Million year old diseases are not going to be adapted to attack humans.
Actually the risk is worse for diseases that have just "made the hop" from another species and haven't yet adapted to keep the infected organism living. There's selection pressure to keep the victim alive, or alive longer, so as to spread more effectively, and becoming a long-term parasite or symbiont is better yet.
But I'm not particularly concerned: Current organisms have had millions of years to improve their defenses against all the pathological processes to which they've been exposed in the intervening times. I would not expect any useful biological attack strategy to have been completely lost and not "reinvented" over that time. Resurrected diseases are almost certain to be wimpybug, not superbug.
Considering how disruptive it can be to introduce species from other geographic regions, I can't imagine that bringing back specimens from millenia ago is going to be very prudent.
I'm not too worried.
The rest of the biosphere has had megayears of the Red Queen's Race to get better at offense and defense - especially with chemical warfare and intelligence. A resurrected fossil - even with resurrections of its ecological support network to help out - is still likely to be at a severe disadvantage. The problem IMHO is more likely to be able to keep it alive than to keep it from getting out of hand.
Without a spore stage, the degradation of DNA and cellular machinery could be severe, and even bringing back a vertebrate encased in amber could be excruciatingly difficult (if possible at all).
But multicelled animals provide multiple copies of their DNA. Multiple samples can be sequenced and error-correction computations performed to arrive at an error-free transcription.
Once you have that you can use the same techniques that are currently being developed for cloning a copy of a modern organism from a sample of differentiated tissue.
This whole fisasco has to make one question the firms grasp of technology and law.
Especially their grasp of the law.
This is one case where a clearly correct analogy exists to print and broadcast media: If a print newspaper or broadcast news operation published the same information about the member lawyers, using their company name and giving their firm's contact information, they'd clearly be exercising "nominative fair use". The web site has clearly done exactly the same thin in a different medium.
In particular: How is this different from a print newspaper article delivered by FAX?
If a law firm wants to demonstrate competence when filing suits on its own behalf - especially when setting precedents where the outcome is virtually certain based on existing law - it should stick to those where the law is on their side. Such a firm should be advising their clients not to waste their time and money filing such losing suits. If they're willing to waste their OWN time and money in the same way what does that say about the advice they'd give a paying client?
The paralysis of the muscles around the eyes, along with the surgery to return her eye to its socket and close the lid around it, changed her facial expressions - in a way that makes her look unemotional in some situations and makes cops think (unconsciously) that she looks like a criminal sociopath - and act accordingly toward her.
It also gives her pathological nystagmus - abnormal eye motion - which made her fail the first screening of the field sobriety tests, where the cop looks at the driver's eye motion before deciding to pull them from the car for more extensive harassment. (She was working near a police academy and it got to where the cops would pull her over every night and burn an hour of her time using her to train the students.)
major issues identified in the last presidential election have not been corrected,... How long can we afford to trust our elections to black box voting practices?
No longer.
The downside to identifying the vulnerabilities: If they aren't fixed there are now a LOT of people who can exploit them. In politics there are plenty of people who will.
So regardless of whether there was cheating before there will be cheating now - including cheating by others than those who could (and perhaps did) when the particular holes were not yet public knowledge.
If there are a LOT more of them than of YOUR mob you should want the elections to TELL you so. Then you and "your guy" can give up and go away quietly, rather than end up covered in tar and feathers while you twist slowly in the wind.
If voters can not have faith in the system of elections, then the voters cannot have faith in their government.
More importantly:
If the LOSERS can not have faith in the system of elections, they may convince themselves that they have enough support to reverse the result by force.
The real purpose of elections is not some kind of fairness. It is to head off civil war by convincing the losers of the election that they'd lose the war too. Thus the perception of fair elections is stabilizing and the perception of massive cheating destabilizing.
For this purpose it's OK to come out wrong if the election is very close. But if it is perceived that the election was so badly off that it reversed a landslide, it doesn't just lose its stabilizing effect: It becomes actively destabilizing, causing the losers to believe that a war to reverse it is not just possible, but justified.
Of course the easiest way to create the perception of fair elections is for the elections to actually BE fair and to be fair in a way that is VISIBLE and can be CHECKED.
How do people that young get access to tools to build these things?
At this point (according to one of TFAs, the other is slashdotted) it looks like he hasn't built anything. He's only done some modeling. Now he's looking for somebody to build a prototype and see if the real world behaves like the model.
And if it doesn't it's not his fault - it's the tool's.
So your question should be "How do people that young get access to tools to model these things?"
Answer: Good schools, good teachers, and maybe a corporate grant program.
Any bets on whether Meadow Park Middle School is a government-run public school?
... air flight is now the mode of transport for the wretched masses that used to be confined to the bus.
Unless they're on the no-fly list. Or look middle-eastern. Or are carrying nontrivial amounts of cash. Or don't want the continual hassle and abrogation of basic human rights that takes place in airports as a cost of admission to the plane.
It's one thing for "stupid" people to exist.
on
Plane Simple Truth
·
· Score: 1
stupid people exist. deal with it. nothing you will ever do will change that
It's one thing for "stupid" people to exist. It's quite another to deliberately take advantage of them by systematically misleading them on scientific issues they are incapable of checking on for themselves in order to warp public policy and swing elections.
While his examples may have been anecdotal, they do correspond to what has been happening in the auto industry.
Fuel economy - at least on the emissions-test operating cycle (which produces the mileage displayed on the stickers as a side-effect) has been a design consideration ever since its display for comparison was mandated. Part of that was the CAFE (corporate average fuel economy) requirements, but more of it was comparison shopping by buyers.
The replacement of mechanical/pneumatic computation with digital engine control computers, along with improvements in materials, research into combustion, modeling of airflow and mechanical design, and decades of engineering work, have enabled major improvements in engine, powertrain, suspension, body shape, and other factors affecting fuel economy - with a cumulative effect that is drastic.
The appearance of corporate hostility to fuel economy is largely an illusion. The companies are indifferent to anything but their bottom line - but they do try to improve fuel economy in cases where it sells cars.
The issue with SUVs is an unintended consequence of regulations intended to improve fuel economy. SUVs are regulated as "trucks" and outside the CAFE computation. (Their original {and still necessary} primary use is as a utility vehicle for remote locations - such a ranches in rugged terrain. They're "SPORTS-utility" because some people used them for recreation in similar driving situations.) Tightening CAFE standards killed the station wagon. So families which needed room for kids and hauling stuff home bought them as the next least expensive alternitive. Then they got used as a commuter vehicle in lieu of buying an additional car. Once that became popular (and most SUVs weren't going off-road) the car companies advertised them to that market and retweaked the vehicle characteristics to attract a bigger share of the "mall-terrain vehicle" crowd - to the point that some models were ruined for off-road function and lost their original market.
Of course this means that the eco-wackos are pushing to apply CAFE to SUVs. Which would just push the city customers up to the NEXT bigger gas hogs - vans and urban light trucks - while wrecking things for people in rural areas who really need an SUV for its original purpose. The car companies would be happy to sell station wagons again (or some other multi-passenger, high cargo capacity vehicle) - with better fuel economy, comfier ride, better safety on freeways, and a bigger market. But the regulations would have to change the other way for that to be practical.
It's important to remember the RIAA members control distribution. Letting net radio operate at a discount or even the same rates as broadcast is a non-starter.
It's also important to remember that the RIAA members also own most of the radio stations. The internet is their competition for earlobes, which they could otherwise sell to advertisers.
This is a bit like saying there is no business case for doing something about climate change....
Oh, no! Now we have a Global Warming take on IPv6 adoption!
I think it's time for a new version of Godwin's law with Global Warming / Climate Change substituted for NAZIs:
As a scientific, technological, or political discussion or grant proposal grows longer, the probability of an assertion of a tie-in to climate change approaches one.
= = =
I realize you may have had a serious point. But (like NAZI analogies) the global warming tie-in has been used so often, and so inappropriately, that it's painful to read past it to search for any real meat in such a posting.
This has been the pattern for decades: Ford invents, then sits on it. Then another company - usually GM but sometimes Chrysler, Toyota, etc. - comes out with the same thing and Ford plays catch-up.
I recall, decades ago, when Ann Arbor was about to repave Division street - the main north-south drag for the core city. They were going to do it up properly so it would last.
They'd had a lot of trouble with utilities tearing up the roads to work on their underground stuff, then not restoring them adequately. (In southern Michigan winters this resulted in frost heaves that soon tore the road back open, resulting in the need for more repairs - sometimes over and over. By which time the information about which utility had torn it up originally had been lost.)
They couldn't really ban them from digging up the street to work on their stuff.
So they passed a new ordinance that would result in a MAJOR cost for any company that tore up the street AFTER it was redone, for a decade or so, and gave 'em some large number of months to get their underground installations fixed up and upgraded before the repaving. (I think they imposed some "fee" - read "fine" or "tax" - but don't know the details.)
That street was dug up all summer as the several utility companies rebuilt everything under it and installed new conduit and manholes for future expansion. (Better to get it in now, while there's no special issues on doing the work, than take the chance that the city's post-repaving gotchas would stick in court - or cost more in court fees to get them struck.)
And that road surface stayed pristine for years.
Now it seems to me that, if this telco wants to play hardball, this municipality could find similar stuff to do to them. B-)
Granted that the courts might eventually strike down whatever the city does as unfair competition, too. But it would still cost the telco more money to get that to happen - and tit-for-tat is well recognized as a very successful strategy.
Downside is it needs to be done in a way that doesn't end up stalling both projects while the citizens sit on their thumbs waiting for an internet connection.
= = = =
Also: Didn't a federal court just strike early-termination fees for cell phone providers? Might be possible to go after that if the telco does a long-term contract lockin to try to keep the citizens on their net once the delayed city net is live.
In a nutshell the telco is suing the city with the justification that they are protecting the city from itself? I think I would have a lot more respect if they just came right out and said they didn't want the city as competition.
In the same statement they said that was the SECOND reason for suing the city.
Naw... if you really want to power-cycle it, just disrupt the electrical service to the entire city. You'd probably have to leave it off for a fair length of time, though, in case the device was on UPS.
They did that a few years ago with the rotating blackouts. Didn't help.
I can sympathize. After seeing it being played, and finding out it was fully supported under WINE, I bought the orange box. First computer game I ever bought. (Now if I can only find the time to PLAY it...)
Slashdot Mirror
This could produce a new bread flavor, as different from baker's yeast and sourdough breads as they are from each other.
Million year old diseases are not going to be adapted to attack humans.
Actually the risk is worse for diseases that have just "made the hop" from another species and haven't yet adapted to keep the infected organism living. There's selection pressure to keep the victim alive, or alive longer, so as to spread more effectively, and becoming a long-term parasite or symbiont is better yet.
But I'm not particularly concerned: Current organisms have had millions of years to improve their defenses against all the pathological processes to which they've been exposed in the intervening times. I would not expect any useful biological attack strategy to have been completely lost and not "reinvented" over that time. Resurrected diseases are almost certain to be wimpybug, not superbug.
Considering how disruptive it can be to introduce species from other geographic regions, I can't imagine that bringing back specimens from millenia ago is going to be very prudent.
I'm not too worried.
The rest of the biosphere has had megayears of the Red Queen's Race to get better at offense and defense - especially with chemical warfare and intelligence. A resurrected fossil - even with resurrections of its ecological support network to help out - is still likely to be at a severe disadvantage. The problem IMHO is more likely to be able to keep it alive than to keep it from getting out of hand.
Without a spore stage, the degradation of DNA and cellular machinery could be severe, and even bringing back a vertebrate encased in amber could be excruciatingly difficult (if possible at all).
But multicelled animals provide multiple copies of their DNA. Multiple samples can be sequenced and error-correction computations performed to arrive at an error-free transcription.
Once you have that you can use the same techniques that are currently being developed for cloning a copy of a modern organism from a sample of differentiated tissue.
This whole fisasco has to make one question the firms grasp of technology and law.
Especially their grasp of the law.
This is one case where a clearly correct analogy exists to print and broadcast media: If a print newspaper or broadcast news operation published the same information about the member lawyers, using their company name and giving their firm's contact information, they'd clearly be exercising "nominative fair use". The web site has clearly done exactly the same thin in a different medium.
In particular: How is this different from a print newspaper article delivered by FAX?
If a law firm wants to demonstrate competence when filing suits on its own behalf - especially when setting precedents where the outcome is virtually certain based on existing law - it should stick to those where the law is on their side. Such a firm should be advising their clients not to waste their time and money filing such losing suits. If they're willing to waste their OWN time and money in the same way what does that say about the advice they'd give a paying client?
...And most importantly, skin colour?
Not to mention people with Graves' Disease.
A lady of my acquaintance had a bad case of it.
The paralysis of the muscles around the eyes, along with the surgery to return her eye to its socket and close the lid around it, changed her facial expressions - in a way that makes her look unemotional in some situations and makes cops think (unconsciously) that she looks like a criminal sociopath - and act accordingly toward her.
It also gives her pathological nystagmus - abnormal eye motion - which made her fail the first screening of the field sobriety tests, where the cop looks at the driver's eye motion before deciding to pull them from the car for more extensive harassment. (She was working near a police academy and it got to where the cops would pull her over every night and burn an hour of her time using her to train the students.)
So here we go again...
Realized just after hitting "submit":
We are about to (or perhaps just did) cross the threshold where elections can be stolen by scriptkiddies.
Next step is dueling gangs and tampering software that protects itself against other tampering software...
major issues identified in the last presidential election have not been corrected, ... How long can we afford to trust our elections to black box voting practices?
No longer.
The downside to identifying the vulnerabilities: If they aren't fixed there are now a LOT of people who can exploit them. In politics there are plenty of people who will.
So regardless of whether there was cheating before there will be cheating now - including cheating by others than those who could (and perhaps did) when the particular holes were not yet public knowledge.
As long as my guy wins, who cares right?
The mob with the pitchforks and torches.
If there are a LOT more of them than of YOUR mob you should want the elections to TELL you so. Then you and "your guy" can give up and go away quietly, rather than end up covered in tar and feathers while you twist slowly in the wind.
If voters can not have faith in the system of elections, then the voters cannot have faith in their government.
More importantly:
If the LOSERS can not have faith in the system of elections, they may convince themselves that they have enough support to reverse the result by force.
The real purpose of elections is not some kind of fairness. It is to head off civil war by convincing the losers of the election that they'd lose the war too. Thus the perception of fair elections is stabilizing and the perception of massive cheating destabilizing.
For this purpose it's OK to come out wrong if the election is very close. But if it is perceived that the election was so badly off that it reversed a landslide, it doesn't just lose its stabilizing effect: It becomes actively destabilizing, causing the losers to believe that a war to reverse it is not just possible, but justified.
Of course the easiest way to create the perception of fair elections is for the elections to actually BE fair and to be fair in a way that is VISIBLE and can be CHECKED.
How do people that young get access to tools to build these things?
At this point (according to one of TFAs, the other is slashdotted) it looks like he hasn't built anything. He's only done some modeling. Now he's looking for somebody to build a prototype and see if the real world behaves like the model.
And if it doesn't it's not his fault - it's the tool's.
So your question should be "How do people that young get access to tools to model these things?"
Answer: Good schools, good teachers, and maybe a corporate grant program.
Any bets on whether Meadow Park Middle School is a government-run public school?
... air flight is now the mode of transport for the wretched masses that used to be confined to the bus.
Unless they're on the no-fly list. Or look middle-eastern. Or are carrying nontrivial amounts of cash. Or don't want the continual hassle and abrogation of basic human rights that takes place in airports as a cost of admission to the plane.
stupid people exist. deal with it. nothing you will ever do will change that
It's one thing for "stupid" people to exist. It's quite another to deliberately take advantage of them by systematically misleading them on scientific issues they are incapable of checking on for themselves in order to warp public policy and swing elections.
One is unfortunate. The other is evil.
While his examples may have been anecdotal, they do correspond to what has been happening in the auto industry.
Fuel economy - at least on the emissions-test operating cycle (which produces the mileage displayed on the stickers as a side-effect) has been a design consideration ever since its display for comparison was mandated. Part of that was the CAFE (corporate average fuel economy) requirements, but more of it was comparison shopping by buyers.
The replacement of mechanical/pneumatic computation with digital engine control computers, along with improvements in materials, research into combustion, modeling of airflow and mechanical design, and decades of engineering work, have enabled major improvements in engine, powertrain, suspension, body shape, and other factors affecting fuel economy - with a cumulative effect that is drastic.
The appearance of corporate hostility to fuel economy is largely an illusion. The companies are indifferent to anything but their bottom line - but they do try to improve fuel economy in cases where it sells cars.
The issue with SUVs is an unintended consequence of regulations intended to improve fuel economy. SUVs are regulated as "trucks" and outside the CAFE computation. (Their original {and still necessary} primary use is as a utility vehicle for remote locations - such a ranches in rugged terrain. They're "SPORTS-utility" because some people used them for recreation in similar driving situations.) Tightening CAFE standards killed the station wagon. So families which needed room for kids and hauling stuff home bought them as the next least expensive alternitive. Then they got used as a commuter vehicle in lieu of buying an additional car. Once that became popular (and most SUVs weren't going off-road) the car companies advertised them to that market and retweaked the vehicle characteristics to attract a bigger share of the "mall-terrain vehicle" crowd - to the point that some models were ruined for off-road function and lost their original market.
Of course this means that the eco-wackos are pushing to apply CAFE to SUVs. Which would just push the city customers up to the NEXT bigger gas hogs - vans and urban light trucks - while wrecking things for people in rural areas who really need an SUV for its original purpose. The car companies would be happy to sell station wagons again (or some other multi-passenger, high cargo capacity vehicle) - with better fuel economy, comfier ride, better safety on freeways, and a bigger market. But the regulations would have to change the other way for that to be practical.
It's important to remember the RIAA members control distribution. Letting net radio operate at a discount or even the same rates as broadcast is a non-starter.
It's also important to remember that the RIAA members also own most of the radio stations. The internet is their competition for earlobes, which they could otherwise sell to advertisers.
This is a bit like saying there is no business case for doing something about climate change. ...
Oh, no! Now we have a Global Warming take on IPv6 adoption!
I think it's time for a new version of Godwin's law with Global Warming / Climate Change substituted for NAZIs:
As a scientific, technological, or political discussion or grant proposal grows longer, the probability of an assertion of a tie-in to climate change approaches one.
= = =
I realize you may have had a serious point. But (like NAZI analogies) the global warming tie-in has been used so often, and so inappropriately, that it's painful to read past it to search for any real meat in such a posting.
Can't sell networking equipment into the gadget capital of the world unless it does v6.
I know. Because we do.
Interestingly, the name for intelligence derived from analyzijng public information (rather than spying) is "open sources".
Note the trailing "s".
... until GM does it first.
This has been the pattern for decades: Ford invents, then sits on it. Then another company - usually GM but sometimes Chrysler, Toyota, etc. - comes out with the same thing and Ford plays catch-up.
- Staple two IBM tab cards together along one narrow and about 3/4 of two long sides.
- Fold down the top of one card.
- Stuff in pocket.
Stable loops of light in plasma. I wonder if this might be related to ball lightning?
I recall, decades ago, when Ann Arbor was about to repave Division street - the main north-south drag for the core city. They were going to do it up properly so it would last.
They'd had a lot of trouble with utilities tearing up the roads to work on their underground stuff, then not restoring them adequately. (In southern Michigan winters this resulted in frost heaves that soon tore the road back open, resulting in the need for more repairs - sometimes over and over. By which time the information about which utility had torn it up originally had been lost.)
They couldn't really ban them from digging up the street to work on their stuff.
So they passed a new ordinance that would result in a MAJOR cost for any company that tore up the street AFTER it was redone, for a decade or so, and gave 'em some large number of months to get their underground installations fixed up and upgraded before the repaving. (I think they imposed some "fee" - read "fine" or "tax" - but don't know the details.)
That street was dug up all summer as the several utility companies rebuilt everything under it and installed new conduit and manholes for future expansion. (Better to get it in now, while there's no special issues on doing the work, than take the chance that the city's post-repaving gotchas would stick in court - or cost more in court fees to get them struck.)
And that road surface stayed pristine for years.
Now it seems to me that, if this telco wants to play hardball, this municipality could find similar stuff to do to them. B-)
Granted that the courts might eventually strike down whatever the city does as unfair competition, too. But it would still cost the telco more money to get that to happen - and tit-for-tat is well recognized as a very successful strategy.
Downside is it needs to be done in a way that doesn't end up stalling both projects while the citizens sit on their thumbs waiting for an internet connection.
= = = =
Also: Didn't a federal court just strike early-termination fees for cell phone providers? Might be possible to go after that if the telco does a long-term contract lockin to try to keep the citizens on their net once the delayed city net is live.
In a nutshell the telco is suing the city with the justification that they are protecting the city from itself? I think I would have a lot more respect if they just came right out and said they didn't want the city as competition.
In the same statement they said that was the SECOND reason for suing the city.
Naw... if you really want to power-cycle it, just disrupt the electrical service to the entire city. You'd probably have to leave it off for a fair length of time, though, in case the device was on UPS.
They did that a few years ago with the rotating blackouts. Didn't help.
Where's Enron when you need them?
Some of the moderators REALLY LIKE Portal.
I can sympathize. After seeing it being played, and finding out it was fully supported under WINE, I bought the orange box. First computer game I ever bought. (Now if I can only find the time to PLAY it...)