We want the fuel efficiency that diesel engines already offer but we can't buy them in the US because of sulfur emission regulation. This makes it sound like our emission regulations are so strict that auto companies can't sell their diesel engines in the US. You make it sound like there is a strict dichotomy between efficiency and sulfur pollution. This is not the case. In fact, the reason is that modern diesel engines have been designed assuming the use of ultra-low-sulfur (ULS) diesel fuel, which, until recently, wasn't available in the US. Therefore, it wasn't feasible to run diesel engines with the sulfur-infused diesel available in the US.
You might wonder why ULS diesel wasn't available sooner? Because there was no regulatory will to make it happen sooner. And why was that? Because refining the sulfur out of diesel costs 3-5 cents per liter and thus the trucking industry lobbied heavily against any proposed legislation.
Everything may have tradeoffs, but this particular case isn't a good example. This is more an example of putting our money where are our mouth is.
T5 flourescent tubes easily give at least 90 lumens per watt, maybe more. These are tubes that you can buy right now almost anywhere.
Care to provide a link where I can get the LED you speak of? Certainly this summary of lighting efficiencies do not agree with your thesis. Perhaps in a few years.
I doubt it has much to do with judging risks and more to do with costs. It's vastly cheaper to build & maintain roads than it is to build up universal public transport, since allowing everyone to buy cars externalizes storage, operating, and maintenance costs. Cheaper for who? We're talking about humanity here (or society), that means you have to add up both the public costs of personal transport (roads, road maintenance, waging wars in foreign lands, the environment) along with the private costs of personal transport (fuel, maintenance, the vehicle, storage). You can't just wave your hands and call the private costs "externalized".
What's egalitarian about the free rider problem Why don't we let drivers pay the real cost of driving rather than letting everyone else subsidize the construction of roads (oh, and wage wars in oil-rich countries).
BTW, please save the commerce-needs-transport retort, it costs four times as much to ship something by truck compared to rail.
For those of you that don't know, The National Review is a conservative magazine that publishes political opinion pieces. It's not exactly a scholarly journal of well researched historical fact. Perhaps not. But the author of the article clearly indicates that his source is: Robert Nisbet's book Prejudices: A Philosophical Dictionary.
And who is Robert Nisbet?
Wikipedia has this to say:
Nisbet obtained a Ph.D. in sociology in 1939 from Berkeley, where he studied under Frederick J. Teggart.
Nisbet founded the Department of Sociology at Berkeley, and was briefly Chairman. Nisbet left an embroiled Berkeley in 1953 to become a dean at the University of California, Riverside, and later a Vice-Chancellor. Nisbet remained in the University of California system until 1972, when he left for the University of Arizona at Tucson. Soon thereafter, he was appointed to the prestigious Albert Schweitzer Chair at Columbia.
After retiring from Columbia in 1978, Nisbet continued his scholarly work for eight years at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington D.C. In 1988, President Reagan asked him to deliver the Jefferson Lecture in Humanities, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Nisbet is an accomplished fellow and, based on his work, probably knows a few things about well researched scholarly fact. Whether his book is a paragon of scholarly fact remains to be seen, but it's not quite as easy to dismiss as you suggest.
I haven't compared the book to the article that the GP links to, but the story that the article describes makes a lot of intuitive sense. Essentially it suggests that Galileo's work was seen as a threat to the established academic institutions, which then used their political power to discredit Galileo. When it comes to explaining the motivations of man, I generally trust the money trail.
Even today, we get along just fine with the Amish, Mormons, Baptists, Southern Baptists, Scientologists, Wiccans, Satanists, etc. Oh really? Tell that to Warren Jeffs. Let me fix your sentiment for you: We get along just fine with those that don't threaten our myopic sense of morality.
they already do this in Canada, and have been since 1994 on all newborns. This is completely false. OP, provide a reference to substantiate your claim.
I'm not supporting the inquisition but this seems wrong to me. If the person being investigated is a woman and has a cat, then shouldn't we see if she floats?
Obvious is difficult to define. Sure, it's obvious now in 2007 a whole 12 years after cookie functionality was added to Netscape. But was it obvious in 1997? Maybe. Maybe not. Obviousness is such a slippery slope that it's pointless to even argue about -- in court this argument boils down to a personality contest between attorneys and expert witnesses. No one wants to win or loose on those odds.
If 1-click isn't Amazon's idea, then produce some proof that it isn't. This is the sure fire way to invalidate the patent and the basis on which patent applications are vetted in the patent office. It helps to know how to do this. Start with the claims and work from there. Unless there is some funny terminology you shouldn't even have to read the rest of the application -- for novelty only the claims matter.
As an example of what not to do bountyquest provides a good illustration:
US Patent #4734858 "Data terminal and system for placing orders," filed March 29, 1988.
This excellent submission, dating back to the late 80s, describes the use of a remote data terminal to place orders. It was a highly relevant patent that was not cited in the original 1-Click application but probably should have been. It's a good example of how electronic shopping systems can be connected via a dial-up connection to legacy computer systems without using the Web. It also describes a simplified ordering system not dissimilar to 1-Click, as it states: "Transmission of orders is manually initiated by actuation of a function key at any time after an order is stored in the send memory." Sounds a whole lot like 1-Click shopping, doesn't it? Unfortunately it doesn't say anything about the use of HTML, the Web, and such, so it wasn't a winner. But kudos to the submitter for coming very close to the target!
The author(s) of the article dismisses this art, but failed to read Amazon's claim. Nowhere in Amazon's first claim does it mention anything about HTML or the Web. I haven't looked at the patent the author cites, but if this is really the only deficiency then it is no deficiency at all.
Bountyquest has dismissed other art for similarly specious reasons such as "[reference] isn't web specific". Well neither is Amazon's claim -- only that there be a client and a server - but these terms can be read very broadly: there are lots of client-server systems that pre-date the web. Similarly "[reference] doesn't include 1-click" is no reason to dismiss art because Amazon's claim only requires "a single action being performed". If you find art that includes a single action being performed, then Amazon is going to have difficulty narrowing the claim by specifying that the action is a mouse click because mouse clicking was a well known method of producing single actions.
Bountyquest makes yet another ridiculous assertion when it says: "However, the [reference] is not a winner, because we don't have evidence that someone . . . implemented [reference] . . . before our Prior To date. " There is absolutely no requirement that prior art must be implemented -- only a person skilled in the art would be ABLE to implement it from the description.
If bountyquest (or anyone else) is serious about digging up prior art they should educate themselves on rudimentary patent prosecution.
From the links:
A program manager "[l]eads the technical side of a product development team, managing and defining the functional specifications and defining how the product will work." These PMs are, as you intimate, a dime a dozen at microsoft.
A product manager "[f]ormulates business and marketing strategy."
These PMs have a lot of authority and make decisions at a much higher level.
Your synopsis falls into the idiotic rambling category. You have no clue what agile is about.
Agile programming means planning for things to change. . . . [Y]ou've structured the program in a way that makes it easy to do so.
This is completely wrong. Agile recognizes that change inevitably happens but that it is chaotic and unpredictable. The mistake you've made is that you assume you can predict the change. This is precisely the mistake that Agile seeks to address. Agile recognizes that it is not likely that you (or anyone else) will be able to predict the nature of changes in the future.
Nowhere does agile prescribe anticipating where code is likely to change. In fact, quite the opposite, agile touts the notion that you build for today. Tomorrow you refactor what you built today. Agile proponents understand that it is often a complete waste of time to build adaptive frameworks that depend on gross assumptions about the kind of changes that are predicted (rather than known).
Agile does have a plan. The plan is: code something that works and build tests that test what you've code against what requirement the code is supposed to satisfy. The code and the test are built together using whatever information is immediately available.
there will always be better schools for people with enough money to afford them.
Saying something emphatically doesn't make it true. Although you haven't defined what 'better' means, lets suppose it means scholastic performance (e.g., according to standardized test) in basic skills such as reading, writing and arithmetic. There are many examples in Canada (such as the province of Alberta) where publicly funded education routinely compete and surpass the education of private schools, at least in terms of test scores. Why? One reason is that public school boards in these areas pay their teachers more than private schools. In essence the private schools end up with the teacher dregs.
It is true that there are still disparities between private and public schools, even in these areas. For example, private schools are able to afford more capital expenditures, so you'll see more equipment, better computers, more materials, fields trips etc. Although this differences may lead to 'better' education or a more wholesome experience for students, they apparently do not have a compensatory impact on scholastic performance.
There are other reasons that you should be careful about comparing public and private schools. It may not be the quality of education that leads to higher scholastic scores. The fact that public schools are able to perform as well or better than private schools is really impressive when you consider that the wealthy are statistically more likely to perform better in school. Wealthy parents, for example, are more likely to value education, books, learning and promote learning in the home (partially because they have they can afford the time and money). Meanwhile, poor parents have to busy themselves with feeding their kids, working long hours and are less likely to be educated themselves.
Lets be clear, no market, including the labour market, suffers a "shortfall". When industry types parade around the notion of a "shortfall" what they really mean is that they anticipate having to pay higher prices (or wages in this case). They do this to drum up support for government policy which will effectively suppress prices/wages.
Okay, so you check whether your choice was correctly entered. You voted B and lo, the website shows you that you voted for B. You know that B corresponds to Coke -- vote verified. Phew.
But wait, what have you really verified? Only you know what B corresponded to... for all we know, thanks to a bug in the software (malicious or otherwise), the computed tally counted your vote B as a vote for Pepsi. We have to trust that the computer actually tallied the vote properly. We have to trust that the computer correctly recorded the ballot's mapping from letter-choice to candidate.
Electronic voting is an answer in search of a problem. Why not have regular paper ballots and let a scanner scan the ballot as it enters the ballot box -- use machine vision to count the ballot (or mark it as questionable). The computer can give us a preliminary count and if necessary (or to audit) we can always fall back to recounting each and every paper ballot. I guess the problem is that it's not as sexy as touch screens.
Without reading the actual applications, it sounds to me like that covers like 99% of anyone selling or storing anything on-line. I mean, WTF?
Here's a tip: a patent's legal boundaries are NOT defined by it's title. As disappointing as it might be, you actually do have to read the patent and, in particular, its claims. The claims of a patent (in light of the patent's specification) define it's legal boundaries. Even the specification itself is not enough. I could describe every conceivable phenomena in the universe and the allowed claim might read: "A red thimble made out of tin with thirteen divots arranged in a circular pattern on the exterior of said thimble." Clearly I've patented much less than all conceivable phenomena.
The title of a patent is intentionally broad. The issue is that otherwise patent infringer's can argue in court that they earnestly looked for applicable patents before they implemented their widget but they couldn't find any such patents. They will argue that if they did infringe they did so by accident. (Patent holders get thrice damage from infringer's who willfully infringe compared to infringer's who do so by accident.) A patent holder doesn't care to entertain such arguments so they intentionally title their patents very broadly, thus ameliorating the issue.
What Gartner fails to understand is that the winds of change say more about Intel then it does about Apple. Intel can't afford not to subsidize Apple or HP or Dell or anyone else. Intel is realizing that consumers, particularly Apple's consumers, don't really care what's on the inside. It could be Intel, AMD, PowerPC or SPARC and as long as the system is still running.br>
The fact is, the processor has become a commodity. The "experience" and end-to-end design that Apple sells is not a commodity. Who has lost their completitive advantage? It sure isn't Apple, and they know that.
I'm not sure if this was meant as a joke or not, in either case, it raises an important issue.
If you ever have an opportunity to talk with someone who lived in a soviet country, I highly recommend asking them what tool of oppression featured most highly in their day-to-day lives.
So far, from the opinions I have gathered, being required to show ID and other papers arbitrarily demanded by authorities ranks pretty highly. It is an infringement of privacy and limits your ability to conduct your own business without being scrutinized by your neighbors (or worse your local constabulary).
Every time I have to show my drivers license at the airport I have a chuckle at the inane pointlessness of it. But in truth I should be pissed off. Why does the flight attendant need to know who I am? What difference does it make who I am? They're certainly not protecting me from terrorists because the last batch of terrorists all had perfectly legitimate ID which they used! It is an information grab by Big Brother, plain and simple.
What about China? Current thinking is that China has less than 400 nuclear weapons. However, most of those are based at fixed sites, unfueled and their warheads in storage. In otherwords, China would not survive a first strike (its fixed sites would be hit) and does not have the to capacity to launch an effective first strike.
Re:Ignoring quality of life issues...
on
The Engine of US Jobs
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· Score: 2, Interesting
We take care of each other [...] it's a good thing
Thank you for your great disservice. You have turned an economic problem into an emotional issue. This is ultimately why healthcare is such a hard problem, people don't like to hear that they (or their loved ones) are not immortal; but it's true. No one lives forever. Burying your head in the sand is not going to fix the problem: health care is costing too much.
I have seen quotes that suggest 80-50 percent of health care costs are spent in the last three months of life 1,
2. How is that money well spent?
Your insistence on fixing your Aunt Tilly is completely selfish and myopic. You successfully ignore the fact that the resources you have spent on Aunt Tilly are resources that could have been spent providing health care to other younger poeple.
How about we make euthanasia a viable option and let healthcare costs incurred before age 60 be covered by the public/insured. After age 60 the public coverage of healthcare expenses can be pro-rated until about age 75-80 when costs are completely covered by the patient. That way, if you want to keep Aunt Tilly around no problem, you pay. But don't expect me to pay and don't you dare expect children and young adults to compromise their medical access for your Aunt.
I said islam is to Iran, you retort christian is to US.
Your generalizations in support of your claims are just as erroneous as my generalizations in support of my claims. The difference of course is that you seem to really believe in your generalizations.
If you care to consider facts, you'll note that Iran is a democracy, has elections, and has a public education system (where women constitute a majority of post-secondary students, btw). On the other hand you'll note the US's social security system is pretty pathetic by most western standards and public education is only marginally better. Also bear in mind we're comparing a developing nation (that, in the last 25 years, been devistated by war) with a fully industrialized first world nation.
Admittedly Iran is more Islamic than the US is Christian because ultimately Iran has a more homogeneous citizenry who do not oppose a completely non-secular political system. Unfortunately for you, that is not a feature of fascism.
Is Iran perfect? Not by a long shot. Would I rather live in the US or Iran? Of course I would rather live in the US. But suggesting that Iran is fascist is hardly accurate at all.
Actually, a good portion of the christian fundamentalists should be considered fascists.
Their stated goal is often times to have a christian government (see abortion), like the United States of America. I would argue that this is definately a fascist government. Fascists typically are authoritarian (warrentless wiretaps? torture? signing statements?), highly nationalistic (us vs. them, with us or against us, axis of evil, immigration), and anti-communist (duh)
It's obvious why they don't do it. I implied as much in my comment: the shareholders are amoral -- or at least some of them are. Many shareholders and their directors want to do whatever they want, which is to make profit-maximizing choices regardless of their ethical implications. However, these same people don't want to be accountable for their choices so they blame the system. This is why the "corporations-have-no-choice" defense that people use to justify Google's actions is just a cop-out. Stop blaming the nebulous and impossibly intangible "corporation" and start blaming the shareholders. Blame the investors, Brin, Page and Schmidt for all being weasels.
Why do you think the only two cases you cite are so old? Partly because investors have come to understand that their actions do have consequences. In the last 20 years there has been an upward trend for investors to invest ethically. If people would start questioning their own investment choices, and the investment choices of their pension fund, and of their insurance companies that trend should continue.
GM crops/foods that include genes spliced from fish (and probably other animals, too) do exist. You can read more about it, and other GM issues, here (notable for it's extensive bibliography).
Slashdot Mirror
You might wonder why ULS diesel wasn't available sooner? Because there was no regulatory will to make it happen sooner. And why was that? Because refining the sulfur out of diesel costs 3-5 cents per liter and thus the trucking industry lobbied heavily against any proposed legislation.
Everything may have tradeoffs, but this particular case isn't a good example. This is more an example of putting our money where are our mouth is.
T5 flourescent tubes easily give at least 90 lumens per watt, maybe more. These are tubes that you can buy right now almost anywhere.
Care to provide a link where I can get the LED you speak of? Certainly this summary of lighting efficiencies do not agree with your thesis. Perhaps in a few years.
Anyway, let me know what your calculation reveals. I'll give you a hint though, at least from an energy efficiency point of view: Gasoline consumption in New York is at the rate the national average was in the 1920s
What's egalitarian about the free rider problem Why don't we let drivers pay the real cost of driving rather than letting everyone else subsidize the construction of roads (oh, and wage wars in oil-rich countries).
BTW, please save the commerce-needs-transport retort, it costs four times as much to ship something by truck compared to rail.
And who is Robert Nisbet? Wikipedia has this to say: Nisbet obtained a Ph.D. in sociology in 1939 from Berkeley, where he studied under Frederick J. Teggart.
Nisbet founded the Department of Sociology at Berkeley, and was briefly Chairman. Nisbet left an embroiled Berkeley in 1953 to become a dean at the University of California, Riverside, and later a Vice-Chancellor. Nisbet remained in the University of California system until 1972, when he left for the University of Arizona at Tucson. Soon thereafter, he was appointed to the prestigious Albert Schweitzer Chair at Columbia.
After retiring from Columbia in 1978, Nisbet continued his scholarly work for eight years at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington D.C. In 1988, President Reagan asked him to deliver the Jefferson Lecture in Humanities, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Nisbet is an accomplished fellow and, based on his work, probably knows a few things about well researched scholarly fact. Whether his book is a paragon of scholarly fact remains to be seen, but it's not quite as easy to dismiss as you suggest.
I haven't compared the book to the article that the GP links to, but the story that the article describes makes a lot of intuitive sense. Essentially it suggests that Galileo's work was seen as a threat to the established academic institutions, which then used their political power to discredit Galileo. When it comes to explaining the motivations of man, I generally trust the money trail.
I'm not supporting the inquisition but this seems wrong to me. If the person being investigated is a woman and has a cat, then shouldn't we see if she floats?
If 1-click isn't Amazon's idea, then produce some proof that it isn't. This is the sure fire way to invalidate the patent and the basis on which patent applications are vetted in the patent office. It helps to know how to do this. Start with the claims and work from there. Unless there is some funny terminology you shouldn't even have to read the rest of the application -- for novelty only the claims matter. As an example of what not to do bountyquest provides a good illustration: The author(s) of the article dismisses this art, but failed to read Amazon's claim. Nowhere in Amazon's first claim does it mention anything about HTML or the Web. I haven't looked at the patent the author cites, but if this is really the only deficiency then it is no deficiency at all.
Bountyquest has dismissed other art for similarly specious reasons such as "[reference] isn't web specific". Well neither is Amazon's claim -- only that there be a client and a server - but these terms can be read very broadly: there are lots of client-server systems that pre-date the web. Similarly "[reference] doesn't include 1-click" is no reason to dismiss art because Amazon's claim only requires "a single action being performed". If you find art that includes a single action being performed, then Amazon is going to have difficulty narrowing the claim by specifying that the action is a mouse click because mouse clicking was a well known method of producing single actions.
Bountyquest makes yet another ridiculous assertion when it says: "However, the [reference] is not a winner, because we don't have evidence that someone . . . implemented [reference] . . . before our Prior To date. " There is absolutely no requirement that prior art must be implemented -- only a person skilled in the art would be ABLE to implement it from the description.
If bountyquest (or anyone else) is serious about digging up prior art they should educate themselves on rudimentary patent prosecution.
From the links:
A program manager "[l]eads the technical side of a product development team, managing and defining the functional specifications and defining how the product will work." These PMs are, as you intimate, a dime a dozen at microsoft.
A product manager "[f]ormulates business and marketing strategy." These PMs have a lot of authority and make decisions at a much higher level.
Just compare the description of a product manager compared to that of a program manager.
There are a 110 product manager job openings at MSFT compared to 365 program manager openings.
This is completely wrong. Agile recognizes that change inevitably happens but that it is chaotic and unpredictable. The mistake you've made is that you assume you can predict the change. This is precisely the mistake that Agile seeks to address. Agile recognizes that it is not likely that you (or anyone else) will be able to predict the nature of changes in the future.
Nowhere does agile prescribe anticipating where code is likely to change. In fact, quite the opposite, agile touts the notion that you build for today. Tomorrow you refactor what you built today. Agile proponents understand that it is often a complete waste of time to build adaptive frameworks that depend on gross assumptions about the kind of changes that are predicted (rather than known).
Agile does have a plan. The plan is: code something that works and build tests that test what you've code against what requirement the code is supposed to satisfy. The code and the test are built together using whatever information is immediately available.
It is true that there are still disparities between private and public schools, even in these areas. For example, private schools are able to afford more capital expenditures, so you'll see more equipment, better computers, more materials, fields trips etc. Although this differences may lead to 'better' education or a more wholesome experience for students, they apparently do not have a compensatory impact on scholastic performance.
There are other reasons that you should be careful about comparing public and private schools. It may not be the quality of education that leads to higher scholastic scores. The fact that public schools are able to perform as well or better than private schools is really impressive when you consider that the wealthy are statistically more likely to perform better in school. Wealthy parents, for example, are more likely to value education, books, learning and promote learning in the home (partially because they have they can afford the time and money). Meanwhile, poor parents have to busy themselves with feeding their kids, working long hours and are less likely to be educated themselves.
Lets be clear, no market, including the labour market, suffers a "shortfall". When industry types parade around the notion of a "shortfall" what they really mean is that they anticipate having to pay higher prices (or wages in this case). They do this to drum up support for government policy which will effectively suppress prices/wages.
I welcome such a shortfall.
Okay, so you check whether your choice was correctly entered. You voted B and lo, the website shows you that you voted for B. You know that B corresponds to Coke -- vote verified. Phew.
But wait, what have you really verified? Only you know what B corresponded to... for all we know, thanks to a bug in the software (malicious or otherwise), the computed tally counted your vote B as a vote for Pepsi. We have to trust that the computer actually tallied the vote properly. We have to trust that the computer correctly recorded the ballot's mapping from letter-choice to candidate.
Electronic voting is an answer in search of a problem. Why not have regular paper ballots and let a scanner scan the ballot as it enters the ballot box -- use machine vision to count the ballot (or mark it as questionable). The computer can give us a preliminary count and if necessary (or to audit) we can always fall back to recounting each and every paper ballot. I guess the problem is that it's not as sexy as touch screens.
The title of a patent is intentionally broad. The issue is that otherwise patent infringer's can argue in court that they earnestly looked for applicable patents before they implemented their widget but they couldn't find any such patents. They will argue that if they did infringe they did so by accident. (Patent holders get thrice damage from infringer's who willfully infringe compared to infringer's who do so by accident.) A patent holder doesn't care to entertain such arguments so they intentionally title their patents very broadly, thus ameliorating the issue.
What Gartner fails to understand is that the winds of change say more about Intel then it does about Apple. Intel can't afford not to subsidize Apple or HP or Dell or anyone else. Intel is realizing that consumers, particularly Apple's consumers, don't really care what's on the inside. It could be Intel, AMD, PowerPC or SPARC and as long as the system is still running.br>
The fact is, the processor has become a commodity. The "experience" and end-to-end design that Apple sells is not a commodity. Who has lost their completitive advantage? It sure isn't Apple, and they know that.
I'm not sure if this was meant as a joke or not, in either case, it raises an important issue.
If you ever have an opportunity to talk with someone who lived in a soviet country, I highly recommend asking them what tool of oppression featured most highly in their day-to-day lives.
So far, from the opinions I have gathered, being required to show ID and other papers arbitrarily demanded by authorities ranks pretty highly. It is an infringement of privacy and limits your ability to conduct your own business without being scrutinized by your neighbors (or worse your local constabulary).
Every time I have to show my drivers license at the airport I have a chuckle at the inane pointlessness of it. But in truth I should be pissed off. Why does the flight attendant need to know who I am? What difference does it make who I am? They're certainly not protecting me from terrorists because the last batch of terrorists all had perfectly legitimate ID which they used! It is an information grab by Big Brother, plain and simple.
What about China? Current thinking is that China has less than 400 nuclear weapons. However, most of those are based at fixed sites, unfueled and their warheads in storage. In otherwords, China would not survive a first strike (its fixed sites would be hit) and does not have the to capacity to launch an effective first strike.
Gonzalas respects civil liberties like he respects the Geneva conventions. Qaint.
I have seen quotes that suggest 80-50 percent of health care costs are spent in the last three months of life 1, 2. How is that money well spent? Your insistence on fixing your Aunt Tilly is completely selfish and myopic. You successfully ignore the fact that the resources you have spent on Aunt Tilly are resources that could have been spent providing health care to other younger poeple.
How about we make euthanasia a viable option and let healthcare costs incurred before age 60 be covered by the public/insured. After age 60 the public coverage of healthcare expenses can be pro-rated until about age 75-80 when costs are completely covered by the patient. That way, if you want to keep Aunt Tilly around no problem, you pay. But don't expect me to pay and don't you dare expect children and young adults to compromise their medical access for your Aunt.
If you care to consider facts, you'll note that Iran is a democracy, has elections, and has a public education system (where women constitute a majority of post-secondary students, btw). On the other hand you'll note the US's social security system is pretty pathetic by most western standards and public education is only marginally better. Also bear in mind we're comparing a developing nation (that, in the last 25 years, been devistated by war) with a fully industrialized first world nation.
Admittedly Iran is more Islamic than the US is Christian because ultimately Iran has a more homogeneous citizenry who do not oppose a completely non-secular political system. Unfortunately for you, that is not a feature of fascism.
Is Iran perfect? Not by a long shot. Would I rather live in the US or Iran? Of course I would rather live in the US. But suggesting that Iran is fascist is hardly accurate at all.
Actually, a good portion of the christian fundamentalists should be considered fascists. Their stated goal is often times to have a christian government (see abortion), like the United States of America. I would argue that this is definately a fascist government. Fascists typically are authoritarian (warrentless wiretaps? torture? signing statements? ), highly nationalistic (us vs. them, with us or against us, axis of evil, immigration), and anti-communist (duh)
Why do you think the only two cases you cite are so old? Partly because investors have come to understand that their actions do have consequences. In the last 20 years there has been an upward trend for investors to invest ethically. If people would start questioning their own investment choices, and the investment choices of their pension fund, and of their insurance companies that trend should continue.
GM crops/foods that include genes spliced from fish (and probably other animals, too) do exist. You can read more about it, and other GM issues, here (notable for it's extensive bibliography).