The problem of course is that if you practice a patent technique, you have infringed on the patent. When the patented technique is a gene, the way you practice it is by growing and selling produce that contains that gene. This is a statutory obligation, not a contractual obligation; you agreed to it when you elected the bastards who made it legal to patent genes.
A much better book for this is Anathem, by Neal Stephenson. Because it's fiction, and he never actually says what his theory of consciousness is, you just get to try to figure out what he thinks it might be, and he drops enough hints to let you construct a pretty interesting theory. I enjoyed it a lot.
We don't actually have a clue how consciousness arises, despite lots of research into the field, so speculation is pretty much all we have. Although there are plenty of neurologists who think their speculation is fact...
This "nobody knows the day and hour" stuff is about your own death. People make it be about armageddon and rapture because that's more abstract, less personal, and hence easier to face.
The implication I've always understood for "[they] shall not taste of death" was that some people present at that sermon would in fact be brought up to heaven without dying first. So either they're still alive, and really bloody old, or they got raptured long ago, and hence aren't our problem anymore. The bit about it being the last hour is that we don't live as long as we think we do, and we will run out of runway sooner than we think, so we'd better gun it and rotate.
Hm, it says here "...but the meek shall inherit the earth; and shall delight themselves in the abundance of peace." So I think the clerks will still be working, but there won't be many people shopping. Conclusion: if you have a lot of stuff, you're probably going to be raptured.
Um, not everything that plays badly for Apple is an Apple bash. In this case, *nobody else is using* the MicroSIM, because *nobody else cares.* Apple wants cell phone providers to stock an extra product just so that their customers can use their product. Providers gamely try to do this, but it's hard to get the stock quantities right. So there are always more of the standard ones than the small ones available.
BTW, by "standard" here I mean "the one everyone uses," not "one that is described in a standards document."
I don't really care whether it's an evil plot or not. I don't care whether it's a "standard" or not. The only cell phone manufacturer that I know of that uses MicroSIMs is Apple. This means that when you go to buy a MicroSIM, they don't have it. This is a royal PITA. It's not a question of criticizing Apple; it's a question of convenience. When I'm traveling, I want to be able to buy a SIM and put it in my phone, not buy a SIM, spent 20 minutes with my swiss army knife cutting it down and shaving it to a final fit, and then maybe discover that it doesn't work anyway and not be able to return it.
I think he means "when the iPhone 4 originally came out," not "when the original iPhone came out." As you say, the original iPhone takes a standard SIM.
Strictly speaking, it's a lock-out strategy. Whenever I travel abroad, I have to talk the local cell provider into selling me a standard SIM, which I then have to cut down to fit in the tiny slot in my giant iPad (most providers claim to sell Micro-SIMs, but they never seem to have them in stock). Whereas I can put a standard SIM in my Nexus S. Guess why I bought a Nexus S instead of an iPhone 4? (Well, okay, partly it was because it was unlocked, but the non-hassle-factor is pretty major too.) If Apple comes up with a SIM that can't even be cut down, that'll be a *really* strong reason not to buy whatever device depends on it.
Honestly, "too large" hasn't been a factor in my cell phone purchases in a *long* time. I don't want a screen the size of my thumbnail anyway. Sometimes standard is more important than small.
Yup. Also, it's not that hard to reverse engineer the hardware the game expects to talk to if you really want to play it. Actually, in my foggy memory of Apple ][ game hacking, I am pretty sure that hacking the game was more fun than playing it anyway.
This is why security solutions based on users making correct decisions can't work. It's bizarre how many of the programs on our computers still depend on this.
You mean if we just exterminated everybody in the country? Yes, that would have been quicker. And indeed I think this illustrates nicely the problem with war: the only way to be sure that you are safe is to kill everyone who might be a potential enemy. And that's everybody. So when you're done, you may have won, but you're so much worse off than you were before you started that calling it a victory is meaningless.
Halliburton, et al., taking over the U.S. economy gets bin Laden what he wanted: an America with a shrinking economy because all the money has been siphoned out of it. This is precisely his strategy, and it's been depressingly effective. You know that part in Buffy where Willow and Xander say "it's a trap!" and Buffy goes in anyway and gets her ass handed to her? That's us.
Your mistake is thinking that anybody wins in the long term because of the expansion of the military. Nobody wins in the long term. In the short term, a few people win, but the damage to the economy is so severe that it's difficult to recover from. So ultimately even the people who siphoned off all the money lose, because they could have had a larger piece, albeit a smaller percentage, of a bigger pie if they hadn't played winner-take-all.
The way economies prosper is that people make things that are useful. Economies don't prosper when you dump money down a drain.
Actually, having a small desk is a great way to keep your desk clean. Generally speaking, what's on my desk is crap that's accumulated there over time. If you have room for a book to the left and the right of your keyboard, you probably have all the room you need. My desk is about 16"x20", and I'm quite happy with it, except that it could be a bit smaller. Of course, I have a rack to the left of my desk with my JTAG debug board and the system I'm debugging...
In 1984, the Ministry of Truth is a propaganda body. They do not provide citations. They do not check facts. They decide what the truth is to be. I totally agree with the points you've made, but I think it's worth noting that what's being discussed here is not related to the Ministry of Truth in 1984. The Ministry of Truth is more like how the Nazis did news, and also more like how various modern news organizations do news. What is being proposed is actually the opposite of the Ministry of Truth.
Yeah, right, that'll improve the situation. The last thing we need is for the people who are in favor of removing this government subsidy to come across to the general public as murderers.
Who cares why they think they should profit from something so obvious? Why do foxes think they should profit from rabbits' foraging? It's a meaningless question. They are just trying to feed themselves, in a way that rabbits might argue is immoral, but that no fox would agree is.
The real question is, when are we going to stop letting foxes gnaw at our bellies and fight back?
If we required all these industries to fund the costs of their externalities, and we were good enough at modeling these costs for this funding to be reasonably accurate, then a lot of things would change. For instance, suppose as an oil company, you had to pay not only for the risk associated with cheaping out on safety equipment on your drilling platforms, but also for carbon offsets for the fuel you collected. It would now be cheaper to invest in safety equipment than to pay for the insurance required to allow you to drill without appropriate safety equipment. And you would have to pay to sequester the carbon. Oil would continue to be a fuel, but now would only be used in places where it's appropriate.
Similarly with nuclear: if you could either pay $20m to fix the wiring in your plant so that it doesn't catch fire, or pay $1b to insure against the risk of a meltdown caused by faulty wiring, you'd fix your wiring and raise your rates to pay for it, because it's cheaper.
Unfortunately, not only do regulations like this not exist, but the oil and nuclear industries have fought very effectively to prevent any such regulations from existing. Why? Because there is a tremendous amount of money to be made building industries with huge external costs that you can lay off on someone else. It's not the case that these costs don't exist, or that they don't matter. Rather, these costs are actually a truly giant piggy bank which unscrupulous businesses can plunder.
So don't expect these externalities to be regulated anytime soon. For them to be regulated would require the kind of emotional investment in an economic strategy that is present in the anti-nuclear movement. People are this emotionally invested in the anti-nuclear movement because they're afraid for their lives and their homes. It would be very, very difficult to get the same number of people that seriously invested in regulating externalities.
We can't build the newer, safer designes for two reasons. The first is that the nuclear industry, by which I mean both the operators and the regulators, have utterly failed to be honest and diligent. By this I mean that they generally do their best to try to paint a happy face on any problem that may come up, rather than saying "here's what's bad about this, and here's what we're doing about it." Consequently, each time something genuinely bad happens, public trust is further undermined. And they do their best to find the cheapest possible solution to any problem, rather than actually trying to solve it, because if they had to actually solve it, it might be cheaper to simply shut down the plant.
The root of this problem is that nuclear, like solar, is not actually economically competitive with carbon sources. We'd like to stop using carbon sources of energy, but it's difficult because it's cheaper (partially because we never count the cost of the externalities). The difference between nuclear and solar is that in the case of nuclear, there's a temptation to cheap out on safety so as to make it more economically feasible, or to simply not account for externalities, like the cost of exclusion zones when a serious accident like the ones at Chernobyl and Fukushima happens.
So the point is not that nuclear is inherently unsafe, or inherently a bad idea, but rather that the economics of nuclear power tend to increase risk, not decrease it, and that what is being risked is an outcome like the ones in Fukushima and Chernobyl.
Right. It's a government subsidy, basically. Of course, so is all property ownership--without government intervention, the only thing stopping someone from moving into your house while you're away on vacation is the security guards you hire.
This is true, but it's actually worse than that. Chrome claims to sandbox plugins. If the exploit pwnz0red the Flash plugin, but the sandbox prevented the exploit from getting any further, that would be a success. Likewise, if the exploit is able to break out of the sandbox, that's a failure. It's a failure of Chrome, as well as a failure of Adobe's malware^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hplugin.
They're really handy for detecting time dilation caused by variations in the gravitational field. It wouldn't surprise me if, when the price comes down, people start using them to survey construction sites for geological stability. Try doing that with some wimpy OXCO that's only accurate to a few parts per billion.
IR laser-based smoke detectors work really well in combination with the kind that detect combustion, but they both trigger based on different signals, and it's not uncommon for one to go off and the other to not go off. So you really can't get by with just the IR-based detectors, unfortunately. But as you say, the exposure is quite low. You're more likely to die of a fire than a cancer caused by the radioactive material encapsulated in a smoke detector.
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The problem of course is that if you practice a patent technique, you have infringed on the patent. When the patented technique is a gene, the way you practice it is by growing and selling produce that contains that gene. This is a statutory obligation, not a contractual obligation; you agreed to it when you elected the bastards who made it legal to patent genes.
A much better book for this is Anathem, by Neal Stephenson. Because it's fiction, and he never actually says what his theory of consciousness is, you just get to try to figure out what he thinks it might be, and he drops enough hints to let you construct a pretty interesting theory. I enjoyed it a lot.
We don't actually have a clue how consciousness arises, despite lots of research into the field, so speculation is pretty much all we have. Although there are plenty of neurologists who think their speculation is fact...
This "nobody knows the day and hour" stuff is about your own death. People make it be about armageddon and rapture because that's more abstract, less personal, and hence easier to face.
The implication I've always understood for "[they] shall not taste of death" was that some people present at that sermon would in fact be brought up to heaven without dying first. So either they're still alive, and really bloody old, or they got raptured long ago, and hence aren't our problem anymore. The bit about it being the last hour is that we don't live as long as we think we do, and we will run out of runway sooner than we think, so we'd better gun it and rotate.
Hm, it says here "...but the meek shall inherit the earth; and shall delight themselves in the abundance of peace." So I think the clerks will still be working, but there won't be many people shopping. Conclusion: if you have a lot of stuff, you're probably going to be raptured.
Um, not everything that plays badly for Apple is an Apple bash. In this case, *nobody else is using* the MicroSIM, because *nobody else cares.* Apple wants cell phone providers to stock an extra product just so that their customers can use their product. Providers gamely try to do this, but it's hard to get the stock quantities right. So there are always more of the standard ones than the small ones available.
BTW, by "standard" here I mean "the one everyone uses," not "one that is described in a standards document."
I don't really care whether it's an evil plot or not. I don't care whether it's a "standard" or not. The only cell phone manufacturer that I know of that uses MicroSIMs is Apple. This means that when you go to buy a MicroSIM, they don't have it. This is a royal PITA. It's not a question of criticizing Apple; it's a question of convenience. When I'm traveling, I want to be able to buy a SIM and put it in my phone, not buy a SIM, spent 20 minutes with my swiss army knife cutting it down and shaving it to a final fit, and then maybe discover that it doesn't work anyway and not be able to return it.
I think he means "when the iPhone 4 originally came out," not "when the original iPhone came out." As you say, the original iPhone takes a standard SIM.
Strictly speaking, it's a lock-out strategy. Whenever I travel abroad, I have to talk the local cell provider into selling me a standard SIM, which I then have to cut down to fit in the tiny slot in my giant iPad (most providers claim to sell Micro-SIMs, but they never seem to have them in stock). Whereas I can put a standard SIM in my Nexus S. Guess why I bought a Nexus S instead of an iPhone 4? (Well, okay, partly it was because it was unlocked, but the non-hassle-factor is pretty major too.) If Apple comes up with a SIM that can't even be cut down, that'll be a *really* strong reason not to buy whatever device depends on it.
Honestly, "too large" hasn't been a factor in my cell phone purchases in a *long* time. I don't want a screen the size of my thumbnail anyway. Sometimes standard is more important than small.
Yup. Also, it's not that hard to reverse engineer the hardware the game expects to talk to if you really want to play it. Actually, in my foggy memory of Apple ][ game hacking, I am pretty sure that hacking the game was more fun than playing it anyway.
This is why security solutions based on users making correct decisions can't work. It's bizarre how many of the programs on our computers still depend on this.
Ah, but decaf never tastes as good...
(delightedly wanders off to make some happy juice...)
You mean if we just exterminated everybody in the country? Yes, that would have been quicker. And indeed I think this illustrates nicely the problem with war: the only way to be sure that you are safe is to kill everyone who might be a potential enemy. And that's everybody. So when you're done, you may have won, but you're so much worse off than you were before you started that calling it a victory is meaningless.
Halliburton, et al., taking over the U.S. economy gets bin Laden what he wanted: an America with a shrinking economy because all the money has been siphoned out of it. This is precisely his strategy, and it's been depressingly effective. You know that part in Buffy where Willow and Xander say "it's a trap!" and Buffy goes in anyway and gets her ass handed to her? That's us.
Your mistake is thinking that anybody wins in the long term because of the expansion of the military. Nobody wins in the long term. In the short term, a few people win, but the damage to the economy is so severe that it's difficult to recover from. So ultimately even the people who siphoned off all the money lose, because they could have had a larger piece, albeit a smaller percentage, of a bigger pie if they hadn't played winner-take-all.
The way economies prosper is that people make things that are useful. Economies don't prosper when you dump money down a drain.
I could tell you were joking. But it wasn't funny.
Actually, having a small desk is a great way to keep your desk clean. Generally speaking, what's on my desk is crap that's accumulated there over time. If you have room for a book to the left and the right of your keyboard, you probably have all the room you need. My desk is about 16"x20", and I'm quite happy with it, except that it could be a bit smaller. Of course, I have a rack to the left of my desk with my JTAG debug board and the system I'm debugging...
In 1984, the Ministry of Truth is a propaganda body. They do not provide citations. They do not check facts. They decide what the truth is to be. I totally agree with the points you've made, but I think it's worth noting that what's being discussed here is not related to the Ministry of Truth in 1984. The Ministry of Truth is more like how the Nazis did news, and also more like how various modern news organizations do news. What is being proposed is actually the opposite of the Ministry of Truth.
Yeah, right, that'll improve the situation. The last thing we need is for the people who are in favor of removing this government subsidy to come across to the general public as murderers.
Who cares why they think they should profit from something so obvious? Why do foxes think they should profit from rabbits' foraging? It's a meaningless question. They are just trying to feed themselves, in a way that rabbits might argue is immoral, but that no fox would agree is.
The real question is, when are we going to stop letting foxes gnaw at our bellies and fight back?
If we required all these industries to fund the costs of their externalities, and we were good enough at modeling these costs for this funding to be reasonably accurate, then a lot of things would change. For instance, suppose as an oil company, you had to pay not only for the risk associated with cheaping out on safety equipment on your drilling platforms, but also for carbon offsets for the fuel you collected. It would now be cheaper to invest in safety equipment than to pay for the insurance required to allow you to drill without appropriate safety equipment. And you would have to pay to sequester the carbon. Oil would continue to be a fuel, but now would only be used in places where it's appropriate.
Similarly with nuclear: if you could either pay $20m to fix the wiring in your plant so that it doesn't catch fire, or pay $1b to insure against the risk of a meltdown caused by faulty wiring, you'd fix your wiring and raise your rates to pay for it, because it's cheaper.
Unfortunately, not only do regulations like this not exist, but the oil and nuclear industries have fought very effectively to prevent any such regulations from existing. Why? Because there is a tremendous amount of money to be made building industries with huge external costs that you can lay off on someone else. It's not the case that these costs don't exist, or that they don't matter. Rather, these costs are actually a truly giant piggy bank which unscrupulous businesses can plunder.
So don't expect these externalities to be regulated anytime soon. For them to be regulated would require the kind of emotional investment in an economic strategy that is present in the anti-nuclear movement. People are this emotionally invested in the anti-nuclear movement because they're afraid for their lives and their homes. It would be very, very difficult to get the same number of people that seriously invested in regulating externalities.
We can't build the newer, safer designes for two reasons. The first is that the nuclear industry, by which I mean both the operators and the regulators, have utterly failed to be honest and diligent. By this I mean that they generally do their best to try to paint a happy face on any problem that may come up, rather than saying "here's what's bad about this, and here's what we're doing about it." Consequently, each time something genuinely bad happens, public trust is further undermined. And they do their best to find the cheapest possible solution to any problem, rather than actually trying to solve it, because if they had to actually solve it, it might be cheaper to simply shut down the plant.
The root of this problem is that nuclear, like solar, is not actually economically competitive with carbon sources. We'd like to stop using carbon sources of energy, but it's difficult because it's cheaper (partially because we never count the cost of the externalities). The difference between nuclear and solar is that in the case of nuclear, there's a temptation to cheap out on safety so as to make it more economically feasible, or to simply not account for externalities, like the cost of exclusion zones when a serious accident like the ones at Chernobyl and Fukushima happens.
So the point is not that nuclear is inherently unsafe, or inherently a bad idea, but rather that the economics of nuclear power tend to increase risk, not decrease it, and that what is being risked is an outcome like the ones in Fukushima and Chernobyl.
Right. It's a government subsidy, basically. Of course, so is all property ownership--without government intervention, the only thing stopping someone from moving into your house while you're away on vacation is the security guards you hire.
This is true, but it's actually worse than that. Chrome claims to sandbox plugins. If the exploit pwnz0red the Flash plugin, but the sandbox prevented the exploit from getting any further, that would be a success. Likewise, if the exploit is able to break out of the sandbox, that's a failure. It's a failure of Chrome, as well as a failure of Adobe's malware^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hplugin.
They're really handy for detecting time dilation caused by variations in the gravitational field. It wouldn't surprise me if, when the price comes down, people start using them to survey construction sites for geological stability. Try doing that with some wimpy OXCO that's only accurate to a few parts per billion.
IR laser-based smoke detectors work really well in combination with the kind that detect combustion, but they both trigger based on different signals, and it's not uncommon for one to go off and the other to not go off. So you really can't get by with just the IR-based detectors, unfortunately. But as you say, the exposure is quite low. You're more likely to die of a fire than a cancer caused by the radioactive material encapsulated in a smoke detector.