And then it came out in the conversation that WE'RE not sending out signals because we don't want to be found because we're not advanced enough to protect ourselves from someone who could find us.
Oops. One slipped out. Though there were belated protests at the UN because some world leaders, who were not consulted ahead of time, shared your girlfriend's fear.
I get the homeless are unlikely to get a letter addressed to a homeless shelter, but I didn't know that the post office would return letters to a voter if it turned out they were black, hispanic, or Native Americans... Do they have some kind of stamp they use that says something like "Return to sender: addressee is black" ??
Har har. The letters are sent to Blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans (and in some areas, white people in flamingly liberal neighborhoods) by various Republican election committees. See, you send letters only to people you think are more likely to vote against you, and when some proportion of them are inevitably returned as undeliverable, you strike those people from the rolls. Even better, the people may not find out until they show up to vote on election day. They then have to file provisional ballots, or are prohibited from filing any at all, depending on the local law. You can then further submit legal challenges to the counting of provisional ballots. If a voter is alert enough to wonder before election day why her voter registration card hasn't arrived, she may discover that restoring her name requires an administrative hearing downtown, or a lengthy application process that won't be completed before election day.
It's a well thought-out, multi-layered strategy to disenfranchise opposition voters en masse. If you've ever moved between elections without notifying your local elections board (how many people forget to do that?) you might be caught up next. Even worse, here in Seattle the local GOP skipped the letter-mailing part. They simply submitted a request for 2000 voters to be stricken for having "illegal addresses" on file - allegedly PO boxes, storage units, etc. Turns out most of the addresses were perfectly legit apartment and condo buildings. But that didn't matter - by the time the mess was sorted out, the election was long over, and those voters simply weren't counted.
I don't think I have really ever said "man, I wish that Windows had case sensitive file systems" or "man, I'm really glad Linux has case sensitive file systems." OTOH, I *know* I have said, on multiple occasions, "damn case sensitivity."
I know what you mean, I've had my "damn case (in)*sensitivity" moments, too. But it's trivial to do a uc(SomEthIng) or the equivalent in whatever language you use to strip out case. Perl even has its "i" tag for regexes. Going the other direction, however, is impossible - the file system didn't retain the necessary information to begin with. Given that both schema have roughly equal appeal, I think it makes more sense to use the one that retains the most information, and can be easily adapted to the other.
Or to use OS X's approach, which is to have a case-insensitive Finder layered on a case-sensitive FS. Typical users gets the simplicity of the former for all their day-to-day interactions, and the/. crowd can use the sophistication of the latter as they see fit.
If that means it will be 85% Asian as you mention, then so be it. Maybe if that happened it would serve as a wake-up call to our society and schools in America. Nothing else seems to.
Because all of those bright, Asian-American kids were educated on Mars, not in the same suburban prep schools as everyone else at MIT?
I have yet to read the paper[...]I do not agree that Vitamin D deficiency can be responsible for about 60% cancers. Wow. that takes balls to say. Kudos.
Even more ballsy is put out a press release making the astonishing claim that more than half of all cancer deaths in this country (100,000's lives/year?) could be prevented by a little sunlight or a supplement pill, when the actual data is to be presented at some undisclosed time, at some undisclosed location, in some undisclosed form. Science by vapid press release always takes balls, but this is a different magnitude altogether. The more respected clinical journals frown heavily on press reports far in advance of publication, so expect this to be a substantially flawed or underpowered study that will eventually see daylight in the West Canadian Journal of Gerontological Heliology.
A randomized double-blind study can verify (or rather, fail to not verify, if we want to get technical) the existence of a primary effect and rule out placebo effect.
RCTs don't have to be placebo-controlled, and in fact few are these days, as we have some sort of "standard of care" for most diseases under study. "Primary effect" and "placebo effect" are only semantically different in any event. You test for (the lack of) difference between any two interventions; statistically it doesn't matter if the control intervention is placebo or some standard treatment.
Would this help explain the apparent causality problem of neuromuscular control (humans seem able to send the neural command to catch the ball before our senses could have delivered the signal that it should be caught)?
What "causality problem" are you alluding to? I don't think there's any suggestion of FTL nerve impulses in the neuroscience community. If you just mean the old saw about being able to catch a dollar bill that you drop between your fingers, remember that it doesn't work if someone else does the dropping. Your higher brain anticipates your own actions, allowing your "reflexes" to appear much faster than they actually are.
I'll assume you're a fucking moron, because you are. If Norway sent its infantry abroad, it would not equip them with AG3s.
Are all Norwegians this polite, gentle, and peace-loving? In any event, reality must have an anti-Norwegian bias, because Norway has sent its soldiers to Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan, and it sent them armed with AG3's (along with even bigger guns). In the latter two nations they are even operating under the aegis of NATO, rather than the UN. Fortunately the Norwegeian government has ensured they are properly armed, but (sadly) this hasn't stopped them from killing civilian demonstrators or getting killed themselves.
The keyword here is "defend". The Norwegian armys standard issue is Heckler & Koch G3 (Slightly modified, renamed to AG3, and produced on licence in Norway). It uses 7.62mm rounds. Norwegian "Special Forces" are equipped with H&K MP5s. The reasoning behind this is that we are allowed to *defend* our country with AG3, but we cannot use the same weapon in an *attack*, thus we have to equip our "attack forces" with MP5s. The same applies to.50 cal (12.7mm), no matter how much the U.S. tries to twist its way out of restrictions that apply to everyone.
That doesn't make the slightest lick of sense. The infantry units use the AG3 because it's an assault rifle. It's long, it's heavy, it has a long range and a lot of penetrating power. Special Forces around the world use the MP5 because it's a submachine gun. It's light, it's easy to handle, and it's accurate at short ranges. Infantry usually fight in the open, often from positions. SF's usually fight in tight, enclosed spaces, often while moving. That is what defines the choice of weapon. It has absolutely nothing to do with whether the soldiers will fight in-country or out-of-country. No one in their right mind would select weapons in order to handicap certain groups of soliders - i.e. get them killed easier.
On the plus side, I bet it will be tough to claim executive privilege on those e-mails.
We think it's a joke, but they actually are claiming executive privilege on these and all emails that went through RNC-owned servers. Because the entire Republican Party is part of the Unitary Executive, evidently.
This is still really irrelevant though. If you do decide to impeach them both, you are doing a coup d'état against a democratically elected government.
Short of that government abolishing democracy, there is nothing that justifies that.
This is nonsensical. How does a demoncratically-elected government overthrow itself? The people's elected representatives following Constiutional procedures cannot constiute a "coup d'état". You make the same dangerous, fundamental conflation that this administration has been encouraging: the "unitary executive", conflating "our nation" and "our government" with "our President". He is but one (limited) branch of a balanced government, who are all bound by law - one branch exercising its powers within both the letter and the spirit of the law is not a coup d'état. You might at well say a President stages a coup d'état when he nominates a new Chief Justice with different views from the last.
"touch" works, yes. I think that's as far as Apple actually tested it.
When a makefile creates files while building a downloaded package, they often don't show up. Same with un-gzipping files. And some other operations. I concede that it works in more cases in 10.4 than it did in previous cases, but it still doesn't work 100% of the time like any modern file browser should. (Note: I experienced this just last week while compiling the GD library for use with PHP.)
FWIW, you're right about this. 'touch' works, but not much else. I spend a lot of time in the Terminal, and a lot of time clicking back and forth to refresh folders when I switch to Finder. Files created by Perl scripts certainly don't trigger any event-monitoring mechanism.
My guess is that a lot of people think of Star Wars because of the inclusion of metaphysics with "The Force", but that doesn't really make it any less sci-fi than something like Dune. A short list of technologies from Star Wars that I can think of:
GP means that all of these things are part of a static backdrop in Star Wars. They're just the way the world works. The plot in no way explores their effects on society of characters. It's borderline fantasy because the "science" is setting, not story.
One of the really cool things about God's design of the male body is this: When sexual arousal begins, two very important things for OS begin to take place. First, the opening to the bladder is squeezed shut, making it difficult for urine to pass through (which is why it's difficult for guys to urinate while they have an erection). Second, the Cowper's glands, which are located close to the prostate, secrete a substance that neutralizes any remaining urine in the urethra.
So, when your FW performs OS on you, rest assured that she will not be getting any urine in her mouth!
I really do appreciate the thought that God is looking out for blowjobs, but a more straightforward explanation is that urine is bad for sperm. Sperm don't tolerate the acidity of urine well (ejaculate is alkaline in order to neutralize the acidic vaginal environment); the nitrogen waste compounds reduce motility; and the volume dilutes out the nutrients sperm need to maintain their activity. Any male anatomy that mixed sperm and urine would be very unlikely to be passed on to future males. Few aspects of biology illustrate the effects of reproductive selection more clearly than the mechanics of reproduction itself.
The truth is that the length of copyright is not at issue here.... This is just a case of wanting to get something for free.... Copyright and IP laws have taken years to fall to this level of disrepair.
So kids today don't respect copyright laws. You think they just want something for free. I think there's little societal respect for these laws because there is a pervasive feeling that they're being manipulated to screw the little folks, or at least to protect the big folks. The length issue actually has a lot to do with this, in that copyright laws have in no way "fallen into disrepair" - they have been regularly and actively updated, in order to protect the big folks. Copyright is de facto perpetual now, since for the past 30 years Congress has retroactively extended them every time anything was due to fall into the public domain under existing law. There was a time when works regularly fell into the public domain, by statutory expiration of copyright, each and every year; but by now, essentially nothing has fallen into the public domain for eighty-four years. Maybe technoilliterati can't recite the various copyright extension acts and quote the current time period (120 years for corporate works), but they intuitively know that the social contract behind copyright is bust. And if it's bust, why does any residual part of it deserve respect?
Copyright is not a natural right... The Constituion is pretty clear. It grants the Congress the ability to create copyright.
Even more to the point, "It grants the Congress the ability to create copyright for a specific purpose, that is 'to promote the progress of science and useful arts'". A strict reading might even suggest that copyright on works of creative arts (is a sitcom a "useful art"?) is unconstitutional. The constitution only mentions "authors and inventors", not artists, musicians, poets or artisans.
>> Is that like how the Constitution provides specific grounds for revoking habeas corpus, >> but it's OK if the government ignores it because you don't have the right in the first >> place?
>No. Aside from the fact that you do have the right to habeas corpus, this has nothing to do with the government at all.
You may not be keeping up with politics, but the GPP's allusion is to the current AG's (and President's) latest argument for why they're Constiutionally permitted to imprison American citizens indefinitely without charge. It goes like this: the Constiution doesn't explicitly mention the right to habeas corpus, except to say when the government can revoke it. Therefore, you remain within the bounds of the Constiution by saying a citizen simply never had the right in the first place, and therefore the government isn't illegally revoking anything. As the Constiution is silent on which citizens actually have this right, it's clearly left to the executive to make the determination.
Kind of a Schrodinger's cat approach to rights. You never know whether you had them or not, until the executive retroactively decides. It's as harebrained as it is hairsplitting (Steven Colbert is surely jealous he didn't think of it first), but it's the official policy of the United States Government.
You may find that the sum of "hidden source" plus "public cost" = true cost is close to "charging out the nose" were there's no hidden source of funds to distort things.
Almost certainly correct, which leaves us with the fundamental difference between open-access and pay-subscription models: for similar costs, one of them permits only a handful to read the research, while the other permits the entire world. Which is better?
And these editorial boards likewise aren't going to receive any kind of money from any source? Is there any particular reason slashdot believes that the world doesn't require money?
1. Open access != no revenue. The emerging model is for scientists to pay a slightly higher page charge. But note that most pay-access journals have these charges anyway, and the odd $1000 to publish an article in PLoS is a rounding error in most annual research budgets, 2. Many editors at society journals work for free. These posts are considered prestigious, and are a good way to make professional friends. There hasn't been any shortage of volunteers. Universities universally support this use of researcher's time, because it adds to the department's and university's prestige.
There *is* a distinction between microevolution and macroevolution. In macroevolution, an organism gains new features, such as wings. In microevolution an organism gets stronger arms.
You simply misunderstand - and it's a very common misunderstanding - how our bodies are patterened by genes. Your model assumes there's an makeArms() gene and an armStrength() gene, and one gets stronger arms by turning on the first and turning up the second. To make wings, makeArms() has to be replaced by makeWings(). If we were made by a competent celestial engineer, this might be the case.
But that's not how it works. Our arms are formed as a result of insanely complex interactions between dozens (if not hundreds) of body-pattern genes. These are largely the same genes that form the body patterns of flies, worms, and mice (for example), just with innumerable tiny differences, some duplications or deletions, and differences in expression levels or times. Tiny changes can turn arms into wings (lighten the bone density, lengthen and stiffen the "hair", strengthen certain muscles). This mish-mash is such a mess precisely because it evolved randomly over billions of years, but as a result it's very amenable to further changes without breaking the whole system.
I think you're right on, and a big part of the problem is that Nature and Science are skewed towards "anticipated science", vs. novel science. In order to be hot, a topic must be widely known and followed, and most people in the field know what the next logical steps will be. Stem cells and fusion are great examples. Chromatin modification and remodeling has been another one for the past few years. Everyone knows that certain advances in these fields will be Nature-material, and everyone knows what the advances are. This generates two behaviors. Giant factory labs throw dozens of postdocs and (god forbid) grad students at a problem, until one of them sticks. And folks desperately motivated to establish a reputation make stuff up. This sort of behavior can only happen if you think you know what the result *should* be.
It is much more rare to see the genuinely surprising article, describing a truly unexpected result, and with only a handful of authors, in these high-profile journals. Such against-the-grain findings will usually hit the walls of "insufficiently supported", "not of general interest", or old-fashioned closed mindedness. Until they crawl up from lower-profile journals and become the new "hot".
We'd probably see patterns in them if the input was purely random data.
The input is random, so we are seeing patterns. A chromosome is linear. These guys wrapped that single long line into a box. Where they put the line breaks is completely arbitrary. Any patterns that you see must be formed by interesting "stacking" of lines together, and that effect is arbitrary. Pretty pictures, but utterly meaningless.
Kinda simple, too. Besides downloading the 40GB or so of genomic data from NCBI, all they needed were like four lines of code:
while (sequence) {
for (i = 0, i++, i < linelength) {
if sequence == A, then print blue
if sequence == G, then print red.... etc
}
newline }
I think it's a little amusing that they ask for job interviews at the bottom of the page.:)
Gray. Seattle thinks the rest of the world is insane for insisting that the sky is blue.
What do you mean, we think? Next you'll tell me I'm the crazy one for not believing those nut-cases who insist there's a giant flaming yellow ball floating somewhere up in the sky. Pssht.
Slashdot Mirror
That fucking rocks. How did I never notice that?
It's a well thought-out, multi-layered strategy to disenfranchise opposition voters en masse. If you've ever moved between elections without notifying your local elections board (how many people forget to do that?) you might be caught up next. Even worse, here in Seattle the local GOP skipped the letter-mailing part. They simply submitted a request for 2000 voters to be stricken for having "illegal addresses" on file - allegedly PO boxes, storage units, etc. Turns out most of the addresses were perfectly legit apartment and condo buildings. But that didn't matter - by the time the mess was sorted out, the election was long over, and those voters simply weren't counted.
Or to use OS X's approach, which is to have a case-insensitive Finder layered on a case-sensitive FS. Typical users gets the simplicity of the former for all their day-to-day interactions, and the
>> Is that like how the Constitution provides specific grounds for revoking habeas corpus,
>> but it's OK if the government ignores it because you don't have the right in the first
>> place?
>No. Aside from the fact that you do have the right to habeas corpus, this has nothing to do with the government at all.
You may not be keeping up with politics, but the GPP's allusion is to the current AG's (and President's) latest argument for why they're Constiutionally permitted to imprison American citizens indefinitely without charge. It goes like this: the Constiution doesn't explicitly mention the right to habeas corpus, except to say when the government can revoke it. Therefore, you remain within the bounds of the Constiution by saying a citizen simply never had the right in the first place, and therefore the government isn't illegally revoking anything. As the Constiution is silent on which citizens actually have this right, it's clearly left to the executive to make the determination.
Kind of a Schrodinger's cat approach to rights. You never know whether you had them or not, until the executive retroactively decides. It's as harebrained as it is hairsplitting (Steven Colbert is surely jealous he didn't think of it first), but it's the official policy of the United States Government.
2. Many editors at society journals work for free. These posts are considered prestigious, and are a good way to make professional friends. There hasn't been any shortage of volunteers. Universities universally support this use of researcher's time, because it adds to the department's and university's prestige.
But that's not how it works. Our arms are formed as a result of insanely complex interactions between dozens (if not hundreds) of body-pattern genes. These are largely the same genes that form the body patterns of flies, worms, and mice (for example), just with innumerable tiny differences, some duplications or deletions, and differences in expression levels or times. Tiny changes can turn arms into wings (lighten the bone density, lengthen and stiffen the "hair", strengthen certain muscles). This mish-mash is such a mess precisely because it evolved randomly over billions of years, but as a result it's very amenable to further changes without breaking the whole system.
I think you're right on, and a big part of the problem is that Nature and Science are skewed towards "anticipated science", vs. novel science. In order to be hot, a topic must be widely known and followed, and most people in the field know what the next logical steps will be. Stem cells and fusion are great examples. Chromatin modification and remodeling has been another one for the past few years. Everyone knows that certain advances in these fields will be Nature-material, and everyone knows what the advances are. This generates two behaviors. Giant factory labs throw dozens of postdocs and (god forbid) grad students at a problem, until one of them sticks. And folks desperately motivated to establish a reputation make stuff up. This sort of behavior can only happen if you think you know what the result *should* be.
It is much more rare to see the genuinely surprising article, describing a truly unexpected result, and with only a handful of authors, in these high-profile journals. Such against-the-grain findings will usually hit the walls of "insufficiently supported", "not of general interest", or old-fashioned closed mindedness. Until they crawl up from lower-profile journals and become the new "hot".
Kinda simple, too. Besides downloading the 40GB or so of genomic data from NCBI, all they needed were like four lines of code: I think it's a little amusing that they ask for job interviews at the bottom of the page.