I think it would have been helpful to note somewhere in the review what IPCop actually is. It's a Linux firewall distribution.
Reading the review, I thought that it was some new packet filtering system, like an actual replacement/alternative to iptables that I'd just never heard about.
The review's introduction called it a "solution" which is a generic term for 'anything that does anything, somehow.' Not very descriptive.
The number of people that I know who have xBoxes and use them for nothing except as "Halo appliances" (or occasionally as a DVD player) is staggering.
People who have other systems all seem to have multiple games...the xBox is the only platform I've seen recently that seems to produce that kind of mono-game mania. (Maybe GTA on the PS2 got close.)
There's only a few common themes here. If you take the most recent arguments, you get a trend that the real argument is "Women -- or people in general -- shouldn't be allowed to enjoy sex". If you take the arguments a bit further, you get a trend that says "Women do not have the right to make their own decisions" -- be it reproductive decisions, legal decisions, what have you.
I think the common theme all drives back to the ridiculous assertion that one should intentionally pass over opportunities for happiness in this life in return for the promise of something better after you're dead.
Personally, I've just decided to ignore anything that springs from that premise. It just strikes me as unhealthy.
First of all, I don't think it's the "pro-choice people" who are pushing the stem cell agenda. If anything, I think it's the pro-life crowd who made it an issue when they went after it a few years ago. It wasn't even on the radar screen before then. There's no giant pro-choice conspiracy here, trying to show the benefits of abortion; that's ridiculous. The benefits of abortion are obvious -- not being pregnant. There's no huge conspiracy afoot there.
On the contrary, I think the arguments against stem cell research are mostly being pushed by pro-life people, in order to be consistent with their stated basis, where any fertilized ovum is the moral equivalent of a 'human life.' I think the argument is pretty clear; if you accept that a blastocyst is alive and equivalent to a sentient being, then you must oppose stem cell research. If you're convinced enough of that that so you're willing to limit others' personal choices (as in banning or limiting abortion), then it's not hard to see going from there to being in favor of a ban on research. It's pretty much QED: if you're really pro-life on a religious/moral basis, which the overwhelming number of pro-life people I've met are, then you almost have to take issue with embryonic stem cell research; there's no necessity in the pro-choice position, because it's not driven by any single fundamental theological or moral argument (I know people who are pro-choice for a huge variety of different reasons).
In terms of your specific questions, I think all of them have been answered elsewhere, but I will attempt to respond to them and give references where I can.
What's wrong with the stem cell lines we already have?
A number of things. First of all, many of them are contaminated. Some sources seem to claim that it's mouse cells that have gotten into the lines, others just describe it as "non human." (cite, cite) All or at least many of the approved lines in the U.S. are contaminated.
Why the push to create endless stem cell lines when a stem cell will reproduce to more and more stem cells forever?
Cells in lines mutate with increased generations. It's not exactly like duplicating a digital file; it's a little more 'analog' than that. This is pretty basic biology; as you keep replicating an organism over and over, minor (random, environmentally-induced, etc.) variations are going to happen, and build up over time. In order to maintain high quality, new lines need to be periodically introduced. Anything that begins with a hard limit on the number of lines that can be used is inherently flawed -- what if there are problems in those lines? You're possibly compromising research by forcing scientists to use cell specimens that may not be optimal. That's like saying that scientists can only use one species of mouse or rat as specimens for research, even though it's known that some are better for some types of research than others.
Why are we wasting money, time and energy creating more stem cell lines when those resources could be spent on the actual research?
Because it's not a waste? Because more cell lines are needed for research. Scientists aren't just coming up with new cell lines for fun, or because they get a huge rush out of destroying blastocysts. Plus, the knowledge gained during the development of the cell lines can be put directly towards other goals. It's not an either/or tradeoff. In order to do the research, a steady supply and wide variety of stem cells are needed; the research can't be done well otherwise. Since the research is in its early stages, a lot of the focus now is on producing a variety of lines that can be worked with. I think this answers your next question as well. It's not as if money for 'research' is being diverted so that evil scientists in their underground la
Everything else is not fine; nobody is going to spend that much money producing new cell lines, if most scientists and research institutes in the U.S. won't be able to use them for risk of losing their Federal funding. Nobody is going to hire you, if your research is ineligible for Federal money. And nobody is going to look hard at your research in terms of publication, if it can't be duplicated by anyone who gets Federal money. The research science world in the U.S. orbits around the Federal government. Basically the only exceptions are pharma companies looking doing short-horizon studies and finding new drugs; but pharmas really aren't all that interested in pure research, or in producing knowledge that's not marketable or patentable.
We can go back and forth on whether it's a good thing that so much science in the U.S. is dependent on Federal grant money -- I think it's pretty clear that it's not good, but to each his own -- but the Executive Order was effectively a ban. The people doing it knew that it would stop all research in that direction, and that's why they did it. The intent was to stop research in that area, and that's what happened.
It's just that with the way that science is done in this country, they didn't have to go through Congress in order to stop stem cell research.
Since you seem to have successfully done it, can you just give me an idea of what's involved in reflashing a phone like that? I've investigated it a little I have a TMobile Razr, now unlocked, that can only do 2-3 seconds (!) of video, while my girlfriend has a Euro version that can do more like 30s.; I've wanted for a while to fix mine.
And when you reflash/flex the phone, does it break things like wireless web and application access?
Just trying to get an idea of how much of a process this would be to do, and what the risk level is like.
You can basically do that with a Mac and a Motorola Razr (probably a lot of other phones as well), although using Bluetooth instead of USB.
Unfortunately the phones don't present themselves as Mass Storage devices over USB -- don't ask me why -- but they use the standard profiles on Bluetooth. That means you can shuffle photos/videos/sounds to and from the phone, using only the Mac's built-in software.
It's dead simple, and in fact quite a bit easier than doing the same thing on the PC (where you need to install some ridiculous 'Phone Tools' software in order to do anything; or at least if there's some other way, it's not obvious).
When it's nice is when you've taken some photos on your phone and just want to grab them off; as long as your phone is in the room somewhere, you can just open it up (there's a menu when you have BT enabled) and download the files. No hassle.
Of course, if your phone is from Verizon, don't expect this to work -- they break their phones on purpose so you can't.
It's a funding ban, as you suspect; however, its effects are so wide-ranging as to be effectively a ban on it in practice. So much scientific research in the U.S. is funded (one way or the other) by the Federal government, or by organizations that receive some level of Federal grants or funding, that nobody is willing to do pure research if it knocks them out of the running for Federal money. Plus, if you did somehow get the money and do stem-cell research, it wouldn't be duplicable by anyone seeking government funding, which makes it much harder to review. Everything in science in the United States is about getting grant money -- if you aren't doing research that's going to bring in grants, it's tough to get a position or funding in many places. Everything is biased against research that the Federal government doesn't like.
There are a few places out there, either privately funded or State (U.S. State, that is) funded, doing some research that's prohibited by GWB's E.O., but not many.
Well, when you're talking about capital gains, it becomes more complicated; you have to specify whether it's "unrealized" capital gains (a stock that you bought at $1 is now trading at $100, but you haven't sold yet) or "realized" capital gains (the money you get when you sell said stock). IMO, "realized" capital gains should just be income. But unrealized capital gains -- the inherent value of securities that you might own, but can't be used until they're converted to cash -- shouldn't be taxed until they're liquidated.
There was another discussion about this higher up in the thread, using the example of Bill Gates; most of Gates' "wealth" isn't taxed every year, only his dividends and income that he gets by occasionally liquidating stock are. To some, this seems unfair -- certainly the 'richest man in the world' should pay a lot in taxes, right? Of course, to say that ignores the huge tax liability he has on his assets, should he choose to liquidate and use them at any time. So he's not getting a total free pass on taxes, he's just deferring them.
Where he clearly is getting a free pass, is in paying only the capital-gains maximum when he does liquidate, rather than the maximum income-tax rate; this is financial gerrymandering at its worst, and simply favors one kind of personal income over another.
That's not true, because on what basis have you to argue that their increased benefit from government is non-linear?
With a percentage-based tax, the person making more money pays more in taxes -- reflecting the greater benefit they get from government and a stable society. But I think this logic falls flat when it tries to justify taking 15% of one person's income and 30-40% of somebody else's. If they were paying the same percentage, the person making more money would already be contributing more. I see no justification for a higher rate of taxation on them.
Progressive tax supporters seem to be saying that the 'disproportionate benefit' increases non-linearly with income; that a person making $100k benefits more than twice as much from the presence of government as does a person making $50k, and I've never seen any convincing argument why that's the case. If anything, the person with more wealth can cope with more risk, and would probably be satisfied with less government, than the person with less.
Well if you look at what they did with iPods, they didn't release them for Windows initially. Instead they waited until the iPod had already become a success with Mac users, and then released both the iPod and iTunes for Windows.
I suspect if they had released a Windows iTunes+iPod at the very beginning, it might not have done as well as it did, released a year or so later, with a lot of traction. I expect they probably would have gotten a lot of flak for not having it work with WMP or whatever the dominant Windows music player software was in 2001. By holding off until later, they could not only sell the device, but sell a solution that was part of an entire application/product/service "stack": iTunes, the iPod, and the iTMS.
Apple's fan base within the Mac market provides them with a perfect test audience for their products, before they go on to release them to the rest of the world. I wouldn't be surprised if they released their phone as Mac-only initially, and then if it's a hit, made a PC version of the Mac's software so that PC users could get in on it. But that way they allow PC demand to build first, and then respond to it, rather than trying to create demand first.
Just out of curiosity, were you using the CF as swap space? I can imagine it wouldn't last long under those conditions, particularly if the system was also RAM-starved (or any situation where RAM working set). But as a regular hard drive, it seems like it ought to be okay for a while (though I suppose you'd want to disable logging, too, as much as possible). How fast were your systems failing?
I've often wondered how CF or other limited-write systems handle swapping and memory-management. It seems like it introduces a whole new set of trade-offs; in addition to the usual speed vs. cost and speed vs. space on disk trade-offs, you also have to deal with speed vs. system life.
In MSFT the assets include a "shit load of cash" so if the company went belly up and the investors were compinsated he would still have plenty of dough.
Which he would then be taxed on, so it's still not as if he's getting away with anything. If the company gave some of its cash to investors by way of a dividend, or by going out of business and liquidating itself, then he'd be liable, but not before. I'm not sure what you're getting at.
Berkshire Hathaway is an interesting company, although basically they're not doing anything much different from what every life insurance company used to do (take the float and invest it until you need it to pay claims; these investments are how you make money), they're just big enough that instead of investing in the markets (by buying stocks or bonds) they've just taken to buying out companies directly. GE Capital (when it was a single operation) did a lot of similar stuff, although apparently more poorly.
Most of Paris Hilton's money comes (I assume) from investments; probably in the real estate, stock, and bond markets. None of them are zero-sum games; all are net wealth creators.
Just because all that money in the market isn't directly employing people doesn't mean it's not doing anything.
The stock market is a huge wealth creator, and a whole lot of people benefit indirectly from it and all the companies that participate. The bond market is somewhat easier to understand because the money invested there is actually used by companies and governments to do stuff; it's fundamentally just a loan. Real estate is more complicated, and depending on how you look at it (limited total amount of real estate) may or may not be zero-sum, but certainly spurs development in other areas indirectly.
No, that would be really dumb. It would further discourage people from saving money, and push everyone even further down the road towards paycheck-to-paycheck living. (Or worse, to debt-maintained living -- unless you want to tax debt?)
Now I agree that it's rather bizarre that we don't just tax capital gains as income; actually it's bizarre that we don't just tax all income as income, and do away with all the little niggling special categories -- if it was someone else's money and now it's yours, that's income, tax it at the same rate.
People shouldn't be taxed on money that's sitting around and not doing anything, or on the principal value of property. If an investment makes money, then they should get taxed on it -- immediately in the case of dividends, or when they cash-out in the case of capital gains. But taxing "wealth" in the form of unrealized capital gains would result in people's retirement/college/savings funds just magically shrinking, year after year. It would basically be telling people: "use it or lose it."
That's not a smart road to go down, because when you discourage people from saving, you're just going to end up having to bail them out later, when they're 65 and broke because they didn't bother to save money for retirement. (I suppose you could pull a Logan's Run and kill them, but I'm going to make some assumptions here.) Rather than letting individuals run their own lives, you're heading down the road to a centrally planned economy, where because nobody can afford it on their own anymore, they have no choice but to depend on the government for everything.
Furthermore, you'd also discourage property ownership (which is one of the keys to social stability), and instead favor people who maintain a low "wealth" by constantly matching their stream of income to their stream of expenses, even when it's obviously not sustainable. Anyone who wants to could probably zero out their 'wealth' by just spending more on services and other items with little residual value. As long as they stay employed, they can maintain a high quality of life -- but the second that they have a gap in their income stream, because they don't have any savings, they fall flat. And then it's back to the government for a bailout.
Wealth-based tax schemes lead directly to heavy government dependency by the entire populace, and encourage personal finance schemes that aren't sustainable or productive in the long term. You might think that it's eliminating one form of classism, but instead you'd just replace it with the classism of a Politburo: a small number of bureaucrats managing all of society's savings and wealth. No thanks.
A poll tax or head tax is in some ways the most fair, in a perfect world, because it assumes that everyone has equal access to services and thus that everyone is "getting" the same thing from their government. Of course, in practice it doesn't work, and you can quite easily make the argument that wealthier people, by virtue of having more to lose, 'get' more from their government (in protection, economic/social stability, etc.) and thus should fairly owe more in taxes.
A percentage-based tax (which is often called a 'flat tax,' but I think that term confuses people with the idea of head taxes) solves this; everyone pays taxes at the same rate on their income, which naturally means that the more you're making, the more tax that you'll pay. This seems quite fair. At the extremes, someone not making any money would have no tax liability, someone making a lot of money would pay a rather large amount. This seems fundamentally most fair. Determining the rate is fairly simple; you take the proposed government budget, and divide it over the gross national earnings. If the rate's too high, you're probably spending too much.
So-called "progressive" schemes rely on taxing people making more not only more money in absolute-value terms, but also at a higher percentage of their income. This always has seemed to me rather nonsensical and punitive. Income is income; everyone should bear the cost of government equally across what they're making. Carving out special exceptions here and there, and taxing this person more than that one, and generally trying to do social engineering with the tax code as a bludgeon, is a terribly flawed idea.
I'm not sure what the point is you're getting at. You don't pay tax on the unrealized capital gains, but you'd pay tax on them when you tried to convert them back to cash.
So let's say I buy 100 shares of a stock at $1 a share; during the year, it increases in value to $100 a share. So my $100 investment is now worth $100,000. Aside from the dividends, I don't owe any taxes on the stock -- however, if I 'cash out,' and sell any of the shares, I'm immediately liable for capital gains taxes. It's not a free ride.
The IRS doesn't try to tax investments as they go up and down, because to do so would be ridiculously complicated (and, as other people have pointed out, would probably lead to people claiming negative tax liability on losses). Instead they look only at the value when you bought in to the investment, and when you cash out, and then tax the difference between the two.
E.g., if my 100 shares ran up to $100 a share but then sunk back to $50 before I could sell them, the capital gain I get taxed on is $49 a share, not $99. Taxing me on $99 wouldn't make any sense, because I never really had that much money, except theoretically.
So while Bill Gates has a lot of money in MSFT, it's only wealth insofar as Microsoft's stock is considered rather stable. If Microsoft were to tank tomorrow, much of that apparent wealth would evaporate. Any time he actually sells stock in order to use any of that wealth, he gets hit with taxes. So really, he has a constant 'potential tax liability' on his 'potential wealth' of about 28% -- because if he wanted to cash out tomorrow, that's what the IRS would be coming after him for. (Well, probably slightly less than 28%, I think the first few thousand bucks get taxed at a lower rate and it goes up from there to 28% which is the cap.)
Actually taxing people on unrealized capital gains would be effectively a tax on savings. It would be a giant mess and have vast consequences -- basically it would mean that just having money sitting around in an investment would make it "shrink." It would lead to lack of savings and probably not hurt the very rich nearly as much as it would hurt the middle class. Not to mention that taxing unrealized capital gains would also involve taxing real property -- it would basically be a federal property tax. That's going to hurt homeowners everywhere; it's a total non-starter.
There are a lot of problems with the current tax code, but the fact that it doesn't go after unrealized capital gains is not one of them.
Tear gas is far from harmless; it can do a real number on people who have any sort of asthmatic or respiratory condition (like, kill them), and it causes some unpleasant side-effects for hours afterwards. I think the idea behind this thing is that you can zap someone with it, and hopefully have fewer long-term effects than tear-gassing them. Whether that's actually the case, naturally remains to be seen.
I think it's also an intimidation weapon; a 'heat ray' is a lot scarier (at least, it would be to me) than tear gas. Tear gas is tear gas; people understand it. But if you say you have a giant death ray that will vaporize people alive, and then 'demonstrate' it at 'low power' (which is probably full power, but nobody else would know that)...that's pretty frightening. I don't know about anyone else, but I'd be looking for the exits.
I initially thought about using OpenOffice; I think it's probably the best solution overall, since it's free and you can get it right now. But let's say you absolutely need to work in Word -- how can you make sure that a document is safe?
If you opened a document in OO, and then saved it, would the resulting document be guaranteed to be clean? What if you saved it as an RTF and then opened that back up in Word? That would probably lose a lot of people's fancy formatting, but it would preserve most of the content and markup. I suppose the most paranoid thing to do would be to save all documents out to ASCII and then open them up in Word, but at that point you've negated any reason to use Word in the first place.
If OO tries to open a file, and it has a maliciously-crafted (which to OO, I assume, would appear corrupt) binary object in it, will OO refuse to open the file / remove the corrupt object? Or will it just ignore it and continue on its way?
This would actually be a good example of how software development actually happens in most corporate environments.
First semester, final exam: "Using VisualBasic, write a sample program to catalog and sort a list of items. You have three hours. Start now."
Second semester, first day of class: "Starting with the programs you wrote for last semester's final, I want you to build me a complete warehouse-management system that will scale to 15,000,000 SKUs, 30 simultaneous users, and 1200 picks per hour. You have thirteen weeks, and it will be the only grade you get in this class. Start now."
It's probably a good thing I don't teach; they'd find me dead in my office, stabbed to death with #2 pencils in the first week.
I agree, however: "learning a field of study," is not what most people in college want, nor what most employers are looking for.
What most students want is job skills. Few students have the inclination (or spare funds) to learn for the sake of learning for four years, and then spend another two or three at a trade/professional school, before they can get a real position.
Students go to various schools in great part because of the job prospects they think they'll have on completion. Only the rich can afford to simply go because it will be intellectually stimulating. Plus, mixing together people who just want job training with people who are fundamentally interested in learning is a mistake; neither are going to be satisfied with the results.
To be honest, I think we need to remove some of the social stigma surrounding trade schools in the U.S., and we should have a clear path for students that just want to get job skills. Maybe the companies themselves could even help fund them, and in return get to dictate parts of the curriculum (via directed tax contributions, if not voluntarily). That would remove the education/industry disconnect. Students who wanted an 'education' would be able to go to college, and students who want 'job training' and a near-guaranteed job in a relatively short amount of time could go to the trade schools.
I think in the U.S. we have dragged 'childhood' further and further out; there is no reason why a person should have to go through nineteen or twenty years of schooling before they can survive on their own in the economy. Education needs to be made more relevant to what students want to learn, and more rigorous earlier in the curriculum. Huge swaths of my own education were nothing but wasted time because of the way the system is currently set up; there is no reason why a motivated 15 or 16-year-old shouldn't be able to be out learning a skill, if that's what they want to do. Making them acquire thousands of dollars in debt and years of wasted 'education' that they won't use first, helps no one.
There's way too much emphasis on starting your own projects from a clean slate, which is very rare in the 'real world.' More often you get handed the spaghetti-code mess of the "last guy," to puzzle over and figure out how to document and maintain.
Too much CS education is focused on the very beginning of the software lifecycle. That's like churning out doctors that can only deliver babies, when what the market needs are GPs and geriatric specialists. Grads need to know not only how to start a new project themselves, but how to pick up one that's in the middle of development, or that's well into its maintenance phase.
I think people are confusing "protest" with "mob." A planned protest with people who know what they're getting into, and have protection, is a very different entity from a spontaneous street riot.
Sometimes people who want to crack down on a protest will term it a 'mob' or 'riot,' but they're different. A riot, and what this machine is designed to disperse, is a situation where you have a whole lot of people just getting together spontaneously for the purposes of causing violence. Since spontaneity implies lack of preparedness, this would be effective there.
Even if you have something that starts off as a protest and then becomes a mob or riot, say by virtue of people joining up with the protest whose ends are violent rather than peaceful, then the deterrent system is most effective against the violent hangers-on, rather than the core protesters. So again, it's not ineffective.
"Professional protesters" and the other people likely to bring protective gear are not the real concern, because they're the ones least likely to be causing violence. (And if they are, you can't really call it a 'protest' anymore, it's a battle, and time to bring out the real weapons.) In many ways, a good crowd 'discourager' should have some form of protective gear that's effective against it, because this allows you to drive off violent spontaneous rioters but have minimal effect on core protesters.
At least in my experience, Tasers replaced nightsticks and billy clubs because they're more photogenic and have less of a stigma. Most of the situations you see Tasers being used in, would in the "bad old days" probably have engendered use of the club. Only that's not quite acceptable anymore, so instead they've found a method that looks better from a distance, and leaves fewer marks. (No awkward explanations of how somebody 'fell down the stairs,' etc.)
I'm not at all convinced that the level of police brutality has increased in recent years, if anything I think it's probably at its lowest level in this country historically. Arguing with people who consider themselves to be in a position of power has never been a safe sport, and depending on where and when you did it (and who you were), you might have been lucky to get out with the equivalent of a Tasering.
I'm not defending the practice per se, I'm just suggesting that I think you're wrong to assume that the technology actually causes brutality; the brutality has always been there, and always finds an outlet. That the Taser seems to be the choice du jour for causing pain doesn't really make it unique.
Joking aside, how easy would it be to make protective armor against this kind of attack? You can buy rolls of steel or aluminum window screening at any hardware store for under $50.
Causing them to fall back to "Plan B," also known as rubber bullets (or real ones). I'm not sure that's an improvement.
Plus, at least if I was going to deploy this, I'd probably use a mix of denial devices; tear gas, smoke, ultrasonics, psychological deterrents (recordings of people screaming, etc.), and the giant Radarange. If one particular method doesn't make you want to leave, chances are one of the other ones will.
It just adds to the would-be rioter's load of stuff they have to bring. Gas mask, earplugs, roll of window screen, padded suit (don't want to get trampled by the less prepared)...joining a mob and burning stuff just becomes less fun-sounding in a hurry, when you have to go home and get your "riot kit" first.
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I think it would have been helpful to note somewhere in the review what IPCop actually is. It's a Linux firewall distribution.
Reading the review, I thought that it was some new packet filtering system, like an actual replacement/alternative to iptables that I'd just never heard about.
The review's introduction called it a "solution" which is a generic term for 'anything that does anything, somehow.' Not very descriptive.
And Halo.
The number of people that I know who have xBoxes and use them for nothing except as "Halo appliances" (or occasionally as a DVD player) is staggering.
People who have other systems all seem to have multiple games...the xBox is the only platform I've seen recently that seems to produce that kind of mono-game mania. (Maybe GTA on the PS2 got close.)
There's only a few common themes here. If you take the most recent arguments, you get a trend that the real argument is "Women -- or people in general -- shouldn't be allowed to enjoy sex". If you take the arguments a bit further, you get a trend that says "Women do not have the right to make their own decisions" -- be it reproductive decisions, legal decisions, what have you.
I think the common theme all drives back to the ridiculous assertion that one should intentionally pass over opportunities for happiness in this life in return for the promise of something better after you're dead.
Personally, I've just decided to ignore anything that springs from that premise. It just strikes me as unhealthy.
On the contrary, I think the arguments against stem cell research are mostly being pushed by pro-life people, in order to be consistent with their stated basis, where any fertilized ovum is the moral equivalent of a 'human life.' I think the argument is pretty clear; if you accept that a blastocyst is alive and equivalent to a sentient being, then you must oppose stem cell research. If you're convinced enough of that that so you're willing to limit others' personal choices (as in banning or limiting abortion), then it's not hard to see going from there to being in favor of a ban on research. It's pretty much QED: if you're really pro-life on a religious/moral basis, which the overwhelming number of pro-life people I've met are, then you almost have to take issue with embryonic stem cell research; there's no necessity in the pro-choice position, because it's not driven by any single fundamental theological or moral argument (I know people who are pro-choice for a huge variety of different reasons).
In terms of your specific questions, I think all of them have been answered elsewhere, but I will attempt to respond to them and give references where I can.
A number of things. First of all, many of them are contaminated. Some sources seem to claim that it's mouse cells that have gotten into the lines, others just describe it as "non human." (cite, cite) All or at least many of the approved lines in the U.S. are contaminated.
Cells in lines mutate with increased generations. It's not exactly like duplicating a digital file; it's a little more 'analog' than that. This is pretty basic biology; as you keep replicating an organism over and over, minor (random, environmentally-induced, etc.) variations are going to happen, and build up over time. In order to maintain high quality, new lines need to be periodically introduced. Anything that begins with a hard limit on the number of lines that can be used is inherently flawed -- what if there are problems in those lines? You're possibly compromising research by forcing scientists to use cell specimens that may not be optimal. That's like saying that scientists can only use one species of mouse or rat as specimens for research, even though it's known that some are better for some types of research than others.
Because it's not a waste? Because more cell lines are needed for research. Scientists aren't just coming up with new cell lines for fun, or because they get a huge rush out of destroying blastocysts. Plus, the knowledge gained during the development of the cell lines can be put directly towards other goals. It's not an either/or tradeoff. In order to do the research, a steady supply and wide variety of stem cells are needed; the research can't be done well otherwise. Since the research is in its early stages, a lot of the focus now is on producing a variety of lines that can be worked with. I think this answers your next question as well. It's not as if money for 'research' is being diverted so that evil scientists in their underground la
Everything else is not fine; nobody is going to spend that much money producing new cell lines, if most scientists and research institutes in the U.S. won't be able to use them for risk of losing their Federal funding. Nobody is going to hire you, if your research is ineligible for Federal money. And nobody is going to look hard at your research in terms of publication, if it can't be duplicated by anyone who gets Federal money. The research science world in the U.S. orbits around the Federal government. Basically the only exceptions are pharma companies looking doing short-horizon studies and finding new drugs; but pharmas really aren't all that interested in pure research, or in producing knowledge that's not marketable or patentable.
We can go back and forth on whether it's a good thing that so much science in the U.S. is dependent on Federal grant money -- I think it's pretty clear that it's not good, but to each his own -- but the Executive Order was effectively a ban. The people doing it knew that it would stop all research in that direction, and that's why they did it. The intent was to stop research in that area, and that's what happened.
It's just that with the way that science is done in this country, they didn't have to go through Congress in order to stop stem cell research.
Since you seem to have successfully done it, can you just give me an idea of what's involved in reflashing a phone like that? I've investigated it a little I have a TMobile Razr, now unlocked, that can only do 2-3 seconds (!) of video, while my girlfriend has a Euro version that can do more like 30s.; I've wanted for a while to fix mine.
And when you reflash/flex the phone, does it break things like wireless web and application access?
Just trying to get an idea of how much of a process this would be to do, and what the risk level is like.
You can basically do that with a Mac and a Motorola Razr (probably a lot of other phones as well), although using Bluetooth instead of USB.
Unfortunately the phones don't present themselves as Mass Storage devices over USB -- don't ask me why -- but they use the standard profiles on Bluetooth. That means you can shuffle photos/videos/sounds to and from the phone, using only the Mac's built-in software.
It's dead simple, and in fact quite a bit easier than doing the same thing on the PC (where you need to install some ridiculous 'Phone Tools' software in order to do anything; or at least if there's some other way, it's not obvious).
When it's nice is when you've taken some photos on your phone and just want to grab them off; as long as your phone is in the room somewhere, you can just open it up (there's a menu when you have BT enabled) and download the files. No hassle.
Of course, if your phone is from Verizon, don't expect this to work -- they break their phones on purpose so you can't.
It's a funding ban, as you suspect; however, its effects are so wide-ranging as to be effectively a ban on it in practice. So much scientific research in the U.S. is funded (one way or the other) by the Federal government, or by organizations that receive some level of Federal grants or funding, that nobody is willing to do pure research if it knocks them out of the running for Federal money. Plus, if you did somehow get the money and do stem-cell research, it wouldn't be duplicable by anyone seeking government funding, which makes it much harder to review. Everything in science in the United States is about getting grant money -- if you aren't doing research that's going to bring in grants, it's tough to get a position or funding in many places. Everything is biased against research that the Federal government doesn't like.
There are a few places out there, either privately funded or State (U.S. State, that is) funded, doing some research that's prohibited by GWB's E.O., but not many.
Well, when you're talking about capital gains, it becomes more complicated; you have to specify whether it's "unrealized" capital gains (a stock that you bought at $1 is now trading at $100, but you haven't sold yet) or "realized" capital gains (the money you get when you sell said stock). IMO, "realized" capital gains should just be income. But unrealized capital gains -- the inherent value of securities that you might own, but can't be used until they're converted to cash -- shouldn't be taxed until they're liquidated.
There was another discussion about this higher up in the thread, using the example of Bill Gates; most of Gates' "wealth" isn't taxed every year, only his dividends and income that he gets by occasionally liquidating stock are. To some, this seems unfair -- certainly the 'richest man in the world' should pay a lot in taxes, right? Of course, to say that ignores the huge tax liability he has on his assets, should he choose to liquidate and use them at any time. So he's not getting a total free pass on taxes, he's just deferring them.
Where he clearly is getting a free pass, is in paying only the capital-gains maximum when he does liquidate, rather than the maximum income-tax rate; this is financial gerrymandering at its worst, and simply favors one kind of personal income over another.
That's not true, because on what basis have you to argue that their increased benefit from government is non-linear?
With a percentage-based tax, the person making more money pays more in taxes -- reflecting the greater benefit they get from government and a stable society. But I think this logic falls flat when it tries to justify taking 15% of one person's income and 30-40% of somebody else's. If they were paying the same percentage, the person making more money would already be contributing more. I see no justification for a higher rate of taxation on them.
Progressive tax supporters seem to be saying that the 'disproportionate benefit' increases non-linearly with income; that a person making $100k benefits more than twice as much from the presence of government as does a person making $50k, and I've never seen any convincing argument why that's the case. If anything, the person with more wealth can cope with more risk, and would probably be satisfied with less government, than the person with less.
Well if you look at what they did with iPods, they didn't release them for Windows initially. Instead they waited until the iPod had already become a success with Mac users, and then released both the iPod and iTunes for Windows.
I suspect if they had released a Windows iTunes+iPod at the very beginning, it might not have done as well as it did, released a year or so later, with a lot of traction. I expect they probably would have gotten a lot of flak for not having it work with WMP or whatever the dominant Windows music player software was in 2001. By holding off until later, they could not only sell the device, but sell a solution that was part of an entire application/product/service "stack": iTunes, the iPod, and the iTMS.
Apple's fan base within the Mac market provides them with a perfect test audience for their products, before they go on to release them to the rest of the world. I wouldn't be surprised if they released their phone as Mac-only initially, and then if it's a hit, made a PC version of the Mac's software so that PC users could get in on it. But that way they allow PC demand to build first, and then respond to it, rather than trying to create demand first.
Just out of curiosity, were you using the CF as swap space? I can imagine it wouldn't last long under those conditions, particularly if the system was also RAM-starved (or any situation where RAM working set). But as a regular hard drive, it seems like it ought to be okay for a while (though I suppose you'd want to disable logging, too, as much as possible). How fast were your systems failing?
I've often wondered how CF or other limited-write systems handle swapping and memory-management. It seems like it introduces a whole new set of trade-offs; in addition to the usual speed vs. cost and speed vs. space on disk trade-offs, you also have to deal with speed vs. system life.
In MSFT the assets include a "shit load of cash" so if the company went belly up and the investors were compinsated he would still have plenty of dough.
Which he would then be taxed on, so it's still not as if he's getting away with anything. If the company gave some of its cash to investors by way of a dividend, or by going out of business and liquidating itself, then he'd be liable, but not before. I'm not sure what you're getting at.
Berkshire Hathaway is an interesting company, although basically they're not doing anything much different from what every life insurance company used to do (take the float and invest it until you need it to pay claims; these investments are how you make money), they're just big enough that instead of investing in the markets (by buying stocks or bonds) they've just taken to buying out companies directly. GE Capital (when it was a single operation) did a lot of similar stuff, although apparently more poorly.
Most of Paris Hilton's money comes (I assume) from investments; probably in the real estate, stock, and bond markets. None of them are zero-sum games; all are net wealth creators.
Just because all that money in the market isn't directly employing people doesn't mean it's not doing anything.
You might want to take a refresher course on How Money Is Made In The Stock Market or Why Do Stocks Go Up? (On the latter, go about halfway down the page.)
The stock market is a huge wealth creator, and a whole lot of people benefit indirectly from it and all the companies that participate. The bond market is somewhat easier to understand because the money invested there is actually used by companies and governments to do stuff; it's fundamentally just a loan. Real estate is more complicated, and depending on how you look at it (limited total amount of real estate) may or may not be zero-sum, but certainly spurs development in other areas indirectly.
No, that would be really dumb. It would further discourage people from saving money, and push everyone even further down the road towards paycheck-to-paycheck living. (Or worse, to debt-maintained living -- unless you want to tax debt?)
Now I agree that it's rather bizarre that we don't just tax capital gains as income; actually it's bizarre that we don't just tax all income as income, and do away with all the little niggling special categories -- if it was someone else's money and now it's yours, that's income, tax it at the same rate.
People shouldn't be taxed on money that's sitting around and not doing anything, or on the principal value of property. If an investment makes money, then they should get taxed on it -- immediately in the case of dividends, or when they cash-out in the case of capital gains. But taxing "wealth" in the form of unrealized capital gains would result in people's retirement/college/savings funds just magically shrinking, year after year. It would basically be telling people: "use it or lose it."
That's not a smart road to go down, because when you discourage people from saving, you're just going to end up having to bail them out later, when they're 65 and broke because they didn't bother to save money for retirement. (I suppose you could pull a Logan's Run and kill them, but I'm going to make some assumptions here.) Rather than letting individuals run their own lives, you're heading down the road to a centrally planned economy, where because nobody can afford it on their own anymore, they have no choice but to depend on the government for everything.
Furthermore, you'd also discourage property ownership (which is one of the keys to social stability), and instead favor people who maintain a low "wealth" by constantly matching their stream of income to their stream of expenses, even when it's obviously not sustainable. Anyone who wants to could probably zero out their 'wealth' by just spending more on services and other items with little residual value. As long as they stay employed, they can maintain a high quality of life -- but the second that they have a gap in their income stream, because they don't have any savings, they fall flat. And then it's back to the government for a bailout.
Wealth-based tax schemes lead directly to heavy government dependency by the entire populace, and encourage personal finance schemes that aren't sustainable or productive in the long term. You might think that it's eliminating one form of classism, but instead you'd just replace it with the classism of a Politburo: a small number of bureaucrats managing all of society's savings and wealth. No thanks.
A poll tax or head tax is in some ways the most fair, in a perfect world, because it assumes that everyone has equal access to services and thus that everyone is "getting" the same thing from their government. Of course, in practice it doesn't work, and you can quite easily make the argument that wealthier people, by virtue of having more to lose, 'get' more from their government (in protection, economic/social stability, etc.) and thus should fairly owe more in taxes.
A percentage-based tax (which is often called a 'flat tax,' but I think that term confuses people with the idea of head taxes) solves this; everyone pays taxes at the same rate on their income, which naturally means that the more you're making, the more tax that you'll pay. This seems quite fair. At the extremes, someone not making any money would have no tax liability, someone making a lot of money would pay a rather large amount. This seems fundamentally most fair. Determining the rate is fairly simple; you take the proposed government budget, and divide it over the gross national earnings. If the rate's too high, you're probably spending too much.
So-called "progressive" schemes rely on taxing people making more not only more money in absolute-value terms, but also at a higher percentage of their income. This always has seemed to me rather nonsensical and punitive. Income is income; everyone should bear the cost of government equally across what they're making. Carving out special exceptions here and there, and taxing this person more than that one, and generally trying to do social engineering with the tax code as a bludgeon, is a terribly flawed idea.
I'm not sure what the point is you're getting at. You don't pay tax on the unrealized capital gains, but you'd pay tax on them when you tried to convert them back to cash.
So let's say I buy 100 shares of a stock at $1 a share; during the year, it increases in value to $100 a share. So my $100 investment is now worth $100,000. Aside from the dividends, I don't owe any taxes on the stock -- however, if I 'cash out,' and sell any of the shares, I'm immediately liable for capital gains taxes. It's not a free ride.
The IRS doesn't try to tax investments as they go up and down, because to do so would be ridiculously complicated (and, as other people have pointed out, would probably lead to people claiming negative tax liability on losses). Instead they look only at the value when you bought in to the investment, and when you cash out, and then tax the difference between the two.
E.g., if my 100 shares ran up to $100 a share but then sunk back to $50 before I could sell them, the capital gain I get taxed on is $49 a share, not $99. Taxing me on $99 wouldn't make any sense, because I never really had that much money, except theoretically.
So while Bill Gates has a lot of money in MSFT, it's only wealth insofar as Microsoft's stock is considered rather stable. If Microsoft were to tank tomorrow, much of that apparent wealth would evaporate. Any time he actually sells stock in order to use any of that wealth, he gets hit with taxes. So really, he has a constant 'potential tax liability' on his 'potential wealth' of about 28% -- because if he wanted to cash out tomorrow, that's what the IRS would be coming after him for. (Well, probably slightly less than 28%, I think the first few thousand bucks get taxed at a lower rate and it goes up from there to 28% which is the cap.)
Actually taxing people on unrealized capital gains would be effectively a tax on savings. It would be a giant mess and have vast consequences -- basically it would mean that just having money sitting around in an investment would make it "shrink." It would lead to lack of savings and probably not hurt the very rich nearly as much as it would hurt the middle class. Not to mention that taxing unrealized capital gains would also involve taxing real property -- it would basically be a federal property tax. That's going to hurt homeowners everywhere; it's a total non-starter.
There are a lot of problems with the current tax code, but the fact that it doesn't go after unrealized capital gains is not one of them.
Tear gas is far from harmless; it can do a real number on people who have any sort of asthmatic or respiratory condition (like, kill them), and it causes some unpleasant side-effects for hours afterwards. I think the idea behind this thing is that you can zap someone with it, and hopefully have fewer long-term effects than tear-gassing them. Whether that's actually the case, naturally remains to be seen.
I think it's also an intimidation weapon; a 'heat ray' is a lot scarier (at least, it would be to me) than tear gas. Tear gas is tear gas; people understand it. But if you say you have a giant death ray that will vaporize people alive, and then 'demonstrate' it at 'low power' (which is probably full power, but nobody else would know that)...that's pretty frightening. I don't know about anyone else, but I'd be looking for the exits.
I initially thought about using OpenOffice; I think it's probably the best solution overall, since it's free and you can get it right now. But let's say you absolutely need to work in Word -- how can you make sure that a document is safe?
If you opened a document in OO, and then saved it, would the resulting document be guaranteed to be clean? What if you saved it as an RTF and then opened that back up in Word? That would probably lose a lot of people's fancy formatting, but it would preserve most of the content and markup. I suppose the most paranoid thing to do would be to save all documents out to ASCII and then open them up in Word, but at that point you've negated any reason to use Word in the first place.
If OO tries to open a file, and it has a maliciously-crafted (which to OO, I assume, would appear corrupt) binary object in it, will OO refuse to open the file / remove the corrupt object? Or will it just ignore it and continue on its way?
This would actually be a good example of how software development actually happens in most corporate environments.
First semester, final exam: "Using VisualBasic, write a sample program to catalog and sort a list of items. You have three hours. Start now."
Second semester, first day of class: "Starting with the programs you wrote for last semester's final, I want you to build me a complete warehouse-management system that will scale to 15,000,000 SKUs, 30 simultaneous users, and 1200 picks per hour. You have thirteen weeks, and it will be the only grade you get in this class. Start now."
It's probably a good thing I don't teach; they'd find me dead in my office, stabbed to death with #2 pencils in the first week.
I agree, however: "learning a field of study," is not what most people in college want, nor what most employers are looking for.
What most students want is job skills. Few students have the inclination (or spare funds) to learn for the sake of learning for four years, and then spend another two or three at a trade/professional school, before they can get a real position.
Students go to various schools in great part because of the job prospects they think they'll have on completion. Only the rich can afford to simply go because it will be intellectually stimulating. Plus, mixing together people who just want job training with people who are fundamentally interested in learning is a mistake; neither are going to be satisfied with the results.
To be honest, I think we need to remove some of the social stigma surrounding trade schools in the U.S., and we should have a clear path for students that just want to get job skills. Maybe the companies themselves could even help fund them, and in return get to dictate parts of the curriculum (via directed tax contributions, if not voluntarily). That would remove the education/industry disconnect. Students who wanted an 'education' would be able to go to college, and students who want 'job training' and a near-guaranteed job in a relatively short amount of time could go to the trade schools.
I think in the U.S. we have dragged 'childhood' further and further out; there is no reason why a person should have to go through nineteen or twenty years of schooling before they can survive on their own in the economy. Education needs to be made more relevant to what students want to learn, and more rigorous earlier in the curriculum. Huge swaths of my own education were nothing but wasted time because of the way the system is currently set up; there is no reason why a motivated 15 or 16-year-old shouldn't be able to be out learning a skill, if that's what they want to do. Making them acquire thousands of dollars in debt and years of wasted 'education' that they won't use first, helps no one.
Second this.
There's way too much emphasis on starting your own projects from a clean slate, which is very rare in the 'real world.' More often you get handed the spaghetti-code mess of the "last guy," to puzzle over and figure out how to document and maintain.
Too much CS education is focused on the very beginning of the software lifecycle. That's like churning out doctors that can only deliver babies, when what the market needs are GPs and geriatric specialists. Grads need to know not only how to start a new project themselves, but how to pick up one that's in the middle of development, or that's well into its maintenance phase.
I think people are confusing "protest" with "mob." A planned protest with people who know what they're getting into, and have protection, is a very different entity from a spontaneous street riot.
Sometimes people who want to crack down on a protest will term it a 'mob' or 'riot,' but they're different. A riot, and what this machine is designed to disperse, is a situation where you have a whole lot of people just getting together spontaneously for the purposes of causing violence. Since spontaneity implies lack of preparedness, this would be effective there.
Even if you have something that starts off as a protest and then becomes a mob or riot, say by virtue of people joining up with the protest whose ends are violent rather than peaceful, then the deterrent system is most effective against the violent hangers-on, rather than the core protesters. So again, it's not ineffective.
"Professional protesters" and the other people likely to bring protective gear are not the real concern, because they're the ones least likely to be causing violence. (And if they are, you can't really call it a 'protest' anymore, it's a battle, and time to bring out the real weapons.) In many ways, a good crowd 'discourager' should have some form of protective gear that's effective against it, because this allows you to drive off violent spontaneous rioters but have minimal effect on core protesters.
At least in my experience, Tasers replaced nightsticks and billy clubs because they're more photogenic and have less of a stigma. Most of the situations you see Tasers being used in, would in the "bad old days" probably have engendered use of the club. Only that's not quite acceptable anymore, so instead they've found a method that looks better from a distance, and leaves fewer marks. (No awkward explanations of how somebody 'fell down the stairs,' etc.)
I'm not at all convinced that the level of police brutality has increased in recent years, if anything I think it's probably at its lowest level in this country historically. Arguing with people who consider themselves to be in a position of power has never been a safe sport, and depending on where and when you did it (and who you were), you might have been lucky to get out with the equivalent of a Tasering.
I'm not defending the practice per se, I'm just suggesting that I think you're wrong to assume that the technology actually causes brutality; the brutality has always been there, and always finds an outlet. That the Taser seems to be the choice du jour for causing pain doesn't really make it unique.
Joking aside, how easy would it be to make protective armor against this kind of attack? You can buy rolls of steel or aluminum window screening at any hardware store for under $50.
Causing them to fall back to "Plan B," also known as rubber bullets (or real ones). I'm not sure that's an improvement.
Plus, at least if I was going to deploy this, I'd probably use a mix of denial devices; tear gas, smoke, ultrasonics, psychological deterrents (recordings of people screaming, etc.), and the giant Radarange. If one particular method doesn't make you want to leave, chances are one of the other ones will.
It just adds to the would-be rioter's load of stuff they have to bring. Gas mask, earplugs, roll of window screen, padded suit (don't want to get trampled by the less prepared)...joining a mob and burning stuff just becomes less fun-sounding in a hurry, when you have to go home and get your "riot kit" first.