Cancer prognosis isn't exactly something unstudied, and having had multiple melanomas removed is obviously worse for the odds than not having had melanoma at all.
I'd have to dig up an account to get journal access to quote recent numbers, but if I recall correctly the 5-year prognosis for people over 70 with a localized melanoma removed is somewhere around a 70-75% survival rate. That's not a death sentence, but it's not great.
I'm not holding my breath, but the deterrent effect on German business competitiveness something like this can have might be enough to get politicians talking about what's wrong with their patent laws, or at least patent enforcement.
The PR war over patents has always been promoting innovation versus stifling it, with most business lobbyists lining up on the "they're good" side. In this particular case, though, the sides lined up are basically Sisvel versus everyone else, which may lead to some pro-reform lobbying (at least modest reform) even from usually pro-patent businesses. It also brings in other special interests who usually stay out of the patent wars, like the travel/convention industry.
If what we're discussing is, as Zimmerman is, the relative merits of Obama and McCain, it doesn't help to point out issues on which they're both bad, since these don't actually give a reason to vote for or against either of them. Both Obama and McCain supported the final FISA bill that contained the illegal wiretapping indemnity. Therefore, pointing that fact out doesn't really help in helping me decide who to vote for, unless we're discussing the pros and cons of voting for a third party.
If you look at the issues on which they actually had different positions, on the other hand, we might get some information. For example, Obama voted to strip immunity from the bill you allude to. McCain, on the other hand, didn't vote on the amendment at all, but even worse, indicated he opposed stripping immunity from the bill and would've voted against doing so had he been present for the vote. So while they are both equally bad on supporting the final bill, Obama comes across somewhat ahead in actually trying to take immunity out of it, whereas McCain actively supported keeping immunity in it. In short: Obama tried to take immunity out and eventually caved on the final bill once that attempt failed; McCain tried to keep immunity in and enthusiastically supported the final bill that contained it. Neither of those positions is a clear great one (most Slashdotters would've preferred: tried to keep immunity out, and then voted against the entire bill if that failed), but the Obama position is clearly less bad than the McCain one on that issue.
The Patriot Act issue is another distinguishing issue, which is why Zimmerman points it out.
Intel has been making forays into the graphics-chip business, so it's entirely possible that they've stepped on an nVidia patent or two. It's nearly impossible to produce anything without stepping on patents, after all.
That may be true as far as engineering tolerances go, but as far as design knowledge goes, I thought the design of the 1945 "Fat Man" bomb was pretty widely disseminated by now, so you could just use that.
The enrichment technology is the only real bottleneck these days, in particular the tricky bits of technology needed to build centrifuges that can enrich to weapons quality.
The actual bomb designs are extremely widely published these days, at least for simple fission bombs.
While it's true that if you disclose an innovation publicly you still have a year to patent it, if you were to disclose it anonymously, it might hamper the company's efforts to patent it, since that could be taken as evidence of prior art---if the company can't show that they were in fact the anonymous poster, it's evidence that someone else invented and published it first. I don't believe prior art requires signed dissemination of the idea, just any prior dissemination by anyone other than the person claiming to be the inventor.
If you mean "guy on the street who just thought about this five minutes ago", probably, but free will has been a serious topic of philosophical discussion for centuries now. As you might expect, various people have written various things on the subject that you might not think of in a college-dorm philosophy session, which seems to be the extent of philosophical thinking the scientists who are the subject of this article have done.
In particular, a major position on the subject, held by both philosophers (from Hume on down) and scientists-turned-philosophers (notably Daniel Dennett), termed "compatibilism", is that free will and determinism are perfectly compatible. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy provides a reasonably good summary.
I didn't detect much of a partisan air back then---they made fun of Clinton a lot, but it didn't come across as if they were conservatives or anything. And in 2000 they were pretty equal-opportunity in attacking both Gore and Bush. These days they come across as distinctly left-leaning; even as a left-leaning person myself it's sometimes a bit uncomfortable when they seem to lapse from humor into some sort of political monologue. So I'm not sure they can successfully, given the corner they've painted themselves into, go back to the previous, less-partisan approach of just making fun of whoever's in power.
I lived for years in Houston and don't remember any proselytizing. Sure, there were the mega-churches every few blocks, but I never went into them and they didn't come to me.
There is a significant body of Supreme Court jurisprudence invoking the Due Process Clause to limit punitive damage awards in civil cases. The most recent significant decision was 2003's State Farm v. Campbell, which gave a strong presumption to the unconstitutionality of multipliers greater than single digits, and summarized some of the past decisions. To quote from the majority opinion in that case:
"We decline again to impose a bright-line ratio which a punitive damages award cannot exceed. Our jurisprudence and the principles it has now established demonstrate, however, that, in practice, few awards exceeding a single-digit ratio between punitive and compensatory damages, to a significant degree, will satisfy due process. In Haslip, in upholding a punitive damages award, we concluded that an award of more than four times the amount of compensatory damages might be close to the line of constitutional impropriety. We cited that 4-to-1 ratio again in Gore. The Court further referenced a long legislative history, dating back over 700 years and going forward to today, providing for sanctions of double, treble, or quadruple damages to deter and punish. While these ratios are not binding, they are instructive. They demonstrate what should be obvious: Single-digit multipliers are more likely to comport with due process, while still achieving the State's goals of deterrence and retribution, than awards with ratios in range of 500 to 1, or, in this case, of 145 to 1."
The Supreme Court has held that punitive damages can virtually never exceed a 10:1 ratio of actual damages. Whether that ruling would extend to statutory damages has never been tested, but it's possible it might. Certainly the RIAA would not want to argue that the purpose of statutory damages is to be punitive, if it wishes to avoid such an extension.
I know plenty of people with damn near zero experience in anything who have jobs with web 2.0 type companies. In certain market segments, especially web 2.0 and even more especially social networking, having anything at all that you can sell yourself as is enough to get in the door, because they're so desperate to hire people. Know a little CSS design, maybe can sell yourself as having done some amateur social-network analysis, and can write a PHP script? Sold!
I exaggerate only slightly. Especially in the SF Bay Area, the fact that Google has hired ten thousand people in the past year alone has really put a drain on the availability, to the extent that most other companies will hire anyone they can in good conscience justify as "probably not terrible".
Ethics committees are only legally mandated for specific categories of researchers, basically institutions receiving federal funding or trying to get things (e.g. new drugs) approved by the federal government. There is no law requiring them for all sociology studies; in fact, it's quite uncommon for, say, market-research experiments to be approved by an ethics committee. It's not even clear what ethics committee they'd apply to---when I do human-computer interaction studies, I apply to my university's ethics committee, but only because my university requires it as a matter of university policy.
In addition, even if you are at an institution that requires such approval, and doing research that would require approval, it isn't actually illegal not to get it. Absent violating some other law, the only sanctions are professional and institutional ones---a journal may refuse to publish your work, or your university may sanction you, or if the university itself is frequently not overseeing studies it may get its federal funding revoked.
If the code were open, you can bet that every hardware vendor would pore over it for anything that might be unfair to their product. It doesn't prove that it isn't, but you at least know that if there was something obviously anti-AMD in it, AMD would complain. Without the source open, you don't get the benefit of that scrutiny.
I'm sorry I'm bad, I'm sorry you're blue I'm sorry about all the downmods I gave to you And I know I can't take it back I love how you post, I love all your sounds And baby the way you make my world go 'round And I just wanted to say I'm sorry.
The main problem with oil companies is that they're selling oil that's found on publicly owned land, i.e. oil owned by the U.S. public. Now it's not like they came in and stole it; they signed contracts, which are quite unfavorable to the original owners (all of us). This is the government's fault for signing them, of course. Even at the time (when oil prices were much lower), the market value of these contracts was considerably higher than the flat statutory royalty rates that we assess. If oil-drilling rights on public land were auctioned off at market rates, the U.S. public would keep a significantly bigger percentage of the profits from drilling for that oil, and it'd be more free-market to boot.
Oil is a global market, influenced by global supply/demand balance. If the U.S. were sitting on a Saudi-Arabia-sized pile of reserves, you'd be correct: a significant increase in expected future supply will cause oil prices to fall. The problem is that the U.S. is not sitting on a Saudi-Arabia-sized pile of reserves. We have approximately 3% of global oil reserves. Three percent! So, basically, how much the U.S. drills or doesn't has a very minor effect on overall supply/demand balance.
Now we do have a whole hell of a lot of oil shale, but that doesn't seem to be included in the current proposal, which is solely for offshore drilling of conventional oil, of which we have fairly small amounts.
No so much in the sense of disciplining kids, as in treating them as thinking human beings who're expected to act intelligently. There's a remarkable correlation between intelligence and demeanor of the parents and that of the kids, which I don't think is wholly genetic: for example, I've traveled near university professors with children a number of times and very few times had any complaints. Compare to the experience traveling near the children of stock brokers on the one hand, or Jerry Springer types on the other.
The airlines would much rather it be federal law so that they can deflect blame: "hey, we're going to have to ask you to turn that off; sorry, it's federal law". It's more messy on their end of it's just corporate policy, as then they have to deal with obnoxious cell-phone users complaining about and/or refusing to obey their policies.
Although he's a bit of an ass in general, I do like a comment of his on the subject, from his majority opinion in United States v. Williams (2008) in which he with dry sarcasm refuses to use one of these silly acronyms:
"After our decision in Free Speech Coalition, Congress went back to the drawing board and produced legislation with the unlikely title of the Prosecutorial Remedies and Other Tools to end the Exploitation of Children Today Act of 2003, 117 Stat. 650. We shall refer to it as the Act."
Slashdot Mirror
Cancer prognosis isn't exactly something unstudied, and having had multiple melanomas removed is obviously worse for the odds than not having had melanoma at all.
I'd have to dig up an account to get journal access to quote recent numbers, but if I recall correctly the 5-year prognosis for people over 70 with a localized melanoma removed is somewhere around a 70-75% survival rate. That's not a death sentence, but it's not great.
I'm not holding my breath, but the deterrent effect on German business competitiveness something like this can have might be enough to get politicians talking about what's wrong with their patent laws, or at least patent enforcement.
The PR war over patents has always been promoting innovation versus stifling it, with most business lobbyists lining up on the "they're good" side. In this particular case, though, the sides lined up are basically Sisvel versus everyone else, which may lead to some pro-reform lobbying (at least modest reform) even from usually pro-patent businesses. It also brings in other special interests who usually stay out of the patent wars, like the travel/convention industry.
If what we're discussing is, as Zimmerman is, the relative merits of Obama and McCain, it doesn't help to point out issues on which they're both bad, since these don't actually give a reason to vote for or against either of them. Both Obama and McCain supported the final FISA bill that contained the illegal wiretapping indemnity. Therefore, pointing that fact out doesn't really help in helping me decide who to vote for, unless we're discussing the pros and cons of voting for a third party.
If you look at the issues on which they actually had different positions, on the other hand, we might get some information. For example, Obama voted to strip immunity from the bill you allude to. McCain, on the other hand, didn't vote on the amendment at all, but even worse, indicated he opposed stripping immunity from the bill and would've voted against doing so had he been present for the vote. So while they are both equally bad on supporting the final bill, Obama comes across somewhat ahead in actually trying to take immunity out of it, whereas McCain actively supported keeping immunity in it. In short: Obama tried to take immunity out and eventually caved on the final bill once that attempt failed; McCain tried to keep immunity in and enthusiastically supported the final bill that contained it. Neither of those positions is a clear great one (most Slashdotters would've preferred: tried to keep immunity out, and then voted against the entire bill if that failed), but the Obama position is clearly less bad than the McCain one on that issue.
The Patriot Act issue is another distinguishing issue, which is why Zimmerman points it out.
Intel has been making forays into the graphics-chip business, so it's entirely possible that they've stepped on an nVidia patent or two. It's nearly impossible to produce anything without stepping on patents, after all.
That may be true as far as engineering tolerances go, but as far as design knowledge goes, I thought the design of the 1945 "Fat Man" bomb was pretty widely disseminated by now, so you could just use that.
The enrichment technology is the only real bottleneck these days, in particular the tricky bits of technology needed to build centrifuges that can enrich to weapons quality.
The actual bomb designs are extremely widely published these days, at least for simple fission bombs.
While it's true that if you disclose an innovation publicly you still have a year to patent it, if you were to disclose it anonymously, it might hamper the company's efforts to patent it, since that could be taken as evidence of prior art---if the company can't show that they were in fact the anonymous poster, it's evidence that someone else invented and published it first. I don't believe prior art requires signed dissemination of the idea, just any prior dissemination by anyone other than the person claiming to be the inventor.
If you mean "guy on the street who just thought about this five minutes ago", probably, but free will has been a serious topic of philosophical discussion for centuries now. As you might expect, various people have written various things on the subject that you might not think of in a college-dorm philosophy session, which seems to be the extent of philosophical thinking the scientists who are the subject of this article have done.
In particular, a major position on the subject, held by both philosophers (from Hume on down) and scientists-turned-philosophers (notably Daniel Dennett), termed "compatibilism", is that free will and determinism are perfectly compatible. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy provides a reasonably good summary.
I didn't detect much of a partisan air back then---they made fun of Clinton a lot, but it didn't come across as if they were conservatives or anything. And in 2000 they were pretty equal-opportunity in attacking both Gore and Bush. These days they come across as distinctly left-leaning; even as a left-leaning person myself it's sometimes a bit uncomfortable when they seem to lapse from humor into some sort of political monologue. So I'm not sure they can successfully, given the corner they've painted themselves into, go back to the previous, less-partisan approach of just making fun of whoever's in power.
I lived for years in Houston and don't remember any proselytizing. Sure, there were the mega-churches every few blocks, but I never went into them and they didn't come to me.
There is a significant body of Supreme Court jurisprudence invoking the Due Process Clause to limit punitive damage awards in civil cases. The most recent significant decision was 2003's State Farm v. Campbell, which gave a strong presumption to the unconstitutionality of multipliers greater than single digits, and summarized some of the past decisions. To quote from the majority opinion in that case:
"We decline again to impose a bright-line ratio which a punitive damages award cannot exceed. Our jurisprudence and the principles it has now established demonstrate, however, that, in practice, few awards exceeding a single-digit ratio between punitive and compensatory damages, to a significant degree, will satisfy due process. In Haslip, in upholding a punitive damages award, we concluded that an award of more than four times the amount of compensatory damages might be close to the line of constitutional impropriety. We cited that 4-to-1 ratio again in Gore. The Court further referenced a long legislative history, dating back over 700 years and going forward to today, providing for sanctions of double, treble, or quadruple damages to deter and punish. While these ratios are not binding, they are instructive. They demonstrate what should be obvious: Single-digit multipliers are more likely to comport with due process, while still achieving the State's goals of deterrence and retribution, than awards with ratios in range of 500 to 1, or, in this case, of 145 to 1."
The Supreme Court has held that punitive damages can virtually never exceed a 10:1 ratio of actual damages. Whether that ruling would extend to statutory damages has never been tested, but it's possible it might. Certainly the RIAA would not want to argue that the purpose of statutory damages is to be punitive, if it wishes to avoid such an extension.
Last I checked, the best-selling beers in Belgium were all generic, tasteless pale lagers. Are you really going to get snobbish over Jupiler?
The amount of plastic in a big black trash bag is probably as much as ten grocery bags. It's much larger and also much thicker.
Is the sale of soda in plastic single-use bottles somehow environmentally more friendly than the sale of water?
I know plenty of people with damn near zero experience in anything who have jobs with web 2.0 type companies. In certain market segments, especially web 2.0 and even more especially social networking, having anything at all that you can sell yourself as is enough to get in the door, because they're so desperate to hire people. Know a little CSS design, maybe can sell yourself as having done some amateur social-network analysis, and can write a PHP script? Sold!
I exaggerate only slightly. Especially in the SF Bay Area, the fact that Google has hired ten thousand people in the past year alone has really put a drain on the availability, to the extent that most other companies will hire anyone they can in good conscience justify as "probably not terrible".
Is this the same circletimessquare who called for the "freelance assassination" of the rulers of Burma?
Ethics committees are only legally mandated for specific categories of researchers, basically institutions receiving federal funding or trying to get things (e.g. new drugs) approved by the federal government. There is no law requiring them for all sociology studies; in fact, it's quite uncommon for, say, market-research experiments to be approved by an ethics committee. It's not even clear what ethics committee they'd apply to---when I do human-computer interaction studies, I apply to my university's ethics committee, but only because my university requires it as a matter of university policy.
In addition, even if you are at an institution that requires such approval, and doing research that would require approval, it isn't actually illegal not to get it. Absent violating some other law, the only sanctions are professional and institutional ones---a journal may refuse to publish your work, or your university may sanction you, or if the university itself is frequently not overseeing studies it may get its federal funding revoked.
If the code were open, you can bet that every hardware vendor would pore over it for anything that might be unfair to their product. It doesn't prove that it isn't, but you at least know that if there was something obviously anti-AMD in it, AMD would complain. Without the source open, you don't get the benefit of that scrutiny.
I'm sorry I'm bad, I'm sorry you're blue
I'm sorry about all the downmods I gave to you
And I know I can't take it back
I love how you post, I love all your sounds
And baby the way you make my world go 'round
And I just wanted to say I'm sorry.
The main problem with oil companies is that they're selling oil that's found on publicly owned land, i.e. oil owned by the U.S. public. Now it's not like they came in and stole it; they signed contracts, which are quite unfavorable to the original owners (all of us). This is the government's fault for signing them, of course. Even at the time (when oil prices were much lower), the market value of these contracts was considerably higher than the flat statutory royalty rates that we assess. If oil-drilling rights on public land were auctioned off at market rates, the U.S. public would keep a significantly bigger percentage of the profits from drilling for that oil, and it'd be more free-market to boot.
Oil is a global market, influenced by global supply/demand balance. If the U.S. were sitting on a Saudi-Arabia-sized pile of reserves, you'd be correct: a significant increase in expected future supply will cause oil prices to fall. The problem is that the U.S. is not sitting on a Saudi-Arabia-sized pile of reserves. We have approximately 3% of global oil reserves. Three percent! So, basically, how much the U.S. drills or doesn't has a very minor effect on overall supply/demand balance.
Now we do have a whole hell of a lot of oil shale, but that doesn't seem to be included in the current proposal, which is solely for offshore drilling of conventional oil, of which we have fairly small amounts.
No so much in the sense of disciplining kids, as in treating them as thinking human beings who're expected to act intelligently. There's a remarkable correlation between intelligence and demeanor of the parents and that of the kids, which I don't think is wholly genetic: for example, I've traveled near university professors with children a number of times and very few times had any complaints. Compare to the experience traveling near the children of stock brokers on the one hand, or Jerry Springer types on the other.
The airlines would much rather it be federal law so that they can deflect blame: "hey, we're going to have to ask you to turn that off; sorry, it's federal law". It's more messy on their end of it's just corporate policy, as then they have to deal with obnoxious cell-phone users complaining about and/or refusing to obey their policies.
Although he's a bit of an ass in general, I do like a comment of his on the subject, from his majority opinion in United States v. Williams (2008) in which he with dry sarcasm refuses to use one of these silly acronyms:
"After our decision in Free Speech Coalition, Congress went back to the drawing board and produced legislation with the unlikely title of the Prosecutorial Remedies and Other Tools to end the Exploitation of Children Today Act of 2003, 117 Stat. 650. We shall refer to it as the Act."