There's a difference between taking the thread off topic and responding to someone else's having already taken the tread off topic. If a mod can't be bothered to identify where the first off topic post happened, and finds his or herself giving an offtopic to the fifth post down, he or she should stop using offtopic untill they understand modding better.
(And I'm not offtopic to post about how the thread is being modded, I'm just meta.).
One of the big reasons they won't be profitable without state sponsorship is the military applications of enriched Uranium. The US made Energy a whole cabinet level entity chiefly because of nuclear prolifieration issues. Any effort by the far right in the US to "drown government in a bathtub" runs into the problem of how you can have a tiny federal government with a multi-billion dollar Dept. of Energy.
( As a small proof of these statements, the total budget for DOE 2014 is a tad over 26 Billion dollars, and the portion of it that is for dealing with weapons and prolifieration related activities is the largest single section of that total at just over 11 billion.)
(If readers want to cut to the chase, try the table on page 19). Interested people may note that the costs of all kinds of energy generation and of environmental activities are grouped together as one section, but they still come out smaller even lumped together, than the 'blowing things up and stopping other people from doing the same back at us' section does. Scientific research is smaller yet, only about a sixth of the budget. Then there's the question, how much of that environmental clean up and scientific research is actually to support the military parts of DoE activites and maybe ought to show up as another cost of war and proliferation?
Those costs are going to be incurred so long as the US runs a Nuclear Navy, has H-bombs in its arsenal, and wants to stop various 'rogue nations and state sponsored action groups' from getting their hands on the resulting materials. Stop all civilian energy research (of all kinds, not just nuclear) and all civilian nuclear power plants cold, and you still have that 11 billion, plus its share of general administration costs, internal safety inspections, workforce health compliance, and such. The complex legal procedures for civilian nuclear involve taking fees that are supposed to help offset other DoE costs, then giving more back in exchange, more that is paid for by common taxation, so that it is very hard to say just how much of the grants actually go to the civil corporations and how much of them involves using the corps as a pass through to transfer money back to the military side.
No other power generation technology faces this problem. We don't have to worry about the costs of military prolifieration of, say, wind or hydro technologies. But, what will happen if we start having to pay to prevent dirty coal projects in other countries? What if, for example, the US starts taking Kyoto seriously and wants to really cut coal prolifieration? About the only options we would have (short of just stopping all those nations from building enough powerplants of any sorts to keep their people alive), would be to let some of them develop nuclear plants. Those costs would then again be counted as part of our nuclear power costs. In other words, A large part of the cost of reducing other nations dirty coal emissions and greenhouse gasses would show up in the US budget as a nuclear proliferation control cost, even if the US completely stopped building or running all civilian nuclear plants on its own soil. Our economic system isn't just built to reward dangerous cost cutting, it is built to push costs that are only tangentially related to nuclear power into counting as 'Nuclear power' costs. That alone means Nukes will never be economically viable without taxation, but it's an artifact of the way we do the budget.
Your point seems to be that you are the only 'objective' one here and your 'enemies' are biased. The very fact that you think that can be reinforced by others who have no facts, only biases, proves you are wrong. If all the people who disagree with you are offering only unsupported or biased opinions, you should not change your fact based opinion in the slightest. If hsmith ()or me for that matter) has no objective facts, then he has given you no new data to either reinforce or moderate your conclusion. So, was your position reinforced by a non-fact, or are you ignoring a fact that disproves it - which is it?
If I started getting the idea that there were some odd, unpublicised laws which seemed to have 'draconian interpretations' or relatively excessive consequences in Nepal, or anywhere else, I might avoid that nation on the principle that they may have many more, that some of them might have much worse consequences than being told to get off a mountain and stay off, and the chance of a more serious problem appears to be high. For more on this, just look up "Disneyland with the Death Penalty", and whether that fine article has had any effect on anybody's tourism.
Within the US, there are millions of people who go to Louisiana once, just for a Mardi Gras. A lot of them plan to do it only once in their lives. I've known people to go out of their way to advise against it, because of the 'speed traps' in surrounding parishes, and stories of people getting $500 tickets for going two miles over the speed limit. I suspect that many of those stories are apocryphal, but I most certainly would not bet that 100% of the people who consider going to see Bourbon street on Fat Tuesday don't care about them. I think you were making a pretty good point about whether the consequences mattered in the case of this particular rule, but you got hyperbolic with your 100%, and I suspect you've weakened your own argument.
The rules were written to cover the situation of people setting up something at least roughly like a largeish array of a videotape holding camera, a boom mike, a foldable dish, battery packs and such to transmit commercial video from a remote location. It's the kind of thing where Everest expeditions tended to leave extra clutter and junk behind, and that's part of the justification for the fees. The rules, as read, spell out some specific situations, and are so 'established' - if you take those rules, ignore some parts, and maybe put in some verbal only interpretations that let some minor government official stretch those rules to cover technologies that didn't exist when those rules were written, you get this situation, where a lot of things have not have been legally 'established'.
The rules are also being used to give the government heads up before any image can be sent, which makes a good backdoor way of knowing when to put persons in place to censor what gets sent out. Yeah, they're probably just trying to make sure it looks good to attract more tourists, not stifle political dissent. Still, why encourage that?
OK, but why do Ferrets get used preferentially for influenza studies? I hope this doesn't come off as know-it-all, but there's a classic example of how picking test animals in medical studies really gave some erronious results and delayed recognizing a major health problem - Thalidomide. Most of the lab animals used to test Thalidomide have zero incidence of birth defects under the doses normally used (even if these are proportionately dozens of times human doses). After reports of stunted limb growth and related syndromes started showing up, mostly in Europe, American researchers retested the drug on a much wider variety of animals, and after seeing several new test animal types with no negative effects, found the problem also occured in horses (and if memory serves, even tested it on a couple of elephants and found it occured there too). Horses were not generally considered major animal test subjects because of expense, and were sometimes not considered good for pregnancy related testing because of their long gestation times.
So the broader question should be, what are the arguments for using ferrets for influenza studies? Is it a matter of cost? Has somebody sequenced the parts of ferret DNA that explain how the flu might affect them and found it has particular similarities to human DNA? Did ferret results translate to a good prediction about human epedemics in the past? This article doesn't really say why, so I see why even people who read more than the summary aren't comfortable with some of the conclusions.
I followed through on my own questions here, so as not to just be nitpicking:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19412910
This is just a short abstract, but it indicates that ferrets get the same broad set of symptoms as humans when they contract a flu. It also mentions that some of the more common lab animals, such as rats and guinea pigs are still quite useful for flu research.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3180220/
A much longer article. It discusses why mice don't work as well as larger rodents, and why even cotton rats (which ARE used) are not ideal. (You learn something every day - today I learned Cotton Rats don't have a sneeze reflex).
L/100Km is a unit where we have length cubed over length, leaving length squared, or area, in the end. Gallons/mile works the same, so MPG is the inverse of an area. So, what real world object or property is being described by this area in metric, or its inverse in imperial? Complaining that either system is flawed because of these particular combinations of units is pretty strange, when it will probably take a 20 year veteran automotive engineer to explain just what esoteric area related property of internal combustion engines actually can be calculated starting from either formula.
To put it another way, why are we debating how hard or simple it is to apply a formula when we studiously have to avoid reducing that formula to simplest terms just so we can get at least a little use out of it? Isn't this in effect saying, "Ha-Ha, my system doesn't mess up quite as much when it trys to create an esoteric compound measurement that doesn't actually mean what most common users will think it means, as your system does?" It's kind of like debating swallows carrying coconuts, and thnking just because you backed the Adfrican, your whole argument now actually makes perfect sense.
I don't know about that - he seems to be one of those people who are imagining a special IP protection that isn't limited to any of the existing ones. He appears to have imagined a form of patent where 'because it's passing through a 3-D printer' makes an existing material novel, or one where the unlimited timeframe of a copyrighted design applies to the raw materials or individual design elements, or something such as that.
"I imagine you're gonna give me special laws with all of the advantages and none of the drawbacks, cause I'm a special butterfly." That's a pretty good imagination right there.
Any competent professional ought to be able to come up with a new name for whatever it is and an easy way to say it's 'obviously' something completely distinct from cold fusion; "Gentlemen, this is not some crackpot cold fusion scheme - it's a perfectly legitimate catalyzed sub-nuclear synthesis." For extra credit, claim to have been led down that path by tantalizing hints you found in three articles published by grad students of people who also co-authored with Einstein, but DON'T claim to have been inspired directly by anything the great man wrote, except in the general 'science is cool' sense.
1. Stopping an attacker more quickly is often the important consideration to designers. Modern firearms achieve that 'more quickly' by increasing lethality. Hollow point rounds, Glazier slugs, and high capacity magazines are generally all methods of stopping more people faster, but the 'stopping' part converts pretty directly to killing more often, or in larger numbers, and trying to make a semantic distinction there is psychobabble. 'Stopping' by deterence is far from all 'stopping', and if we are talking logically here, show me one perp who has ever claimed he would have continued with his attack except he realized the pistol he faced had 17 rounds and not just 6. Yes, I'll freely concede that deterrance sometimes works. Hell, I've used it myself. Now what about all that other stopping?
2. I'm a former enlisted soldier who eventually took a comission as a military officer, and who has actually trained people with things the professionals call guns (up to 120 mm MBT pieces) and not just those silly pistols and rifles and such. I can't count the number of times I have disagreed with someone on the NRA right and recieved that lecture that starts with "Guns don't kill people...", as though anyone who disagrees with any point in their playbook must be that totally ignorant. I've had my claim to service challenged, by people who admit they have never served, but can't believe anyone who disagrees with them over any point at all might have given more to the USA than they did. I've had people tell me that only people who were wounded count as real patriots, or that Desert Shield/Storm didn't count as real combat or even real service, because I disagreed with an NRA talking point. I've had self professed NRA spokesmen accuse me of war crimes, saying without any evidence what-so-ever that if I really served at all, I was probably the kind of bad soldier who shot unarmed civilians and ran from real combat. Your post is more of the same - defending verbal tricks by insulting everybody who disagrees with you.
You don't know me. You probably didn't mean any of your remarks about illogical libtards and such to apply to me. But I have met enough of the people on your side that stoop to that that I do hold you responsible for standing alongside them. Please don't ever thank me for my service, it would sound too much like you spitting on it.
I'd be careful bringing a car analogy into this. The 'don't change a reliable, working mechanism' side is basically claiming this sort of tech cannot be implemented without a great loss of reliability. Since we have been able to add breath sensor based steering wheel and ignition interlock systems to cars for preventing drunk driving, and the technology has worked out pretty damned well, both in terms of stopping DUIs with those vehicles and in terms of them still remaining normally functional otherwise, mandating extra electronic interface devices and all that icky extra complexity is, at the very, very least, not always a bad idea, so you seem to be shooting down what I strongly suspect is your own side's argument.
They actually put them in far too much, giving the false impression there is still a scientific controversy, when there isn't.
This combines with the problem of accredation. Most of the 'MSM' is far too sloppy with checking sources. Writing "Side A says - Side B says" is an easy formula for a story, and makes the writers look wise and fair (at least in their own minds), It gets worse when they don't really look at Side B's backgrounds as well as their claims. (please note that I am including Fox News in the MSM, and in fact they have a very bad record in claiming people have degrees and positions they in fact do not, (and in my opinion, just to make an argument from authority.)).
In most Christian sects, believing that the people you disagree with are all personally motivated by Satan and all willing to deliberately lie to make their arguments against the faith is not standard doctrine, but a heresy. (Basically, the most extreme form of Manichaeism*, as seen by the Roman Catholics, Russian or Greek Orthodox, or many main stream protestants such as the Methodests or Lutherans). The common claim by deniers that the consensus on AGW is deliberate fraud is actually more similar to them being the hidden fanatics within the faith who want an inqusition right damn now to purge all the eeevilll from the secular world., while the pro-man made side is more like the regular churches in play nice with others mode (like the RC before the counter reformation, to some extent).
* i'm not taking sides here on whether all you Manichis out there are right or wrong about the whole Gnostic thing, just that some pretty nasty things have happened starting from people who want nice clear lines between right and wrong, and end up being willing to make false accusations to get them.
No, no there isn't. Using a patent MEANS you agree to disclose a secret, period. A trade secret MEANS you are going to take care of protecting that secret yourself without the taxpayer having to meet the costs, as we do for patents. Your question MEANS 'Is there some way I can keep all the benfits for me while getting someone else to shoulder more of the costs?'
That's a definition process. Random, to a theoretical mathematician, means something rather specific, and something that uses pseudorandom functions to produce a similar effect (such as going any of several directions for differing durations when it hits something), isn't actually random. To most engineers, if something behaves sufficiently like mathematical randomness, you might as well call it random.
There are circumstances where either approach is sensible. A Roomba that didn't have any randomizing functions, true or false, would behave much like a real Rhoomba, except it would get stuck more. A Rhoomba with randomizing based on a small radiation source, relying on half life for randomizing input, would not appear to act any differently to casual inspection from a normal one, and I'm not sure even a good AI theoretician could devise a test to tell whether a truly random function generator was enclosed (at least without taking the Rhoomba apart).
Now imagine something that could fake its way through a Turing test for some little time, say 15 minutes, on average. Eventually, most humans manage to 'spot the bot', but it's fairly good at faking people out in casual encounters, say pretending to be a person's secretary over the phone. Maybe there, the question of whether the randomness really matters has a different answer. maybe swapping out a pseudo-random source for a true random source would change the time it took for such a robot to fail a Turing test, even if robotics experts didn't necessarily know why. But, you have to get to robots of some sophistication before you can test the point. You can argue about which power saw is better, Black and Decker or Dewalt, but if the things you are testing are broken animal jaws, boards with sharks teeth set in them, and such, your first argument will be about whether anything even counts as a power saw at all.
Businesses don't just wait until they have some additional cost to pass on to their customers - they always charge as much as the traffic will bear. Thinking that any losses can always be passed on to consumers is a basic economic fallacy. It's part of a false argument against taxing corporations to claim that they somehow voluntarily keep their profits low to leave headroom so they can pass the additional tax on to the individual customers, so 'corporate taxes are always really individual taxation'. It's a far right wing talking point that too many people still uncritically parrot. AC want a cracker?
I don't usually play grammer nazi, but the internally unpunctuated, run-on question you asked ended with the wrong punctuation as well. This is a bad enough series of grammer mistakes to be seriously difficult to understand. After that, there's a singular/plural disagreement, the socialist Germans (I thought that wall came down) are selling only oozed out bank data, and the one thing you did not actually do is digress. There's a great pile of other errors, enough that two things happened.
1. You failed to communicate. I have a vague feeling you made some very sensible statements and asked some good questions, but I'm doing so much work trying to understand you, I'm putting words in your mouth, so much so I may be creating meanings you didn't intend.
2. It took me less time to write this than it did simply to read your post, as best I could. Even if I'm wasting my breath and inviting down moderation for being a grammar nazi, you've still wasted more of my time, and probably many others.
I'm strongly suspecting English is not your primary language. Normally, I would thank you for at least trying to master the difficult and often illogical English tongue, but that must take second place to regretfully informing you you are not very close to mastery yet.
And here's a few questions that follow from yours: If gun control laws can't deter weapons falling into the hands of criminals, won't many guns supplied to foreign factions also fall into the hands of criminals? Won't the tyrants spin that as the US is arming common criminals in their nation to destabilize their regime? (They're going to spin it that way for revolutionaries and even non-violent political opposition - why on Earth wouldn't they spin it that way for regular robbers and rapists that actually use a US provided weapon). How do you aid freedom fighters (real or in quotes), so long as there are traditional criminals in the same nation? Do you just assume revolutionary organizations are adept at controlling their own rogues and the unaligned ones? Are you assuming the corrupt tyrants can enforce their gun control laws on their criminals even though somehow it's impossible in the US?
That's the difference between anarchy as "no laws' and anarchy as "no rulers". A ruling class that can pass laws solely on its behalf and pretend (or even honestly but wrongly believe) it's acting for everybody will inevitably create a great deal of chaos and blame it all on those out of power. The mere fact that the US government rammed through a bank bailout in seven days and has taken six years to partly implement health insurance reform shows the extent of the disparity in power. If that disparity is the source of social chaos, as 4333 stated, think about just how much chaos that implies. We aren't talking about a little bit of relatively harmless randomness injected into the system, a few bad administrative decisions by people who are out to protect the interests of a ruling class instead of doing what they promised to get elected - we are talking about nations being drawn into unnecessary wars with resulting millions of casualties, and similar sorts of chaos, all to fight a type of 'chaos' where it only feels like 'chaos' to the self designated ruling class. I'd love to have your "number of people working on problems" and even to vote for whom I want to tackle those problems. I would even consider paying those people a salary to deal with those problems (I'll kick in my share, not fund the whole thing). That means those people are working for me (or at least the majority), not ruling me.
I'm a former military officer, who once usually scored in the extended, above 300 range on the ARMY physical fitness test. My regular running partner at one point was an Olympic silver medalist before joining up. I have literally run marathons before, and once hiked 55 miles in 2 days with a 88 lb. load out in a hot desert setting. During my enlisted days, I was usually the guy doing long range recon while carrying a 30 cal machine gun and 3 belts of ammo instead of just an M-16.
Ten years later, out of the army for a few, and my weight was up to 210 lbs. I could still bench press 250 at that time, and still put in 2 miles at the track at least once a week, but had a sedentary job. And then I suddenly started feeling weak and lethargic. It took another six months to get a diagnosis, because the first physician assumed anybody with my muscle to fat ratios couldn't possibly be a type 2. He made a note on my chart saying that had been evaluated, but he meant he'd done a mental evaluation of the odds, not actually run the tests.
Losing 30 lbs to get off of insulin and into the range where oral meds were enough was physically the hardest single thing I have ever done. I did it by diet and exercise, and until my sugar stayed consistantly below 200, I never had a single moment free of pain. I didn't heal after exercise at anything like the normal rate, I simply hurt all over, for a week or more after each session at the track or gym. Yeah, I beat it eventually, and running 5 miles became something that left me with occasional moderate soreness and not a week of constant throbbing pain. You're absolutely right, all I had to do was get off my ass and lose some weight, at a level above training for the Boston marathon as far as personal dedication (not bragging, I didn't want to die, and the way it hit me I thought I was damn well going to. Dieting alone seemed like it would take at least six months and I wasn't sure I had six months, the way it felt. With intense exercise I made it in five weeks, but the first four were nasty).
Mary Tyler Moore was diagnosed as a type 2, with a blood sugar level initially over 750 (which is enough to kill most people - 200 is about where symptoms usually start). Her weight at the time - 20 lbs more than she weighed when she did the MTM show. She was still dancing regularly too.
I know plenty of people with Loud Mouthed Idiot Syndrome, so stop posting now if that's you. Go join the U. S. Army, and when you make it through Ranger school's hell week, you can come back here and judge me some more.
As the uncle of an autistic adult who has been called a gimp by various ignorant and vicious people, and seen his face when it happened, I literally think of the people who insist in clinging to that name as the equivalent of the KKK or the Manson family. I will not use the GIMP, and remove it from all installs I do. Large distros are turning off tens of thousands of potential users by insisting it's just a play on words, It's hateful, bigoted, and harms all the other developers of bundled Linux software that won't stoop to that level by association. However, out here in meatspace, I'm certainly not afraid of the software, I simply find it (and its creators) offensive.
What amazes me is that so many people have evidently shopped for their own groceries for years and never noticed that anyone besides Kelloggs makes toaster breakfast pastries. (At a guess, the alternative is they eat whatever Mom brings down to the basement). Worse, any such product has to have a shape that fits in a standard toaster, so for this product, shape and component placement aren't design choices or things distinctive about the Kelloggs product, they're natural constraints, as when a hot air balloon has a bulgy shape and the hole is always at the bottom. A toaster pastry is one of those things where many features can't be trademarked, patented, or kept as trade secrets (just try suing everybody who puts the frosting on the outside, like there's no prior art and it could even possibly go anywhere else). We've even got talk about suing over the word Nyan, like that's copyrightable, or claiming that using the word 'breakfast' weakens normal protection (apparently because Kelloggs somehow owns the idea of breakfast), or that using rainbows might need the permission of the GLBT community. It must be depressing as hell to cower in constant fear that some company or whatever owns all your thoughts and creative expressions.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a difference between taking the thread off topic and responding to someone else's having already taken the tread off topic. If a mod can't be bothered to identify where the first off topic post happened, and finds his or herself giving an offtopic to the fifth post down, he or she should stop using offtopic untill they understand modding better.
(And I'm not offtopic to post about how the thread is being modded, I'm just meta.).
One of the big reasons they won't be profitable without state sponsorship is the military applications of enriched Uranium. The US made Energy a whole cabinet level entity chiefly because of nuclear prolifieration issues. Any effort by the far right in the US to "drown government in a bathtub" runs into the problem of how you can have a tiny federal government with a multi-billion dollar Dept. of Energy.
( As a small proof of these statements, the total budget for DOE 2014 is a tad over 26 Billion dollars, and the portion of it that is for dealing with weapons and prolifieration related activities is the largest single section of that total at just over 11 billion.)
http://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2013/04/f0/FY14_DOE_Budget_Highlights_Final.pdf
(If readers want to cut to the chase, try the table on page 19). Interested people may note that the costs of all kinds of energy generation and of environmental activities are grouped together as one section, but they still come out smaller even lumped together, than the 'blowing things up and stopping other people from doing the same back at us' section does. Scientific research is smaller yet, only about a sixth of the budget. Then there's the question, how much of that environmental clean up and scientific research is actually to support the military parts of DoE activites and maybe ought to show up as another cost of war and proliferation?
Those costs are going to be incurred so long as the US runs a Nuclear Navy, has H-bombs in its arsenal, and wants to stop various 'rogue nations and state sponsored action groups' from getting their hands on the resulting materials. Stop all civilian energy research (of all kinds, not just nuclear) and all civilian nuclear power plants cold, and you still have that 11 billion, plus its share of general administration costs, internal safety inspections, workforce health compliance, and such. The complex legal procedures for civilian nuclear involve taking fees that are supposed to help offset other DoE costs, then giving more back in exchange, more that is paid for by common taxation, so that it is very hard to say just how much of the grants actually go to the civil corporations and how much of them involves using the corps as a pass through to transfer money back to the military side.
No other power generation technology faces this problem. We don't have to worry about the costs of military prolifieration of, say, wind or hydro technologies. But, what will happen if we start having to pay to prevent dirty coal projects in other countries? What if, for example, the US starts taking Kyoto seriously and wants to really cut coal prolifieration? About the only options we would have (short of just stopping all those nations from building enough powerplants of any sorts to keep their people alive), would be to let some of them develop nuclear plants. Those costs would then again be counted as part of our nuclear power costs. In other words, A large part of the cost of reducing other nations dirty coal emissions and greenhouse gasses would show up in the US budget as a nuclear proliferation control cost, even if the US completely stopped building or running all civilian nuclear plants on its own soil. Our economic system isn't just built to reward dangerous cost cutting, it is built to push costs that are only tangentially related to nuclear power into counting as 'Nuclear power' costs. That alone means Nukes will never be economically viable without taxation, but it's an artifact of the way we do the budget.
Your point seems to be that you are the only 'objective' one here and your 'enemies' are biased. The very fact that you think that can be reinforced by others who have no facts, only biases, proves you are wrong. If all the people who disagree with you are offering only unsupported or biased opinions, you should not change your fact based opinion in the slightest. If hsmith ()or me for that matter) has no objective facts, then he has given you no new data to either reinforce or moderate your conclusion. So, was your position reinforced by a non-fact, or are you ignoring a fact that disproves it - which is it?
If I started getting the idea that there were some odd, unpublicised laws which seemed to have 'draconian interpretations' or relatively excessive consequences in Nepal, or anywhere else, I might avoid that nation on the principle that they may have many more, that some of them might have much worse consequences than being told to get off a mountain and stay off, and the chance of a more serious problem appears to be high. For more on this, just look up "Disneyland with the Death Penalty", and whether that fine article has had any effect on anybody's tourism.
Within the US, there are millions of people who go to Louisiana once, just for a Mardi Gras. A lot of them plan to do it only once in their lives. I've known people to go out of their way to advise against it, because of the 'speed traps' in surrounding parishes, and stories of people getting $500 tickets for going two miles over the speed limit. I suspect that many of those stories are apocryphal, but I most certainly would not bet that 100% of the people who consider going to see Bourbon street on Fat Tuesday don't care about them. I think you were making a pretty good point about whether the consequences mattered in the case of this particular rule, but you got hyperbolic with your 100%, and I suspect you've weakened your own argument.
The rules were written to cover the situation of people setting up something at least roughly like a largeish array of a videotape holding camera, a boom mike, a foldable dish, battery packs and such to transmit commercial video from a remote location. It's the kind of thing where Everest expeditions tended to leave extra clutter and junk behind, and that's part of the justification for the fees. The rules, as read, spell out some specific situations, and are so 'established' - if you take those rules, ignore some parts, and maybe put in some verbal only interpretations that let some minor government official stretch those rules to cover technologies that didn't exist when those rules were written, you get this situation, where a lot of things have not have been legally 'established'.
The rules are also being used to give the government heads up before any image can be sent, which makes a good backdoor way of knowing when to put persons in place to censor what gets sent out. Yeah, they're probably just trying to make sure it looks good to attract more tourists, not stifle political dissent. Still, why encourage that?
OK, but why do Ferrets get used preferentially for influenza studies?
I hope this doesn't come off as know-it-all, but there's a classic example of how picking test animals in medical studies really gave some erronious results and delayed recognizing a major health problem - Thalidomide.
Most of the lab animals used to test Thalidomide have zero incidence of birth defects under the doses normally used (even if these are proportionately dozens of times human doses). After reports of stunted limb growth and related syndromes started showing up, mostly in Europe, American researchers retested the drug on a much wider variety of animals, and after seeing several new test animal types with no negative effects, found the problem also occured in horses (and if memory serves, even tested it on a couple of elephants and found it occured there too). Horses were not generally considered major animal test subjects because of expense, and were sometimes not considered good for pregnancy related testing because of their long gestation times.
So the broader question should be, what are the arguments for using ferrets for influenza studies? Is it a matter of cost? Has somebody sequenced the parts of ferret DNA that explain how the flu might affect them and found it has particular similarities to human DNA? Did ferret results translate to a good prediction about human epedemics in the past? This article doesn't really say why, so I see why even people who read more than the summary aren't comfortable with some of the conclusions.
I followed through on my own questions here, so as not to just be nitpicking:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19412910
This is just a short abstract, but it indicates that ferrets get the same broad set of symptoms as humans when they contract a flu. It also mentions that some of the more common lab animals, such as rats and guinea pigs are still quite useful for flu research.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3180220/
A much longer article. It discusses why mice don't work as well as larger rodents, and why even cotton rats (which ARE used) are not ideal. (You learn something every day - today I learned Cotton Rats don't have a sneeze reflex).
L/100Km is a unit where we have length cubed over length, leaving length squared, or area, in the end. Gallons/mile works the same, so MPG is the inverse of an area. So, what real world object or property is being described by this area in metric, or its inverse in imperial? Complaining that either system is flawed because of these particular combinations of units is pretty strange, when it will probably take a 20 year veteran automotive engineer to explain just what esoteric area related property of internal combustion engines actually can be calculated starting from either formula.
To put it another way, why are we debating how hard or simple it is to apply a formula when we studiously have to avoid reducing that formula to simplest terms just so we can get at least a little use out of it? Isn't this in effect saying, "Ha-Ha, my system doesn't mess up quite as much when it trys to create an esoteric compound measurement that doesn't actually mean what most common users will think it means, as your system does?" It's kind of like debating swallows carrying coconuts, and thnking just because you backed the Adfrican, your whole argument now actually makes perfect sense.
I don't know about that - he seems to be one of those people who are imagining a special IP protection that isn't limited to any of the existing ones. He appears to have imagined a form of patent where 'because it's passing through a 3-D printer' makes an existing material novel, or one where the unlimited timeframe of a copyrighted design applies to the raw materials or individual design elements, or something such as that.
"I imagine you're gonna give me special laws with all of the advantages and none of the drawbacks, cause I'm a special butterfly." That's a pretty good imagination right there.
Any competent professional ought to be able to come up with a new name for whatever it is and an easy way to say it's 'obviously' something completely distinct from cold fusion; "Gentlemen, this is not some crackpot cold fusion scheme - it's a perfectly legitimate catalyzed sub-nuclear synthesis." For extra credit, claim to have been led down that path by tantalizing hints you found in three articles published by grad students of people who also co-authored with Einstein, but DON'T claim to have been inspired directly by anything the great man wrote, except in the general 'science is cool' sense.
1. Stopping an attacker more quickly is often the important consideration to designers. Modern firearms achieve that 'more quickly' by increasing lethality. Hollow point rounds, Glazier slugs, and high capacity magazines are generally all methods of stopping more people faster, but the 'stopping' part converts pretty directly to killing more often, or in larger numbers, and trying to make a semantic distinction there is psychobabble. 'Stopping' by deterence is far from all 'stopping', and if we are talking logically here, show me one perp who has ever claimed he would have continued with his attack except he realized the pistol he faced had 17 rounds and not just 6. Yes, I'll freely concede that deterrance sometimes works. Hell, I've used it myself. Now what about all that other stopping?
2. I'm a former enlisted soldier who eventually took a comission as a military officer, and who has actually trained people with things the professionals call guns (up to 120 mm MBT pieces) and not just those silly pistols and rifles and such. I can't count the number of times I have disagreed with someone on the NRA right and recieved that lecture that starts with "Guns don't kill people...", as though anyone who disagrees with any point in their playbook must be that totally ignorant. I've had my claim to service challenged, by people who admit they have never served, but can't believe anyone who disagrees with them over any point at all might have given more to the USA than they did. I've had people tell me that only people who were wounded count as real patriots, or that Desert Shield/Storm didn't count as real combat or even real service, because I disagreed with an NRA talking point. I've had self professed NRA spokesmen accuse me of war crimes, saying without any evidence what-so-ever that if I really served at all, I was probably the kind of bad soldier who shot unarmed civilians and ran from real combat. Your post is more of the same - defending verbal tricks by insulting everybody who disagrees with you.
You don't know me. You probably didn't mean any of your remarks about illogical libtards and such to apply to me. But I have met enough of the people on your side that stoop to that that I do hold you responsible for standing alongside them. Please don't ever thank me for my service, it would sound too much like you spitting on it.
Wonder Woman - she's both even more Amurikan and nipplier!
I'd be careful bringing a car analogy into this. The 'don't change a reliable, working mechanism' side is basically claiming this sort of tech cannot be implemented without a great loss of reliability. Since we have been able to add breath sensor based steering wheel and ignition interlock systems to cars for preventing drunk driving, and the technology has worked out pretty damned well, both in terms of stopping DUIs with those vehicles and in terms of them still remaining normally functional otherwise, mandating extra electronic interface devices and all that icky extra complexity is, at the very, very least, not always a bad idea, so you seem to be shooting down what I strongly suspect is your own side's argument.
They actually put them in far too much, giving the false impression there is still a scientific controversy, when there isn't.
This combines with the problem of accredation. Most of the 'MSM' is far too sloppy with checking sources. Writing "Side A says - Side B says" is an easy formula for a story, and makes the writers look wise and fair (at least in their own minds), It gets worse when they don't really look at Side B's backgrounds as well as their claims. (please note that I am including Fox News in the MSM, and in fact they have a very bad record in claiming people have degrees and positions they in fact do not, (and in my opinion, just to make an argument from authority.)).
In most Christian sects, believing that the people you disagree with are all personally motivated by Satan and all willing to deliberately lie to make their arguments against the faith is not standard doctrine, but a heresy. (Basically, the most extreme form of Manichaeism*, as seen by the Roman Catholics, Russian or Greek Orthodox, or many main stream protestants such as the Methodests or Lutherans). The common claim by deniers that the consensus on AGW is deliberate fraud is actually more similar to them being the hidden fanatics within the faith who want an inqusition right damn now to purge all the eeevilll from the secular world., while the pro-man made side is more like the regular churches in play nice with others mode (like the RC before the counter reformation, to some extent).
* i'm not taking sides here on whether all you Manichis out there are right or wrong about the whole Gnostic thing, just that some pretty nasty things have happened starting from people who want nice clear lines between right and wrong, and end up being willing to make false accusations to get them.
No, no there isn't. Using a patent MEANS you agree to disclose a secret, period. A trade secret MEANS you are going to take care of protecting that secret yourself without the taxpayer having to meet the costs, as we do for patents. Your question MEANS 'Is there some way I can keep all the benfits for me while getting someone else to shoulder more of the costs?'
That's a definition process. Random, to a theoretical mathematician, means something rather specific, and something that uses pseudorandom functions to produce a similar effect (such as going any of several directions for differing durations when it hits something), isn't actually random. To most engineers, if something behaves sufficiently like mathematical randomness, you might as well call it random.
There are circumstances where either approach is sensible. A Roomba that didn't have any randomizing functions, true or false, would behave much like a real Rhoomba, except it would get stuck more. A Rhoomba with randomizing based on a small radiation source, relying on half life for randomizing input, would not appear to act any differently to casual inspection from a normal one, and I'm not sure even a good AI theoretician could devise a test to tell whether a truly random function generator was enclosed (at least without taking the Rhoomba apart).
Now imagine something that could fake its way through a Turing test for some little time, say 15 minutes, on average. Eventually, most humans manage to 'spot the bot', but it's fairly good at faking people out in casual encounters, say pretending to be a person's secretary over the phone. Maybe there, the question of whether the randomness really matters has a different answer. maybe swapping out a pseudo-random source for a true random source would change the time it took for such a robot to fail a Turing test, even if robotics experts didn't necessarily know why. But, you have to get to robots of some sophistication before you can test the point. You can argue about which power saw is better, Black and Decker or Dewalt, but if the things you are testing are broken animal jaws, boards with sharks teeth set in them, and such, your first argument will be about whether anything even counts as a power saw at all.
Businesses don't just wait until they have some additional cost to pass on to their customers - they always charge as much as the traffic will bear. Thinking that any losses can always be passed on to consumers is a basic economic fallacy. It's part of a false argument against taxing corporations to claim that they somehow voluntarily keep their profits low to leave headroom so they can pass the additional tax on to the individual customers, so 'corporate taxes are always really individual taxation'. It's a far right wing talking point that too many people still uncritically parrot. AC want a cracker?
I don't usually play grammer nazi, but the internally unpunctuated, run-on question you asked ended with the wrong punctuation as well. This is a bad enough series of grammer mistakes to be seriously difficult to understand. After that, there's a singular/plural disagreement, the socialist Germans (I thought that wall came down) are selling only oozed out bank data, and the one thing you did not actually do is digress. There's a great pile of other errors, enough that two things happened.
1. You failed to communicate. I have a vague feeling you made some very sensible statements and asked some good questions, but I'm doing so much work trying to understand you, I'm putting words in your mouth, so much so I may be creating meanings you didn't intend.
2. It took me less time to write this than it did simply to read your post, as best I could. Even if I'm wasting my breath and inviting down moderation for being a grammar nazi, you've still wasted more of my time, and probably many others.
I'm strongly suspecting English is not your primary language. Normally, I would thank you for at least trying to master the difficult and often illogical English tongue, but that must take second place to regretfully informing you you are not very close to mastery yet.
And here's a few questions that follow from yours: If gun control laws can't deter weapons falling into the hands of criminals, won't many guns supplied to foreign factions also fall into the hands of criminals? Won't the tyrants spin that as the US is arming common criminals in their nation to destabilize their regime? (They're going to spin it that way for revolutionaries and even non-violent political opposition - why on Earth wouldn't they spin it that way for regular robbers and rapists that actually use a US provided weapon). How do you aid freedom fighters (real or in quotes), so long as there are traditional criminals in the same nation? Do you just assume revolutionary organizations are adept at controlling their own rogues and the unaligned ones? Are you assuming the corrupt tyrants can enforce their gun control laws on their criminals even though somehow it's impossible in the US?
That's the difference between anarchy as "no laws' and anarchy as "no rulers". A ruling class that can pass laws solely on its behalf and pretend (or even honestly but wrongly believe) it's acting for everybody will inevitably create a great deal of chaos and blame it all on those out of power. The mere fact that the US government rammed through a bank bailout in seven days and has taken six years to partly implement health insurance reform shows the extent of the disparity in power. If that disparity is the source of social chaos, as 4333 stated, think about just how much chaos that implies. We aren't talking about a little bit of relatively harmless randomness injected into the system, a few bad administrative decisions by people who are out to protect the interests of a ruling class instead of doing what they promised to get elected - we are talking about nations being drawn into unnecessary wars with resulting millions of casualties, and similar sorts of chaos, all to fight a type of 'chaos' where it only feels like 'chaos' to the self designated ruling class. I'd love to have your "number of people working on problems" and even to vote for whom I want to tackle those problems. I would even consider paying those people a salary to deal with those problems (I'll kick in my share, not fund the whole thing). That means those people are working for me (or at least the majority), not ruling me.
I'm a former military officer, who once usually scored in the extended, above 300 range on the ARMY physical fitness test. My regular running partner at one point was an Olympic silver medalist before joining up. I have literally run marathons before, and once hiked 55 miles in 2 days with a 88 lb. load out in a hot desert setting. During my enlisted days, I was usually the guy doing long range recon while carrying a 30 cal machine gun and 3 belts of ammo instead of just an M-16.
Ten years later, out of the army for a few, and my weight was up to 210 lbs. I could still bench press 250 at that time, and still put in 2 miles at the track at least once a week, but had a sedentary job. And then I suddenly started feeling weak and lethargic. It took another six months to get a diagnosis, because the first physician assumed anybody with my muscle to fat ratios couldn't possibly be a type 2. He made a note on my chart saying that had been evaluated, but he meant he'd done a mental evaluation of the odds, not actually run the tests.
Losing 30 lbs to get off of insulin and into the range where oral meds were enough was physically the hardest single thing I have ever done. I did it by diet and exercise, and until my sugar stayed consistantly below 200, I never had a single moment free of pain. I didn't heal after exercise at anything like the normal rate, I simply hurt all over, for a week or more after each session at the track or gym. Yeah, I beat it eventually, and running 5 miles became something that left me with occasional moderate soreness and not a week of constant throbbing pain. You're absolutely right, all I had to do was get off my ass and lose some weight, at a level above training for the Boston marathon as far as personal dedication (not bragging, I didn't want to die, and the way it hit me I thought I was damn well going to. Dieting alone seemed like it would take at least six months and I wasn't sure I had six months, the way it felt. With intense exercise I made it in five weeks, but the first four were nasty).
Mary Tyler Moore was diagnosed as a type 2, with a blood sugar level initially over 750 (which is enough to kill most people - 200 is about where symptoms usually start). Her weight at the time - 20 lbs more than she weighed when she did the MTM show. She was still dancing regularly too.
I know plenty of people with Loud Mouthed Idiot Syndrome, so stop posting now if that's you. Go join the U. S. Army, and when you make it through Ranger school's hell week, you can come back here and judge me some more.
As a type 2 diabetic (male) who stands 6' 1" and weighs 180 lbs, I'm not sure you understand it either.
As the uncle of an autistic adult who has been called a gimp by various ignorant and vicious people, and seen his face when it happened, I literally think of the people who insist in clinging to that name as the equivalent of the KKK or the Manson family. I will not use the GIMP, and remove it from all installs I do. Large distros are turning off tens of thousands of potential users by insisting it's just a play on words, It's hateful, bigoted, and harms all the other developers of bundled Linux software that won't stoop to that level by association. However, out here in meatspace, I'm certainly not afraid of the software, I simply find it (and its creators) offensive.
Tell me, do you go into court and challenge eyewitnesses because they couldn't have seen a thing on a planet that's always half dark?
What amazes me is that so many people have evidently shopped for their own groceries for years and never noticed that anyone besides Kelloggs makes toaster breakfast pastries. (At a guess, the alternative is they eat whatever Mom brings down to the basement). Worse, any such product has to have a shape that fits in a standard toaster, so for this product, shape and component placement aren't design choices or things distinctive about the Kelloggs product, they're natural constraints, as when a hot air balloon has a bulgy shape and the hole is always at the bottom. A toaster pastry is one of those things where many features can't be trademarked, patented, or kept as trade secrets (just try suing everybody who puts the frosting on the outside, like there's no prior art and it could even possibly go anywhere else). We've even got talk about suing over the word Nyan, like that's copyrightable, or claiming that using the word 'breakfast' weakens normal protection (apparently because Kelloggs somehow owns the idea of breakfast), or that using rainbows might need the permission of the GLBT community. It must be depressing as hell to cower in constant fear that some company or whatever owns all your thoughts and creative expressions.