Notepad is good enough for most people. (I'm using it right now.) But some people need certain features in their work, and if a program doesn't have those features, they can't use it.
He's a professional writer who writes books, and he's talking about whether Google Docs and Zoho Docs can do that. They can't.
A big book needs a style sheet. Otherwise you're taping lists of codes to the monitor, like we used to do in 1985.
A writer who works with an editor needs Track Changes. Otherwise, the writer doesn't know what changes the editor made. They'd be better off faxing hand-written corrections to each other, like we used to do in 1985.
When Microsoft started marketing Word, they were competing with WordPerfect, which dominated the word processing market and did a pretty good job. So Word had to do an even better job. MS worked with people who used Word in every major industry, like law firms, to find out how they wrote and what they needed in their word processor. They worked with an American Bar Association word processing committee to write free manuals. Lawyers sometimes write documents with line numbers. You got it. Law firms use all kinds of strikeouts and underlinings. You got it. Law firms use elaborate outlines. You got it. If you're a lawyer, and the judge wants a submission a certain way, there's no excuses.
When I have a problem with Office, I do a Google search and I find people who have left the answers. Microsoft's web site, much as I hate to admit it, is an excellent manual in every version of Office. They paid a lot of very good technical writers what they were worth to explain it. (In fairness, they haven't been up to the same quality lately.) When I have a problem with Google, I do a Google search and sometimes find a bunch of guys trying to give helpful suggestions. I wonder what Google's paid tech support is like. If my job depended on it, it would certainly be worth $50 a year.
I too would love to use OpenOffice/LibreOffice etc., just for the principle of open software, but I've tried them and they had little incompatibilities. If you're working on a big project with other people, you can't take a chance on an incompatibility that will take an hour or two to figure out, or that you just have to work around.
I knew a lot of Communists (big "C") and communists (little "c") in the late '50s and early '60s. Some of them followed the party line, and some of them didn't. Obviously the Trotskyites didn't.
For most of the Communists I knew, the question was, "When did you leave the Party?" Some of them left the Party after the Hungarian revolution, some of them left after the Czechoslovokian revolution.
They left the party because they couldn't support a government that was doing the same kind of thing that the U.S. was doing in Vietnam, Haiti, Chile, Argentina, and Iran -- overthrowing democratically elected governments, and replacing them with compliant dictators.
In other words, most of the Communists I knew had more integrity and commitment to democracy than the right-wing corporate suckups in this country.
So if you're going to talk about the Communist Party, let's open the discussion to the crimes, murders and dictatorship on both sides of the cold war. Let's bring Henry Kissinger and George W. Bush into the dock.
I think history will give credit to the American Communist Party for one great contribution to democracy: the civil rights movement.
If you believe J. Edgar Hoover, the Communist Party was responsible for training the leaders of the black civil rights movement, and showing them how to organize their movement.
Do you know who Rosa Parks was? She led the Montgomery bus boycott, which put an end to racial segregation on the Montgomery, Alabama public transportation system. Do you know who Martin Luther King is? They were trained at the Highlander Folk School http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highlander_Research_and_Education_Center where Communists and non-Communists taught them how to develop effective strategies to attack racism, and organize the community to fight it.
Let's go back to the history that your high school may have skipped through quickly. From shortly after the Civil War, up to even 1968, black people in the South (and a lot of other places in America) weren't allowed to vote. Think about that for a second. What's wrong with Communism? They don't have free elections. Well, up to 1968, Americans weren't allowed to vote, because of the color of their skin. And according to William F. Buckley, and the Wall Street Journal editorial page, that was fine, and the federal government had no business interfering with state decisions on the matter.
And of course black people were also discriminated against in education, the courts, and everywhere else. They had fucking lynchings.
Think about that. Lynching black people for trying to vote. Are you OK with that? Your right-wing heros were.
The Communist Party, for all its many failings, supported the civil rights movement. The Daily Worker sent reporters to cover the struggle, when a lot of other newspapers were ignoring it.
And in fact, the editors of the Daily Worker, and other Communists, were sent to jail for publishing newspapers and books, holding meetings and classes, organizing demonstrations -- the very activities protected by the First Amendment. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_v._United_States#The_court.27s_decision
People were fired, not for being Communists, but for having left the party years ago, or having associated with Communists, and refusing to testify and denounce their former friends before the House Un-American Activities Committee. And people were fired for defending Communists. Or not denouncing Communists strongly enough.
When I took my first physics course in college, my professor was teaching physics in the U.S. for the first time in many years. He had been blacklisted, and left the country till then. I didn't know that until I read his obituary in the New York Times.
So don't go crying to me about how nobody asks conservatives to dance at the faculty parties. Unlike a lot of teachers in the 1950s, you don't know what it means to be fired for your ideas.
The response is, so what? Even if it turns out to be true, it means that mRNA from non-GM rice will also wind up in your bloodstream. Even if it's true, there's no evidence here that the plant mRNAs are harmful. After all, we've been eating plants for how long, 300 million years?
One of the problems with working with DNA and RNA in the laboratory is that cells are full of enzymes that degrade them -- because over evolution, foreign nucleotides have usually been from pathogens. Even bacterial cells destroy foreign nucleotides. That's where we found restriction enzymes. So there are mechanisms in place to take care of these things.
But I don't know for sure. I'm not an expert in this stuff. If the experts thought it was a problem, I'd worry. I haven't seen anything about this in the context of GM foods in the journals since this was published a year ago.
It's possible to be too worried about DNA.
If we had listened to Jeremy Rifkin in the 1980s, we wouldn't have done any recombinant DNA work until it had been proven totally safe, which is impossible.
When AIDS hit, we wouldn't have known what to do. We wouldn't have had tests for AIDS, tissue culture techniques for T cells, screens for AIDS drugs, and we wouldn't have discovered AZT and the dozens of AIDS drugs that followed. Everybody you know with AIDS would be dead.
We wouldn't have had a whole generation of cancer drugs. I know a young woman who got acute myelocytic leukemia in her 30s. Life expectancy was 6 months. She was in the first trial of imatinib (Glevic). She's still alive now, which I think has been 10 years. Her life was saved by biotechnology. There are something like 10,000 or 20,000 people being kept alive on imatinib or its successors right now.
There are more drugs to treat and sometimes cure autoimmune diseases, also from biotechnology.
This is agricultural biotechnology, which is a little less critical than medical biotechnology, but if we had listened to guys like Rifkin, these people would be dead now.
An Android could be an OK toy for a 6-month-olds. But anything beyond flashing lights, shapes and sound is wasted.
Of course a colored block of wood is also a great toy for a 6-month-old.
(Actually, the most important thing about a toy is that it keeps the parent's attention so that they'll play with it together with the kid. If an Android does that, fine.)
A new potato cultivar had to be withdrawn from the market because of its acute toxicity to humans-a consequence of higher levels of two natural toxins, solanine and chaconine.
Yes, it is possible for proteins to bind to DNA and pass through the digestive system. That's why I said "basically."
It's an interesting hypothesis that DNA from GM food could survive through the digestive tract and somehow cause harm. In science, when you get a hypothesis, you test it. That hypothesis has been tested in animal studies which couldn't confirm any effect. Some guy claimed to have found damage to rats, it was published in a major journal, other people tried to repeat his results, and they couldn't repeat it. That's science.
I once asked a NRDC scientist who opposed GM food whether she also thought people should avoid Ben & Jerry's ice cream -- since the effects of so much fats and sugar on the diet had a demonstrated harm (and because Ben & Jerry's had been supporting a ban on GM food). She couldn't give me an answer.
If you want to adopt this level of certainty, I can't imagine what you could eat. People have gotten fatal food poisoning from "organic" farms.
I think it should be labeled, and I think a lot of the corporations that were pushing GM foods acted like overbearing assholes. But it's as safe as any other food.
The critics have raised every conceivable objection to GM food, and none of them has held up. I've talked with scientists on both sides of the issue, including the Natural Resources Defense Council. The critics have made their case. Good for them. That's their job. Every point has been answered. If they can come up with something new, I'd like to hear it. But they haven't.
I'm no fan of greedy businessmen, but I do believe in scientific progress. They have to overcome the burden of proof to demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt that it's safe, and they've done so.
People who are several generations away from American (or any) agriculture don't realize that breeding and improvement of animals and plants has been going on for ten thousand years. They've done the same kind of thing with conventional breeding.
To answer your question, they can't reproduce with wild salmon because they're triploid; they have an extra set of chromosomes.
Even if they did -- maybe 1 out of a billion -- you'd have nothing more than the normal genetic variations in fish. Growth hormones are evolved to turn on and off in different cycles according to the environment in all kinds of animals. There are already animals with extra growth genes from conventional breeding, like Belgian bulls. It doesn't do any harm.
Hybrid seed corn, developed by Henry A. Wallace, revolutionized American agriculture.
It's a small improvement, and not that important by itself, but the problem with the anti-GM movement is that it's anti-science. They're in there with the anti-vaccine people. It comes down to, they don't trust corporations. I don't trust corporations either, but get your arguments right.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/frederickallen/2011/12/21/germany-builds-twice-as-many-cars-as-the-u-s-while-paying-its-auto-workers-twice-as-much/ Frederick E. Allen 12/21/2011 @ 5:42PM |60,178 views How Germany Builds Twice as Many Cars as the U.S. While Paying Its Workers Twice as Much In 2010, Germany produced more than 5.5 million automobiles; the U.S produced 2.7 million. At the same time, the average auto worker in Germany made $67.14 per hour in salary in benefits; the average one in the U.S. made $33.77 per hour. Yet Germany’s big three car companies—BMW, Daimler (Mercedes-Benz), and Volkswagen—are very profitable. How can that be? The question is explored in a new article from Remapping Debate, a public policy e-journal. Its author, Kevin C. Brown, writes that “the salient difference is that, in Germany, the automakers operate within an environment that precludes a race to the bottom; in the U.S., they operate within an environment that encourages such a race.” There are “two overlapping sets of institutions” in Germany that guarantee high wages and good working conditions for autoworkers. The first is IG Metall, the country’s equivalent of the United Automobile Workers. Virtually all Germany’s car workers are members, and though they have the right to strike, they “hardly use it, because there is an elaborate system of conflict resolution that regularly is used to come to some sort of compromise that is acceptable to all parties,” according to Horst Mund, an IG Metall executive. The second institution is the German constitution, which allows for “works councils” in every factory, where management and employees work together on matters like shop floor conditions and work life. Mund says this guarantees cooperation, “where you don’t always wear your management pin or your union pin.” Mund points out that this goes
against all mainstream wisdom of the neo-liberals. We have strong unions, we have strong social security systems, we have high wages. So, if I believed what the neo-liberals are arguing, we would have to be bankrupt, but apparently this is not the case. Despite high wages . . . despite our possibility to influence companies, the economy is working well in Germany. At Volkswagen’s Chattanooga plant, the nonunionized new employees get $14.50 an hour, which rises to $19.50 after three years.
http://www.remappingdebate.org/article/tale-two-systems A tale of two systems By Kevin C. Brown Remapping Debate Dec. 21, 2011 American autoworkers are constantly told that high-wage work is an unsustainable relic in the face of a hyper-competitive, globalized marketplace. Apostles of neo-liberal economic theory — both in the public and private sectors — have stressed the message that worker adaptation is necessary to survive.... But the case of German automakers — BMW, Daimler, and Volkswagen — tells a different story. Each company produces vehicles not only in Germany, but also in “transplant” factories in the U.S. The former are characterized by high wages and high union membership; the U.S. plants pay lower wages and are located in so-called “right-to-work” (anti-union) states.... the UAW has made significant concessions on wages, especially through the creation of a permanent “Tier 2” level for all new employees. Whereas incumbent “Tier 1” workers earn about $28 an hour, all new UAW hires at the GM, Ford, and Chrysler earn around $15 per hour.
Chaney also targeted two women he knew, sending nude pictures of one former co-worker to her father.
The women, who both knew Chaney, said their lives have been irreparably damaged by his actions. One has anxiety and panic attacks; the other is depressed and paranoid. Both say Chaney was calculated, cruel and creepy.
When I hear movie and modeling celebrities giving these long stories about how their lives have been destroyed by having nude photos made public on the internet, I wonder whether that's what the district attorney told them they'd have to say to get a conviction. After all, how many of those celebrities would pose nude for Playboy or Vogue at a time when it would be good for their career?
However, distributing nude pictures of co-workers, who are private persons, is something else again, and sending nude pictures to a woman's father is the kind of outrageous behavior that can get the judge to throw the book at him. And it makes me lose a lot of sympathy for him.
Still, 10 years does seem harsh when compared to the sentences for violent crimes.
Point taken. But it looks as if the workers come out better economically in Germany than they do here. The unions seem to have a bigger part of the process than they do here.
Germans have a very different attitude towards corporate power and influence. It seems almost quaint.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/23/world/europe/berlin-tour-raises-awareness-on-lobbying.html Berlin Journal And on Your Left, Behind Those Walls, Lobbyists Are at Work By NICHOLAS KULISH November 22, 2012 (Timo Lange, campaigner LobbyControl, gives tours to sites of lobbyists. German Brewers Association, cigarette lobby. German Chemical Industry Association. Germans suspicous of propaganda and paid advertising. Money in campaigns is seen not as free speech but as buying access. Merkel lives a modest life.) “The problem is the linkage between economic power and political power,” said Daniela Haug. “We are very thin-skinned when it comes to any form of propaganda,” Claas Lorenz, 25, a student on the tour, said in a succinct reference to Germany’s Nazi history. “We had very bad experiences with it in our past.” Andrea Römmele, a professor at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin, said: “Money in campaigns in the United States is freedom of speech; it’s seen as a way of expressing oneself. In Germany, giving money in politics is always seen as trying to buy access.” German attitudes toward politics and money help explain the enduring appeal of Ms. Merkel, who still lives in the apartment she got before she became chancellor, and who hikes on vacation. “Merkel is so beloved for her sober, unglamorous style of governing,” said Frank Decker, a professor of political science at the University of Bonn. “With her, you would never imagine that she might use politics to become rich.” The Christian Democrats
It's not clear how much they owe you, but if they're 6 months behind on all their payments, that's a substantial amount.
It's also not clear what your company does for legal advice -- whether you have a lawyer in-house (apparently not), or a lawyer that you regularly use, or hire a new lawyer whenever you need one. You must have signed a contract with this company. Did you have a lawyer to review the contract before you signed? A good contract should anticipate every likely problem, including this. Are there any provisions for delayed payments?
But you need to get a lawyer's advice. It might be easy and cheap to collect your debt, it might not be. (In the US, lawyers sometimes charge 30% of the amount to collect it.) You don't know until you've talked to a lawyer.
If the company is judgment-proof, that is, if they're running at a deficit and don't have the money to pay it, you might not be able to collect at all. Or you might be able to get your bills paid before somebody else's. Or before they go bankrupt.
Actually, posting on Slashdot is useful. Regardless of the law, what you ultimately want to know is what happened to other people in your situation. But a lawyer can look at the specific facts and give you your options.
Here's a tip on how to save money on legal fees: Write a detailed, well-organized memo describing the situation for the lawyer. (Organization is more important than detail.) Collect the major documents, contracts, etc. and add them to the memo. Normally, a lawyer will interview you, write a detailed memo for his file -- and bill you for his time. Anything you can do to save the lawyer time will also save you a lot of money.
In my experience, when your clients fall way behind on their bills, it's for one of 2 reasons:
(1) The company is successful but having cash flow problems, they can't get enough capital for everything, they're paying the most important bills first, and yours is on the end of the list. But you'll get paid eventually. You should be able to negotiate with them to get something now even if you can't get the whole amount. Get them to agree on how they pay you from now on.
(2) The company is failing, they're not making enough to pay their bills, and they'll soon be out of business. You may never get paid. But you might get something if you take aggressive measures now (maybe suing them). Or it might be hopeless.
So these are 2 different strategies. The commercial credit rating agencies may help you there. But if they're a large international corporation, their annual and quarterly reports should tell you what their financial situation is.
I used to do a lot of back-country hiking, and I could always depend on the U.S. Geological Survey maps. They were more accurate than the gas station maps, Rand-McNalley, anything else. Let's hear it for the government getting it right.
And we didn't have satellites then. Or lasers. We had to go out with transits! And tape measures! And get off my lawn!
What do they do with a gun in a remote area? Shoot kangaroos?
The problem here is getting stuck without water, food or a means to get out. Guns don't help you there, unless you are inclined to give up and kill yourself.
There was an engineering professor in California named Terman who taught his students that they shouldn't just study the technology, they should also look at how to start a business, and keep their eyes out for opportunities.
Free market in technology means no money coming in for a year, 2 years or more while you develop it.
It means you invest $250 mill of somebody else's money, get even more money if it looks like it's working, and finally get a working salable product years down the road. With the understanding that most investments fail.
That's how Genentech did it. They got substantial government investments. Their original basic research was done under National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health grants. And now their biggest customer is Medicare.
Thousands of other biotechnology companies (also founded with basic research paid by the government) failed.
The government invests lots of money to keep this free market working. Take the airplane. The Wright brothers succeeded because they got the government to invest in them. The aircraft industry was built on government money (and regulation).
Intel succeeded because they had government (military) contracts. The whole fucking silicon valley was built on military contracts. The military still drives technology. And spends the most money. How many $250 million failed projects did Halliburton and the other government contractors build in Afghanistan and Iraq?
This free market model disappears pretty quickly when you look at the actual history of technology. Most major developments were built on public-private cooperation. Oh, that's right, we're not allowed to major in history any more because history majors can't pay back their student loans.
Back in the 1950s, there was a publisher called Dover, that reprinted out-of-print classics, mostly math and science orphan books that science students had to read an hour at a time on reserve in the university library. (There were professors who owned a rare book that nobody else could get, and could give an entire course by paraphrasing from the book.)
Dover was very successful, because there was a great need for these books that the free market wasn't otherwise filling. I read many of their books. I thought that was pretty innovative.
You couldn't do that today. There are important math and science books that are out of print, and nobody can legally reprint them. You might find them in a big academic library, you might be able to buy them on the rare books market for $200, you might be able to find pirated editions, but you can't legally get them when you need them under these copyright laws.
Similarly with the music industry. There was a record publisher called Nonsuch that used to put out cheap records of public domain or uncopyrighted music. (For most of its existence the Soviet Union didn't believe in copyright, and they had some of the best musicians in the world.)
Probably the most innovative thing you could do with out-of-copyright works is to compile them into an anthology. Under the old copyright laws, you could put together a pretty good poetry collection of works that were only 14 or 28 years old without royalties. Now you can't do that. You'd have to wait until 100 years after the death of the author.
Slashdot Mirror
Notepad is good enough for most people. (I'm using it right now.) But some people need certain features in their work, and if a program doesn't have those features, they can't use it.
He's a professional writer who writes books, and he's talking about whether Google Docs and Zoho Docs can do that. They can't.
A big book needs a style sheet. Otherwise you're taping lists of codes to the monitor, like we used to do in 1985.
A writer who works with an editor needs Track Changes. Otherwise, the writer doesn't know what changes the editor made. They'd be better off faxing hand-written corrections to each other, like we used to do in 1985.
When Microsoft started marketing Word, they were competing with WordPerfect, which dominated the word processing market and did a pretty good job. So Word had to do an even better job. MS worked with people who used Word in every major industry, like law firms, to find out how they wrote and what they needed in their word processor. They worked with an American Bar Association word processing committee to write free manuals. Lawyers sometimes write documents with line numbers. You got it. Law firms use all kinds of strikeouts and underlinings. You got it. Law firms use elaborate outlines. You got it. If you're a lawyer, and the judge wants a submission a certain way, there's no excuses.
When I have a problem with Office, I do a Google search and I find people who have left the answers. Microsoft's web site, much as I hate to admit it, is an excellent manual in every version of Office. They paid a lot of very good technical writers what they were worth to explain it. (In fairness, they haven't been up to the same quality lately.) When I have a problem with Google, I do a Google search and sometimes find a bunch of guys trying to give helpful suggestions. I wonder what Google's paid tech support is like. If my job depended on it, it would certainly be worth $50 a year.
I too would love to use OpenOffice/LibreOffice etc., just for the principle of open software, but I've tried them and they had little incompatibilities. If you're working on a big project with other people, you can't take a chance on an incompatibility that will take an hour or two to figure out, or that you just have to work around.
Some day they'll get there. Not yet.
I knew a lot of Communists (big "C") and communists (little "c") in the late '50s and early '60s. Some of them followed the party line, and some of them didn't. Obviously the Trotskyites didn't.
For most of the Communists I knew, the question was, "When did you leave the Party?" Some of them left the Party after the Hungarian revolution, some of them left after the Czechoslovokian revolution.
They left the party because they couldn't support a government that was doing the same kind of thing that the U.S. was doing in Vietnam, Haiti, Chile, Argentina, and Iran -- overthrowing democratically elected governments, and replacing them with compliant dictators.
In other words, most of the Communists I knew had more integrity and commitment to democracy than the right-wing corporate suckups in this country.
So if you're going to talk about the Communist Party, let's open the discussion to the crimes, murders and dictatorship on both sides of the cold war. Let's bring Henry Kissinger and George W. Bush into the dock.
I think history will give credit to the American Communist Party for one great contribution to democracy: the civil rights movement.
If you believe J. Edgar Hoover, the Communist Party was responsible for training the leaders of the black civil rights movement, and showing them how to organize their movement.
Do you know who Rosa Parks was? She led the Montgomery bus boycott, which put an end to racial segregation on the Montgomery, Alabama public transportation system. Do you know who Martin Luther King is? They were trained at the Highlander Folk School http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highlander_Research_and_Education_Center where Communists and non-Communists taught them how to develop effective strategies to attack racism, and organize the community to fight it.
Let's go back to the history that your high school may have skipped through quickly. From shortly after the Civil War, up to even 1968, black people in the South (and a lot of other places in America) weren't allowed to vote. Think about that for a second. What's wrong with Communism? They don't have free elections. Well, up to 1968, Americans weren't allowed to vote, because of the color of their skin. And according to William F. Buckley, and the Wall Street Journal editorial page, that was fine, and the federal government had no business interfering with state decisions on the matter.
And of course black people were also discriminated against in education, the courts, and everywhere else. They had fucking lynchings.
Think about that. Lynching black people for trying to vote. Are you OK with that? Your right-wing heros were.
The Communist Party, for all its many failings, supported the civil rights movement. The Daily Worker sent reporters to cover the struggle, when a lot of other newspapers were ignoring it.
And in fact, the editors of the Daily Worker, and other Communists, were sent to jail for publishing newspapers and books, holding meetings and classes, organizing demonstrations -- the very activities protected by the First Amendment. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_v._United_States#The_court.27s_decision
People were fired, not for being Communists, but for having left the party years ago, or having associated with Communists, and refusing to testify and denounce their former friends before the House Un-American Activities Committee. And people were fired for defending Communists. Or not denouncing Communists strongly enough.
When I took my first physics course in college, my professor was teaching physics in the U.S. for the first time in many years. He had been blacklisted, and left the country till then. I didn't know that until I read his obituary in the New York Times.
So don't go crying to me about how nobody asks conservatives to dance at the faculty parties. Unlike a lot of teachers in the 1950s, you don't know what it means to be fired for your ideas.
Moran is appropriately skeptical.
The response is, so what? Even if it turns out to be true, it means that mRNA from non-GM rice will also wind up in your bloodstream. Even if it's true, there's no evidence here that the plant mRNAs are harmful. After all, we've been eating plants for how long, 300 million years?
One of the problems with working with DNA and RNA in the laboratory is that cells are full of enzymes that degrade them -- because over evolution, foreign nucleotides have usually been from pathogens. Even bacterial cells destroy foreign nucleotides. That's where we found restriction enzymes. So there are mechanisms in place to take care of these things.
But I don't know for sure. I'm not an expert in this stuff. If the experts thought it was a problem, I'd worry. I haven't seen anything about this in the context of GM foods in the journals since this was published a year ago.
It's possible to be too worried about DNA.
If we had listened to Jeremy Rifkin in the 1980s, we wouldn't have done any recombinant DNA work until it had been proven totally safe, which is impossible.
When AIDS hit, we wouldn't have known what to do. We wouldn't have had tests for AIDS, tissue culture techniques for T cells, screens for AIDS drugs, and we wouldn't have discovered AZT and the dozens of AIDS drugs that followed. Everybody you know with AIDS would be dead.
We wouldn't have had a whole generation of cancer drugs. I know a young woman who got acute myelocytic leukemia in her 30s. Life expectancy was 6 months. She was in the first trial of imatinib (Glevic). She's still alive now, which I think has been 10 years. Her life was saved by biotechnology. There are something like 10,000 or 20,000 people being kept alive on imatinib or its successors right now.
There are more drugs to treat and sometimes cure autoimmune diseases, also from biotechnology.
This is agricultural biotechnology, which is a little less critical than medical biotechnology, but if we had listened to guys like Rifkin, these people would be dead now.
Is there an app for parents that suggests things to do with kids and then turns the phone off?
I hear they have some rattles today with digital chips.
Counting? Languages? At 6 months?
He'll be doing OK to say "mamma" and "papa" at 6 months.
http://www.babycenter.com/0_developmental-milestone-talking_6573.bc
An Android could be an OK toy for a 6-month-olds. But anything beyond flashing lights, shapes and sound is wasted.
Of course a colored block of wood is also a great toy for a 6-month-old.
(Actually, the most important thing about a toy is that it keeps the parent's attention so that they'll play with it together with the kid. If an Android does that, fine.)
Sugar of lead.
A new potato cultivar had to be withdrawn from the market because of its acute toxicity to humans-a consequence of higher levels of two natural toxins, solanine and chaconine.
My favorite. The killer potato.
Yes, it is possible for proteins to bind to DNA and pass through the digestive system. That's why I said "basically."
It's an interesting hypothesis that DNA from GM food could survive through the digestive tract and somehow cause harm. In science, when you get a hypothesis, you test it. That hypothesis has been tested in animal studies which couldn't confirm any effect. Some guy claimed to have found damage to rats, it was published in a major journal, other people tried to repeat his results, and they couldn't repeat it. That's science.
I once asked a NRDC scientist who opposed GM food whether she also thought people should avoid Ben & Jerry's ice cream -- since the effects of so much fats and sugar on the diet had a demonstrated harm (and because Ben & Jerry's had been supporting a ban on GM food). She couldn't give me an answer.
If you want to adopt this level of certainty, I can't imagine what you could eat. People have gotten fatal food poisoning from "organic" farms.
I think it should be labeled, and I think a lot of the corporations that were pushing GM foods acted like overbearing assholes. But it's as safe as any other food.
I think your concerns should be addressed to Saturday Night Live.
What if people eating this GM Fish suddenly start getting weird cancers and tumors in their bowels or elsewhere 10 years down the line?
There's no plausible mechanism for that. The food basically gets digested in the stomach. They've done animal studies and nothing happened.
It hasn't been a quick decision. The FDA has been considering their application since 1995.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703989304575503891676987232.html
The critics have raised every conceivable objection to GM food, and none of them has held up. I've talked with scientists on both sides of the issue, including the Natural Resources Defense Council. The critics have made their case. Good for them. That's their job. Every point has been answered. If they can come up with something new, I'd like to hear it. But they haven't.
I'm no fan of greedy businessmen, but I do believe in scientific progress. They have to overcome the burden of proof to demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt that it's safe, and they've done so.
People who are several generations away from American (or any) agriculture don't realize that breeding and improvement of animals and plants has been going on for ten thousand years. They've done the same kind of thing with conventional breeding.
To answer your question, they can't reproduce with wild salmon because they're triploid; they have an extra set of chromosomes.
Even if they did -- maybe 1 out of a billion -- you'd have nothing more than the normal genetic variations in fish. Growth hormones are evolved to turn on and off in different cycles according to the environment in all kinds of animals. There are already animals with extra growth genes from conventional breeding, like Belgian bulls. It doesn't do any harm.
Hybrid seed corn, developed by Henry A. Wallace, revolutionized American agriculture.
It's a small improvement, and not that important by itself, but the problem with the anti-GM movement is that it's anti-science. They're in there with the anti-vaccine people. It comes down to, they don't trust corporations. I don't trust corporations either, but get your arguments right.
Depends on the worker.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/frederickallen/2011/12/21/germany-builds-twice-as-many-cars-as-the-u-s-while-paying-its-auto-workers-twice-as-much/
Frederick E. Allen
12/21/2011 @ 5:42PM |60,178 views
How Germany Builds Twice as Many Cars as the U.S. While Paying Its Workers Twice as Much
In 2010, Germany produced more than 5.5 million automobiles; the U.S produced 2.7 million. At the same time, the average auto worker in Germany made $67.14 per hour in salary in benefits; the average one in the U.S. made $33.77 per hour. Yet Germany’s big three car companies—BMW, Daimler (Mercedes-Benz), and Volkswagen—are very profitable.
How can that be? The question is explored in a new article from Remapping Debate, a public policy e-journal. Its author, Kevin C. Brown, writes that “the salient difference is that, in Germany, the automakers operate within an environment that precludes a race to the bottom; in the U.S., they operate within an environment that encourages such a race.”
There are “two overlapping sets of institutions” in Germany that guarantee high wages and good working conditions for autoworkers. The first is IG Metall, the country’s equivalent of the United Automobile Workers. Virtually all Germany’s car workers are members, and though they have the right to strike, they “hardly use it, because there is an elaborate system of conflict resolution that regularly is used to come to some sort of compromise that is acceptable to all parties,” according to Horst Mund, an IG Metall executive. The second institution is the German constitution, which allows for “works councils” in every factory, where management and employees work together on matters like shop floor conditions and work life. Mund says this guarantees cooperation, “where you don’t always wear your management pin or your union pin.”
Mund points out that this goes
against all mainstream wisdom of the neo-liberals. We have strong unions, we have strong social security systems, we have high wages. So, if I believed what the neo-liberals are arguing, we would have to be bankrupt, but apparently this is not the case. Despite high wages . . . despite our possibility to influence companies, the economy is working well in Germany.
At Volkswagen’s Chattanooga plant, the nonunionized new employees get $14.50 an hour, which rises to $19.50 after three years.
http://www.remappingdebate.org/article/tale-two-systems ... the UAW has made significant concessions on wages, especially through the creation of a permanent “Tier 2” level for all new employees. Whereas incumbent “Tier 1” workers earn about $28 an hour, all new UAW hires at the GM, Ford, and Chrysler earn around $15 per hour.
A tale of two systems
By Kevin C. Brown
Remapping Debate
Dec. 21, 2011
American autoworkers are constantly told that high-wage work is an unsustainable relic in the face of a hyper-competitive, globalized marketplace. Apostles of neo-liberal economic theory — both in the public and private sectors — have stressed the message that worker adaptation is necessary to survive....
But the case of German automakers — BMW, Daimler, and Volkswagen — tells a different story. Each company produces vehicles not only in Germany, but also in “transplant” factories in the U.S. The former are characterized by high wages and high union membership; the U.S. plants pay lower wages and are located in so-called “right-to-work” (anti-union) states.
Those are not particularly embarrassing pictures for a professional model.
I thought so too until I read this:
http://www.vancouversun.com/entertainment/Hollywood+hacker+that+posted+nude+photos+Scarlett+Johansson+sentenced+Monday/7708693/story.html
Chaney also targeted two women he knew, sending nude pictures of one former co-worker to her father.
The women, who both knew Chaney, said their lives have been irreparably damaged by his actions. One has anxiety and panic attacks; the other is depressed and paranoid. Both say Chaney was calculated, cruel and creepy.
When I hear movie and modeling celebrities giving these long stories about how their lives have been destroyed by having nude photos made public on the internet, I wonder whether that's what the district attorney told them they'd have to say to get a conviction. After all, how many of those celebrities would pose nude for Playboy or Vogue at a time when it would be good for their career?
However, distributing nude pictures of co-workers, who are private persons, is something else again, and sending nude pictures to a woman's father is the kind of outrageous behavior that can get the judge to throw the book at him. And it makes me lose a lot of sympathy for him.
Still, 10 years does seem harsh when compared to the sentences for violent crimes.
And how many years did Murdoch get?
Point taken. But it looks as if the workers come out better economically in Germany than they do here. The unions seem to have a bigger part of the process than they do here.
Germans have a very different attitude towards corporate power and influence. It seems almost quaint.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/23/world/europe/berlin-tour-raises-awareness-on-lobbying.html
Berlin Journal
And on Your Left, Behind Those Walls, Lobbyists Are at Work
By NICHOLAS KULISH
November 22, 2012
(Timo Lange, campaigner LobbyControl, gives tours to sites of lobbyists. German Brewers Association, cigarette lobby. German Chemical Industry Association. Germans suspicous of propaganda and paid advertising. Money in campaigns is seen not as free speech but as buying access. Merkel lives a modest life.)
“The problem is the linkage between economic power and political power,” said Daniela Haug.
“We are very thin-skinned when it comes to any form of propaganda,” Claas Lorenz, 25, a student on the tour, said in a succinct reference to Germany’s Nazi history. “We had very bad experiences with it in our past.”
Andrea Römmele, a professor at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin, said: “Money in campaigns in the United States is freedom of speech; it’s seen as a way of expressing oneself. In Germany, giving money in politics is always seen as trying to buy access.”
German attitudes toward politics and money help explain the enduring appeal of Ms. Merkel, who still lives in the apartment she got before she became chancellor, and who hikes on vacation. “Merkel is so beloved for her sober, unglamorous style of governing,” said Frank Decker, a professor of political science at the University of Bonn. “With her, you would never imagine that she might use politics to become rich.”
The Christian Democrats
It's not clear how much they owe you, but if they're 6 months behind on all their payments, that's a substantial amount.
It's also not clear what your company does for legal advice -- whether you have a lawyer in-house (apparently not), or a lawyer that you regularly use, or hire a new lawyer whenever you need one. You must have signed a contract with this company. Did you have a lawyer to review the contract before you signed? A good contract should anticipate every likely problem, including this. Are there any provisions for delayed payments?
But you need to get a lawyer's advice. It might be easy and cheap to collect your debt, it might not be. (In the US, lawyers sometimes charge 30% of the amount to collect it.) You don't know until you've talked to a lawyer.
If the company is judgment-proof, that is, if they're running at a deficit and don't have the money to pay it, you might not be able to collect at all. Or you might be able to get your bills paid before somebody else's. Or before they go bankrupt.
Actually, posting on Slashdot is useful. Regardless of the law, what you ultimately want to know is what happened to other people in your situation. But a lawyer can look at the specific facts and give you your options.
Here's a tip on how to save money on legal fees: Write a detailed, well-organized memo describing the situation for the lawyer. (Organization is more important than detail.) Collect the major documents, contracts, etc. and add them to the memo. Normally, a lawyer will interview you, write a detailed memo for his file -- and bill you for his time. Anything you can do to save the lawyer time will also save you a lot of money.
In my experience, when your clients fall way behind on their bills, it's for one of 2 reasons:
(1) The company is successful but having cash flow problems, they can't get enough capital for everything, they're paying the most important bills first, and yours is on the end of the list. But you'll get paid eventually. You should be able to negotiate with them to get something now even if you can't get the whole amount. Get them to agree on how they pay you from now on.
(2) The company is failing, they're not making enough to pay their bills, and they'll soon be out of business. You may never get paid. But you might get something if you take aggressive measures now (maybe suing them). Or it might be hopeless.
So these are 2 different strategies. The commercial credit rating agencies may help you there. But if they're a large international corporation, their annual and quarterly reports should tell you what their financial situation is.
How can you go skinny dipping in an arid desert?
(Wouldn't anybody go skinny dipping with a white chick given half a chance? I would. Wouldn't you?)
I used to do a lot of back-country hiking, and I could always depend on the U.S. Geological Survey maps. They were more accurate than the gas station maps, Rand-McNalley, anything else. Let's hear it for the government getting it right.
And we didn't have satellites then. Or lasers. We had to go out with transits! And tape measures! And get off my lawn!
What do they do with a gun in a remote area? Shoot kangaroos?
The problem here is getting stuck without water, food or a means to get out. Guns don't help you there, unless you are inclined to give up and kill yourself.
There was an engineering professor in California named Terman who taught his students that they shouldn't just study the technology, they should also look at how to start a business, and keep their eyes out for opportunities.
Two of his students were Hewlett and Packard.
Why couldn't they waste it on more drug prosecutions and prisons like the Republicans?
Free market in technology means no money coming in for a year, 2 years or more while you develop it.
It means you invest $250 mill of somebody else's money, get even more money if it looks like it's working, and finally get a working salable product years down the road. With the understanding that most investments fail.
That's how Genentech did it. They got substantial government investments. Their original basic research was done under National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health grants. And now their biggest customer is Medicare.
Thousands of other biotechnology companies (also founded with basic research paid by the government) failed.
The government invests lots of money to keep this free market working. Take the airplane. The Wright brothers succeeded because they got the government to invest in them. The aircraft industry was built on government money (and regulation).
Intel succeeded because they had government (military) contracts. The whole fucking silicon valley was built on military contracts. The military still drives technology. And spends the most money. How many $250 million failed projects did Halliburton and the other government contractors build in Afghanistan and Iraq?
This free market model disappears pretty quickly when you look at the actual history of technology. Most major developments were built on public-private cooperation. Oh, that's right, we're not allowed to major in history any more because history majors can't pay back their student loans.
Back in the 1950s, there was a publisher called Dover, that reprinted out-of-print classics, mostly math and science orphan books that science students had to read an hour at a time on reserve in the university library. (There were professors who owned a rare book that nobody else could get, and could give an entire course by paraphrasing from the book.)
Dover was very successful, because there was a great need for these books that the free market wasn't otherwise filling. I read many of their books. I thought that was pretty innovative.
You couldn't do that today. There are important math and science books that are out of print, and nobody can legally reprint them. You might find them in a big academic library, you might be able to buy them on the rare books market for $200, you might be able to find pirated editions, but you can't legally get them when you need them under these copyright laws.
Similarly with the music industry. There was a record publisher called Nonsuch that used to put out cheap records of public domain or uncopyrighted music. (For most of its existence the Soviet Union didn't believe in copyright, and they had some of the best musicians in the world.)
Probably the most innovative thing you could do with out-of-copyright works is to compile them into an anthology. Under the old copyright laws, you could put together a pretty good poetry collection of works that were only 14 or 28 years old without royalties. Now you can't do that. You'd have to wait until 100 years after the death of the author.