Your party platform contains scary restrictions on freedom of speech, freedom of association, and freedom of commerce. Your platform is full of hidden subsidies to banks, "homeowners", medical insurance, and other powerful political interest groups. Before you add more nonsense to your platform, why don't you fix that first?
Those silly socialist Germans with their free health care and consumer rights.
Germany doesn't have "free health care", it has mandatory, regulated private insurance. And you have no idea how royally screwed German consumers are; a non-profit suing Google and Valve doesn't change that.
Germany industry hates that Google offers free services. If this stands, if Google is required to provide free support for German users of their free services, they would basically have to stop offering the service, which would be great from the point of view of German companies, and bad for German consumers, who end up being back in the arms of their overpriced monopolistic German overlords.
It's not the apps that I bash, it's the Java platform: it set out to deliver a great cross platform experience and it failed, because what it attempted to do is impossible. The only way you can get a good experience on each platform is to customize your app for each platform.
Whether they are "nice" or not in and of themselves isn't the point. They fail to integrate with the desktop, they don't behave like native apps, and they don't look like native apps either.
Java language evolution has been cosmetic, not substantive; Sun and Oracle have refused to fix things at the VM level. As a result, Java has fallen behind more and more over the years.
Java is "the language of choice" for programming in roughly the same way that the military is "the method of choice" for dealing with diplomatic problems.
Actually, Citizens United shows that the ACLU is not yet complete in the pocket of progressives and socialists, preserving at least a shred of credibility for them.
The ACLU has had serious mission creep. It should stick to defending civil liberties, consistently and across the board. Instead, it has turned into an advocacy group for progressive causes, at times even contradicting its core mission. Now it seems to be thinking of itself as a consumer advocacy group in the area of technology. WTF are they thinking?
US, Canadian and European governments also spy on their citizens. So Mozilla now needs to determine whose spying is good and whose spying is bad. I'm not sure that's a business that Mozilla should be in.
Perhaps a better solution would be to make it easier and more user friendly for people to detect questionable certificates and choose which certificates you trust. But, of course, that would upset Western governments...
In other words, if the author had included more points than his cherry-picked few, it would make the hypothesis of a generally exponential evolutionary trend (passing through and extrapolable back from early prokaryotes) appear patently ridiculous.
Nobody knows what prokaryotic genome size was because bacteria don't evolve like higher organisms. Any number at that point is a guess, but it's OK to guess if you say so.
it would make the hypothesis of a generally exponential evolutionary trend (passing through and extrapolable back from early prokaryotes) appear patently ridiculous
No, it would merely make it weakly supported, not "ridiculous". And weakly supported or speculative ideas are most certainly publishable. The scientific literature is not a repository of proven truths, it's a repository of materials that scientists like to read, and that includes speculative and "far out" ideas. Because even if the authors of these papers can't make the data stick, someone else can take these ideas and either find evidence for or against them. Sorry, man, but you're just not a scientist.
Ahh, I see, a reference to the author's own previous paper, in which he says basically the same stuff with a bit more detail.
Hence my point: peer review doesn't guarantee anything about the quality or correctness of the paper. It wouldn't have made any difference if this paper had been peer reviewed or not.
(As for you, you're just a sloppy reader and apparently cannot follow a simple argument.)
One key thing that immediately entirely disqualifies it: there is absolutely no discussion of how/why they selected the six data point categories on their main plot
There is a reference to a published paper that explains it, which is the way this sort of thing works in the sciences.
I'm not defending the paper (there are lots of things wrong with it), but both "anonymous" and you seem to be having real trouble reading scientific papers and understanding peer review.
This is a fine example of how not to use arXiv as a news source.
You don't understand what peer review is about. Peer review doesn't guarantee that a paper is true or even reasonable. Peer review, in general, just says that a paper is of sufficient interest to be published.
and it is based on bad assumptions about complexity and offers a handy False Dilemma Fallacy.
The paper doesn't make any "assumptions" about complexity, nor does it pose a "dilemma". It just measures a number associated with genomes and extrapolates that number back to where it reaches zero. Then it starts speculating wildly.
This old yarn has been trotted out before,
Really? Instead of wildly waving your hands about "fallacies" and "peer review", why don't you behave like a proper little scientist and provide an actual reference to prior work?
Unfortunately, this is one of those instances where capitalism is not the best solution for everyone
"Capitalism" has nothing to do with it. The question is whether a free market can produce these goods.
Additionally, in a purely capitalist society, the people who bear the cost for drug research are people who are already sick, and thus less able to work.
There are certainly market-based solutions for this: health insurance companies would have to pay you based on your pain, suffering, and years of life lost. In that case, they have an incentive to keep you healthy for as long as possible with drugs and treatments that are as cheap as possible. Whether such solutions would emerge in a free market is an open question (it's not clear people actually really want it even though they say they do). But one thing is abundantly clear: low cost drugs and efficient health care cannot exist in the current highly regulated environment, in particular since a lot of the regulations are written by drug companies and insurance companies themselves (including the latest gigantic corporate give-away, Obamacare).
Exceptions "for good causes" for existing copyright and patent laws that he has been pushing for end up legitimizing the laws themselves. Laws and regulations related to medicine often end up just making drug manufacturers richer or protect them from competition further. In the end, Nader/Love-style efforts view more government regulation as the solution, but those regulations usually end up becoming tools by which corporations enrich themselves and by which bad laws become legitimate as "compromises".
From what I read, Schwartz only had access to the library because his father was on staff. ID was required which is how they found him the copying data, the first time. I doubt this changed the second time he was caught.
Your information is completely wrong.
Even the prosecutor admitted that they were stacking charges to force a plea bargain. The prosecutors office admitted it was a common tactic to get pleas.
This is the official statement from the prosecutor's office:
I must, however, make clear that this office’s conduct was appropriate in bringing and handling this case. The career prosecutors handling this matter took on the difficult task of enforcing a law they had taken an oath to uphold, and did so reasonably. The prosecutors recognized that there was no evidence against Mr. Swartz indicating that he committed his acts for personal financial gain, and they recognized that his conduct – while a violation of the law – did not warrant the severe punishments authorized by Congress and called for by the Sentencing Guidelines in appropriate cases. That is why in the discussions with his counsel about a resolution of the case this office sought an appropriate sentence that matched the alleged conduct – a sentence that we would recommend to the judge of six months in a low security setting. While at the same time, his defense counsel would have been free to recommend a sentence of probation. Ultimately, any sentence imposed would have been up to the judge. At no time did this office ever seek – or ever tell Mr. Swartz’s attorneys that it intended to seek – maximum penalties under the law.
Maybe you are claiming that I'm wrong in the post you pulled up from history? I really don't know what your point is
My point is that you don't know elementary concepts in chemistry, yet presume to speak with certainty about pollution, the environment, etc.
I still find it odd that they would call pollutants from burning fossil fuels, and of course remnant pesticides "Organic".
"They" have done this for a few centuries and taught it in high school (and again in college) for at least a century. We aren't talking about an obscure little aspect of chemistry, the organic/inorganic distinction was of profound importance in the history of science. What's "odd" is that someone who thinks himself educated simply doesn't know any of this stuff.
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Your party platform contains scary restrictions on freedom of speech, freedom of association, and freedom of commerce. Your platform is full of hidden subsidies to banks, "homeowners", medical insurance, and other powerful political interest groups. Before you add more nonsense to your platform, why don't you fix that first?
Germany doesn't have "free health care", it has mandatory, regulated private insurance. And you have no idea how royally screwed German consumers are; a non-profit suing Google and Valve doesn't change that.
Germany industry hates that Google offers free services. If this stands, if Google is required to provide free support for German users of their free services, they would basically have to stop offering the service, which would be great from the point of view of German companies, and bad for German consumers, who end up being back in the arms of their overpriced monopolistic German overlords.
It's not the apps that I bash, it's the Java platform: it set out to deliver a great cross platform experience and it failed, because what it attempted to do is impossible. The only way you can get a good experience on each platform is to customize your app for each platform.
Better than a citation: just download desktop Java apps and run them on OS X or Gnome or KDE.
No, just truth.
Whether they are "nice" or not in and of themselves isn't the point. They fail to integrate with the desktop, they don't behave like native apps, and they don't look like native apps either.
You may like Java as a developer, but Java fails to integrate properly with any of the desktops; Java desktop apps are a nightmare.
Java language evolution has been cosmetic, not substantive; Sun and Oracle have refused to fix things at the VM level. As a result, Java has fallen behind more and more over the years.
Java is "the language of choice" for programming in roughly the same way that the military is "the method of choice" for dealing with diplomatic problems.
Is Cerf getting senile? Or does he have large amounts of stock in an SDN company?
Actually, Citizens United shows that the ACLU is not yet complete in the pocket of progressives and socialists, preserving at least a shred of credibility for them.
The ACLU has had serious mission creep. It should stick to defending civil liberties, consistently and across the board. Instead, it has turned into an advocacy group for progressive causes, at times even contradicting its core mission. Now it seems to be thinking of itself as a consumer advocacy group in the area of technology. WTF are they thinking?
US, Canadian and European governments also spy on their citizens. So Mozilla now needs to determine whose spying is good and whose spying is bad. I'm not sure that's a business that Mozilla should be in.
Perhaps a better solution would be to make it easier and more user friendly for people to detect questionable certificates and choose which certificates you trust. But, of course, that would upset Western governments...
Nobody knows what prokaryotic genome size was because bacteria don't evolve like higher organisms. Any number at that point is a guess, but it's OK to guess if you say so.
No, it would merely make it weakly supported, not "ridiculous". And weakly supported or speculative ideas are most certainly publishable. The scientific literature is not a repository of proven truths, it's a repository of materials that scientists like to read, and that includes speculative and "far out" ideas. Because even if the authors of these papers can't make the data stick, someone else can take these ideas and either find evidence for or against them. Sorry, man, but you're just not a scientist.
Hence my point: peer review doesn't guarantee anything about the quality or correctness of the paper. It wouldn't have made any difference if this paper had been peer reviewed or not.
(As for you, you're just a sloppy reader and apparently cannot follow a simple argument.)
There is a reference to a published paper that explains it, which is the way this sort of thing works in the sciences.
I'm not defending the paper (there are lots of things wrong with it), but both "anonymous" and you seem to be having real trouble reading scientific papers and understanding peer review.
You don't understand what peer review is about. Peer review doesn't guarantee that a paper is true or even reasonable. Peer review, in general, just says that a paper is of sufficient interest to be published.
The paper doesn't make any "assumptions" about complexity, nor does it pose a "dilemma". It just measures a number associated with genomes and extrapolates that number back to where it reaches zero. Then it starts speculating wildly.
Really? Instead of wildly waving your hands about "fallacies" and "peer review", why don't you behave like a proper little scientist and provide an actual reference to prior work?
We could call it "Smalltalk-80"!
"Capitalism" has nothing to do with it. The question is whether a free market can produce these goods.
There are certainly market-based solutions for this: health insurance companies would have to pay you based on your pain, suffering, and years of life lost. In that case, they have an incentive to keep you healthy for as long as possible with drugs and treatments that are as cheap as possible. Whether such solutions would emerge in a free market is an open question (it's not clear people actually really want it even though they say they do). But one thing is abundantly clear: low cost drugs and efficient health care cannot exist in the current highly regulated environment, in particular since a lot of the regulations are written by drug companies and insurance companies themselves (including the latest gigantic corporate give-away, Obamacare).
Exceptions "for good causes" for existing copyright and patent laws that he has been pushing for end up legitimizing the laws themselves. Laws and regulations related to medicine often end up just making drug manufacturers richer or protect them from competition further. In the end, Nader/Love-style efforts view more government regulation as the solution, but those regulations usually end up becoming tools by which corporations enrich themselves and by which bad laws become legitimate as "compromises".
No, but one ought to have at least a high-school level understanding of science; you apparently don't. Don't try to defend the indefensible.
Your information is completely wrong.
This is the official statement from the prosecutor's office:
Where does she "admit" what you say she "admits"?
I doubt it. New Yorkers manage to deal with aggressive window washers; what are a few 50 foot Pythons in comparison?
My point is that you don't know elementary concepts in chemistry, yet presume to speak with certainty about pollution, the environment, etc.
"They" have done this for a few centuries and taught it in high school (and again in college) for at least a century. We aren't talking about an obscure little aspect of chemistry, the organic/inorganic distinction was of profound importance in the history of science. What's "odd" is that someone who thinks himself educated simply doesn't know any of this stuff.