In the case of the gimli incident, not only would the computer have to know what to do about no engine power due to no fuel, and know how to do forward slip to cut some speed fast just before landing, it would have to know about a landing strip that was no longer in use. If you happen to account for the first two, your chances of knowing about the landing strip are zero.
Were there NO other fields within flying range that were active? Keep in mind that a computer-controlled plane would make far more ideal use of its altitude and be able to get better range. Also - a plane doesn't have to land on a runway - the computer could just have a general terrain map and look for someplace flat that isn't covered in water in the worst case.
Not to mention that if there had been more computer controls the fueling problem wouldn't have happened in the first place.
As somebody who just had two different 'fully redundant' disk arrays at two different sites totally fail because one controller took out the other via the sync channel, this is not an easy task.
By the same logic you could have had the fuel run out and at the same time have both pilots have simultaneous strokes. People are machines too...
In the gimli case, it was luck that one pilot happened to be a glider pilot and the other happened to be stationed at gimli a few years before.
So, chances were that this accident wouldn't have been prevented even with a human pilot. The advantage of computers is that they can be reproducibly made - luck is a poor thing to rely on.
If a computer was in charge of this incident, we would probably have 60+ dead people.
Actually, according to your previous sentence if a different crew were put in the same situation you'd probably STILL have 60+ dead people. And even if the computer had crashed the flight, how many other crashes that have happened would have been prevented if a computer were in charge? I'm sure I can sit down and come up with a billion ways that a computer-controlled plane could fail, and I'm sure that I could come up with a billion ways that a human pilot could fail. The question is which is better, not which is perfect.
If I were designing a flight control system I'm sure that running out of fuel would be one of the first scenarios I'd put on the list - right after engine failures. I'm shocked the flight manual didn't even have the optimum glide speed.
Anybody designing a system to cope with failures should certainly pull out the NTSB logs and look up every failure to date - after all, the known failures are the easiest ones to handle. Running out of fuel would have to be in there somewhere.
And how many disasters have been caused by having a human in the loop? How many cases of runway incursions, etc?
And if you want to talk about mechanical failures - how about when the pilot has a heart attack? His body is a machine just like any other and is subject to the same principles of maintenance and failures.
A computer doesn't need to be perfect - it just needs to be better than a human. And how many more software bugs could be fixed with the money we'd save by not paying pilots?
Software doesn't have to have bugs. And if it stays in production long enough it eventually won't have any - if there is a standard of perfection and the complexity of software is finite, then eventually that standard will be reached.
I think that the idea that no machine could ever be engineered capable of flight better in EVERY respect than ANY human pilot is a romantic one.
Just because you have eliminated humans from directly operating your system doesn't mean than human error (in the form of programming) can't crash your airplane. In most cases the computer can do the job just fine, but the pilot can override it in more dangerous conditions. Of course, the pilot could also act with malice (or be replaced with a hijacker). So I would also argue that at some level of system robustness that an all computer system would be the safest. But that is only in an extraordinarily well tested system (that probably will never be built for transporting hundreds of people).
I'm thinking six-sigma - the key is to make your process repeatable, and then make it better. If you don't have the first you'll NEVER have the second. Computers are VERY good for achieving repeatability.
Think about this as a programmer - which situation would you rather have:
1. A test scenario that causes failure 100% of the time. 2. A test scenario that causes failure 0.001% of the time.
You'd rather have the former - you just trace the problem and you're done - probably fixed in an hour. The latter simply means you haven't controlled all your variables and you might spend weeks figuring out what the missing variable is...
With computer control you can first test the software out on unloaded planes in all kinds of conditions. Then you can put people on-board. Once in a blue moon there might be a failure, in which case the bug gets tracked and then it NEVER happens again. There is continuous improvement. Eventually the failure rate gets so low people will be shocked when planes simply encounter air turbulence - because normally flights will involve no bumps at all.
The main problem will be liability. With computer control you can't blame the pilot, which means that the manufacturers get sued and they have deep pockets (nobody bothers suing the pilot except out of vengeance). If you grant too much legal protection from this liability then manufacturers will tend to cut corners. There needs to be a balance, because computer control won't eliminate all disasters - at least not at first. But I think they're our best chance for doing so.
The same sorts of issues apply to automating cars as well. Why have your GPS tell you which way to turn when it can just drive the car?
Well, that sounds nice, and maybe even sounds intuitive. However, is there really any evidence that a human can land a plane without engines any better than a computer can? Sure, the human has more incentive to try to survive, but other than evoking our sense of heroism does that really equate to more lives being saved?
Well, I guess you could use a refresh system combined with ECC.
I hadn't thought of this before, but the problem with spin is that it is a truly digital attribute. With dynamic RAM the capacitors that make it up are either more than half full, or less than half full. So, intermediate states can be refreshed to the endpoint states to keep the memory intact. With spin you're at one state and instantly flip to the other, so the only way to know that this has happened is to store redundant information and then refresh bits by making them line up with the majority. It will certainly waste quite a bit of space, but if you can store one bit per electron you'll have lots of room to do so...
Not sure if the video is supposed to promote or demote linux, since on my 64-bit konqueror it doesn't show up at all (well, like all flash-based videos).
Gotta love that a video about open source would be done in a format that is about as proprietary as it gets...
If you've ever flown a long-haul international flight you may have noticed that the plane always struggles to get off the ground. That is because for every pound of luggage somebody doesn't pack, they go ahead and load freight. And if you look at a freight aircraft variation you don't get much more compressed than that...
The planes have a certified max takeoff weight, and they takeoff with almost exactly that weight on many if not most flights.
More passengers just means a little less freight - and the passengers certainly make more money.
Should the flight deck be required to have three or four positions? ATC controllers often operate with a planner and a controller in parallel. Maybe there is a role for strategic and tactical control on the flight deck of the A380.
I wonder if it would be better to mandate that the flight deck have zero positions...
How many accidents could have been prevented by having computer-control of the flight vs how many near-accidents have actually been recovered by having a human on-board (that a computer couldn't have resolved)?
I wonder if pilots exist only to absolve the plane manufacturers of liability even at a cost of human life...
Parent knows what he is talking about. You're not going to accomplish much trying to run two mixes at once unless all you're doing is just ballparking everything and not adding anything creative.
Additionally, I'd also comment that the record mix should be done somewhere with sound isolation from the main event. Technically it isn't needed from an electronics standpoint, but good luck getting a good mix when the engineer is surrounded with 120dB of noise. I normally consider myself a half-decent mixer and when I've listened to CDs I've created in this sort of environment I cringe!
Not sure how truecrypt makes filesystem A look like it takes up the whole drive while filesystem B is hidden there as well, ie how to keep data written to filesystem B from looking like corruption on filesystem A.
Filesystem B uses unused space in filesystem A. If you mount A without supplying the password for B it gets wiped out when you write to A (since there is no way for truecrypt to know B even exists).
And a 4GB filesystem with 500MB of data isn't suspicious at all - do you run all your drives at 99% capacity? Now, if you have a 4GB filesystem and the only file on it is a copy of the GPL that might look suspicious.
Swap and stuff like that is simple - encrypt with a random key on each reboot. Nothing can be recovered after the system is shut down - even the owner doesn't know the key.
Tempfiles or cache can be stored in tmpfs - with the protection of the encrypted swap.
While I agree that transparent encryption is a built-in kernel feature in linux (and has been for some time), one thing truecrypt does offer is plausible deniability with hidden partitions. This allows you to store data in a volume whose existence is impossible to infer (unless you somehow record its existence elsewhere - like in a shell history). You can enter one password and get one set of data, and another password to get a different set of data. If you're threatened and asked to divulge the decryption key to what appears to be a file that could contain an encrypted drive you can give a password which divulges nothing of value to the attacker.
You can't do that with a loopback filesystem in linux. If somebody finds a huge file full of random data and can reasonably suggest that it is an encrypted drive then you're going to have to give up the key or face consequences (beatings, imprisonment, etc - depending on who is trying to get a hold of the data).
The dependency chains are almost always monstrous.
Stop and consider what life on earth would be like after a nuclear war destroyed most of the infrastructure. Even on earth it would probably take a century to get back to where we are now. On Mars it would be far worse generally - basic resources are far more scarce. Now, arguably high-tech resources like miniaturized devices are more plentiful - they could be made on Earth and shipped, but large infrastructure would be more easily built on Earth even post-apocalypse.
Don't hold your breath.
Uh, you seem to have forgotten what planet you're talking about. If for whatever reason your dependency chain does run out you will most certainly want to hold your breath...:)
We run the real risk of becoming a has-been in space exploration, at a time when in the next 100 years or so our planet is becoming less and less habitable, we need to be looking for a backup plan.
Uh, no matter HOW bad things get on the Earth, it will probably still be cheaper to build habitats on the Earth than anywhere else in the solar system, unless we can terraform some other body in space.
Whole planet covered with nerve gas? No problem, build space modules - just like you'd have to do in space.
No crops? No problem, use hydroponics - just like you'd have to do in space.
And lots of resources will still be closer at hand on the Earth.
One thing would be a lot cheaper in space - travel. Getting from point A to point B with no friction is a lot cheaper in space unless you need to transit between planets or really different orbits (ie avoid putting stuff in really different orbits to begin with...).
My argument wasn't that they should receive identical treatment, but that the same issues apply to any form of genetic modification. I wouldn't dispute that the risk level would vary.
However, the proposals of others on this thread to treat GM crops like "bioweapons" is also out of hand. Like anything there needs to be a balance, and it should be based on science rather than hysteria. If the risk of GM crops were THAT high we'd have probably killed off the human race by now. That doesn't make the risk zero - everything has risks associated with it and the goal is to manage it.
Keep in mind that there are risks associated with non-GM crops as well. Non-GM crops in theory mean higher food prices. Higher food prices mean that poor people have less money to spend on other things like education, standard of living, and health care. Less money spent in any of these areas means shorter life expectancy, and hence greating curbing GM crops in the end will actually kill people (statistically - but the deaths are no less real). Kind of like doubling the cost of airplane tickets by putting in extra safety standards - the net result is more people die because they choose to drive instead.
GM crops lower the cost associated with producing food - a TREMENDOUS benefit to any society. Now, some of that reduced cost goes into higher profits for a fewer corporations, but most of it goes to consumers.
In the end my point isn't that there shouldn't be ANY regulation of GM crops. My concern is that most of those who demand the highest possible precautions for recombinant crops often don't ask for ANY regulation at all of selective breeding (see comment above by somebody asking for airtight growing areas for generational time periods - not sure if he meant corn-generations or people-generations (I'm sure studies last for the former just for regular R&D work today)). Now, the regulation of one might need to be higher than the other, but it is absurd to think that one is reasonably likely to kill off the entire human race, and the other is unlikely to ever have any problems at all.
I agree with your points. My main beef with the anti-GM crowd is that they single out genetic manipulation in the lab, and not other forms of genetic manipulation (like selective breeding).
Any process that changes the genetic composition of a plant or animal has some potential to cause problems. We need to have standards in place to ensure the food supply is safe - and it amounts to more than just banning products that use recombinant DNA. Farmers have practiced selective breeding since the age of Mendel - usually without much thought to expensive safety testing.
Arguably there is no such thing as "natural corn" these days.
Isn't the whole point of the DMCA that there is a standard process for requesting takedowns? If Viacom doesn't like something on Youtube they can file a DMCA takedown notice. Google then notifies the poster, and if the poster doesn't object they remove the content. If the poster does object Google gives their contact info to Viacom and they can sue each other over the issue.
Viacom's complaint is that they don't like the DMCA and want Google to just delete content without bothering to see if it is legal, or that Google should have to perform this service. That simply isn't the law.
And I'm not claiming that the concept of marriage couldn't exist outside legal definition; however, since any legal ban on gay marriage would only ban the "official" kind, the kind which has laws concerning it, I assumed we were talking about the kind of marriage that involves filing documents.
I think his point is that NO marriage should involve filing documents. Governments shouldn't recognize the institution of marriage, and laws should not make reference to it. If that happened, then nobody would be arguing about the legal issue of who can and cannot marry.
I tend to agree - marriage is essentially a religious or cultural institution depending on who you ask (and that could be a huge debate in itself). It isn't the place of a secular government to take sides in such a debate. Let people marry or not as they wish, and let anybody who wants to perform marriages, and let anybody choose to accept/reject anybody else's so-called marriage. Have people file individual income taxes, or if you want to allow couples then define it as any two people living at the same address, or something like that (presumably that could include friends, roommates, siblings, parent/child, or whatever). If nobody gets preferential or detrimental treatment on the basis of somebody calling a relationship marriage then the law doesn't need to take a position on the matter. And if people want legal protections when entering marriage have them create a contract beforehand.
I've seen lots of arguments that the government shouldn't be in the tax software business. I generally agree.
However, the government should define an open standard for e-filing returns - free of charge. It saves the IRS money, and it saves taxpayers money.
The two are not the same thing.
My state has a website where you can file online. It is hardly tax-preparation software - you just get to fill out the normal forms on a website. It doesn't compete with private industry per-se, but it does allow taxpayers to file for free.
While I think that we do need to do everything we can to preserve the effectiveness of antibiotics, I think part of the reason new ones aren't discovered is because society does not value them highly. At least not highly enough to spend big money on them. If a Pharma company can make $5B/yr on a new erectile dysfunction drug, and only a few million on an antibiotic (which won't be prescribed the 99% of the time that old antibiotics work fine), you can imagine where they're direct their R&D efforts...
I think the only way we'll see lots of new antibiotics would be if the government steps in to do one of a few things (maybe there are other options as well):
1. Directly fund R&D - not just basic reasearch but the whole things soup to nuts. Maybe they might outsource some of this to a pharma company. 2. Declare huge bounties for new antibiotics. A big prize for the next novel FDA-approved antibiotic would probably get things moving. If it is less than a billion dollars don't expect too much to happen though... 3. Declare in advance an intent to maintain a huge stockpile of new antibiotics - maybe for anti-terrorism purposes or whatever. That creates an artificial demand for any newly developed drugs, and would spur R&D.
Any way you slice it somebody has to pay for it, and if there is no market that somebody is the government. The sad thing is that in the end the whole world would benefit from a new drug, but most likely only one or two nations will end up shelling out the bucks to develop it...
The fact that you have a process to set up secure FTP for your users puts you MILES ahead of most IT groups out there.
In many companies getting an intranet website created on the official webserver requires tons of red tape and brings on questions like "Are you an official web dev in the official web dev group?" Then IT wonders why IIS or whatever is running on 47 PCs sitting under desks all over the company, completely unmanaged.
Likewise in many companies users get a 25MB email quota or something silly like that, and then IT wonders why so many users find ways to go through proxy servers to get to gmail.
Now, if you have services in place and they are given out without extreme duress that is one thing. But in many companies there is so much red tape to go through IT that everybody just ends up creating their own mini-IT groups...
Then create a cert using CACert, provide instructions for users to import their root cert, and get on the bandwagon of people shouting for Mozilla to finally add them to the default list.
Or publish your own root cert for users to import.
Slashdot Mirror
In the case of the gimli incident, not only would the computer have to know what to do about no engine power due to no fuel, and know how to do forward slip to cut some speed fast just before landing, it would have to know about a landing strip that was no longer in use. If you happen to account for the first two, your chances of knowing about the landing strip are zero.
Were there NO other fields within flying range that were active? Keep in mind that a computer-controlled plane would make far more ideal use of its altitude and be able to get better range. Also - a plane doesn't have to land on a runway - the computer could just have a general terrain map and look for someplace flat that isn't covered in water in the worst case.
Not to mention that if there had been more computer controls the fueling problem wouldn't have happened in the first place.
As somebody who just had two different 'fully redundant' disk arrays at two different sites totally fail because one controller took out the other via the sync channel, this is not an easy task.
By the same logic you could have had the fuel run out and at the same time have both pilots have simultaneous strokes. People are machines too...
In the gimli case, it was luck that one pilot happened to be a glider pilot and the other happened to be stationed at gimli a few years before.
So, chances were that this accident wouldn't have been prevented even with a human pilot. The advantage of computers is that they can be reproducibly made - luck is a poor thing to rely on.
If a computer was in charge of this incident, we would probably have 60+ dead people.
Actually, according to your previous sentence if a different crew were put in the same situation you'd probably STILL have 60+ dead people. And even if the computer had crashed the flight, how many other crashes that have happened would have been prevented if a computer were in charge? I'm sure I can sit down and come up with a billion ways that a computer-controlled plane could fail, and I'm sure that I could come up with a billion ways that a human pilot could fail. The question is which is better, not which is perfect.
If I were designing a flight control system I'm sure that running out of fuel would be one of the first scenarios I'd put on the list - right after engine failures. I'm shocked the flight manual didn't even have the optimum glide speed.
Anybody designing a system to cope with failures should certainly pull out the NTSB logs and look up every failure to date - after all, the known failures are the easiest ones to handle. Running out of fuel would have to be in there somewhere.
And how many disasters have been caused by having a human in the loop? How many cases of runway incursions, etc?
And if you want to talk about mechanical failures - how about when the pilot has a heart attack? His body is a machine just like any other and is subject to the same principles of maintenance and failures.
A computer doesn't need to be perfect - it just needs to be better than a human. And how many more software bugs could be fixed with the money we'd save by not paying pilots?
Software doesn't have to have bugs. And if it stays in production long enough it eventually won't have any - if there is a standard of perfection and the complexity of software is finite, then eventually that standard will be reached.
I think that the idea that no machine could ever be engineered capable of flight better in EVERY respect than ANY human pilot is a romantic one.
Just because you have eliminated humans from directly operating your system doesn't mean than human error (in the form of programming) can't crash your airplane. In most cases the computer can do the job just fine, but the pilot can override it in more dangerous conditions. Of course, the pilot could also act with malice (or be replaced with a hijacker). So I would also argue that at some level of system robustness that an all computer system would be the safest. But that is only in an extraordinarily well tested system (that probably will never be built for transporting hundreds of people).
I'm thinking six-sigma - the key is to make your process repeatable, and then make it better. If you don't have the first you'll NEVER have the second. Computers are VERY good for achieving repeatability.
Think about this as a programmer - which situation would you rather have:
1. A test scenario that causes failure 100% of the time.
2. A test scenario that causes failure 0.001% of the time.
You'd rather have the former - you just trace the problem and you're done - probably fixed in an hour. The latter simply means you haven't controlled all your variables and you might spend weeks figuring out what the missing variable is...
With computer control you can first test the software out on unloaded planes in all kinds of conditions. Then you can put people on-board. Once in a blue moon there might be a failure, in which case the bug gets tracked and then it NEVER happens again. There is continuous improvement. Eventually the failure rate gets so low people will be shocked when planes simply encounter air turbulence - because normally flights will involve no bumps at all.
The main problem will be liability. With computer control you can't blame the pilot, which means that the manufacturers get sued and they have deep pockets (nobody bothers suing the pilot except out of vengeance). If you grant too much legal protection from this liability then manufacturers will tend to cut corners. There needs to be a balance, because computer control won't eliminate all disasters - at least not at first. But I think they're our best chance for doing so.
The same sorts of issues apply to automating cars as well. Why have your GPS tell you which way to turn when it can just drive the car?
Well, that sounds nice, and maybe even sounds intuitive. However, is there really any evidence that a human can land a plane without engines any better than a computer can? Sure, the human has more incentive to try to survive, but other than evoking our sense of heroism does that really equate to more lives being saved?
Well, I guess you could use a refresh system combined with ECC.
I hadn't thought of this before, but the problem with spin is that it is a truly digital attribute. With dynamic RAM the capacitors that make it up are either more than half full, or less than half full. So, intermediate states can be refreshed to the endpoint states to keep the memory intact. With spin you're at one state and instantly flip to the other, so the only way to know that this has happened is to store redundant information and then refresh bits by making them line up with the majority. It will certainly waste quite a bit of space, but if you can store one bit per electron you'll have lots of room to do so...
Not sure if the video is supposed to promote or demote linux, since on my 64-bit konqueror it doesn't show up at all (well, like all flash-based videos).
Gotta love that a video about open source would be done in a format that is about as proprietary as it gets...
If you've ever flown a long-haul international flight you may have noticed that the plane always struggles to get off the ground. That is because for every pound of luggage somebody doesn't pack, they go ahead and load freight. And if you look at a freight aircraft variation you don't get much more compressed than that...
The planes have a certified max takeoff weight, and they takeoff with almost exactly that weight on many if not most flights.
More passengers just means a little less freight - and the passengers certainly make more money.
Should the flight deck be required to have three or four positions? ATC controllers often operate with a planner and a controller in parallel. Maybe there is a role for strategic and tactical control on the flight deck of the A380.
I wonder if it would be better to mandate that the flight deck have zero positions...
How many accidents could have been prevented by having computer-control of the flight vs how many near-accidents have actually been recovered by having a human on-board (that a computer couldn't have resolved)?
I wonder if pilots exist only to absolve the plane manufacturers of liability even at a cost of human life...
In this country, the law exists only as it interpreted by the Judiciary.
In reality, the law exists only as it is enforced by the Executive (the guys with the guns).
Therefore, as a law abiding citizen, it is my duty to uphold the law and deny your request until such time as you provide a warrant.
Or until such time as you make me disappear, seize my computers, and get the info you're looking for anyway...
Parent knows what he is talking about. You're not going to accomplish much trying to run two mixes at once unless all you're doing is just ballparking everything and not adding anything creative.
Additionally, I'd also comment that the record mix should be done somewhere with sound isolation from the main event. Technically it isn't needed from an electronics standpoint, but good luck getting a good mix when the engineer is surrounded with 120dB of noise. I normally consider myself a half-decent mixer and when I've listened to CDs I've created in this sort of environment I cringe!
Not sure how truecrypt makes filesystem A look like it takes up the whole drive while filesystem B is hidden there as well, ie how to keep data written to filesystem B from looking like corruption on filesystem A.
Filesystem B uses unused space in filesystem A. If you mount A without supplying the password for B it gets wiped out when you write to A (since there is no way for truecrypt to know B even exists).
And a 4GB filesystem with 500MB of data isn't suspicious at all - do you run all your drives at 99% capacity? Now, if you have a 4GB filesystem and the only file on it is a copy of the GPL that might look suspicious.
Swap and stuff like that is simple - encrypt with a random key on each reboot. Nothing can be recovered after the system is shut down - even the owner doesn't know the key.
Tempfiles or cache can be stored in tmpfs - with the protection of the encrypted swap.
While I agree that transparent encryption is a built-in kernel feature in linux (and has been for some time), one thing truecrypt does offer is plausible deniability with hidden partitions. This allows you to store data in a volume whose existence is impossible to infer (unless you somehow record its existence elsewhere - like in a shell history). You can enter one password and get one set of data, and another password to get a different set of data. If you're threatened and asked to divulge the decryption key to what appears to be a file that could contain an encrypted drive you can give a password which divulges nothing of value to the attacker.
You can't do that with a loopback filesystem in linux. If somebody finds a huge file full of random data and can reasonably suggest that it is an encrypted drive then you're going to have to give up the key or face consequences (beatings, imprisonment, etc - depending on who is trying to get a hold of the data).
The dependency chains are almost always monstrous.
:)
Stop and consider what life on earth would be like after a nuclear war destroyed most of the infrastructure. Even on earth it would probably take a century to get back to where we are now. On Mars it would be far worse generally - basic resources are far more scarce. Now, arguably high-tech resources like miniaturized devices are more plentiful - they could be made on Earth and shipped, but large infrastructure would be more easily built on Earth even post-apocalypse.
Don't hold your breath.
Uh, you seem to have forgotten what planet you're talking about. If for whatever reason your dependency chain does run out you will most certainly want to hold your breath...
We run the real risk of becoming a has-been in space exploration, at a time when in the next 100 years or so our planet is becoming less and less habitable, we need to be looking for a backup plan.
Uh, no matter HOW bad things get on the Earth, it will probably still be cheaper to build habitats on the Earth than anywhere else in the solar system, unless we can terraform some other body in space.
Whole planet covered with nerve gas? No problem, build space modules - just like you'd have to do in space.
No crops? No problem, use hydroponics - just like you'd have to do in space.
And lots of resources will still be closer at hand on the Earth.
One thing would be a lot cheaper in space - travel. Getting from point A to point B with no friction is a lot cheaper in space unless you need to transit between planets or really different orbits (ie avoid putting stuff in really different orbits to begin with...).
My argument wasn't that they should receive identical treatment, but that the same issues apply to any form of genetic modification. I wouldn't dispute that the risk level would vary.
However, the proposals of others on this thread to treat GM crops like "bioweapons" is also out of hand. Like anything there needs to be a balance, and it should be based on science rather than hysteria. If the risk of GM crops were THAT high we'd have probably killed off the human race by now. That doesn't make the risk zero - everything has risks associated with it and the goal is to manage it.
Keep in mind that there are risks associated with non-GM crops as well. Non-GM crops in theory mean higher food prices. Higher food prices mean that poor people have less money to spend on other things like education, standard of living, and health care. Less money spent in any of these areas means shorter life expectancy, and hence greating curbing GM crops in the end will actually kill people (statistically - but the deaths are no less real). Kind of like doubling the cost of airplane tickets by putting in extra safety standards - the net result is more people die because they choose to drive instead.
GM crops lower the cost associated with producing food - a TREMENDOUS benefit to any society. Now, some of that reduced cost goes into higher profits for a fewer corporations, but most of it goes to consumers.
In the end my point isn't that there shouldn't be ANY regulation of GM crops. My concern is that most of those who demand the highest possible precautions for recombinant crops often don't ask for ANY regulation at all of selective breeding (see comment above by somebody asking for airtight growing areas for generational time periods - not sure if he meant corn-generations or people-generations (I'm sure studies last for the former just for regular R&D work today)). Now, the regulation of one might need to be higher than the other, but it is absurd to think that one is reasonably likely to kill off the entire human race, and the other is unlikely to ever have any problems at all.
I agree with your points. My main beef with the anti-GM crowd is that they single out genetic manipulation in the lab, and not other forms of genetic manipulation (like selective breeding).
Any process that changes the genetic composition of a plant or animal has some potential to cause problems. We need to have standards in place to ensure the food supply is safe - and it amounts to more than just banning products that use recombinant DNA. Farmers have practiced selective breeding since the age of Mendel - usually without much thought to expensive safety testing.
Arguably there is no such thing as "natural corn" these days.
Isn't the whole point of the DMCA that there is a standard process for requesting takedowns? If Viacom doesn't like something on Youtube they can file a DMCA takedown notice. Google then notifies the poster, and if the poster doesn't object they remove the content. If the poster does object Google gives their contact info to Viacom and they can sue each other over the issue.
Viacom's complaint is that they don't like the DMCA and want Google to just delete content without bothering to see if it is legal, or that Google should have to perform this service. That simply isn't the law.
Hmm - the website calls it a utility to help prevent RSI.
I like portage's description of it better:
A small utility which bothers you at certain intervals
And I'm not claiming that the concept of marriage couldn't exist outside legal definition; however, since any legal ban on gay marriage would only ban the "official" kind, the kind which has laws concerning it, I assumed we were talking about the kind of marriage that involves filing documents.
I think his point is that NO marriage should involve filing documents. Governments shouldn't recognize the institution of marriage, and laws should not make reference to it. If that happened, then nobody would be arguing about the legal issue of who can and cannot marry.
I tend to agree - marriage is essentially a religious or cultural institution depending on who you ask (and that could be a huge debate in itself). It isn't the place of a secular government to take sides in such a debate. Let people marry or not as they wish, and let anybody who wants to perform marriages, and let anybody choose to accept/reject anybody else's so-called marriage. Have people file individual income taxes, or if you want to allow couples then define it as any two people living at the same address, or something like that (presumably that could include friends, roommates, siblings, parent/child, or whatever). If nobody gets preferential or detrimental treatment on the basis of somebody calling a relationship marriage then the law doesn't need to take a position on the matter. And if people want legal protections when entering marriage have them create a contract beforehand.
I've seen lots of arguments that the government shouldn't be in the tax software business. I generally agree.
However, the government should define an open standard for e-filing returns - free of charge. It saves the IRS money, and it saves taxpayers money.
The two are not the same thing.
My state has a website where you can file online. It is hardly tax-preparation software - you just get to fill out the normal forms on a website. It doesn't compete with private industry per-se, but it does allow taxpayers to file for free.
While I think that we do need to do everything we can to preserve the effectiveness of antibiotics, I think part of the reason new ones aren't discovered is because society does not value them highly. At least not highly enough to spend big money on them. If a Pharma company can make $5B/yr on a new erectile dysfunction drug, and only a few million on an antibiotic (which won't be prescribed the 99% of the time that old antibiotics work fine), you can imagine where they're direct their R&D efforts...
I think the only way we'll see lots of new antibiotics would be if the government steps in to do one of a few things (maybe there are other options as well):
1. Directly fund R&D - not just basic reasearch but the whole things soup to nuts. Maybe they might outsource some of this to a pharma company.
2. Declare huge bounties for new antibiotics. A big prize for the next novel FDA-approved antibiotic would probably get things moving. If it is less than a billion dollars don't expect too much to happen though...
3. Declare in advance an intent to maintain a huge stockpile of new antibiotics - maybe for anti-terrorism purposes or whatever. That creates an artificial demand for any newly developed drugs, and would spur R&D.
Any way you slice it somebody has to pay for it, and if there is no market that somebody is the government. The sad thing is that in the end the whole world would benefit from a new drug, but most likely only one or two nations will end up shelling out the bucks to develop it...
The fact that you have a process to set up secure FTP for your users puts you MILES ahead of most IT groups out there.
In many companies getting an intranet website created on the official webserver requires tons of red tape and brings on questions like "Are you an official web dev in the official web dev group?" Then IT wonders why IIS or whatever is running on 47 PCs sitting under desks all over the company, completely unmanaged.
Likewise in many companies users get a 25MB email quota or something silly like that, and then IT wonders why so many users find ways to go through proxy servers to get to gmail.
Now, if you have services in place and they are given out without extreme duress that is one thing. But in many companies there is so much red tape to go through IT that everybody just ends up creating their own mini-IT groups...
Then create a cert using CACert, provide instructions for users to import their root cert, and get on the bandwagon of people shouting for Mozilla to finally add them to the default list.
Or publish your own root cert for users to import.
There are solutions out there...