The article uncannily reminds me of this Schlock Mercenary comic, about the somewhat fuzzy line between journalists and spies. If the state considers Julian Assange an enemy, and Julian works to the benefit of the general public, does this make the state an enemy of the public ?
Or to put it more accurately: nicotine is not the addicting substance in cigarettes / tobacco. The careful analysis of lab tests (mostly done on rats and monkeys) shows repeatedly that nicotine fails to induce the effects we understand as demonstrating addiction.
However, the belief that nicotine is the substance that you crave when trying to stop smoking, is extremely lucrative to the nicotine-gum and nicotine-patch industry. In my country (France) the state's healthcare plan covers most of those products, making this coverage a (costly) disguised subsidy.
Well, AIS is 1/20 000 in the general population... and 1/400 in athletes. It IS overrepresented in sport competitions, even though it causes the body to be partially or totally unresponsive to testosterone and other androgens. So, testosterone won't cut it.
What if I'm XXY (Klinefelter Syndrome) ? What if I'm just X (Turner Syndrome) ? What if I'm XX but SR-Y positive due to gene translocation ? What if I'm XY but Completely Androgen Insensitive (CAIS) ? What if some of my cells are XY, but the others are X, or XX, or XXY (mosaicism and chimerism, sometimes combiend with the syndromes above, see the famous case of Lydia Fairchild for a primer) ? Do we decide sex on the cells' majority+1 ? Or should part of my body compete in the Mens' races, and the other part in Womens' ?
No wait, I read that wrong. It says there is a +.155C warming/decade using the best (classes 1 & 2) stations, +.248C using the worse stations (classes 3, 4 and 5), and that, somehow, NOAA managed to get a +.309C / decade result out of them, by adjsuting upwards the bad stations in order to make up for their poor fidelity, and THEN adjusted upwards the good stations so they would match the poor, adjusted ones.
The research has classified all the surface stations into 5 classes of relevance, from "reliably close to environment" to "poorly sited" in order to evaluate whether and how much the location of the thermometer and its proximity from airports, cities and so on would skew its measures over time. The end result is that there is a warming over time, but that warming is +0.155 C / decade using the best surfacestations, and twice that (+0.309C / decade) if you use them all.
And my point is that the ongoing empiric approach of making games that try all kinds of methods for bringing enjoyment that aim for ease and intuitiveness, has probably already succeeded. As a bonus, this approach also aims at more than just that, with some games having high moral or high aesthetic value. I doubt neuroscience will ever be able to measure those.
I'm reasonably sure they can safely and successfully replace "shooting guns" with "swinging swords" and other bladed weapons. Remote-control explosives, lassos and whips, Force-lightning and gravity-guns would probably also work. I'm unsure about their untold, implicit objective though, but then, science is about testing hypotheses, and not fulfilling fantasies about human nature - now that's what simulation video games are for !
For decades it's as if developers have been driving a car with no speedometer
Well of course the game designers wouldn't need external measuring tools, not when their own brain can tell them what they, themselves, enjoy playing. Apparently they found out on their own that the most efficient way for getting "crude dopamine-triggering effects" was "simulated weaponry".
I'll even go out on a limb and say that the researchers will find "triggering peaceful-triggers" is best done by solving puzzles that are challenging but not out of reach, repeating a timed sequence of memorized or interpreted actions to a sufficiently close match of a model (like, say, jumping through perilously placed platforms) and the sort of things that have spawned entire casual videogame genres.
JD's gets free publicity, and strengthens the brand by setting a nice example and by turning Wensik's book's first edition into a collector for its own whiskey fans, while the author enjoys greater exposition for his book, and sells out the first edition as a collector item. The general public loses nothing, some of us can even enjoy an unexpected collectible.
This really is the nicer way to handle brand infringement.
Damn right they should be commended for fighting to make privacy a bit more valuable. If they win I can then trade that privacy for slightly more valuable services to Facebook, Google, etc...
The kind of slippery slope towards more and more blind zeal and further-reaching powers from agents of every kind of administration (private or public, it makes little difference) was at the center of Ludwig von Mises' 1944 short book Bureaucracy. He tried to explain why and how this happens in terms of systemic incentives and asymetry of information: - promotion works mainly on seniority inside a bureaucracy, thus the top bureaucrats are restricted in their long-term planning by having their own retirement as an event horizon, and having grown a bias towards the statu quo ; while the newly appointed officials are being selected only on their then characteristics (good grades and diplomas mostly), and then all innovation and vigor they might have is sucked out by the subordinate positions they are forced to go through and the fact that none of it will matter much, if at all, to their advancement. - having no market appraisal of the value of their action (which is not the same as there being no value to it, please mind), they they get no valuations of their own initiatives or actions from the rest of society, and they have no guidance for allocating their efforts and resources across many tasks and priorities, they cannot know how good or bad a job they're doing, except through conforming blindly to the rules and laws they enforce, and enforcing them as closely to the letter as they can - 'doing a good bureaucrat's job' often equates 'not doing anything that triggers the ire of your hierarchical superiors' - being on the side that enforces the law often makes them forget that they, too, are subject to it, especially when things like due process hampers their enforcement of the law ; this creates a double standard in their mind where the law is never applied strictly and widely enough to the general population, and always too tightly and too often to themselves - serving in an administration often has the perverse effect of turning the means at the disposal of the agents, into ends of their own:
The dictatorial nutrition expert wants to feed his fellow citizens according to his own ideas about perfect alimentation. He wants to deal with men as the cattle breeder deals with his cows. He fails to realize that nutrition is not an end in itself but the means for the attainment of other ends. The farmer does not feed his cow in order to make it happy but in order to attain some end which the well-fed cow should serve. There are various schemes for feeding cows. Which one of them he chooses depends on whether he wants to get as much milk as possible or as much meat as possible or something else. Every dictator plans to rear, raise, feed, and train his fellow men as the breeder does his cattle. His aim is not to make the people happy but to bring them into a condition which renders him, the dictator, happy. He wants to domesticate them, to give them cattle status. The cattle breeder also is a benevolent despot.
remarks made in the context of a paper he delivered on copyright law at a recent Internet conference could reflect on his impartiality
Does that really make him impartial, or does that show he is knowledgeable enough about the subject at hand to properly motivate any decision of his ? A clueless judge would only be a better option only for the prosecution alone. Having an informed opinion about copyright law and its potential international abuses is a sign of someone who knows what is going on and what matters.
Having been there before, I disagree. First, he would have to know what to do: going to the Police is useless since there is nothing more for them to do - no ongoing delictuous act to stop, no perp to identify and look for, no public peace waiting to be restored. Mann would have to sue the restaurant's owner in its local Tribunal d'Instance: he'd have to identify that owner, and their place of residence, just to properly file a case. He does not actually need a lawyer here, since the damages are low, but that would help him tremendously with those first steps. Besides the case would just be dismissed outright if he can't be physically present or have someone represent him before the judge, whenever the audition happens... and from experience that could very well be anytime from next month to next year. The judge would then most likely award damages to the value of the glass, and that's about it - no punitives, no trial fee award. Elyrest, the limited-liability company that owns the restaurant, would pass that cost onto its civil responsibility insurance and just move on. I think it highly unlikely that he "net a few bucks" by suing, and much more probable he'd end up losing money overall. This is France, not the US, here even punitive damage fees barely reach thousands of euros at most, and they're rarely awarded.
Going public like he did, however, he's already gotten national attention and pushed McDonald's France to issue a statement (they acknowledge the incident and say they're investigating the case internally). If there's anyone semi-competent handling the McD part of it, it will be over in a few days tops with compensation for the damages (and then some) and a sincere apology. That really is his better option IMO.
And it's on: famous french blogger Maitre Eolas relayed the news much earlier this morning (does the guy even sleep ?), which then was picked up by L'Express (national newspaper) half an hour ago. It will be all over french social networks for the next couple days. Apparently the restaurant is not owned by McDonald's, it is a franchise owned by the limited-liability society Elyrest.
And based on my past experience, as a french citizen, of being assaulted and turning to the Police for help, I find his claims of getting no useful response completely realistic and plausible.
However, once this incident becomes more widely known in french-language blogs and media, it'll quickly attract a lot of attention and will probably elicit an official (outraged) reaction of McDonald's France, and maybe cause a few interviews of politicians trying to look like they're concerned. That's how it works here.
McDonald's France is mostly a branding entity, and that the restaurants themselves are franchised. Most of the restaurants are small limited-liability, self-owned enterprises that lease out the brand, inner organization + recipes, and general appearance. They do have a deep, continued relationship with the brand itself, through the regular auditing, the training of employees and the management courses provided along with the branding. The branding entity does own some corporate restaurants, and apparently the Champs Elysées venue is among them, so this contact information may not be useless in this particular case.
As a side-note, a simple web search turned out this french newspaper article about the director of this particular restaurant, Khader Aissani, who happens to look closely like the "perpetrator 1" identified in the original article's photos.
Slashdot Mirror
The article uncannily reminds me of this Schlock Mercenary comic, about the somewhat fuzzy line between journalists and spies. If the state considers Julian Assange an enemy, and Julian works to the benefit of the general public, does this make the state an enemy of the public ?
Nicotine is not addictive.
Or to put it more accurately: nicotine is not the addicting substance in cigarettes / tobacco. The careful analysis of lab tests (mostly done on rats and monkeys) shows repeatedly that nicotine fails to induce the effects we understand as demonstrating addiction.
However, the belief that nicotine is the substance that you crave when trying to stop smoking, is extremely lucrative to the nicotine-gum and nicotine-patch industry. In my country (France) the state's healthcare plan covers most of those products, making this coverage a (costly) disguised subsidy.
I say.
You might want to rethink that: hypospadias is very common.
Well, AIS is 1 /20 000 in the general population... and 1 /400 in athletes. It IS overrepresented in sport competitions, even though it causes the body to be partially or totally unresponsive to testosterone and other androgens. So, testosterone won't cut it.
S/He needs the visibility !
What about Hawaii's "old" NELHA 220 kW Ocean Thermal Energy conversion plant off the Kona coast ?
OTEC solutions are apparently still alive in Hawaii, as a project and funding for building another more powerful OTEC plant off Maui's coast was awarded in 2010 to Lockheed Martin, and NELHA is aiming to build a second plant by 2014.
Oh yes, how hard can it be...
Check one:
[ XX ] Woman
[ XY ] Man
What if I'm XXY (Klinefelter Syndrome) ? What if I'm just X (Turner Syndrome) ? What if I'm XX but SR-Y positive due to gene translocation ? What if I'm XY but Completely Androgen Insensitive (CAIS) ?
What if some of my cells are XY, but the others are X, or XX, or XXY (mosaicism and chimerism, sometimes combiend with the syndromes above, see the famous case of Lydia Fairchild for a primer) ? Do we decide sex on the cells' majority+1 ? Or should part of my body compete in the Mens' races, and the other part in Womens' ?
No, the most common reason would be congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia, which does NOT eliminate the effect of testosterone (quite the opposite).
I fail to see how this even remotely applies to "Turbulence", "Sphere", "Disclosure" or "Congo".
No wait, I read that wrong. It says there is a +.155C warming/decade using the best (classes 1 & 2) stations, +.248C using the worse stations (classes 3, 4 and 5), and that, somehow, NOAA managed to get a +.309C / decade result out of them, by adjsuting upwards the bad stations in order to make up for their poor fidelity, and THEN adjusted upwards the good stations so they would match the poor, adjusted ones.
The research has classified all the surface stations into 5 classes of relevance, from "reliably close to environment" to "poorly sited" in order to evaluate whether and how much the location of the thermometer and its proximity from airports, cities and so on would skew its measures over time. The end result is that there is a warming over time, but that warming is +0.155 C / decade using the best surfacestations, and twice that (+0.309C / decade) if you use them all.
Cheating may be the terrorism of the online gaming world, it's the full-powers resolution of the offline single-player gaming world.
And my point is that the ongoing empiric approach of making games that try all kinds of methods for bringing enjoyment that aim for ease and intuitiveness, has probably already succeeded. As a bonus, this approach also aims at more than just that, with some games having high moral or high aesthetic value. I doubt neuroscience will ever be able to measure those.
No it has not. Check your facts.
I'm reasonably sure they can safely and successfully replace "shooting guns" with "swinging swords" and other bladed weapons. Remote-control explosives, lassos and whips, Force-lightning and gravity-guns would probably also work. I'm unsure about their untold, implicit objective though, but then, science is about testing hypotheses, and not fulfilling fantasies about human nature - now that's what simulation video games are for !
Well of course the game designers wouldn't need external measuring tools, not when their own brain can tell them what they, themselves, enjoy playing. Apparently they found out on their own that the most efficient way for getting "crude dopamine-triggering effects" was "simulated weaponry".
I'll even go out on a limb and say that the researchers will find "triggering peaceful-triggers" is best done by solving puzzles that are challenging but not out of reach, repeating a timed sequence of memorized or interpreted actions to a sufficiently close match of a model (like, say, jumping through perilously placed platforms) and the sort of things that have spawned entire casual videogame genres.
JD's gets free publicity, and strengthens the brand by setting a nice example and by turning Wensik's book's first edition into a collector for its own whiskey fans, while the author enjoys greater exposition for his book, and sells out the first edition as a collector item. The general public loses nothing, some of us can even enjoy an unexpected collectible.
This really is the nicer way to handle brand infringement.
Damn right they should be commended for fighting to make privacy a bit more valuable. If they win I can then trade that privacy for slightly more valuable services to Facebook, Google, etc...
The kind of slippery slope towards more and more blind zeal and further-reaching powers from agents of every kind of administration (private or public, it makes little difference) was at the center of Ludwig von Mises' 1944 short book Bureaucracy. He tried to explain why and how this happens in terms of systemic incentives and asymetry of information:
- promotion works mainly on seniority inside a bureaucracy, thus the top bureaucrats are restricted in their long-term planning by having their own retirement as an event horizon, and having grown a bias towards the statu quo ; while the newly appointed officials are being selected only on their then characteristics (good grades and diplomas mostly), and then all innovation and vigor they might have is sucked out by the subordinate positions they are forced to go through and the fact that none of it will matter much, if at all, to their advancement.
- having no market appraisal of the value of their action (which is not the same as there being no value to it, please mind), they they get no valuations of their own initiatives or actions from the rest of society, and they have no guidance for allocating their efforts and resources across many tasks and priorities, they cannot know how good or bad a job they're doing, except through conforming blindly to the rules and laws they enforce, and enforcing them as closely to the letter as they can - 'doing a good bureaucrat's job' often equates 'not doing anything that triggers the ire of your hierarchical superiors'
- being on the side that enforces the law often makes them forget that they, too, are subject to it, especially when things like due process hampers their enforcement of the law ; this creates a double standard in their mind where the law is never applied strictly and widely enough to the general population, and always too tightly and too often to themselves
- serving in an administration often has the perverse effect of turning the means at the disposal of the agents, into ends of their own:
Does that really make him impartial, or does that show he is knowledgeable enough about the subject at hand to properly motivate any decision of his ? A clueless judge would only be a better option only for the prosecution alone. Having an informed opinion about copyright law and its potential international abuses is a sign of someone who knows what is going on and what matters.
Having been there before, I disagree. First, he would have to know what to do: going to the Police is useless since there is nothing more for them to do - no ongoing delictuous act to stop, no perp to identify and look for, no public peace waiting to be restored. Mann would have to sue the restaurant's owner in its local Tribunal d'Instance: he'd have to identify that owner, and their place of residence, just to properly file a case. He does not actually need a lawyer here, since the damages are low, but that would help him tremendously with those first steps. Besides the case would just be dismissed outright if he can't be physically present or have someone represent him before the judge, whenever the audition happens... and from experience that could very well be anytime from next month to next year. The judge would then most likely award damages to the value of the glass, and that's about it - no punitives, no trial fee award. Elyrest, the limited-liability company that owns the restaurant, would pass that cost onto its civil responsibility insurance and just move on. I think it highly unlikely that he "net a few bucks" by suing, and much more probable he'd end up losing money overall. This is France, not the US, here even punitive damage fees barely reach thousands of euros at most, and they're rarely awarded.
Going public like he did, however, he's already gotten national attention and pushed McDonald's France to issue a statement (they acknowledge the incident and say they're investigating the case internally). If there's anyone semi-competent handling the McD part of it, it will be over in a few days tops with compensation for the damages (and then some) and a sincere apology. That really is his better option IMO.
And it's on: famous french blogger Maitre Eolas relayed the news much earlier this morning (does the guy even sleep ?), which then was picked up by L'Express (national newspaper) half an hour ago. It will be all over french social networks for the next couple days. Apparently the restaurant is not owned by McDonald's, it is a franchise owned by the limited-liability society Elyrest.
And based on my past experience, as a french citizen, of being assaulted and turning to the Police for help, I find his claims of getting no useful response completely realistic and plausible.
However, once this incident becomes more widely known in french-language blogs and media, it'll quickly attract a lot of attention and will probably elicit an official (outraged) reaction of McDonald's France, and maybe cause a few interviews of politicians trying to look like they're concerned. That's how it works here.
McDonald's France is mostly a branding entity, and that the restaurants themselves are franchised. Most of the restaurants are small limited-liability, self-owned enterprises that lease out the brand, inner organization + recipes, and general appearance. They do have a deep, continued relationship with the brand itself, through the regular auditing, the training of employees and the management courses provided along with the branding. The branding entity does own some corporate restaurants, and apparently the Champs Elysées venue is among them, so this contact information may not be useless in this particular case.
As a side-note, a simple web search turned out this french newspaper article about the director of this particular restaurant, Khader Aissani, who happens to look closely like the "perpetrator 1" identified in the original article's photos.
This sort of fraud is no more a part of capitalism, than torture of political prisoners is a part of communism.