The theoretical free market of Adam Smith fame assumes parity of information. An asymmetric information structure is already, by definition, the opposite of a free market, to the extent of the asymmetry, before you even get to the question of whether the government is involved or not. So, what a lot of people are arguing for here seems to be a 'Free Market', just like dear old Karl Marx, the Anti-Adam Smith, wanted. The level of cognitive dissonance in some of these posts is every bit as high as claiming "Jesus wants you to torture children", or "I'm a scientist, so of course astrology is correct". If these people really represent Capital theory, then I shan't be surprised to see a bunch of Wall Street traders erecting a solid gold statue of V. I. Lenin, thrice life size, where the bull now resides.
"I see communists. Walking around like regular people. They don't see each other. They only see what they want to see. They don't know they're communists."
As someone who really was once an Intelligence officer, I'd like to point out that Bradley Manning was ranked Specialist 4, which is neither an NCO or commissioned rank. Until he made at least Sergeant, his need to know on anything besides possibly technical equipment specs was probably somewhere between nothing and Sgt. Schultz's "Nuuthink! Nuuthink!".
A big step - only two more launches and the capsule is man rated, and we have a seven person scaled up version of an Apollo atop a Saturn Ib, easily capable of reaching the ISS with a full crew. Then all we need is a new version of the Saturn V, and we have essentially all the capability we lost in the 70's and 80's, scaled by 7/3rds. (OK, to do an actual lunar mission, we need a LEM, but there, exact duplicates of the original, flawless design would do - let's hope the Gruman design sheets are still around).
We know that's not the point as the media campaigns address it. The point in this article is: Will the campaigns be successful, given this motivation? Let's say you are doing real charity - not giving away someone else's content, but giving your own money. Now someone who owns a check into cash business calls you a thief, because by making it softer for some poor person, they don't have to pay a bunch of check into cash fees. Do you believe them? Do you accept their moral premise, that they own their clientele and you are stealing those potential clients from them?
Same here. Yes, there's a difference in how clear cut the issues are. That's real life for you - complex and sometimes ambiguous moral issues. The file sharers may not own the content, but Robin Hood didn't own what he gave the peasants either. The Sheriff of Nottingham never saw Robin Hood as anything other than just another thief. Do you think Robin Hood minded if a lackey of thieves like the Sheriff, working for a great thief like John the Bastard, called him a thief? The average file sharer thinks the media cartels have committed great crimes, and being called a thief by the media campaigns just enforces the Robin Hood syndrome.
Now personally, I just boycott. I agree that the media have bent or broken a lot of laws, bought political actions, ignored other people's rights, and done a host of things that undermine their moral position. They've refused to recognise legitimate fair use, bribed politicians, failed utterly to comply with the spirit of the Constitution regarding copyright, vilified their opponents by comparing them to not just pirates and thieves but Jack the Ripper, and claimed that people like me don't exist (and that nobody is boycotting without being a thief), the list goes on and on. I don't think of what the RIAA or MPAA is doing as nearly the sort of massive thing Robin Hood faced in legends, with the legitimate government kidnapped in a back room deal with a foreign power, and armed thugs beating people, so I don't go to direct opposition. If the RIAA somehow starts using physical force, sending goons to kick down my doors and audit my PC files, then maybe I'll consider them worth Robin Hood style tactics.
But make no mistake, this is one big set of crooks accusing other people of being small scale crooks, and most of those crooks don't think of themselves as just another guy who is passing around something that isn't really theirs, they think of themselves as Robin Hood.
The article is pointing out that you can't shame Robin Hood into giving up. Prince John can't legitimately claim to have the moral high ground. Short of vicious reprisals against a Robin Hood's family, or very public executions, you can't stop him and his whole band of merry men, and according to legends, a new 'hero' always rises up in such cases.
To add to that; Railroads came up with pretty damned reliable solutions about a full century ago for using a conduit that has to intermittently carry traffic both ways on a flexible schedule and not having traffic collide. They had somewhat sloppy solutions that still allowed them to run at a profit well before the US civil war - Casey Jones was an exception, not a rule. Given the current society, this system needs to start out where the railroads were in the 1910's or the airlines in the 1940's. Rail also got storing empty 'pods' in some sort of holding area and sending them back at optimal times down pat, earlier than that, say 125 years ago. Some of you are treating this idea like it was quantum rocket surgery being attempted by the schoolboys cast away in Lord of the Flies.
and how to get the inordinate amount of hamster waste back to where it needs to be. Forget robohamsters, I propose Giant Space Hamsters. Woolly Rupert for the win.
Use tubes 1 way each (you'll want that eventually when loads and distances make both way use prohibitive even with great software switching). Divided placement with an access gangway big enough to run at least a small electric cart down running between them, and a two person crew clears blockages. Designed right, You still get the reliability advantages of being able to switch tubes when the loads are running more one direction than the other and funnel everything one way for a time, parking empty capsules until load is light to return them, and using one tunnel in bi-directional mode while the other one is being cleared/serviced. Once you get high enough throughput need, a single access-way could be servicing 4, 6, or more tubes, so it actually scales up well.
It doesn't really add one. Less surface shipping by truck/plane/rail would reduce the risks there, so it's a +1 + -1 = 0 situation at worst. Since the tubes don't have to run close to highways, power grid, or places with lots of people/civilian targets, it could be designed to minimize human risks, for a net negative terror threat potential.
Two meter long capsules entering your house through appropriately sized tubes at up to 60 miles an hour represent a serious "last mile problem", (with the obvious solution of a smaller tube system connecting to a Tube Service Provider). So, we're back to an analog of the current model, where not everyone has a direct connection to the physical net. Just be glad you won't get 'ping' flooded with empty 2 meter capsules, or a 200,000 capsule DDOS attack.
Well, since Astrid Anderson is married to Greg Bear, presumably she can live off her husband's work and not her dad's. He's doing pretty well, although how that income stacks up in terms of California prices is a different story. For that matter, she's quite talented and could probably make more money herself if she wanted to focus on it. She's been involved heavily with SFWA, doing the sort of work her dad did as a past president of the organization, lobbying for his causes. Much of what remains available of Poul's work is through Baen, who have published all the Flandry of Terra and Polesotechnic League books recently (yes, Baen of the many free samples). Maybe she thinks Gutenburg may hurt these sales, or maybe she's planning to release the texts via Baen after sales die down, as many have done, and just doesn't like the loss of control. I wouldn't assume this particular case is all about the Benjamins.
You're technically right if you count it one way, way wrong if you don't. Talk about just the general fund - Social security has its own tax, not part of the general fund at all. It's pretty self sustaining, at least until the 2030's. Same for medicare and unemployment comp. Some of these programs are projected to be in trouble, especially if money borrowed out of them in prior years isn't put back as promised, but they may or may not follow those projections - there's a lot of axes being ground there when people talk about 20 years out. Let's not count where these are properly funded by their own separate taxes, just if we have to use the descressionary budget for them.
Now, do you count the VA budget as civilian? Military retirement? How about foreign aid - do you count the aid that is earmarked only for purchasing military grade weapons systems and can't be used for civil improvements as civilan spending? Highways - that ought to be civilian, right? Now what about burying 2 inch thick steel plates under roads on US military bases where tanks maneuver a lot? (We can hide this in Dept. of Transportation funds, and even claim the road projects are to improve routes leading to isolated and poor communities - there's lots of isolated communities of trailer parks on the far sides of US mainland military bases). Black projects - why hide a top secret item in some part of the military budget when you can hide it all they way over in Health and Human Services? We finally have confirmation that the CIA directed parts of the national endowment for the arts budget to prove this has been going on, but we may never know about the majority of such cases.
Here's how it looks for the 2011 descressionary budget, which is still with all the black projects hidden, so if anything, its more one sided than this. Military/Security: 895 Billion dollars - 63% NonMilitary: 520 Billion - 37%
Or, we could count everything, in which case, we don't just throw SS and unemployment in, we add servicing the national debt, and then break out what part of the debt is from prior year military spending. This looks pretty similar. You can get pretty close to the military being less than half if you add only the non-military portion of the debt and add in SS and such, but that is simply not an honest way to figure it.
The existing weapons are worse. Usually, the response with enemy forces firing from buildings and falling back into inner rooms and halls is a rocket or mortar mission. This takes a minute or so to set up, and involves a much bigger bang than a grenade. Small grenade rounds can be delivered before the enemy falls back more than a few feet, and are much more precise. The idea is to make it very impractical for a small team (say 2 or 3 men) to fire and switch windows, fire and switch windows, over and over and tie up or defeat a whole platoon moving through the area.
Let's assume a pretty sloppy case with this weapon. Two Afghan snipers work a building, and a dozen US infantry with two of these weapons engage. The snipers are determined, will stay engaged through some return fire, and they manage to get out of a room and move to another several times before one of them is hit and the other withdraws. They manage to wound or kill 3 US troops. Six grenade rounds are fired, for a really lousy accuracy rating of 12.5% , and at least one of the rooms hit has civilians in it for 3 civilian casualties. A really bad, fubared response.
Now what's an average case with these same personnel on both sides, and existing weapons? The first hits against the US side are again by surprise and so are likely to be unchanged - 2 US casualties either wounded or killed. The snipers switch locations as many times as before, because they now have enough time as support sets up a mortar mission. For an average case, the US maneuvers pretty well taking cover once the first surprise round is past, so maybe the average US casualties with existing weapons are a bit lower than for the screw up case with this gadjet. So three mortar rounds are fired, destroying 8 to 25 rooms of the building and these again kill or seriously wound one sniper. They actually got him on the second, but spotted some movement that could have been the sniper still moving in the same direction, towards the exit side of the building. (At that range, it's hard to spot that this is someone else who has decided exiting the building is a good idea, for some odd reason. Mortars don't have scopes attached, after all.). Here, the other sniper withdraws whether he actually knows the first one is hit or just because of all the explosions. Sounds pretty similar to the first case, but this is more average, not an 'assume somebody screws up a lot' case. Civilian casualties? OK, that's a real difference, now we are talking about maybe 8 on average.
Try it with other existing weapons systems - like no mortars or rockets are available, and the US infantry has to cross an open square with some rubble and vehicles to get inside the building, then clear room to room with personal weapons and grenades. These don't give low civilian casualties, low US casualties or high chance of getting one or both snipers either. Average costs for these methods are likely to be equivalent to worst case screw ups with a lighter direct fire grenade option, and the screw up case is where the selected route of entry passes through a day care.
I wouldn't clalm that an absolute majority of Slashdotters that oppose the current broken copyright system liked the older 28 year rules, but there have been enough posters that it's fair to say at least a very healthy minority do. Add me to that. I'd be perfectly happy to see these films protected by an automatic 14 year copyright with the owners allowed to renew for another 14 at their option. I'd be fine with them being able to seek some punitive damages even where the violation isn't for profit, although I see $150,000 per incident as both absurd and immoral.
Its fair to point out, for these recent film cases, the chance a violation has done real harm and cost real money is very high, and this is fundamentally different from the case of, say a 20 year old TV show or novel, where the odds are more of a mixed bag. Really cleaning up the copyright mess means taking the most likely consequences into account, and for cases like this one, the likelyest consequences include real harm to the copyright holder.
grunt work and MAYBE defensive employments... and tank operators who can maybe survive a turret hit, and tanks with only a three person crew (like the old Soviet designs, no separate loader, but now it's because the gunner can easily load as well... and assault troops that can ride into combat armored up, on top of one of these tanks, or inside an APC equivalent, and go back to recharge...
DNA definitely has a lower mutation rate. That doesn't mean it evolves more slowly. Complex species actually seem to give way to new species more rapidly than simpler ones. There's some arguments that a high enough mutation rate actually slows evolution down:
1) Most mutations are bad 2) Of the few that are good, most give only a small improvement, since most organisms are pretty well adapted to their environments. 3) So a successful mutation usually means an organism has on average, say 1.01 offspring while its competitors have only 0.99.
(Sure sometimes a positive mutation has a bigger effect, but on average, it only has a little benefit.). 4) So if the mutation rate is high enough, that beneficial effect gets swamped by bad mutations before it has much chance to be tested through multiple generations and beat out its competition. 5) If the mutation rate is really high, that slightly beneficial mutation actually gets overwritten by another mutation at that spot in the code before it has time to be tested. 5a) And probably if the mutation rate is that high, the bad ones destroy the species completely - a high enough general rate leads to mass extinction. 5b) It's even worse if you're talking about a sexually reproducing species, as now a high enough rate means the offspring differ by to much to reproduce with each other - just to make sex work the mutation rate needs to be lower than for asexual reproduction. 6) Species come and go faster for sexually reproducing types. That supports the claim, a high mutation rate doesn't make evolution go faster, but slower. 7) Obviously, there has to be a minimum for this - no mutations at all means no evolution. 8) But life on earth is either at the optimum error rate or still above it.
I don't see why you claim there isn't a spell checker. Using DNA for the long term storage itself increases fidelity over RNA. Putting the DNA in a nucleus to protect it from some chemical processes that can cause data malformation also means an increase in fidelity. Multicellularity means (admittedly among other things), moving the reproductive cells deep in the organism so they are again protected from some more sources of copying errors. Simultaniously, it allows apoptosis (as there's no advantage for cell death in a single celled organism), and that's a second spell checker of sorts for multicelled organisms only. A lot of the more complex organism's defenses against diseases such as cancer could all be described as spell checkers (for example, P53 tumor suppressor). The form of DNA polymerase used in the complex organisms itself improves copying accuracy by about 100fold over what's possible for the non-eukarotes and even some of the fairly complex bacteria, and it's been described in operation as 'wiggling the part it has just put together to make sure it hasn't allowed the wrong base to pair before it moves on to the next bit, and having a digestive capability to strip out such mistakes when it finds them'. (See "Our Molecular Nature", by David Goodsell for more on this). Then there's snRNPs (Small Nuclear Ribonucleoproteins, which are formed to snip out introns from RNA copies for those RNA strands that aren't self splicing ribozymes (and of course rybozymes themselves even in organisms too simple to have snRNPs). It looks to me like most of the major changes in organic complexity are also spell checkers of one sort or another. I don't really like to anthropomorphise evolution as having long term goals, but it's probably at least as fair to say evolution is trying to produce totally accurate transcription, as it is to say it is trying to make organisms more ideally suited to their environments.
The four bases in DNA aren't the same as codons in the code - there are 64 codons set up as triplets of bases in DNA, even though of those, 61 are used to code for only 20 amino acids and the remaining 3 code for a STOP bit. Messenger RNA uses the same number of codons by the model, including also having three ways to express a STOP. There are some already known exceptions, mostly some uncommon organisms use one or two of the three STOP bits to code for an amino acid instead. Incidentally, the START bit (AUG) is also used to code an amino acid (methionine) when the process of transcription is already running - economical, that. Another thing already known is that some choices for coding the same amino acid are much more common than others. That fact suggests there is more to the code than this model and there's something, (perhaps even a whole 'nother level of interpretation) we don't have a grip on yet, but some researchers think it may alternately be explained just as a consequence of some triplets having higher energy requirements to make than others.
Exactly - there's a difference between getting an occasionally screwed up BMW, with a random seeming defect, and getting an occasional Yugo, or maybe a working Jetpack, or every time the BMW is not to spec it's always because it has only four lug nut shafts on the left rear wheel, and the spacing also adjusts to make them symmetrically placed, rather than you seeing a host of other defects that are theoretically as likely. Or maybe it's something that definitely won't work as well, definitely what would be called a damaged product, but still it's still a very common glitch compared to the predicted likelyhood, and it's strange a bunch of other glitches aren't also more likely.
What I like about this discovery is it's stranger than it sounds in summary to most of the lay public on Slashdot - that's a good sign. It means instead of there being a 1 in 10,000 chance it's really significant research, the odds are more like 1 in 100. There's still a good chance it will end up being no big deal, but it just might.
Slashdot Mirror
The theoretical free market of Adam Smith fame assumes parity of information. An asymmetric information structure is already, by definition, the opposite of a free market, to the extent of the asymmetry, before you even get to the question of whether the government is involved or not. So, what a lot of people are arguing for here seems to be a 'Free Market', just like dear old Karl Marx, the Anti-Adam Smith, wanted. The level of cognitive dissonance in some of these posts is every bit as high as claiming "Jesus wants you to torture children", or "I'm a scientist, so of course astrology is correct". If these people really represent Capital theory, then I shan't be surprised to see a bunch of Wall Street traders erecting a solid gold statue of V. I. Lenin, thrice life size, where the bull now resides.
"I see communists. Walking around like regular people. They don't see each other. They only see what they want to see. They don't know they're communists."
As someone who really was once an Intelligence officer, I'd like to point out that Bradley Manning was ranked Specialist 4, which is neither an NCO or commissioned rank. Until he made at least Sergeant, his need to know on anything besides possibly technical equipment specs was probably somewhere between nothing and Sgt. Schultz's "Nuuthink! Nuuthink!".
A big step - only two more launches and the capsule is man rated, and we have a seven person scaled up version of an Apollo atop a Saturn Ib, easily capable of reaching the ISS with a full crew. Then all we need is a new version of the Saturn V, and we have essentially all the capability we lost in the 70's and 80's, scaled by 7/3rds. (OK, to do an actual lunar mission, we need a LEM, but there, exact duplicates of the original, flawless design would do - let's hope the Gruman design sheets are still around).
We know that's not the point as the media campaigns address it. The point in this article is: Will the campaigns be successful, given this motivation?
Let's say you are doing real charity - not giving away someone else's content, but giving your own money. Now someone who owns a check into cash business calls you a thief, because by making it softer for some poor person, they don't have to pay a bunch of check into cash fees. Do you believe them? Do you accept their moral premise, that they own their clientele and you are stealing those potential clients from them?
Same here. Yes, there's a difference in how clear cut the issues are. That's real life for you - complex and sometimes ambiguous moral issues. The file sharers may not own the content, but Robin Hood didn't own what he gave the peasants either. The Sheriff of Nottingham never saw Robin Hood as anything other than just another thief. Do you think Robin Hood minded if a lackey of thieves like the Sheriff, working for a great thief like John the Bastard, called him a thief? The average file sharer thinks the media cartels have committed great crimes, and being called a thief by the media campaigns just enforces the Robin Hood syndrome.
Now personally, I just boycott. I agree that the media have bent or broken a lot of laws, bought political actions, ignored other people's rights, and done a host of things that undermine their moral position. They've refused to recognise legitimate fair use, bribed politicians, failed utterly to comply with the spirit of the Constitution regarding copyright, vilified their opponents by comparing them to not just pirates and thieves but Jack the Ripper, and claimed that people like me don't exist (and that nobody is boycotting without being a thief), the list goes on and on. I don't think of what the RIAA or MPAA is doing as nearly the sort of massive thing Robin Hood faced in legends, with the legitimate government kidnapped in a back room deal with a foreign power, and armed thugs beating people, so I don't go to direct opposition. If the RIAA somehow starts using physical force, sending goons to kick down my doors and audit my PC files, then maybe I'll consider them worth Robin Hood style tactics.
But make no mistake, this is one big set of crooks accusing other people of being small scale crooks, and most of those crooks don't think of themselves as just another guy who is passing around something that isn't really theirs, they think of themselves as Robin Hood.
The article is pointing out that you can't shame Robin Hood into giving up. Prince John can't legitimately claim to have the moral high ground. Short of vicious reprisals against a Robin Hood's family, or very public executions, you can't stop him and his whole band of merry men, and according to legends, a new 'hero' always rises up in such cases.
DASA = Distributed Arrival of Spam Attack.
DASAWPR = Distributed Arrival of Spam Attack With Pineapple Rings.
To add to that; Railroads came up with pretty damned reliable solutions about a full century ago for using a conduit that has to intermittently carry traffic both ways on a flexible schedule and not having traffic collide. They had somewhat sloppy solutions that still allowed them to run at a profit well before the US civil war - Casey Jones was an exception, not a rule. Given the current society, this system needs to start out where the railroads were in the 1910's or the airlines in the 1940's. Rail also got storing empty 'pods' in some sort of holding area and sending them back at optimal times down pat, earlier than that, say 125 years ago. Some of you are treating this idea like it was quantum rocket surgery being attempted by the schoolboys cast away in Lord of the Flies.
and how to get the inordinate amount of hamster waste back to where it needs to be. Forget robohamsters, I propose Giant Space Hamsters. Woolly Rupert for the win.
Use tubes 1 way each (you'll want that eventually when loads and distances make both way use prohibitive even with great software switching). Divided placement with an access gangway big enough to run at least a small electric cart down running between them, and a two person crew clears blockages. Designed right, You still get the reliability advantages of being able to switch tubes when the loads are running more one direction than the other and funnel everything one way for a time, parking empty capsules until load is light to return them, and using one tunnel in bi-directional mode while the other one is being cleared/serviced. Once you get high enough throughput need, a single access-way could be servicing 4, 6, or more tubes, so it actually scales up well.
It doesn't really add one. Less surface shipping by truck/plane/rail would reduce the risks there, so it's a +1 + -1 = 0 situation at worst. Since the tubes don't have to run close to highways, power grid, or places with lots of people/civilian targets, it could be designed to minimize human risks, for a net negative terror threat potential.
Two meter long capsules entering your house through appropriately sized tubes at up to 60 miles an hour represent a serious "last mile problem", (with the obvious solution of a smaller tube system connecting to a Tube Service Provider). So, we're back to an analog of the current model, where not everyone has a direct connection to the physical net. Just be glad you won't get 'ping' flooded with empty 2 meter capsules, or a 200,000 capsule DDOS attack.
Personally, I'm trasmodic with eucompipulation about Exascale.
It's not worth debating. As long as the most common adjectives used are also sexual terms,* the public WILL have its adjectives.
*and they are, as in "really f**king big!", "Muthaf**kin gynormous", and "awesomer than F**kzilla stompin the s**t outa Tokif**kio"
Well, since Astrid Anderson is married to Greg Bear, presumably she can live off her husband's work and not her dad's. He's doing pretty well, although how that income stacks up in terms of California prices is a different story. For that matter, she's quite talented and could probably make more money herself if she wanted to focus on it. She's been involved heavily with SFWA, doing the sort of work her dad did as a past president of the organization, lobbying for his causes. Much of what remains available of Poul's work is through Baen, who have published all the Flandry of Terra and Polesotechnic League books recently (yes, Baen of the many free samples). Maybe she thinks Gutenburg may hurt these sales, or maybe she's planning to release the texts via Baen after sales die down, as many have done, and just doesn't like the loss of control. I wouldn't assume this particular case is all about the Benjamins.
This does however expose a tactical weakness of the XM25 - the lack of good, flat mousing surfaces on the modern battlefield.
You're technically right if you count it one way, way wrong if you don't.
Talk about just the general fund - Social security has its own tax, not part of the general fund at all. It's pretty self sustaining, at least until the 2030's. Same for medicare and unemployment comp. Some of these programs are projected to be in trouble, especially if money borrowed out of them in prior years isn't put back as promised, but they may or may not follow those projections - there's a lot of axes being ground there when people talk about 20 years out. Let's not count where these are properly funded by their own separate taxes, just if we have to use the descressionary budget for them.
Now, do you count the VA budget as civilian? Military retirement? How about foreign aid - do you count the aid that is earmarked only for purchasing military grade weapons systems and can't be used for civil improvements as civilan spending? Highways - that ought to be civilian, right? Now what about burying 2 inch thick steel plates under roads on US military bases where tanks maneuver a lot? (We can hide this in Dept. of Transportation funds, and even claim the road projects are to improve routes leading to isolated and poor communities - there's lots of isolated communities of trailer parks on the far sides of US mainland military bases). Black projects - why hide a top secret item in some part of the military budget when you can hide it all they way over in Health and Human Services? We finally have confirmation that the CIA directed parts of the national endowment for the arts budget to prove this has been going on, but we may never know about the majority of such cases.
Here's how it looks for the 2011 descressionary budget, which is still with all the black projects hidden, so if anything, its more one sided than this.
Military/Security: 895 Billion dollars - 63%
NonMilitary: 520 Billion - 37%
Or, we could count everything, in which case, we don't just throw SS and unemployment in, we add servicing the national debt, and then break out what part of the debt is from prior year military spending. This looks pretty similar. You can get pretty close to the military being less than half if you add only the non-military portion of the debt and add in
SS and such, but that is simply not an honest way to figure it.
Quick Source - try www.DeathandTaxesPoster.com
The existing weapons are worse. Usually, the response with enemy forces firing from buildings and falling back into inner rooms and halls is a rocket or mortar mission. This takes a minute or so to set up, and involves a much bigger bang than a grenade. Small grenade rounds can be delivered before the enemy falls back more than a few feet, and are much more precise. The idea is to make it very impractical for a small team (say 2 or 3 men) to fire and switch windows, fire and switch windows, over and over and tie up or defeat a whole platoon moving through the area.
Let's assume a pretty sloppy case with this weapon. Two Afghan snipers work a building, and a dozen US infantry with two of these weapons engage. The snipers are determined, will stay engaged through some return fire, and they manage to get out of a room and move to another several times before one of them is hit and the other withdraws. They manage to wound or kill 3 US troops. Six grenade rounds are fired, for a really lousy accuracy rating of 12.5% , and at least one of the rooms hit has civilians in it for 3 civilian casualties. A really bad, fubared response.
Now what's an average case with these same personnel on both sides, and existing weapons? The first hits against the US side are again by surprise and so are likely to be unchanged - 2 US casualties either wounded or killed. The snipers switch locations as many times as before, because they now have enough time as support sets up a mortar mission. For an average case, the US maneuvers pretty well taking cover once the first surprise round is past, so maybe the average US casualties with existing weapons are a bit lower than for the screw up case with this gadjet. So three mortar rounds are fired, destroying 8 to 25 rooms of the building and these again kill or seriously wound one sniper. They actually got him on the second, but spotted some movement that could have been the sniper still moving in the same direction, towards the exit side of the building. (At that range, it's hard to spot that this is someone else who has decided exiting the building is a good idea, for some odd reason. Mortars don't have scopes attached, after all.). Here, the other sniper withdraws whether he actually knows the first one is hit or just because of all the explosions. Sounds pretty similar to the first case, but this is more average, not an 'assume somebody screws up a lot' case. Civilian casualties? OK, that's a real difference, now we are talking about maybe 8 on average.
Try it with other existing weapons systems - like no mortars or rockets are available, and the US infantry has to cross an open square with some rubble and vehicles to get inside the building, then clear room to room with personal weapons and grenades. These don't give low civilian casualties, low US casualties or high chance of getting one or both snipers either. Average costs for these methods are likely to be equivalent to worst case screw ups with a lighter direct fire grenade option, and the screw up case is where the selected route of entry passes through a day care.
I wouldn't clalm that an absolute majority of Slashdotters that oppose the current broken copyright system liked the older 28 year rules, but there have been enough posters that it's fair to say at least a very healthy minority do. Add me to that. I'd be perfectly happy to see these films protected by an automatic 14 year copyright with the owners allowed to renew for another 14 at their option. I'd be fine with them being able to seek some punitive damages even where the violation isn't for profit, although I see $150,000 per incident as both absurd and immoral.
Its fair to point out, for these recent film cases, the chance a violation has done real harm and cost real money is very high, and this is fundamentally different from the case of, say a 20 year old TV show or novel, where the odds are more of a mixed bag. Really cleaning up the copyright mess means taking the most likely consequences into account, and for cases like this one, the likelyest consequences include real harm to the copyright holder.
You do know that the law allows holding more than one entity responsible for damages and even finding more than one entity criminally negligent?
the second, I'm afraid, will require empirical evidence to be proven as fact.
Well, it's slightly more polite put that way than "Tits or GTFO", but really, save that for 4Chan.
Hi Marvin, I see you found your Space Modulator.
grunt work and MAYBE defensive employments... and tank operators who can maybe survive a turret hit, and tanks with only a three person crew (like the old Soviet designs, no separate loader, but now it's because the gunner can easily load as well ... and assault troops that can ride into combat armored up, on top of one of these tanks, or inside an APC equivalent, and go back to recharge...
Baen books ought to love this.
DNA definitely has a lower mutation rate. That doesn't mean it evolves more slowly. Complex species actually seem to give way to new species more rapidly than simpler ones. There's some arguments that a high enough mutation rate actually slows evolution down:
1) Most mutations are bad
2) Of the few that are good, most give only a small improvement, since most organisms are pretty well adapted to their environments.
3) So a successful mutation usually means an organism has on average, say 1.01 offspring while its competitors have only 0.99.
(Sure sometimes a positive mutation has a bigger effect, but on average, it only has a little benefit.).
4) So if the mutation rate is high enough, that beneficial effect gets swamped by bad mutations before it has much chance to be tested through multiple generations and beat out its competition.
5) If the mutation rate is really high, that slightly beneficial mutation actually gets overwritten by another mutation at that spot in the code before it has time to be tested.
5a) And probably if the mutation rate is that high, the bad ones destroy the species completely - a high enough general rate leads to mass extinction.
5b) It's even worse if you're talking about a sexually reproducing species, as now a high enough rate means the offspring differ by to much to reproduce with each other - just to make sex work the mutation rate needs to be lower than for asexual reproduction.
6) Species come and go faster for sexually reproducing types. That supports the claim, a high mutation rate doesn't make evolution go faster, but slower.
7) Obviously, there has to be a minimum for this - no mutations at all means no evolution.
8) But life on earth is either at the optimum error rate or still above it.
I don't see why you claim there isn't a spell checker. Using DNA for the long term storage itself increases fidelity over RNA. Putting the DNA in a nucleus to protect it from some chemical processes that can cause data malformation also means an increase in fidelity. Multicellularity means (admittedly among other things), moving the reproductive cells deep in the organism so they are again protected from some more sources of copying errors. Simultaniously, it allows apoptosis (as there's no advantage for cell death in a single celled organism), and that's a second spell checker of sorts for multicelled organisms only. A lot of the more complex organism's defenses against diseases such as cancer could all be described as spell checkers (for example, P53 tumor suppressor). The form of DNA polymerase used in the complex organisms itself improves copying accuracy by about 100fold over what's possible for the non-eukarotes and even some of the fairly complex bacteria, and it's been described in operation as 'wiggling the part it has just put together to make sure it hasn't allowed the wrong base to pair before it moves on to the next bit, and having a digestive capability to strip out such mistakes when it finds them'. (See "Our Molecular Nature", by David Goodsell for more on this). Then there's snRNPs (Small Nuclear Ribonucleoproteins, which are formed to snip out introns from RNA copies for those RNA strands that aren't self splicing ribozymes (and of course rybozymes themselves even in organisms too simple to have snRNPs). It looks to me like most of the major changes in organic complexity are also spell checkers of one sort or another. I don't really like to anthropomorphise evolution as having long term goals, but it's probably at least as fair to say evolution is trying to produce totally accurate transcription, as it is to say it is trying to make organisms more ideally suited to their environments.
The four bases in DNA aren't the same as codons in the code - there are 64 codons set up as triplets of bases in DNA, even though of those, 61 are used to code for only 20 amino acids and the remaining 3 code for a STOP bit. Messenger RNA uses the same number of codons by the model, including also having three ways to express a STOP. There are some already known exceptions, mostly some uncommon organisms use one or two of the three STOP bits to code for an amino acid instead. Incidentally, the START bit (AUG) is also used to code an amino acid (methionine) when the process of transcription is already running - economical, that. Another thing already known is that some choices for coding the same amino acid are much more common than others. That fact suggests there is more to the code than this model and there's something, (perhaps even a whole 'nother level of interpretation) we don't have a grip on yet, but some researchers think it may alternately be explained just as a consequence of some triplets having higher energy requirements to make than others.
Exactly - there's a difference between getting an occasionally screwed up BMW, with a random seeming defect, and getting an occasional Yugo, or maybe a working Jetpack, or every time the BMW is not to spec it's always because it has only four lug nut shafts on the left rear wheel, and the spacing also adjusts to make them symmetrically placed, rather than you seeing a host of other defects that are theoretically as likely. Or maybe it's something that definitely won't work as well, definitely what would be called a damaged product, but still it's still a very common glitch compared to the predicted likelyhood, and it's strange a bunch of other glitches aren't also more likely.
What I like about this discovery is it's stranger than it sounds in summary to most of the lay public on Slashdot - that's a good sign. It means instead of there being a 1 in 10,000 chance it's really significant research, the odds are more like 1 in 100. There's still a good chance it will end up being no big deal, but it just might.