For 1, Selenium isn't a metal. For 2, it's a necessary part of the diet of all known forms of life (it's a micronutrient). Seeing as you're not an expert on the subject, how about you STFU?
I'll see your STFU and raise you an RTFA (to the original poster), from the Wired article, "He genetically enhanced the plant's ability to convert selenium into a nontoxic form"
The US versus one of the five largest armies in the world? (and larger than France's or Germany's, FWIW). You can say lots of things about the occupation, or the coming elections, or your ideal of humanitarian aid. In terms of civialian an miltary deaths this was the most bloodless war every fought between two of the largest armies (I won't say top armies, numbers != strength).
It is neat to highlight where we did our worst, but the fact is we kicked ass. I'm too old (the recruiter thanked me for my time post 9-11) but my brother was called up from national guard and my younger fraternity brothers did time in "the sandbox" Rummy is wrong on points ("lighter and faster" still aint as good as "morer and heavier") but I read the damned article and the idea that we didn't have perfect information is both valid and shit. That happens, "no plan survives contact with the enemy"
Any marketing department would be fired if they merely didn't lose. Winning means pushing the boundaries.
0.30 x 0.70 == 0.21 chance (minimum, assuming no correlation) that you would believe both of these things siumultaneously. Probably higher with the moniker of "Marixst Hacker 42"
acting pursuant to the Constitution and Public Law 107-243 is consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.
The letter is cute out of context, but the fact that it isn't frequently sited implies no one else finds it damning. Regime change in Iraq was offical policy under Clinton well before 9-11. It is debatable how signifigant Hussein's support of Al Queda and Hamas was but not its existance.
I'll side with the top post, as in "Is this news to anyone?"
I'll take umbrage with the fact that the submitter and the linked summary both imply Bush voters are insane while Kerry voters aren't. The partisanship of Bush voters was highlighted but the fact that over 70% of Kerry voters think the US economy is worse than a year ago (wha?!) is partisan too, they want it to be true. Kerry voters also have a more deluded POV of Bush voters, 30% think that Bush said Iraq was involved in 9-11, several times higher than Bush voters (eg, the Bush voters aren't quite the rubes Kerry voters want them to be).
That's isn't a balanced take, but the OP and the summary were slanted to slam Bush voters, so there ya go. I noticed some of the results used in the summary weren't in the detailed report too.
Only problem is american or german tourists not looking/behaving like american or german tourists. You never realize they are american or german tourists to begin with. Bastards.
Agreed, I lived in Australia for a year (I'm an American) and the "Americans" are easy to spot (A peircing female New Jersey accent carries for miles) but there are many more that you only notice on closer inpsection, and presumably some not at all.
Contra example, when I was in Paris recently with my family we stuck out like a sore thumb as all the males were wearing khaki pants, backpacks (day packs), and shoes. Shoes aren't unusual per se, but dark sneakers seemed to be the norm in mufti/casual. Pick pockets were _everywhere_ and most conspicuously by the signs that said "beware of pickpockets". At first I wondered how 30 guys could make any money selling $1 keychains to a pool of 100 tourists (with no tourists buying) and then I had my ah-ha moment. Five guys surrounding one tourist to sell a $1 trinket == Fucking gypsies.
Ah no, the evil genius of Karl Rove is far more subtle. The computers were _actually_ stolen, and he convinced some low level DNC patsies to do it because:
1) The plans on the computers were fake outs 2) The low level patsies will be easilly caught, making for a scandal 3) Karl Rove is eeeeEEEEvil.
This comment is not the opinion of the author, just guessing what democracticunderground.com will be saying about now.
A minority of python CVS commiters run windows or OSX but there is a fair number; they keep the canonical interpreter happy on those systems. Throw in Jython (python to JVM bytecode) and IronPython (python to dotnet/mono bytecode) and pirate (pie-in-the-face inability to make python into parrot bytecode) and that is pretty portable.
Also, the python 2.3 release was timed to coincide with the OSX panther release. I make demo CDs for clients that run windows with exes on them (really just a python interpreter and files crammed into an exe, but it makes it easier for them).
Technically OSX might be UNIX but to Mac fanboys "UNIX" is just the newest reason that they kick windows' ass. They didn't care when it wasn't UNIX and they don't care now. They do care about OSX because... Its got frigin drop shadows, DROP SHADOWS. [if that wasn't funny you haven't gotten multiple client requests for a 'contact' page that includes the postal address with frigin DROP SHADOWS]
"The young man goes to a tin teapot in the kitchen which is powered by a solar panel. When the water comes to the boil, the boy makes the tea, pours it into a traditional vacuum flask"
I call abuse of cute adjectives! I haven't read up on Afghan culture but I'm willing to bet vacuum thermoses are about as "traditional" as solar panels.
I did C++ for years before I switched to Python, and writing the same thing in python takes a third of the lines and is much more readable. If you do hardcore bit banging and pointer arithmatic python takes ten times fewer lines (at the sacrifice of speed). When speed matters I still do that part of the program in C or C++ which is called from python, but I only do it when I have to (premature optimisation is the root of all evil, etc etc).
CPU hours are cheap, developers hours aren't. I personally prefer python over perl/ruby but either one is better than their lower level friends (C, C++, Java). Perl loses here because the C & C++ interface is terrible, python and ruby are sane (and again, I prefer python). There is even a python interpreter that compiles to native java byte code [jython] if you want it (I don't, I'm fine with writing hotspot functions in C or tiny objects in C++).
Your friend was willing to pay $100 for a game knowing he could sell it for $40 later. So he was actually only willing to pay $60 for the game.
If you eliminated the secondary market some of the people that buy lots of games would buy fewer games. The people that buy used games would buy a smaller number of new games.
If the game makers are lucky things would come out about the same, but word of mouth would be hurt because the used market increases the number of eyeballs even if it doesn't directly pad the bottom line.
green: See? You all have mad cow disease now, we told you it was coming! public: Didn't you take credit for sneaking onto farms and feeding cows diseased brains? green: Inevitable! we told you! public: You realize we have to kill most of the cows and use more grain to raise new ones? green: Blasphemy! Reform! Extreme measures are required! public: To keep down costs we're going to use GM corn. green: We will burn your GM crops! Repent! public: You seem pretty bent on killing us. So we're going to take the easy route and kill you first. green: Err, can't we talk about this?
I don't know if you've ever had the experience of telling people the "truth" (as you see it), and then being ignored. You seem to be a stickler for [modern kinds of] mythology. I suggest you read about Cassandra...
I read the link in your.sig, and the sample chapter. The book is about very modern myth, that of a "noble savage" past that if we all returned to everything would be glorious (justice prevails, man is in balance with nature, etc). If you are under eighteen you can be excused for liking it, but ask around there are much better writers with the same uptopian themes.
As for Cassandra, have you heard of a "Cassandra Complex"? (google search sucks, a band with that name floods the results). A Cassandra Complex is the belief that you alone know the truth but no one will listen to you. Cassandra had one (she was kinda entitled to it), but so do many people who mean well but are completely wrong. If you see yourself as Cassandra but everyone calls you "chicken little" you have more than a dose and you are actually a chicken little (unless you are the leading researcher in your field who's groundbreaking study hasn't been published yet, which I doubt).
Is the "I didn't know" defence become legitimate if it takes a highly trained expert and millions of dollars of equipment to determine if the plant has been pateneded or not?
In this case it would probably be a non-issue because it would be more expensive for Monsanto to find offenders than they would recoup from suing them.
Diamond guys like DeBeers almost have this problem now, artificial diamonds are so good the equipment to detect "fakes" costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. It is harder to convince the public to buy the "real" thing when not even a trained jeweler can tell the difference. WARNING: Using this argument with your girlfriend may have negative effects.
(What's even funnier is that research shows these crops neither require fewer pesticides nor produce greater yields.)
If true, Monsanto is SOL from the get go. Publish the supporting studies in some farmer's quarterlies and the problem just goes away because no one would plant Monsanto seeds.
Unless you believe corporation are evil and can bend the minds of the public at will. But only side show True Believers say stuff like that, and you are probably a level headed practical guy.
Corporations have seriously fucked entire local economies with gestapo policies like the one this article is reporting
Yes, if your child (with the paid for, modified gene) has her own child before her eleventh birthday she'll have to pay. If she holds out to say, sixteen, the patent will have expired.
if you consider yourself a libertarian, this is perhaps the most important right--to determine the time of your own death.
No one that has ever killed themselves has told me he regreted it afterwards. It is common for failed or stopped suicides to exrpess regret at even trying. You have to try really hard to pretend only the first class were making a rational decision. Extreme (or poser) Libertarianism requires that people be allowed to make their own choices without exception, but the implication is that they will make rational decisions.
As an extreme (or poser) libertarian you would agree that someone in emotional distress shouldn't be allowed to kill another unwilling person, right? That still holds If the person to be killed is himself.
This is an opinion from a guy who reads Reason magazine, and I voted for Harry Brown. So that makes you a freak job (or a teenaged poser).
man that was a painful article to read. Never has so much been written by one man that means less to so many who can read [English].
This man couldn't be more uniteresting, less politcal, or less aware of _existing projects_ (*cough* freenet *cough*).
Crypto? RSS? Blogs? Why bother extrapolating from things that are highly effective right now when you can go a different way and get posted to slasdhot?
-1 Karma for the article becuase it comes from the BBC. Britons paid for this obviousness "drunk people more promiscuous, study finds" journalism.
1) Do you think the US interferes with the natural market processes or are they hyper captilisists? Please pick one.
2) Oil isn't running out in our lifetime. Oh sure, if you look around some people think it will but people have predicted apocalypse (food, ice age) for two hundred years.
3) Clever about the US defense bugdet and the US killing for oil and all. Your country pays the same for oil on the world market as the US does. Tax a $1 gallon of gas $5 and it will cost $6. Mereley tax it $1 (like in the US) at it will cost $2.
here is a Frenchman(!) writing about the "new" anti-Americanism. His point is that the hate isn't new at all, just a hundreds of years old envy directed against someone new. (although the US has been the object for the last hundred plus).
The US seems to be like a spoiled child that wants all the remaining cheap energy to feed its ever-increasing needs. You seem like a spoiled child who refuses to believe your family isn't better off or more deserving than your neighbor.
I have mod points, but I posted instead of just modding you down.
You can't say "there is a medium diameter horizontal axis generator on the dorsal surface" without also saying "I am a marine physicist who accidentally posted shop-talk." If you leave that out you just said "I am a giant ass" or "Remember on Star Trek when they used ten words when two would do? I was that writer"
What would be a large diameter generator on a never before seen prototype? And what does being on the center-middle-top have to do with it?
"The turbine looking thing probably _is_ a turbine, so it swims up and down to make it spin" Was that so hard?
So the patent looks silly on the face, but the opening claims are easy to work around and make it hard for them to sue:
a method of incorporating at least one data structure from the database into a browser cookie to reduce accesses to the database
Okay, the stuff I'm storing in the cookie isn't the same as a structure in my database. FOAD. You think it is? I say it is half a structure from my database. Or one item from each of five structures in my database.
They could drown you in lawsuits, but they didn't need a patent to do that anyway.
old: replace the operative word with "black" or "white" and see if the sentence still makes sense. If It doesn't -- you're a racist!
new: replace the operative word with "freakishly tall librarian" and see if the sentence still makes sense. If it doesn't -- congratulations, this issue isn't black and white!
we call them cliches because they didn't die when they stopped being useful.
Slashdot Mirror
For 1, Selenium isn't a metal. For 2, it's a necessary part of the diet of all known forms of life (it's a micronutrient). Seeing as you're not an expert on the subject, how about you STFU?
I'll see your STFU and raise you an RTFA (to the original poster), from the Wired article, "He genetically enhanced the plant's ability to convert selenium into a nontoxic form"
Sturgeon's Law.
Interviewer: Why is 90% of Sci-Fi crap?
Scifi Author: Because 90% of everything is crap.
I've got karma out the ass, #28066 means "mod me down and I will only quote star wars" or something.
Sorry to sound uppity but I know plenty of people gladly risking their necks in Iraq - and at a guess You don't.
The US versus one of the five largest armies in the world? (and larger than France's or Germany's, FWIW). You can say lots of things about the occupation, or the coming elections, or your ideal of humanitarian aid. In terms of civialian an miltary deaths this was the most bloodless war every fought between two of the largest armies (I won't say top armies, numbers != strength).
It is neat to highlight where we did our worst, but the fact is we kicked ass. I'm too old (the recruiter thanked me for my time post 9-11) but my brother was called up from national guard and my younger fraternity brothers did time in "the sandbox" Rummy is wrong on points ("lighter and faster" still aint as good as "morer and heavier") but I read the damned article and the idea that we didn't have perfect information is both valid and shit. That happens, "no plan survives contact with the enemy"
Any marketing department would be fired if they merely didn't lose. Winning means pushing the boundaries.
0.30 x 0.70 == 0.21 chance (minimum, assuming no correlation) that you would believe both of these things siumultaneously. Probably higher with the moniker of "Marixst Hacker 42"
acting pursuant to the Constitution and Public Law 107-243 is consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.
is consistent with the Authorization for use of military force against Iraq resolution of 2002 (Oct 2002) aka Public Law 107-243.
The letter is cute out of context, but the fact that it isn't frequently sited implies no one else finds it damning. Regime change in Iraq was offical policy under Clinton well before 9-11. It is debatable how signifigant Hussein's support of Al Queda and Hamas was but not its existance.
I'll side with the top post, as in "Is this news to anyone?"
I'll take umbrage with the fact that the submitter and the linked summary both imply Bush voters are insane while Kerry voters aren't. The partisanship of Bush voters was highlighted but the fact that over 70% of Kerry voters think the US economy is worse than a year ago (wha?!) is partisan too, they want it to be true. Kerry voters also have a more deluded POV of Bush voters, 30% think that Bush said Iraq was involved in 9-11, several times higher than Bush voters (eg, the Bush voters aren't quite the rubes Kerry voters want them to be).
That's isn't a balanced take, but the OP and the summary were slanted to slam Bush voters, so there ya go. I noticed some of the results used in the summary weren't in the detailed report too.
Only problem is american or german tourists not looking/behaving like american or german tourists. You never realize they are american or german tourists to begin with. Bastards.
Agreed, I lived in Australia for a year (I'm an American) and the "Americans" are easy to spot (A peircing female New Jersey accent carries for miles) but there are many more that you only notice on closer inpsection, and presumably some not at all.
Contra example, when I was in Paris recently with my family we stuck out like a sore thumb as all the males were wearing khaki pants, backpacks (day packs), and shoes. Shoes aren't unusual per se, but dark sneakers seemed to be the norm in mufti/casual. Pick pockets were _everywhere_ and most conspicuously by the signs that said "beware of pickpockets". At first I wondered how 30 guys could make any money selling $1 keychains to a pool of 100 tourists (with no tourists buying) and then I had my ah-ha moment. Five guys surrounding one tourist to sell a $1 trinket == Fucking gypsies.
Ah no, the evil genius of Karl Rove is far more subtle. The computers were _actually_ stolen, and he convinced some low level DNC patsies to do it because:
1) The plans on the computers were fake outs
2) The low level patsies will be easilly caught, making for a scandal
3) Karl Rove is eeeeEEEEvil.
This comment is not the opinion of the author, just guessing what democracticunderground.com will be saying about now.
Tinfoil hats have no part affiliation.
A minority of python CVS commiters run windows or OSX but there is a fair number; they keep the canonical interpreter happy on those systems. Throw in Jython (python to JVM bytecode) and IronPython (python to dotnet/mono bytecode) and pirate (pie-in-the-face inability to make python into parrot bytecode) and that is pretty portable.
...
Also, the python 2.3 release was timed to coincide with the OSX panther release. I make demo CDs for clients that run windows with exes on them (really just a python interpreter and files crammed into an exe, but it makes it easier for them).
Technically OSX might be UNIX but to Mac fanboys "UNIX" is just the newest reason that they kick windows' ass. They didn't care when it wasn't UNIX and they don't care now. They do care about OSX because
Its got frigin drop shadows, DROP SHADOWS. [if that wasn't funny you haven't gotten multiple client requests for a 'contact' page that includes the postal address with frigin DROP SHADOWS]
"The young man goes to a tin teapot in the kitchen which is powered by a solar panel. When the water comes to the boil, the boy makes the tea, pours it into a traditional vacuum flask"
I call abuse of cute adjectives! I haven't read up on Afghan culture but I'm willing to bet vacuum thermoses are about as "traditional" as solar panels.
Wow, I call troll.
I did C++ for years before I switched to Python, and writing the same thing in python takes a third of the lines and is much more readable. If you do hardcore bit banging and pointer arithmatic python takes ten times fewer lines (at the sacrifice of speed). When speed matters I still do that part of the program in C or C++ which is called from python, but I only do it when I have to (premature optimisation is the root of all evil, etc etc).
CPU hours are cheap, developers hours aren't. I personally prefer python over perl/ruby but either one is better than their lower level friends (C, C++, Java). Perl loses here because the C & C++ interface is terrible, python and ruby are sane (and again, I prefer python). There is even a python interpreter that compiles to native java byte code [jython] if you want it (I don't, I'm fine with writing hotspot functions in C or tiny objects in C++).
rephrasing your post:
Your friend was willing to pay $100 for a game knowing he could sell it for $40 later.
So he was actually only willing to pay $60 for the game.
If you eliminated the secondary market some of the people that buy lots of games would buy fewer games. The people that buy used games would buy a smaller number of new games.
If the game makers are lucky things would come out about the same, but word of mouth would be hurt because the used market increases the number of eyeballs even if it doesn't directly pad the bottom line.
I've been waiting for a similar shoe to drop:
green: See? You all have mad cow disease now, we told you it was coming!
public: Didn't you take credit for sneaking onto farms and feeding cows diseased brains?
green: Inevitable! we told you!
public: You realize we have to kill most of the cows and use more grain to raise new ones?
green: Blasphemy! Reform! Extreme measures are required!
public: To keep down costs we're going to use GM corn.
green: We will burn your GM crops! Repent!
public: You seem pretty bent on killing us. So we're going to take the easy route and kill you first.
green: Err, can't we talk about this?
I don't know if you've ever had the experience of telling people the "truth" (as you see it), and then being ignored. You seem to be a stickler for [modern kinds of] mythology. I suggest you read about Cassandra...
.sig, and the sample chapter. The book is about very modern myth, that of a "noble savage" past that if we all returned to everything would be glorious (justice prevails, man is in balance with nature, etc). If you are under eighteen you can be excused for liking it, but ask around there are much better writers with the same uptopian themes.
I read the link in your
As for Cassandra, have you heard of a "Cassandra Complex"? (google search sucks, a band with that name floods the results). A Cassandra Complex is the belief that you alone know the truth but no one will listen to you. Cassandra had one (she was kinda entitled to it), but so do many people who mean well but are completely wrong. If you see yourself as Cassandra but everyone calls you "chicken little" you have more than a dose and you are actually a chicken little (unless you are the leading researcher in your field who's groundbreaking study hasn't been published yet, which I doubt).
Is the "I didn't know" defence become legitimate if it takes a highly trained expert and millions of dollars of equipment to determine if the plant has been pateneded or not?
In this case it would probably be a non-issue because it would be more expensive for Monsanto to find offenders than they would recoup from suing them.
Diamond guys like DeBeers almost have this problem now, artificial diamonds are so good the equipment to detect "fakes" costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. It is harder to convince the public to buy the "real" thing when not even a trained jeweler can tell the difference. WARNING: Using this argument with your girlfriend may have negative effects.
(What's even funnier is that research shows these crops neither require fewer pesticides nor produce greater yields.)
If true, Monsanto is SOL from the get go. Publish the supporting studies in some farmer's quarterlies and the problem just goes away because no one would plant Monsanto seeds.
Unless you believe corporation are evil and can bend the minds of the public at will. But only side show True Believers say stuff like that, and you are probably a level headed practical guy.
Corporations have seriously fucked entire local economies with gestapo policies like the one this article is reporting
Oh, nevermind.
Yes, if your child (with the paid for, modified gene) has her own child before her eleventh birthday she'll have to pay. If she holds out to say, sixteen, the patent will have expired.
Oh right, I meant "No"
if you consider yourself a libertarian, this is perhaps the most important right--to determine the time of your own death.
No one that has ever killed themselves has told me he regreted it afterwards. It is common for failed or stopped suicides to exrpess regret at even trying. You have to try really hard to pretend only the first class were making a rational decision. Extreme (or poser) Libertarianism requires that people be allowed to make their own choices without exception, but the implication is that they will make rational decisions.
As an extreme (or poser) libertarian you would agree that someone in emotional distress shouldn't be allowed to kill another unwilling person, right? That still holds If the person to be killed is himself.
This is an opinion from a guy who reads Reason magazine, and I voted for Harry Brown. So that makes you a freak job (or a teenaged poser).
man that was a painful article to read. Never has so much been written by one man that means less to so many who can read [English].
This man couldn't be more uniteresting, less politcal, or less aware of _existing projects_ (*cough* freenet *cough*).
Crypto? RSS? Blogs? Why bother extrapolating from things that are highly effective right now when you can go a different way and get posted to slasdhot?
-1 Karma for the article becuase it comes from the BBC. Britons paid for this obviousness "drunk people more promiscuous, study finds" journalism.
Dear Confused,
1) Do you think the US interferes with the natural market processes or are they hyper captilisists? Please pick one.
2) Oil isn't running out in our lifetime. Oh sure, if you look around some people think it will but people have predicted apocalypse (food, ice age) for two hundred years.
3) Clever about the US defense bugdet and the US killing for oil and all. Your country pays the same for oil on the world market as the US does. Tax a $1 gallon of gas $5 and it will cost $6. Mereley tax it $1 (like in the US) at it will cost $2.
here is a Frenchman(!) writing about the "new" anti-Americanism. His point is that the hate isn't new at all, just a hundreds of years old envy directed against someone new. (although the US has been the object for the last hundred plus).
The US seems to be like a spoiled child that wants all the remaining cheap energy to feed its ever-increasing needs. You seem like a spoiled child who refuses to believe your family isn't better off or more deserving than your neighbor.
I have mod points, but I posted instead of just modding you down.
You can't say "there is a medium diameter horizontal axis generator on the dorsal surface" without also saying "I am a marine physicist who accidentally posted shop-talk." If you leave that out you just said "I am a giant ass" or "Remember on Star Trek when they used ten words when two would do? I was that writer"
What would be a large diameter generator on a never before seen prototype? And what does being on the center-middle-top have to do with it?
"The turbine looking thing probably _is_ a turbine, so it swims up and down to make it spin" Was that so hard?
Mod me down, but take that post with me.
+1 ROFL.
You might have added a 'dumbass' so mods would notice (reading comments before moderation doesn't seem to be a popular habit).
So the patent looks silly on the face, but the opening claims are easy to work around and make it hard for them to sue:
a method of incorporating at least one data structure from the database into a browser cookie to reduce accesses to the database
Okay, the stuff I'm storing in the cookie isn't the same as a structure in my database. FOAD. You think it is? I say it is half a structure from my database. Or one item from each of five structures in my database.
They could drown you in lawsuits, but they didn't need a patent to do that anyway.
old: replace the operative word with "black" or "white" and see if the sentence still makes sense. If It doesn't -- you're a racist!
new: replace the operative word with "freakishly tall librarian" and see if the sentence still makes sense. If it doesn't -- congratulations, this issue isn't black and white!
we call them cliches because they didn't die when they stopped being useful.