And I will just say the idea of a system that would have thousands of receptors for different smells that combine in combinatorial ways to generate all of our smells isn't that unfathomable when you consider how the immune system works (antibodies being the first real understanding of how with an extremely limited of amount of DNA can produce some many different possible combinations through splicing).
I think one of Dr. Buck's contributions was the idea that it's not one olfactory receptor gene that gets mutated and modified in billions of random ways, like the immunoglobulin locus. Rather, we actually do possess thousands of individual genes for olfactory receptors, each with a different specificity. Which makes sense - for Ig's, all you care about it whether it recognizes something, not what, exactly, that something is (as long as it's non-self). For smells, you need some idea of what's what so you can properly integrate signals from all the different olfactory cells. In fact, it's interesting that each cell expresses only one type of receptor (like a B-cell), since that means all that integration happens in downstream neurons, not within an olfactory cell. Which we now know to be the case - first you combine signals from all cells expressing each type of receptor, then integrate those summed signals.
Great shot. I walked that trail two summers ago, it was probably the most awesome (as in awe-insiring) scenery I've ever seen. I also remember that I was way too chicken-shit to follow the trail the full length of Johnston ridge.:)
Everyone can see the trail winding off into the distance on the left side of the picture. Then you see the enormous, blackend and scarred, barren ridge that juts out the left, towards Mt. St. Helens? And how there's a little white horizontal scrape about 4/5 of the way up that ridge, that looks like part of the sendimentation pattern of the rock? Nope, that's the trail. Two feet across, covered in loose tock, literally scraped into the side a cliff and hugging it all the way around that jutting ridge. I got about a hundred feet along it and decided the other half of the trail must not be nearly as interesting as the first half.
Thank you for being the first here to point out that third party candidates who are not kooks with less than 3% of the vote are not invited to debates, but real candidates are not shut out.
He wasn't invited because he wasn't a "kook" - he was invited only because both sides thought he would take votes away from the other guy, Turns out one side badly miscalculated. That side refused to make the same mistake in 1996, and the other side decided they didn't need the help or the distraction. The Clinton campaign was right on both counts.
So don't confuse "doing what's good for our partes" with "doing what's good for the country". 1992 was a fluke, since both parties thought they were doing themselves a favor by having Perot there. His actual performance in the election must have scared the hell out both of them, and I can guarantee that neither will ever let something like that happen again.
The "official" debates are highly flawed, but to call them pseudo-debates because you don't like them is absurd.
Well, one of the ground rules is that the candidates may not address questions or comments at each other. That would seem to take much of the actual debating out of the debates. It's more like a moderated Q&A session.
Not to say they aren't still valuable, because they're still the only time most of the public will ever hear the candidates discuss a reasonable breadth of issues, and because they're all we've got.
>blockquote> Maybe the answer is that a good Catholic cannot run for office in the U.S.That's what the WASPs have trying to convince everyone for a hundred and fifty years now.:)
Ah, but as a Catholic you must be opposed to a law declaring Mohammed infallible.
An odd example. Any American should be opposed to any law that tries to impose any particular religious beliefs on the entire society. Allah, Yahweh, the Wicca Witch of the West, whatever. There's no Catholic teaching involved there.
how do you argue for prohibiting anything?...What should it be based on? What you think other people believe?...I think that Catholics have to draw the line on the other side of abortion
I hope you're not under the impression that morality exists only as an extension of religion. Personally, I'm a bit of a Social Libertarian when it comes to what sorts of things the government should and should not legislate. Respect the individual, good of society and all that. If there is a moral basis for law, it is only that of universal morality, not any particular religion's interpretation of it. Abortion is not an issue of universal morality. "Drawing the line" is a misnomer. It's not a matter of picking which religious beliefs are most inoffensive to everyone else. Laws cannot enforce religious beliefs, period. If you can't justify it except by "God told me so", it shouldn't be in law.
The thing about all of that, besides the fact that if the Church excommunicated every member who disagreed with any teaching there would be no Catholics left in America...well, that's a thing. But there's another thing, and that thing is that there's a firewall, if you will, between one's personal beliefs and what one thinks should be codified into law.
We do not live in a theocracy, and no sane person would advocate that our nation should adopt any one religion's teachings as law, lock-stock-and-barrel. But that is exactly the position the Church has been moving towards recently. It began with asserting that politicians have a non-binding duty to advocate Church policies. It evolved into the idea that politicians who don't risk censure or excommunication. It has further evolved, here in America, into the idea that people who vote for such politicians should be censured or excommunicated.
The whole premise is nonsense, besides being unconstitutional. Just because I'm Catholic doesn't mean I advocate passing a law declaring that Jesus is the Son of God and Pope John Paul II is his infallible representative on Earth. This is America. I would feel the same way if a Muslim politican tried to introduce Sharia here. Hell, even Jesus himself didn't seem keen on theocracies (that whole "give unto Ceasar" thing, along with his relentless bashing of the Jewish elders). What I do and what I believe is my own business. What I think should be legal and illegal for other people to do should not, and in the USA can not, be based on what I believe.
Are you trying to prove that x $ spend on spreading lies is a better investment than spending 10x $ on telling the truth?
Clearly. I think the explanation is that the truth is never a news story worth covering, but lies frequently are. The more outlandish, the more newsworthy.
For proof, check out how many people actually saw the SBV4T ad on TV (vanishingly few) against how many watched it on the news or otherwise heard about it through the media (everyone in America).
Several, actually. You can find them on johnkerry.com/issues/technology/plan. I just cherry-picked a few examples:
- Provide substantial research increases for clean energy, medicine, advanced manufacturing, information technology, nanotechnology, and other priorities. - Extend the Research & Experimentation tax credit - Provide a tax credit to ensure that broadband access is universal and affordable - Expand spectrum that is available for wireless broadband - Remove restrictions on federal funding of stem cell research
These and other ideas are laid out in fairly impressive detail on the site. The first point is most important to me. Bush completed the planned 5-year doubling of the NIH budget only by a technicality in 2003, and both it and the NSF are taking a big hit this year. His budgets plan further cuts in following years. Science is not a priority for him. It is for Kerry.
Fair enough. But then he shouldn't call himself Catholic. Doncha see what the problem is? A Catholic is someone who believes in what the Catholic Church teaches.
There is a WORLD of difference between personal beliefs and what should be codified into law. WE DO NOT LIVE IN A THEOCRACY. Last I checked, our sons and daughters were dying to prevent the spread of theocracy in the Middle East.
The Catholic Church hierarchy has been lately taking the stance that any politician who doesn't think the laws of the United States should mirror the teachings of the Catholic Church isn't a good Catholic. In a fit of cognitive dissonance, I'm starting to think the Catholic Church isn't a very good Church, at least not for any patriotic American. I mean, seriously, substitue some Muslim-American candidate for "John Kerry" and "Islam" for "Catholicism"; how fast would you be calling the Muslim a hypocrite if he didn't think sharia was a great idea for the US? And how quickly would he be thrown in jail as a fundie terrorist if he did?
I suspect the only things preventing me from liking Apple's interfaces are my years of Windows experience and my affinity for the keyboard. I should point out that I only know the Windows-based Apple software--I have little to no experience of Macs--but I hate that it can't be operated from the keyboard. I'm talking specifically about iTunes and Quicktime for Windows.
I'm glad you added that qualifier; I wouldn't judge OSX from iTunes for Windows any more than I'd judge XP from WMP for Mac [shudder]. There is a neat feature in OSX called Universal Access that allows complete control of the computer from the keyboard. You can tab between interface elements, switch between menus and windows, even move the mouse with cursor keys! If you need specific functions mapped to specific keys, there's a system-wide, er, system for mapping any menu item to a universal keyboard shortcut. A number of freeware utilities make the process even simpler (the most popular lets you easily map iTunes' Play and Forward/Back buttons to, for example, F-keys, so you can control iTunes regardless of which app you're currently in). Anyway, real hax0rs get their work done in the Terminal, right?:) If you're a real keyboard snob, you hardly even need to look at the GUI, except the bits underneath the transparent Terminal windows, much less mouse around in it.
So, ignoring the GPP and accepting that the amount of money spent by all levels of government in the US on education of all people in the US is roughly equal to the amount of money spent by the federal government on (on-budget) national defense... realizing that if you added in the not-on-budget costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Defense number is probably bigger than the education number...
That doesn't seem just a teeny bit odd to you? That we spend more money on defense than on educating all 300 million of our citizens?
I already knew that all federal non-defense, discretionary spending doesn't add up to federal defense spending. But I would have figured for sure we overall spent vastly more on education, just like we do on health care. Weird.
Germans did not win the war on the eastern front by military means. At the military level they were getting their arse kicked. Brusililov breakthrough, Moonzund, etc.
You may be mistaking the Germans for the Austrians. The Hapsburgs couldn't seem to do anything right against the Russians. The Brusilov offensive was a breakthrough into Galacia (Austria), which had no strategic result execpt for convincing hapless Romania to join the Allies; she was occupied by the German army almost before the ink was dry on her treaty of alliance.
I had never heard of Moonzund, but some googling suggests it was a minor amphibious operation in 1944. Wrong war.
Meanwhile, if the Russians often had their way with the Hapsburgs, the Germans regularly thrashed the Russians. They started by annihalating the two Russian armies send to invade East Prussia in 1914 and never let up. But you're right, that in strictly military terms German would have had a hard time actually conquering Russia. But wars aren't fought on strictly military terms, and as their morale, economy, and government all collapsed under the strain of war, the Russian military wasn't in much shape to continue resistance. Heck, they barely held off the Polish two years later. And the Germans may have helped with the October Revolution, but the original March Revolution was a purely Russian affair.
I'm not even sure the Germans didn't suffer more casualties on the Western Front. Together, the UK and France suffered 2.2M, Russia only 1.7M. Considering all the bloodiest set-peice battles were in the West, I'd be surprised if the majority of Germany's casualties weren't there.
Same in WWI, The US helped shorten the wars but Russia won them.
Erm, Germany beat Russia in WWI, fair and square and damn near total. The war on the Eastern Front was over in Nov. 1917. By the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the Germans occupied all of the Ukraine, the Baltic states, Poland, the Crimea, and a further chunk of the Black Sea coast; they also grabbed a large slice of Belorussia just because they felt like it. Russia was done. They were saved from Germany's harsh terms only by Allied victory in the West. The contrast with WWII, which Russia might have been able to win on its own, was striking.
Give it up with this "liberal media" bullshit. Good lord. The "liberal media" acted so liberal in the run-up to war that the liberal editors of the two most liberal of the liberal papers, the NYTimes and the Washington Post, felt the need to publically apologize in recent months for not doing their jobs, and instead acting like pseudo-patriotic parrots of administration propoganda - and doing so very willfully. There was a great study showing that during the war anti-war pundits on all networks together (including PBS) got one-twenty-fifth the air time of pro-war pundits. That would be 1:25, not 8:1. Real "liberal" there.
If you could see past that log in your eye, you'd realize there's nothing liberal about the media anymore. Virtual all media in this country is owned by a handful of large corporations. They look out for #1. CNN viewers may have been slightly less misinformed than FNC viewers, but CNN still beat the war drum just as hard, and have been just as soft in criticizing the administration since.
Fact is less than 25% of all oil is consumed to fuel our cars and power our homes. The other 75% goes directly to manufacturing
I wish I had a few mod points to mark you "Troll". Fact is, you're so amazingly misinformed as to give a very good impression of being completely full of shit.
According to the US Department of Energy, the vast, vast majority of oil used in the US is used to produce energy. Most of that energy is for transportation, and most of that energy for transportation is in the form of gasoline for motor vehicles. Only a tiny fraction is used as industrial raw materials.
(1000's of barrels per day) 19,254: Total US petroleum consumption in 2002 13,079 (68%): For use in transportation 8665 (45%): In the form of motor gasoline 878 (4.5%): All residential use (heating, cooking, etc.) 4926 (26%): All industrial use (energy + raw materials)
Only a fraction of 26% of our oil is used as raw materials. Unless we replace gasoline as the fuel of choice for motor vehicles, we'll never significantly reduce consumption. You cannot possibly have a reasonable opinion on energy policy without understanding these basic patterns of consumption. http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/aer/petro.html/
(The harsh tone of this post is in direct proportion to degree of certainty with which the parent expounded completely incorrect "facts". However, the parent's conclusion that solar is not the answer right now is correct for the wrong reason. Precisely because there is not yet any reasonable alternative to gasoline for motor vehicles, and because gasoline is the #1 use of oil in the US, we will never reduce our oil consumption without developing a viable alternative to the internal-combustion engine. Solar can produce electricity, but electric batteries are, at the moment, an awfully poor way to power a car.)
You might be right, but remember there's really no such thing as an oil company. There are only energy companies.
The reason I doubt this is that oil is a tangible commodity. Someone owns it, and other people can sign leases for it, still others can distribute and market it. By definition, it's scarce, and scarce = profit.
But fusion...fusion will (mostly) just be a technology. Once the kinks are worked out, anyone could build a fusion plant. Even it's patented and copyrighted, you can't stop a sovereign nation from building their own, short of bombing them. There's no scarcity, so no profit. Even if you fancy yourself an "energy" company, would you hurry along the day when your scarce, supremely profitable business will be superseded by a ethereal technology that no one can control (much less profit from)?
(I know that certain rare raw materials will likely make the best fusion reactors, at least initially, and those raw materials may be most abundant in out-of-the-way places, like the moon, leading to scarcity and profit. But in principle, and eventually, one would think, in practice, all you need is water and seed energy.)
The U.S. has found that using several smaller cargo aircraft such as the C-130 Herc is typically more efficient for military use.
That's often true, although you're sort of comparing apples and oranges - the C-130 is a short(ish)-haul tactical cargo aircraft, while the C-5/C-17/An-124/An-225 are designed for non-stop, long-haul missions. And despite how pleased the US armed forces are with the C-17, I don't doubt for a moment they wouldn't mind having an aircraft that could carry more than a single Abrams at a time.
I can't believe I got a "Troll" mod for pointing out that MBA's aren't the be-all and end-all of business acumen. There must be a few bored MBA students with mod points today.:)
You got your long list of MBA's a few posts down, I presume, from the 2003 CEO Magazine survey of CEOs - the same one that found that only 36% of Fortune 200/500/700 CEO's have MBA's. More pointedly, I will assert that non-MBA's are heavily enriched in "founding CEO's" - arguably the most valuable group, to their companies and to the economy. CEO is an incredibly difficult job, and having an MBA has little or nothing to do with success in it.
I certainly agree that MBA's are heavily represented in middle-management. And that quality middle-management is essential to any successful company. I'm unconvinced of the correlation between those two statements, however. GE, for example, has a long tradition of breeding managers of the highest-quality, and they don't turn to MBA schools to do it. I think it's also telling that the most common undergrad major among those Fortune X00 CEO's is engineering.
MBA's are only viewed as money wasting company destroyers because that's all they get press for. When a business is run well, and has success, as the result of a hard working MBA, it doesn't exactly make news.
When a business is run well, and has success, it's often not run by an MBA.:)
Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jack Welch, Sam Palmisano, Michael Dell, Larry Ellison... I can't even name one major tech CEO, off the top of my head, who has an MBA.
So -- will some areas soon have journals less likely to accept gov't funded papers as a result of this proposal? If so, will gov't funding become less desirable?
With all due respect to other fields, biomedicine is the 800 pound gorilla of scientific publishing, especially here in the US. Most of the funding, research, journals, and profits are in biomedicine. And the vast majority of the funding comes from the NIH, with the vast majority of publications coming from NIH-funded labs. Any journal that decides to exlude NIH-funded research will quickly wither.
For this exact reason I'm shocked (and gratified) that Congress is actually taking up this issue. Particularly in the current climate, I figured there's no way they would do the right thing and force publishers to give up their fat profit margins. It would be like giving Medicare the power to negotiate prescription drug prices.
Perhaps Congress should use it's Library as a "mirror" of gov't funded research journal articles instead of engaging in price control?
There already is such a thing, called PubMed Central. It's a public, electronic repository for journal articles. However, only a handful of journals permit their content to be so archived, because they fear the loss of profits. Since the journals own the copyrights on their articles, you can't just "mirror" them - you need an act of Congress to force them into certain licensing terms.
I hate to remind you, but you fine Finnish folk were on the German side of WWII. It was the Russians that you did all the killin' of.
It wasn't really your fault whose side you wound up on - the Russians attacked you first. France and the UK actually considered sending troops to help, which would have put them at war with both Germany and Russia. Later on, the Germans were able to persuade you to join in their invasion of Russia in the hope of recovering the territory you had earlier lost, and you fought with the Germans until almost the end of the war.
The US constitution, while protecting speech, explicitly authorized (even mandates) the protection of innovation by granting monopolies on copying.
I know you mean well, but you're hardly better informed than the people who scream "copying == stealing!!".
The Constitution most certainly does NOT mandate protection of innovation. Rather, it grants Congress the power "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;" (Section 8, Clause 8)
Notice the order of words there. The power it grants is to "promote the progess of science and useful arts". The means to that end is by patenting and copyright for limited times. If patents and copyrights are failing to do their job, promoting the useful arts and sciences, then they should be scrapped. Patent and copyright law as it exists now, being extended retroactively into perpetuity, being used to stifle innovation, and secure endless revenue streams for non-corporal Corporations, would make the writers of the Constitution roll over in their graves.
If I can plant just one kernel in your mind, let it be that patents and copyrights, according to the Constitution, are supposed to serve society, to serve YOU. Not the other way around.
Slashdot Mirror
Great shot. I walked that trail two summers ago, it was probably the most awesome (as in awe-insiring) scenery I've ever seen. I also remember that I was way too chicken-shit to follow the trail the full length of Johnston ridge. :)
Everyone can see the trail winding off into the distance on the left side of the picture. Then you see the enormous, blackend and scarred, barren ridge that juts out the left, towards Mt. St. Helens? And how there's a little white horizontal scrape about 4/5 of the way up that ridge, that looks like part of the sendimentation pattern of the rock? Nope, that's the trail. Two feet across, covered in loose tock, literally scraped into the side a cliff and hugging it all the way around that jutting ridge. I got about a hundred feet along it and decided the other half of the trail must not be nearly as interesting as the first half.
I'd mod you up if I could. Why is that irrational scaremongering gets +5 insightful while the rational reply gets nadda?
So don't confuse "doing what's good for our partes" with "doing what's good for the country". 1992 was a fluke, since both parties thought they were doing themselves a favor by having Perot there. His actual performance in the election must have scared the hell out both of them, and I can guarantee that neither will ever let something like that happen again.
Not to say they aren't still valuable, because they're still the only time most of the public will ever hear the candidates discuss a reasonable breadth of issues, and because they're all we've got.
>blockquote> Maybe the answer is that a good Catholic cannot run for office in the U.S.That's what the WASPs have trying to convince everyone for a hundred and fifty years now. :)
The thing about all of that, besides the fact that if the Church excommunicated every member who disagreed with any teaching there would be no Catholics left in America...well, that's a thing. But there's another thing, and that thing is that there's a firewall, if you will, between one's personal beliefs and what one thinks should be codified into law.
We do not live in a theocracy, and no sane person would advocate that our nation should adopt any one religion's teachings as law, lock-stock-and-barrel. But that is exactly the position the Church has been moving towards recently. It began with asserting that politicians have a non-binding duty to advocate Church policies. It evolved into the idea that politicians who don't risk censure or excommunication. It has further evolved, here in America, into the idea that people who vote for such politicians should be censured or excommunicated.
The whole premise is nonsense, besides being unconstitutional. Just because I'm Catholic doesn't mean I advocate passing a law declaring that Jesus is the Son of God and Pope John Paul II is his infallible representative on Earth. This is America. I would feel the same way if a Muslim politican tried to introduce Sharia here. Hell, even Jesus himself didn't seem keen on theocracies (that whole "give unto Ceasar" thing, along with his relentless bashing of the Jewish elders). What I do and what I believe is my own business. What I think should be legal and illegal for other people to do should not, and in the USA can not, be based on what I believe.
For proof, check out how many people actually saw the SBV4T ad on TV (vanishingly few) against how many watched it on the news or otherwise heard about it through the media (everyone in America).
Several, actually. You can find them on johnkerry.com/issues/technology/plan. I just cherry-picked a few examples:
- Provide substantial research increases for clean energy, medicine, advanced manufacturing, information technology, nanotechnology, and other priorities.
- Extend the Research & Experimentation tax credit
- Provide a tax credit to ensure that broadband access is universal and affordable
- Expand spectrum that is available for wireless broadband
- Remove restrictions on federal funding of stem cell research
These and other ideas are laid out in fairly impressive detail on the site. The first point is most important to me. Bush completed the planned 5-year doubling of the NIH budget only by a technicality in 2003, and both it and the NSF are taking a big hit this year. His budgets plan further cuts in following years. Science is not a priority for him. It is for Kerry.
The Catholic Church hierarchy has been lately taking the stance that any politician who doesn't think the laws of the United States should mirror the teachings of the Catholic Church isn't a good Catholic. In a fit of cognitive dissonance, I'm starting to think the Catholic Church isn't a very good Church, at least not for any patriotic American. I mean, seriously, substitue some Muslim-American candidate for "John Kerry" and "Islam" for "Catholicism"; how fast would you be calling the Muslim a hypocrite if he didn't think sharia was a great idea for the US? And how quickly would he be thrown in jail as a fundie terrorist if he did?
So, ignoring the GPP and accepting that the amount of money spent by all levels of government in the US on education of all people in the US is roughly equal to the amount of money spent by the federal government on (on-budget) national defense... realizing that if you added in the not-on-budget costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Defense number is probably bigger than the education number...
That doesn't seem just a teeny bit odd to you? That we spend more money on defense than on educating all 300 million of our citizens?
I already knew that all federal non-defense, discretionary spending doesn't add up to federal defense spending. But I would have figured for sure we overall spent vastly more on education, just like we do on health care. Weird.
I had never heard of Moonzund, but some googling suggests it was a minor amphibious operation in 1944. Wrong war.
Meanwhile, if the Russians often had their way with the Hapsburgs, the Germans regularly thrashed the Russians. They started by annihalating the two Russian armies send to invade East Prussia in 1914 and never let up. But you're right, that in strictly military terms German would have had a hard time actually conquering Russia. But wars aren't fought on strictly military terms, and as their morale, economy, and government all collapsed under the strain of war, the Russian military wasn't in much shape to continue resistance. Heck, they barely held off the Polish two years later. And the Germans may have helped with the October Revolution, but the original March Revolution was a purely Russian affair.
I'm not even sure the Germans didn't suffer more casualties on the Western Front. Together, the UK and France suffered 2.2M, Russia only 1.7M. Considering all the bloodiest set-peice battles were in the West, I'd be surprised if the majority of Germany's casualties weren't there.
Give it up with this "liberal media" bullshit. Good lord. The "liberal media" acted so liberal in the run-up to war that the liberal editors of the two most liberal of the liberal papers, the NYTimes and the Washington Post, felt the need to publically apologize in recent months for not doing their jobs, and instead acting like pseudo-patriotic parrots of administration propoganda - and doing so very willfully. There was a great study showing that during the war anti-war pundits on all networks together (including PBS) got one-twenty-fifth the air time of pro-war pundits. That would be 1:25, not 8:1. Real "liberal" there.
If you could see past that log in your eye, you'd realize there's nothing liberal about the media anymore. Virtual all media in this country is owned by a handful of large corporations. They look out for #1. CNN viewers may have been slightly less misinformed than FNC viewers, but CNN still beat the war drum just as hard, and have been just as soft in criticizing the administration since.
According to the US Department of Energy, the vast, vast majority of oil used in the US is used to produce energy. Most of that energy is for transportation, and most of that energy for transportation is in the form of gasoline for motor vehicles. Only a tiny fraction is used as industrial raw materials.
(1000's of barrels per day)
19,254: Total US petroleum consumption in 2002
13,079 (68%): For use in transportation
8665 (45%): In the form of motor gasoline
878 (4.5%): All residential use (heating, cooking, etc.)
4926 (26%): All industrial use (energy + raw materials)
Only a fraction of 26% of our oil is used as raw materials. Unless we replace gasoline as the fuel of choice for motor vehicles, we'll never significantly reduce consumption. You cannot possibly have a reasonable opinion on energy policy without understanding these basic patterns of consumption.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/aer/petro.html/
(The harsh tone of this post is in direct proportion to degree of certainty with which the parent expounded completely incorrect "facts". However, the parent's conclusion that solar is not the answer right now is correct for the wrong reason. Precisely because there is not yet any reasonable alternative to gasoline for motor vehicles, and because gasoline is the #1 use of oil in the US, we will never reduce our oil consumption without developing a viable alternative to the internal-combustion engine. Solar can produce electricity, but electric batteries are, at the moment, an awfully poor way to power a car.)
But fusion...fusion will (mostly) just be a technology. Once the kinks are worked out, anyone could build a fusion plant. Even it's patented and copyrighted, you can't stop a sovereign nation from building their own, short of bombing them. There's no scarcity, so no profit. Even if you fancy yourself an "energy" company, would you hurry along the day when your scarce, supremely profitable business will be superseded by a ethereal technology that no one can control (much less profit from)?
(I know that certain rare raw materials will likely make the best fusion reactors, at least initially, and those raw materials may be most abundant in out-of-the-way places, like the moon, leading to scarcity and profit. But in principle, and eventually, one would think, in practice, all you need is water and seed energy.)
I can't believe I got a "Troll" mod for pointing out that MBA's aren't the be-all and end-all of business acumen. There must be a few bored MBA students with mod points today. :)
You got your long list of MBA's a few posts down, I presume, from the 2003 CEO Magazine survey of CEOs - the same one that found that only 36% of Fortune 200/500/700 CEO's have MBA's. More pointedly, I will assert that non-MBA's are heavily enriched in "founding CEO's" - arguably the most valuable group, to their companies and to the economy. CEO is an incredibly difficult job, and having an MBA has little or nothing to do with success in it.
I certainly agree that MBA's are heavily represented in middle-management. And that quality middle-management is essential to any successful company. I'm unconvinced of the correlation between those two statements, however. GE, for example, has a long tradition of breeding managers of the highest-quality, and they don't turn to MBA schools to do it. I think it's also telling that the most common undergrad major among those Fortune X00 CEO's is engineering.
Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jack Welch, Sam Palmisano, Michael Dell, Larry Ellison... I can't even name one major tech CEO, off the top of my head, who has an MBA.
For this exact reason I'm shocked (and gratified) that Congress is actually taking up this issue. Particularly in the current climate, I figured there's no way they would do the right thing and force publishers to give up their fat profit margins. It would be like giving Medicare the power to negotiate prescription drug prices.There already is such a thing, called PubMed Central. It's a public, electronic repository for journal articles. However, only a handful of journals permit their content to be so archived, because they fear the loss of profits. Since the journals own the copyrights on their articles, you can't just "mirror" them - you need an act of Congress to force them into certain licensing terms.
I hate to remind you, but you fine Finnish folk were on the German side of WWII. It was the Russians that you did all the killin' of.
It wasn't really your fault whose side you wound up on - the Russians attacked you first. France and the UK actually considered sending troops to help, which would have put them at war with both Germany and Russia. Later on, the Germans were able to persuade you to join in their invasion of Russia in the hope of recovering the territory you had earlier lost, and you fought with the Germans until almost the end of the war.
The Constitution most certainly does NOT mandate protection of innovation. Rather, it grants Congress the power "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;" (Section 8, Clause 8)
Notice the order of words there. The power it grants is to "promote the progess of science and useful arts". The means to that end is by patenting and copyright for limited times. If patents and copyrights are failing to do their job, promoting the useful arts and sciences, then they should be scrapped. Patent and copyright law as it exists now, being extended retroactively into perpetuity, being used to stifle innovation, and secure endless revenue streams for non-corporal Corporations, would make the writers of the Constitution roll over in their graves.
If I can plant just one kernel in your mind, let it be that patents and copyrights, according to the Constitution, are supposed to serve society, to serve YOU. Not the other way around.