This is the 10th comet found by Don Macholz, and only now has he hung his name on one? If this one isn't really Macholz 10, I'd love to know who he named the first nine after.
In the same ways that setting a booby trap in your own home can make you at fault for harm to the burglar or others. 1. You are using more force than necessary. Setting a trap that has every intention of killing someone. 2. You are endangering innocents. For the brakes, it's whoever else may be hit by that out of control car. For a booby-trap it might be the fireman who may enter through that window in an emergency. 3. You have clearly committed either a gross midemeanor or an actual felony before the other criminal ever becomes involved. Sabotage the brakes and then park the car on the street, and you're already there (that's why we have the phrase "Street Legal" - which that car is not). Reckless endangerment, aggrievated by intent. For example, in CA (the state that was part of the original story), reckless endangerment is a gross midemeanor. California currently also has a law on adult responsibility for juvenal crimes that could make you responsible if the thief is under age 18 and causes some accident, even one unrelated to the brake lines. (see my sig, and take the first part seriously - if you have a serious need to get the hard facts about this).
Put the car in a parking area, but leave the keys in it and the gate open, and you're still committing reckless endangerment. Lock the car away, and hang a sign on the steering wheel that says "Brakes don't work", and you're legal, but it's not a very effective trap anymore.
When an armed robbery causes a heart attack in a victim, we hold the criminal responsible for a homicide, regardless of his lack of deliberate intent. We even try robbers for felony murder for dropping a gun and accidentally shooting one of their own accomplices. Why do so many people think they can commit felonies such as deliberately sabotaging a vehicle or planting a boobytrap and then not take responsibility just because there's a chance a criminal may become the victim?
Your responsibilty doesnt start when a criminal successfully starts the car - you are responsible the whole time the car is sitting there in an unsafe manner.
Actually try this, and you may hear a prosecuting attourney saying things like "arrogant disregard for the safety of others", "taking the law into his own hands", and "acting as judge, jury, and executioner".
Maybe the comment was needed, but why was it needed as part of this article? I happen to think a lot of people need to be reminded as the new year approaches to make that resolution to lose 20 pounds, and to stick to it this time. I'll just throw that thought out here. It's very much needed, so no one should moderate it offtopic, or flamebait either.
True=!on topic
The independant list should be judged on its opwn merits. I don't need someone telling me that I have to like this because it stands in oppposition to Halo 2. How would you have felt if the article said, "Ignore the independent list this year, it's obvious the creators were avoiding any game that would remind you of Halo 2".
Could a valid seeming FBI or NSA ID get someone enough access at INS to alter someone's immigration records? Could it get someone a look at when the Dept. of the Interior schedules park ranger fly-overs or walk-throughs along the undeveloped parts of the US/Canadian border? Could it get unfettered access to many of a state or local government's files?
Can it be used to find out things indirectly - for example, can someone find out whether DEA has found their hidden dope plantation in a national park by watching for the warnings DEA gives the park service before raids?
Agencies like the Dept. of Transportation, Office of Management & Budget, or HEW all have information or tools that could be highly useful to criminals, while not having the high profile of DOD, DOE or one of the 17 or so smaller police/intelligence related agencies (BATF, OSR, DEA, FEMA, etc.). These civil oriented agencies mindset re. information or physical security is usually lower than a small town sherriff's office, even though they may have a budget 50 times as high.
A single standard ID might help if it was part of a general security upgrade of these agencies, but now we're talking about even more funding, to fix the holes that would otherwise allow not just ID spoofing, but many other tricks. Without that, consolidating ID systems isn't likely to help much, if at all.
Unlike most discussions of Einstein, the article does a good job of mentioning the breadth of his discoveries and explaining his stellar place in the scientific pantheon. It's refreshing to see some mention of his work on the photoelectric effect and the results of his brownian motion studies (this is referred to as proving atoms are real, rather than mentioned directly).
Some of Einstein's other accomplishments, such as the new interpretations of metalurgical theory spun off in his paper on diffusion of metallic atoms at a plane surface weld, has been skipped over, but enough is included to give the idea. His "not quite accomplishement" of getting close to proving the universe was expanding has been skipped as well, but then this field has opened back up and the results are as yet very uncertain. This would probably have required too much space to introduce properly.
However, in discussing quantum mechanics, only non-locality is really touched upon. Both the other approaches Einstein himself criticised and affected (the many-worlds interpretation, and the classical Copenhagen interpretation) aren't mentioned, and so his thought experiments about QM aren't actually explained at all. When I got to this section, I kept expecting to see the phrase Einstein-Rosen-Podolski pop up somewhere to give the reader something they could google for an explanation. If the article space was that limited, it would have been better to discuss only the early Einstein and stop about 1926.
I once saw two French philosophers debate for 15 minutes before they figured out that one of them had originally meant "Sky" (where airplanes fly) instead of "Heaven" (where angels fly). These were two PHDs who couldn't think of a better way to phrase it in French than to ask if the speaker meant angels or airplanes. Standardized, by the law-book French has less thsn 1/2 the vocabulary of English - Depending on just how you measure what's standard or common in English, that number can be much lower. By some methods French has only 36% of the vocabulary of modern Emglish.
In German, the common word for gloves would literally translate as hand-shoes. I can't swear it affects general thinking much, but it does affect what specialty store carries pairs of gloves. In the USA, a leather goods oriented shoe store is likely to carry shoes, gloves, wallets and belts, while in Germany you have specialty stores that are shoes and gloves only, and sporting type shoe stores that carry lots of sporting type gloves as well.
In English, the two words that seem to cause the most trouble are "free", and "my". What is the common meaning of the word "my", as used in my mind, my arm, my car, my home, my wife, my child, my job, my country, and my God?
It's more like saying "Nothing gets invented by a lone inventor anymore - It's all collective work.". Now just to piss off the Libertarians;-), I'll argue that position.
With costs to file and defend running what they are, a lone inventor takes a huge risk in marketing for himself (or herself). The most effective way to bring that risk into line with general business start up risks is to have (at the very least) a design engineer and a marketer also involved. Both of these will be having imput into the invention phase itself ("It needs to fit into this case design. Oh, and can't you make it air cooled? We can get quiet fans cheaper than quiet pumps.").
If Edison himself had just now invented the light bulb, the only way investors would risk capitalizing it these days it would be if a design engineer had aestetically critiqued the final shape, a safety engineer had figured out a better alternative than those open sockets, and a process engineer had figured out how to make them with the maximum ratio of unskilled to skilled labor. All that fits what you describe as migration to the marketplace, of course. However, these days it also has to happen while the invention is still in process and not just after it is "finished". Normally, a company files for a group of basic patents, and some design patents, and maybe even trademarks all at the same time.
Now realistically, impossible is too strong a word. If someone invents a process for "getting three men to the moon and back on the power contained in 2 AA batteries", they could probably patent it all by themselves and still end up making money hand over fist (maybe). These days, however, it's usually a five man effort to incline a cooking grill.
Malable, sentient & malevolent? It's that stuff the T2 was made out of, Duh! Forget going to Mt. Doom, we'll just take it to the particle accellerator torus at Orthanc.
I'd like to know where the slashes after filenames come from as well, but I'm not big on delving into the slashcode or whatever. I'll probably get modded flamebait for saying this, but just offhand it looks like I can cut and paste urls to slashdot without them in Mozilla (1.7.3) even if I paste from tabbed browsing only, and yet it may be screwing up that way in Firefox (that's on the wife's computer - I'm gonna have to ask her just what she put on there). I'm stuck on this problem - it seems incredibly unlikely that I went back and somehow added a slash after the link worked in testing, not just once but twice, but I can't reproduce the behavior reliably either so maybe I had an extended brain cramp.
I'll grant you that the FDA seemed to be getting stubborn about not allowing l-tryptophan back on the market at all by about 2000 AD. I suspect offhand they weren't originally that stubborn in the late 90's.
It looks (IMHO) like a particular response to the industry that pushed to market it in the first place. When problems showed up, some of those companies were both rather uncooperative, and got impatient with the pace of government investigations that they were slowing down. They started doing their own press releases and such which didn't always quote the other parties involved (both the FDA, and outside witnesses) accurately. I can't agree with your assessment of the FDA's behavior, because I don't think they started out distrustful and paranoid so much as reacted their way into it. Our individual experiences with government may make either viewpoint there rational from our own perspectives.
As just one example, the FDA didn't have any reason to think that good filtering schemes were being proposed. All those proposals started with the assumption that the contaminants were all known, and in fact were really limited to just one well known contaminant, If that assumption were true, then both existing testing and existing filtering methods would be effective. Meanwhile, other advisors were stressing that there was a good possibilty of two or more contaminants, and noting that one of the likely suspects was only detectable by a relatively new test (invented 7 years before in 1991, but not tested to see how it would scale up to industrial size operations).
Some of the more speculative ideas floated were that there could be more (maybe a lot more) than two related chemicals, or that the ones found by tests might be only the more complex variants on a simpler common molecule, and that base molecule (or maybe some variants) might be small enough that the standard processes either wouldn't detect or wouldn't filter it/them.
One reason for this speculation that makes it more than just anti-industry alarmism is that materials grown in a bacterium just generally seem to show more varieties of end product than ones made in a reaction vessel.
In living creatures, some chemical reactions that are statistically ultra-rare (due largely to time/energy constraints), become common, because they are mediated by enzymes that make the reaction happen literally billions of times faster than normal. Since some other enzymatic processes don't proceed at nearly such accellerated rates, intermediate products that are normally rare because the next step in the synthesis chain is an easy one (so they don't normally linger long) can also become 'disproportionately' common - if the bacterium is harvested at the right stage in its metabolism of the end product.
Cells that naturally evolve to produce a chemical from a really fast enzyme also naturally evolve mechanisms for preventing the reaction heat for an exothermic process from damaging things internally. Without that, bacteria could easily kill themselves off prematurely making the finished product in exceptional amounts, and die with some large amounts of a particular intermediate stage compound still tied up in their internals. Scientists might observe that the GE cells lifespans were shorter without
These days, the 'penny' stock category starts at 5 dollars US. Below that point, certain kinds of trading, including short options, are no longer allowed, which is what really differentiates them from 'normal' stocks. I watch SCOX, and it surprised me to see a couple of days ago, they briefly rose above $5.00.
I hate to reply to my own post, but I went back and checked the earlier links again:
FYI, Slashdot has a tendency to sometimes insert spaces into long URLS. This makes them invalid. I didn't put the space between my and otox, the system did. People who aren't clueless newbees know about this fault, and when it shows up, cut and paste to get a valid link.
1. I used the preview function. I tested it again after I posted it. It worked then. Sorry it quit, but your remarks are uncalled for. I appologized once already. That you can't accept it is your loss, not mine. 2. If you want to go check a few of the sites Perhaps starting with ones linked to Governments and Major Universities instead of Nutritional Supplement Distributers , you'll find that the claim that the purification step's being ommitted was the cause of the fatalities was proposed by the company at fault, and is hotly debated by any number of sources.
Here's the link for an editorial which is part of the Mayo Clinic Proceedings:
You might want to read the multiple parts where the nature of the "contaminant" is contested, where it is revealed that there were multiple possible contaminants, with a minimum of two, and the section mentioning that the actual cause may actually be a third or even higher numbered substance unique to the particular process and unidentifiable by tests capable of detecting all the contaminants known to be produceable by non-GE synthesis of Tryptophan.
Of course, that's just the Mayo Clinic. If some manufacturer of L-Tryptophan wants to claim that it was just a missing purification step that was responsible and they should be allowed to resume manufacture, I'm sure we should take their word over the Mayo Clinic.
The FDA itself has since gone on record as refuseing to liscence any process for making GE L-Tryptophan, regardless of the number of tests and filtration system designs proposed by the companies to assure purity. That's in addition to a general ban on marketing it as a supplement even if made from natural sources.
Of course the same sites that tell you it was just a corner cutting problem will also tell you how the FDA is just doing this to support the American Psychiatric Industry in its drive to get everyone hooked on Prozac.
So, criticize my professionalism, then call me a GE Hater. Pass on what you've read without linking. Why risk revealing the extensive biases possibly inherent in your sources?
The link originally went to a story about a Gene-Engineered bacterium that produced massive amounts of Tryptophan. Tryptophan harvested from this source and marketed as a dietary supplement killed at least 37 people (Note: some sites give this number as 27, some as 37, 37 appears to be the right figure) and made hundreds more ill and may still be contributing to premature deaths on the parts of hundreds more. I'm sorry the first reference got removed. Here's another one. If it gets taken down too, please try Googling for either "Tryptophan Fatalities" or "Gene Engineered Food Deaths" and see if you get some hits.
Christianity went through a period very early (from about 150 AD to a time a little past Constantine's conversion, say 350 AD at the latest), when the biggest heresy was called Gnosticism. The Gnostics were big on hidden messages, secret meanings only the elect could know, codes and symbols, and so on.
The basic reason for rejecting their ideas was when those ideas were reduced to simplest common assumptions, the Gnostics believed in a God who would damn all the stupid people just for not being smart enough to follow the Gnostic arguements. Their model assumed a coldly intellectual God, who wanted only the companionship of a few equally cold intellectual types. Everyone else was a throw away. At its best, Gnosticism incorporated some interesting and novel (for the time) ideas about the nature of creation and the origins of evil, pain and death. Some of these ideas were accepted by the mainstream in time, and there is still some interest on the part of Christian scholars in studying the whole movement. At its worst, however, it was a flurry of arguments each designed to exclude some person or group so someone else could feel superior for being a 'real' Christian. (Yes we still have a tendency to fall into this error, sorry!).
My own take on this point is: God doesn't want to hide anything. As Einstein said, He may be subtle, but not malicious. IF there's any hidden code in the Bible, it isn't needed for salvation, or even for anything else even half-way as important as that. Love that which created you, and love your neighbor - the rest is, (by comparison) commentary.
Appology appreciated. Hey, it's Slashdot, plus text always has problems with clarity from bandwidth limits, no problem.
What I was argueing, is that the situation exists where someone takes a couple of months or even years of life each from a bunch of people who are nearing retirement, by damaging their investements, screwing up their pension plans, or ripping off their bank accounts (like this thread was about), so they die earlier from not getting as good medical care.
What is it fair to compare that to? I think those victims of identity theft count (generally) as productive members of society. Some of them may have done a few things. Statisticly, if you sample say a hundred thousand people with credit cads, some of them will have fallen far short of being decent, productive citizens. But, on the average, for people who have identities worth ripping off, they count as productive people, good members of society, etc.
So I think you could more fairly compare taking months or years from a sufficiently large bunch of mostly good, decent people's lives as being like murdering one newborn who we somehow know will grow up to be an honest and productive person, than even just comparing it to murdering one newborn in general. You're right in that we can't know the future for the baby (except in the broadest statistical sense), but we do know it (in the aggregate) for the past of the crime victims, and ought to include that factor in any estimate of damages.
In a case like the one in the thread, I'm asserting that stealing enough identities or abusing enough credit information can add up to enough damage to health and life and not just pocketbook to deserve that 9 years penalty or more, which some people think was fundamentally unfair for that tupe of crime. Please don't think I'm argueing that it was automatically the right penalty for this particular example of the crime - I'm trusting the jury on that as much as any of us.
It's a paradox - the arguemnt runs: 1. natural causes of extinction have not changed significantly since long before humans evolved. 2. All the added risk to us is man-made causes of extinction. 3. We can avoid (at least some of)those risks by colonizing other planets. New colonies on Mars and beyond can get decoupled from the political institutions that pose the man-made risks.
BUT... If the risk of a suicidal war or stupidity based accident taking us all out is really that high, then it is also true that the social institutions will suicidally and stupidly set up colonies so that they will inevitably be dragged back into the general collapse of civilization. As we make the mistakes that will lead to our short sighted deaths in a wave of gray goo/nuclear exchange/skynet awakening/whatever, we will also make the mistakes that will lead to our colonies being kept tied to the social system so that they can't survive either.
If we are too stupid to implement real disarmament/stop melting the ice caps/build asteroid deflectors/stockpile enough flu vaccines/whatever, we will also be too stupid to let colonies become completely self sufficient/experiment with new forms of government/stay neutral in the devastating final war/whatever.
A lot of what was cut for the first film was the stuff Tolkien wrote early, before he decided what the main point of the books would be (Bombadil, Old man Willow, the Barrowdowns). In various letters, Tolkien himself 'admitted' he left in some parts extranious to the main plot, knew this was placing obstacles in front of the readers, and only hoped the readers would find them entertaining enough to overlook their nature as padding. He himself described his goals in leaving these early bits in as incorporating tip of the hat references to various medeval works, i.e. references to the Old Thomas the Rhymer type stories and Jack fairytales, not as supporting the main story. It's not a statistical coincidence that most people who drop the LOTR unfinished do so before Frodo meets Strider in chapter 10.
I don't know if this makes the films better than the books. I doubt that - but it may mean that the films don't essentially demand you go read a number of early works from Beowulf to the Song of Roland to make full sense out of them.
This seems to be a particularly US centric situation. I don't exactly have a survey that shows people in the US are more focused on actors and pay less attention to screen writers, directors and such than anywhere else, but I would suggest people compare the posters and newspaper ads for various movies shown both overseas and stateside and see if they come to a similar conclusion.
I'm one of those people who goes to the theater, stays through the closing credits, and makes mental notes of who did the soundtrack or what special effects studios were involved. I only saw about 9 or 10 films in theaters last year, but I didn't see a single one that left me wanting my money back.
Anyone wanting to make Snowcrash properly would have one basic problem: Some plot points hinge on some people having cheap looking generic avatars in cyberspace while others have carefully crafted individual avatars with much more bandwidth supporting them. How do you make it apparent in a film that the cheap stuff reflects the real characterization and not the film's special effects budget?
I suspect that those directors who would want to do Snowcrash right exist, but they probably are not really committed to the project because they'd have to solve this problem in terms of set design, overall look and feel, and its impact on the humorous elements of the plot, all before they could even tackle a final screenplay, let alone casting.
Usually, films, particularly SF, are done in the reverse, i.e. you delegate designing the suit robot Andy Kaufmann is going to wear after you have actually cast him. Similarly, you usually know what stunts an actor will need to do before you sweat visual style too much, so you have a plan for when you will use blue screen effects, wirework and such - a plan that is there to make the impossible shot possible, or often, safer for the actors, not to make a deliberately cheesy avatar look cheesier and a qualty avatar look more fluid and 'bandwidth rich'.
I didn't say anything about serial murderers, period. I think you misread my post badly. In fact, if I hadn't checked out your posting history and seen a reasonably normal history with a few insightfuls sprinkled in, I would have decided you were deliberately trolling. What gives here?
Primary contractor for the interceptor missile system is Boeing. Four previous tests have been successful as tests of at least some parts of the system. At least 1 previous test was spectacularly unsuccessful after the missile boost stage failed to separate, and others have had less obvious problems.
Orbital Sciences Corp. is an alternate contractor for a booster system in case the Boeing design doesn't meet final acceptance, and several companies such as Lockeed-Martin also have standby programs.
The warhead that may ultimately be deployed is technically an EKV (Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle). Raethon has the contract for this design. It contains a sensor suite that is supposed to descriminate between actual nuclear devices and decoys. Tests so far have had balloon decoys whose IR characteristics were relatively easy to discriminate vis-a-vis an actual warhead. This test would have been against a wider selection of balloon decoys.
If you lose your retirement fund, you will probably lose at least a few months life expectancy living on just social security. You will have to put off some medical treatments, not get as many expensive tests, and so on. You may even have a poorer diet. AARP estimates suggest the average life expectancy in the US is about 2 years shorter if you only have Medicare for medical support.
What's the real difference between killing one healthy newborn infant that is specifically guarenteed to otherwise become a productive member of socitey, and takeing 2 years apiece from about 35-40 formerly productive retirees? To reverse the old saying, Money is Time (and Time is Life).
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Whoops! That's machholz, two h's. Sorry!
This is the 10th comet found by Don Macholz, and only now has he hung his name on one? If this one isn't really Macholz 10, I'd love to know who he named the first nine after.
In the same ways that setting a booby trap in your own home can make you at fault for harm to the burglar or others.
1. You are using more force than necessary. Setting a trap that has every intention of killing someone.
2. You are endangering innocents. For the brakes, it's whoever else may be hit by that out of control car. For a booby-trap it might be the fireman who may enter through that window in an emergency.
3. You have clearly committed either a gross midemeanor or an actual felony before the other criminal ever becomes involved. Sabotage the brakes and then park the car on the street, and you're already there (that's why we have the phrase "Street Legal" - which that car is not). Reckless endangerment, aggrievated by intent. For example, in CA (the state that was part of the original story), reckless endangerment is a gross midemeanor. California currently also has a law on adult responsibility for juvenal crimes that could make you responsible if the thief is under age 18 and causes some accident, even one unrelated to the brake lines. (see my sig, and take the first part seriously - if you have a serious need to get the hard facts about this).
Put the car in a parking area, but leave the keys in it and the gate open, and you're still committing reckless endangerment. Lock the car away, and hang a sign on the steering wheel that says "Brakes don't work", and you're legal, but it's not a very effective trap anymore.
When an armed robbery causes a heart attack in a victim, we hold the criminal responsible for a homicide, regardless of his lack of deliberate intent. We even try robbers for felony murder for dropping a gun and accidentally shooting one of their own accomplices. Why do so many people think they can commit felonies such as deliberately sabotaging a vehicle or planting a boobytrap and then not take responsibility just because there's a chance a criminal may become the victim?
Your responsibilty doesnt start when a criminal successfully starts the car - you are responsible the whole time the car is sitting there in an unsafe manner.
Actually try this, and you may hear a prosecuting attourney saying things like "arrogant disregard for the safety of others", "taking the law into his own hands", and "acting as judge, jury, and executioner".
Maybe the comment was needed, but why was it needed as part of this article? I happen to think a lot of people need to be reminded as the new year approaches to make that resolution to lose 20 pounds, and to stick to it this time. I'll just throw that thought out here. It's very much needed, so no one should moderate it offtopic, or flamebait either.
True=!on topic
The independant list should be judged on its opwn merits. I don't need someone telling me that I have to like this because it stands in oppposition to Halo 2. How would you have felt if the article said, "Ignore the independent list this year, it's obvious the creators were avoiding any game that would remind you of Halo 2".
Could a valid seeming FBI or NSA ID get someone enough access at INS to alter someone's immigration records? Could it get someone a look at when the Dept. of the Interior schedules park ranger fly-overs or walk-throughs along the undeveloped parts of the US/Canadian border? Could it get unfettered access to many of a state or local government's files?
Can it be used to find out things indirectly - for example, can someone find out whether DEA has found their hidden dope plantation in a national park by watching for the warnings DEA gives the park service before raids?
Agencies like the Dept. of Transportation, Office of Management & Budget, or HEW all have information or tools that could be highly useful to criminals, while not having the high profile of DOD, DOE or one of the 17 or so smaller police/intelligence related agencies (BATF, OSR, DEA, FEMA, etc.). These civil oriented agencies mindset re. information or physical security is usually lower than a small town sherriff's office, even though they may have a budget 50 times as high.
A single standard ID might help if it was part of a general security upgrade of these agencies, but now we're talking about even more funding, to fix the holes that would otherwise allow not just ID spoofing, but many other tricks. Without that, consolidating ID systems isn't likely to help much, if at all.
Unlike most discussions of Einstein, the article does a good job of mentioning the breadth of his discoveries and explaining his stellar place in the scientific pantheon. It's refreshing to see some mention of his work on the photoelectric effect and the results of his brownian motion studies (this is referred to as proving atoms are real, rather than mentioned directly).
Some of Einstein's other accomplishments, such as the new interpretations of metalurgical theory spun off in his paper on diffusion of metallic atoms at a plane surface weld, has been skipped over, but enough is included to give the idea. His "not quite accomplishement" of getting close to proving the universe was expanding has been skipped as well, but then this field has opened back up and the results are as yet very uncertain. This would probably have required too much space to introduce properly.
However, in discussing quantum mechanics, only non-locality is really touched upon. Both the other approaches Einstein himself criticised and affected (the many-worlds interpretation, and the classical Copenhagen interpretation) aren't mentioned, and so his thought experiments about QM aren't actually explained at all. When I got to this section, I kept expecting to see the phrase Einstein-Rosen-Podolski pop up somewhere to give the reader something they could google for an explanation. If the article space was that limited, it would have been better to discuss only the early Einstein and stop about 1926.
I once saw two French philosophers debate for 15 minutes before they figured out that one of them had originally meant "Sky" (where airplanes fly) instead of "Heaven" (where angels fly). These were two PHDs who couldn't think of a better way to phrase it in French than to ask if the speaker meant angels or airplanes. Standardized, by the law-book French has less thsn 1/2 the vocabulary of English - Depending on just how you measure what's standard or common in English, that number can be much lower. By some methods French has only 36% of the vocabulary of modern Emglish.
In German, the common word for gloves would literally translate as hand-shoes. I can't swear it affects general thinking much, but it does affect what specialty store carries pairs of gloves. In the USA, a leather goods oriented shoe store is likely to carry shoes, gloves, wallets and belts, while in Germany you have specialty stores that are shoes and gloves only, and sporting type shoe stores that carry lots of sporting type gloves as well.
In English, the two words that seem to cause the most trouble are "free", and "my". What is the common meaning of the word "my", as used in my mind, my arm, my car, my home, my wife, my child, my job, my country, and my God?
It's more like saying "Nothing gets invented by a lone inventor anymore - It's all collective work.". Now just to piss off the Libertarians ;-), I'll argue that position.
With costs to file and defend running what they are, a lone inventor takes a huge risk in marketing for himself (or herself). The most effective way to bring that risk into line with general business start up risks is to have (at the very least) a design engineer and a marketer also involved. Both of these will be having imput into the invention phase itself ("It needs to fit into this case design. Oh, and can't you make it air cooled? We can get quiet fans cheaper than quiet pumps.").
If Edison himself had just now invented the light bulb, the only way investors would risk capitalizing it these days it would be if a design engineer had aestetically critiqued the final shape, a safety engineer had figured out a better alternative than those open sockets, and a process engineer had figured out how to make them with the maximum ratio of unskilled to skilled labor. All that fits what you describe as migration to the marketplace, of course. However, these days it also has to happen while the invention is still in process and not just after it is "finished". Normally, a company files for a group of basic patents, and some design patents, and maybe even trademarks all at the same time.
Now realistically, impossible is too strong a word. If someone invents a process for "getting three men to the moon and back on the power contained in 2 AA batteries", they could probably patent it all by themselves and still end up making money hand over fist (maybe). These days, however, it's usually a five man effort to incline a cooking grill.
Malable, sentient & malevolent?
It's that stuff the T2 was made out of, Duh!
Forget going to Mt. Doom, we'll just take it to the particle accellerator torus at Orthanc.
It turns out Titan is habitable, but you have to enrage the Cacodaemons so they follow you around firing lost souls at you to keep you warm.
I'd like to know where the slashes after filenames come from as well, but I'm not big on delving into the slashcode or whatever. I'll probably get modded flamebait for saying this, but just offhand it looks like I can cut and paste urls to slashdot without them in Mozilla (1.7.3) even if I paste from tabbed browsing only, and yet it may be screwing up that way in Firefox (that's on the wife's computer - I'm gonna have to ask her just what she put on there). I'm stuck on this problem - it seems incredibly unlikely that I went back and somehow added a slash after the link worked in testing, not just once but twice, but I can't reproduce the behavior reliably either so maybe I had an extended brain cramp.
I'll grant you that the FDA seemed to be getting stubborn about not allowing l-tryptophan back on the market at all by about 2000 AD. I suspect offhand they weren't originally that stubborn in the late 90's.
It looks (IMHO) like a particular response to the industry that pushed to market it in the first place. When problems showed up, some of those companies were both rather uncooperative, and got impatient with the pace of government investigations that they were slowing down. They started doing their own press releases and such which didn't always quote the other parties involved (both the FDA, and outside witnesses) accurately. I can't agree with your assessment of the FDA's behavior, because I don't think they started out distrustful and paranoid so much as reacted their way into it. Our individual experiences with government may make either viewpoint there rational from our own perspectives.
As just one example, the FDA didn't have any reason to think that good filtering schemes were being proposed. All those proposals started with the assumption that the contaminants were all known, and in fact were really limited to just one well known contaminant, If that assumption were true, then both existing testing and existing filtering methods would be effective. Meanwhile, other advisors were stressing that there was a good possibilty of two or more contaminants, and noting that one of the likely suspects was only detectable by a relatively new test (invented 7 years before in 1991, but not tested to see how it would scale up to industrial size operations).
Some of the more speculative ideas floated were that there could be more (maybe a lot more) than two related chemicals, or that the ones found by tests might be only the more complex variants on a simpler common molecule, and that base molecule (or maybe some variants) might be small enough that the standard processes either wouldn't detect or wouldn't filter it/them.
One reason for this speculation that makes it more than just anti-industry alarmism is that materials grown in a bacterium just generally seem to show more varieties of end product than ones made in a reaction vessel.
In living creatures, some chemical reactions that are statistically ultra-rare (due largely to time/energy constraints), become common, because they are mediated by enzymes that make the reaction happen literally billions of times faster than normal. Since some other enzymatic processes don't proceed at nearly such accellerated rates, intermediate products that are normally rare because the next step in the synthesis chain is an easy one (so they don't normally linger long) can also become 'disproportionately' common - if the bacterium is harvested at the right stage in its metabolism of the end product.
Cells that naturally evolve to produce a chemical from a really fast enzyme also naturally evolve mechanisms for preventing the reaction heat for an exothermic process from damaging things internally. Without that, bacteria could easily kill themselves off prematurely making the finished product in exceptional amounts, and die with some large amounts of a particular intermediate stage compound still tied up in their internals. Scientists might observe that the GE cells lifespans were shorter without
These days, the 'penny' stock category starts at 5 dollars US. Below that point, certain kinds of trading, including short options, are no longer allowed, which is what really differentiates them from 'normal' stocks. I watch SCOX, and it surprised me to see a couple of days ago, they briefly rose above $5.00.
I hate to reply to my own post, but I went back and checked the earlier links again:
y otox.htm
FYI, Slashdot has a tendency to sometimes insert spaces into long URLS. This makes them invalid. I didn't put the space between my and otox, the system did. People who aren't clueless newbees know about this fault, and when it shows up, cut and paste to get a valid link.
http://www.neuro.wustl.edu/neuromuscular/mother/m
What you see above just worked for me when tested in preview mode. If it quits working, cut and paste it, or quit yer bitchin.
1. I used the preview function. I tested it again after I posted it. It worked then. Sorry it quit, but your remarks are uncalled for. I appologized once already. That you can't accept it is your loss, not mine.
2. If you want to go check a few of the sites Perhaps starting with ones linked to Governments and Major Universities instead of Nutritional Supplement Distributers , you'll find that the claim that the purification step's being ommitted was the cause of the fatalities was proposed by the company at fault, and is hotly debated by any number of sources.
Here's the link for an editorial which is part of the Mayo Clinic Proceedings:
http://www.nemsn.org/Articles/editorial.htm
You might want to read the multiple parts where the nature of the "contaminant" is contested, where it is revealed that there were multiple possible contaminants, with a minimum of two, and the section mentioning that the actual cause may actually be a third or even higher numbered substance unique to the particular process and unidentifiable by tests capable of detecting all the contaminants known to be produceable by non-GE synthesis of Tryptophan.
Of course, that's just the Mayo Clinic. If some manufacturer of L-Tryptophan wants to claim that it was just a missing purification step that was responsible and they should be allowed to resume manufacture, I'm sure we should take their word over the Mayo Clinic.
The FDA itself has since gone on record as refuseing to liscence any process for making GE L-Tryptophan, regardless of the number of tests and filtration system designs proposed by the companies to assure purity. That's in addition to a general ban on marketing it as a supplement even if made from natural sources.
Of course the same sites that tell you it was just a corner cutting problem will also tell you how the FDA is just doing this to support the American Psychiatric Industry in its drive to get everyone hooked on Prozac.
So, criticize my professionalism, then call me a GE Hater. Pass on what you've read without linking. Why risk revealing the extensive biases possibly inherent in your sources?
The link originally went to a story about a Gene-Engineered bacterium that produced massive amounts of Tryptophan. Tryptophan harvested from this source and marketed as a dietary supplement killed at least 37 people (Note: some sites give this number as 27, some as 37, 37 appears to be the right figure) and made hundreds more ill and may still be contributing to premature deaths on the parts of hundreds more.
y otox.htm/
I'm sorry the first reference got removed. Here's another one. If it gets taken down too, please try Googling for either "Tryptophan Fatalities" or "Gene Engineered Food Deaths" and see if you get some hits.
http://www.neuro.wustl.edu/neuromuscular/mother/m
I know of at least 1 well documented medical risk to humans from a gene-engineered food, if you count a dietary supplement and not just whole foods.
http://www.nd.edu/~chem191/d3.html/
Christianity went through a period very early (from about 150 AD to a time a little past Constantine's conversion, say 350 AD at the latest), when the biggest heresy was called Gnosticism. The Gnostics were big on hidden messages, secret meanings only the elect could know, codes and symbols, and so on.
The basic reason for rejecting their ideas was when those ideas were reduced to simplest common assumptions, the Gnostics believed in a God who would damn all the stupid people just for not being smart enough to follow the Gnostic arguements. Their model assumed a coldly intellectual God, who wanted only the companionship of a few equally cold intellectual types. Everyone else was a throw away. At its best, Gnosticism incorporated some interesting and novel (for the time) ideas about the nature of creation and the origins of evil, pain and death. Some of these ideas were accepted by the mainstream in time, and there is still some interest on the part of Christian scholars in studying the whole movement. At its worst, however, it was a flurry of arguments each designed to exclude some person or group so someone else could feel superior for being a 'real' Christian. (Yes we still have a tendency to fall into this error, sorry!).
My own take on this point is: God doesn't want to hide anything. As Einstein said, He may be subtle, but not malicious. IF there's any hidden code in the Bible, it isn't needed for salvation, or even for anything else even half-way as important as that. Love that which created you, and love your neighbor - the rest is, (by comparison) commentary.
Appology appreciated. Hey, it's Slashdot, plus text always has problems with clarity from bandwidth limits, no problem.
What I was argueing, is that the situation exists where someone takes a couple of months or even years of life each from a bunch of people who are nearing retirement, by damaging their investements, screwing up their pension plans, or ripping off their bank accounts (like this thread was about), so they die earlier from not getting as good medical care.
What is it fair to compare that to? I think those victims of identity theft count (generally) as productive members of society. Some of them may have done a few things. Statisticly, if you sample say a hundred thousand people with credit cads, some of them will have fallen far short of being decent, productive citizens. But, on the average, for people who have identities worth ripping off, they count as productive people, good members of society, etc.
So I think you could more fairly compare taking months or years from a sufficiently large bunch of mostly good, decent people's lives as being like murdering one newborn who we somehow know will grow up to be an honest and productive person, than even just comparing it to murdering one newborn in general. You're right in that we can't know the future for the baby (except in the broadest statistical sense), but we do know it (in the aggregate) for the past of the crime victims, and ought to include that factor in any estimate of damages.
In a case like the one in the thread, I'm asserting that stealing enough identities or abusing enough credit information can add up to enough damage to health and life and not just pocketbook to deserve that 9 years penalty or more, which some people think was fundamentally unfair for that tupe of crime. Please don't think I'm argueing that it was automatically the right penalty for this particular example of the crime - I'm trusting the jury on that as much as any of us.
It's a paradox - the arguemnt runs:
1. natural causes of extinction have not changed significantly since long before humans evolved.
2. All the added risk to us is man-made causes of extinction.
3. We can avoid (at least some of)those risks by colonizing other planets. New colonies on Mars and beyond can get decoupled from the political institutions that pose the man-made risks.
BUT... If the risk of a suicidal war or stupidity based accident taking us all out is really that high, then it is also true that the social institutions will suicidally and stupidly set up colonies so that they will inevitably be dragged back into the general collapse of civilization. As we make the mistakes that will lead to our short sighted deaths in a wave of gray goo/nuclear exchange/skynet awakening/whatever, we will also make the mistakes that will lead to our colonies being kept tied to the social system so that they can't survive either.
If we are too stupid to implement real disarmament/stop melting the ice caps/build asteroid deflectors/stockpile enough flu vaccines/whatever, we will also be too stupid to let colonies become completely self sufficient/experiment with new forms of government/stay neutral in the devastating final war/whatever.
A lot of what was cut for the first film was the stuff Tolkien wrote early, before he decided what the main point of the books would be (Bombadil, Old man Willow, the Barrowdowns). In various letters, Tolkien himself 'admitted' he left in some parts extranious to the main plot, knew this was placing obstacles in front of the readers, and only hoped the readers would find them entertaining enough to overlook their nature as padding. He himself described his goals in leaving these early bits in as incorporating tip of the hat references to various medeval works, i.e. references to the Old Thomas the Rhymer type stories and Jack fairytales, not as supporting the main story. It's not a statistical coincidence that most people who drop the LOTR unfinished do so before Frodo meets Strider in chapter 10.
I don't know if this makes the films better than the books. I doubt that - but it may mean that the films don't essentially demand you go read a number of early works from Beowulf to the Song of Roland to make full sense out of them.
This seems to be a particularly US centric situation. I don't exactly have a survey that shows people in the US are more focused on actors and pay less attention to screen writers, directors and such than anywhere else, but I would suggest people compare the posters and newspaper ads for various movies shown both overseas and stateside and see if they come to a similar conclusion.
I'm one of those people who goes to the theater, stays through the closing credits, and makes mental notes of who did the soundtrack or what special effects studios were involved. I only saw about 9 or 10 films in theaters last year, but I didn't see a single one that left me wanting my money back.
Anyone wanting to make Snowcrash properly would have one basic problem: Some plot points hinge on some people having cheap looking generic avatars in cyberspace while others have carefully crafted individual avatars with much more bandwidth supporting them. How do you make it apparent in a film that the cheap stuff reflects the real characterization and not the film's special effects budget?
I suspect that those directors who would want to do Snowcrash right exist, but they probably are not really committed to the project because they'd have to solve this problem in terms of set design, overall look and feel, and its impact on the humorous elements of the plot, all before they could even tackle a final screenplay, let alone casting.
Usually, films, particularly SF, are done in the reverse, i.e. you delegate designing the suit robot Andy Kaufmann is going to wear after you have actually cast him. Similarly, you usually know what stunts an actor will need to do before you sweat visual style too much, so you have a plan for when you will use blue screen effects, wirework and such - a plan that is there to make the impossible shot possible, or often, safer for the actors, not to make a deliberately cheesy avatar look cheesier and a qualty avatar look more fluid and 'bandwidth rich'.
I didn't say anything about serial murderers, period. I think you misread my post badly. In fact, if I hadn't checked out your posting history and seen a reasonably normal history with a few insightfuls sprinkled in, I would have decided you were deliberately trolling. What gives here?
Primary contractor for the interceptor missile system is Boeing. Four previous tests have been successful as tests of at least some parts of the system. At least 1 previous test was spectacularly unsuccessful after the missile boost stage failed to separate, and others have had less obvious problems.
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Orbital Sciences Corp. is an alternate contractor for a booster system in case the Boeing design doesn't meet final acceptance, and several companies such as Lockeed-Martin also have standby programs.
The warhead that may ultimately be deployed is technically an EKV (Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle). Raethon has the contract for this design. It contains a sensor suite that is supposed to descriminate between actual nuclear devices and decoys. Tests so far have had balloon decoys whose IR characteristics were relatively easy to discriminate vis-a-vis an actual warhead. This test would have been against a wider selection of balloon decoys.
For more info, and some nice photos, try:
http://www.designation-systems.net/dusrm/app4/gbi
If you lose your retirement fund, you will probably lose at least a few months life expectancy living on just social security. You will have to put off some medical treatments, not get as many expensive tests, and so on. You may even have a poorer diet. AARP estimates suggest the average life expectancy in the US is about 2 years shorter if you only have Medicare for medical support.
What's the real difference between killing one healthy newborn infant that is specifically guarenteed to otherwise become a productive member of socitey, and takeing 2 years apiece from about 35-40 formerly productive retirees? To reverse the old saying, Money is Time (and Time is Life).