Or, for that matter, what do we want to do about autism? We definitely would like to make sure nobody's on the far end of the spectrum, but for those of us on the near end it's part of who we are, and isn't just a detriment.
Let's look at the market realities. Farmers nowadays tend to be pretty conscious of why they're paying money and what they're getting for it, and they still buy lots and lots of GMO seeds. Clearly, they get considerable savings out of the seeds, or they wouldn't pay money for them.
Get to know some scientists. They're fanatical about being able to check each other's work, because science doesn't actually work if it relies on blind trust. Most of the scientists I've known will explain their work and why they're doing it and what the science is if asked, or sometimes if the listener just stands there and looks halfway interested.
If you want to check on anything scientific, a university library should be able to provide everything you want to check on starting with the results of experiments performed under carefully described conditions (a larger library will have more of the material immediately available). If someone has published an argument against the results of the experiment, you can find that with a citation index.
Now, there are some bad science teachers and journalists that present science as a fait accompli to be accepted on faith, but that's not the fault of "actual scientists" as a general rule.
There is a finite amount of room on any food container for labels, and there are things that matter more.
I have friends with serious food problems. One will react really badly to sulfites, one to gluten, another to cornstarch. I have to read ingredient labels in detail and hope I'm interpreting them correctly if I don't want to poison my friends. I'd really like, for example, a sulfite label, since that can cause an actual problem, so I'm not real keen on a mandatory label for something that really doesn't matter.
If people want to avoid GMO food, there's nothing stopping anyone from claiming that their food isn't GMO and putting that on the label. It's like kosher or halal food: a certain number of people are interested in buying it, so they can look for food labeled as such, and those companies interested in selling kosher and/or halal will put the labels on.
What about when the local team broadcasts are not available on the basic plan? My fiber internet came with a TV plan which we canceled. About $100/month and didn't even carry Twins games.
I don't agree with the person from the Copyright office.
There are valid legal uses for being able to use third-party cable boxes. Therefore, the fact that they make a certain form of illegal activity easier isn't good enough reason to ban them. There have been lots of proposals to ban things that make breaking the law easier that were stopped because the things had good legal uses.
No, Trump has some very hard limits on the people who will consider voting for him. You're referring to a certain anti-elitist and anti-rationality group, which is nowhere near a majority and which is basically in Trump's pocket already.
Nor is an independent going to win. There have been realistic third-party challenges before (Teddy Roosevelt, Wallace, Perot), but no third party candidate will win a single state this election. If there was going to be a credible independent, we'd know by now. The news would be all over it. There simply isn't time for anyone not from the two major parties to get the name recognition and campaign going for 2016. Neither the Libertarians nor the Greens are going to become credible without some big changes. (The last time I looked at a Libertarian platform, it was clearly a document to publicize ideology and not anything to govern by.)
You can't handle the raw news. Seriously. There's far too much of it. Even for a small incident, it can involve video footage, interviews (which are of course affected by the questions asked), additional research, hours of monitoring of Twitter and Facebook, and so forth. News outlets take all that stuff and condense it down into summaries that are small enough to be absorbed without a great deal of time and effort, and they may add background information. It would be useful to have all the source material available, to be able to dig into the details, but I don't expect that to happen any time soon.
You mean the 90% of the web that you use, because that isn't the case for lots and lots of sites. When you give the temporary permission, what do you give it to? Everything on the page (which means that time.com is a danger) or the domain of the URL (which breaks quite a few sites nowadays)?
Whitelist selected javascript, and disable everything else.
That's getting really hard to do. I used to rely on NoScript for my main defense, and when I wanted to use a site I'd allow the scripts through that came from that domain, and everything worked fairly well. In the last few years, I found that more and more sites are using scripts from somewhere else, with no clear idea of what "somewhere else" means. This means that, to get a site to work, it is necessary to enable script sources more or less randomly until it works. (I figure that my main threat is advertisements, XSS, and other ways to run malicious scripts that are not from the site I'm at. Foolishly or not, I'm willing to take my chances with scripts on the sites themselves.)
What we'd need is for the site to list somehow which script sources it uses, as opposed to whatever is dumped in from elsewhere, and the browser (or plug-in) to block scripts on that basis. Realistically, that would tick off advertisers to the point that it isn't going to happen. People are not going to stop web-surfing because of an abstract threat. I don't have a solution here.
I do consider taxes useful for behavior modification, although I'm not real comfortable with that. I believe carbon taxes will internalize some market externalities and therefore make the economy reduce carbon dioxide emissions more efficiently. I believe that one of the important roles of government in the economy is to reduce externality and principal agent problems.
The science that says that we're causing global warming is very strong and sound. However, I don't see all that many people claiming that global warming is happening but people don't cause it. There used to be a lot more. The thing about human causation is that, if the warming is not caused by us, we may not be able to stop it.
We might be able to work carbon taxes into surcharges on imported goods, and that would influence China and other nations. Since developed countries cause the most CO2 emissions, directly or indirectly, such surcharges would have a significant effect. China seems to be working on getting away from fossil fuels, likely because of their extreme pollution problems.
The other suggestions I've seen are generally from research institutes, not altruistic individuals. It's likely that they would get government attention if worked out. It's happened before. One advantage to these schemes is that a large government could do a lot on its own, without worrying about countries like China.
I agree with your low-hanging fruit, but the real challenge is to get that happening. This is a very large Tragedy of the Commons issue.
The advertising and media coverage you mention from the 1970s was there, but we seem to disagree on the consequences. I maintain that the changes were done on a large scale, and that individual choices and altruism had little to do with it, other than increased acceptance of what was happening. McDonald's switched from plastic to cardboard to hold its burgers. Companies making aerosol cans switched to non-CFC propellant. This wasn't a case of consumers en masse deliberately buying non-CFC products that were more expensive and inferior.
Apple makes its money on hardware, and OSX helps sell hardware. Apple tried licensing OSX to other OEMs once, and it was not a financial success. I don't think the market for selling OSes is there for anyone other than Microsoft.
Apple wants the experience of using their products to be pleasant, and they do that in laptops by controlling the whole environment. They can save a lot of compatibility testing that way, too.
The IBM PC was not seen as a strategic move. It was pretty much what an IBM division could put together on a low budget, to cash in on the new and potentially lucrative microcomputer market. It was obviously not going to replace real computers, and if the customer wanted to talk to the mainframe they could buy 3270 terminals (IBM later had PCs that doubled as 3270 terminals). There was no sort of strategic vision at first that said where the IBM PC would fit in. Initially, much PC software ran slower than its CP/M equivalent, since it was the CP/M assembler source run through an instruction-level translator.
I wouldn't say CP/M dominated the business computer market, since there were a large number of Apple IIs running Visicalc out there ("large" being relative to the time, as the small computer market had not yet exploded), frequently a result of an accountant buying his own Apple to use Visicalc.
Sure. However, the situations are not comparable. If the police illegally find your wife's head, you have no basic right to have the evidence excluded. The exclusion is an attempt to solve a serious problem, in which LEOs would violate basic rights pretty much with impunity, and the details are not based on a general legal principle.
Facebook is not obligated to act on such official requests. (They are obligated to act on court orders, but there wasn't one in this case.) Their cooperation was voluntary. They have the right to suspend their services for any reason, unless there's an agreement to the contrary (and Facebook sure doesn't have one with me).
The ruling is essentially that the police can't do everything. They can't protect everyone. They can't even try. They have no specific duty to protect anyone, just a general duty with no actual legal force behind it.
Police often put other people's lives over their own. That doesn't mean they shouldn't return fire or hesitate to stop someone who's armed, irrational, and dangerous.
They should have de-escalated the situation if possible, and police in this country are often sadly deficient in this skill and attitude. However, the first thing to do when facing an imminent lethal threat is to eliminate the threat, and then de-escalate what's left. She was a very serious threat to the cops, and they're humans just like you and me and Donald Trump.
Speaking as a person on the autism spectrum who suffers from clinical depression, I would really really prefer it if "mental illness" and "mental health problems" were not considered name calling. The woman's actions, as I understand them, are consistent with untreated mental illness (or treated, for that matter, since treatment isn't normally completely successful), and I consider that reasonable speculation.
Slashdot Mirror
It's happened. Strains of cells from real people have been patented without them knowing that the strains are even interesting.
Or, for that matter, what do we want to do about autism? We definitely would like to make sure nobody's on the far end of the spectrum, but for those of us on the near end it's part of who we are, and isn't just a detriment.
Let's look at the market realities. Farmers nowadays tend to be pretty conscious of why they're paying money and what they're getting for it, and they still buy lots and lots of GMO seeds. Clearly, they get considerable savings out of the seeds, or they wouldn't pay money for them.
Get to know some scientists. They're fanatical about being able to check each other's work, because science doesn't actually work if it relies on blind trust. Most of the scientists I've known will explain their work and why they're doing it and what the science is if asked, or sometimes if the listener just stands there and looks halfway interested.
If you want to check on anything scientific, a university library should be able to provide everything you want to check on starting with the results of experiments performed under carefully described conditions (a larger library will have more of the material immediately available). If someone has published an argument against the results of the experiment, you can find that with a citation index.
Now, there are some bad science teachers and journalists that present science as a fait accompli to be accepted on faith, but that's not the fault of "actual scientists" as a general rule.
There is a finite amount of room on any food container for labels, and there are things that matter more.
I have friends with serious food problems. One will react really badly to sulfites, one to gluten, another to cornstarch. I have to read ingredient labels in detail and hope I'm interpreting them correctly if I don't want to poison my friends. I'd really like, for example, a sulfite label, since that can cause an actual problem, so I'm not real keen on a mandatory label for something that really doesn't matter.
If people want to avoid GMO food, there's nothing stopping anyone from claiming that their food isn't GMO and putting that on the label. It's like kosher or halal food: a certain number of people are interested in buying it, so they can look for food labeled as such, and those companies interested in selling kosher and/or halal will put the labels on.
What about when the local team broadcasts are not available on the basic plan? My fiber internet came with a TV plan which we canceled. About $100/month and didn't even carry Twins games.
I don't agree with the person from the Copyright office.
There are valid legal uses for being able to use third-party cable boxes. Therefore, the fact that they make a certain form of illegal activity easier isn't good enough reason to ban them. There have been lots of proposals to ban things that make breaking the law easier that were stopped because the things had good legal uses.
No, Trump has some very hard limits on the people who will consider voting for him. You're referring to a certain anti-elitist and anti-rationality group, which is nowhere near a majority and which is basically in Trump's pocket already.
Nor is an independent going to win. There have been realistic third-party challenges before (Teddy Roosevelt, Wallace, Perot), but no third party candidate will win a single state this election. If there was going to be a credible independent, we'd know by now. The news would be all over it. There simply isn't time for anyone not from the two major parties to get the name recognition and campaign going for 2016. Neither the Libertarians nor the Greens are going to become credible without some big changes. (The last time I looked at a Libertarian platform, it was clearly a document to publicize ideology and not anything to govern by.)
So, you're saying that only news outlets that endorse your favored candidate are respectable?
You can't handle the raw news. Seriously. There's far too much of it. Even for a small incident, it can involve video footage, interviews (which are of course affected by the questions asked), additional research, hours of monitoring of Twitter and Facebook, and so forth. News outlets take all that stuff and condense it down into summaries that are small enough to be absorbed without a great deal of time and effort, and they may add background information. It would be useful to have all the source material available, to be able to dig into the details, but I don't expect that to happen any time soon.
You mean the 90% of the web that you use, because that isn't the case for lots and lots of sites. When you give the temporary permission, what do you give it to? Everything on the page (which means that time.com is a danger) or the domain of the URL (which breaks quite a few sites nowadays)?
That's getting really hard to do. I used to rely on NoScript for my main defense, and when I wanted to use a site I'd allow the scripts through that came from that domain, and everything worked fairly well. In the last few years, I found that more and more sites are using scripts from somewhere else, with no clear idea of what "somewhere else" means. This means that, to get a site to work, it is necessary to enable script sources more or less randomly until it works. (I figure that my main threat is advertisements, XSS, and other ways to run malicious scripts that are not from the site I'm at. Foolishly or not, I'm willing to take my chances with scripts on the sites themselves.)
What we'd need is for the site to list somehow which script sources it uses, as opposed to whatever is dumped in from elsewhere, and the browser (or plug-in) to block scripts on that basis. Realistically, that would tick off advertisers to the point that it isn't going to happen. People are not going to stop web-surfing because of an abstract threat. I don't have a solution here.
I do consider taxes useful for behavior modification, although I'm not real comfortable with that. I believe carbon taxes will internalize some market externalities and therefore make the economy reduce carbon dioxide emissions more efficiently. I believe that one of the important roles of government in the economy is to reduce externality and principal agent problems.
The science that says that we're causing global warming is very strong and sound. However, I don't see all that many people claiming that global warming is happening but people don't cause it. There used to be a lot more. The thing about human causation is that, if the warming is not caused by us, we may not be able to stop it.
We might be able to work carbon taxes into surcharges on imported goods, and that would influence China and other nations. Since developed countries cause the most CO2 emissions, directly or indirectly, such surcharges would have a significant effect. China seems to be working on getting away from fossil fuels, likely because of their extreme pollution problems.
The other suggestions I've seen are generally from research institutes, not altruistic individuals. It's likely that they would get government attention if worked out. It's happened before. One advantage to these schemes is that a large government could do a lot on its own, without worrying about countries like China.
I agree with your low-hanging fruit, but the real challenge is to get that happening. This is a very large Tragedy of the Commons issue.
The advertising and media coverage you mention from the 1970s was there, but we seem to disagree on the consequences. I maintain that the changes were done on a large scale, and that individual choices and altruism had little to do with it, other than increased acceptance of what was happening. McDonald's switched from plastic to cardboard to hold its burgers. Companies making aerosol cans switched to non-CFC propellant. This wasn't a case of consumers en masse deliberately buying non-CFC products that were more expensive and inferior.
Understood. My comment was in response to geekmux.
Some of us are dexterity-impaired. I've gotten very good at not hurting myself when I fall, but that doesn't necessarily apply to what I'm carrying.
Apple makes its money on hardware, and OSX helps sell hardware. Apple tried licensing OSX to other OEMs once, and it was not a financial success. I don't think the market for selling OSes is there for anyone other than Microsoft.
Apple wants the experience of using their products to be pleasant, and they do that in laptops by controlling the whole environment. They can save a lot of compatibility testing that way, too.
The IBM PC was not seen as a strategic move. It was pretty much what an IBM division could put together on a low budget, to cash in on the new and potentially lucrative microcomputer market. It was obviously not going to replace real computers, and if the customer wanted to talk to the mainframe they could buy 3270 terminals (IBM later had PCs that doubled as 3270 terminals). There was no sort of strategic vision at first that said where the IBM PC would fit in. Initially, much PC software ran slower than its CP/M equivalent, since it was the CP/M assembler source run through an instruction-level translator.
I wouldn't say CP/M dominated the business computer market, since there were a large number of Apple IIs running Visicalc out there ("large" being relative to the time, as the small computer market had not yet exploded), frequently a result of an accountant buying his own Apple to use Visicalc.
Sure, but we're talking about IBM's projections for the PC, not what other people were able to do with it.
The person most likely to be the next President is against it in its final form. Nor am I at all sure it would pass a two-thirds vote in the Senate.
Sure. However, the situations are not comparable. If the police illegally find your wife's head, you have no basic right to have the evidence excluded. The exclusion is an attempt to solve a serious problem, in which LEOs would violate basic rights pretty much with impunity, and the details are not based on a general legal principle.
Facebook is not obligated to act on such official requests. (They are obligated to act on court orders, but there wasn't one in this case.) Their cooperation was voluntary. They have the right to suspend their services for any reason, unless there's an agreement to the contrary (and Facebook sure doesn't have one with me).
Your right to access someone else's web site is not inalienable. Facebook is not an arm of the government.
The ruling is essentially that the police can't do everything. They can't protect everyone. They can't even try. They have no specific duty to protect anyone, just a general duty with no actual legal force behind it.
Police often put other people's lives over their own. That doesn't mean they shouldn't return fire or hesitate to stop someone who's armed, irrational, and dangerous.
They should have de-escalated the situation if possible, and police in this country are often sadly deficient in this skill and attitude. However, the first thing to do when facing an imminent lethal threat is to eliminate the threat, and then de-escalate what's left. She was a very serious threat to the cops, and they're humans just like you and me and Donald Trump.
Speaking as a person on the autism spectrum who suffers from clinical depression, I would really really prefer it if "mental illness" and "mental health problems" were not considered name calling. The woman's actions, as I understand them, are consistent with untreated mental illness (or treated, for that matter, since treatment isn't normally completely successful), and I consider that reasonable speculation.