The best way to get the attention of congress is to have one of the IP stooges lose an election.
Identify one of the prominent supporters of SOPA/PIPA who is weak in his district and support his challenger in the next primary and general election.
When a congressman loses a seat for taking on a third-rail issue, the surviving congressmen remember that for decades.
That's what AIPAC does. You don't see any congressmen criticizing Israel, do you?
Strategically, it would be best to attack somebody who is a jerk on other issues too; in other words, an all-around jerk.
The only problem is that it's hard in this country to defeat a well-financed incumbent, no matter how much he sells out the interests of his constituents.
But it does happen. I give democracy about 50% odds.
According to TFA, the DHS hasn't disclosed the radiation.
Radiation capable of penetrating a centimeter of steel plate, as these machines are, is also in the high mark for radiation dosage.
I thought they expect the driver and passengers to get out of the car while they x-ray it. There's no fucking way I'm going to be in a car with that much radiation.
If the driver is supposed to drive through the radiation, as in the illustration, we're talking about giving cancer to 1 driver in every 1,000 who crosses the border. How many is that?
If I pick you out of the U.S. population at random, you already have a 10% average chance of developing type II diabetes. If you have a family history of diabetes, that confirms it. So whatever it is you're going to do with that information, do it.
If a genetic test tells you that you have a 10% higher chance than average of developing type II diabetes -- that is, 11% -- would you do anything more than you wouldn't do otherwise?
The answer is no. The additional information from these genetic tests for type II diabetes has such a small effect that they wouldn't make any difference.
People *already* have a pretty good idea of their genetic background from their family history. If your parents had diabetes, that tells you as accurately as any genetic test that you have a predisposition. If your grandfather lost a leg to complications of diabetes, that's the kind of thing that motivates people. Which makes sense.
As for warfarin, yes, different people have different responses and doctors are working out a test to find out in advance. I don't know how far they've gotten, but I expect they'll have a good test someday soon.
However, (1) The doctor doesn't need that information until he prescribes warfarin and (2) You don't have to sequence 3 billion base pairs of DNA to find out. The tests they're working on only test for single enzymes (actually, it's usually easier and cheaper to test for the enzymes than for the DNA that synthesizes the enzyme).
This isn't like sickle cell anemia. These genetic traits that show up in the tests have very low penetrance. The penetrance for sickle cell anemia is 100%. The penetrance for these diabetes genes is 1%.
What you're watching is a bunch of guys who have been burning through billions of dollars on the War On Cancer, and still haven't been about to cure (most) cancers. They've hit a few home runs, like chronic myelocytic leukemia and acute lymphocytic leukemia in children, and some of the major cancers have longer life expectancies and less brutal treatments, but it never delivered the promise Mary Lasker and Richard Nixon made of curing cancer (thought it's better than pissing it away on the military). We've learned. Curing cancer is difficult.
You're also watching a bunch of guys who have followed so many wild goose chases that they don't want to follow another one.
Back in the 1990s, I wrote an article predicting the wonderful world of computerized courts in the 21st Century. You'd go into the court records office, press a few buttons, and your documents would appear on the screen like magic. (According to IBM.) Then around 2005 I had to go down to the Federal courthouse in Manhattan to look up the documents in a patent trial that was going on there. I will leave it to your imagination. It was easier to get court documents in Herman Melville's time.
OK, you run it through this wonderful statistics software and it gives you a list.
Your doctor says, "Normally you would have a 10% chance of getting breast cancer (when you're still young enough that treating it would make a difference), so you should get a mammogram every 2 years. But you have a 5% increased chance for breast cancer, so you have a 10.5% chance of getting breast cancer. You *really* should get a mammogram every 2 years."
There is an increasing list of mutations that really do make a significant difference in risk, like 50% or 85% risk, such as BRCA1 and BRCA2 for breast cancer. I think it's up to a couple of hundred by now. Most of them are fairly rare, with the disease occurring in maybe 1/100,000 births. Most of the people who have these genes know that they have it in their family. (Another difficulty is that unlike breast cancer many of these diseases have no cure or treatment.)
You could make a single gene chip to test for all of these genes, although it's a waste to test me for sickle cell anemia since I don't have any Mediterranean or African ancestry, and it's a waste to test me for Huntington's disease since I've never had it in my family. But if it's cheap enough, and the patents expire, you might as well make a singe test for all the *known* mutations to test at birth. But there's no benefit in sequencing the *entire* 3 billion bp human genome, given our current state of understanding and our understanding any time in the near (5-10 years) future.
There are some useful genetic tests to diagnose cancers for example. You're 60 years old, you get a routine blood test, and you have chronic lymphocytic leukemia. Now there's a DNA test. For patients with a marker called ZAP-70, median survival is 5 years. For patients without the ZAP-70 marker, median survival is 25-30 years (without treatment). Big difference.
Sequencing your entire genome is a cool thing to do. I'd like to have a copy of my entire genome sequence, so every time I read about the discovery of a new function for a gene, I could look up my allele. It's about as cool as a backyard telescope and about as useful.
Yes, you bring your doctor a thumb drive with 3 billion base pairs of your genome, coding for 23,000 genes. Do you know what he says?
"What am I supposed to do with that?"
Years ago, people thought that we could find Mendelian genes for all the important things in health and disease. Now it turns out that most of the important things we want to know are controlled by hundreds or thousands of genes, each of which increases the risk by 1%, sometimes less. That's for things like cholesterol, autoimmune diseases, cancer susceptibility, etc.
For the most part, your family history is a better predictor than any genome screening. Gene tests usually aren't useful unless you have a particular gene in your family and you want to find out whether you have it, like the BRCA genes for breast cancer. If your mother died of breast cancer at age 40 because of the BRCA1 gene, and you don't have the BRCA1 gene, you don't have to worry.
I'm a science nerd, and I've learned a little bit of computer programming over the years.
Learn to code, get a job? Ridiculous.
I programmed some scientific formulas in FORTRAN in college.
I wrote a program in Business BASIC to replace my bookkeeping system. (It was more trouble than paper. I went back to paper.)
During the DOS days, I programmed elaborate batch files to zip and save my backup files on floppy disks. I wrote elaborate macros for XyWrite and WordPerfect, which worked pretty well. I wrote Lotus 123 macros to finally automate my bookkeeping system.
When the Internet came, I created my own web site in HTML.
Even during the hottest computer bubbles, I've never heard anybody say, "We're desperate! We need somebody who knows a little bit of HTML!" Or any other program you could pick up in a week of all-nighters.
I looked into computer programming because it would have been fun (and some people were getting really rich). But I couldn't get a job with my introductory skills.
I figure that it would have taken me at least six months to a year to learn some programming-related skills well enough to earn my keep as you trained me.
If you paid my expenses for a year, gave me the hardware I needed, gave me access to people who knew how to teach computer concepts and guide me in self-instruction, surrounded me with people who were obsessed with doing the same thing, and we spent all our time working on computers, talking about computers, meeting smart computer people, and helping each other with our problems (with an occasional break for a party) -- I think I would have been a competent programmer at the end. I might even have been good. Maybe very good.
That sounds a lot like what a college is supposed to do. The main difference is that in the U.S., you pay your own (exhorbitant) college expenses, and your own living expenses besides. If you want to make a mid-career transition, you have to spend your retirement fund. That's in contrast to many other countries. Maybe that's why Linus Torvalds came from Finland. Maybe that's why German workers are making twice as much as U.S. workers.
(NYC Mayor Bloomberg is really hypocritical. He's talking up these low-budget old-fashioned online textbooks at the same time that he's raising tuition and cutting staff salaries at the City University of New York, which is NYC's real engine of innovation, science, technology, engineering, high-tech industry, economic development, all that good stuff http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_affiliated_with_the_City_University_of_New_York . His MBA-style educational fads are also destroying the public education system. He's destroying the neighborhood public library. Lesson for Bloomberg: When you've got something working very well, don't destroy it.)
Fortunately I have science skills in other areas (biomedical) that were also fun, where I could advance my skills and make a living. Unfortunately, I'll never have the satisfaction of writing a really good computer program. But I did learn how the cell works, and the cell nucleus, the cell membrane, DNA, and what causes cancer. I've met Nobel laureates and cancer researchers. That's a good life too.
This idea is decades old -- testing substances in tissue culture. The Frauenhofer guys have come up with an interesting improvement.
It will never replace most of the animal testing.
Researchers do tissue culture testing all the time. Then after the tissue culture tests, they have to see if it still works in the rats. Lots of times it doesn't. That's especially true with cancer treatments. There are lots of pathways in real animals, and they interfere with each other, particularly liver enzymes.
We cured cancer in tissue culture many times. Then they try to repeat it in animals and it doesn't work.
And lots of animal testing has nothing to do with activating a receptor. How can you send a tissue culture through a maze? This is especially a problem for discovering harmful effects of consumer products.
It is true that under some circumstances, voluntarily going through a scanner would be interpreted as consent.
According to the lawyers I spoke to, you should first ask "Why?" That puts their reason on record. They're requierd to have an "articulable reason" to demand a search. A "hunch" alone isn't enough of a reason to demand a search.
The next question to ask is, "Am I legally required to let you search me?"
If they say, "Yes," you say, "I won't prevent you from searching me, but I'm not giving you consent."
It does make a difference, because if they search you without a legally valid reason, and you don't give consent, then everything they find during the search is not admissible in court.
So it might make the difference between going to jail or not. That's a distinction with a difference.
They didn't ask. I didn't say anything. I just had to go through the scanner and send my bags through the x-ray machine in order to get onto the plane.
If someone came up to me at an airport outside of the screening station, I would follow the advice of the last lawyer I spoke to and ask, "Why?"
No, sometimes they have probable cause to justify a search, sometimes they don't.
If they have probable cause, they're going to search you with or without your consent, and might pile a charge on you of resisting arrest or failing to follow a lawful order.
If they *don't* have probable cause, it gets sticky.
If they don't have probable cause, they'll ask for your consent. A lot of people give their consent. A friend of mine in California gave a cop permission to search him, because he didn't think he had done anything wrong, and then a piece of hashish that he had forgotten about popped out of his jacket pocket.
In principle, they could search you anyway. The search would be illegal, and they couldn't use anything they find to prosecute you, but you'd have to establish that it was illegal. That's not as difficult as it may sound. Lots of cases get thrown out because of illegal search. The facts of the case are a jury decision. It's not impossible to get a jury that would believe you.
You could refuse to allow inspection, but you can't go onto the subway at that entrance.
It seemed to me that it would be possible to leave the subway, and walk down the street to another entrance of the same subway stop. Since the inspections are random spot-checks anyway, they're unlikely to select the same person twice. (Unless you have a beard or are carrying something in Arabic, or just look different.)
There was a college student in New York who let the cops search his bags, and they found a copy of the New York Review of Books, with a cover story, "Jihad." They took him to the station and kept him there most of the day, until somebody realized how ridiculous it was.
The advice I got repeatedly from lawyers was, "Never consent to a search."
Every science student, and certainly every biology student, needs to dissect animals. They should do it in high school. Or sooner.
One of the main skills of a scientist is looking at nature. It's not the same as reading about it in a book (which is what you get in a computer). The lesson is that you're looking at the actual real world. Science teaches you how to look at the real world.
If your book says it should be one way, and your specimen is another way, then your book has a lot of explaining to do.
The other thing is you get a lot of "Oh, now I understand" moments.
For example, I dissected a cow's eye (a popular lab). The thing that impressed me about it was how thin the retina was -- it looked like an oil slick. Now I can appreciate how difficult it is to do retinal surgery, and I can appreciate the tricks eye surgeons figured to be able to do it. I read a lot of anatomy books (Netter has great drawings of the eye) but real life was different.
I can't explain how it was different. You'll just have to dissect an eye and see for yourself.
Actually Iran still has a significant Jewish community, of people who have refused offers to leave to Israel. One of the most popular TV series in Iran was a story set in WWII Europe in which an Iranian saves a Jewish woman.
The Moslem countries were actually a relatively tolerant and accepting home for Jews over 500 years.
Unlike some religions I could mention.
Re:Government responsible says, 'Look, commies'.
on
Was Russia Behind Stuxnet?
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· Score: 3, Informative
According to Juan Cole, whom I trust on Middle eastern affairs, there is no phrase in Farsi that translates to "wipe off the map."
The library owns the material. They contract out to Google the job of managing the images.
They do laminate selected clippings. I don't know how much it cost, but it's certainly >$1/page and probably >$5/page to do it in volume. These are fragile clippings that won't always easily fit through a high-volume laminating machine. If they laminated every page, they'd need 5 times the storage space. And it would be even more difficult to file them and bring them up from storage.
The New York Public Library (like all major reference libraries) has been preserving books and old paper since they opened. They have a system for de-acidifying rare books and paper. I think it costs around $10/page.
The judges will decide. Since the copyright law is so vague, they'll decide it on the basis of how much the social value of an index of all the books in all the libraries in the world overrides the (undefined) copyright rights of the authors of those books. Google lets them opt out. The issue is whether it should be opt-out or opt-in. If it's opt-in, orphan books will be effectively gone. And there are a lot of important orphan books.
The copyright laws are written broadly and generally, and they don't define specific rights for most things. Their definition of "fair use" isn't specific enough to let you know whether a particular use is fair use or not.
That's why fair use is defined by the courts, in a long series of decisions. So they don't need legislative authority. They depend on court decisions.
There are no decisions on exactly this issue, or they wouldn't be in court.
The library had a right to scan their copyrighted books. They had a right to call in an outside contractor (Google) to scan their books. They had a right to make a card catalog entry for each of those books.
They have a right to let their patrons make a copy of several pages from a book. If the book is digitized, they have a right to let their patrons read the digitized copy within the library. They have a right to let their patrons make copies from the digitized source.
The question is, do they have a right to let an outside contractor make an index of snippits for use within their own library? I think they do. If they can make a card catalog entry, it's not much different from indexing snippits. Snippits have a clear value to society.
Do they have a right to let people outside the library read snippits of the digitized book under fair use? Snippits might be as short as a sentence. This has the value to society of enabling people to conduct full-text searches through entire libraries.
If it's fair use to have a library patron come in and copy a few pages from a book, why isn't it fair use to have a library patron access that book online and read snippits?
It's reasonable to conclude under the copyright act that they do have this right.
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The best way to get the attention of congress is to have one of the IP stooges lose an election.
Identify one of the prominent supporters of SOPA/PIPA who is weak in his district and support his challenger in the next primary and general election.
When a congressman loses a seat for taking on a third-rail issue, the surviving congressmen remember that for decades.
That's what AIPAC does. You don't see any congressmen criticizing Israel, do you?
Strategically, it would be best to attack somebody who is a jerk on other issues too; in other words, an all-around jerk.
The only problem is that it's hard in this country to defeat a well-financed incumbent, no matter how much he sells out the interests of his constituents.
But it does happen. I give democracy about 50% odds.
According to TFA, the DHS hasn't disclosed the radiation.
Radiation capable of penetrating a centimeter of steel plate, as these machines are, is also in the high mark for radiation dosage.
I thought they expect the driver and passengers to get out of the car while they x-ray it. There's no fucking way I'm going to be in a car with that much radiation.
If the driver is supposed to drive through the radiation, as in the illustration, we're talking about giving cancer to 1 driver in every 1,000 who crosses the border. How many is that?
If I pick you out of the U.S. population at random, you already have a 10% average chance of developing type II diabetes. If you have a family history of diabetes, that confirms it. So whatever it is you're going to do with that information, do it.
If a genetic test tells you that you have a 10% higher chance than average of developing type II diabetes -- that is, 11% -- would you do anything more than you wouldn't do otherwise?
The answer is no. The additional information from these genetic tests for type II diabetes has such a small effect that they wouldn't make any difference.
People *already* have a pretty good idea of their genetic background from their family history. If your parents had diabetes, that tells you as accurately as any genetic test that you have a predisposition. If your grandfather lost a leg to complications of diabetes, that's the kind of thing that motivates people. Which makes sense.
As for warfarin, yes, different people have different responses and doctors are working out a test to find out in advance. I don't know how far they've gotten, but I expect they'll have a good test someday soon.
However, (1) The doctor doesn't need that information until he prescribes warfarin and (2) You don't have to sequence 3 billion base pairs of DNA to find out. The tests they're working on only test for single enzymes (actually, it's usually easier and cheaper to test for the enzymes than for the DNA that synthesizes the enzyme).
This isn't like sickle cell anemia. These genetic traits that show up in the tests have very low penetrance. The penetrance for sickle cell anemia is 100%. The penetrance for these diabetes genes is 1%.
What you're watching is a bunch of guys who have been burning through billions of dollars on the War On Cancer, and still haven't been about to cure (most) cancers. They've hit a few home runs, like chronic myelocytic leukemia and acute lymphocytic leukemia in children, and some of the major cancers have longer life expectancies and less brutal treatments, but it never delivered the promise Mary Lasker and Richard Nixon made of curing cancer (thought it's better than pissing it away on the military). We've learned. Curing cancer is difficult.
You're also watching a bunch of guys who have followed so many wild goose chases that they don't want to follow another one.
Back in the 1990s, I wrote an article predicting the wonderful world of computerized courts in the 21st Century. You'd go into the court records office, press a few buttons, and your documents would appear on the screen like magic. (According to IBM.) Then around 2005 I had to go down to the Federal courthouse in Manhattan to look up the documents in a patent trial that was going on there. I will leave it to your imagination. It was easier to get court documents in Herman Melville's time.
"There's a 0.001% possibility of a future problem. Oh, I see, 18th chromosome, 1017th pair... 0.0009% possibility."
OK, you run it through this wonderful statistics software and it gives you a list.
Your doctor says, "Normally you would have a 10% chance of getting breast cancer (when you're still young enough that treating it would make a difference), so you should get a mammogram every 2 years. But you have a 5% increased chance for breast cancer, so you have a 10.5% chance of getting breast cancer. You *really* should get a mammogram every 2 years."
There is an increasing list of mutations that really do make a significant difference in risk, like 50% or 85% risk, such as BRCA1 and BRCA2 for breast cancer. I think it's up to a couple of hundred by now. Most of them are fairly rare, with the disease occurring in maybe 1/100,000 births. Most of the people who have these genes know that they have it in their family. (Another difficulty is that unlike breast cancer many of these diseases have no cure or treatment.)
You could make a single gene chip to test for all of these genes, although it's a waste to test me for sickle cell anemia since I don't have any Mediterranean or African ancestry, and it's a waste to test me for Huntington's disease since I've never had it in my family. But if it's cheap enough, and the patents expire, you might as well make a singe test for all the *known* mutations to test at birth. But there's no benefit in sequencing the *entire* 3 billion bp human genome, given our current state of understanding and our understanding any time in the near (5-10 years) future.
There are some useful genetic tests to diagnose cancers for example. You're 60 years old, you get a routine blood test, and you have chronic lymphocytic leukemia. Now there's a DNA test. For patients with a marker called ZAP-70, median survival is 5 years. For patients without the ZAP-70 marker, median survival is 25-30 years (without treatment). Big difference.
Sequencing your entire genome is a cool thing to do. I'd like to have a copy of my entire genome sequence, so every time I read about the discovery of a new function for a gene, I could look up my allele. It's about as cool as a backyard telescope and about as useful.
Yes, you bring your doctor a thumb drive with 3 billion base pairs of your genome, coding for 23,000 genes. Do you know what he says?
"What am I supposed to do with that?"
Years ago, people thought that we could find Mendelian genes for all the important things in health and disease. Now it turns out that most of the important things we want to know are controlled by hundreds or thousands of genes, each of which increases the risk by 1%, sometimes less. That's for things like cholesterol, autoimmune diseases, cancer susceptibility, etc.
For the most part, your family history is a better predictor than any genome screening. Gene tests usually aren't useful unless you have a particular gene in your family and you want to find out whether you have it, like the BRCA genes for breast cancer. If your mother died of breast cancer at age 40 because of the BRCA1 gene, and you don't have the BRCA1 gene, you don't have to worry.
I guess it depends on the field. There are a lot of women in cell biology. The easy pickup line is, "What protein are you studying?"
I must admit that I can count the number of women engineers I've met on my fingers.
I'm a science nerd, and I've learned a little bit of computer programming over the years.
Learn to code, get a job? Ridiculous.
I programmed some scientific formulas in FORTRAN in college.
I wrote a program in Business BASIC to replace my bookkeeping system. (It was more trouble than paper. I went back to paper.)
During the DOS days, I programmed elaborate batch files to zip and save my backup files on floppy disks. I wrote elaborate macros for XyWrite and WordPerfect, which worked pretty well. I wrote Lotus 123 macros to finally automate my bookkeeping system.
When the Internet came, I created my own web site in HTML.
Even during the hottest computer bubbles, I've never heard anybody say, "We're desperate! We need somebody who knows a little bit of HTML!" Or any other program you could pick up in a week of all-nighters.
I looked into computer programming because it would have been fun (and some people were getting really rich). But I couldn't get a job with my introductory skills.
I figure that it would have taken me at least six months to a year to learn some programming-related skills well enough to earn my keep as you trained me.
If you paid my expenses for a year, gave me the hardware I needed, gave me access to people who knew how to teach computer concepts and guide me in self-instruction, surrounded me with people who were obsessed with doing the same thing, and we spent all our time working on computers, talking about computers, meeting smart computer people, and helping each other with our problems (with an occasional break for a party) -- I think I would have been a competent programmer at the end. I might even have been good. Maybe very good.
That sounds a lot like what a college is supposed to do. The main difference is that in the U.S., you pay your own (exhorbitant) college expenses, and your own living expenses besides. If you want to make a mid-career transition, you have to spend your retirement fund. That's in contrast to many other countries. Maybe that's why Linus Torvalds came from Finland. Maybe that's why German workers are making twice as much as U.S. workers.
(NYC Mayor Bloomberg is really hypocritical. He's talking up these low-budget old-fashioned online textbooks at the same time that he's raising tuition and cutting staff salaries at the City University of New York, which is NYC's real engine of innovation, science, technology, engineering, high-tech industry, economic development, all that good stuff http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_affiliated_with_the_City_University_of_New_York . His MBA-style educational fads are also destroying the public education system. He's destroying the neighborhood public library. Lesson for Bloomberg: When you've got something working very well, don't destroy it.)
Fortunately I have science skills in other areas (biomedical) that were also fun, where I could advance my skills and make a living. Unfortunately, I'll never have the satisfaction of writing a really good computer program. But I did learn how the cell works, and the cell nucleus, the cell membrane,
DNA, and what causes cancer. I've met Nobel laureates and cancer researchers. That's a good life too.
And there are more girls in biology.
This idea is decades old -- testing substances in tissue culture. The Frauenhofer guys have come up with an interesting improvement.
It will never replace most of the animal testing.
Researchers do tissue culture testing all the time. Then after the tissue culture tests, they have to see if it still works in the rats. Lots of times it doesn't. That's especially true with cancer treatments. There are lots of pathways in real animals, and they interfere with each other, particularly liver enzymes.
We cured cancer in tissue culture many times. Then they try to repeat it in animals and it doesn't work.
And lots of animal testing has nothing to do with activating a receptor. How can you send a tissue culture through a maze?
This is especially a problem for discovering harmful effects of consumer products.
It is true that under some circumstances, voluntarily going through a scanner would be interpreted as consent.
According to the lawyers I spoke to, you should first ask "Why?" That puts their reason on record. They're requierd to have an "articulable reason" to demand a search. A "hunch" alone isn't enough of a reason to demand a search.
The next question to ask is, "Am I legally required to let you search me?"
If they say, "Yes," you say, "I won't prevent you from searching me, but I'm not giving you consent."
It does make a difference, because if they search you without a legally valid reason, and you don't give consent, then everything they find during the search is not admissible in court.
So it might make the difference between going to jail or not. That's a distinction with a difference.
They didn't ask. I didn't say anything. I just had to go through the scanner and send my bags through the x-ray machine in order to get onto the plane.
If someone came up to me at an airport outside of the screening station, I would follow the advice of the last lawyer I spoke to and ask, "Why?"
At the airport I didn't consent, I was searched without my consent.
I think "acquiesced" might be a better word.
No, sometimes they have probable cause to justify a search, sometimes they don't.
If they have probable cause, they're going to search you with or without your consent, and might pile a charge on you of resisting arrest or failing to follow a lawful order.
If they *don't* have probable cause, it gets sticky.
If they don't have probable cause, they'll ask for your consent. A lot of people give their consent. A friend of mine in California gave a cop permission to search him, because he didn't think he had done anything wrong, and then a piece of hashish that he had forgotten about popped out of his jacket pocket.
In principle, they could search you anyway. The search would be illegal, and they couldn't use anything they find to prosecute you, but you'd have to establish that it was illegal. That's not as difficult as it may sound. Lots of cases get thrown out because of illegal search. The facts of the case are a jury decision. It's not impossible to get a jury that would believe you.
No, in Columbus Circle, checkpoints are before the turnstile.
Setting up the checkpoint after the turnstiles would be ridiculous.
I'm in New York and I didn't think you had to show them an ID, unless you committed some kind of violation and they wanted to give you a ticket.
That was the situation in New York City.
You could refuse to allow inspection, but you can't go onto the subway at that entrance.
It seemed to me that it would be possible to leave the subway, and walk down the street to another entrance of the same subway stop. Since the inspections are random spot-checks anyway, they're unlikely to select the same person twice. (Unless you have a beard or are carrying something in Arabic, or just look different.)
There was a college student in New York who let the cops search his bags, and they found a copy of the New York Review of Books, with a cover story, "Jihad." They took him to the station and kept him there most of the day, until somebody realized how ridiculous it was.
The advice I got repeatedly from lawyers was, "Never consent to a search."
Every science student, and certainly every biology student, needs to dissect animals. They should do it in high school. Or sooner.
One of the main skills of a scientist is looking at nature. It's not the same as reading about it in a book (which is what you get in a computer). The lesson is that you're looking at the actual real world. Science teaches you how to look at the real world.
If your book says it should be one way, and your specimen is another way, then your book has a lot of explaining to do.
The other thing is you get a lot of "Oh, now I understand" moments.
For example, I dissected a cow's eye (a popular lab). The thing that impressed me about it was how thin the retina was -- it looked like an oil slick. Now I can appreciate how difficult it is to do retinal surgery, and I can appreciate the tricks eye surgeons figured to be able to do it. I read a lot of anatomy books (Netter has great drawings of the eye) but real life was different.
I can't explain how it was different. You'll just have to dissect an eye and see for yourself.
That's the point. He didn't *call* it genocide, he called it "liberating."
He only killed 600,000 Iraqis, according to The Lancet.
Actually Iran still has a significant Jewish community, of people who have refused offers to leave to Israel. One of the most popular TV series in Iran was a story set in WWII Europe in which an Iranian saves a Jewish woman.
The Moslem countries were actually a relatively tolerant and accepting home for Jews over 500 years.
Unlike some religions I could mention.
According to Juan Cole, whom I trust on Middle eastern affairs, there is no phrase in Farsi that translates to "wipe off the map."
Democratic elections.
As opposed to a wacko president who cries out for the destruction of Iraq.
(Is destruction OK if you call it "liberating"?)
The library owns the material. They contract out to Google the job of managing the images.
They do laminate selected clippings. I don't know how much it cost, but it's certainly >$1/page and probably >$5/page to do it in volume. These are fragile clippings that won't always easily fit through a high-volume laminating machine. If they laminated every page, they'd need 5 times the storage space. And it would be even more difficult to file them and bring them up from storage.
The New York Public Library (like all major reference libraries) has been preserving books and old paper since they opened. They have a system for de-acidifying rare books and paper. I think it costs around $10/page.
The judges will decide. Since the copyright law is so vague, they'll decide it on the basis of how much the social value of an index of all the books in all the libraries in the world overrides the (undefined) copyright rights of the authors of those books. Google lets them opt out. The issue is whether it should be opt-out or opt-in. If it's opt-in, orphan books will be effectively gone. And there are a lot of important orphan books.
If Google wins, will I then be able to copy entire library books also, like they do? Somehow I don't
think so.
Libraries can copy entire books, under certain circumstances.
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/usc_sec_17_00000108----000-.html
The copyright laws are written broadly and generally, and they don't define specific rights for most things. Their definition of "fair use" isn't specific enough to let you know whether a particular use is fair use or not.
That's why fair use is defined by the courts, in a long series of decisions. So they don't need legislative authority. They depend on court decisions.
There are no decisions on exactly this issue, or they wouldn't be in court.
The library had a right to scan their copyrighted books. They had a right to call in an outside contractor (Google) to scan their books. They had a right to make a card catalog entry for each of those books.
They have a right to let their patrons make a copy of several pages from a book. If the book is digitized, they have a right to let their patrons read the digitized copy within the library. They have a right to let their patrons make copies from the digitized source.
The question is, do they have a right to let an outside contractor make an index of snippits for use within their own library? I think they do. If they can make a card catalog entry, it's not much different from indexing snippits. Snippits have a clear value to society.
Do they have a right to let people outside the library read snippits of the digitized book under fair use? Snippits might be as short as a sentence. This has the value to society of enabling people to conduct full-text searches through entire libraries.
If it's fair use to have a library patron come in and copy a few pages from a book, why isn't it fair use to have a library patron access that book online and read snippits?
It's reasonable to conclude under the copyright act that they do have this right.