If you want to know more about GM food, go ahead and read this book, seriously. It is an eye-opener to me, as someone who knows next to nothing about farming and thinks there might be some good reasons for NGOs to oppose GM food so vehemently.
A few juicy points from the book (not in the order as they appear in the book, just the order it came out from my memory), though I knows too little to judge if their validity:
In the book it mentioned one similar experiment with potatoes and mice (not sure if this is the same one), however, the experiment is so poorly controlled (e.g. the GM potato contains less vital nutrients compared to the "normal" potatoes) that the mice are more likely damaged through malnutrition than any effect of GM food. Other experiments that accounts for all the intake value of different nutrients showed no harmful effects for GM food.
Agriculture in its current form (with pesticides, fertilizers, etc) is already the most destruction thing human does routinely to nature. Any additional "damage" to the environment due to planting GM crops won't make much a difference anyway.
Corn farmers already have to buy seed every year from dealers, no terminator gene needed! Why? Because modern corn are usually hybrid breeds that give great yield but do not generate viable seeds. But you don't see NGOs screaming at seed dealers. This shows that farmer don't mind buying seed constantly as long as the yield difference is worth the price.
People has been making genetically new variants of plants for centuries already (i.e. through selective breeding). Needless to say, none of these new variants are subjected to as much scrutiny as GM foods has gone through (yet some still think them "unsafe").
Before GM, there were already other means (e.g. soaking in chemicals, radiation, etc) to cause genetic mutation in plants, which can also result in new variants of plants. These crops, however, are not called "GM" and can be sold with as much testing as variants obtained through breeding (i.e. no testing at all).
In some cases, the use of GM crops can and do reduce the use of pesticides, so it is not all bad.
Furthermore, one of the famous GM linked pesticide (Roundup), has the advantage of naturally decaying in matter of weeks. Thus using Roundup linked crop with Roundup do leave less harmful chemicals around in the environment.
You wouldn't teach driver's ed and refuse to give out information on what to do in slippery conditions to prevent kids from driving recklessly.
More like, it is a driver's ed where the teacher tells you never to drive a car so you won't get into a crash. A swimming class where the teacher tells you never to go near water so you will never drown. A pilot class that tells you never to try to fly a plane, etc, etc.
Simply being told to avoid an activity cannot be called an education about that activity.
There are many, MANY cultures where violent imagery is culturally accepted, but sexual imagery is even more restricted than in the U.S. I'm thinking of the Middle East and Asia especially.
I don't know which Asian countries you were thinking of, but here in Hong Kong, and places nearby (e.g. Singapore, China, etc), I would say that sex and violence are equally restricted. Where one is banned/limited, the other is treated equally, i.e. "not approprate for children" ratings will apply when either sex or violence is depicted.
Compared to the US, I think most Asian countries are much more restricted w.r.t. to violence and on-par/slightly more relaxed w.r.t. sex (i.e. some scenes of women's breast are tolerated in some special cases even in "appropriate for children" ratings).
To all posts that ask how this law is going to work, about generated content, etc, etc.
I have learned that nowadays, the main reason that law-makers introduces new laws is to boost their own popularity. It doesn't matter if the law cannot work, is impractical, will be struck down in courts, etc. It only matters that the (1) it grabs the headline thus putting his name on the news and (2) it showed people that he has "taken a stance" against something.
Just think about it, is it a surprise that people who are elected based on a popularity contest do things to boost their own popularity?
If you want to stop this law from passing, don't waste your time telling people it is not workable. Stuck at the heart of the matter and go tell games companies how much money it will wastes them, and tell people how many jobs such money could have created instead, or how much dividends would it costs the stock holders of those game companies.
Turn the law into an unpopular proposition and it will be dead.
Same here in Hong Kong, but worst. There is no local HK version of Wii here (there is one for PS3), so we have the choice of buying the US version or the Japan version Wii console and Wii games. Which sounds great... until I find out that the US Wii cannot play Japan Wii games, and vice versa (thanks to the dumba** idea of stopping game imports).
So effectively we have 2 parallel, mutually incompatible consoles called "Wii" with their sets of incompatible games. I can buy the US version which is more expensive and with fewer games available, or I can buy the Japan version with more games that I cannot understand a word.
So I elected not to buy it at all, maybe until someone hacks a version that can play both.
What's freaking ironic is that I'd be considered "social" by just freaking showing up standing around and not saying anything for 30 min - 1 hour half. How is that social? What I have now learned is women value the appearances of doing something more than actually doing the said thing! When you wife tells you "I want you to do more X", you should translate that to "I want you to be seen as do more X". For example, when she tells you she wants you to "be more social", she actually means (in menspeak) she wants you to appear to be more social, regardless of whether you are actually being social or not. Thus showing up (thus being seen) and standing silent for 1 hour is exactly what she wants, but going around chatting with your neighbors without other people see you doing it is not.
One potential client, when told by my boss that I would be on site the next day to troubleshoot their problem, told him in a crestfallen manner "...can't you come out instead? She's just a woman..." They'd never even heard of me before - this was not related to my performance, but simply to my sex. This was NOT an isolated incident. Not that I am dismissing your experience, but I just want to add something on this point. I know one reason why some people automatically dismiss a person's technical ability based on sex alone, and it is caused exactly by attempts to "close" such gender gap!
What I saw is that some large multi-national firm that have a surprisingly large portion of female staff in their IT departments (relative to other IT firms in the same area), and rumor has it that they intentionally hire more female to avoid discrimination charges. Unfortunately, the only way to hire more percentage of any sub-population than the market can supply is to lower the bar for that sub-population, so the result is many female IT staff that got hire is, frankly speaking, sub-par. So, the end result of that is eventually people inside the firm "knows" that female IT staffs are sub-par.
You still see the Gates Foundation doing good things but why is it that so many foundations of insurmountable wealth are somehow ignorant of the economic problems they persist for those they try to help? When an organization's purpose is to do X, a cynical people might think that such organization will turn a blind eye to some unintended side-effect which creates the opportunity for doing X.
For example, read the book "Games people play" about a social welfare company, tasked (and paid by govt) to help unemployed people finding jobs, fired an employee who found ways to actually succeed (thus reducing the number of unemployed needing their help). Or people in an alcoholics group went back to drinking when they ran out of alcoholics to help.
Foundations investing in companies that helped create the situation where the foundation can do their task? Somehow, that does not surprise me.
This is actually a good advice, assuming it is sold in the US. Depending on how real the toy gun looks and the lighting conditions, it might be mistaken for a real gun. Nevermind that a child is holding it, with enough news about school shootings, people will believe a child can get their hands on a real gun and start shooting at random people.
So pointing your toy gun at people might get yourself shot at by someone with a real gun.
I would have agreed with you if only the driver himself will be harmed in traffic accident.
But unfortunately, other drivers and pedestrians will be just as likely to be killed when some dumbass irresponsible driver decides to driver after he got drunk.
So what do you do when someone is behaving like an irresponsible child and start hurting other people? Simple, at the very least you should take away his ability to hurt people. When a child hit other people with a stick, you take away his stick. When someone decided to drive when he is drunk, taking away his ability to drive == good.
if you expected a 4 fold ncrease for 72 hours, then demand to drop to more moderate levels That's one of the main selling point of using VMs. When your army of servers in the hosting facilities are really just virtual machines running on some super uber server along with other VMs, it will be feasible to rent 4x more computing power for a week, either by making more VMs or increasing the resource share of your VMs.
Each password (user/admin) is used as the key when encrypting the master key, which means that there is no way, even for the crypto architect, to recover the master key without knowing at least one of these passwords. (The passwords are never stored anywhere on the disk of course!) I have done a similar design for a imaging system that required the stored images not accessible by simply reading the disks without knowing the passwords.
I always wondered if that is the right way to do it. It is good to know I at least got that part right.
In Europe, a significant number of DVD players are hacked to allow playing US DVDs. In Asia, well SE Asia at least, all DVD players are either already hacked (i.e. all-codes enabled) or comes with instructions on how to do that, even the ones from big name retailers. One of the reason is there so many DVD imports from Europe, US and Japan that it simply doesn't make sense to buy a region coded DVD player here.
Academics comes first, and then comes everything else.Not only India, this attitude is generally true for almost all asian countries also (e.g. Japan, China, Korea, SE Asia countries, etc).
Can any one in the USA (and not having Asian parents) imagine that there are training schools that train 5 year old kids (and their parents) for the admission interview for primary schools? (Note: not preparing their academic ability, but just for the interview itself! How to behave, what to say, what best answer for what kind of questions, etc.)
Was anyone surprised by this sensational piece of news?Because this time the students have hard evidence that the teacher lied? I think the fact that the teacher lied to the school afterwards is a more serious breach of trust than the fact he tried to preach during class.
...we find that if we do not lock down the high-level requirements you will never see the end of the development.
Personally, that is one of the Aha! experience when I learn about the agile approaches. There is no end of the development, at least not from the developers side. The purpose of software development is to create software that provides business value to the users, and further development will almost always provide software to gives more business value to the users! Until you reach the point that the value provided by further development (including bug fixes) is not worth the projected effort required, then it is a business decision to stop further development.
It is like any home-improvement projects, there is no end to the things you can improve in your home, as long as you are willing to pay for each piece of work, why must the contractor set some arbitrary "end" the project? YOU should be the one to say "That's enough.".
I think the idea that there should be an "end" to a development project stems from the inappropriate commodity-buying approach of from the buying side (i.e. the users/clients) which is encouraged/accommodated by selling side (i.e. software house/developers), which is only suitable for buying off-the-shelf software but not very useful for a software development effort.
I can't comment on Yau at all, but regarding Michael Anderson
... he just assumes a level of trust from the journalist that he could not possibly deserve. He is not her editor or legal counsel or whatever, just an interview partner; if you assume this level of trust you are naive and will be disappointed, and it's about time you learn a lesson in dealing with media.
While he might be naive to trust a journalist, it is indeed saddening that people now expect this kind of deceptive behaviour from journalist instead of finding it repungent.
While this may be true in business, where doublespeak and back-stabbing is rampant, it is not so in academics. In the academics, reputation and integrity are the most important asset for a professor, and he won't have any left if he were caught saying opposite things to different people. When an academic say something publicly, including to a journalist, they expect what they say to be represented fairly and they expect to stand by what they have said, otherwise they would have said nothing instead.
You find it funny that a man devoted to advancing the knowledge of human kind was deceived by a journalist? And you think a piece of journalism created by lies and deception "brilliant"?
I must be of those rare old school that still think that your notes should be a set of short personal reminders of what you have learned during the class, instead of just a blanket copy of everything written or said.
If you just want a blanket copy, why not take a camera and record the lecture yourself? If you notes contains everything, why not just bring a book and mark sections covered during the lecture instead?
When did those two groups become disjoint, then? In my experience nearly all of the second kind of people are also in the third group (though not vice versa).
Maybe I should put it this way: The third group will focus on who caused the problem and try to find who to blame.
For example, a server goes down due to a blown fuse in the power supply. People in the 2nd group will look at the server, determine the power supply is not working, and maybe fix it by replacing the power supply. What they don't care is what makes the power supply not working, as long as they can replace it. If they cannot replace the whole power supply, they might dig deeper and find the blown fuse and replace the fuse instead. But the point is the 2nd group dig into the problem just as deep as they needed in order to find a fix. In a crisis, finding a fix is 1st priority for those people.
On the contrary, people in the 3rd group will focus on who to blame for the problem. After learning the power supply is dead, they will want to know why for the purpose of assigning blame. If they find out a blown fuse is the cause, the first thing they will ask is what the server was doing, who might have done anything on it so they can lay the blame on triggering the blown fuse. Failing that, they will ask for who ordered the machine, etc. For these people, knowing who to blame is the 1st priority, actually fixing the problem comes later.
While people in the 2nd group may look for who to blame after the problem is under control, the 3rd group treat finding blame as more important.
The company I work for has 20,000+ employees and uses Exchange without a hitch. Why? Because everything is networked and each inbox is 20MB in size. After that, you have a default archive PST that is placed on a Samba NFS mount.
So what you mean is Exchange works for those 20k users because they are not actually using it much?
Does your company also "fix" the storage/backup problem by setting a tiny network disk quota and tell people to put files on their local disk too?
Slashdot Mirror
A few juicy points from the book (not in the order as they appear in the book, just the order it came out from my memory), though I knows too little to judge if their validity:
More like, it is a driver's ed where the teacher tells you never to drive a car so you won't get into a crash. A swimming class where the teacher tells you never to go near water so you will never drown. A pilot class that tells you never to try to fly a plane, etc, etc.
Simply being told to avoid an activity cannot be called an education about that activity.
I don't know which Asian countries you were thinking of, but here in Hong Kong, and places nearby (e.g. Singapore, China, etc), I would say that sex and violence are equally restricted. Where one is banned/limited, the other is treated equally, i.e. "not approprate for children" ratings will apply when either sex or violence is depicted.
Compared to the US, I think most Asian countries are much more restricted w.r.t. to violence and on-par/slightly more relaxed w.r.t. sex (i.e. some scenes of women's breast are tolerated in some special cases even in "appropriate for children" ratings).
To all posts that ask how this law is going to work, about generated content, etc, etc.
I have learned that nowadays, the main reason that law-makers introduces new laws is to boost their own popularity. It doesn't matter if the law cannot work, is impractical, will be struck down in courts, etc. It only matters that the (1) it grabs the headline thus putting his name on the news and (2) it showed people that he has "taken a stance" against something.
Just think about it, is it a surprise that people who are elected based on a popularity contest do things to boost their own popularity?
If you want to stop this law from passing, don't waste your time telling people it is not workable. Stuck at the heart of the matter and go tell games companies how much money it will wastes them, and tell people how many jobs such money could have created instead, or how much dividends would it costs the stock holders of those game companies.
Turn the law into an unpopular proposition and it will be dead.
Same here in Hong Kong, but worst. There is no local HK version of Wii here (there is one for PS3), so we have the choice of buying the US version or the Japan version Wii console and Wii games. Which sounds great... until I find out that the US Wii cannot play Japan Wii games, and vice versa (thanks to the dumba** idea of stopping game imports).
So effectively we have 2 parallel, mutually incompatible consoles called "Wii" with their sets of incompatible games. I can buy the US version which is more expensive and with fewer games available, or I can buy the Japan version with more games that I cannot understand a word.
So I elected not to buy it at all, maybe until someone hacks a version that can play both.
What I saw is that some large multi-national firm that have a surprisingly large portion of female staff in their IT departments (relative to other IT firms in the same area), and rumor has it that they intentionally hire more female to avoid discrimination charges. Unfortunately, the only way to hire more percentage of any sub-population than the market can supply is to lower the bar for that sub-population, so the result is many female IT staff that got hire is, frankly speaking, sub-par. So, the end result of that is eventually people inside the firm "knows" that female IT staffs are sub-par.
For example, read the book "Games people play" about a social welfare company, tasked (and paid by govt) to help unemployed people finding jobs, fired an employee who found ways to actually succeed (thus reducing the number of unemployed needing their help). Or people in an alcoholics group went back to drinking when they ran out of alcoholics to help.
Foundations investing in companies that helped create the situation where the foundation can do their task? Somehow, that does not surprise me.
This is actually a good advice, assuming it is sold in the US. Depending on how real the toy gun looks and the lighting conditions, it might be mistaken for a real gun. Nevermind that a child is holding it, with enough news about school shootings, people will believe a child can get their hands on a real gun and start shooting at random people.
So pointing your toy gun at people might get yourself shot at by someone with a real gun.
I would have agreed with you if only the driver himself will be harmed in traffic accident.
But unfortunately, other drivers and pedestrians will be just as likely to be killed when some dumbass irresponsible driver decides to driver after he got drunk.
So what do you do when someone is behaving like an irresponsible child and start hurting other people? Simple, at the very least you should take away his ability to hurt people. When a child hit other people with a stick, you take away his stick. When someone decided to drive when he is drunk, taking away his ability to drive == good.
I always wondered if that is the right way to do it. It is good to know I at least got that part right.
Academics comes first, and then comes everything else.Not only India, this attitude is generally true for almost all asian countries also (e.g. Japan, China, Korea, SE Asia countries, etc).
Can any one in the USA (and not having Asian parents) imagine that there are training schools that train 5 year old kids (and their parents) for the admission interview for primary schools? (Note: not preparing their academic ability, but just for the interview itself! How to behave, what to say, what best answer for what kind of questions, etc.)
Was anyone surprised by this sensational piece of news?Because this time the students have hard evidence that the teacher lied? I think the fact that the teacher lied to the school afterwards is a more serious breach of trust than the fact he tried to preach during class.
Personally, that is one of the Aha! experience when I learn about the agile approaches. There is no end of the development, at least not from the developers side. The purpose of software development is to create software that provides business value to the users, and further development will almost always provide software to gives more business value to the users! Until you reach the point that the value provided by further development (including bug fixes) is not worth the projected effort required, then it is a business decision to stop further development.
It is like any home-improvement projects, there is no end to the things you can improve in your home, as long as you are willing to pay for each piece of work, why must the contractor set some arbitrary "end" the project? YOU should be the one to say "That's enough.".
I think the idea that there should be an "end" to a development project stems from the inappropriate commodity-buying approach of from the buying side (i.e. the users/clients) which is encouraged/accommodated by selling side (i.e. software house/developers), which is only suitable for buying off-the-shelf software but not very useful for a software development effort.
While he might be naive to trust a journalist, it is indeed saddening that people now expect this kind of deceptive behaviour from journalist instead of finding it repungent.
While this may be true in business, where doublespeak and back-stabbing is rampant, it is not so in academics. In the academics, reputation and integrity are the most important asset for a professor, and he won't have any left if he were caught saying opposite things to different people. When an academic say something publicly, including to a journalist, they expect what they say to be represented fairly and they expect to stand by what they have said, otherwise they would have said nothing instead.
You find it funny that a man devoted to advancing the knowledge of human kind was deceived by a journalist? And you think a piece of journalism created by lies and deception "brilliant"?
Furthermore, take a look at this comment http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=19714
One would think that any decent human being would be dismayed at seeing this kind of "journalism" instead finding it "brilliant".
... before it was patented by someone else!
I must be of those rare old school that still think that your notes should be a set of short personal reminders of what you have learned during the class, instead of just a blanket copy of everything written or said.
If you just want a blanket copy, why not take a camera and record the lecture yourself? If you notes contains everything, why not just bring a book and mark sections covered during the lecture instead?
Maybe I should put it this way: The third group will focus on who caused the problem and try to find who to blame.
For example, a server goes down due to a blown fuse in the power supply. People in the 2nd group will look at the server, determine the power supply is not working, and maybe fix it by replacing the power supply. What they don't care is what makes the power supply not working, as long as they can replace it. If they cannot replace the whole power supply, they might dig deeper and find the blown fuse and replace the fuse instead. But the point is the 2nd group dig into the problem just as deep as they needed in order to find a fix. In a crisis, finding a fix is 1st priority for those people.
On the contrary, people in the 3rd group will focus on who to blame for the problem. After learning the power supply is dead, they will want to know why for the purpose of assigning blame. If they find out a blown fuse is the cause, the first thing they will ask is what the server was doing, who might have done anything on it so they can lay the blame on triggering the blown fuse. Failing that, they will ask for who ordered the machine, etc. For these people, knowing who to blame is the 1st priority, actually fixing the problem comes later.
While people in the 2nd group may look for who to blame after the problem is under control, the 3rd group treat finding blame as more important.
When there is a problem or a crisis, I observe that there are usually 3 kinds of response from 3 different kinds of people:
.... Are you going to feel partly responsible?
The first group of people will stand back and let other people fix the problem.
The second group will focus on the nature of the problem and try to fix it.
The third group will focus on the cause of the problem and try to find who to blame.
You "skeptics":
In my experience, those in the third group can always find someone else to blame for any problem so they can feel they are not responsible for it.
So what you mean is Exchange works for those 20k users because they are not actually using it much?
Does your company also "fix" the storage/backup problem by setting a tiny network disk quota and tell people to put files on their local disk too?
How much longer before we see reports that ATT, Google, Yahoo, or MSN have supplied information leading to the political imprisonment of US citizens?
This one is easy: You won't be seeing those reports, because by then, it would be illegal to report those incidents.