidents; in CANDU this is not especially dangerous. Damaging pebbles may be dangerous in and of itself; damaging the fuel ingress/egress points or the pressure vessel such that normal air is introduced into the core would be dangerous; the combination may be disastrous.
Another option is to overbuild efficient nuclear reactors of whatever type fits best, and use the excess power to drive a particle accelerator to induce a nuclear spallation reaction in waste products. This decouples the geometry (or even type) of reactor core -- and thus the reactor's overall efficiency -- from the transmutation of transuranic elements, allowing even finer-grained control of waste burning or fuel breeding.
... recreated a pressure dome to duplicate submarine conditions on dry land. Crazy.
Yes, this assertion is crazy -- while there are many PWRs deployed in submarines and PWR designs mostly trace their ancestry to the Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory's design for use in nuclear submarines, the conditions inside the reactor core is nothing like that outside the submarines themselves. The water *inside* PWR cores reaches ca 325 degC and are kept from boiling by a pressure of some 15 MPa (~150 atmospheres). The water *outside* submarines might reach 3 MPa (steel hulls) or 10MPa (titanium hulls) whereas the temperature will approach 4 degC.
The goal of a submarine hull is to keep the internal pressure and temperature comfortable for humans; the goal of a PWR pressure vessel is to optimize the nuclear chain reaction. With respect to PWRs, the comfort of nearby humans is the responsibility of the containment structure, not the pressure vessel.
Pebble bed makes SO much more sense...
Perhaps, but not on this basis of comparison -- pebble bed reactors run much hotter (they must run much hotter than the annealing temperature of the graphite so that Wigner energy does not accumulate) and usually have an operating temperature of 900-1500 degC. They must carefully maintain an inert atmosphere inside the core, and must be able to contain (chemical) reaction products in case of the accidental introduction of oxygen. The combination of hot gas and a positive pressure (both for efficiency and as a safeguard against the introduction of ordinary air) does require a carefully engineered pressure vessel system. The PBMR's core for example, reaches almost 7MPa (~70 atmospheres) and a temperature of 900 degC. This is only half the pressure -- but nearly three times the temperature -- of pressurized water reactor cores. Moreover, the PBMR uses four such pressure vessels -- the other three contain the compressor units and the turbine. The engineering challenges are comparable to that in a PWR.
Both PWRs and pebble bed designs, however, have simpler and smaller pressure vessel systems than a boiling water reactor, but much more complicated systems than that in deuterium (heavy water) moderated thermal reactors. One reason for this is that the Canadians lacked the heavy industrial ability to build large pressure vessels, but had the ability to produce heavy water at industrial scales. CANDU evolved out of an unpressurized room-temperature tank of very pure heavy water that acted both as moderator and heat-sink (secondary coolant), into which many small (as in an athletic person could carry them by hand) pressure vessels containing the fuel and pressurized hot coolant were inserted.
However, the complexity of pressure vessels is only one of the many trade-offs one can make in a nuclear reactor design, and is nowhere near the most useful basis on which to compare PWRs with pebble bed reactors.
If you look at most computer languages, the syntax comes from BCPL
Huh? Perhaps you should reexamine BCPL and note its descent from ALGOL.
At the end of the ALGOL article you'll see a list of historically and currently widely-used programming languages, some of which descend from ALGOL, many of which do not.
Your homework for tonight is to determine the set of these that descends from BCPL, the set that was influenced by BCPL, and the set which was not. You get bonus marks if you can evaluate these languages' support for thinking "in terms of OOP, functional and procedural ways".
In particular: "It will usually be possible to implement `eq?' much more efficiently than `eqv?', for example, as a simple pointer comparison [...which would be useful because...] it may not be possible to compute `eqv?' of two numbers in constant time".
Per eqv?'s rationale, implementations may merge constant objects by using the same pointer or representation, but are not required to.
Effectively, anything testable by eq? is indistinguishable from a pointer to some object.
Also, consider a list l which is eq? to (a b c). (cdr l) returns a pointer to the second element in the list, i.e., (b c). (set-cdr! (cdr l) 'd) destructively changes l such that (equal? l '(a b d)) ==> #t.
There is no real semantic difference between this sort of dereferencing of pointers and how one would do this in C; it's the syntax that is different.
Although this can be true in C as well, usually Scheme objects are subject to relocation (e.g. during garbage collection) where the relocation process updates all pointers to the object, whereas usually C objects are not relocated from wherever pointers to them point to.
That is, if one could { SCHEME_OBJECT s_o; printf("%p", &s_o); } the output could differ from moment to moment, whereas usually{ int c_o; printf("%p", &c_o); } will output the same number every time. Moreover, C may guarantee that *(addr) = val will change a specific location in memory e.g. if it's running with no MMU in the way, whereas in R5RS there is no equivalent semantic.
That said, there are several Scheme implementations which use foreign function interfaces (FFIs) to call code written in other languages. Chicken is one of them, and it introduces locations as a first class Scheme type directly equivalent to C pointers.
Interestingly (most likely due simply to the laws of thermodynamics), it seems that antibiotics-resistant strains are actually less virulent than their non-resistant brethren. The theory is that it takes extra energy to replicate the genes that confer resistance, so these organisms tend not to replicate as quickly.
It's not the DNA replication per se that requires extra energy, it's the additional cost of the peptidoglycolization process that the mutant (resistant) strains incur. The two most common classes of MRSA mutants either overexpress beta-lactamase or (most commonly) express a penicillin binding protein (PBP) with a lower affinity for beta-lactam rings than the wild type.
Overproducing an enzyme which breaks open a beta-lactam ring (which inactivates antibiotics like Methicillin) is energy expensive, so in the absence of beta-lactam, the resistant type is at a disadvantage -- there is less energy available for reproduction. In the presence of such antibiotics, this is a favourable mutation.
Producing a PBP that has less affinity for beta-lactam rings also comes at a cost, in that they are less efficient at producing peptidoglycans. As the final crosslinking of peptidoglycan chains is a vital part of constructing a cell wall, and this is essential in binary fission, this also puts such resistant species at a disadvantage to the wild type, by increasing the energy cost of reproduction. Again, in the presence of beta-lactams (from antibiotics), this is a favourable mutation.
So I find it no accident that most cases of "flesh-eating bacteria" (necrotizing fasciitis) that I've seen are actually caused by MSSA (methicillin-sensitive Staph aureus), although it may simply be that MSSA far outnumbers the amount of MRSA floating around in the environment, and likely MRSA can probably do the same thing.
It's unlikely that there is any practical difference between MRSA and MSSA other than the gene conferring resistance.
If you innoculate a host with both MRSA and MSSA, you can be fairly certain that MSSA will dominate in an untreated host, and MRSA will dominate in a host being treated with methicillin.
There may be both resistant and non-resistant strains within the same host simultaneously; the ratio will likely vary with treatment. Since there is an energy cost associated with resistance, and since resistant S. aureus (and offspring) may revert to non-resistant forms, using methicillin may slow down the progress of infection enough to make the costs to the host worthwhile.
Necrotizing fasciitis is mostly dangerous not because of beta-lactam (or even vancomycin) resistance but because human fascia are not well served by blood vessels, which has several awful side effects including reduced carriage of intravenous or oral antibiotics to the site of infection. The deeper fascial planes are alsoa nearly ideal bacterial growth medium. High quality food, little passive resistance to the spread of infection, and reduced delivery of active immune system components to the infected tissues, all contribute to potentially explosive spread rates.
Necrotizing fasciitis is also complicated by the inflammation response -- not only does it further reduce the delivery of active immunse system components, it also releases pyrogenic exo- and endotoxins which unleases a cascade reaction which leads to the necrosis. Cytokines damage endothelial layers, increasing small-scale vascular permeability (i.e., smaller than neutrophils and platelets), which increases inflammation and edema and makes the lives of the infectious organisms easier. The body further responds by decreasing blood flow, which leads to tissue hypoxemia and cell death. The reduction in oxygen in the area impairs the phagocytic activity of neutrophils which have managed to arrive in the area, and further favours anaerobic growth of the infecting organisms. This in turn contributes to vasculitis and thrombosis in nearby tissues, s
Even more importantly, resistance to triclosan would not be the same as resistance to vancomycin or methicillin, so misuse of triclosan would not contribute to the development of "superbugs".
Triclosan is a topical biocide applied externally in creams and pastes which allow it to linger. Vancomycin, by contrast, must be administered intravenously becuase it does not cross the intestinal lining. The stronger members of penicillin family are also often administered intravenously because most of them denature rapidly in gastric acids. These and triclosan have totally different modes of operation (triclosan interferes with fatty acid production; penicillins and vancomycin interfere with peptidoglycan production in different ways -- the former inhibits a final crosslinking and the latter prevents the incorporation of two subunits). Mutations in transpeptidase (PBP) which may confer resistance to beta-lactam antibiotics like penicillin would do nothing with respect to the organism's potential resistance to triclosan.
With respect to triclosan, the literature is filled with evidence repudiating the Stuart Levy speculative statement on acquired triclosan resistance. Generally speaking, triclosan has been in wide use as a topical biocide for some thirty years and there are no peer-reviewed studies demonstrating acquired resistance with long term use. There are resistant bacteria which either overexpress FabI or which have mutant FabI that does not as readily form the stable ternary compound FabI-NAD+-triclosan. Those bacteria continue to produce enough fatty acids to survive triclosan exposure, but at some cost. Overproduction of FabI wastes energy and the mutant FabIs typically incur an energy or time cost in the production of fatty acids, so these organisms are at a disadvantage in the absence of triclosan.
This disadvantage leads to fewer viable offspring expressing these traits, which in a population causes the phenotype reversion that you mention. (Individuals may kick around in smaller numbers, so that when the population is stressed with triclosan, the population will "de-revert". This happens with a wide variety of toxins.
Triclosan is the focus of occasional health panics for a variety of reasons. Acquired resistance is just one complaint; others are breakdown products, especially into dioxins (exposure to UV), and an almost inevitable but very small amount of polychlorinated dioxins and furans as side effects of produciton. The panics involve either environmental concerns or bioaccumulation in people using products -- whether topical/external (like hand soap) or internal (toothpaste).
However, it's been pretty widely used in the past couple of decades in formulations which allow triclosan to stick around so as to inhibit the growth of microbes which survive washing with sodium lauryl sulphate and other surfactants. There is hardly a poisoning epidemic in evidence... Some people are mildly allergic to triclosan; this is most often seen in people who form mouth chancres (aphthous stomatitis) -- triclosan may exacerbate outbreaks. (On the other hand, mouth cankers are weird things, and there is also some evidence that triclosan may soothe symptoms...)
Can you suggest anything that would be sufficient evidence to even suggest that I didn't have an encryption key a month ago, let alone "raise an issue with respect to" the charge?
Yes. "It was never available to me in a memorizable format (locked in hardware)", "it was automatically generated (smartcard output)", "it was a very long sequence meant for one-time use rather than memorization and reuse", "it was months between when I last used it and when I was asked to cough it up, and during that time I forgot", and so forth would all raise an issue with respect to the assertion that you were in possession of the key.
It would then fall upon the prosecution to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that you did in fact possess it nevertheless.
This is weakly similar to the repudiation of handwritten signatures by a defendant at criminal trial. "No that is not my signature" is probably insufficient to require the Crown to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that it is, whereas something along the lines of "I know that is not my signature because I have never signed anything in green ink in my life" would meet the test of "sufficient evidence... to raise an issue with respect to it".
now the defense has to establish "proof beyond reasonable doubt" while the prosecution only the "reasonable doubt"
No, because you have the sense of the leading wording backwards. It delineates a defence.
For the purposes of this section a person shall be taken to have shown that he was not in possession of a key to protected information at a particular time if- (a) sufficient evidence of that fact is adduced to raise an issue with respect to it; and (b) the contrary is not proved beyond a reasonable doubt.
This says that the court must assume that you DO NOT have the key if (b) it is not proven beyond a reasonable doubt that you did.
The offensive clause is (a), which shifts burden onto you, in that you must first offer up evidence that you did not have it.
However, "sufficient evidence... adduced" is clear and standard wording that does not raise the bar of the burden offensively high. While you may or may not not be able to simply deny that you had the key, you could certainly offer a plausible reason why you might not have had it. A history of forgetfulness (perhaps you have to write down phone numbers, or have friends who say you're absent minded, or it's been a long time since you last used the key) would meet this test.
Once you have plausible grounds for not having been in the possession of the key, the prosecution MUST then demostrate beyond a reasonable doubt that you did possess it at the time after all.
In practice, (a) mainly will be interpreted by the court as a reminder of the requirements of a no actus reus defence in similar cases in which key incriminating physical evidence is connected with a defendant.
It's not in YRO because in the UK we don't have rights, enshrined in a constitutional document
Yes you do, it's called the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (and often European Convention of Human Rights, although that means the acronym ECHR is overloaded with the European Court of Human Rights, which is charged by the Council of Europe with enforcing the Convention).
All Council of Europe countries must subscribe to the Convention. All European Union member states must also be members of the Council of Europe. The Council of Europe is not a body of the European Union -- it is a proper superset of the EU member-states.
The aquis communitaire (the common-law and regulations of the European Union) and the Convention treaty have obliged the UK to protect human and civil rights in the UK even where that conflicted with UK law or jurisprudence. The same has been true of the Council of Europe states since 1950.
The sets of treaties and rulings obliging the UK to adhere to the Convention are beyond the easy reach of Parliament, and are thus effectively part of the unconsolidated UK constitution.
Individual access to the Court has been available to all Council of Europe nationals since Protocol 11 came into force on 1 November 1988. The Court has regularly required Convention states to adjust national laws since then.
In the UK, the process was made simpler with the proclamation of the Human Rights Act (1988) which came into effect on 2 October 2000. The Human Rights Act makes it possible to seek remedy for breaches of Convention rights within the UK court system. In effect, it requires the various courts in England and Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and the Isle of Man to interpret local laws consistently with the Convention, and allows the appeals courts to issue declarations of incompatibility against Acts of Parliament. This is a back-handed way of instituting primacy of the Convention in UK law -- the Human Rights Act does not allow the appeals courts to strike down laws passed by Parliament, but the declaration of incompatibility effectively estops lower courts from enforcing them, and pretty much guarantees that a subsequent appeal to the European Court of Human Rights would oblige the UK to alter or repeal the law in question per its treaty obligations.
The English courts in particular have been looking more and more like those in Canada since the 1982 adoption of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, although the latter is more explicit about the teeth being given to the judiciary in protecting human rights. Among various statutes and practices declared incompatible were Part 4 of the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act, and the ability of the Home Secretary (a politician) to participate in judicial sentencing.
Moreover, the current UK government has strangely been markedly positive in its support of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. It has no legal weight at this time, but the proposed Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe incorporated the Chater and would have the EU and all its member-states formally subject itself and align its justice system (and those of its member-states) with the European Court of Human Rights. This would further strengthen the legal changes unleashed by the proclamation of the Human Rights Act (1998).
Unfortunately there is substantial split-personality disorder rampant in the UK government. In particular, the Home Office seems to do little other than produce proposed legislation and regulation which are obviously against the spirit (and sometimes the letter) of the Convention. The politicians put in charge of the Home Office apparently cave in to the militant authoritarians entrenched in the ministry itself.
But Martin and Chretien, and skilled as their fiscal management was, were up to their eyeballs in the sponsorship scandal.
I no longer live in Canada, and I am not a fan of Paul Martin Jr., except that he quit immediately and completely after the 2006 election results were clear, and that he made some surprisingly stirring speeches (in French) about being just as much of a Quebecer as anyone else living in the province.
Martin still does not understand that people simply did not believe that -- no matter how tense the relationship between him and Jean Chretien was -- the number two official in government, and the finance minister of many years, could not have known about the sponsorship program. Moreover, Martin would not -- and maybe could not -- play the card that Chretien did, namely that the scandal was a necessary risk in order to win the referendum in Quebec with pseudo grassroots slogans like "My Canada Includes Quebec", and a big splashy presence of the Canadian government whenever it doled out even the smallest of presents (pork, in other words) in Quebec.
The interesting thing is that the opposition parties negotiation of terms of reference for Gomery excluded the run up to the 1995 referendum, and fixed the timeframe of the sponsorship program from 1996 to 2004.
The 1995 referendum, you will remember, came out as 50.6% to 49.4% against negotiating sovereignty assocation (i.e., in favour of keeping the Constitutional status quo).
Chretien's line has consistently been that had the sponsorship program not happened, or had it been done in the open (thus exposing it to ridicule in the press), the referendum would have been lost, or a rerun would have happened after the 1998 Quebec provincial election (which in turn was an unsurprising "clone" seats-wise of the 1994 election, but which had a very different popular vote split, where the winner was the Quebec Liberal Party under former Mulroney cabinet minister Jean Charest). Moreover, the sponsorship program was designed to prop up Jean Charest's popularity as well, and he did become premier in 2003, not-entirely-coincidentally at the height of the scandalous abuse of the secret federalist slush fund.
Martin could have admitted that he knew all this, and that the scandalousness was a necessary (and ultimately pretty small, and probably recoverable) cost of effectively destroying the sovereignty platform in Quebec. It would have been very difficult for him as an Ontario-born anglophone, but certainly not impossible.
Instead, he did two things that helped destroy his predecessor John Turner. Turner had been finance minister under Trudeau and assigned blame to Trudeau for financial awkwardnesses when he returned to fight for the leadership of the party. He also called a quick election because he "wanted a new mandate" and to capitalize on his supposed "newness" and "popularity" while the Conservatives were still breaking in their new leader, Brian Mulroney. (Turner also had a much smaller majority in the House of Commons). Martin had been finance minister under Chretien and assigned blame to Chretien for the sponsorship scandal when he returned to fight for the leadership of the party. Martin called a quick election because he "wanted a new mandate" and to capitalize on his supposed "newness" and "popularity" (and ability to parachute in candidates of his own choosing, even against the will of the local grassroots riding associations)...
The total 'scandal quotient' of the federal Liberals from 1993 to 2005 was about the same as for Mulroney's Conservatives from November 1984 to... December 1984. And Mulroney's fiscal mismanagement cost the country $300 billion in increased national debt
Two very good points that Martin was unwilling or unable to bring up clearly and early. He would not admit that he was involved in any aspect of the scandal, thus destroying his ability to accept blame with exactly t
The Senate blocks your bill? No problem! Appoint some of your best friends to the Senate!
This only worked thanks to Article 26 of the Constitution Act, 1867, which reads:
If at any Time on the Recommendation of the Governor General the Queen thinks fit to direct that Four or Eight Members be added to the Senate, the Governor General may by Summons to Four or Eight qualified Persons (as the Case may be), representing equally the Four Divisions of Canada, add to the Senate accordingly
Mulroney had been in power for several years by 1989, and the deaths and mandatory retirements of several old Liberal senators left a number of open Senate seats, which he filled as it became clearer that the Senate committee studying the bill after second reading had interviewed enough credible witnesses with strong reservations about the GST would recommend that the Senate not give the bill third reading (killing the GST). The use of Article 26 to appoint eight divisional Senators gave the Conservatives a slim majority of the then 112 Senators.
Even still, it took a decision by the (appointed) Speaker of the Senate to hold a vote in the absence of the Opposition Whip, contrary to the Rules of the Senate, in order to pass the GST after months of delay in the Senate.
Mandatory retirements and deaths during the post-Mulroney years has left the Liberals with 65 of 105 Senators. The CPC has 24, and there are 3 "Progressive Conservatives".
At the moment, only 7 Article 26 Senators can be appointed, and there are 7 vacancies.
24+3+7+7 = 41 Senators which would support the Government, if all vacancies were filled, and Article 26 was exercised.
An independent Senator (Madeleine Plamondon) must retire in September, a Liberal (Jack Austin) must retire in March 2007. Barring untimely deaths, the next resignation useful to the current government will be in Feb 2008 (Senator Fitzpatrick), August and October 2008 (Senators Gill, Christensen and Trenholm).
In short, there is no plausible means by which the current government can break Liberal control of the Senate before it is Constitutionally obliged to face a general election.
the NDP will call a non-confidence vote and force an election
The NDP cannot unilaterally deprive the government of the House of Commons's confidence.
They have only 29 seats. The government has 125 seats. The BQ has 51 and the Liberals 103. There is one independent. Ignoring that one of the Liberals is Speaker of the House of Commons and will vote only in the event of a tie, the relevant results are:
125+51 > 103+29+1 (176-133) -- BQ keeps the government alive -- and we have seen this vote in divisions already this session 125+103 > 51+29+1 (228-81) -- Liberals keep the government alive -- and we have seen this too, in this session
Unignoring the Speaker's voting tradition:
125+29 = 102+51+1 (154-154, Speaker casts the tie vote 154-155) -- NDP fails to keep the government alive
The interesting question here is whether the Liberals, who can defeat most legislation in the Senate, or have the Senate insist upon amendments to most legislation, would join the BQ and NDP in defeating the current government before they have elected a new leader.
The Liberals have been clear that they would support Bill Graham, the interim leader, as Prime Minister until a new leader is elected by the party, and that they might be able to sell this state of affairs to the Canadian electorate.
However, a possibly exciting leadership contest (okay, that's a stretch), a possibly exciting new leader (maybe less of a stretch), and some time to make apologetic noises about the sponsorship scandal, plus some time for the Conservatives to shoot more of their toes off, may be preferable.
It is possible for the Liberals to not support the Conservatives in the House of Commons, without depri
CPC 40% of seats, 36% of popular vote LIB 33% of seats, 30.2% of popular vote BQ 17% of seats, 11% of popular vote NDP 9% of seats, 18% of popular vote IND 0.3% of seats, 0.6% of popular vote GRN 0% of seats, 4.5% of popular vote
No other party got more than 0.32% of the popular vote, which would give 1 seat in a PR system.
Note that the BQ fielded candidates only in Quebec. In that province, the results were (for 75 seats, rounded):
CPC 13% of seats, 25% of popular vote LIB 17% of seats, 21% of popular vote NDP 0% of seats, 8% of popular vote IND 0.1% of seats, 1% of popular vote BQ 68% of seats, 42% of popular vote
Alberta and Prince Edward Island are also interesting, in that only Conservatives were elected in the former (28 Conservatives, 65% popular vote) and in the latter only Liberals (4 Liberals, 53% of popular vote).
Given the history of Canada East (now Quebec) with respect to "rep by pop", it is unlikely that the Bloc Quebecois would abandon the first-past-the-post system. In the 39th Parliament's House of Commons, the Conservatives are over-represented in Saskatchewan, Manitoba and British Columbia -- the Western power-base of the CPC -- and are also unlikely to support a change.
The NDP currently holds the balance of power in Ottawa. They've never held enough seats to become corrupt.
Uhm, they don't hold the balance of power, because they cannot combine with either party and guarantee a majority of the House of Commons.
CPC 125 LIB 102 BQ 51 NDP 29 IND 1
CPC+NDP vs rest: 154 vs 154 (technically 153 as the Speaker (elected as a Liberal) votes only in the event of a tie) LIB+NDP vs rest : 131 vs 176 ("") BQ+NDP vs rest: 80 vs 227 ("")
However, the CPC were unable to get the NDP to agree to support them for two years (with no "24 hour flu" outbreaks on confidence votes, or NDP MPs voting against their whip) in exchange for supporting some NDP initiatives.
Full attendance is impractical in any event, and the working vote splits will be somewhat different.
More practically, there have been several divisions in the last few days which have gone 175-115 +/- (CPC+BQ vs LIB+NDP) on ways and means motions geared towards passing the Conservatives' budget.
This is the Bloc holding the balance of power, and not the NDP. This is not surprising, since what are now CPC and BQ constituencies often voted PC in the Mulroney era. Remember Meech Lake, and Mulroney and Lucien Bouchard being close friends?
As to lack of power leading to lack of corruption, there have been several provincial NDP governments which are remembered unfondly, and several current NDP MPs have had some scandals in municipal government. Jack Layton, the leader, and his wife Olivia Chow, both MPs, had a noisy scandal about living in government subsidized housing despite their ineligibity for subsidy because of their high combined income.
Also amusing is that the former NDP premier of Ontario, Bob Rae, is a candidate for the leadership of the (according to you) quite corrupt Liberal party. What does he know that Mr Layton doesn't?
they don't melt down. no china syndrome, no 3 mile island, no chernobyl, no silkwood.
You've got one right (no Three Mile Island).
However, pebble-bed reactors certainly could melt down. The pebbles are extremely thermally stable and a critical pile of them will happily produce temperatures up to ca. 2700K before they deform (due to melting of the pyrolitic carbon). The fissile materials are stable oxides or carbides of Uranium, are heavy, and will happily sustain a critical reaction in a melted pool of neutron moderator (e.g., carbon). The major limits to heat are doppler broadening (which won't stop "China Syndrome" meltdowns), which depends enormously on the arrangement of the neutron moderating material, or the arrival of Oxygen to burn away the moderator in a fire.
Thus the safety engineering challenge of pebble bed reactors is to minimize the reactivity in the core (which means carefully balancing the number and "age" of pebbles in the bed through constant (re)fuelling) and to prevent any deformation of the pellets themselves, as that would permit neutron passage through the graphite in the pellet. Moreover, the reactor must be able to deal with long-term operation at the high "idle" temperature at which a reasonable worst-case runaway chain reaction will reach. Underdesign in any of these areas would be risky in terms of meltdown, or entry into the core of normal Oxygen-containing, fire-enabling atmosphere.
A fire would be different from Chernobyl, where the fire itself released many TBq of radioactive fuel particles -- the fissiles are in heavy pellets which won't disperse easily even in a raging hot fire, however there is likely to be some radioactive (and merely chemically poisonous) material in the smoke anyway.
Karen Silkwood was (allegedly) offed because she had evidence of accidents at the chemical level thanks to shoddy management at a fuel processing plant. The pebble manufacturing facility may also suffer from chemical (rather than nuclear) risk as well -- there are many dangerous and toxic substances involved in producing the pebbles and their input components.
Although the pebble bed design is efficient (especially in terms of thermal gradient) and possibly much safer than highly pressurized light water reactors, it is not as passively safe as a pressurized heavy water reactor. Current PHWRs run with a much smaller pressure vessel thanks to constraints on heavy industry in Canada during the development of early CANDU. This practically eliminates any dangerous phase-change steam explsions. A breech of the pressure vessel dumps the moderator, terminating the reaction entirely. The heavy water moderator is not thermally stable, and if it does not simply leak out it will boil off at temperatures much lower than the melting points of the fuel assemblies. Fuelling irregularities are well-tolerated (unlike in pebble-bed reactors).
The amount of heavy water needed in modern PHWR designs has decreased enough that it is no longer a massive cost constraint on the design; the thermal gradient disadvantage of running cooler has also been improved.
Finally, PHWRs in general can burn all sorts of fuels from highly enriched or slightly enriched Uranium, to natural Uranium ore, to Plutonium, to waste from pressurized light water reactors or weapons. The small-fuel-assembly/small-pressure-vessel design of CANDU makes arranging different fuel cycles a problem of calculating the appropriate geometry and rearranging the materials from time to time while the reactor is in operation. This also allows for breeding fissile fuels from e.g. Thorium, but it also allows breeding weapons materials, and this proliferation aspect has been abused (by India, for one). Pebble-beds by requiring tight pebble tolerances to avoid accidents are much less likely to be used as breeder reactors, however they can be, by adjusting the mix of pebbles conveyed through the contiuous (re)fuelling process. This might
Cockroaches don't fight off infections. Their systems are designed/evolved to work in spite of infection.
No, B. germanica, like other arthropods, has two primary active immunocytes, namely the granulocytes and the plasmatocytes. The former are particularly cool in the cockroach -- their granulocytes (GRs) discover, encapsulate, and phagocytize foreign substances. In fact, unlike in other arthropods, cockroach GRs are particularly active in terms of encapsulation; they flatten and increase the number of microtubules and nuclear membrane pores. The latter mechanism enables the rapid production of tubulin by increasing the "channel width" between the ribosomes and the nuclear DNA. The former protects the GRs from the shearing forces the rapid encapsulation response creates within the cell. The cockroach GRs are in some ways closer to the human macrophage than to typical arthropod active immunocytes.
Plasmatocytes (PLs) adhere to foreign substances in a clotting response geared to isolate it from the rest of the cockroach. PLs also have a phagocytizing role in the cockroach.
Both the GRs and the PLs display an accelerated response if the organism is reintroduced to the same foreign substance. This suggests that the cockroach immunocytes have the same sort of "memory" as vertebrate neutrophils and macrophages.
Cockroaches meanwhile are also a host to a variety of microbes which provide a degree of passive immune response to common antigens -- various intestinal flora produce narrow-spectrum antibiotics which ward off dangerous infections.
Although cockroaches have somewhat weaker structural defences against infection (spiracles for breathing instead of cilliated, mucous-protected airways; low pressure in the hemolymph instead of a bleeding response which washes away microbes in the envent of a skin/chitin-penetrating trauma), they have a highly-reactive immunoresponse which is less-costly energy-wise for the individual than regenerating tissues destroyed by infection and more successful (in the evolutionary fitness sense) for the species as a whole than accepting a lowered production of viable offspring because individuals are debilitated by infectious disease.
In general the more cosmopolitan pests in Blattaria/Blattodea are biologically successful because they can cope with all sorts of toxins and microbes found in household detritus and waste that concentrates in cockroach feces, which is usually found near -- or in -- their food supply.
So you would be more right if you said that cockroaches are evolving in environments full of infectious agents, and are obviously pretty successful there.
Otherwise healthy household mammals that encounter cockroaches have little to fear from cockroaches, their "helpful" microbes, their "harmful" microbes (which are held in check by the cockroach immune system), or whatever concentrates in their feces, except that there are some humans (and probably other mammals) who suffer an intense immunoglobin-E mediated allergic reaction to many antigens which accumulate in cockroach poo.
When you're done paying for the interest also, you may have built some equity, but accounting for maintenance and other expenses, you probably broke even... If you do the math, take into account the property taxes, etc, you're lucky to break even.
and
I was also a licensed insurance salesman and mortgage officer
Then why would you be surprised that the purchase price of property is closely related to the present value of rents payable across the duration of the property's ownership?
Housing speculation is generally based on externalities (urbanization, gentrification) driving house price inflation.
As to the valuation of the U.S. dollar and your home heating anecdote...
You see however, this concept isn't understood easily so I'll make it simple.
No, the concept isn't understood at all. Perhaps you could trade your simplicity for a bit of accuracy. That may help.
Ever wonder why solid assets retain their value... ahem... "appreciate" in value?
Because demand increases relative to supply? In most OECD countries, urban real estate is appreciating in value relative to other items (commodities, money, metals, chattels) because people are moving to cities. Rural real estate is depreciating.
120% inflation
and
currently 6 or 7 krona get you 10 dollars
I think you have a problem with at least decimals. Google 1 SEK in USD and find that one U.S. dollar buys you 7.5561231 Swedish kronor (note plural of krona).
Similarly you should find it easy to find that the annualized inflation rate in the USA has been below 4% since 2000, and that (to be really generous to you) the biggest jump in reported monthly inflation since 2000 was 1.22% (Aug-Sep 2005).
STOPPED printing the M3 report which issues how much currency is issued and in what forms
M3 = M2+eurodollars+repos+CD worth more than $100 000.
"Eurodollars" are overseas/foreign-bank deposits denominated in USD.
M3 was considered to be shaky because it is hard to hunt down eurodollars and all repos. The error bars were large enough to account plausibly for the final 8.22% annualized growth posted this March; the difference between M3 growth and the other money supply markers could be because of earlier poor uncovering of M3 input data.
M3 has not been central to interest rate policy for some time -- the Congress has allowed the increase of the M3 debt ceiling rather than require the Fed to convert M3 deposits into government debt.
Incidentally, the European Central Bank's official target of 4.5% M3 growth has also not been met -- EuroM3 growth was an annual 8.0% in February 2006.
It appears that other central banks reject the idea that the Fed (or the ECB) is deliberately covering up an expansionist monetary policy -- otherwise there would be a fall-off in the increases in foreign central bank dollar reserves and a likely run on other fungibles. There is no evidence of this, unless you want to get into crude crude oil conspiracy theories.
everyone defends the system to the death
No, not to the death; just until someone clearly outlines unfixable real weaknesses that suggest another dramatic change to international finance is necessary. This happens from time to time.
You have not done so in this thread. Sorry.
Re:eliminate top-level domains ?
on
Is It Time For .tel?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
how the current heirarchical domain system works... we would have to change quite a bit
Well... really what would have to change is (non-recursive-querying) resolver code, and since that is distributed to practically every Internet host, that likely would take time.
However, the server-side and administrative-side changes would stay largely the same, and there is no need to abandon hierarchical delegation of parts of the global distributed dabase.
There are two obvious approaches.
The first possible approach is to group arbitrary strings into three-or-four character groups and look up those substrings hierarchically. For example, "unformatteddomainname" would result in lookups for "name" "main" "eddo" etc., essentially as if it were originally written "u.nfor.matt.eddo.main.name." under the current system, with authoritative nameservers for the root and each subdomain.
An alternative hierarchicalization of arbitrary domain names -- implemented and demonstrated in practice -- is detailed in RFC 2317 which allows for non-octet-boundary IN-ADDR.ARPA. DNS names, since classless inter-domain routing has a different hierarchy from the legacy DNS.
Slashdot Mirror
On the contrary, he had assembled the pieces of a small and subcritical but reasonably efficient 232Th-fuel-cycle reactor that was happily, if slowly, breeding 233U.
With some attention to geometry, which is suggested by his parcelling of ash, his 232Th had a reasonable probability of capturing slow neutrons from his small emitter, becoming 233Th, which quickly beta decays into 233Pa which in some days beta decays into 233U . His neutron spectrum was sufficiently fast that more 233U fission than actinide production is plausible. Apart from the low neutron flux of his initiating neutron source, nowhere near enough neutrons are produced in this Thorium cycle to maintain a fast neutron chain reaction, so his reactor would have remained subcritical while still breeding 233U.
His apparatus was not particularly conventional, but was clearly a breeder reactor, in the form: Th-232+n -> Th-233 (22 m) -> Pa-233 (27 d) -> U-233 (1.6*10^5 a).
Incidentally, breeding 233U from 232Th is the long term strategy for India, and some small experimental piles there (and in the West in the 50s and 60s) may have looked much like Hahn's description of his own.
What he might have done next is anybody's guess, but he may have made some gains making a powdered mixture of his 9Be with his 241Am or his 226Ra as is done in some conventional neutron generators.
He was clearly pretty bright (no pun intended), and good at learning and improvising as he went along.
Unfortunately for him, Uranium in general is chemically hazardous, and he is also likely to have been accumulating some 232U which has many alpha and gamma emitters in its decay chain. These were obvious and dangerous environmental hazards (not just to him), not least of which is the reactivity surge from 233U production after shutting down and dismantling his reactor, thanks to the relatively long half-life of 233Pa.
Constitutional convention would not be tantamount to civil war, because there is almost no liklihood that an Article V convention would result in any sort of consensus among the requisite 3/4 states on any issue. Indeed, just getting 2/3 of the states to apply to the Congress for such a convention seems unlikely at this time (and has never happened).
The wording of Article V leaves Congress with enormous latitude to game the process and procedures. While it would be the states doing all the voting, it is clearly Congress's show. The Executive and Judicial branches do not have a constitutionally-defined role in such a convention any more than they have a role in amendments proposed directly by Congress. The latter process has not so far led to civil war.
There is uncertainty which cuts both ways, however: the Congress and the states face substantially the same electors and opposing one's electorate openly is politically unsafe. Moreover, if there were opposition between the Congress and a 3/4 majority of the states, both "sides" could propose constitutional amendments until the situation is resolved (perhaps by an election). Although Congress has an edge with respect to the procedural aspects of a convention (e.g., it could slow a convention down enough that it could make its own proposals first, however any such proposals would require state ratification), Congress has no power to block any amendments proposed by 3/4 of the states. The Senate relented in its opposition to the House of Representative's initiations of what ultimately became the Seventeenth Amendment because of this.
The federal Executive has no constitutional role in the federal amendments process, as recognized by Hollingsworth v. Virginia, 3 U.S. (3 Dall.) 378 (1798). By inference, no state Executive has a constitutional role in the federal amendments process. Hollingsworth did not precisely address the question of a veto, however it would be very difficult to retain the ruling as stare decisis while allowing a veto. Moreover, Immigration and Naturalization Service v. Chadha, 462 U.S. 919 (1983) [footnote 21] read the Hollingsworth case to explictly exclude a Presidential veto.
Chadha argues that the Article I veto is essentially meaningless because of the numbers required to propose and ratify an amendment in the first place. The most wriggle room would revolve around the question of a sort of "suspensive" veto, wherein the President might be able to require a second vote, although this was directly addressed in Hollingsworth ("[Since] two thirds of both Houses are required to originate the proposition, it would be nugatory to return it with the President's negative, to be repassed by the same number"). Arguing that a delay would not be nugatory in a particular case might be successful, however the Executive is on very shaky ground with respect to this, and the Courts (even the current SCOTUS) are likely to rule that the Executive really has no constitutional role whatsoever with respect to Article V.
Assuming that the Congress sides with the states, open conflict between the federal Executive and the legislators cannot be won in a constitutional way by the Executive, as Congress (particularly the House of Representatives) could easily starve the Executive of supply (i.e., no money to spend on continuing the conflict)
"Hypothesis", not "theory".
It's unlikely.
The developing embryo takes a few days from fertilization to implantation. This sometimes leads to light bleeding or minor cramping, and is often read as a pregnancy marker. Before this time, there is little contact between the developing embryo and the mother. Moreover, there is essentially no active/adaptive immune system in the embryo, as there is little cell differentiation. An allergic response requires mast cells or basophils.
After implantation, a placenta is formed. The placental barrier is selectively permeable, and uses active transport to move large molecules across the barrier. The molecules involved in active transport are very protein-specific, even to the point of rejecting similar immunoglobins, most notably IgE which activates the allergic response in mast cells and basophils.
(Rhesus incompatibility is a much more common problem and does more or less what you suggest: there can be a leakage of blood in the foetus->mother direction (ONLY!) that given an Rh+ foetus and an Rh- mother, can lead to an IgG response; immunoglobin G can cross the placental barrier and attack the Rh sites on the surfaces of foetal blood cells. Result: anaemia, jaundice, and possibly death of the foetus. Rhesus haemolytic disease was commonplace, but since the 70s an injection of passive antibodies (Rh immune globulin) into an Rh- mother quickly and throughly destroys Rh+ foetal blood cells before they can elicit an IgG response. Standard western postnatal care also involves administering RhIG to Rh- mothers after the birth of a child, to eliminate the risk of training her adaptive immune system with spillover blood from her baby (and the placenta. It is worth noting that the vast majority of sensitizing events in Rh haemolytic disease generally occur after the 28th week of pregnancy, and that the dangerous allergic response is that of the mother. So this does not really fit your hypothesis well at all.)
Some small molecules (like ethanol) cross the barrier via diffusion; some viral particles (like CMV) actively "tunnel" through the barrier in a variety of ways. These can be dangerous to even a young foetus.
Spontaneous abortions are sadly commonplace, and some studies using very sensitive early pregnancy tests show an incidence of 25% of fertilizations resulting in miscarriage before the 6th week.
A great deal of study has gone into early spontaneous abortions, and about half of the embryos studied have shown chromosomal aberrations including outright misarrangements. These are thought to be caused by a fertilization involving one or two damaged gametes, rather than a structural, repeatable genetic defect in either parent. These embryos stop developing on their own most of the time, and are sometimes called "blighted ova".
Obesity, use of NSAIDs, alcohol consumption and high caffeine intake are also associated with higher than average miscarriage rates.
It is certainly plausible that a response to an allergen by the mother could lead to an early spontaneous abortion. This has been seen in Rh haemolytic syndrome, and other allergic repsonses could similarly attack an implanted embryo with the mother's antibodies.
However, your hypothesis that young embryos might self-terminate in the face of an allergen is unlikely, largely because young embryos lack an active/adaptive immune system. Moreover, most of the allergens in question are highly unlikely to reach a young embryo at all because of physical disconnectedness or the filtering done by the placenta (and the rest of the mother's body too, which is an imposing physical barrier armed with its own immune system).
Finally, as noted, misc
Sweden and many other OECD countries make substantial foreign aid donations geared towards saving lives from preventable disease, among other things. This would be similar, with the added advantage of cheaper pharmaceuticals within Sweden (possibly via imports from the aforementioned Indias and Chinas) and fewer diseased people needing expensive medical attention or palliative care abroad.
Socializing the returns on investment in pharmaceutical research is a smart idea, as long as the investments themselves are made. These can be socialized too, via direct funding grants for applied research, or they can be pirated, or they can be left as they are wherein grants of monopoly rents are made.
The problem with the first approach is that granting agencies cannot be expected to make very accurate predictions of the utility or success of the work early in the funding process. This can lead to serious risk-aversion, wherein only formerly successful researchers are given grants, which can be between merely inefficient in the sense of missing out on radical new ideas from bright young researchers, or to an old-boy network wherein who you know or who you work for is more important than what you know or how you work.
The problem with the third is the status quo, which results not only in high prices thanks to monopolies, but also biases research in favour of treatments for rich people's diseases (a drug which has to be taken regularly and which costs thousands per year) rather than one-shot, inexpensive cures.
The "pirate it" path has problems you are well aware of, but also has the disadvantage that it is unlikely to convince the researchers to change their focus from drugs producing high cost recurring income to drugs which are cheap, permanent solutions.
Multicast technology has advanced considerably since the days of MBONE.
David Meyer, University of Oregon, and at various times with Sprint and Cisco, and on the Internet Architecture Board, spent a considerable amount of time herding cats in the development and deployment of scalable native multicast forwarding across large-scale ISP infrastructure.
Here is one result: no-fee Sprintlink native multicast (see also the FAQ).
Several other ISPs and university networks also exchange multicast network layer reachability information (mBGP), implying support for native multicast.
Currently most multicast deployment favours large dynamic groups of listeners subscribing and unsubscribing to traffic originated from a relatively small set of sources, rather than generalized many-to-many conversations. With current technology many-to-many "oligocasting" is most efficiently emulated by a single sender receiving (via unicast) messages which are then multicast to a tree of subscribers. This is generally referred to as SSM, Single-Sender Multicasting, which is suitable for the modern Internet in which switching equipment performance (or cost, if you will) is bounded by dynamic adaptiveness (control messaging, routing) rather than the amount of traffic being switched. SSM is also a good fit for applications similar to cable-TV-like broadcasts or distribution of large sets of data from a primary centre to subsidiary or replica centres.
MBONE's performance was bounded by the tunnelling and especially replication performance of the UNIX workstations that were the majority of MBONE's routers, as well as by the obsolete DVMRP and MOSPF multicast WAN routing protocols which were used even across ISP and other network boundaries.
You could combine SSM with a "TIVO-like" function, saving the multicasted data locally and extracting what you want, when you want it, from your local copy. If your shared multicast distribution tree significantly reduces the sender's bandwidth by moving your 100x duplication into "the network" such that you approach only one copy of a given datum sent once from the sender to the sender's ISP, it's a win. If you also approach one copy of a given datum sent once down any given branch of the tree rooted at the sender and branching at Internet routers between the sender and every receiver, you make a good trade-off, as the cost of small numbers of copies performed in routers (possibly one per interface) distributes well and for heavily-subscribed Single Sources the cost is likely to be smaller than the cost of carrying multiple copies of the same traffic.
With your example the question is whether the cost of locally recording likely-to-be-interesting data received via multicast is greater than the cost of smearing out any duplicate requests (from you or any of the other 100 sites) over time. Most of the cost in the latter "video-on-demand" style approach is borne by the primary sender.
Hyenas are at a disadvantage to humans who wash, cook and otherwise prepare their food.
Cooking inactivates or kills harmful organisms such as amoeba, bacteria or viruses. It also denatures proteins, some of which are toxic to humans. Most of the interesting toxins produced by the flora and fauna found in the digestive systems of carrion eaters are essentially rendered harmless at temperatures above 60 degC.
Cooking tends to destroy many other toxins, as well, but not all -- several steroid alkaloids survive high temperature cooking or drying. Most of these are produced by plants.
Most of the order Carnivora have strong enough gastric acids and pepsins to inactivate most of the organisms and toxins they are likely to eat, particularly those species which consume large prey over the course of several days after a kill. Humans have decent stomachs too, but cooking is useful for eliminating acid-tolerant sporulating and encapsulating microbes and larger animals (such as many types of worm) whose eggs also survive a trip through a human or feline stomach.
Jackals, Order Carnivora, Family Canidae, do occasionally scavenge carcasses, however they normally hunt live prey alone or in pairs. Several much larger obligate carnivores such as hyenas and lions will also scavenge relatively fresh corpses if given a chance. Most opportunistic scavengers have strong vomit reflexes.
Turkey vultures have especially acidic gastric secretions, which is an advantage in eliminating the microbes and eggs found on decaying meat. Vulture vomit can be dangerous, and vulture poop is acidic enough to inhibit bacterial growth on their feet, which are used to rip into rotting carcasses.
Turkey vultures would be as edible as pigeons or chickens provided they were well-prepared (so as to remove the contents of the digestive system and wash away the strong acids) and thoroughly cooked. Hyenas do neither of these things, and would risk injury and illness if they tried to eat a turkey vulture. How an old-world hyena would come to prey upon a new-world vulture is anyone's guess, however.
Old-world vultures, which are not closely related to turkey vultures, have a somewhat different digestion strategy, involving the aggressive turnover of gastric acids closer to that found in mammals and a strong emetic response. Unfortunately this leaves them at the mercy of prostaglandin cyclooxygenase inhibitors like the veterinary NSAID diclofenac which in small doses causes severe gastric ulceration (which impairs digestion) and kidney problems in Asian vultures. Moreover, these birds do not quickly eliminate diclofenac, so it tends to accumulate even when consumed irregularly in tiny doses found in the bodies of animals treated with the drug. Some 90% of the Asian vulture population in the Indian subcontinent have been wiped out by chronic renal impairment associated with veterinary NSAID use.
Diclofenac-contaminated Asian vulture meat is much more dangerous to other Asian vultures and animals who have adverse reactions to NSAIDs in general than to human beings.
If (spotted) hyenas, which are primarily predators, are not eating Asian vultures for reasons other than being fussy eaters who do not wash, trim and cook their prey, or because there are fewer old world vultures around than there used to be, it may also be that old world vultures arrive on the ground mainly at kills, and in large cooperating groups which are aggressive towards other scavengers. Spotted hyenas do not fly.
Finally, brown hyenas and striped hyenas are principally scavengers themselves (and also do not fly).
You can skip the expensive and dangerous fast neutron reactors -- current designs are liquid metal or molten salt cooled and require a relatively highly enriched fissile source (i.e., not spent fuel) -- and start with CANDU. The operating geometry of a mixed-fuel CANDU reactor pile is a well-researched and demonstrated aspect of the design.
With respect to fast neutron reactors, Phénix (and EBR-II, precursor of the IFR) also transmute(d) nuclear waste in experimental quantities. The proposed Generation IV Gas-cooled Fast Reactor design also would be able to burn actinides, possibly economically.
Pebble bed reactor designs usually involve some cycling and shuffling of the pebbles in the reactor pile. Given that this is how CANDU works (the pressurized fuel tubes are rearranged in the various holes in the calandria), mixing pebbles with traditional enriched uranium fuel and other fissiles is plausible, but a mixed-fuel-cycle PBR presents several engineering challenges. The primary difficulty is that this is not a well-researched or demonstrated aspect of the fundamental design (CANDU evolved from an experimental reactor which was built to breed various isotopes, irradiate various materials, and operate a mixed-fuel-cycle; pebble bed designs trace their ancestry to Schulzen who wanted a simple, safe power generating reactor using commoditized fuel and the AVR which was originally an inefficient 232Th->233U breeder). The very low defect construction of pebbles is critical to the safety of pebble bed reactor designs (and there are occasional problems in this area that the different chemistry of other fissiles may exacerbate), and the design of the beds themselves usually make mechanical opitimization of the pile geometry difficult to dangerous. The tools used to shuffle CANDU assemblies around have damaged both tubes and calandrias in accidents; in CANDU this is not especially dangerous. Damaging pebbles may be dangerous in and of itself; damaging the fuel ingress/egress points or the pressure vessel such that normal air is introduced into the core would be dangerous; the combination may be disastrous.
Another option is to overbuild efficient nuclear reactors of whatever type fits best, and use the excess power to drive a particle accelerator to induce a nuclear spallation reaction in waste products. This decouples the geometry (or even type) of reactor core -- and thus the reactor's overall efficiency -- from the transmutation of transuranic elements, allowing even finer-grained control of waste burning or fuel breeding.
Yes, this assertion is crazy -- while there are many PWRs deployed in submarines and PWR designs mostly trace their ancestry to the Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory's design for use in nuclear submarines, the conditions inside the reactor core is nothing like that outside the submarines themselves. The water *inside* PWR cores reaches ca 325 degC and are kept from boiling by a pressure of some 15 MPa (~150 atmospheres). The water *outside* submarines might reach 3 MPa (steel hulls) or 10MPa (titanium hulls) whereas the temperature will approach 4 degC.
The goal of a submarine hull is to keep the internal pressure and temperature comfortable for humans; the goal of a PWR pressure vessel is to optimize the nuclear chain reaction. With respect to PWRs, the comfort of nearby humans is the responsibility of the containment structure, not the pressure vessel.
Perhaps, but not on this basis of comparison -- pebble bed reactors run much hotter (they must run much hotter than the annealing temperature of the graphite so that Wigner energy does not accumulate) and usually have an operating temperature of 900-1500 degC. They must carefully maintain an inert atmosphere inside the core, and must be able to contain (chemical) reaction products in case of the accidental introduction of oxygen. The combination of hot gas and a positive pressure (both for efficiency and as a safeguard against the introduction of ordinary air) does require a carefully engineered pressure vessel system. The PBMR's core for example, reaches almost 7MPa (~70 atmospheres) and a temperature of 900 degC. This is only half the pressure -- but nearly three times the temperature -- of pressurized water reactor cores. Moreover, the PBMR uses four such pressure vessels -- the other three contain the compressor units and the turbine. The engineering challenges are comparable to that in a PWR.
Both PWRs and pebble bed designs, however, have simpler and smaller pressure vessel systems than a boiling water reactor, but much more complicated systems than that in deuterium (heavy water) moderated thermal reactors. One reason for this is that the Canadians lacked the heavy industrial ability to build large pressure vessels, but had the ability to produce heavy water at industrial scales. CANDU evolved out of an unpressurized room-temperature tank of very pure heavy water that acted both as moderator and heat-sink (secondary coolant), into which many small (as in an athletic person could carry them by hand) pressure vessels containing the fuel and pressurized hot coolant were inserted.
However, the complexity of pressure vessels is only one of the many trade-offs one can make in a nuclear reactor design, and is nowhere near the most useful basis on which to compare PWRs with pebble bed reactors.
Huh? Perhaps you should reexamine BCPL and note its descent from ALGOL.
At the end of the ALGOL article you'll see a list of historically and currently widely-used programming languages, some of which descend from ALGOL, many of which do not.
Your homework for tonight is to determine the set of these that descends from BCPL, the set that was influenced by BCPL, and the set which was not. You get bonus marks if you can evaluate these languages' support for thinking "in terms of OOP, functional and procedural ways".
For this task, you are encouraged to check up on this list of programming language families.
See eq? in R5RS
In particular: "It will usually be possible to implement `eq?' much more efficiently than `eqv?', for example, as a simple pointer comparison [...which would be useful because...] it may not be possible to compute `eqv?' of two numbers in constant time".
Per eqv?'s rationale, implementations may merge constant objects by using the same pointer or representation, but are not required to.
Effectively, anything testable by eq? is indistinguishable from a pointer to some object.
Also, consider a list l which is eq? to (a b c). (cdr l) returns a pointer to the second element in the list, i.e., (b c). (set-cdr! (cdr l) 'd) destructively changes l such that (equal? l '(a b d)) ==> #t.
There is no real semantic difference between this sort of dereferencing of pointers and how one would do this in C; it's the syntax that is different.
Although this can be true in C as well, usually Scheme objects are subject to relocation (e.g. during garbage collection) where the relocation process updates all pointers to the object, whereas usually C objects are not relocated from wherever pointers to them point to.
That is, if one could { SCHEME_OBJECT s_o; printf("%p", &s_o); } the output could differ from moment to moment, whereas usually { int c_o; printf("%p", &c_o); } will output the same number every time. Moreover, C may guarantee that *(addr) = val will change a specific location in memory e.g. if it's running with no MMU in the way, whereas in R5RS there is no equivalent semantic.
That said, there are several Scheme implementations which use foreign function interfaces (FFIs) to call code written in other languages. Chicken is one of them, and it introduces locations as a first class Scheme type directly equivalent to C pointers.
In other words...
Too late!
It's not the DNA replication per se that requires extra energy, it's the additional cost of the peptidoglycolization process that the mutant (resistant) strains incur. The two most common classes of MRSA mutants either overexpress beta-lactamase or (most commonly) express a penicillin binding protein (PBP) with a lower affinity for beta-lactam rings than the wild type.
Overproducing an enzyme which breaks open a beta-lactam ring (which inactivates antibiotics like Methicillin) is energy expensive, so in the absence of beta-lactam, the resistant type is at a disadvantage -- there is less energy available for reproduction. In the presence of such antibiotics, this is a favourable mutation.
Producing a PBP that has less affinity for beta-lactam rings also comes at a cost, in that they are less efficient at producing peptidoglycans. As the final crosslinking of peptidoglycan chains is a vital part of constructing a cell wall, and this is essential in binary fission, this also puts such resistant species at a disadvantage to the wild type, by increasing the energy cost of reproduction. Again, in the presence of beta-lactams (from antibiotics), this is a favourable mutation.
It's unlikely that there is any practical difference between MRSA and MSSA other than the gene conferring resistance.
If you innoculate a host with both MRSA and MSSA, you can be fairly certain that MSSA will dominate in an untreated host, and MRSA will dominate in a host being treated with methicillin.
There may be both resistant and non-resistant strains within the same host simultaneously; the ratio will likely vary with treatment. Since there is an energy cost associated with resistance, and since resistant S. aureus (and offspring) may revert to non-resistant forms, using methicillin may slow down the progress of infection enough to make the costs to the host worthwhile.
Necrotizing fasciitis is mostly dangerous not because of beta-lactam (or even vancomycin) resistance but because human fascia are not well served by blood vessels, which has several awful side effects including reduced carriage of intravenous or oral antibiotics to the site of infection. The deeper fascial planes are alsoa nearly ideal bacterial growth medium. High quality food, little passive resistance to the spread of infection, and reduced delivery of active immune system components to the infected tissues, all contribute to potentially explosive spread rates.
Necrotizing fasciitis is also complicated by the inflammation response -- not only does it further reduce the delivery of active immunse system components, it also releases pyrogenic exo- and endotoxins which unleases a cascade reaction which leads to the necrosis. Cytokines damage endothelial layers, increasing small-scale vascular permeability (i.e., smaller than neutrophils and platelets), which increases inflammation and edema and makes the lives of the infectious organisms easier. The body further responds by decreasing blood flow, which leads to tissue hypoxemia and cell death. The reduction in oxygen in the area impairs the phagocytic activity of neutrophils which have managed to arrive in the area, and further favours anaerobic growth of the infecting organisms. This in turn contributes to vasculitis and thrombosis in nearby tissues, s
Even more importantly, resistance to triclosan would not be the same as resistance to vancomycin or methicillin, so misuse of triclosan would not contribute to the development of "superbugs".
Triclosan is a topical biocide applied externally in creams and pastes which allow it to linger. Vancomycin, by contrast, must be administered intravenously becuase it does not cross the intestinal lining. The stronger members of penicillin family are also often administered intravenously because most of them denature rapidly in gastric acids. These and triclosan have totally different modes of operation (triclosan interferes with fatty acid production; penicillins and vancomycin interfere with peptidoglycan production in different ways -- the former inhibits a final crosslinking and the latter prevents the incorporation of two subunits). Mutations in transpeptidase (PBP) which may confer resistance to beta-lactam antibiotics like penicillin would do nothing with respect to the organism's potential resistance to triclosan.
With respect to triclosan, the literature is filled with evidence repudiating the Stuart Levy speculative statement on acquired triclosan resistance. Generally speaking, triclosan has been in wide use as a topical biocide for some thirty years and there are no peer-reviewed studies demonstrating acquired resistance with long term use. There are resistant bacteria which either overexpress FabI or which have mutant FabI that does not as readily form the stable ternary compound FabI-NAD+-triclosan. Those bacteria continue to produce enough fatty acids to survive triclosan exposure, but at some cost. Overproduction of FabI wastes energy and the mutant FabIs typically incur an energy or time cost in the production of fatty acids, so these organisms are at a disadvantage in the absence of triclosan.
This disadvantage leads to fewer viable offspring expressing these traits, which in a population causes the phenotype reversion that you mention. (Individuals may kick around in smaller numbers, so that when the population is stressed with triclosan, the population will "de-revert". This happens with a wide variety of toxins.
Triclosan is the focus of occasional health panics for a variety of reasons. Acquired resistance is just one complaint; others are breakdown products, especially into dioxins (exposure to UV), and an almost inevitable but very small amount of polychlorinated dioxins and furans as side effects of produciton. The panics involve either environmental concerns or bioaccumulation in people using products -- whether topical/external (like hand soap) or internal (toothpaste).
However, it's been pretty widely used in the past couple of decades in formulations which allow triclosan to stick around so as to inhibit the growth of microbes which survive washing with sodium lauryl sulphate and other surfactants. There is hardly a poisoning epidemic in evidence... Some people are mildly allergic to triclosan; this is most often seen in people who form mouth chancres (aphthous stomatitis) -- triclosan may exacerbate outbreaks. (On the other hand, mouth cankers are weird things, and there is also some evidence that triclosan may soothe symptoms...)
Yes. "It was never available to me in a memorizable format (locked in hardware)", "it was automatically generated (smartcard output)", "it was a very long sequence meant for one-time use rather than memorization and reuse", "it was months between when I last used it and when I was asked to cough it up, and during that time I forgot", and so forth would all raise an issue with respect to the assertion that you were in possession of the key.
It would then fall upon the prosecution to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that you did in fact possess it nevertheless.
This is weakly similar to the repudiation of handwritten signatures by a defendant at criminal trial. "No that is not my signature" is probably insufficient to require the Crown to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that it is, whereas something along the lines of "I know that is not my signature because I have never signed anything in green ink in my life" would meet the test of "sufficient evidence
No, because you have the sense of the leading wording backwards. It delineates a defence.
This says that the court must assume that you DO NOT have the key if (b) it is not proven beyond a reasonable doubt that you did.
The offensive clause is (a), which shifts burden onto you, in that you must first offer up evidence that you did not have it.
However, "sufficient evidence
Once you have plausible grounds for not having been in the possession of the key, the prosecution MUST then demostrate beyond a reasonable doubt that you did possess it at the time after all.
In practice, (a) mainly will be interpreted by the court as a reminder of the requirements of a no actus reus defence in similar cases in which key incriminating physical evidence is connected with a defendant.
Yes you do, it's called the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (and often European Convention of Human Rights, although that means the acronym ECHR is overloaded with the European Court of Human Rights, which is charged by the Council of Europe with enforcing the Convention).
All Council of Europe countries must subscribe to the Convention. All European Union member states must also be members of the Council of Europe. The Council of Europe is not a body of the European Union -- it is a proper superset of the EU member-states.
The aquis communitaire (the common-law and regulations of the European Union) and the Convention treaty have obliged the UK to protect human and civil rights in the UK even where that conflicted with UK law or jurisprudence. The same has been true of the Council of Europe states since 1950.
The sets of treaties and rulings obliging the UK to adhere to the Convention are beyond the easy reach of Parliament, and are thus effectively part of the unconsolidated UK constitution.
Individual access to the Court has been available to all Council of Europe nationals since Protocol 11 came into force on 1 November 1988. The Court has regularly required Convention states to adjust national laws since then.
In the UK, the process was made simpler with the proclamation of the Human Rights Act (1988) which came into effect on 2 October 2000. The Human Rights Act makes it possible to seek remedy for breaches of Convention rights within the UK court system. In effect, it requires the various courts in England and Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and the Isle of Man to interpret local laws consistently with the Convention, and allows the appeals courts to issue declarations of incompatibility against Acts of Parliament. This is a back-handed way of instituting primacy of the Convention in UK law -- the Human Rights Act does not allow the appeals courts to strike down laws passed by Parliament, but the declaration of incompatibility effectively estops lower courts from enforcing them, and pretty much guarantees that a subsequent appeal to the European Court of Human Rights would oblige the UK to alter or repeal the law in question per its treaty obligations.
The English courts in particular have been looking more and more like those in Canada since the 1982 adoption of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, although the latter is more explicit about the teeth being given to the judiciary in protecting human rights. Among various statutes and practices declared incompatible were Part 4 of the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act, and the ability of the Home Secretary (a politician) to participate in judicial sentencing.
Moreover, the current UK government has strangely been markedly positive in its support of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. It has no legal weight at this time, but the proposed Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe incorporated the Chater and would have the EU and all its member-states formally subject itself and align its justice system (and those of its member-states) with the European Court of Human Rights. This would further strengthen the legal changes unleashed by the proclamation of the Human Rights Act (1998).
Unfortunately there is substantial split-personality disorder rampant in the UK government. In particular, the Home Office seems to do little other than produce proposed legislation and regulation which are obviously against the spirit (and sometimes the letter) of the Convention. The politicians put in charge of the Home Office apparently cave in to the militant authoritarians entrenched in the ministry itself.
Coincidentally, Liberty today published
I no longer live in Canada, and I am not a fan of Paul Martin Jr., except that he quit immediately and completely after the 2006 election results were clear, and that he made some surprisingly stirring speeches (in French) about being just as much of a Quebecer as anyone else living in the province.
Martin still does not understand that people simply did not believe that -- no matter how tense the relationship between him and Jean Chretien was -- the number two official in government, and the finance minister of many years, could not have known about the sponsorship program. Moreover, Martin would not -- and maybe could not -- play the card that Chretien did, namely that the scandal was a necessary risk in order to win the referendum in Quebec with pseudo grassroots slogans like "My Canada Includes Quebec", and a big splashy presence of the Canadian government whenever it doled out even the smallest of presents (pork, in other words) in Quebec.
The interesting thing is that the opposition parties negotiation of terms of reference for Gomery excluded the run up to the 1995 referendum, and fixed the timeframe of the sponsorship program from 1996 to 2004.
The 1995 referendum, you will remember, came out as 50.6% to 49.4% against negotiating sovereignty assocation (i.e., in favour of keeping the Constitutional status quo).
Chretien's line has consistently been that had the sponsorship program not happened, or had it been done in the open (thus exposing it to ridicule in the press), the referendum would have been lost, or a rerun would have happened after the 1998 Quebec provincial election (which in turn was an unsurprising "clone" seats-wise of the 1994 election, but which had a very different popular vote split, where the winner was the Quebec Liberal Party under former Mulroney cabinet minister Jean Charest). Moreover, the sponsorship program was designed to prop up Jean Charest's popularity as well, and he did become premier in 2003, not-entirely-coincidentally at the height of the scandalous abuse of the secret federalist slush fund.
Martin could have admitted that he knew all this, and that the scandalousness was a necessary (and ultimately pretty small, and probably recoverable) cost of effectively destroying the sovereignty platform in Quebec. It would have been very difficult for him as an Ontario-born anglophone, but certainly not impossible.
Instead, he did two things that helped destroy his predecessor John Turner. Turner had been finance minister under Trudeau and assigned blame to Trudeau for financial awkwardnesses when he returned to fight for the leadership of the party. He also called a quick election because he "wanted a new mandate" and to capitalize on his supposed "newness" and "popularity" while the Conservatives were still breaking in their new leader, Brian Mulroney. (Turner also had a much smaller majority in the House of Commons). Martin had been finance minister under Chretien and assigned blame to Chretien for the sponsorship scandal when he returned to fight for the leadership of the party. Martin called a quick election because he "wanted a new mandate" and to capitalize on his supposed "newness" and "popularity" (and ability to parachute in candidates of his own choosing, even against the will of the local grassroots riding associations)...
Two very good points that Martin was unwilling or unable to bring up clearly and early. He would not admit that he was involved in any aspect of the scandal, thus destroying his ability to accept blame with exactly t
This only worked thanks to Article 26 of the Constitution Act, 1867, which reads:
Mulroney had been in power for several years by 1989, and the deaths and mandatory retirements of several old Liberal senators left a number of open Senate seats, which he filled as it became clearer that the Senate committee studying the bill after second reading had interviewed enough credible witnesses with strong reservations about the GST would recommend that the Senate not give the bill third reading (killing the GST). The use of Article 26 to appoint eight divisional Senators gave the Conservatives a slim majority of the then 112 Senators.
Even still, it took a decision by the (appointed) Speaker of the Senate to hold a vote in the absence of the Opposition Whip, contrary to the Rules of the Senate, in order to pass the GST after months of delay in the Senate.
Mandatory retirements and deaths during the post-Mulroney years has left the Liberals with 65 of 105 Senators. The CPC has 24, and there are 3 "Progressive Conservatives".
At the moment, only 7 Article 26 Senators can be appointed, and there are 7 vacancies.
24+3+7+7 = 41 Senators which would support the Government, if all vacancies were filled, and Article 26 was exercised.
An independent Senator (Madeleine Plamondon) must retire in September, a Liberal (Jack Austin) must retire in March 2007. Barring untimely deaths, the next resignation useful to the current government will be in Feb 2008 (Senator Fitzpatrick), August and October 2008 (Senators Gill, Christensen and Trenholm).
In short, there is no plausible means by which the current government can break Liberal control of the Senate before it is Constitutionally obliged to face a general election.
The NDP cannot unilaterally deprive the government of the House of Commons's confidence.
They have only 29 seats. The government has 125 seats. The BQ has 51 and the Liberals 103. There is one independent. Ignoring that one of the Liberals is Speaker of the House of Commons and will vote only in the event of a tie, the relevant results are:
125+51 > 103+29+1 (176-133) -- BQ keeps the government alive -- and we have seen this vote in divisions already this session
125+103 > 51+29+1 (228-81) -- Liberals keep the government alive -- and we have seen this too, in this session
Unignoring the Speaker's voting tradition:
125+29 = 102+51+1 (154-154, Speaker casts the tie vote 154-155) -- NDP fails to keep the government alive
The interesting question here is whether the Liberals, who can defeat most legislation in the Senate, or have the Senate insist upon amendments to most legislation, would join the BQ and NDP in defeating the current government before they have elected a new leader.
The Liberals have been clear that they would support Bill Graham, the interim leader, as Prime Minister until a new leader is elected by the party, and that they might be able to sell this state of affairs to the Canadian electorate.
However, a possibly exciting leadership contest (okay, that's a stretch), a possibly exciting new leader (maybe less of a stretch), and some time to make apologetic noises about the sponsorship scandal, plus some time for the Conservatives to shoot more of their toes off, may be preferable.
It is possible for the Liberals to not support the Conservatives in the House of Commons, without depri
2006 Election results (308 seats), rounded:
CPC 40% of seats, 36% of popular vote
LIB 33% of seats, 30.2% of popular vote
BQ 17% of seats, 11% of popular vote
NDP 9% of seats, 18% of popular vote
IND 0.3% of seats, 0.6% of popular vote
GRN 0% of seats, 4.5% of popular vote
No other party got more than 0.32% of the popular vote, which would give 1 seat in a PR system.
Note that the BQ fielded candidates only in Quebec. In that province, the results were (for 75 seats, rounded):
CPC 13% of seats, 25% of popular vote
LIB 17% of seats, 21% of popular vote
NDP 0% of seats, 8% of popular vote
IND 0.1% of seats, 1% of popular vote
BQ 68% of seats, 42% of popular vote
Alberta and Prince Edward Island are also interesting, in that only Conservatives were elected in the former (28 Conservatives, 65% popular vote) and in the latter only Liberals (4 Liberals, 53% of popular vote).
Given the history of Canada East (now Quebec) with respect to "rep by pop", it is unlikely that the Bloc Quebecois would abandon the first-past-the-post system. In the 39th Parliament's House of Commons, the Conservatives are over-represented in Saskatchewan, Manitoba and British Columbia -- the Western power-base of the CPC -- and are also unlikely to support a change.
Uhm, they don't hold the balance of power, because they cannot combine with either party and guarantee a majority of the House of Commons.
CPC 125
LIB 102
BQ 51
NDP 29
IND 1
CPC+NDP vs rest: 154 vs 154 (technically 153 as the Speaker (elected as a Liberal) votes only in the event of a tie)
LIB+NDP vs rest : 131 vs 176 ("")
BQ+NDP vs rest: 80 vs 227 ("")
However, the CPC were unable to get the NDP to agree to support them for two years (with no "24 hour flu" outbreaks on confidence votes, or NDP MPs voting against their whip) in exchange for supporting some NDP initiatives.
Full attendance is impractical in any event, and the working vote splits will be somewhat different.
More practically, there have been several divisions in the last few days which have gone 175-115 +/- (CPC+BQ vs LIB+NDP) on ways and means motions geared towards passing the Conservatives' budget.
This is the Bloc holding the balance of power, and not the NDP. This is not surprising, since what are now CPC and BQ constituencies often voted PC in the Mulroney era. Remember Meech Lake, and Mulroney and Lucien Bouchard being close friends?
As to lack of power leading to lack of corruption, there have been several provincial NDP governments which are remembered unfondly, and several current NDP MPs have had some scandals in municipal government. Jack Layton, the leader, and his wife Olivia Chow, both MPs, had a noisy scandal about living in government subsidized housing despite their ineligibity for subsidy because of their high combined income.
Also amusing is that the former NDP premier of Ontario, Bob Rae, is a candidate for the leadership of the (according to you) quite corrupt Liberal party. What does he know that Mr Layton doesn't?
You've got one right (no Three Mile Island).
However, pebble-bed reactors certainly could melt down. The pebbles are extremely thermally stable and a critical pile of them will happily produce temperatures up to ca. 2700K before they deform (due to melting of the pyrolitic carbon). The fissile materials are stable oxides or carbides of Uranium, are heavy, and will happily sustain a critical reaction in a melted pool of neutron moderator (e.g., carbon). The major limits to heat are doppler broadening (which won't stop "China Syndrome" meltdowns), which depends enormously on the arrangement of the neutron moderating material, or the arrival of Oxygen to burn away the moderator in a fire.
Thus the safety engineering challenge of pebble bed reactors is to minimize the reactivity in the core (which means carefully balancing the number and "age" of pebbles in the bed through constant (re)fuelling) and to prevent any deformation of the pellets themselves, as that would permit neutron passage through the graphite in the pellet. Moreover, the reactor must be able to deal with long-term operation at the high "idle" temperature at which a reasonable worst-case runaway chain reaction will reach. Underdesign in any of these areas would be risky in terms of meltdown, or entry into the core of normal Oxygen-containing, fire-enabling atmosphere.
A fire would be different from Chernobyl, where the fire itself released many TBq of radioactive fuel particles -- the fissiles are in heavy pellets which won't disperse easily even in a raging hot fire, however there is likely to be some radioactive (and merely chemically poisonous) material in the smoke anyway.
Karen Silkwood was (allegedly) offed because she had evidence of accidents at the chemical level thanks to shoddy management at a fuel processing plant. The pebble manufacturing facility may also suffer from chemical (rather than nuclear) risk as well -- there are many dangerous and toxic substances involved in producing the pebbles and their input components.
Although the pebble bed design is efficient (especially in terms of thermal gradient) and possibly much safer than highly pressurized light water reactors, it is not as passively safe as a pressurized heavy water reactor. Current PHWRs run with a much smaller pressure vessel thanks to constraints on heavy industry in Canada during the development of early CANDU. This practically eliminates any dangerous phase-change steam explsions. A breech of the pressure vessel dumps the moderator, terminating the reaction entirely. The heavy water moderator is not thermally stable, and if it does not simply leak out it will boil off at temperatures much lower than the melting points of the fuel assemblies. Fuelling irregularities are well-tolerated (unlike in pebble-bed reactors).
The amount of heavy water needed in modern PHWR designs has decreased enough that it is no longer a massive cost constraint on the design; the thermal gradient disadvantage of running cooler has also been improved.
Finally, PHWRs in general can burn all sorts of fuels from highly enriched or slightly enriched Uranium, to natural Uranium ore, to Plutonium, to waste from pressurized light water reactors or weapons. The small-fuel-assembly/small-pressure-vessel design of CANDU makes arranging different fuel cycles a problem of calculating the appropriate geometry and rearranging the materials from time to time while the reactor is in operation. This also allows for breeding fissile fuels from e.g. Thorium, but it also allows breeding weapons materials, and this proliferation aspect has been abused (by India, for one). Pebble-beds by requiring tight pebble tolerances to avoid accidents are much less likely to be used as breeder reactors, however they can be, by adjusting the mix of pebbles conveyed through the contiuous (re)fuelling process. This might
Chill out, dude. I'm not even American.
No, B. germanica, like other arthropods, has two primary active immunocytes, namely the granulocytes and the plasmatocytes. The former are particularly cool in the cockroach -- their granulocytes (GRs) discover, encapsulate, and phagocytize foreign substances. In fact, unlike in other arthropods, cockroach GRs are particularly active in terms of encapsulation; they flatten and increase the number of microtubules and nuclear membrane pores. The latter mechanism enables the rapid production of tubulin by increasing the "channel width" between the ribosomes and the nuclear DNA. The former protects the GRs from the shearing forces the rapid encapsulation response creates within the cell. The cockroach GRs are in some ways closer to the human macrophage than to typical arthropod active immunocytes.
Plasmatocytes (PLs) adhere to foreign substances in a clotting response geared to isolate it from the rest of the cockroach. PLs also have a phagocytizing role in the cockroach.
Both the GRs and the PLs display an accelerated response if the organism is reintroduced to the same foreign substance. This suggests that the cockroach immunocytes have the same sort of "memory" as vertebrate neutrophils and macrophages.
Cockroaches meanwhile are also a host to a variety of microbes which provide a degree of passive immune response to common antigens -- various intestinal flora produce narrow-spectrum antibiotics which ward off dangerous infections.
Although cockroaches have somewhat weaker structural defences against infection (spiracles for breathing instead of cilliated, mucous-protected airways; low pressure in the hemolymph instead of a bleeding response which washes away microbes in the envent of a skin/chitin-penetrating trauma), they have a highly-reactive immunoresponse which is less-costly energy-wise for the individual than regenerating tissues destroyed by infection and more successful (in the evolutionary fitness sense) for the species as a whole than accepting a lowered production of viable offspring because individuals are debilitated by infectious disease.
In general the more cosmopolitan pests in Blattaria/Blattodea are biologically successful because they can cope with all sorts of toxins and microbes found in household detritus and waste that concentrates in cockroach feces, which is usually found near -- or in -- their food supply.
So you would be more right if you said that cockroaches are evolving in environments full of infectious agents, and are obviously pretty successful there.
Otherwise healthy household mammals that encounter cockroaches have little to fear from cockroaches, their "helpful" microbes, their "harmful" microbes (which are held in check by the cockroach immune system), or whatever concentrates in their feces, except that there are some humans (and probably other mammals) who suffer an intense immunoglobin-E mediated allergic reaction to many antigens which accumulate in cockroach poo.
and
Then why would you be surprised that the purchase price of property is closely related to the present value of rents payable across the duration of the property's ownership?
Housing speculation is generally based on externalities (urbanization, gentrification) driving house price inflation.
As to the valuation of the U.S. dollar and your home heating anecdote...
No, the concept isn't understood at all. Perhaps you could trade your simplicity for a bit of accuracy. That may help.
Because demand increases relative to supply? In most OECD countries, urban real estate is appreciating in value relative to other items (commodities, money, metals, chattels) because people are moving to cities. Rural real estate is depreciating.
and
I think you have a problem with at least decimals. Google 1 SEK in USD and find that one U.S. dollar buys you 7.5561231 Swedish kronor (note plural of krona).
Similarly you should find it easy to find that the annualized inflation rate in the USA has been below 4% since 2000, and that (to be really generous to you) the biggest jump in reported monthly inflation since 2000 was 1.22% (Aug-Sep 2005).
M3 = M2+eurodollars+repos+CD worth more than $100 000.
"Eurodollars" are overseas/foreign-bank deposits denominated in USD.
M3 was considered to be shaky because it is hard to hunt down eurodollars and all repos. The error bars were large enough to account plausibly for the final 8.22% annualized growth posted this March; the difference between M3 growth and the other money supply markers could be because of earlier poor uncovering of M3 input data.
M3 has not been central to interest rate policy for some time -- the Congress has allowed the increase of the M3 debt ceiling rather than require the Fed to convert M3 deposits into government debt.
Incidentally, the European Central Bank's official target of 4.5% M3 growth has also not been met -- EuroM3 growth was an annual 8.0% in February 2006.
It appears that other central banks reject the idea that the Fed (or the ECB) is deliberately covering up an expansionist monetary policy -- otherwise there would be a fall-off in the increases in foreign central bank dollar reserves and a likely run on other fungibles. There is no evidence of this, unless you want to get into crude crude oil conspiracy theories.
No, not to the death; just until someone clearly outlines unfixable real weaknesses that suggest another dramatic change to international finance is necessary. This happens from time to time.
You have not done so in this thread. Sorry.
Well... really what would have to change is (non-recursive-querying) resolver code, and since that is distributed to practically every Internet host, that likely would take time.
However, the server-side and administrative-side changes would stay largely the same, and there is no need to abandon hierarchical delegation of parts of the global distributed dabase.
There are two obvious approaches.
The first possible approach is to group arbitrary strings into three-or-four character groups and look up those substrings hierarchically. For example, "unformatteddomainname" would result in lookups for "name" "main" "eddo" etc., essentially as if it were originally written "u.nfor.matt.eddo.main.name." under the current system, with authoritative nameservers for the root and each subdomain.
An alternative hierarchicalization of arbitrary domain names -- implemented and demonstrated in practice -- is detailed in RFC 2317 which allows for non-octet-boundary IN-ADDR.ARPA. DNS names, since classless inter-domain routing has a different hierarchy from the legacy DNS.