It's absolutely true that some people will find a way to continue making a living delivering news (people want it, after all,) and that others will provide news and commentary for free.
If you are a religious free market nut, you may think this is an improvement over current circumstances. To a heretic such as myself, this is clearly not an improvement over our current circumstances where, desultory as it may be, there has been some effort to keep the general public informed, particularly on events of local or civic relevance. Meanwhile, billionaire glamor publishers like Murdoch and Eli Broad will increase their already disproportionate influence over public discourse. Fantastic.
So, as a public service, municipalities should set up non-profit local newspapers with independent editorial staffs (I would suggest direct election of editors, with the contents of the newspaper split between the top five vote-getters who can then publish whatever they want without even consulting one another if they wish.) If this sounds impossible, given how popular it would be with the public (particularly in large cities), that tells you how thoroughly degraded our political culture has become. Turning news into even-more of a for-profit venture with no broader responsibility to the community will degrade our political culture further, until we end up a kleptocracy like Mexico or Italy.
Develop the game anonymously using an svn server in the Philippines or something, and then distribute it by BT. Avoid using real names and addresses for all concerned.
Then, let the bastards stew. They can send C&D letters to the entire population of Western Europe, what does it get them?
I can't believe that they spent all that effort developing this game and didn't do so in a way that would let them, at the least, try to stay undetectable.
I'm not a mathematician, could someone explain why this is surprising in terms that a computer programmer or biologist could follow? First thing I thought - no matter how many innings you have, you can guarantee that the top of the order will be up at least as many times as the bottom of the order.
Okay, if you have a random number along the interval (1,10^X), all the leading digits will be equally likely.
If you have some other interval (1,n*10^X), 1<=n<=9, then the leading digits > n will appear roughly 1/10 as often as leading digits 1..n.
If you have a large sample which is drawn from an admixture of some huge number of random distributions (1,n*10^X), with the "n" of each sub-distribution evenly distributed on 1..9, then the lower leading digits will be moderately more common, yeah?
Prime numbers, meanwhile, become decreasingly common as you get larger and larger, is that not correct? So it seems to me this is the obvious way to model prime numbers, no?
I'm aware that the advertizing is targeted, but all I ever see are ads for dating sites or russian mail-order brides.
Oh, and those "free" credit report companies, who make the russian mailorder bride people look reputable.
Also, isn't facebook losing money hand over fist anyway? They'd probably do better if they moved to a subscription model that let you look at other user's porn.
You do realize that's complete and utter bullshit?
Social security has an overhead cost of about 1%, vs roughly 15% for money market funds and the like.
Medicare has, at worst, comparable administrative costs of private health insurance: http://alankatz.wordpress.com/2007/10/08/medicare-administrative-expense-reality-check/ (read the entire article, and note that even by his assumptions, very generous to insurance companies by among other things excluding *commissions and profits*!, and other funny math, medicare is still more efficient.)
Parent is abrasive, but I think his point is probably correct.
I'm not an astronomer - but I'm a biologist and we do circular dichroism measurements on biological samples (wikipedia article is good enough: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_Dichromism).
The notion that you could detect these signals from an exoplanet lightyears away - given that we can't, at the moment, detect light from such planets at all - strikes me as somewhere between far fetched and complete bullshit.
On the other hand, as a device on a mars rover (or even a satellite probe, maybe, although I doubt this would work through the atmosphere) this makes a lot of sense. So tag this as xenobiology rather than astronomy and we're maybe okay. Can't say more without reading the actual paper.
You puncture a big hole in the earth's crust, and let the ocean flow in. You use the electrical output from the turbines to re-smelt the turbines (because they get coated with salt), and you use the steam as fresh water.
The Obama administration has roughly the same goals as the Bush administration, so it's no surprise that they're continuing to pursue them.
The change, and it is a change, is that they are pursuing them in a smarter way. 1) By making this extreme argument, they give judges wiggle-room to reject it and then accept the state secrets argument, while still allowing the judge to make token gestures in favor of the rule of law, even write a long, pious opinion dismissing the second argument while accepting the first. I can see that it would be very easy for any judge to delude himself into believing he was making a Solomonic compromise. Very smart on their part.
2) If the second argument *does* somehow fly, they have carte blanche to do what they want. I suspect that the Bush administration would've argued for the same thing, except that they weren't smart enough to come up with a line of argument that would've passed the laugh test (IANAL, maybe this one doesn't either.)
Begin broken record mode: The only way to get real improvement from Obama (or from Bush, for that matter,) is to mobilize the public to control the government. No elected leader is going to do this for us as a gift, we have to maintain the pressure constantly.
Personally, I'm much more disappointed with his ongoing embrace of "public-private partnerships" in education (crooked self-dealing and cronyism do not focus group so well, so they rebranded them as "public-private partnerships" in which the government partners with a private entity to give it money with minimal oversight and much righteous rhetoric.) My saintly mother blogs about it: http://chemtchr.dailykos.com/
And I'm sure Obama has not delivered from progressives on a dozen other fronts. Only way he will is *if we make him*. In the case of progressive causes that are popular with the public, this should be relatively easy, and ought to benefit the election prospects of the Democratic party anyway, so let's get going.
And it appears (look in a sister thread,) that FOX isn't going to fire him. At least not immediately.
The *reason* that FOX isn't going to fire him is because their news division is *supposed* to be independent of their other divisions. Among other things, this is part of the conditions under which their affiliates get discounted access to the public airwaves.
Yeah, yeah, that's a joke, right? Of course it is. BUT, for FOX news to fire this guy would be a pretty brazen display of non-independence, wouldn't it? The joke is only funny if you keep it going. And FOX can no longer count on a pet federal government giving them an easy ride of it.
I should say - I think that this law suit is bollocks, obviously.
But if you want to prevent this sort of thing, all you need is a law to indemnify inventors and distributors of technological devices and other services against contributory infringement. Why single out the investors and directors for legal protection?
Investors and directors already have far too *much* indemnity against the actions taken with their money, generally speaking. This would set a terrible precedent, potentially causing tremendous harm to society in order to advance a very minor point of agenda.
The hebrew bible gets the order of Persian kings wrong. Josephus quotes list of Persian kings found in hebrew manuscript. Tada, the list of persian kings is independently verified!
New technology enables this kind of thing to happen with amazing *speed*, but it always took careful consideration and scholarship to disentangle. If anything, having all those explicit timestamps makes this much easier in the information age, but the volume is probably greater than people can really process.
Plants and animals have a distinct origin of multicellularity. Many of the genes used to control patterning are homologous between the two clades, but that's as far as it goes.
Now, something similar may very well happen in some animals, where somatic tissue cells resume dividing in response to injury. But these experiments tell you nothing about that, one way or another.
And no, the spreadsheet is not responsible for all moral decay and infamy in our society.
Cars are shoddy, consumer goods are junk. Toxic substances are in the food supply. Lead is in toys. Most of what we buy is made cheaply elsewhere. At every level of the business scene today, some bean counter does a what-if calculation before making the decisions. The spineless CEO worries about what the shareholders would think if he disagreed with what the spreadsheet and the CFO told him to do. To make him feel better, the board will give the CEO a fat bonus for saving money.
Back in the day, before spreadsheets, the US Military secretly gave the children of US servicemen whooping cough, prisoners were secretly injected with syphillus, and a deal was cut with lead paint manufacturers to leave their remaining inventory on the market rather than recalling it after everyone had given up denying it was harmful. Don't get me started on lead gasoline or cigarettes.
Amoral behavior like this is a property of all *secretive and powerful institutions*. Since the spreadsheet has been invented, private corporations have become more secretive and more powerful, and their directors have become more dedicated to institutional goals as a cultural shift. There is no causation here.
There is a lot of criticism of administrators on this thread - and it is certainly true that the administrators of powerful, secretive institutions tend to personify both the destructive social impact and caustically short-sighted, self-interested purposefully ignorant culture of the institutions where they hold sway.
But as has been pointed out elsewhere, for human beings to act productively and cooperatively, administration and logistics are required. Spreadsheets help with this task immensely - as anyone who's tried to for fucksakes budget a camping trip (how much more would it cost to bring uncle David and his kids too?) can attest.
To clarify my assertion further (and I have to credit this assertion to David F. Noble, who's ideas are primarily reflected here): The technology is neutral - if you don't like what's being done with it, that's entirely the fault of the people using it. To the extent that spreadsheets have had a deleterious effect on our society, that is because powerful individuals saw an opportunity in the technology and exploited it. In a different instutitional structure or with different power relations already in place, the effects would be totally different.
In closing, if anyone actually cares about the future of engineering professions, read Forces of Production by David F. Noble. De-skilled assembly line jobs became the norm not because it was a better way of doing things and not through any inherent properties of machine tools (let alone "market pressure"), but because it served the economic and political interests of the managerical class. Spreadsheets are (relatively minor) among the many tools that the current generation of management tries to use to do the same to engineers today.
Of course consumers will benefit! Microsoft has just announced the first truly-effective open-source promotion policy in the history of the american computing industry. We should be saluting this, but instead, the microsoft bashers on slashdot are reflexively criticizing them.
"Seriously": Consumers will benefit because they will pay proportional to their actual use, which more efficiently distributes the costs. Thus, those who can afford to pay more will do so, and those who can't won't, which is always good if you are a bizarro-world inverse-marxist ideologue, a.k.a. "free market theorist."
Oh, also, higher profits for microsoft will drive them to innovate.
This is the same reason that coupons are good for the economy - those with enough money don't bother and just pay the higher prices. The time and energy people spend clipping coupons has zero cost - likewise, artificially restricting computer use by introducing significant marginal costs is a zero loss to the economy if you are a corporate tool.
The fact that there are economists who actually believe crap like the above tells you that economics really is the dismal science.
We still don't know all of the details of how life emerged on earth, but it appears to have required some very specific chemistry. Something-like-RNA bases meet the requirements for abiogenesis (a non-biological origin for life): * capable of catalyzing it's own reproduction * versatile enough to adopt novel catalytic activity and replicate *with the novel activity intact* (by base pairing) * produced in fair abundance in the chemistry seen on a young planet
It's *possible* that something other than carbon aromatics in a polar solvent might fit the bill, we certainly don't know enough physical chemsitry to rule it out. But to the extent that we have any evidence on this topic at all, RNA appears to be unique. So we are we looking for (liquid) water.
I also have a question - is this *liquid* water we're talking about, or ice or water vapor? Under what conditions does water mase? Because finding H2O in some form in distant galaxies is not particularly surprising - it's cool that we can confirm it's there, but hydrogen and oxygen aren't exactly rare, on a galactic scale.
Okay, firstly, the average adult male at birth of last child is now well above the average *life expectancy* for much of human history.
Secondly, evolution is not driven by mutations - it's driven by *natural selection*. The already existing genetic diversity could continue to allow evolution for some time without any mutations at all.
Our new environment, in which reproduction is largely unlinked from sexual activity, means that genes associated with child bonding and child rearing will be favored in future generations, and genes associated with fucking like bunnies will probably be selected *against*. Or you could come up with some other plausible scenario.
As new mutations arise in the population - and let's pretend we buy his argument that such mutations are less frequent now than they were 250,000 yrs ago - they will confer fitness (in a biological sense) not because they confer better survival; in industrial societies, few people literally die before reaching childbearing age. They will confer biological fitness if they are associated with a strong reproductive drive.
Obviously this could change drastically in the event of some major shift in our society or the environment.
Doctors get to proscribe drugs. This means that they should, at the very least, have a basic inkling of what drugs are and how they're made. That knowledge is not "useless" simply because the vast majority of doctors are never going anywhere near a chemical factory - if they have a basic inkling of what is going on, they are less likely to make obvious mistakes (proscibing the wrong drug, forgetting what the drug even is, etc. etc.)
Now, the fact that so many prescription drug errors *do* occur can be blamed, in significant part, on the fact that, in reality, many doctors manage to get through med school *without* a basic understanding of organic chemistry.
The open access law that they are threatening to overturn wasn't enacted until December, 2007.
It never would've had a shot at becoming law in the first place when the Republicans were in charge of Congress.
Now, it's absolutely true that we (the voters) must be vigilant to make sure that the reforms we won in the 2006 election aren't eroded. We must also be vigilant that they aren't simply ignored (presumably in exchange for sex) by the executives we elect.
Does the US, by virtue of being a member of the UN, agree that socialized medicine is a natural right? I happen to think that it *is*, but the notion that this can be divorced from my west-coast, hippy-dippy culture is ludicrous.
Also, there is a question of the facts here. Is the US government actually doing something to protect the natural rights of Chinese citizens (which, FWIW, I agree that they have) - or is something else going on? The most likely explanation is just that the US Congress wants to make sure that all US corporations, while doing whatever they want, cover their asses with sanctimonious boiler plate.
It is true that this is culturally relative. OTOH, when two cultures interact, it is both natural and productive to seek some progressive synthesis of the best of the two. However, it is also true that our actions are extremely hypocritical. Statements like the one I make above are generally made with the underlying assumption that our *government* or *corporate institutions* somehow support freedom. Bollocks.
Our government and institutions hate freedom just as much as the Politburo. The population, and yes, our culture, have beaten back our institutions so that our institutions can't exercise the kind of power that the Politburo does over its own population, but when our institutions claim they are somehow going to export our freedoms, it's 100% cover for some other agenda.
Certainly this is every advertizer's wet-dream - to stop their advertisements from being parasatized by filthy content.
What if everyone just say down at their computers and allowed themselves to be passively inundated with whatever they were told to like. Wouldn't that be wondrous?
I don't doubt that such targeted advertizing is going to increase dramatically in both power and sophistication over the coming years - and that the percentage of ads I see which are for things that I might actually want will rise dramatically. But will this replace google, which does a good job of providing me with things that I actually want to see for my own purposes? No, it won't. Not in a million years.
I know scientists who devote their entire lives to their work, never go out, never have a good time, have no children (or never see them), etc. etc.
Are they *better* scientists? I don't think so.
Are they *more productive* scientists? Not in every case, but on average, yeah, I'd say they are. There are situations where spending all your time on work and neglecting other aspects of your life is a self-defeating proposition, especially in creative work (which generally includes science, although what scientists actually *do* varies a lot from one scientist to another.)
But burn-out aside, if you're willing to sacrifice other aspects of your life, you can get more science done. Pretending that this is not, generally speaking, true, because you want to pretend that it doesn't cost you anything to have a life, is not productive.
That said, the article-author is right about the statistics. Bad Czechs!
Obviously, some individual person did discover penicillin, and Einstein did himself personally figure out relativity.
The question is - if we want more such grand advances, do we want to cultivate more Great Men who can make them, or do we want to cultivate the countless minor advances, not to mention dead ends and often informative failed experiments, etc. etc., on which their work was predicated?
Firstly, science is a gradual process. The "great man" theory of scientific progress has no more merit than the "great man" theory of history. It is in fact *not* true that those who make the very most important discoveries are better than other scientists (The fools! They mocked my research!), and their advances, even when seemingly revolutionary, are predicated on the gradual accumulation of knowledge through careful, thoughtful and reproducible work. This does not mean that all scientists are equally competent, or that financial or political concerns do not sometimes promote inferior scientists.
Secondly, those best qualified to decide which avenues of research will bear fruit are those doing the science, not someone with prize money. Not only are we best qualified to decide what to do - we are best qualified to decide that we are the ones to do it. You may think that one of those young engineers doing successful, and, yes, profitable work on reducing power consumption in laptops could have made super-rope for a space elevator instead, and there are individuals for whom this is true (see next point,) but most of the time, people at this level of skill and education pursue the questions that interest them, and on which they have some confidence that they can usefully contribute. If we were in this for the money we'd have had MBAs in half the time it took to get the PhD.
Now, there is a legitimate problem. You can get private money to fund research in applied science, but the government (or some agency which does not expect any return on each, individual investment) has to fund basic research, for basically the reasons stated in the article. This does not mean we need huge "prizes". What we need are grants - which are in short supply at the moment thanks, and I'm willing to be partisan because the facts are brazenly clear in this case, to the stupid, short-sighted and wasteful policies of the current administration.
Slashdot Mirror
It's absolutely true that some people will find a way to continue making a living delivering news (people want it, after all,) and that others will provide news and commentary for free.
If you are a religious free market nut, you may think this is an improvement over current circumstances. To a heretic such as myself, this is clearly not an improvement over our current circumstances where, desultory as it may be, there has been some effort to keep the general public informed, particularly on events of local or civic relevance. Meanwhile, billionaire glamor publishers like Murdoch and Eli Broad will increase their already disproportionate influence over public discourse. Fantastic.
So, as a public service, municipalities should set up non-profit local newspapers with independent editorial staffs (I would suggest direct election of editors, with the contents of the newspaper split between the top five vote-getters who can then publish whatever they want without even consulting one another if they wish.) If this sounds impossible, given how popular it would be with the public (particularly in large cities), that tells you how thoroughly degraded our political culture has become. Turning news into even-more of a for-profit venture with no broader responsibility to the community will degrade our political culture further, until we end up a kleptocracy like Mexico or Italy.
Develop the game anonymously using an svn server in the Philippines or something, and then distribute it by BT. Avoid using real names and addresses for all concerned.
Then, let the bastards stew. They can send C&D letters to the entire population of Western Europe, what does it get them?
I can't believe that they spent all that effort developing this game and didn't do so in a way that would let them, at the least, try to stay undetectable.
I'm not a mathematician, could someone explain why this is surprising in terms that a computer programmer or biologist could follow? First thing I thought - no matter how many innings you have, you can guarantee that the top of the order will be up at least as many times as the bottom of the order.
Okay, if you have a random number along the interval (1,10^X), all the leading digits will be equally likely.
If you have some other interval (1,n*10^X), 1<=n<=9, then the leading digits > n will appear roughly 1/10 as often as leading digits 1..n.
If you have a large sample which is drawn from an admixture of some huge number of random distributions (1,n*10^X), with the "n" of each sub-distribution evenly distributed on 1..9, then the lower leading digits will be moderately more common, yeah?
Prime numbers, meanwhile, become decreasingly common as you get larger and larger, is that not correct? So it seems to me this is the obvious way to model prime numbers, no?
I'm aware that the advertizing is targeted, but all I ever see are ads for dating sites or russian mail-order brides.
Oh, and those "free" credit report companies, who make the russian mailorder bride people look reputable.
Also, isn't facebook losing money hand over fist anyway? They'd probably do better if they moved to a subscription model that let you look at other user's porn.
You do realize that's complete and utter bullshit?
Social security has an overhead cost of about 1%, vs roughly 15% for money market funds and the like.
Medicare has, at worst, comparable administrative costs of private health insurance: http://alankatz.wordpress.com/2007/10/08/medicare-administrative-expense-reality-check/
(read the entire article, and note that even by his assumptions, very generous to insurance companies by among other things excluding *commissions and profits*!, and other funny math, medicare is still more efficient.)
Parent is abrasive, but I think his point is probably correct.
I'm not an astronomer - but I'm a biologist and we do circular dichroism measurements on biological samples (wikipedia article is good enough: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_Dichromism).
The notion that you could detect these signals from an exoplanet lightyears away - given that we can't, at the moment, detect light from such planets at all - strikes me as somewhere between far fetched and complete bullshit.
On the other hand, as a device on a mars rover (or even a satellite probe, maybe, although I doubt this would work through the atmosphere) this makes a lot of sense. So tag this as xenobiology rather than astronomy and we're maybe okay. Can't say more without reading the actual paper.
You puncture a big hole in the earth's crust, and let the ocean flow in. You use the electrical output from the turbines to re-smelt the turbines (because they get coated with salt), and you use the steam as fresh water.
The Obama administration has roughly the same goals as the Bush administration, so it's no surprise that they're continuing to pursue them.
The change, and it is a change, is that they are pursuing them in a smarter way.
1) By making this extreme argument, they give judges wiggle-room to reject it and then accept the state secrets argument, while still allowing the judge to make token gestures in favor of the rule of law, even write a long, pious opinion dismissing the second argument while accepting the first. I can see that it would be very easy for any judge to delude himself into believing he was making a Solomonic compromise. Very smart on their part.
2) If the second argument *does* somehow fly, they have carte blanche to do what they want. I suspect that the Bush administration would've argued for the same thing, except that they weren't smart enough to come up with a line of argument that would've passed the laugh test (IANAL, maybe this one doesn't either.)
Begin broken record mode: The only way to get real improvement from Obama (or from Bush, for that matter,) is to mobilize the public to control the government. No elected leader is going to do this for us as a gift, we have to maintain the pressure constantly.
Personally, I'm much more disappointed with his ongoing embrace of "public-private partnerships" in education (crooked self-dealing and cronyism do not focus group so well, so they rebranded them as "public-private partnerships" in which the government partners with a private entity to give it money with minimal oversight and much righteous rhetoric.) My saintly mother blogs about it: http://chemtchr.dailykos.com/
And I'm sure Obama has not delivered from progressives on a dozen other fronts. Only way he will is *if we make him*. In the case of progressive causes that are popular with the public, this should be relatively easy, and ought to benefit the election prospects of the Democratic party anyway, so let's get going.
Okay, no, it wasn't in-depth reporting.
And it appears (look in a sister thread,) that FOX isn't going to fire him. At least not immediately.
The *reason* that FOX isn't going to fire him is because their news division is *supposed* to be independent of their other divisions. Among other things, this is part of the conditions under which their affiliates get discounted access to the public airwaves.
Yeah, yeah, that's a joke, right? Of course it is. BUT, for FOX news to fire this guy would be a pretty brazen display of non-independence, wouldn't it? The joke is only funny if you keep it going. And FOX can no longer count on a pet federal government giving them an easy ride of it.
I should say - I think that this law suit is bollocks, obviously.
But if you want to prevent this sort of thing, all you need is a law to indemnify inventors and distributors of technological devices and other services against contributory infringement. Why single out the investors and directors for legal protection?
Investors and directors already have far too *much* indemnity against the actions taken with their money, generally speaking. This would set a terrible precedent, potentially causing tremendous harm to society in order to advance a very minor point of agenda.
You're not kidding this is nothing new.
The hebrew bible gets the order of Persian kings wrong. Josephus quotes list of Persian kings found in hebrew manuscript. Tada, the list of persian kings is independently verified!
New technology enables this kind of thing to happen with amazing *speed*, but it always took careful consideration and scholarship to disentangle. If anything, having all those explicit timestamps makes this much easier in the information age, but the volume is probably greater than people can really process.
None, zero and zilch.
Plants and animals have a distinct origin of multicellularity. Many of the genes used to control patterning are homologous between the two clades, but that's as far as it goes.
Now, something similar may very well happen in some animals, where somatic tissue cells resume dividing in response to injury. But these experiments tell you nothing about that, one way or another.
And no, the spreadsheet is not responsible for all moral decay and infamy in our society.
Cars are shoddy, consumer goods are junk. Toxic substances are in the food supply. Lead is in toys. Most of what we buy is made cheaply elsewhere. At every level of the business scene today, some bean counter does a what-if calculation before making the decisions. The spineless CEO worries about what the shareholders would think if he disagreed with what the spreadsheet and the CFO told him to do. To make him feel better, the board will give the CEO a fat bonus for saving money.
Back in the day, before spreadsheets, the US Military secretly gave the children of US servicemen whooping cough, prisoners were secretly injected with syphillus, and a deal was cut with lead paint manufacturers to leave their remaining inventory on the market rather than recalling it after everyone had given up denying it was harmful. Don't get me started on lead gasoline or cigarettes.
Amoral behavior like this is a property of all *secretive and powerful institutions*. Since the spreadsheet has been invented, private corporations have become more secretive and more powerful, and their directors have become more dedicated to institutional goals as a cultural shift. There is no causation here.
There is a lot of criticism of administrators on this thread - and it is certainly true that the administrators of powerful, secretive institutions tend to personify both the destructive social impact and caustically short-sighted, self-interested purposefully ignorant culture of the institutions where they hold sway.
But as has been pointed out elsewhere, for human beings to act productively and cooperatively, administration and logistics are required. Spreadsheets help with this task immensely - as anyone who's tried to for fucksakes budget a camping trip (how much more would it cost to bring uncle David and his kids too?) can attest.
To clarify my assertion further (and I have to credit this assertion to David F. Noble, who's ideas are primarily reflected here): The technology is neutral - if you don't like what's being done with it, that's entirely the fault of the people using it. To the extent that spreadsheets have had a deleterious effect on our society, that is because powerful individuals saw an opportunity in the technology and exploited it. In a different instutitional structure or with different power relations already in place, the effects would be totally different.
In closing, if anyone actually cares about the future of engineering professions, read Forces of Production by David F. Noble. De-skilled assembly line jobs became the norm not because it was a better way of doing things and not through any inherent properties of machine tools (let alone "market pressure"), but because it served the economic and political interests of the managerical class. Spreadsheets are (relatively minor) among the many tools that the current generation of management tries to use to do the same to engineers today.
Of course consumers will benefit! Microsoft has just announced the first truly-effective open-source promotion policy in the history of the american computing industry. We should be saluting this, but instead, the microsoft bashers on slashdot are reflexively criticizing them.
"Seriously": Consumers will benefit because they will pay proportional to their actual use, which more efficiently distributes the costs. Thus, those who can afford to pay more will do so, and those who can't won't, which is always good if you are a bizarro-world inverse-marxist ideologue, a.k.a. "free market theorist."
Oh, also, higher profits for microsoft will drive them to innovate.
This is the same reason that coupons are good for the economy - those with enough money don't bother and just pay the higher prices. The time and energy people spend clipping coupons has zero cost - likewise, artificially restricting computer use by introducing significant marginal costs is a zero loss to the economy if you are a corporate tool.
The fact that there are economists who actually believe crap like the above tells you that economics really is the dismal science.
The parent is right, and certainly not a troll!
We still don't know all of the details of how life emerged on earth, but it appears to have required some very specific chemistry. Something-like-RNA bases meet the requirements for abiogenesis (a non-biological origin for life):
* capable of catalyzing it's own reproduction
* versatile enough to adopt novel catalytic activity and replicate *with the novel activity intact* (by base pairing)
* produced in fair abundance in the chemistry seen on a young planet
It's *possible* that something other than carbon aromatics in a polar solvent might fit the bill, we certainly don't know enough physical chemsitry to rule it out. But to the extent that we have any evidence on this topic at all, RNA appears to be unique. So we are we looking for (liquid) water.
I also have a question - is this *liquid* water we're talking about, or ice or water vapor? Under what conditions does water mase? Because finding H2O in some form in distant galaxies is not particularly surprising - it's cool that we can confirm it's there, but hydrogen and oxygen aren't exactly rare, on a galactic scale.
Maybe they aren't so stupid after all.
This entire discussion consists of 2 parallel discussions -
1) These DMCA notices will draw all kinds of attention to the website in question.
2) The website in question is completely favorable to Toyota, why would they shut it down?
Answer is pretty obvious, my friends.
Okay, firstly, the average adult male at birth of last child is now well above the average *life expectancy* for much of human history.
Secondly, evolution is not driven by mutations - it's driven by *natural selection*. The already existing genetic diversity could continue to allow evolution for some time without any mutations at all.
Our new environment, in which reproduction is largely unlinked from sexual activity, means that genes associated with child bonding and child rearing will be favored in future generations, and genes associated with fucking like bunnies will probably be selected *against*. Or you could come up with some other plausible scenario.
As new mutations arise in the population - and let's pretend we buy his argument that such mutations are less frequent now than they were 250,000 yrs ago - they will confer fitness (in a biological sense) not because they confer better survival; in industrial societies, few people literally die before reaching childbearing age. They will confer biological fitness if they are associated with a strong reproductive drive.
Obviously this could change drastically in the event of some major shift in our society or the environment.
Anyway, these claims are rubbish.
This just goes to prove my point - with a basic understanding of Latin, I could've avoided that mistake.
can be prevented by basic understanding.
Doctors get to proscribe drugs. This means that they should, at the very least, have a basic inkling of what drugs are and how they're made. That knowledge is not "useless" simply because the vast majority of doctors are never going anywhere near a chemical factory - if they have a basic inkling of what is going on, they are less likely to make obvious mistakes (proscibing the wrong drug, forgetting what the drug even is, etc. etc.)
Now, the fact that so many prescription drug errors *do* occur can be blamed, in significant part, on the fact that, in reality, many doctors manage to get through med school *without* a basic understanding of organic chemistry.
Bullshit.
The open access law that they are threatening to overturn wasn't enacted until December, 2007.
It never would've had a shot at becoming law in the first place when the Republicans were in charge of Congress.
Now, it's absolutely true that we (the voters) must be vigilant to make sure that the reforms we won in the 2006 election aren't eroded. We must also be vigilant that they aren't simply ignored (presumably in exchange for sex) by the executives we elect.
Does the US, by virtue of being a member of the UN, agree that socialized medicine is a natural right? I happen to think that it *is*, but the notion that this can be divorced from my west-coast, hippy-dippy culture is ludicrous.
Also, there is a question of the facts here. Is the US government actually doing something to protect the natural rights of Chinese citizens (which, FWIW, I agree that they have) - or is something else going on? The most likely explanation is just that the US Congress wants to make sure that all US corporations, while doing whatever they want, cover their asses with sanctimonious boiler plate.
It is true that this is culturally relative. OTOH, when two cultures interact, it is both natural and productive to seek some progressive synthesis of the best of the two. However, it is also true that our actions are extremely hypocritical. Statements like the one I make above are generally made with the underlying assumption that our *government* or *corporate institutions* somehow support freedom. Bollocks.
Our government and institutions hate freedom just as much as the Politburo. The population, and yes, our culture, have beaten back our institutions so that our institutions can't exercise the kind of power that the Politburo does over its own population, but when our institutions claim they are somehow going to export our freedoms, it's 100% cover for some other agenda.
Certainly this is every advertizer's wet-dream - to stop their advertisements from being parasatized by filthy content.
What if everyone just say down at their computers and allowed themselves to be passively inundated with whatever they were told to like. Wouldn't that be wondrous?
I don't doubt that such targeted advertizing is going to increase dramatically in both power and sophistication over the coming years - and that the percentage of ads I see which are for things that I might actually want will rise dramatically. But will this replace google, which does a good job of providing me with things that I actually want to see for my own purposes? No, it won't. Not in a million years.
I know scientists who devote their entire lives to their work, never go out, never have a good time, have no children (or never see them), etc. etc.
Are they *better* scientists? I don't think so.
Are they *more productive* scientists? Not in every case, but on average, yeah, I'd say they are. There are situations where spending all your time on work and neglecting other aspects of your life is a self-defeating proposition, especially in creative work (which generally includes science, although what scientists actually *do* varies a lot from one scientist to another.)
But burn-out aside, if you're willing to sacrifice other aspects of your life, you can get more science done. Pretending that this is not, generally speaking, true, because you want to pretend that it doesn't cost you anything to have a life, is not productive.
That said, the article-author is right about the statistics. Bad Czechs!
Obviously, some individual person did discover penicillin, and Einstein did himself personally figure out relativity.
The question is - if we want more such grand advances, do we want to cultivate more Great Men who can make them, or do we want to cultivate the countless minor advances, not to mention dead ends and often informative failed experiments, etc. etc., on which their work was predicated?
I would say the latter.
Firstly, science is a gradual process. The "great man" theory of scientific progress has no more merit than the "great man" theory of history. It is in fact *not* true that those who make the very most important discoveries are better than other scientists (The fools! They mocked my research!), and their advances, even when seemingly revolutionary, are predicated on the gradual accumulation of knowledge through careful, thoughtful and reproducible work. This does not mean that all scientists are equally competent, or that financial or political concerns do not sometimes promote inferior scientists.
Secondly, those best qualified to decide which avenues of research will bear fruit are those doing the science, not someone with prize money. Not only are we best qualified to decide what to do - we are best qualified to decide that we are the ones to do it. You may think that one of those young engineers doing successful, and, yes, profitable work on reducing power consumption in laptops could have made super-rope for a space elevator instead, and there are individuals for whom this is true (see next point,) but most of the time, people at this level of skill and education pursue the questions that interest them, and on which they have some confidence that they can usefully contribute. If we were in this for the money we'd have had MBAs in half the time it took to get the PhD.
Now, there is a legitimate problem. You can get private money to fund research in applied science, but the government (or some agency which does not expect any return on each, individual investment) has to fund basic research, for basically the reasons stated in the article. This does not mean we need huge "prizes". What we need are grants - which are in short supply at the moment thanks, and I'm willing to be partisan because the facts are brazenly clear in this case, to the stupid, short-sighted and wasteful policies of the current administration.