141 words, counting the posting date. Can we all just be a little cautious before we all rush to judgment over this?
Doesn't sound good in 4th amendment terms, but there's so little detail here that I'm hesitant to offer any analysis.
Well, the reason why the U.S. is the #1 industrialized nation, and China is not, has little to do with the horrible working conditions described here. Perhaps I'm missing your sarcasm.
The problem here, as it always is, is poverty. The reason why people choose to work in horrible conditions is because they don't have a better alternative available, in their own estimation. Americans have a powerful tendency to project their own values and choices onto others without a realistic appraisal of the situation. For example, when we crack down on "third world" sweatshops (in itself a slightly racist term, IMHO), net effect is that all these children who were working in horrible conditions are fired. Of course we would prefer that the children be going to school, or just about anything more healthy for a child than working. But if nothing more attractive is available, these people migrate to a less desirable, and less visible means of supporting themselves.
In this country, we've decided that some things are not to be held open as options, no matter how horrible the alternative. I tend to say that what I see in this photo article should be stopped, but I do wonder if I'm not assuming options that would be available here are available there, when that's not necessarily true.
I assume that this project is simply a proof of concept; a project to generate one freak animal that would die, and the species would be extinct again.But what if it weren't?
What possible place in the world would this species have? If we're truly talking about "bringing back" a species, we have to talk about releasing it into the environment.
Now the environment has long since shaken out to equilibrium from the lack of mammoths, so introducing mammoths must necessarily take it out of equilibrium. Does anyone really thing we have any shot of predicting the impact?
Let's say we generate a genetically viable population of 100 mammoths and release them into the wastes of Siberia. What if it is simply so that the conditions that led to their demise are still in effect?
Well, I strongly disagree that simply because they used GA that this is not an impressive achievement. When I first read this article, and I saw the keyword "learned", I starting scanning the article for the fitness function...ahh, "generate maximum lift".
This is impressive because it demonstrates a particularly successful marriage between a design and a fitness function for the design.
Finally, re: evolution vs. intelligent design; who specified the fitness function;)?
The heat from the unit catches the back of the chair on fire. Of course at this point, you're semi-locked into the chair by the touchscreen, so you're desperately scootching along the floor trying to wrench yourself free from a horrible death straight from Terry Gilliam's worst nightmare...
Cool! Now if they can just make an track player in the shape of a CD, I'll be back in business, baby...
Re:Refuting Evolution
on
Genome
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Again, at the risk of starting a flame war...
Full disclosure: I consider myself a deeply religious person. I attend church twice a week, read the Bible, and send my children to a private religious school (at great expense).
However, I find Creationism utter nonsense. I do believe that God created man, but through the process of evolution. The evidence for evolution is so utterly overwhelming that Christians are left with two alternatives:
God created man through the process of evolution, or
God created man through the process literally described in the Bible and left the Earth scatted with damning evidence to the contrary, as some bizarre test of faith.
Whenever this subject comes up with the faithful, I try to change minds gently, and remember a quote (from whom I don't remember):
"A frantic orthodoxy is not rooted in faith, but in doubt."
If he's worried about the spread of U.S. influence, shouldn't he want to block U.S. Internet from Europe, rather than blocking European Internet from U.S.?
I find his candor refreshing; anytime you talk about taking things back from the libertarians, start buying stock in fascism...
1. Don't even bother with binocs, much less a scope.
2. Get outside of the city and lay on the hood of your car.
3.Bring a flashlight with a red filter to save your night vision.
4. The Perseids come from a point near the constellation Perseus (go figure). It's actually closer to Cassiopeia, which is much easier to find (it's the big W). Find this point for the best viewing.
I'll break my usual rule of not responding to responses by quoting someone who knows a lot more about this subject than either one of us, economist Thomas Sowell:
The one monumental fact that is being ignored in all the political schemes to bring down the cost of pharmaceutical drugs is that it costs hundreds of millions of dollars to develop one successful new medicine.
No matter how cleverly the politicians try to shift those costs around, somebody has to end up paying those hundreds of millions of dollars, if you expect new pharmaceutical drugs to continue to be developed to cope with AIDS, Alzheimer's, cancer, and all the other maladies that afflict human beings...
Senator Hillary Clinton and other political demagogues make a lot of noise about how Canadians and others are paying much less than Americans pay for the same medicines that are produced in the United States. Apparently all we need to do is to get our prices down to the level of Canadian prices, whether by re-importing these drugs from Canada or by other means. But is that true?
What is really happening is that Americans are paying more of the high fixed costs of developing new medicines, which then allows others to pay the lower costs of producing these medicines. But if American prices also come down to the lower prices charged in other countries, then the high costs of developing new medicines will not be covered, and a slowdown in developing new medicines becomes virtually inevitable.
But, by that time, Senator Clinton will have been re-elected -- and that's all that matters, isn't it?
Those who are constantly pointing to the prices and the practices of other nations when it comes to pharmaceutical drugs ignore the fact that those other nations lag far behind the United States when it comes to creating new medicines. A majority of the most widely sold medicines in the world are American. The United States has more invested in pharmaceutical research than all of Europe put together.
The kinds of policies in other countries that we are being urged to follow has led to a decline in those countries' roles in creating new medicines. Germany, once a worldwide leader in pharmaceutical research, has fallen far behind the United States, and some leading German pharmaceutical firms are expanding their operations in the United States more so than in Germany.
Canada, Germany and other countries get the benefits of American research but contribute much less than the United States does to the creation of drugs. On the surface, these countries have a good deal, but in reality everyone is worse off, because the development of new medicines is slower than it would be if worldwide prices were high enough to cover research costs, rather than the much lower cost of manufacturing medicines that have already been developed in the United States.
You pay one way or you pay another. Paying in needless pain, debilitation and early death is one of the worst ways of paying.
As someone who knows what it is to be rushed to the nearest hospital emergency room by paramedics because I forgot to take my medication, I am grateful that today's clever political schemes for controlling the prices of pharmaceutical drugs did not exist in years past, when these medications were being developed. Otherwise, I might not be here.
The secret -- and the tragedy -- of welfare state politics, especially in an election year, is that you can always do some immediate good, right under your nose, at costs that are hidden, ignored or postponed. But those costs don't go away. They can grow even bigger in the dark.
Too many politicians see prices as just things to be manipulated, the way they manipulate words and emotions to get votes. But the underlying realities which prices convey are not going to go away just because the prices themselves are controlled.
Price controls in general have a centuries-long record of reducing the quantity and quality of whatever product or service has its price controlled. Price controls on food have produced hunger and even starvation in some countries. Rent control produces housing shortages in cities around the world. Medicine is not exempt from economics -- or from politics.
The political temptation with pharmaceutical drugs, as with other things, is to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. But, in this case, that can also amount to killing sick people.
Of course rich folks will get the stuff first. It's just like everything, but as companies produce this stuff, they'll figure out ways to make it cheaper in an attempt to outbid their competitors and make more money. The price falls, everyone benefits.
Your second point, re: Zimbabwe assumes that the drugs came down like manna from heaven. The fact that they exist at all is due to the fact that some people were willing and able to pay what you and I would consider outrageous prices. Those outrageous prices whet the appetite of investors to pony up more dough for research.
Don't like the system? The alternative is tax money extracted at gunpoint to run labs that are under very little pressure to produce (see: NASA, NIH).
Mod this off-topic a tad, but how the hell do I get a job like George Broussard's where I can just run a development team indefinitely and never release a product?
People kind of chuckle about Duke Nukem Forever, but I mean think about it; surely Duke Nukem forever is the worst case scenario in software project management 101.
Slashdot Mirror
A dorito-scented CD in a Pamela Anderson shaped box.
141 words, counting the posting date. Can we all just be a little cautious before we all rush to judgment over this?
Doesn't sound good in 4th amendment terms, but there's so little detail here that I'm hesitant to offer any analysis.
I can mount my expedition into the jungles of Africa and search for King Solomon's mines...
Well, the reason why the U.S. is the #1 industrialized nation, and China is not, has little to do with the horrible working conditions described here. Perhaps I'm missing your sarcasm.
The problem here, as it always is, is poverty. The reason why people choose to work in horrible conditions is because they don't have a better alternative available, in their own estimation. Americans have a powerful tendency to project their own values and choices onto others without a realistic appraisal of the situation. For example, when we crack down on "third world" sweatshops (in itself a slightly racist term, IMHO), net effect is that all these children who were working in horrible conditions are fired. Of course we would prefer that the children be going to school, or just about anything more healthy for a child than working. But if nothing more attractive is available, these people migrate to a less desirable, and less visible means of supporting themselves.
In this country, we've decided that some things are not to be held open as options, no matter how horrible the alternative. I tend to say that what I see in this photo article should be stopped, but I do wonder if I'm not assuming options that would be available here are available there, when that's not necessarily true.
I assume that this project is simply a proof of concept; a project to generate one freak animal that would die, and the species would be extinct again.But what if it weren't?
What possible place in the world would this species have? If we're truly talking about "bringing back" a species, we have to talk about releasing it into the environment.
Now the environment has long since shaken out to equilibrium from the lack of mammoths, so introducing mammoths must necessarily take it out of equilibrium. Does anyone really thing we have any shot of predicting the impact?
Let's say we generate a genetically viable population of 100 mammoths and release them into the wastes of Siberia. What if it is simply so that the conditions that led to their demise are still in effect?
Well, I strongly disagree that simply because they used GA that this is not an impressive achievement. When I first read this article, and I saw the keyword "learned", I starting scanning the article for the fitness function...ahh, "generate maximum lift".
;)?
This is impressive because it demonstrates a particularly successful marriage between a design and a fitness function for the design.
Finally, re: evolution vs. intelligent design; who specified the fitness function
"How Robots took over the world" circa - 2051.
Electronic edition, of course.
The heat from the unit catches the back of the chair on fire. Of course at this point, you're semi-locked into the chair by the touchscreen, so you're desperately scootching along the floor trying to wrench yourself free from a horrible death straight from Terry Gilliam's worst nightmare...
Cool! Now if they can just make an track player in the shape of a CD, I'll be back in business, baby...
Full disclosure: I consider myself a deeply religious person. I attend church twice a week, read the Bible, and send my children to a private religious school (at great expense).
However, I find Creationism utter nonsense. I do believe that God created man, but through the process of evolution. The evidence for evolution is so utterly overwhelming that Christians are left with two alternatives:
Whenever this subject comes up with the faithful, I try to change minds gently, and remember a quote (from whom I don't remember):
"A frantic orthodoxy is not rooted in faith, but in doubt."
Would conclude that plummeting costs would collapse an industry.
No, it's still true. Concentrating the dollars has no positive economic that the disparate impact of the individual dollars wouldn't have.
In fact, it has the negative effect that any large concentration of money in the hand of politicians has (waste, inefficiency and outright graft).
You're right about the tourist dollars; however, those dollars would have likely been spent for tourist businesses in Florida.
If he's worried about the spread of U.S. influence, shouldn't he want to block U.S. Internet from Europe, rather than blocking European Internet from U.S.?
I find his candor refreshing; anytime you talk about taking things back from the libertarians, start buying stock in fascism...
1. Don't even bother with binocs, much less a scope.
2. Get outside of the city and lay on the hood of your car.
3.Bring a flashlight with a red filter to save your night vision.
4. The Perseids come from a point near the constellation Perseus (go figure). It's actually closer to Cassiopeia, which is much easier to find (it's the big W). Find this point for the best viewing.
Link
I can build my haptic feedback arm-wrestling simulator.
Simply because the few and organized wield much more powerful than the many and disorganized.
Maybe the government shouldn't have the power to tell me what kind of #$(*&#$* television I can buy?
Could she take a very deep breath? A flexible strap around her chest could activate an electronic alarm.
Perhaps a little more information about what her capabilites are would be helpful.
I'll break my usual rule of not responding to responses by quoting someone who knows a lot more about this subject than either one of us, economist Thomas Sowell:
The one monumental fact that is being ignored in all the political schemes to bring down the cost of pharmaceutical drugs is that it costs hundreds of millions of dollars to develop one successful new medicine.
No matter how cleverly the politicians try to shift those costs around, somebody has to end up paying those hundreds of millions of dollars, if you expect new pharmaceutical drugs to continue to be developed to cope with AIDS, Alzheimer's, cancer, and all the other maladies that afflict human beings...
Senator Hillary Clinton and other political demagogues make a lot of noise about how Canadians and others are paying much less than Americans pay for the same medicines that are produced in the United States. Apparently all we need to do is to get our prices down to the level of Canadian prices, whether by re-importing these drugs from Canada or by other means. But is that true?
What is really happening is that Americans are paying more of the high fixed costs of developing new medicines, which then allows others to pay the lower costs of producing these medicines. But if American prices also come down to the lower prices charged in other countries, then the high costs of developing new medicines will not be covered, and a slowdown in developing new medicines becomes virtually inevitable.
But, by that time, Senator Clinton will have been re-elected -- and that's all that matters, isn't it?
Those who are constantly pointing to the prices and the practices of other nations when it comes to pharmaceutical drugs ignore the fact that those other nations lag far behind the United States when it comes to creating new medicines. A majority of the most widely sold medicines in the world are American. The United States has more invested in pharmaceutical research than all of Europe put together.
The kinds of policies in other countries that we are being urged to follow has led to a decline in those countries' roles in creating new medicines. Germany, once a worldwide leader in pharmaceutical research, has fallen far behind the United States, and some leading German pharmaceutical firms are expanding their operations in the United States more so than in Germany.
Canada, Germany and other countries get the benefits of American research but contribute much less than the United States does to the creation of drugs. On the surface, these countries have a good deal, but in reality everyone is worse off, because the development of new medicines is slower than it would be if worldwide prices were high enough to cover research costs, rather than the much lower cost of manufacturing medicines that have already been developed in the United States.
You pay one way or you pay another. Paying in needless pain, debilitation and early death is one of the worst ways of paying.
As someone who knows what it is to be rushed to the nearest hospital emergency room by paramedics because I forgot to take my medication, I am grateful that today's clever political schemes for controlling the prices of pharmaceutical drugs did not exist in years past, when these medications were being developed. Otherwise, I might not be here.
The secret -- and the tragedy -- of welfare state politics, especially in an election year, is that you can always do some immediate good, right under your nose, at costs that are hidden, ignored or postponed. But those costs don't go away. They can grow even bigger in the dark.
Too many politicians see prices as just things to be manipulated, the way they manipulate words and emotions to get votes. But the underlying realities which prices convey are not going to go away just because the prices themselves are controlled.
Price controls in general have a centuries-long record of reducing the quantity and quality of whatever product or service has its price controlled. Price controls on food have produced hunger and even starvation in some countries. Rent control produces housing shortages in cities around the world. Medicine is not exempt from economics -- or from politics.
The political temptation with pharmaceutical drugs, as with other things, is to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. But, in this case, that can also amount to killing sick people.
Nah, you've missed the point.
Of course rich folks will get the stuff first. It's just like everything, but as companies produce this stuff, they'll figure out ways to make it cheaper in an attempt to outbid their competitors and make more money. The price falls, everyone benefits.
Your second point, re: Zimbabwe assumes that the drugs came down like manna from heaven. The fact that they exist at all is due to the fact that some people were willing and able to pay what you and I would consider outrageous prices. Those outrageous prices whet the appetite of investors to pony up more dough for research.
Don't like the system? The alternative is tax money extracted at gunpoint to run labs that are under very little pressure to produce (see: NASA, NIH).
Mod this off-topic a tad, but how the hell do I get a job like George Broussard's where I can just run a development team indefinitely and never release a product?
People kind of chuckle about Duke Nukem Forever, but I mean think about it; surely Duke Nukem forever is the worst case scenario in software project management 101.
Does anyone else see a problem with a bunch of robotics researchers teaching a robot social skills?
Relax, it's a joke.
Is Slashdot now just a memepool retread?
for a handheld.
suddenly I will be treated only to static
Maybe someone in America will actually pick up a book for a change...