So long as the Sun is up, a properly oriented tube will always have a thin line with perfect angle of incidence to the Sun, and a region somewhat less than half the tube's diameter that has a pretty good angle of incidence. Over the course of the day, the amount of surface area that is in excellent to good relationship to the Sun's rays is nearly constant, and if the tubes are spaced optimally, this area is nearly as large as that which a flat panel array of the same size would provide.
Plus, the tube is self-supporting, so there are minimal shading losses from structural support, and it can capture reflected light from its backside. Any comparison of flat panels with tubes needs to take these factors into account.
Over the course of a day, I can see where the light gathering ability of a static array of tubes would be comparable to the light gathering ability of a static array of flat panels. The output curves would be very different: the flat array would have a much higher midday peak, but the tube array would begin producing output earlier in the morning and continue for longer into the evening.
Please re-read the the posts you are responding to and pay attention to the content.
Persons with expertise on the ground in handling cattle are saying that moving the herd is only one component of the job, and one of the less difficult components, at that. Protecting the animals from external threats and from their internal inabilities to cope with common environmental traps are economic necessities.
Until there is a remote way of intervening when a cow worth several hundred dollars gets itself crosswise to a barbed wire fence, being able to remotely direct the herd offers no benefits. These parts of the job will require a sophisticated all terrain robot capable of identifying a cow in trouble, immobilizing the large animal without hurting it, cutting and repairing barbed wire, delivering an antitetanus jab, and so on. And then you might as well save a bunch of money on the cowhead radio receivers by just putting a loudspeaker system in the robot.
Yeah, at some point technology might replace the cowboy and his horse, but radiohead cows are not going to do it. And robotics has a long ways to go before a person who knows how to safely immobilize a ton of living hamburger with a few feet of rope is in danger of losing his job.
To put this in perspective: a little before Fulton figured out how to make a steam engine small enough to fit inside a boat, there were some persons that history has forgotten who were experimenting with steam powered bicycles. Radiohead cows sound an awful lot like steam powered bicycles. The developers might be shooting their arrows more or less in the right direction, but unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any actual target anywhere near where their arrows are going.
An adequately designed multiple vote system would replace the current two party nonsense with a multitude of less powerful parties. Because of this, successful candidates would be those who know how to put together working coalitions between multiple factions. And the leadership skills needed to develop effective coalitions transfer extremely well to handling other complex problems such as the issues surrounding climate change and international finance (to name just two examples).
There would be a big change in the way each candidate needs to think about how they campaign, when they realize that a significant part of their campaigns needs to be aimed at becoming the best second choice of various factions that would never regard them as a first choice. If this were implemented, you would see a large amount of Washington's deadwood go away with the next round of elections, and you would see an increasing number of elected officials who might not be so good with the 15 second sound bite, but are quite competent at listening to new ideas and seeking new ways to go forward.
At this point it is clearly evident that the Imperial President approach is not just a failure, it actually breaks institutions and causes wealth to vaporize. It is time to give serious consideration to altering the Constitution to prevent this kind of President from happening again.
To take this a bit further, in any party system where the populace elects representatives and each individual has one vote, the system will tend to develop two major parties where each party on any issue tries to represent the center of the bell shaped curve while simultaneously trying to be somewhat more attractive to either the left or right nearly-on-center voters than the opposing party. The end result is that most of the time, elected officials are pretty representative of the views of a large block of almost average citizens. That's the basis of the US system, and it works. Unfortunately.
The following is very USA centric.
This is unfortunate because change always develops at the margins, not the center. With the problems that your generation faces, you need meaningful change, not just mild shifts in the status quo. (I will be around to experience the early results of the outcomes of these changes, but basically this is a fight that needs to be fought by younger persons than my cohort. This is mostly your problem, you twenty, thirty, and forty year olds.)
The US system fills elected roles with persons who are opposed to significant change. Persons who are committed to moving the status quo just slightly toward a more conservative (the Golden Age was yesterday and we need to get back there) or progressive (we can usher in a Golden Age tomorrow if we just do this little change today) position. This kind of system does not provide true leadership: leadership arises from the thin margins of the bell curve, not from the center. When significant changes have to be made, you need something other than a US type of system to put persons with true leadership qualities into effective roles. Another way of saying this is that the current system institutionalizes the tyranny of the majority and we cannot afford that suppression when we know we need fresh approaches to meet the challenges that are on the horizon.
In the past, democracies were limited to one vote per individual due mostly to the technical problems in trying to audit any other approach. That is no longer the case, and as we look at how to prevent further Diebold corruptions, we might as well start thinking about a larger overhaul of our voting system. There are several really interesting multiple vote systems where a voter records his first and second choice candidates in one way or another.
For instance, an individual voter could have selected Nader as his first choice, and either Bush or Kerry as his second choice. Nader would still have lost on the first ballot count, but those votes would have then transferred to the second choices. We would possibly have had President Kerry and a very different recent history with a very different set of current problems.
The differences are more subtle and profound than simply making the spoiler role a contributory role. Knowing that your second choice will be used if your first choice doesn't win would allow voters to more freely express what they would really like. It would also mean that candidates from the two major parties would have to change campaign tactics and argue that they will do a better job of representing Nader's interests than their opponent, so they should be your second choice. It would also lead to alliances between the major parties and smaller parties, where a smaller party would offer its support to a candidate as a second choice in return for concessions on something important to its constituency. Rather than the elected government being representative of a two almost average groups, the influence of a broader range of groups would come to bear on the issues. Including groups that have been actively working on the issues, and can take the lead in developing solutions.
I'm guessing that core elements in both the Republican and Democratic parties would oppose this. But this kind of change could be brought about in the next few years by grassroots efforts. It is, after all, a relatively simple concept that both average and almost average US citizens are capable of understanding, and who would see personal benefits in such a constitutional change.
I checked your link and the first definition offered has to do with risk assessment in an area of business activities that is currently looking for a $700 billion bail-out because they have screwed each other (and everyone else) so bad.
Seems like another good reason for Google to rein in its use of the word "beta".
Hmm. I found I understood each and every word in Google's explanation, and that the entire explanation parses easily, without any ambiguities. Yet it doesn't have any meaningful content. So other than being a good example of perfect syntax with no semantic sense, the statement has no utility.
Seems like Google's marketdroids have gotten loose in the technical jargon and they need to rounded up and put back in their place. For all the IT world for more than 30 years, "beta" has meant a product with expected bugs put out to the general public for the express purpose of identifying said bugs so a dependable 1.0 version can be released. "Beta" implies that under mainstream conditions, the software will have enough usefulness that you can get a sense of what your workflow with the finalized version could be like, but that it is too prone to breakage to be reliable in daily use.
The Google marketdroids need to be told that they have to find some other label to distinguish their constantly upgraded web apps from traditional software with its episodic upgrades and consequent problems. And the people that Google has hired to actually think about problems (as opposed to those few hired to visualize market images) need to be prodded into keeping a closer eye on the marketdroids and making sure that they can't sneak out of their rumpus rooms so easily.
Yeah, marketing is important, and it should be a company's first consideration. (After developing a sound product, treating your customers right, upholding business ethics, treating your employees and vendors right, being a good citizen in your communities, and a few other things like that).
so science is an improved version of superstition in terms of its value to humankind - thats what he was trying to say i thought
Yes, that seems to be what TFA is saying, but I suspect that is a failing within TFA and that it doesn't accurately reflect the research it is supposed to be reporting. Which is not an uncommon problem with slashdot articles. (Not slamming anyone here; this stuff which is on the frontiers of scientific reasoning is difficult to handle.)
One of the things that makes me doubt that TFA is accurate is that by its phrasing, referring to centrifugal force in analyzing an automobile accident would be reasoning based on superstition (TFA does not distinguish between superstition and convenient fictional forces). Similarly, all the science work prior to Einstein that was based on Newton's three laws would be based on superstition, if using a strict application of the principles reported in TFA. I very much doubt that this is what the researchers are talking about. I'm pretty certain that something crucial got lost in the process of reducing their work into an article for the popular press.
On an issue that should be entirely separate, there is nothing in TFA that has anything to do with religion. There are, however, a lot of vocal persons on slashdot who conflate religion and superstition, which suggests that they are using very generalized and inadequate definitions for both terms. Perhaps some of them can be motivated to refining their vocabulary, and improving the clarity of their world view, by simply pointing this out.
SINEs and LINEs do nothing - they only propagate themselves (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_interspersed_nuclear_element).
Inactive genes are just that - inactive. They can't be transcribed because they lack crucial parts.
idunno.
Bootstrap computer programs are very simple analogs to what goes on in a cell during telophase. Some bootstrap computer programs have long runs of NOP codes or other repetitive do-nothing structures, but if you cut them out, the system won't boot because it would then try to look for an MBR on the floppy before the drive's stepper motor is calibrated. Sometimes large, empty structures are built into the code itself, because it is sometimes more expedient to copy such things to an explicit area of ram as a pre-initialized, zeroed array than it is to explicitly allocate the space and use a loop to initialize it.
So I have some doubt that repetitive, simple structures in DNA have no function. I think a lot more needs to be learned about the context in which these portions of DNA are activated before these things we do not understand are dismissed as doing nothing.
Similarly, there were chunks of assembly language in the Apple ][ code that looked like scrap heaps of malformed opcodes, unless you realized that the system was jumping to the second byte of the first instruction, and in that context things made perfect sense. I don't think we know enough yet about the various ways that DNA is used, especially during the critical boot processes of telophase, to declare a gene inactive simply because it won't work with transcription RNA.
I think a better phrasing than "do nothing", or "inactive" is "we don't understand".
The argument is not about the nature of reality, not directly anyway. The argument is about the nature of language and how its inappropriate usage can limit the internal maps that are the only guide any individual gets to this world. If you choose poor language rules, such as tossing out any concept that cannot be supported by reason, then you will have a map that is severely deficient in some areas. A much better approach is to carry several different maps and be willing to swap them in and out of usage when the going gets strange.
There are indeed some things that are entirely beyond our ability to understand, such as the existence of pi. But to say that there is some way of constructing a ratio between what we can understand and what we can never understand, and then use that percentage as an argument to support a reasoned-only approach is pure and utter bullshit. Don't elevate reason to some higher plane because it explains 99% of the less than 2% of human experience that might possibly be expressable in a reasonable way. There is no reason in love, passion, war, or death. Most of human existence is unreasonable.
Science and reason are of great value, in their place. Unfortunately, there are persons who elevate these tools to the level of belief systems, and then you end up with an intolerance to other beliefs and modes of expression. You've got an individual who adamantly denies the existence of Rain God, Sun God, and Goddess Of The Garden, but who refuses to recognize that he is completely and utterly absorbed in the catechisms and dogma of his worship of his Tractor and his Hoe.
As far as understanding the world-- that is a childish notion that belongs to 19th century physics. The most we can hope to do is to build new models that are a little more detailed than our old models. But make no mistake: these are all just models. No one of them is intrinsically better than any other. It all depends on your context of usage.
</rant
An interesting article. However these kinds of studies ignore what we know about the pre-selection of stimuli that other work has shown must be going on. I've got to lay some background for general readers to follow along, which shouldn't be necessary for a cognitive scientist, so bear with me for a paragraph or two.
Present an image to a test subject, and his retina responds to the photons and passes signals through the optic nerve to a number of different areas that coordinate to create a perception in short term memory. That perception is then further processed through noetic, autonoetic, and actually a great number of other ways (aesthetic, for instance), which attach different meanings to the perception, and seemingly involve creating additional partial copies of the original perception for later processing, and probably do a bunch of other housekeeping chores (we now know enough about graphics software to know that none of this stuff is simple). All this work involves some of the oldest structures in the brain as well as the latest additions: for example the recticular activating system of the reptilian brain stem mediates a "tuning" of neocortical structures, so that when processing visual input, auditory areas are suppressed, and when presented with culturally dependent symbolic information such as printed words, aesthetic processing (color, shape, etc) is suppressed. While the neurons involved in all this processing are very fast and the distances signals need to travel are very short, there is still a definite time lag between when the photons are presented to the retina and the formation of meaningful perceptions.
An interesting thing about this process is that the retinal response involves billions of bits of photonic information, but the initial perception involves at the most millions of bits, but more likely only hundreds of thousands of bits. There is clearly some major throttling of bandwidth going on here, but it is not a simple "cast out 99.9% of everything" throttling. It is highly dependent on what the subject expects to perceive. Under near subliminal conditions, it is possible to present a stimulus that someone fluent in Arabic would perceive as a word without noticing any particular color or form, while a graphics artist with no knowledge of Arabic would perceive as a distinctive shape with a definite color gradient. Meanwhile, the musician might well hear the associated tone that neither of the others were aware of, and see only a meaningless flash. The effect of expectation on perceptions is so strong that in many ways the ancient Greek concept had it right: we see the world by projecting our expectations from our minds through our eyes onto whatever is Out There.
What is supremely interesting is that the feedback effects of expectation on perception have been shown to occur too rapidly to be mediated by the neuronal circuitry itself. This stuff is happening amazingly fast, to the point where there is some discussion about whether biological quantum entanglements could be involved, such that retinal structures might be directly told how to filter raw input before the perception is fully formed and available on the neural network. Other possibilities involve some kind of precognition where a holistic mind is affected by a greater holistic pattern and in turn pre-tunes the organic brain structures before the photons arrive at the retina. Weird shit, involving the idea that the Universe as a whole is fractal, and the concept of "mind" is an expression of universal self-similarity. Of course we don't yet have any way of framing any testable hypotheses based on these kinds of blue sky conjectures, but that isn't the point here.
The point here is that even in the study of neuronal circuitry, our reasoning capabilities are insufficient to comprehend what is really going on.
To swing this back to its original course, a belief system based on reason is insufficient for modeling the world in enough detail to be interesting or helpful. One simply must work with mo
Whether the soul is a dead concept by scientific evidence is
Impossible to determine, since as parent post had pointed out three sentences earlier, "soul" cannot be defined in scientific terms. No definition, no hypothesis formulation, no science.
Is immaterial to this discussion, where the focus is on the limitations of "science" as a mode for understanding Life, The Universe, and Everything.
The world view from which parent post emerged is so terribly constricted by lack of an adequate vocabulary that it cannot describe itself without absurd self-contradictions that would be laughable if they were not so commonly pathetic. The poster uses English very well, and his citations indicate that he is capable of critical reading, so in his case it is possible for him to get beyond the mind crippling world view of reason being the ultimate OTROW (the One True, Right, Only Way). But to do this requires getting beyond the null dragon fallacy and accepting the possibility that there may indeed be dragons in any of the unexplored parts of the universe.
A basic anti-belief that I hold dear: Reason is too limited a tool to measure the entirety of Everything.
No one has adequately defined "soul," so there is no reason to believe one exists. There is no "bing" moment (is that a technical term?). The differentiation of our experience from our physical bodies is an illusion.
Um... This is the "null dragon" fallacy. (Disclaimer: I just made that term up, read on and its meaning will become obvious.) Among other functions, natural languages provide the means by which we map the world of our experiences into our minds. This mapping is the underlying characteristic of abstract thought and the basis of reasoning. I fully agree with parent post that if you cannot define something in your internal language, you cannot reason about it. But there is no basis for going any further than that; that is where the fallacy of parent post begins.
Look at this pragmatically. Those who say that undefinable things cannot exist are cropping their world maps to exclude large areas that others have marked with the phrase "Here Be Dragons". That does lead to a simpler map that is also easier to use and perhaps is more accurate in the humdrum of everyday existence. But by cropping out those dragon-infested regions of terra incognita, the user can no longer see the bridges that others see between different realms of human experience. Such as the parallels between mathematics and music, or that allow presentations of scientific data like Hubble's images to be appreciated as art. It would seem that the most one could hope for from this null dragon approach is a lifetime of moving between different limited compartments with no hope of integrating them into a unified whole. And probably an increasing amount of personal energy having to go into maintaining a portable framework of consistency that one can drag from one compartment to the next. For we do need our illusions of self-consistency. Of course the energy needed to build and drag about portable consistency is no longer available for forming new relationships or enjoying the moments of one's life, but that might not be apparent to the young fellow just starting his journey.
Another way to make this point is much easier to write and comprehend, but less interesting:
Since when is some thing's existence dependent on one's ability to reason about it? Pi is an unreasonable concept. Yet I doubt that anyone reading slashdot would deny its existence. This despite the fact that pi is definitely irrational. And I'm not playing games with semantics here, either. What makes pi so very real despite being completely beyond our ability to reason about it is something that is intrinsic to one of the "Here Be Dragons" places on everyone's world maps. That the mathematical terms "rational" and "real" can serve double duty in this context is not accidental, but has to do with early mathematicians recognizing the underlying metaphysics and choosing technical terminology that reflects how mathematics relates to human reasoning, and the universe, and everything.
So good maps of the world at large will necessarily have regions that are marked "Here Be Dragons". Some may see those areas as places to explore; others may choose to heed the implicit warnings and stay away. But anyone who chooses to cut those areas out of their maps will have to contend with a fragmented existence, and the increased overheads in managing all these different fragments. Which I guess in a larger sense is okay, but my experience is that after thirty years or so, these people tend to be opinionated, boorish, uninteresting, and energy drains on others who have to associate with them.
Beware the fallacy of the null dragon. Maps that don't mention dragons are not sufficiently realistic for living a wholesome and interesting life.
Okay, I sort of think I understand where you are going with this now. It will be interesting to see if anyone who knows anything about this kind of cosmology can answer your question.
But my understanding of the state of astronomy is that our very best models of what we know for sure all state that galaxies like the Milky Way cannot exist. We have to use this tremendous fudge factor called "dark matter" to get the models anywhere close to what we can observe on any cloudless night. Since all these models are so badly flawed, there is no reasonable way to use them to guess the shape of Sol's path around the galactic core. And since Sol has traveled less than 10 degrees of arc during the 5,000 years of our recorded history, even if archeologists came across some ancient databases of pertinent observations, we wouldn't have a long enough span of data to determine Sol's path.
So I think we would need to do observations for about 20,000 years before we could begin to construct the kind of plot you are talking about.
This is not to say that your underlying proposition is wrong. But it needs to be re-expressed in different language; in phrasing that would support hypothesis formulation and testing.
TFA's frame of reference is the Earth's orbit about the Sun, and reports a small but significant correlation between aphelion - perihelion and decay rates of some radioactive nuclides. TFA suggests that the 4% change between Earth's closest approach to the Sun and its most distant point is a possible cause for the change in decay rates.
When the frame of reference is expanded to galactic distances, we find that Earth's aphelion point is coincidentally very close to a line drawn from the Sun to the center of the galactic core. So it could also be that some shielding or suppressive effect of the Sun's local environment is reducing decay rates when the Earth is behind the Sun relative to the galactic core.
Proposed hypothesis: the changes in radioactive decay rates are related in an unknown fashion to the annual changes in the geometry of the Earth - Sun - galactic core.
This could probably be ruled out with a couple of tests of the existing data:
Aphelion occurs on Jan 4, while Earth's fullest exposure to any presumed galactic core influence occurs on Dec 17. Does the data suggest that increased activity centers around aphelion, or 18 days earlier?
If TFA's heliocentric model is correct, the change in rates of decay from month to month will be a smooth sinusoidal curve over the course of the year. But if the galactic core is involved, the changes in rates of decay will depart from this since the ecliptic does not parallel the galactic plane, and the degree of the Earth's "exposure" to galactic core will vary in a more complex way. Does the data support either of these conjectures?
I'm not going to cite my references here: they would be a distraction. Key words for google: aphelion, perihelion, solstice, galactic core, "plane of the ecliptic", "galactic plane". Um, a quick review of high school trigonometry might be useful, too.
Kudos to all the researchers and lab assistants who contributed to this work. It sounds like years of seemingly mindless drudge data collection went into this database. Yet the results are stunning: something Out There is affecting "constants" that we thought were intrinsic and immutable. That changes things. That changes everything.
Uh, no, that probably isn't a good idea. If you find prior art that someone else has patented, you've exposed the company to willful infringement, as other replies have pointed out. Linus Torvalds has said some interesting things along these lines but at the moment I can't think of an easy way to google up his quote (too little coffee on board as yet). In any event, the common wisdom is: don't go there. It is better not to know.
A big question is how the company intends to use your work.
If your work is only going to be used in house, then argue that it is both less costly and less risky to treat it as a trade secret (no worries about being sued for infringing somebody else's patent; no unnecessary legal expenses with the crapshoot patent process). You and management might have some disagreements about your NDA, but that's a very different problem. If you were hired without a formal NDA that covers this kind of thing, then it would be in their interest to have you sign one, and you should be compensated for your signature with a raise or bonus (otherwise the NDA might not be a legally binding contract).
If the company intends to include your work in a product that it will sell or put before the public, and your work will be visible in that product, then the company should be thinking about patent protection, reducing risks of exposure to infringements, and all those kinds of things. Your personal objections to software patents need to take a back seat in this situation. Since the company paid you to develop the application, the application belongs to the company and if you don't like that, you should have walked away.
The above advice is worth every penny you paid for it....
Thank you for correcting my oversight. Embedded device controllers and similar applications are a world of their own. Forth is glorious: the first programming language commercially implemented on the 8086 back in the day, and still, when you count up all the cars and trucks, elevators and diesel-electric locomotives, the most commonly used computer language in the world.
Upwardly compatible opcodes was the overarching reason why, in that era, the 8086 was considered a true descendant of the 8080, and the 8080 was considered the true descendant of the 8008.
Remember we are talking about an era when Assembly Language was the highest level of programming abstraction available on the early micro computers. The compilers that converted AL to binary machine language ran on minicomputers, were state of the art, expensive, hard to acquire, and difficult to use. Developing under these conditions, and attempting to fit working programs into 4, 8, or even a glorious 16 kilobytes of RAM, was an art form that no one has had to practice in more than 30 years.
There was a tremendous advantage in developing a chip that allowed extension of the existing AL compilers without total rewriting, and allowed the AL programmers of the day to build upon their old skills. That some of the routines developed for the 8008 would also run on the 8086 / 8088 was a fringe benefit.
Disclaimer: while I was writing my first "HELLO WORLD" programs in Fortran on punch cards at the time the 8008 was put on the market, my first PC was an Apple II+ (about 8 years later) and I learned 6502 Assembly rather than 8086 code. I have since managed to forget all those old skills. Good riddance! It is much better to scratch out new ideas in Perl, and then if there is some reason to optimize, get a code monkey or two to do the low level work.
Uh, that's what Microsoft is doing. Putting their money into marketing. Microsoft has nearly 30 years of experience in convincing the market that what they are currently selling is what everybody needs. Of course the market has changed-- now the guys making the purchasing decisions know the difference between an application suite and an operating system-- but still Microsoft is playing to its strength. They never were much good at things like design and quality control.
Failure: when giving it your very best just isn't good enough.
This can be easily summarized: mitochondria are obligatory symbiotes. The relationship with the host cell is symbiotic: the host cell would be unable to produce enough energy to function properly were it not for its mitochondria partners.
This is the God is Dead theory as applied to biological taxonomy:
There is but One True, Right, and Only God (OTROG).
Therefore OTROG cannot self-replicate.
Therefore God Is Dead.
This is but one of the reasons that the neopagan movement keeps gaining adherents among the growing number of post-Christians despite its aversion to evangelism. In a polytheistic framework, it is simply much easier for a nimble mind to sustain the necessary suspension of disbelief that is the core of Faith.
While this is a viable and interesting approach to the great questions of ontology, I don't see how it can be applied to virology. Fungi are generally considered to be living things, even though their spores are inert and can't grow or replicate until they are embedded in the (usually but not always) dead carcass of some other life form. It would be inconsistent to declare flu viruses as not alive while accepting mushrooms as being alive.
Let's just see how many noses we can tweak this morning, eh, Pinky?
This shouldn't be mistaken for true group-shared humour. Whether it's funny is irrelevant. ...
Do we actually think it's funny any more?
No, no , no, that's wrong. That is, I think I disagree.
What's funny about Ballmer and chairs is four-fold:
Even if Ballmer/chair references were not intrinsically funny, they very often illicit very funny responses, like the parent post, so there is a lot of anticipatory humor about them. People start to laugh when they see Groucho pick up the cream pie; they don't wait until the food fight has actually begun. Similarly, many on slashdot begin to chortle on encountering a Ballmer/chair as they begin to visualize the agonizing facial contortions of the Microsoft apologist who is hunched over his keyboard attempting to peck out an effective response. Well, I admit that this imagery is funny in the same semicrass way that watching a lefty trying to learn calligraphy is funny. It is slashdot slapstick milk-out-the-nose funny, not the highest level of urbane wit.
Second point: For those who've been around for a while, Ballmer/chair triggers a series of recollections that parallel the "I know an old lady who swallowed a fly" song:
He threw the chair because somebody quit
The somebody who quit was a major developer
??? [since this slot is always "???"]
The monkey dance...
This kind of compression of communications through evocation of shared memories is the hallmark of a good in-joke. It is funny because you know the guy who wrote it knew that you would bring up memories of this entire series of unfortunate events as you read it, and that's funny.
It brings to mind ancient childhood memories that are themselves funny: "...she's dead, of course."
There was something else, but I forgot it.
Now I agree that this is humor at the sophomoric Slashdot level. It has none of the elegance of a good Board Room joke. References to monkey dances and guys throwing chairs the way an errant subroutine might throw an exception certainly don't belong in the Corporate Head Office.
Mr. Bill is not giving away any portion of what has come to him through his Microsoft activities. He is giving away roughly half of the new income that is generated by investing this amount.
It is a smart business move for anybody with enough money to need an accountant, who is subject to USA taxes. Check out the 501 Corporation tax laws. Gates retains all the benefits that come from having a free choice of where to invest the funds, and the total amount of the actual charitable contributions that the corporation needs to make each year are minimal, and of course he's got full control over where to give away these funds. Meanwhile, contributions to the corporation, such as moneys received from liquidating his MS stock, are not subject to personal taxes since they are charitable gifts. He avoids the hefty capital gains taxes that he would otherwise have to pay.
B&MGF's financial statements are public and published on the web; google for them. Compare the amount of contribution to the total of all assets at the beginning of the prior year, and you will see that this is consistently around the 5% or so minimum needed to maintain tax exempt status. Then look at the earnings for the end of the current year, and you will see that these vary somewhat but tend to be more than double the amount that was contributed. The whole thing is driven by tax laws.
For Mr. Bill, this is indeed a brilliant plan. For citizens of the USA, not so much. If he had not made use of this tax shelter, his contribution to the costs of USA wars, No Child Left Behind initiatives, Homeland Security measures and so forth would have reduced the tax burden on everyone else.
Slashdot Mirror
So long as the Sun is up, a properly oriented tube will always have a thin line with perfect angle of incidence to the Sun, and a region somewhat less than half the tube's diameter that has a pretty good angle of incidence. Over the course of the day, the amount of surface area that is in excellent to good relationship to the Sun's rays is nearly constant, and if the tubes are spaced optimally, this area is nearly as large as that which a flat panel array of the same size would provide. Plus, the tube is self-supporting, so there are minimal shading losses from structural support, and it can capture reflected light from its backside. Any comparison of flat panels with tubes needs to take these factors into account.
Over the course of a day, I can see where the light gathering ability of a static array of tubes would be comparable to the light gathering ability of a static array of flat panels. The output curves would be very different: the flat array would have a much higher midday peak, but the tube array would begin producing output earlier in the morning and continue for longer into the evening.
Please re-read the the posts you are responding to and pay attention to the content.
Persons with expertise on the ground in handling cattle are saying that moving the herd is only one component of the job, and one of the less difficult components, at that. Protecting the animals from external threats and from their internal inabilities to cope with common environmental traps are economic necessities.
Until there is a remote way of intervening when a cow worth several hundred dollars gets itself crosswise to a barbed wire fence, being able to remotely direct the herd offers no benefits. These parts of the job will require a sophisticated all terrain robot capable of identifying a cow in trouble, immobilizing the large animal without hurting it, cutting and repairing barbed wire, delivering an antitetanus jab, and so on. And then you might as well save a bunch of money on the cowhead radio receivers by just putting a loudspeaker system in the robot.
Yeah, at some point technology might replace the cowboy and his horse, but radiohead cows are not going to do it. And robotics has a long ways to go before a person who knows how to safely immobilize a ton of living hamburger with a few feet of rope is in danger of losing his job.
To put this in perspective: a little before Fulton figured out how to make a steam engine small enough to fit inside a boat, there were some persons that history has forgotten who were experimenting with steam powered bicycles. Radiohead cows sound an awful lot like steam powered bicycles. The developers might be shooting their arrows more or less in the right direction, but unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any actual target anywhere near where their arrows are going.
Good points.
An adequately designed multiple vote system would replace the current two party nonsense with a multitude of less powerful parties. Because of this, successful candidates would be those who know how to put together working coalitions between multiple factions. And the leadership skills needed to develop effective coalitions transfer extremely well to handling other complex problems such as the issues surrounding climate change and international finance (to name just two examples).
There would be a big change in the way each candidate needs to think about how they campaign, when they realize that a significant part of their campaigns needs to be aimed at becoming the best second choice of various factions that would never regard them as a first choice. If this were implemented, you would see a large amount of Washington's deadwood go away with the next round of elections, and you would see an increasing number of elected officials who might not be so good with the 15 second sound bite, but are quite competent at listening to new ideas and seeking new ways to go forward.
At this point it is clearly evident that the Imperial President approach is not just a failure, it actually breaks institutions and causes wealth to vaporize. It is time to give serious consideration to altering the Constitution to prevent this kind of President from happening again.
Very nicely presented; thank you.
To take this a bit further, in any party system where the populace elects representatives and each individual has one vote, the system will tend to develop two major parties where each party on any issue tries to represent the center of the bell shaped curve while simultaneously trying to be somewhat more attractive to either the left or right nearly-on-center voters than the opposing party. The end result is that most of the time, elected officials are pretty representative of the views of a large block of almost average citizens. That's the basis of the US system, and it works. Unfortunately.
The following is very USA centric.
This is unfortunate because change always develops at the margins, not the center. With the problems that your generation faces, you need meaningful change, not just mild shifts in the status quo. (I will be around to experience the early results of the outcomes of these changes, but basically this is a fight that needs to be fought by younger persons than my cohort. This is mostly your problem, you twenty, thirty, and forty year olds.)
The US system fills elected roles with persons who are opposed to significant change. Persons who are committed to moving the status quo just slightly toward a more conservative (the Golden Age was yesterday and we need to get back there) or progressive (we can usher in a Golden Age tomorrow if we just do this little change today) position. This kind of system does not provide true leadership: leadership arises from the thin margins of the bell curve, not from the center. When significant changes have to be made, you need something other than a US type of system to put persons with true leadership qualities into effective roles. Another way of saying this is that the current system institutionalizes the tyranny of the majority and we cannot afford that suppression when we know we need fresh approaches to meet the challenges that are on the horizon.
In the past, democracies were limited to one vote per individual due mostly to the technical problems in trying to audit any other approach. That is no longer the case, and as we look at how to prevent further Diebold corruptions, we might as well start thinking about a larger overhaul of our voting system. There are several really interesting multiple vote systems where a voter records his first and second choice candidates in one way or another.
For instance, an individual voter could have selected Nader as his first choice, and either Bush or Kerry as his second choice. Nader would still have lost on the first ballot count, but those votes would have then transferred to the second choices. We would possibly have had President Kerry and a very different recent history with a very different set of current problems.
The differences are more subtle and profound than simply making the spoiler role a contributory role. Knowing that your second choice will be used if your first choice doesn't win would allow voters to more freely express what they would really like. It would also mean that candidates from the two major parties would have to change campaign tactics and argue that they will do a better job of representing Nader's interests than their opponent, so they should be your second choice. It would also lead to alliances between the major parties and smaller parties, where a smaller party would offer its support to a candidate as a second choice in return for concessions on something important to its constituency. Rather than the elected government being representative of a two almost average groups, the influence of a broader range of groups would come to bear on the issues. Including groups that have been actively working on the issues, and can take the lead in developing solutions.
I'm guessing that core elements in both the Republican and Democratic parties would oppose this. But this kind of change could be brought about in the next few years by grassroots efforts. It is, after all, a relatively simple concept that both average and almost average US citizens are capable of understanding, and who would see personal benefits in such a constitutional change.
I checked your link and the first definition offered has to do with risk assessment in an area of business activities that is currently looking for a $700 billion bail-out because they have screwed each other (and everyone else) so bad.
Seems like another good reason for Google to rein in its use of the word "beta".
Hmm. I found I understood each and every word in Google's explanation, and that the entire explanation parses easily, without any ambiguities. Yet it doesn't have any meaningful content. So other than being a good example of perfect syntax with no semantic sense, the statement has no utility.
Seems like Google's marketdroids have gotten loose in the technical jargon and they need to rounded up and put back in their place. For all the IT world for more than 30 years, "beta" has meant a product with expected bugs put out to the general public for the express purpose of identifying said bugs so a dependable 1.0 version can be released. "Beta" implies that under mainstream conditions, the software will have enough usefulness that you can get a sense of what your workflow with the finalized version could be like, but that it is too prone to breakage to be reliable in daily use.
The Google marketdroids need to be told that they have to find some other label to distinguish their constantly upgraded web apps from traditional software with its episodic upgrades and consequent problems. And the people that Google has hired to actually think about problems (as opposed to those few hired to visualize market images) need to be prodded into keeping a closer eye on the marketdroids and making sure that they can't sneak out of their rumpus rooms so easily.
Yeah, marketing is important, and it should be a company's first consideration. (After developing a sound product, treating your customers right, upholding business ethics, treating your employees and vendors right, being a good citizen in your communities, and a few other things like that).
so science is an improved version of superstition in terms of its value to humankind - thats what he was trying to say i thought
Yes, that seems to be what TFA is saying, but I suspect that is a failing within TFA and that it doesn't accurately reflect the research it is supposed to be reporting. Which is not an uncommon problem with slashdot articles. (Not slamming anyone here; this stuff which is on the frontiers of scientific reasoning is difficult to handle.)
One of the things that makes me doubt that TFA is accurate is that by its phrasing, referring to centrifugal force in analyzing an automobile accident would be reasoning based on superstition (TFA does not distinguish between superstition and convenient fictional forces). Similarly, all the science work prior to Einstein that was based on Newton's three laws would be based on superstition, if using a strict application of the principles reported in TFA. I very much doubt that this is what the researchers are talking about. I'm pretty certain that something crucial got lost in the process of reducing their work into an article for the popular press.
On an issue that should be entirely separate, there is nothing in TFA that has anything to do with religion. There are, however, a lot of vocal persons on slashdot who conflate religion and superstition, which suggests that they are using very generalized and inadequate definitions for both terms. Perhaps some of them can be motivated to refining their vocabulary, and improving the clarity of their world view, by simply pointing this out.
SINEs and LINEs do nothing - they only propagate themselves (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_interspersed_nuclear_element).
Inactive genes are just that - inactive. They can't be transcribed because they lack crucial parts.
idunno.
Bootstrap computer programs are very simple analogs to what goes on in a cell during telophase. Some bootstrap computer programs have long runs of NOP codes or other repetitive do-nothing structures, but if you cut them out, the system won't boot because it would then try to look for an MBR on the floppy before the drive's stepper motor is calibrated. Sometimes large, empty structures are built into the code itself, because it is sometimes more expedient to copy such things to an explicit area of ram as a pre-initialized, zeroed array than it is to explicitly allocate the space and use a loop to initialize it.
So I have some doubt that repetitive, simple structures in DNA have no function. I think a lot more needs to be learned about the context in which these portions of DNA are activated before these things we do not understand are dismissed as doing nothing.
Similarly, there were chunks of assembly language in the Apple ][ code that looked like scrap heaps of malformed opcodes, unless you realized that the system was jumping to the second byte of the first instruction, and in that context things made perfect sense. I don't think we know enough yet about the various ways that DNA is used, especially during the critical boot processes of telophase, to declare a gene inactive simply because it won't work with transcription RNA.
I think a better phrasing than "do nothing", or "inactive" is "we don't understand".
There was no straw man.
The argument is not about the nature of reality, not directly anyway. The argument is about the nature of language and how its inappropriate usage can limit the internal maps that are the only guide any individual gets to this world. If you choose poor language rules, such as tossing out any concept that cannot be supported by reason, then you will have a map that is severely deficient in some areas. A much better approach is to carry several different maps and be willing to swap them in and out of usage when the going gets strange.
There are indeed some things that are entirely beyond our ability to understand, such as the existence of pi. But to say that there is some way of constructing a ratio between what we can understand and what we can never understand, and then use that percentage as an argument to support a reasoned-only approach is pure and utter bullshit. Don't elevate reason to some higher plane because it explains 99% of the less than 2% of human experience that might possibly be expressable in a reasonable way. There is no reason in love, passion, war, or death. Most of human existence is unreasonable.
Science and reason are of great value, in their place. Unfortunately, there are persons who elevate these tools to the level of belief systems, and then you end up with an intolerance to other beliefs and modes of expression. You've got an individual who adamantly denies the existence of Rain God, Sun God, and Goddess Of The Garden, but who refuses to recognize that he is completely and utterly absorbed in the catechisms and dogma of his worship of his Tractor and his Hoe.
As far as understanding the world-- that is a childish notion that belongs to 19th century physics. The most we can hope to do is to build new models that are a little more detailed than our old models. But make no mistake: these are all just models. No one of them is intrinsically better than any other. It all depends on your context of usage. </rant
An interesting article. However these kinds of studies ignore what we know about the pre-selection of stimuli that other work has shown must be going on. I've got to lay some background for general readers to follow along, which shouldn't be necessary for a cognitive scientist, so bear with me for a paragraph or two.
Present an image to a test subject, and his retina responds to the photons and passes signals through the optic nerve to a number of different areas that coordinate to create a perception in short term memory. That perception is then further processed through noetic, autonoetic, and actually a great number of other ways (aesthetic, for instance), which attach different meanings to the perception, and seemingly involve creating additional partial copies of the original perception for later processing, and probably do a bunch of other housekeeping chores (we now know enough about graphics software to know that none of this stuff is simple). All this work involves some of the oldest structures in the brain as well as the latest additions: for example the recticular activating system of the reptilian brain stem mediates a "tuning" of neocortical structures, so that when processing visual input, auditory areas are suppressed, and when presented with culturally dependent symbolic information such as printed words, aesthetic processing (color, shape, etc) is suppressed. While the neurons involved in all this processing are very fast and the distances signals need to travel are very short, there is still a definite time lag between when the photons are presented to the retina and the formation of meaningful perceptions.
An interesting thing about this process is that the retinal response involves billions of bits of photonic information, but the initial perception involves at the most millions of bits, but more likely only hundreds of thousands of bits. There is clearly some major throttling of bandwidth going on here, but it is not a simple "cast out 99.9% of everything" throttling. It is highly dependent on what the subject expects to perceive. Under near subliminal conditions, it is possible to present a stimulus that someone fluent in Arabic would perceive as a word without noticing any particular color or form, while a graphics artist with no knowledge of Arabic would perceive as a distinctive shape with a definite color gradient. Meanwhile, the musician might well hear the associated tone that neither of the others were aware of, and see only a meaningless flash. The effect of expectation on perceptions is so strong that in many ways the ancient Greek concept had it right: we see the world by projecting our expectations from our minds through our eyes onto whatever is Out There.
What is supremely interesting is that the feedback effects of expectation on perception have been shown to occur too rapidly to be mediated by the neuronal circuitry itself. This stuff is happening amazingly fast, to the point where there is some discussion about whether biological quantum entanglements could be involved, such that retinal structures might be directly told how to filter raw input before the perception is fully formed and available on the neural network. Other possibilities involve some kind of precognition where a holistic mind is affected by a greater holistic pattern and in turn pre-tunes the organic brain structures before the photons arrive at the retina. Weird shit, involving the idea that the Universe as a whole is fractal, and the concept of "mind" is an expression of universal self-similarity. Of course we don't yet have any way of framing any testable hypotheses based on these kinds of blue sky conjectures, but that isn't the point here.
The point here is that even in the study of neuronal circuitry, our reasoning capabilities are insufficient to comprehend what is really going on.
To swing this back to its original course, a belief system based on reason is insufficient for modeling the world in enough detail to be interesting or helpful. One simply must work with mo
Whether the soul is a dead concept by scientific evidence is
The world view from which parent post emerged is so terribly constricted by lack of an adequate vocabulary that it cannot describe itself without absurd self-contradictions that would be laughable if they were not so commonly pathetic. The poster uses English very well, and his citations indicate that he is capable of critical reading, so in his case it is possible for him to get beyond the mind crippling world view of reason being the ultimate OTROW (the One True, Right, Only Way). But to do this requires getting beyond the null dragon fallacy and accepting the possibility that there may indeed be dragons in any of the unexplored parts of the universe.
A basic anti-belief that I hold dear: Reason is too limited a tool to measure the entirety of Everything.
The "bing" moment is also known as the Eureka moment, or flash of insight.
Insight is generally recognized as a real phenomenon. It is, however, not rational and you cannot reason your way into having an insight.
No one has adequately defined "soul," so there is no reason to believe one exists. There is no "bing" moment (is that a technical term?). The differentiation of our experience from our physical bodies is an illusion.
Um... This is the "null dragon" fallacy. (Disclaimer: I just made that term up, read on and its meaning will become obvious.) Among other functions, natural languages provide the means by which we map the world of our experiences into our minds. This mapping is the underlying characteristic of abstract thought and the basis of reasoning. I fully agree with parent post that if you cannot define something in your internal language, you cannot reason about it. But there is no basis for going any further than that; that is where the fallacy of parent post begins.
Look at this pragmatically. Those who say that undefinable things cannot exist are cropping their world maps to exclude large areas that others have marked with the phrase "Here Be Dragons". That does lead to a simpler map that is also easier to use and perhaps is more accurate in the humdrum of everyday existence. But by cropping out those dragon-infested regions of terra incognita, the user can no longer see the bridges that others see between different realms of human experience. Such as the parallels between mathematics and music, or that allow presentations of scientific data like Hubble's images to be appreciated as art. It would seem that the most one could hope for from this null dragon approach is a lifetime of moving between different limited compartments with no hope of integrating them into a unified whole. And probably an increasing amount of personal energy having to go into maintaining a portable framework of consistency that one can drag from one compartment to the next. For we do need our illusions of self-consistency. Of course the energy needed to build and drag about portable consistency is no longer available for forming new relationships or enjoying the moments of one's life, but that might not be apparent to the young fellow just starting his journey.
Another way to make this point is much easier to write and comprehend, but less interesting:
Since when is some thing's existence dependent on one's ability to reason about it? Pi is an unreasonable concept. Yet I doubt that anyone reading slashdot would deny its existence. This despite the fact that pi is definitely irrational. And I'm not playing games with semantics here, either. What makes pi so very real despite being completely beyond our ability to reason about it is something that is intrinsic to one of the "Here Be Dragons" places on everyone's world maps. That the mathematical terms "rational" and "real" can serve double duty in this context is not accidental, but has to do with early mathematicians recognizing the underlying metaphysics and choosing technical terminology that reflects how mathematics relates to human reasoning, and the universe, and everything.
So good maps of the world at large will necessarily have regions that are marked "Here Be Dragons". Some may see those areas as places to explore; others may choose to heed the implicit warnings and stay away. But anyone who chooses to cut those areas out of their maps will have to contend with a fragmented existence, and the increased overheads in managing all these different fragments. Which I guess in a larger sense is okay, but my experience is that after thirty years or so, these people tend to be opinionated, boorish, uninteresting, and energy drains on others who have to associate with them.
Beware the fallacy of the null dragon. Maps that don't mention dragons are not sufficiently realistic for living a wholesome and interesting life.
Okay, I sort of think I understand where you are going with this now. It will be interesting to see if anyone who knows anything about this kind of cosmology can answer your question.
But my understanding of the state of astronomy is that our very best models of what we know for sure all state that galaxies like the Milky Way cannot exist. We have to use this tremendous fudge factor called "dark matter" to get the models anywhere close to what we can observe on any cloudless night. Since all these models are so badly flawed, there is no reasonable way to use them to guess the shape of Sol's path around the galactic core. And since Sol has traveled less than 10 degrees of arc during the 5,000 years of our recorded history, even if archeologists came across some ancient databases of pertinent observations, we wouldn't have a long enough span of data to determine Sol's path.
So I think we would need to do observations for about 20,000 years before we could begin to construct the kind of plot you are talking about.
This is not to say that your underlying proposition is wrong. But it needs to be re-expressed in different language; in phrasing that would support hypothesis formulation and testing.
I would also test if the direction of movement of our galaxy is overlapped or against the direction of Earth moveemnt through space.
I don't understand. Did I just hear a "whoosh"?
TFA's frame of reference is the Earth's orbit about the Sun, and reports a small but significant correlation between aphelion - perihelion and decay rates of some radioactive nuclides. TFA suggests that the 4% change between Earth's closest approach to the Sun and its most distant point is a possible cause for the change in decay rates.
When the frame of reference is expanded to galactic distances, we find that Earth's aphelion point is coincidentally very close to a line drawn from the Sun to the center of the galactic core. So it could also be that some shielding or suppressive effect of the Sun's local environment is reducing decay rates when the Earth is behind the Sun relative to the galactic core.
Proposed hypothesis: the changes in radioactive decay rates are related in an unknown fashion to the annual changes in the geometry of the Earth - Sun - galactic core.
This could probably be ruled out with a couple of tests of the existing data:
Aphelion occurs on Jan 4, while Earth's fullest exposure to any presumed galactic core influence occurs on Dec 17. Does the data suggest that increased activity centers around aphelion, or 18 days earlier?
If TFA's heliocentric model is correct, the change in rates of decay from month to month will be a smooth sinusoidal curve over the course of the year. But if the galactic core is involved, the changes in rates of decay will depart from this since the ecliptic does not parallel the galactic plane, and the degree of the Earth's "exposure" to galactic core will vary in a more complex way. Does the data support either of these conjectures?
I'm not going to cite my references here: they would be a distraction. Key words for google: aphelion, perihelion, solstice, galactic core, "plane of the ecliptic", "galactic plane". Um, a quick review of high school trigonometry might be useful, too.
Kudos to all the researchers and lab assistants who contributed to this work. It sounds like years of seemingly mindless drudge data collection went into this database. Yet the results are stunning: something Out There is affecting "constants" that we thought were intrinsic and immutable. That changes things. That changes everything.
Find some prior art.
Uh, no, that probably isn't a good idea. If you find prior art that someone else has patented, you've exposed the company to willful infringement, as other replies have pointed out. Linus Torvalds has said some interesting things along these lines but at the moment I can't think of an easy way to google up his quote (too little coffee on board as yet). In any event, the common wisdom is: don't go there. It is better not to know.
A big question is how the company intends to use your work.
If your work is only going to be used in house, then argue that it is both less costly and less risky to treat it as a trade secret (no worries about being sued for infringing somebody else's patent; no unnecessary legal expenses with the crapshoot patent process). You and management might have some disagreements about your NDA, but that's a very different problem. If you were hired without a formal NDA that covers this kind of thing, then it would be in their interest to have you sign one, and you should be compensated for your signature with a raise or bonus (otherwise the NDA might not be a legally binding contract).
If the company intends to include your work in a product that it will sell or put before the public, and your work will be visible in that product, then the company should be thinking about patent protection, reducing risks of exposure to infringements, and all those kinds of things. Your personal objections to software patents need to take a back seat in this situation. Since the company paid you to develop the application, the application belongs to the company and if you don't like that, you should have walked away.
The above advice is worth every penny you paid for it....
Thank you for correcting my oversight. Embedded device controllers and similar applications are a world of their own. Forth is glorious: the first programming language commercially implemented on the 8086 back in the day, and still, when you count up all the cars and trucks, elevators and diesel-electric locomotives, the most commonly used computer language in the world.
Upwardly compatible opcodes was the overarching reason why, in that era, the 8086 was considered a true descendant of the 8080, and the 8080 was considered the true descendant of the 8008.
Remember we are talking about an era when Assembly Language was the highest level of programming abstraction available on the early micro computers. The compilers that converted AL to binary machine language ran on minicomputers, were state of the art, expensive, hard to acquire, and difficult to use. Developing under these conditions, and attempting to fit working programs into 4, 8, or even a glorious 16 kilobytes of RAM, was an art form that no one has had to practice in more than 30 years.
There was a tremendous advantage in developing a chip that allowed extension of the existing AL compilers without total rewriting, and allowed the AL programmers of the day to build upon their old skills. That some of the routines developed for the 8008 would also run on the 8086 / 8088 was a fringe benefit.
Disclaimer: while I was writing my first "HELLO WORLD" programs in Fortran on punch cards at the time the 8008 was put on the market, my first PC was an Apple II+ (about 8 years later) and I learned 6502 Assembly rather than 8086 code. I have since managed to forget all those old skills. Good riddance! It is much better to scratch out new ideas in Perl, and then if there is some reason to optimize, get a code monkey or two to do the low level work.
They should concentrate on their core strengths
Uh, that's what Microsoft is doing. Putting their money into marketing. Microsoft has nearly 30 years of experience in convincing the market that what they are currently selling is what everybody needs. Of course the market has changed-- now the guys making the purchasing decisions know the difference between an application suite and an operating system-- but still Microsoft is playing to its strength. They never were much good at things like design and quality control.
Failure: when giving it your very best just isn't good enough.
Bye-bye Microsoft! Hello Linux!
This can be easily summarized: mitochondria are obligatory symbiotes. The relationship with the host cell is symbiotic: the host cell would be unable to produce enough energy to function properly were it not for its mitochondria partners.
This is the God is Dead theory as applied to biological taxonomy:
This is but one of the reasons that the neopagan movement keeps gaining adherents among the growing number of post-Christians despite its aversion to evangelism. In a polytheistic framework, it is simply much easier for a nimble mind to sustain the necessary suspension of disbelief that is the core of Faith.
While this is a viable and interesting approach to the great questions of ontology, I don't see how it can be applied to virology. Fungi are generally considered to be living things, even though their spores are inert and can't grow or replicate until they are embedded in the (usually but not always) dead carcass of some other life form. It would be inconsistent to declare flu viruses as not alive while accepting mushrooms as being alive.
Let's just see how many noses we can tweak this morning, eh, Pinky?
This shouldn't be mistaken for true group-shared humour. Whether it's funny is irrelevant.
...
Do we actually think it's funny any more?
No, no , no, that's wrong. That is, I think I disagree.
What's funny about Ballmer and chairs is four-fold:
This kind of compression of communications through evocation of shared memories is the hallmark of a good in-joke. It is funny because you know the guy who wrote it knew that you would bring up memories of this entire series of unfortunate events as you read it, and that's funny.
Now I agree that this is humor at the sophomoric Slashdot level. It has none of the elegance of a good Board Room joke. References to monkey dances and guys throwing chairs the way an errant subroutine might throw an exception certainly don't belong in the Corporate Head Office.
Oh, wait....
Do please read GP again, more carefully.
Mr. Bill is not giving away any portion of what has come to him through his Microsoft activities. He is giving away roughly half of the new income that is generated by investing this amount.
It is a smart business move for anybody with enough money to need an accountant, who is subject to USA taxes. Check out the 501 Corporation tax laws. Gates retains all the benefits that come from having a free choice of where to invest the funds, and the total amount of the actual charitable contributions that the corporation needs to make each year are minimal, and of course he's got full control over where to give away these funds. Meanwhile, contributions to the corporation, such as moneys received from liquidating his MS stock, are not subject to personal taxes since they are charitable gifts. He avoids the hefty capital gains taxes that he would otherwise have to pay.
B&MGF's financial statements are public and published on the web; google for them. Compare the amount of contribution to the total of all assets at the beginning of the prior year, and you will see that this is consistently around the 5% or so minimum needed to maintain tax exempt status. Then look at the earnings for the end of the current year, and you will see that these vary somewhat but tend to be more than double the amount that was contributed. The whole thing is driven by tax laws.
For Mr. Bill, this is indeed a brilliant plan. For citizens of the USA, not so much. If he had not made use of this tax shelter, his contribution to the costs of USA wars, No Child Left Behind initiatives, Homeland Security measures and so forth would have reduced the tax burden on everyone else.