Let's not include the DEA or the BATF. For that matter, there's 17 federal government agencies that have police-like powers in one area or another, we could probably drop half that budget and consolidate massively. My point is that you may benefit from federal police agencies or justice dept. protection of your rights even if you don't expect to.
Without knowing much at all about you, the question of whether you might ever find yourself needing a federal appeal is indeterminable, just like if I said I don't ever expect to need flood insurance and shouldn't have to pay for it just to get a mortgage, but didn't tell you I live on a hill, 800 feet+ vertical to the local flood plain.
Let's split that one, raising your estimate by just 1%, to 26% total. Arguably, we could shave some from the military budget without getting you less protection from military threats, which means you're not even getting 26%, say 20% instead.
More even than your property taxes, you've got me wondering "Why is he paying so much in state sales taxes?" I'll assume your state sales taxes run in the neigborhood of 9-10% of gross sales, as that's typical. It sounds like the state tax pays for little more than another layer of con-men shuffling your property taxes (and any city or county sales taxes you may also have) around.
Add to that, there's payments from old deficit spending. A lot of your taxes are probably paying off old debts. If the original expenditures there were unjustified, then interest on them is unjustified as well, but it's now inescapable - no changes to government except defaulting on that old debt will help, and that's generally a bad option. You'll never get services for interest payments, of course.
If we're talking about Zeroing the education budget, we're not just talking about home schooling, but no testing to see if it took and no money to set or enforce any legal requirements what-so-ever. Your employer (if any), now has to pay for all testing needed to select employees, down to basic math and literacy tests. Admittedly, many employers already have to pay to check some of the work claimed by the public schools, but the amount of work required increases a great deal when you have to conduct the equivalent of a full SAT as part of the intake process. There goes some of the savings, but that's minor.
What's major is the major crime rate in your state. Because you're supporting a system where it will easily be above 20%. What you just saved on education, you'll pay for in prisons. FIVE TIMES OVER! (Or did you think all those people who can't change a lightbulb are going to suddenly become competent to hold a full time job and simultaneously educate their children to the level they can survive in our economy? Or did you think they were all going to just magically quietly vanish?)
Or you can start shooting them all. As a former military officer, I will want a 100,000$ a year salary plus my men will doubtless expect at lest twice what you're paying police currently, and hazardous duty pay for actual riots, and I absolutely refuse to help you defend your state against its internal ravening hordes unless you give me triple your current police manpower, even with absolute blanket permission to enforce martial law as under combat conditions if needed. You'll need to set up curfews, border checkpoints, internal checkpoints and a manditory at all times ID system, or it will take more.
I won't take your money to enslave or shoot the poor and incompetent, mind you. You can get people who will, and many of them work dirt cheap, but they still aren't worth it and they will chew you up too in the end. I'm talkng that kind of money to actually enforce your laws, to be the judge, jury and commander of executioners in cases of real violations. I'm not offering to put people in your forced labor camps for a little weed or the constant stealing a loaf of bread stuff, but to deal with your homicide and grand theft rates.
Since I'm not as anal retentive as some in this line of work, I'd genuinely like to find ways to preserve freedom of association, prohibitions against quartering, and due process. To do that, you'll end up spending more money than my base estimate, not less. Oh, but you didn't even have five times your education budget in the state coffers? Better get out your papers, citizen. Avoiding the goosestepper approach isn't cheap.
90% of the people qualified to do that very dirty job you've just created will expect the same sort of deal. Just ask them. The other 10% will overestimate their own competency and die early, after which we will have to re-negotiate based on the mob's becoming overconfident from having lynched your last hired police force.
If you don't want to bother with the whole article, here's one of the quotes I based my admittedly rough guestimate on.
"Burning $2-a-gallon gasoline, the power generated by current hybrid-car engines costs about 35 cents per kilowatt-hour. Many utilities, though, sell off-peak power for much less: 2 to 4 cents per kilowatt-hour. The nationwide residential price is still only 8.5 cents or so. (Peak rates in Manhattan are higher because of the city's heavy dependence on oil and gas, but not enough to change the basic arithmetic.) Grid kilowatts are cheaper because cheaper fuels generate them and because utility power plants run a lot more efficiently than car engines."
My local power cost is only about 3.5 cents (living near several hydro plants, one coal burner, and one nuke plant). For me, charging the batteries off of home current would be about 90% s cheaper than charging them off the vehicle's engine, and even 2.00 gas looks like a great incentive. For others, the savings are smaller, but still likely to prove persuasive.
I'd like to get rid of the coal plant, and actually burn less oil as well (reserving more for durable plastics and lubricants), but if New York needs the power that bad, it's probably not going to happen. Burning the same amount of oil in a few large plants will at least pollute my air less than in millions of cars, for more total power.
You probably ought to add Federal Police and Courts to that. I'd even count a part of state educational services. True they're not very efficient for the buck, but would you really claim you are not benefitting at all from your fellow citizens being given at least a basic grounding in the three R's and such? Try imagining all the people you interact with on a given day, (including every driver on those roads you use, all your coworkers, and every clerk you hand money), as all homeschooled. Do you really think you'ld have fewer day to day problems?
The best part of this is the batteries are being developed for cars. Compare this with the various high tech alloys and such that end up being available first in luxury items such as golf clubs or tennis racquets but not making it out to more fundamental products for another generation, or more. If this really starts showing up in 2006 models, it should slow the increase in gas prices within a few years, maybe a great deal if sales are good.
For Americans, would you rather have these batteries make it more quickly to your MP3 players and laptops, or have 2010 gas prices only rise to say $4.50 instead of $5.75 a gallon?
(And for most Europeans figure somewhere around EU 8 or 9 instead of EU 12, even if the Euro rises against the Dollar, as most of your governments have already agreed to discout hybred fuel costs in various ways, but a lot of the cost will still be taxes).
Indirect savings, i.e. from trucked goods costs and smaller winter spikes in heating oil prices would add substantially to that.
$1.25 a gallon difference (or likely more) will pay for lots of older model batteries for all your smaller appliances, and then some.
There's some proofs that information transfer is required, but they are all pretty limited as physicists see them, and abstract mathematicians see bigger gaps in these theories. For example, Dr. Hawking gave some arguements for instantanious transfer in his popularization, A Brief History of Time, but he also switched the way he was using the word imaginary, sometimes sticking to the math definition as in imaginary numbers, sometimes letting that slip a bit towards the popular meaning of the word. One interpretation of Quantum Mechanics claims that particles that have been in close proximity remain coupled by some sort of instantanious (FTL) means of knowing each other's states. If someone rigorously proves that instantanious information transfer is absolutely required, that's likely to also extend to a proof that this quantum mechanic interpretation is preferred over the others, which would be a definite huge step forward in physics. Right now, that's not the standard model, at least yet.
Throw the multi-kilotonne lump of Ni/Fe hard enough and it will vapor deposit traces of Iridium on the whole planet and finish off those pesky dinosaurs.
There's no shortage of kids hoping to go into the pros when they start playing highschool football, but the chance a given one makes it is less than one in ten thousand. The percentage that get injured in high school is better than half, and a substantial group of them drop out without even a high school diploma afterwards. Then there's all the ones who end up with the kind of great education that lets them sell used cars.
There's no shortage of kids moving to the Hollywood area hoping to get one of those big actor's contracts. Despite this, the average yearly income from acting for the ones who actually get a Screen Actor's Guild card is less than from a full time job at minimum wage, and for the ones who never get into the union, the average income often turns into 20$ a blowjob.
Your "go figure" translates into "A lot of young people, often unsupervised minors, see nothing wrong in gambling on a million to one shot with no back up plan. A smaller group of older, more socially mobile people sees nothing wrong with basing their whole business plan on that fact."
The Beatles were steered by some sort of management comittee. Remember "Michelle"? The year it was released was 14 years after the year the name "Michelle" became the most popular name to give baby girls in Britain. Looking at the other Beatles albums, the pattern emerges. On the early albums, there is almost always a song using the most popular 14 or 15 year old girl's names in Britain, while on the latter ones, (basically after the Ed Sullivan appearance), there are songs using both these and the most popular US adolescent girl's names as well.
Beyond this, there's the required love song on every album, the required 3:22 long song for optimal AM play, and so on. Looking at when songs were actually recorded in studio, John and Paul uusually had to wait to record their favorites until someone in management was satisfied they had the required songs in the can.
You have a valid underlieng point. A lot of this research involves data that passes through many man-made intermediaries before it becomes something a human mind can work with, and is about conditions where normal common sense and intuition are not at all reliable guides.
On the other hand, some of your rhetoric is an answer of sorts to your own questions. It's not usually stated as an explicit rule of science, but for a working scientist, phrases like "in a way we cannot detect" are themselves something that requires exceptionally strong proof. By default she would mostly first try to test for "in a way that we have not yet detected". Even if she had a few failures working along that line, she would probably try to find other new methods of possibly detecting something, or move on to some other problem.
If a problem seems stagnant for a very long time, usually a whole generation of researchers or more, someone may try to prove there's a fundamental reason we just can't do something, but even then, it's usually part of developing a theory that has some more positive aspects.
In the same way, she might first look for explanations that might require minor reframing of a single small section of theory, and not major rewrites of multiple whole sections. Most Cosmologists are very wary of claiming they have done something huge until the first Nobel or getting Einstein's old office.
You might Google for (Sir) Karl Popper. He wrote a lot (and well) on what things like 'testability' or 'proof' mean to a scientist. I'm just trying to adapt some of his arguements to the way you phrased your questions. You might also Google for Thomas Khun, but I recommend reading a bit of Popper first. A lot of Khun's writings have been thrown around too freely of late.
At the risk of over-simplifying: Look one way, there's a certain amount of lumpyness. Look the opposite way, there's the same amount of lumpyness - that's uniform - uniformly lumpy. Finding early lumpyness helps explain why the modern universe is very lumpy with galaxies and groups of galaxies and voids between them. The more detailed scan really didn't find as much lumpy as expected, but it found enough lumpyness that Cosmologists are thinking it just might explain modern structure, or at least it's not off by too tremendous a factor.
The uniformity problem is different. Look one way (call it towards point A), see 12 billion light years. Look the opposite (towards point B), see 12 billion more. 12+12 is 24, so that spot on the far left has never exchanged information with the spot on the far right since the universe began. (Light from point A is only half way to point B, and vice versa). If they haven't exchanged information, how can they be in sync? To some theoreticians, that's like having a bunch of dancers staying in step, when some of them are so far from the band that the sound of the beat hasn't reached them yet.
I just pulled that one out of a drawer and plugged it up as a slave drive, and found some files still on it. I didn't try to boot from it or run a large executable off of it or otherwise verify that it was still solidly there, and it very probably isn't.
I feel your pain re. old junky parts. I just threw out about 240 Kg. of less than 1 Meg video cards, 10 M. Ethernet hubs and cards, CGA monitors, and 5 1/4" hard drives. I had to steel myself to push the button on the compactor. They'll take my SX-64 away from me when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers.
I think you are very much on track there. I also tend to think that maybe most "good" traits are already there, but not all of them. Some pretty smart people do seem to disagree with both of us there, and say that if we watched long enough term (like a million years or so) it would turn out people's best edumakated guess would still always be worse than nature's methods. Since nature's methods are endless variations on the four horsemen of the apokalipse, that does not speak well for these people's opinion of the value of human intelligence.
As long as roundup is being widely used, resistance should be advantagious, and the gene should spread. Neither back mutation/error correction, nor cross-fertilization with wild strains should weed (ouch!) the gene out with such a powerful net advantage.
Though the mechanism is unclear, the gene was obviously detrimental.
When I wrote code, I didn't mean "block of DNA based code". I meant an entire code, seperate from DNA. (This is what the article meant, too). We're not talking about a single gene, but an entire seperate encoding mechanism being detrimental. The original article suggests it might be an RNA based scheme. I've pointed out that this is extremely unlikely, because RNA's copying error rate is so many times greater than DNA, that using RNA to correct DNA would be about as useful as using third generation photocopies of had written notes that had been passed through an old fashioned purple ink - handcranked drum offset lithograpy machine, to correct current generation optically scanned text. The Researcher's don't think the information is in the DNA itself. If its not in either of those two, it has to be in some third encoding method. That 5% rate for correction some people are discussing sets some upper and lower bounds for how good such an encoding scheme could be. It's roughly an order of magnetude less fidelity than is DNA with additional error corrction from DNA transcriptase and other enzyme based correctors, roughly two orders of magnetude better than basic DNA as found in primative bacteria (without all the correcting mechanisms we multi-celled organisms share), and six or so orders of magnetude above RNA.
So how could this other encoding scheme be obviously detremental? What flaw could it have to make it universally unused for heredity (as a replacement for either basic DNA in bacteria and some viruses, or DNA plus its additional error correcting mechanisms in advanced organisms) or short term data transfer (as a replacement for tRNA)? What you're saying amounts to, "I can't think of a problem big enough to make this detremental, the researchers can't think of one, nobody has the remotest clue as to what a negative big enough to offset the positive of having a million fold better error correction is, but it has to be there, because the theory can't be flawed".
His government may well intervene more in business and/or private activities, but many non-US governments, particularly some of the European ones, are sticklers for doing this via actual laws, passed by some elected body that can be recalled or voted out. The US has tended to give agencies like the FCC or OSHA the power to write regulations that have the full force of law behind them, but are not always written with the same rigor, and are often harder to challenge legally or attempt to correct via the electoral process.
I really hate to reply to my own post, but this topic is heating up, and someone will probably ignore the smiley and everything, so just for the record, the above is an attempt at humor. Fellow slashdotters many be the judge it it's successful, but I am not seriously advocating Lysenkoism, Lamarkism, Marxist/Leninism, or anything else by it.
1. I am most certainly not attempting to confuse anything, including you. That by the way is an ad hominem. You seem prone to them. 2. I didn't mention God as an explanation in my post. You did. That's an error of attribution to imply otherwise. On the other hand, if you're conflating God and the Necessary Complexity arguement, I'll plead guilty to offering an arguement that at least tangentially relates to the latter. That means you just made an error of the excluded middle instead, although granted it's not as obvious as the other possibility. 3. Any good standard textbook will tell you that for Evolution to be true, more is required than imperfect replicators, and your statement there is simply wrong. In fact it's a classic wrong assmption a first year college Biology student often leaps to, and is, in the better courses, soon corrected. Darwin himself said "If it could be shown that unlimited blending of the mechanisms of heredity could occur, my theory would be fundamentally in error.". The modern version of this is sometimes phrased as "Quantization of the genetic code is absolutely fundamental to the theory of Evolution, and is why Mendelian Genetics is necessary to validate Darwin's work.". Incidentally, you might read the papaers accompanying Crick and Watson's Nobel award. They got it in part for demonstrating the particulate nature of the genetic code and thereby removing one of the then still extant objections to classical Darwinism.
What is this Geological Evolution of which you speak? What mechanism of "heredity" prohibits blending of the genes for being "Basalt" or "Granite"? What process kills living geological features selectively, sometimes before they can reproduce? What evidence do you have for Geological features being quantized into species? You're spouting mystical assertions there.
Oh my God, I'm argueing Evolutionary theory with someone who obviously hasn't even read Dawkins! I give up!
You've just asked a hard question. (A lot of experts disagree on the answer). Some geneticists argue that an advantageous trait like that must have some big hidden costs to offset it or it would have already developed naturally. By them, our "improvements" are all short term only. Others argue that we don't have to be perfectly insightful or understand all the consequences of our actions to do better than nature. Nature, by this arguement tries for workable, not perfect, and we can sometimes beat her.
Then too, what's short term for an apple tree? Ten generations there may be a thousand years. A subtle flaw in a GE apple tree, might be a net negative, but might take 50,000 years or more to be selected out.
I hope you are seriously cluelsss and not just faking it, but here goes: IPv5 doesn't exist, because by the time it became obvious that there was a need for more addresses, China and India's populations were rapidly joining the internet, and Bill Gates was talking about putting everyone's toasters on it too. It quickly became so obvious that this would not just overload the existing system, but over-overload it. So "they" jumped straight to 6 to make sure. IPV4 has 256^4 addresses (minus a smidgen), and 6 has 256^6 (ditto)
It poses a basic problem because most modern Evolutionists don't just claim that Natural Selection is responsible for Speciation, but that it is responsible for selecting the current Genetic code itself. By current theory DNA itself evolved from more primative hereditary mechanisms. Many Evolutionists try to extend this even farther, talking about cosmic and stellar evolution.
Just like RNA was a more primitive precursor to DNA (by the standard theory), this Error Correcting Code would have to fall somewhere in that model of mechanism evolution. It also has to be pretty good at copying fidelity, because DNA is pretty damned good (as in one error per billion passes good), and if this code is thousands of times worse, it won't survive unchanged long enough to be useful as an error corrector. That means this is a coding that could be used for the basic mechanism of heredity, just as DNA and RNA are, and it has much better copying fidelity than RNA. In copy quality, it has to be close to, or even better than DNA. (From basic chemestry, it seems very, very doubtful any other chemical combination could be exactly as good as DNA but no worse or better).
OK, so where is it? Some primative life forms still exist that use RNA for a genetic code, but this code, tens of thousands of times better, isn't still used in any living organism for actual heredity? What, the better code got weeded out of one application faster than the worse one? Advanced organisms still use RNA for short term information transfer, but this code, tens of thousands of times better on at least one count, isn't used anywhere for short term transfer either? How can a code be good enough to survive multiple generations of tranfer until it is needed, but simultaneously not good enough to use short term?
Handwave over all that, and the theory stands as elaborated. Admit that it is a very major example of 'survival of the less fit code" and the theory of Evolution explains only how species diversify and otherwise change. It becomes impossible to claim that Evolution reveals how life gets started and advances to near flawless replicators like DNA. Of course, that was why Darwin called his best book "The Origin of Species", and not "The origin of Life". He had the sense to limit his theory to what he had enough evidence to support. There are at least five apparently sound arguements against extending natural selection to 'explain' the origin of life. This was just one more. You won't hear any of them from the current establishment.
I like the quacks, no brains, and liars remarks in your post. Sure, many of those people have a bias from their religion. They also include people who have noticed many other flaws like this one. Those flaws aren't going to go away faster by you resorting to name calling. They are real, they cry out for an explanation, and sooner or later, that explanation will be part of the theory that is to come.
It's an EXTREMELY BASIC conundrum because, if there is an error correction mechanism, it must be at least roughly as good as the DNA it corrects to be of much use. If the error correction is something like RNA, well modern DNA makes copying errors with about 1/100,000th the frequency of RNA. There won't be much error correction out of a coding scheme that is that error filled iteself.
Even without the multicelled organism's version of DNA polymerase and a follow on repair enzyme to help error correct, even what we call 'primitive' DNA based bacteria have at least several thousand times greater copying fidelity than with RNA.
So, if the Error Correction Mechanism's copying system is much better than RNA, and at least close to as good as DNA, maybe even better, why isn't it being used as the main Genetic code? After all, RNA is still used by some viruses as their main genetic mechanism, and despite its flaws, hasn't been completely weeded out yet. RNA is used by more complex organisms only as a messenger. How could a much better coding system be weeded out for carrying the main code for actual heredity faster than a much worse one? And how come an apparently much better coding scheme than RNA exists, but isn't being used for short term transfer anywhere, just for this sort of error correction?
That's not really ture for humans. Reproduction for humans involves getting your kids raised, not just born. As long as even grandparents and great grandparents may sometimes be healthy enough to contribute more to their offspring's survival than to diminish it, that is an evolutionary pressure for longer lifespans. In fact, that probably explains why we have the potential to live so much longer than any similar species.
A lot of genetically modified plants will be selected against where they escape into the wild. Golden Rice, for example, uses a lot of energy making Beta Carotine, that is, (from the plant's view), wasted. When its seeds get cross fertilized by wild rices the genes tend to be weeded out in the wild areas quite rapidly. Rice has generations lasting a year or less, and it's been estimated that the genes are 99% gone within 10 years. Even in cultivation, farmers have to suplement their seed stock saved from the last harvest with new purchases of fresh Golden Rice every few years to keep the yields up.
That's not mutation as you've described, it's natural and artificial selection, but so long as there are unmodifed plants in the same areas as the GE ones, it tends to work that way, as the vast majority of GE features are disadvantagious under natural selection, and a lot of them are so disadvantagious they require real rigor to preserve via artificial selection. They're like Pekinese dogs in the wild.
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Good Evening Mr. Phelps...
Let's not include the DEA or the BATF. For that matter, there's 17 federal government agencies that have police-like powers in one area or another, we could probably drop half that budget and consolidate massively. My point is that you may benefit from federal police agencies or justice dept. protection of your rights even if you don't expect to.
Without knowing much at all about you, the question of whether you might ever find yourself needing a federal appeal is indeterminable, just like if I said I don't ever expect to need flood insurance and shouldn't have to pay for it just to get a mortgage, but didn't tell you I live on a hill, 800 feet+ vertical to the local flood plain.
Let's split that one, raising your estimate by just 1%, to 26% total. Arguably, we could shave some from the military budget without getting you less protection from military threats, which means you're not even getting 26%, say 20% instead.
More even than your property taxes, you've got me wondering "Why is he paying so much in state sales taxes?" I'll assume your state sales taxes run in the neigborhood of 9-10% of gross sales, as that's typical. It sounds like the state tax pays for little more than another layer of con-men shuffling your property taxes (and any city or county sales taxes you may also have) around.
Add to that, there's payments from old deficit spending. A lot of your taxes are probably paying off old debts. If the original expenditures there were unjustified, then interest on them is unjustified as well, but it's now inescapable - no changes to government except defaulting on that old debt will help, and that's generally a bad option. You'll never get services for interest payments, of course.
If we're talking about Zeroing the education budget, we're not just talking about home schooling, but no testing to see if it took and no money to set or enforce any legal requirements what-so-ever. Your employer (if any), now has to pay for all testing needed to select employees, down to basic math and literacy tests. Admittedly, many employers already have to pay to check some of the work claimed by the public schools, but the amount of work required increases a great deal when you have to conduct the equivalent of a full SAT as part of the intake process. There goes some of the savings, but that's minor.
What's major is the major crime rate in your state. Because you're supporting a system where it will easily be above 20%. What you just saved on education, you'll pay for in prisons. FIVE TIMES OVER! (Or did you think all those people who can't change a lightbulb are going to suddenly become competent to hold a full time job and simultaneously educate their children to the level they can survive in our economy? Or did you think they were all going to just magically quietly vanish?)
Or you can start shooting them all. As a former military officer, I will want a 100,000$ a year salary plus my men will doubtless expect at lest twice what you're paying police currently, and hazardous duty pay for actual riots, and I absolutely refuse to help you defend your state against its internal ravening hordes unless you give me triple your current police manpower, even with absolute blanket permission to enforce martial law as under combat conditions if needed. You'll need to set up curfews, border checkpoints, internal checkpoints and a manditory at all times ID system, or it will take more.
I won't take your money to enslave or shoot the poor and incompetent, mind you. You can get people who will, and many of them work dirt cheap, but they still aren't worth it and they will chew you up too in the end. I'm talkng that kind of money to actually enforce your laws, to be the judge, jury and commander of executioners in cases of real violations. I'm not offering to put people in your forced labor camps for a little weed or the constant stealing a loaf of bread stuff, but to deal with your homicide and grand theft rates.
Since I'm not as anal retentive as some in this line of work, I'd genuinely like to find ways to preserve freedom of association, prohibitions against quartering, and due process. To do that, you'll end up spending more money than my base estimate, not less. Oh, but you didn't even have five times your education budget in the state coffers? Better get out your papers, citizen. Avoiding the goosestepper approach isn't cheap.
90% of the people qualified to do that very dirty job you've just created will expect the same sort of deal. Just ask them. The other 10% will overestimate their own competency and die early, after which we will have to re-negotiate based on the mob's becoming overconfident from having lynched your last hired police force.
Certainly the energy has to come from somewhere, but the efficiency doesn't have to be the same for two somewheres.
e r.html
While this site has a pro-nuclear axe to grind, one point it discusses is how much it costs to generate a Kilowatt/Hour using various methods:
http://www.city-journal.org/html/15_1_nuclear_pow
If you don't want to bother with the whole article, here's one of the quotes I based my admittedly rough guestimate on.
"Burning $2-a-gallon gasoline, the power generated by current hybrid-car engines costs about 35 cents per kilowatt-hour. Many utilities, though, sell off-peak power for much less: 2 to 4 cents per kilowatt-hour. The nationwide residential price is still only 8.5 cents or so. (Peak rates in Manhattan are higher because of the city's heavy dependence on oil and gas, but not enough to change the basic arithmetic.) Grid kilowatts are cheaper because cheaper fuels generate them and because utility power plants run a lot more efficiently than car engines."
My local power cost is only about 3.5 cents (living near several hydro plants, one coal burner, and one nuke plant). For me, charging the batteries off of home current would be about 90% s cheaper than charging them off the vehicle's engine, and even 2.00 gas looks like a great incentive. For others, the savings are smaller, but still likely to prove persuasive.
I'd like to get rid of the coal plant, and actually burn less oil as well (reserving more for durable plastics and lubricants), but if New York needs the power that bad, it's probably not going to happen. Burning the same amount of oil in a few large plants will at least pollute my air less than in millions of cars, for more total power.
You probably ought to add Federal Police and Courts to that. I'd even count a part of state educational services. True they're not very efficient for the buck, but would you really claim you are not benefitting at all from your fellow citizens being given at least a basic grounding in the three R's and such? Try imagining all the people you interact with on a given day, (including every driver on those roads you use, all your coworkers, and every clerk you hand money), as all homeschooled. Do you really think you'ld have fewer day to day problems?
The best part of this is the batteries are being developed for cars. Compare this with the various high tech alloys and such that end up being available first in luxury items such as golf clubs or tennis racquets but not making it out to more fundamental products for another generation, or more. If this really starts showing up in 2006 models, it should slow the increase in gas prices within a few years, maybe a great deal if sales are good.
For Americans, would you rather have these batteries make it more quickly to your MP3 players and laptops, or have 2010 gas prices only rise to say $4.50 instead of $5.75 a gallon?
(And for most Europeans figure somewhere around EU 8 or 9 instead of EU 12, even if the Euro rises against the Dollar, as most of your governments have already agreed to discout hybred fuel costs in various ways, but a lot of the cost will still be taxes).
Indirect savings, i.e. from trucked goods costs and smaller winter spikes in heating oil prices would add substantially to that.
$1.25 a gallon difference (or likely more) will pay for lots of older model batteries for all your smaller appliances, and then some.
There's some proofs that information transfer is required, but they are all pretty limited as physicists see them, and abstract mathematicians see bigger gaps in these theories. For example, Dr. Hawking gave some arguements for instantanious transfer in his popularization, A Brief History of Time, but he also switched the way he was using the word imaginary, sometimes sticking to the math definition as in imaginary numbers, sometimes letting that slip a bit towards the popular meaning of the word.
One interpretation of Quantum Mechanics claims that particles that have been in close proximity remain coupled by some sort of instantanious (FTL) means of knowing each other's states. If someone rigorously proves that instantanious information transfer is absolutely required, that's likely to also extend to a proof that this quantum mechanic interpretation is preferred over the others, which would be a definite huge step forward in physics. Right now, that's not the standard model, at least yet.
Throw the multi-kilotonne lump of Ni/Fe hard enough and it will vapor deposit traces of Iridium on the whole planet and finish off those pesky dinosaurs.
There's no shortage of kids hoping to go into the pros when they start playing highschool football, but the chance a given one makes it is less than one in ten thousand. The percentage that get injured in high school is better than half, and a substantial group of them drop out without even a high school diploma afterwards. Then there's all the ones who end up with the kind of great education that lets them sell used cars.
There's no shortage of kids moving to the Hollywood area hoping to get one of those big actor's contracts. Despite this, the average yearly income from acting for the ones who actually get a Screen Actor's Guild card is less than from a full time job at minimum wage, and for the ones who never get into the union, the average income often turns into 20$ a blowjob.
Your "go figure" translates into "A lot of young people, often unsupervised minors, see nothing wrong in gambling on a million to one shot with no back up plan. A smaller group of older, more socially mobile people sees nothing wrong with basing their whole business plan on that fact."
The Beatles were steered by some sort of management comittee. Remember "Michelle"? The year it was released was 14 years after the year the name "Michelle" became the most popular name to give baby girls in Britain. Looking at the other Beatles albums, the pattern emerges. On the early albums, there is almost always a song using the most popular 14 or 15 year old girl's names in Britain, while on the latter ones, (basically after the Ed Sullivan appearance), there are songs using both these and the most popular US adolescent girl's names as well.
Anna, Julia, Lucy, Rita, Martha, Maggy (Mae), Penny, Pam, Honey, Sadie...
Beyond this, there's the required love song on every album, the required 3:22 long song for optimal AM play, and so on. Looking at when songs were actually recorded in studio, John and Paul uusually had to wait to record their favorites until someone in management was satisfied they had the required songs in the can.
You have a valid underlieng point. A lot of this research involves data that passes through many man-made intermediaries before it becomes something a human mind can work with, and is about conditions where normal common sense and intuition are not at all reliable guides.
On the other hand, some of your rhetoric is an answer of sorts to your own questions.
It's not usually stated as an explicit rule of science, but for a working scientist, phrases like "in a way we cannot detect" are themselves something that requires exceptionally strong proof. By default she would mostly first try to test for "in a way that we have not yet detected". Even if she had a few failures working along that line, she would probably try to find other new methods of possibly detecting something, or move on to some other problem.
If a problem seems stagnant for a very long time, usually a whole generation of researchers or more, someone may try to prove there's a fundamental reason we just can't do something, but even then, it's usually part of developing a theory that has some more positive aspects.
In the same way, she might first look for explanations that might require minor reframing of a single small section of theory, and not major rewrites of multiple whole sections. Most Cosmologists are very wary of claiming they have done something huge until the first Nobel or getting Einstein's old office.
You might Google for (Sir) Karl Popper. He wrote a lot (and well) on what things like 'testability' or 'proof' mean to a scientist. I'm just trying to adapt some of his arguements to the way you phrased your questions. You might also Google for Thomas Khun, but I recommend reading a bit of Popper first. A lot of Khun's writings have been thrown around too freely of late.
At the risk of over-simplifying:
Look one way, there's a certain amount of lumpyness. Look the opposite way, there's the same amount of lumpyness - that's uniform - uniformly lumpy.
Finding early lumpyness helps explain why the modern universe is very lumpy with galaxies and groups of galaxies and voids between them. The more detailed scan really didn't find as much lumpy as expected, but it found enough lumpyness that Cosmologists are thinking it just might explain modern structure, or at least it's not off by too tremendous a factor.
The uniformity problem is different. Look one way (call it towards point A), see 12 billion light years. Look the opposite (towards point B), see 12 billion more. 12+12 is 24, so that spot on the far left has never exchanged information with the spot on the far right since the universe began. (Light from point A is only half way to point B, and vice versa). If they haven't exchanged information, how can they be in sync? To some theoreticians, that's like having a bunch of dancers staying in step, when some of them are so far from the band that the sound of the beat hasn't reached them yet.
I just pulled that one out of a drawer and plugged it up as a slave drive, and found some files still on it. I didn't try to boot from it or run a large executable off of it or otherwise verify that it was still solidly there, and it very probably isn't.
I feel your pain re. old junky parts. I just threw out about 240 Kg. of less than 1 Meg video cards, 10 M. Ethernet hubs and cards, CGA monitors, and 5 1/4" hard drives. I had to steel myself to push the button on the compactor. They'll take my SX-64 away from me when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers.
I think you are very much on track there. I also tend to think that maybe most "good" traits are already there, but not all of them. Some pretty smart people do seem to disagree with both of us there, and say that if we watched long enough term (like a million years or so) it would turn out people's best edumakated guess would still always be worse than nature's methods. Since nature's methods are endless variations on the four horsemen of the apokalipse, that does not speak well for these people's opinion of the value of human intelligence.
As long as roundup is being widely used, resistance should be advantagious, and the gene should spread. Neither back mutation/error correction, nor cross-fertilization with wild strains should weed (ouch!) the gene out with such a powerful net advantage.
Though the mechanism is unclear, the gene was obviously detrimental.
When I wrote code, I didn't mean "block of DNA based code". I meant an entire code, seperate from DNA. (This is what the article meant, too).
We're not talking about a single gene, but an entire seperate encoding mechanism being detrimental. The original article suggests it might be an RNA based scheme. I've pointed out that this is extremely unlikely, because RNA's copying error rate is so many times greater than DNA, that using RNA to correct DNA would be about as useful as using third generation photocopies of had written notes that had been passed through an old fashioned purple ink - handcranked drum offset lithograpy machine, to correct current generation optically scanned text. The Researcher's don't think the information is in the DNA itself. If its not in either of those two, it has to be in some third encoding method. That 5% rate for correction some people are discussing sets some upper and lower bounds for how good such an encoding scheme could be. It's roughly an order of magnetude less fidelity than is DNA with additional error corrction from DNA transcriptase and other enzyme based correctors, roughly two orders of magnetude better than basic DNA as found in primative bacteria (without all the correcting mechanisms we multi-celled organisms share), and six or so orders of magnetude above RNA.
So how could this other encoding scheme be obviously detremental? What flaw could it have to make it universally unused for heredity (as a replacement for either basic DNA in bacteria and some viruses, or DNA plus its additional error correcting mechanisms in advanced organisms) or short term data transfer (as a replacement for tRNA)? What you're saying amounts to, "I can't think of a problem big enough to make this detremental, the researchers can't think of one, nobody has the remotest clue as to what a negative big enough to offset the positive of having a million fold better error correction is, but it has to be there, because the theory can't be flawed".
His government may well intervene more in business and/or private activities, but many non-US governments, particularly some of the European ones, are sticklers for doing this via actual laws, passed by some elected body that can be recalled or voted out. The US has tended to give agencies like the FCC or OSHA the power to write regulations that have the full force of law behind them, but are not always written with the same rigor, and are often harder to challenge legally or attempt to correct via the electoral process.
I really hate to reply to my own post, but this topic is heating up, and someone will probably ignore the smiley and everything, so just for the record, the above is an attempt at humor. Fellow slashdotters many be the judge it it's successful, but I am not seriously advocating Lysenkoism, Lamarkism, Marxist/Leninism, or anything else by it.
1. I am most certainly not attempting to confuse anything, including you. That by the way is an ad hominem. You seem prone to them.
2. I didn't mention God as an explanation in my post. You did. That's an error of attribution to imply otherwise. On the other hand, if you're conflating God and the Necessary Complexity arguement, I'll plead guilty to offering an arguement that at least tangentially relates to the latter. That means you just made an error of the excluded middle instead, although granted it's not as obvious as the other possibility.
3. Any good standard textbook will tell you that for Evolution to be true, more is required than imperfect replicators, and your statement there is simply wrong. In fact it's a classic wrong assmption a first year college Biology student often leaps to, and is, in the better courses, soon corrected. Darwin himself said "If it could be shown that unlimited blending of the mechanisms of heredity could occur, my theory would be fundamentally in error.". The modern version of this is sometimes phrased as "Quantization of the genetic code is absolutely fundamental to the theory of Evolution, and is why Mendelian Genetics is necessary to validate Darwin's work.". Incidentally, you might read the papaers accompanying Crick and Watson's Nobel award. They got it in part for demonstrating the particulate nature of the genetic code and thereby removing one of the then still extant objections to classical Darwinism.
What is this Geological Evolution of which you speak? What mechanism of "heredity" prohibits blending of the genes for being "Basalt" or "Granite"? What process kills living geological features selectively, sometimes before they can reproduce? What evidence do you have for Geological features being quantized into species? You're spouting mystical assertions there.
Oh my God, I'm argueing Evolutionary theory with someone who obviously hasn't even read Dawkins! I give up!
You've just asked a hard question. (A lot of experts disagree on the answer). Some geneticists argue that an advantageous trait like that must have some big hidden costs to offset it or it would have already developed naturally. By them, our "improvements" are all short term only. Others argue that we don't have to be perfectly insightful or understand all the consequences of our actions to do better than nature. Nature, by this arguement tries for workable, not perfect, and we can sometimes beat her.
Then too, what's short term for an apple tree? Ten generations there may be a thousand years. A subtle flaw in a GE apple tree, might be a net negative, but might take 50,000 years or more to be selected out.
I hope you are seriously cluelsss and not just faking it, but here goes:
IPv5 doesn't exist, because by the time it became obvious that there was a need for more addresses, China and India's populations were rapidly joining the internet, and Bill Gates was talking about putting everyone's toasters on it too. It quickly became so obvious that this would not just overload the existing system, but over-overload it. So "they" jumped straight to 6 to make sure.
IPV4 has 256^4 addresses (minus a smidgen), and 6 has 256^6 (ditto)
Then we have to give Lysenko a posthumous Nobel :-)
It poses a basic problem because most modern Evolutionists don't just claim that Natural Selection is responsible for Speciation, but that it is responsible for selecting the current Genetic code itself. By current theory DNA itself evolved from more primative hereditary mechanisms. Many Evolutionists try to extend this even farther, talking about cosmic and stellar evolution.
Just like RNA was a more primitive precursor to DNA (by the standard theory), this Error Correcting Code would have to fall somewhere in that model of mechanism evolution. It also has to be pretty good at copying fidelity, because DNA is pretty damned good (as in one error per billion passes good), and if this code is thousands of times worse, it won't survive unchanged long enough to be useful as an error corrector. That means this is a coding that could be used for the basic mechanism of heredity, just as DNA and RNA are, and it has much better copying fidelity than RNA. In copy quality, it has to be close to, or even better than DNA. (From basic chemestry, it seems very, very doubtful any other chemical combination could be exactly as good as DNA but no worse or better).
OK, so where is it? Some primative life forms still exist that use RNA for a genetic code, but this code, tens of thousands of times better, isn't still used in any living organism for actual heredity? What, the better code got weeded out of one application faster than the worse one? Advanced organisms still use RNA for short term information transfer, but this code, tens of thousands of times better on at least one count, isn't used anywhere for short term transfer either? How can a code be good enough to survive multiple generations of tranfer until it is needed, but simultaneously not good enough to use short term?
Handwave over all that, and the theory stands as elaborated. Admit that it is a very major example of 'survival of the less fit code" and the theory of Evolution explains only how species diversify and otherwise change. It becomes impossible to claim that Evolution reveals how life gets started and advances to near flawless replicators like DNA. Of course, that was why Darwin called his best book "The Origin of Species", and not "The origin of Life". He had the sense to limit his theory to what he had enough evidence to support. There are at least five apparently sound arguements against extending natural selection to 'explain' the origin of life. This was just one more. You won't hear any of them from the current establishment.
I like the quacks, no brains, and liars remarks in your post. Sure, many of those people have a bias from their religion. They also include people who have noticed many other flaws like this one. Those flaws aren't going to go away faster by you resorting to name calling. They are real, they cry out for an explanation, and sooner or later, that explanation will be part of the theory that is to come.
It's an EXTREMELY BASIC conundrum because, if there is an error correction mechanism, it must be at least roughly as good as the DNA it corrects to be of much use. If the error correction is something like RNA, well modern DNA makes copying errors with about 1/100,000th the frequency of RNA. There won't be much error correction out of a coding scheme that is that error filled iteself.
Even without the multicelled organism's version of DNA polymerase and a follow on repair enzyme to help error correct, even what we call 'primitive' DNA based bacteria have at least several thousand times greater copying fidelity than with RNA.
So, if the Error Correction Mechanism's copying system is much better than RNA, and at least close to as good as DNA, maybe even better, why isn't it being used as the main Genetic code? After all, RNA is still used by some viruses as their main genetic mechanism, and despite its flaws, hasn't been completely weeded out yet. RNA is used by more complex organisms only as a messenger. How could a much better coding system be weeded out for carrying the main code for actual heredity faster than a much worse one? And how come an apparently much better coding scheme than RNA exists, but isn't being used for short term transfer anywhere, just for this sort of error correction?
That's not really ture for humans. Reproduction for humans involves getting your kids raised, not just born. As long as even grandparents and great grandparents may sometimes be healthy enough to contribute more to their offspring's survival than to diminish it, that is an evolutionary pressure for longer lifespans. In fact, that probably explains why we have the potential to live so much longer than any similar species.
A lot of genetically modified plants will be selected against where they escape into the wild. Golden Rice, for example, uses a lot of energy making Beta Carotine, that is, (from the plant's view), wasted. When its seeds get cross fertilized by wild rices the genes tend to be weeded out in the wild areas quite rapidly. Rice has generations lasting a year or less, and it's been estimated that the genes are 99% gone within 10 years. Even in cultivation, farmers have to suplement their seed stock saved from the last harvest with new purchases of fresh Golden Rice every few years to keep the yields up.
That's not mutation as you've described, it's natural and artificial selection, but so long as there are unmodifed plants in the same areas as the GE ones, it tends to work that way, as the vast majority of GE features are disadvantagious under natural selection, and a lot of them are so disadvantagious they require real rigor to preserve via artificial selection. They're like Pekinese dogs in the wild.