The overall level of scientific literacy is woefully low, and this particular data point doesn't happen to cluster nicely with the others.
Thought experiment: suppose your test of driving law literacy discovered that knowing you are supposed to stop if possible on a yellow light correlates poorly with knowledge of other traffic laws. So you toss out that question. This means that a subject can in theory get a perfect score on your driving literacy test without knowing one of the most basic things about driving laws.
The reason that people (usually social scientists) do this kind of thing is (a) it's often useful to do so and (b) they don't understand statistics.
What Kagan is doing here is he is re-engineering the concept of "scientific literacy" so he can treat it as a "parameter". It's not. You can get twice as many answers right on the test, but that doesn't make you "twice as scientifically literate" because that's a meaningless statement. The truth is you need to know certain things like conservation of energy, the germ theory of disease, and evolution to be functionally literate in science
At this point we don't understand what the impact of many driverless cars will be. It makes sense *for now* to require a licensed human driver be ready take over the vehicle in case the robotic control begins to conduct the vehicle incorrectly.
Later, as we gain more experience with autonomous vehicles and the systems become both more sophisticated and more proven, we'll reach a point where he have hard, data that proves having a human driver handy doesn't statistically have any benefit. At that point there's no rational reason to require a human driver even be aboard.
Even further down the road, we might even lock human drivers out of control of their vehicles, at least on public thoroughfares. If people want to drive they'll have to do it on closed tracks where they don't endanger anyone.
I wish the experimental subjects well. If the procedure works, they will not only be saving themselves, but many future patients whose injuries can't be treated quickly enough. And if the procedure becomes routine, it may someday pave humanity's road to the stars.
I haven't, but we were discussing this over the dinner table, and the consensus is that he must have given off major creepy vibes.
It raises an interesting question: what if he had simply received training in not sounding creepy? Interesting, because I think something like that really could set someone on the path to becoming successfully socially integrated, but it could also transform someone from a creepy sounding psychopath into a charming psychopath.
Can in fact be made from plant sources (e.g. sugar -> sugar alcohol -> artificial resin). No doubt early versions of the process won't yield much, if any reduction in environmental impact, but at least in principle the process could be made sustainable.
I wouldn't be surprised if plant based epoxies started in appearing soon in eco-chic products along with bamboo. I mean, hemp-and-bamboo composite -- among a certain crowd that would sell like hotcakes.
Frankly i think the fight against most invasive species simply creates jobs for public employees.
That's easy to think because it's easy to forget about the species that we used to have, but don't any longer.I'm old, so I do remember the species we used to have back in the 60s. but are long gone, like the rock crab, which is way better eating than the tiny Asian shore crab that displaced it.
Another thing to remember is that Florida is a very big state, so if you simply list all the edible invasive animals, it seems like a cornucopia. But if you look at the situation in habitat by habitat, the situation looks different.The problem these things is that they don't have native predators -- they overwhelm the resources within a habitat. That means you lose everything else in that habitat that was dependent, directly or indirectly, on resources consumed by the exotic. That includes many desirable native species.
Take Tilapia. Of course the're edible, they're a popular aquaculture fish, but they're not *great* eating. They're like tofu: it's all about what you cook them *with*. When they take over a body of water, they displace native fish that are actually *better* eating. So instead of a nice bass, you end up catching a mediocre white fish you can buy cheaper than bait at the supermarket anyway.
Or Asian carp. They are indeed edible, in fact good if you know how to prepare them, but they also displace many, many desirable native gamefish: bass, crappie, catfish, trout and salmon, all of which are superb eating. For a whole list of edible animals you might not be aware of, you get one in their place. That's a raw deal.
Cook it to the old FDA internal temperature recommendation. Problem solved.
Tapeworm eggs can also be killed by freezing to -4F for 24 hours. My local butcher carries game and it's always deep frozen, probably for this very reason.
Here in Boston we don't have a feral pig problem, but we do have gourmet butcher shops that sell game and exotic meat. I've tried feral pig and it's good, but intense -- intense enough that I wasn't sure I liked it at first. The best way I can describe it is "extremely piggy".
I'll explain. Imagine on one hand a cooked chicken breast. Imagine on the other hand a regular, commercial pork chop. There's a clear difference between the two, but it's... subtle. Now imagine a place far beyond the other hand, where the difference is as subtle as being whacked in the face with a shovel. In an era where pork is marketed as "the other whtie meat" the distinctive flavor of pork has been toned down to the point where nobody will be offended, but feral pig is unabashedly swine-y. Not everyone will like it. By *I* do.
According to the article feral pigs reproduce so successfully in many places that it would be impossible to put a dent in the populations through hunting, but I choose to call that "sustainable". Trying to eat these animals into oblivion (if you can stomach them) is an environmental "can't lose", especially if you count the environmental cost of industrial scale hog farming. I'm very happy to pay some guy from Texas to remove the problem from his ranch and send it up here so I can put it on my plate.
Well, it's not like they're proposing leaving the stuff in an out of the way spot and forgetting about it. Presumably they're talking about a disposal facility that will have a staff and security forces etc.
I'm more concerned about what the definition of "remote" is. Just think about what that word means for a second. When someone uses it to describe a place, they're revealing as much about themselves as they are the place. To an American, Mumbai is a "remote" place; that doesn't mean it's *empty*, it means its far from them or anything they care about.
In any case there's no such thing on this Earth as "empty space". When the report was made recommending this location, it was viewed as low value, overgrazed rangeland. It has since been returned to its traditional Aboriginal owners, who I suspect don't view it as just "empty space".
Well, you've hit on the point of lethal injection. The real appeal of the elaborate pseudo-medical procedure is that it masks the nature of what is being done to the condemned, makes it seem nicer than it really is.
If being humane toward the condemned were the highest priority, firing squad or guillotine would be the best choices among the traditional execution methods. In fact, and ironically, the traditional method of *extrajudicial* execution would be most reliably humane: a shot in the back of the head.
The reason we don't use these methods is that they're embarrassingly messy, and leave an ugly residue. We'd prefer to have a nicely intact body as if the condemned died peacefully, but in fact the catastrophic destruction of the condemned bodies is what makes the uglier methods more humane. Instant oblivion is is clearly preferable to an elaborately drawn out psuedo-medical procedure, especially an untried one carried out by inexperienced hands.
The reason we carry out lethal injections isn't humane, it's political.
Perhaps, but in this case the US justice system would have a point.
This is a criminal enterprise; not a very large one, it is true, but one that nets almost a hundred thousand a year in cash, and obtains services no doubt in the million dollar range, although obviously this doesn't translate directly into *losses* the way taking cash would.
It's disingenous to call this a "protest". A protest is to get as many people as possible to jump the turnstiles on *one day*. A protest is to boycott the system, maybe standing outside with signs. This is *using* the system you don't want to pay for, and arranging to avoid the fine.
To do be fair, if somebody dumped the problem in *your* regulatory lap, the intelligent thing to do would be to commission studies.
It's not the EPA's fault that the funding situation is chaotic. The system is designed to make spending money complicated; the original intent might have even been to make spending money *hard*, of course complexity only makes it easier to spend money on stupid things. Something like nuclear cleanup needs stable, multi-year funding, not something that get put through the belt-and-suspenders-and-yet-more-suspenders Congressional budgeting and appropriations system.
A non-profit corporation or public authority funded by energy taxation would be the way to go.
Any time someone says "look how bad winter was" they are (rightfully) chided for treating a variation in weather as being "climate".
But that's not what he's saying. He's saying that the kind of weather S. California has had in the last few months will be more common in the future, which *is* a statement about climate. He's saying that the acreage burned by wildfire has increased steadily over the last thirty years, which is also a statement about climate (albeit indirect).
He did not say "the fires this year prove that climate is warming", or any of discouragingly braindead kinds of things you hear coming out of the denialist echo chamber whenever there's a patch of cold weather.
And you can't even see that climate change makes drought more likely without way more data than we have. A warmer climate could mean some areas are dryer, others wetter. But actually overall it would mean more moisture in the system, not less...
Another dishonest piece of shifting ground/strawman denialist argument. Nobody is saying that there will be drought everywhere. The models predict more drought in the American west, Australia, South America, and most of Africa; they predict increased precipitation in Eastern Canada, Siberia, East and Southeast Asia and at very high and low latitudes.
Well, you've never been in a position where your employer *required* you to attend fundraisers. Your views have nothing to do with it; your continued employment does.
In effect this is money laundering, but it occurs at a management level where nobody wants to rock the boat because the pay is so good.
"Consensus" simply identifies where the burden of proof lay. It is not a barrier to new ideas.
Examples:
(1) The geosyncline theory was replaced by plate tectonics. (2) We used to think passing a black hole event horizon was a one way trip for matter/energy; now we think black holes evaporate. (3) We used to think DNA to RNA information transcription was one way; then we discovered retroviruses.
The idea that "consensus" is just scientific priggery is ridiculous. Scientists *want* consensus to be overturned. New ideas are what make science interesting, but a new consensus only meaningful if the standards of disproof for the old consensus are high. Otherwise a change on scientific consensus wouldn't be *progress*, it would be *fashion*.
This demonstrates the extreme open-mindedness of science, when compared to virtually any other field of human endeavor. Yes, the process is slanted in favor of the prevailing wisdom, but people who disagree with the majority opinion aren't ostracized or prevented from publishing, no matter *why* they believe what they do. Scientists believe things for all kinds of un-scientific reasons: aesthetics, hunches, even personal dislike for other scientists. Religion isn't any less scientific than any of that stuff, but you leave that stuff in the locker room when you're on the playing field, so to speak.
Naturally people whose papers get rejected by reviewers think the referees were unfair. But it's not like *other* skeptics can't get their papers published; they just have to play by science's rules.
You're on the right track. The right to be forgotten isn't about erasing your participation in the public sphere. It's about the abuse of routinely collected data, such as which websites you visit or which products you shop for.
A few years ago I did a lot of web based research on right wing hate groups like Aryan Nation and the KKK. That list left traces I am sure, in my search history at least. Last year after the Boston Marathon bombings I did some searches about pressure cooker bombs. I'm sure a lot of us here did; curiosity isn't a crime -- yet. I actually *purchased* a pressure cooker shortly after the bombing.
Now if someone did a search "what extremist web sites has this guy been visiting/looking for?" they'd get a highly selective and somewhat disturbing picture of my web browsing habits. Lets suppose somebody set up a particular filter, looking for people whose search, shopping and browsing history hit a set of highly specific websites. Somebody could well choose to tag me as suspicious, and cause a lot of problems for me. What's worse is that these problems mean *nothing* to the person flagging me; it makes his life easier to deal in suspicion wholesale, as it were.
The right to be forgotten isn't fundamental, it's instrumental. The fundamental right is not to be victimized by half-baked inferences based on old, ambiguous data. The only way to do that is to purge old data except where it is held for a clear and appropriate purpose. The problem is "purge old data except where held for a clear and appropriate purpose" doesn't exactly trip off the tongue. Nobody is going to stand up and advocate for something that sounds so... technical. So we instead call it a "right to be forgotten", which in general is NOT what we're talking about.
Well, I don't have a problem with HSQLDB, which is the engine used by Base, but when I did a similar exercise for a non-profit a while back the problem with Base was it shipped with an old, old version of HSQLDB. The subset of HSQL it supported was *totally* undocumented. Basically nothing beyond the most basic stuff worked. You couldn't even used stored procedures to get around the limitations (I needed the Base/HSQLDB combination to calculate an UUID -- simple stuff).
I am a big non-fan of MS Access. For one thing its the *only* database product I've ever used that gives *wrong* answers (usually there's a null involved somehow, and a connection to an external database). But MS Access with the stand alone JET engine addresses quite a wide range of practical situations better than anything else that's out there, and that's sad.
OO Base is meant to address the same range of situations, but it's simply impossible to recommend such a poorly documented and quirky product to someone you're not going to be around to support. I suppose you could use Base with Firebird, HSQLDB, Derby, or some such, but I have experience with supporting organizations out in the field in primitive conditions, and sooner or later they're going to need to re-install the software. And most people aren't good at that. They lose heart if there's too many steps.
So the advantage something like Access, Base, or FileMaker, despite their many warts, is that the overview is simple. Pop the installation CD in and click through. Open a copy of the last back of the "database file" you have and see how much stuff you have to re-enter.
I really, really, really wish I could recommend Base, but as of the last time I checked, I simply can't unless the documentation and HSQLDB version problems have been addressed.
Beware impressive looking demonstrations. They aren't chosen to be be *representative* of the problems the product will face; they're chosen to impress people who aren't cynical enough to guess the vendor dreamed up a dozen amazing demos but that the product failed eleven of them.
Actually, there *are* no alternate versions of the Koran -- or at least there's not supposed to be. Any translation of the Koran is not considered an actual "Koran" for purposes of Islamic law or worship. Anyone who wants to read or recite from the Koran is obliged to learn seventh century Arabic.
So there are no disputes in Islam equivalent to Christian disputes over whether the King James or the Revised Standard Version are more accurate; whether 1 Maccabees or the Epistles of Clement are divinely inspired; on whether to base the Old Testament on Hebrew sources or the Septuagint (the 2nd Cenury BCE Koine Greek translation that Jesus himself would have used). There's just one version of the Koran, the one authorized by Caliph Uthman in 650 CE, and believed to be compiled by Abu Bakr two years following the Prophet's death.
Yet oddly this has not prevented radically different versions of Islam from arising. The cheerful liberal Sufi imam at the local mosque has about as much in common with Wahabbist firebrands recruiting for Al Qaeda as the local gay Congregational minister has with the Aryan Nation affiliated Christian churches. There might even be *less* in common.
When dragons belch and hippos flee My thoughts, Ankh-Morpork, are of thee Let others boast of martial dash For we have boldly fought with cash We own all your helmets, we own all your shoes We own all your generals - touch us and you'll lose.
Morporkia! Morporkia! Morporkia owns the day! We can rule you wholesale Touch us and you'll pay.
Fortuntely, Russia is run by humorless, dead-eyed authoritarians who are about as likely to have read the Discworld novels as the average American is to have read Russel and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica
Not really. In fact not even close. The ability to spoof caller id has nothing whatsoever to do with number portability. People were spoofing caller id long before number portability. I don't know what specifically led to the phone companies adopting a more abstract architecture, but it goes way back; possibly predating the breakup of the Bell System.
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The overall level of scientific literacy is woefully low, and this particular data point doesn't happen to cluster nicely with the others.
Thought experiment: suppose your test of driving law literacy discovered that knowing you are supposed to stop if possible on a yellow light correlates poorly with knowledge of other traffic laws. So you toss out that question. This means that a subject can in theory get a perfect score on your driving literacy test without knowing one of the most basic things about driving laws.
The reason that people (usually social scientists) do this kind of thing is (a) it's often useful to do so and (b) they don't understand statistics.
What Kagan is doing here is he is re-engineering the concept of "scientific literacy" so he can treat it as a "parameter". It's not. You can get twice as many answers right on the test, but that doesn't make you "twice as scientifically literate" because that's a meaningless statement. The truth is you need to know certain things like conservation of energy, the germ theory of disease, and evolution to be functionally literate in science
I'd modify this answer to be: not yet.
At this point we don't understand what the impact of many driverless cars will be. It makes sense *for now* to require a licensed human driver be ready take over the vehicle in case the robotic control begins to conduct the vehicle incorrectly.
Later, as we gain more experience with autonomous vehicles and the systems become both more sophisticated and more proven, we'll reach a point where he have hard, data that proves having a human driver handy doesn't statistically have any benefit. At that point there's no rational reason to require a human driver even be aboard.
Even further down the road, we might even lock human drivers out of control of their vehicles, at least on public thoroughfares. If people want to drive they'll have to do it on closed tracks where they don't endanger anyone.
I wish the experimental subjects well. If the procedure works, they will not only be saving themselves, but many future patients whose injuries can't be treated quickly enough. And if the procedure becomes routine, it may someday pave humanity's road to the stars.
I haven't, but we were discussing this over the dinner table, and the consensus is that he must have given off major creepy vibes.
It raises an interesting question: what if he had simply received training in not sounding creepy? Interesting, because I think something like that really could set someone on the path to becoming successfully socially integrated, but it could also transform someone from a creepy sounding psychopath into a charming psychopath.
And the epoxy used to bond the bamboo weave?
Can in fact be made from plant sources (e.g. sugar -> sugar alcohol -> artificial resin). No doubt early versions of the process won't yield much, if any reduction in environmental impact, but at least in principle the process could be made sustainable.
I wouldn't be surprised if plant based epoxies started in appearing soon in eco-chic products along with bamboo. I mean, hemp-and-bamboo composite -- among a certain crowd that would sell like hotcakes.
Frankly i think the fight against most invasive species simply creates jobs for public employees.
That's easy to think because it's easy to forget about the species that we used to have, but don't any longer.I'm old, so I do remember the species we used to have back in the 60s. but are long gone, like the rock crab, which is way better eating than the tiny Asian shore crab that displaced it.
Another thing to remember is that Florida is a very big state, so if you simply list all the edible invasive animals, it seems like a cornucopia. But if you look at the situation in habitat by habitat, the situation looks different.The problem these things is that they don't have native predators -- they overwhelm the resources within a habitat. That means you lose everything else in that habitat that was dependent, directly or indirectly, on resources consumed by the exotic. That includes many desirable native species.
Take Tilapia. Of course the're edible, they're a popular aquaculture fish, but they're not *great* eating. They're like tofu: it's all about what you cook them *with*. When they take over a body of water, they displace native fish that are actually *better* eating. So instead of a nice bass, you end up catching a mediocre white fish you can buy cheaper than bait at the supermarket anyway.
Or Asian carp. They are indeed edible, in fact good if you know how to prepare them, but they also displace many, many desirable native gamefish: bass, crappie, catfish, trout and salmon, all of which are superb eating. For a whole list of edible animals you might not be aware of, you get one in their place. That's a raw deal.
Cook it to the old FDA internal temperature recommendation. Problem solved.
Tapeworm eggs can also be killed by freezing to -4F for 24 hours. My local butcher carries game and it's always deep frozen, probably for this very reason.
Here in Boston we don't have a feral pig problem, but we do have gourmet butcher shops that sell game and exotic meat. I've tried feral pig and it's good, but intense -- intense enough that I wasn't sure I liked it at first. The best way I can describe it is "extremely piggy".
I'll explain. Imagine on one hand a cooked chicken breast. Imagine on the other hand a regular, commercial pork chop. There's a clear difference between the two, but it's ... subtle. Now imagine a place far beyond the other hand, where the difference is as subtle as being whacked in the face with a shovel. In an era where pork is marketed as "the other whtie meat" the distinctive flavor of pork has been toned down to the point where nobody will be offended, but feral pig is unabashedly swine-y. Not everyone will like it. By *I* do.
According to the article feral pigs reproduce so successfully in many places that it would be impossible to put a dent in the populations through hunting, but I choose to call that "sustainable". Trying to eat these animals into oblivion (if you can stomach them) is an environmental "can't lose", especially if you count the environmental cost of industrial scale hog farming. I'm very happy to pay some guy from Texas to remove the problem from his ranch and send it up here so I can put it on my plate.
For Pete's sake, use your brain. If you can *ask* the patient whether she wants to have the machines unplugged, you don't make the decision for her.
Well, it's not like they're proposing leaving the stuff in an out of the way spot and forgetting about it. Presumably they're talking about a disposal facility that will have a staff and security forces etc.
I'm more concerned about what the definition of "remote" is. Just think about what that word means for a second. When someone uses it to describe a place, they're revealing as much about themselves as they are the place. To an American, Mumbai is a "remote" place; that doesn't mean it's *empty*, it means its far from them or anything they care about.
In any case there's no such thing on this Earth as "empty space". When the report was made recommending this location, it was viewed as low value, overgrazed rangeland. It has since been returned to its traditional Aboriginal owners, who I suspect don't view it as just "empty space".
Well, you've hit on the point of lethal injection. The real appeal of the elaborate pseudo-medical procedure is that it masks the nature of what is being done to the condemned, makes it seem nicer than it really is.
If being humane toward the condemned were the highest priority, firing squad or guillotine would be the best choices among the traditional execution methods. In fact, and ironically, the traditional method of *extrajudicial* execution would be most reliably humane: a shot in the back of the head.
The reason we don't use these methods is that they're embarrassingly messy, and leave an ugly residue. We'd prefer to have a nicely intact body as if the condemned died peacefully, but in fact the catastrophic destruction of the condemned bodies is what makes the uglier methods more humane. Instant oblivion is is clearly preferable to an elaborately drawn out psuedo-medical procedure, especially an untried one carried out by inexperienced hands.
The reason we carry out lethal injections isn't humane, it's political.
Then the initials would have been "S.O.L."
Perhaps, but in this case the US justice system would have a point.
This is a criminal enterprise; not a very large one, it is true, but one that nets almost a hundred thousand a year in cash, and obtains services no doubt in the million dollar range, although obviously this doesn't translate directly into *losses* the way taking cash would.
It's disingenous to call this a "protest". A protest is to get as many people as possible to jump the turnstiles on *one day*. A protest is to boycott the system, maybe standing outside with signs. This is *using* the system you don't want to pay for, and arranging to avoid the fine.
To do be fair, if somebody dumped the problem in *your* regulatory lap, the intelligent thing to do would be to commission studies.
It's not the EPA's fault that the funding situation is chaotic. The system is designed to make spending money complicated; the original intent might have even been to make spending money *hard*, of course complexity only makes it easier to spend money on stupid things. Something like nuclear cleanup needs stable, multi-year funding, not something that get put through the belt-and-suspenders-and-yet-more-suspenders Congressional budgeting and appropriations system.
A non-profit corporation or public authority funded by energy taxation would be the way to go.
Any time someone says "look how bad winter was" they are (rightfully) chided for treating a variation in weather as being "climate".
But that's not what he's saying. He's saying that the kind of weather S. California has had in the last few months will be more common in the future, which *is* a statement about climate. He's saying that the acreage burned by wildfire has increased steadily over the last thirty years, which is also a statement about climate (albeit indirect).
He did not say "the fires this year prove that climate is warming", or any of discouragingly braindead kinds of things you hear coming out of the denialist echo chamber whenever there's a patch of cold weather.
And you can't even see that climate change makes drought more likely without way more data than we have. A warmer climate could mean some areas are dryer, others wetter. But actually overall it would mean more moisture in the system, not less...
Another dishonest piece of shifting ground/strawman denialist argument. Nobody is saying that there will be drought everywhere. The models predict more drought in the American west, Australia, South America, and most of Africa; they predict increased precipitation in Eastern Canada, Siberia, East and Southeast Asia and at very high and low latitudes.
Well, you've never been in a position where your employer *required* you to attend fundraisers. Your views have nothing to do with it; your continued employment does.
In effect this is money laundering, but it occurs at a management level where nobody wants to rock the boat because the pay is so good.
"Consensus" simply identifies where the burden of proof lay. It is not a barrier to new ideas.
Examples:
(1) The geosyncline theory was replaced by plate tectonics.
(2) We used to think passing a black hole event horizon was a one way trip for matter/energy; now we think black holes evaporate.
(3) We used to think DNA to RNA information transcription was one way; then we discovered retroviruses.
The idea that "consensus" is just scientific priggery is ridiculous. Scientists *want* consensus to be overturned. New ideas are what make science interesting, but a new consensus only meaningful if the standards of disproof for the old consensus are high. Otherwise a change on scientific consensus wouldn't be *progress*, it would be *fashion*.
Actually, climate change skeptics publish in mainstream journals all the time. There's always loose threads you can pull at.
For example RW Spencer is an evangelical Christian who believes that climate change would contradict God's will. Yet he still gets published in mainstream journals.
This demonstrates the extreme open-mindedness of science, when compared to virtually any other field of human endeavor. Yes, the process is slanted in favor of the prevailing wisdom, but people who disagree with the majority opinion aren't ostracized or prevented from publishing, no matter *why* they believe what they do. Scientists believe things for all kinds of un-scientific reasons: aesthetics, hunches, even personal dislike for other scientists. Religion isn't any less scientific than any of that stuff, but you leave that stuff in the locker room when you're on the playing field, so to speak.
Naturally people whose papers get rejected by reviewers think the referees were unfair. But it's not like *other* skeptics can't get their papers published; they just have to play by science's rules.
You're on the right track. The right to be forgotten isn't about erasing your participation in the public sphere. It's about the abuse of routinely collected data, such as which websites you visit or which products you shop for.
A few years ago I did a lot of web based research on right wing hate groups like Aryan Nation and the KKK. That list left traces I am sure, in my search history at least. Last year after the Boston Marathon bombings I did some searches about pressure cooker bombs. I'm sure a lot of us here did; curiosity isn't a crime -- yet. I actually *purchased* a pressure cooker shortly after the bombing.
Now if someone did a search "what extremist web sites has this guy been visiting/looking for?" they'd get a highly selective and somewhat disturbing picture of my web browsing habits. Lets suppose somebody set up a particular filter, looking for people whose search, shopping and browsing history hit a set of highly specific websites. Somebody could well choose to tag me as suspicious, and cause a lot of problems for me. What's worse is that these problems mean *nothing* to the person flagging me; it makes his life easier to deal in suspicion wholesale, as it were.
The right to be forgotten isn't fundamental, it's instrumental. The fundamental right is not to be victimized by half-baked inferences based on old, ambiguous data. The only way to do that is to purge old data except where it is held for a clear and appropriate purpose. The problem is "purge old data except where held for a clear and appropriate purpose" doesn't exactly trip off the tongue. Nobody is going to stand up and advocate for something that sounds so ... technical. So we instead call it a "right to be forgotten", which in general is NOT what we're talking about.
Well, I don't have a problem with HSQLDB, which is the engine used by Base, but when I did a similar exercise for a non-profit a while back the problem with Base was it shipped with an old, old version of HSQLDB. The subset of HSQL it supported was *totally* undocumented. Basically nothing beyond the most basic stuff worked. You couldn't even used stored procedures to get around the limitations (I needed the Base/HSQLDB combination to calculate an UUID -- simple stuff).
I am a big non-fan of MS Access. For one thing its the *only* database product I've ever used that gives *wrong* answers (usually there's a null involved somehow, and a connection to an external database). But MS Access with the stand alone JET engine addresses quite a wide range of practical situations better than anything else that's out there, and that's sad.
OO Base is meant to address the same range of situations, but it's simply impossible to recommend such a poorly documented and quirky product to someone you're not going to be around to support. I suppose you could use Base with Firebird, HSQLDB, Derby, or some such, but I have experience with supporting organizations out in the field in primitive conditions, and sooner or later they're going to need to re-install the software. And most people aren't good at that. They lose heart if there's too many steps.
So the advantage something like Access, Base, or FileMaker, despite their many warts, is that the overview is simple. Pop the installation CD in and click through. Open a copy of the last back of the "database file" you have and see how much stuff you have to re-enter.
I really, really, really wish I could recommend Base, but as of the last time I checked, I simply can't unless the documentation and HSQLDB version problems have been addressed.
Beware impressive looking demonstrations. They aren't chosen to be be *representative* of the problems the product will face; they're chosen to impress people who aren't cynical enough to guess the vendor dreamed up a dozen amazing demos but that the product failed eleven of them.
Yeah, which Bible? Which Koran?
Actually, there *are* no alternate versions of the Koran -- or at least there's not supposed to be. Any translation of the Koran is not considered an actual "Koran" for purposes of Islamic law or worship. Anyone who wants to read or recite from the Koran is obliged to learn seventh century Arabic.
So there are no disputes in Islam equivalent to Christian disputes over whether the King James or the Revised Standard Version are more accurate; whether 1 Maccabees or the Epistles of Clement are divinely inspired; on whether to base the Old Testament on Hebrew sources or the Septuagint (the 2nd Cenury BCE Koine Greek translation that Jesus himself would have used). There's just one version of the Koran, the one authorized by Caliph Uthman in 650 CE, and believed to be compiled by Abu Bakr two years following the Prophet's death.
Yet oddly this has not prevented radically different versions of Islam from arising. The cheerful liberal Sufi imam at the local mosque has about as much in common with Wahabbist firebrands recruiting for Al Qaeda as the local gay Congregational minister has with the Aryan Nation affiliated Christian churches. There might even be *less* in common.
When dragons belch and hippos flee
My thoughts, Ankh-Morpork, are of thee
Let others boast of martial dash
For we have boldly fought with cash
We own all your helmets, we own all your shoes
We own all your generals - touch us and you'll lose.
Morporkia! Morporkia!
Morporkia owns the day!
We can rule you wholesale
Touch us and you'll pay.
Fortuntely, Russia is run by humorless, dead-eyed authoritarians who are about as likely to have read the Discworld novels as the average American is to have read Russel and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica
Not really. In fact not even close. The ability to spoof caller id has nothing whatsoever to do with number portability. People were spoofing caller id long before number portability. I don't know what specifically led to the phone companies adopting a more abstract architecture, but it goes way back; possibly predating the breakup of the Bell System.
My civil engineer brother-in-law is currently searching for a cottage across the street from some currently beachfront property.