I'm sure they'll keep airplanes around for people who like looking at the scenery. Also cars and bicycles. You might want to be careful about that airplane though... it has turbines spinning at more than 700 MPH a millimetre or so from the rest of the airplane. The car has some pretty fast spinny bits with tolerances much less than 6" too.
Problem is, with the possible exception of Afghanistan, US foreign policy since the resolution of that Pearl Harbour thing has basically been about starting an almost continuous string of fights.
That's a bit of an oversimplification. War probably started out as conflicts over hunting grounds or other territory. Hungry people whacking each other, up close and personal. Later it was refined to some noble wanting to distract his peasants from how hungry they were, so he marched a bunch of them up to some other noble's army and they stabbed or later shot each other at close range for a bit.
WWI was the big test of the new hotness, mechanized killing. WWII added dropping bombs from airplanes in the general direction of something believed to be worth destroying.
If you dislike war in any kind of non-selfish way, precision weapons, particularly remotely operated precision weapons, may not be a good idea. There's even a Star Trek episode about it. When killing is apparently clean and precise, especially when it's one-sided, you tend to forget it's killing.
How good a job do they do? Probably a pretty good one. Their profitability is directly tied to getting, having, and keeping loads of data. Probably better than the random companies who would otherwise roll their own. Do they keep track of where you've signed on using the service? Of course.
My bank has a website. I put data "on" that website, and I certainly expect it won't be shared by the bank.
Facebook users who left their profiles public have no reason to object to someone using their data.
Facebook users who clicked on some stupid survey and gave Facebook permission to give the shady author of the survey permission to use their data have no reason to object to someone using that data, except perhaps if the Facebook permission request was misleading.
Facebook users who set their profile private and did not click on a stupid survey, but were friends with someone who did, have a legitimate complaint against Facebook for sharing their data.
Facebook could certainly implement an automatic scanning system that would block certain messages, and they would just disappear unless the sender complained.
The question is, do they?
There should be a common carrier law for messaging apps. Your app either:
1) uses end-to-end encryption so you have no way of reading users' messages, in which case you're a common carrier and absolved of any responsibility for the content of the messages, or
2) you can read and filter the messages, and you're completely responsible for the content of any message that is passed on.
Yup. All the things listed in the summary seem to be plusses as far as schools are concerned, except for possible issues with delicate screens and waterproofing, which really apply to nearly any electronic device.
Before optical mice, we used to purposely glue mice shut so the kids wouldn't steal the balls.
The rules that prevent supersonic flights over land are probably more stringent than they need to be. The US did a test flying supersonic fighters over Oklahoma city eight times a day for six months. Most of the residents said it was fine, but a minority complained. There was also the side benefit that the law would cripple Concorde.
Almost every nation on the planet, including every democracy, benefits from this tradeoff today, including the US. The US has a LOT of law enforcement agencies, and one of the most powerful central governments. It also has the second highest incarceration rate in the world, one of the largest judicial systems, and among the highest rates of civil suits. Like virtually all other countries, the US is also a radically safer place today than it has been for most of its history.
Your assertion that resolution of disputes through peaceful mediation by collective authority leads to totalitarianism just doesn't seem to be supported by evidence.
I tend to agree, and I would not advocate for humanitarian or ideological military intervention in the US, a la Nicaragua, Vietnam, Iran, Panama, Iraq, Libya, etc. I won't argue with moral pressure though, a la China.
I'm not an American. I don't really care what you do, and if you actually read what I said you will observe that I didn't tell anybody they should undo anything.
However, according to polls, the majority of the US population (an overwhelming majority actually), seems to be dissatisfied with daily mass shootings and would like to see that change. The people concerned would like their culture to change.
There is an argument that cultures that promote certain behaviour should be encouraged to change by the international community. I believe the US has been involved in several foreign wars based on this principle.
I mentioned once to an American that gun laws in Canada require that if you have a gun, you store it unloaded, with a trigger lock AND in a locked gun cabinet. The response was "that's stupid, how do you use it to defend your home?"
So I think you're right. The problem with guns in the US is the attitude towards them. Guns in the US are for protection (i.e. shooting people). Guns in other countries are tools or sporting equipment (i.e. not for shooting people).
Stephen Pinker points out that a good correlate of the violent death rate in a country is the willingness of the populace to trust an authority to resolve their conflicts.
I doubt strong gun control laws in the US will be a quick fix. It takes time to undo a couple of centuries of frontier attitude.
"When you eat selectively bred tomatoes you know exactly what you're getting."
No you don't. Many of those selective breeding techniques involve doing things to crank up the mutation rate. It's unlikely you're going to get RoundUp resistance or something, but it's not impossible you could get resurgence of something stored in the plant's genome that is normally turned off.
In general our domesticated crop species have had many of their undesirable defensive characteristics bred out. Tomatoes are part of the nightshade family.
We're specifically talking about CRISPR here, which can be used in one of two ways. The first way is to randomly cut stuff out. The second way is to (semi-)randomly insert new things.
If you're using CRISPR to make pretty random changes you're not doing much that hasn't been done before. People used to expose seeds to radiation to induce mutations, then try and grow them. Sometimes you'd get something new.
More directed engineering, where you borrow bits from other species, including very different ones, is harder to accomplish with selective breeding.
The American bison isn't extinct. They successfully evolved into tasty farm animals, and there are many near my home town. They weren't as successful as the cow, but they've found a niche. Many other North American megafauna did not, but most of those were eliminated by clever primates with sharp sticks and rocks, not guns.
There's a bit of a difference. College athletes succeed or fail in undergrad, and it's probably fairly obvious who's who after the first couple of years. While they're there, they're forced to attend classes in something else.
Grad students have gone through four years of undergrad, usually four to eight years of grad school to get a PhD, then as much postdoc as they care to do before they give up. They're not 21 year old jocks who can take their accounting degree, put on a suit and get an entry level job somewhere. They're mid to late thirties, the best in the world at something, and facing the prospect of going and competing with those 21 year olds for entry level jobs.
"Nature selected" the passenger pigeon for extinction just as much as nature selects any other species.
Passenger pigeons were outcompeted by humans, failed to adapt, and went extinct. Other animals either didn't compete with the oddly effective humans, or adapted, like rats, roaches, cows and branches of wolves and cats.
Looking at the data they released, I think the "equivocal" conclusion was more honest. It doesn't look like the tumor incidence results would survive correction for multiple comparisons.
The findings that do look like they remain significant are that the male rats exposed to RF survived longer. It doesn't appear that the study was long enough to see significance in the female rats, but they were also showing that tendency.
The tumor results are complicated by that longer survival as well. They don't look like they were corrected for that effect.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure they'll keep airplanes around for people who like looking at the scenery. Also cars and bicycles. You might want to be careful about that airplane though... it has turbines spinning at more than 700 MPH a millimetre or so from the rest of the airplane. The car has some pretty fast spinny bits with tolerances much less than 6" too.
Or sitting in a movie theatre. Or a typical office.
Problem is, with the possible exception of Afghanistan, US foreign policy since the resolution of that Pearl Harbour thing has basically been about starting an almost continuous string of fights.
"Otherwise you could extend the same logic to conclude the jailing people indefinitely is inherently evil as well."
It is. Sometimes it may be necessary as "the lesser of two evils" as the GP pointed out. It's something you might do if there's no other option.
Even then, countries with modern justice systems have found that in the vast majority of cases it's better to rehabilitate prisoners.
That's a bit of an oversimplification. War probably started out as conflicts over hunting grounds or other territory. Hungry people whacking each other, up close and personal. Later it was refined to some noble wanting to distract his peasants from how hungry they were, so he marched a bunch of them up to some other noble's army and they stabbed or later shot each other at close range for a bit.
WWI was the big test of the new hotness, mechanized killing. WWII added dropping bombs from airplanes in the general direction of something believed to be worth destroying.
If you dislike war in any kind of non-selfish way, precision weapons, particularly remotely operated precision weapons, may not be a good idea. There's even a Star Trek episode about it. When killing is apparently clean and precise, especially when it's one-sided, you tend to forget it's killing.
Facebook does sell themselves as a single sign on provider. Here's a photo of 2010 Zucks announcing the mobile version:
https://www.cnet.com/news/face...
How good a job do they do? Probably a pretty good one. Their profitability is directly tied to getting, having, and keeping loads of data. Probably better than the random companies who would otherwise roll their own. Do they keep track of where you've signed on using the service? Of course.
Didn't read the last paragraph hey?
My bank has a website. I put data "on" that website, and I certainly expect it won't be shared by the bank.
Facebook users who left their profiles public have no reason to object to someone using their data.
Facebook users who clicked on some stupid survey and gave Facebook permission to give the shady author of the survey permission to use their data have no reason to object to someone using that data, except perhaps if the Facebook permission request was misleading.
Facebook users who set their profile private and did not click on a stupid survey, but were friends with someone who did, have a legitimate complaint against Facebook for sharing their data.
This *might* not be one of them.
Facebook could certainly implement an automatic scanning system that would block certain messages, and they would just disappear unless the sender complained.
The question is, do they?
There should be a common carrier law for messaging apps. Your app either:
1) uses end-to-end encryption so you have no way of reading users' messages, in which case you're a common carrier and absolved of any responsibility for the content of the messages, or
2) you can read and filter the messages, and you're completely responsible for the content of any message that is passed on.
I bet everyone would opt for #1 in a hurry.
*blocked*
Yup. All the things listed in the summary seem to be plusses as far as schools are concerned, except for possible issues with delicate screens and waterproofing, which really apply to nearly any electronic device.
Before optical mice, we used to purposely glue mice shut so the kids wouldn't steal the balls.
The rules that prevent supersonic flights over land are probably more stringent than they need to be. The US did a test flying supersonic fighters over Oklahoma city eight times a day for six months. Most of the residents said it was fine, but a minority complained. There was also the side benefit that the law would cripple Concorde.
Almost every nation on the planet, including every democracy, benefits from this tradeoff today, including the US. The US has a LOT of law enforcement agencies, and one of the most powerful central governments. It also has the second highest incarceration rate in the world, one of the largest judicial systems, and among the highest rates of civil suits. Like virtually all other countries, the US is also a radically safer place today than it has been for most of its history.
Your assertion that resolution of disputes through peaceful mediation by collective authority leads to totalitarianism just doesn't seem to be supported by evidence.
Why not?
I tend to agree, and I would not advocate for humanitarian or ideological military intervention in the US, a la Nicaragua, Vietnam, Iran, Panama, Iraq, Libya, etc. I won't argue with moral pressure though, a la China.
I'm not an American. I don't really care what you do, and if you actually read what I said you will observe that I didn't tell anybody they should undo anything.
However, according to polls, the majority of the US population (an overwhelming majority actually), seems to be dissatisfied with daily mass shootings and would like to see that change. The people concerned would like their culture to change.
There is an argument that cultures that promote certain behaviour should be encouraged to change by the international community. I believe the US has been involved in several foreign wars based on this principle.
I mentioned once to an American that gun laws in Canada require that if you have a gun, you store it unloaded, with a trigger lock AND in a locked gun cabinet. The response was "that's stupid, how do you use it to defend your home?"
So I think you're right. The problem with guns in the US is the attitude towards them. Guns in the US are for protection (i.e. shooting people). Guns in other countries are tools or sporting equipment (i.e. not for shooting people).
Stephen Pinker points out that a good correlate of the violent death rate in a country is the willingness of the populace to trust an authority to resolve their conflicts.
I doubt strong gun control laws in the US will be a quick fix. It takes time to undo a couple of centuries of frontier attitude.
Sure, except of course for anything that involves human reproduction, no matter how tangentially.
"When you eat selectively bred tomatoes you know exactly what you're getting."
No you don't. Many of those selective breeding techniques involve doing things to crank up the mutation rate. It's unlikely you're going to get RoundUp resistance or something, but it's not impossible you could get resurgence of something stored in the plant's genome that is normally turned off.
In general our domesticated crop species have had many of their undesirable defensive characteristics bred out. Tomatoes are part of the nightshade family.
We're specifically talking about CRISPR here, which can be used in one of two ways. The first way is to randomly cut stuff out. The second way is to (semi-)randomly insert new things.
If you're using CRISPR to make pretty random changes you're not doing much that hasn't been done before. People used to expose seeds to radiation to induce mutations, then try and grow them. Sometimes you'd get something new.
More directed engineering, where you borrow bits from other species, including very different ones, is harder to accomplish with selective breeding.
The American bison isn't extinct. They successfully evolved into tasty farm animals, and there are many near my home town. They weren't as successful as the cow, but they've found a niche. Many other North American megafauna did not, but most of those were eliminated by clever primates with sharp sticks and rocks, not guns.
There's a bit of a difference. College athletes succeed or fail in undergrad, and it's probably fairly obvious who's who after the first couple of years. While they're there, they're forced to attend classes in something else.
Grad students have gone through four years of undergrad, usually four to eight years of grad school to get a PhD, then as much postdoc as they care to do before they give up. They're not 21 year old jocks who can take their accounting degree, put on a suit and get an entry level job somewhere. They're mid to late thirties, the best in the world at something, and facing the prospect of going and competing with those 21 year olds for entry level jobs.
As much so as a bower bird nest.
Actually, fission piles can occur even without the intervention of biology, so they're about as natural as rocks.
"Nature selected" the passenger pigeon for extinction just as much as nature selects any other species.
Passenger pigeons were outcompeted by humans, failed to adapt, and went extinct. Other animals either didn't compete with the oddly effective humans, or adapted, like rats, roaches, cows and branches of wolves and cats.
Looking at the data they released, I think the "equivocal" conclusion was more honest. It doesn't look like the tumor incidence results would survive correction for multiple comparisons.
The findings that do look like they remain significant are that the male rats exposed to RF survived longer. It doesn't appear that the study was long enough to see significance in the female rats, but they were also showing that tendency.
The tumor results are complicated by that longer survival as well. They don't look like they were corrected for that effect.