Down's Syndrome, even with gene therapy wouldn't be easy to fix, since you're not changing a gene, you actually have to change the number of chromosomes.
When given both prenatal screening and access to abortion, about 90% of mothers choose to abort a fetus with Down's Syndrome. Sarah Palin famously chose to keep hers, but she is in a small and shrinking minority. With better and earlier screening, it is likely even more would chose to abort.
If a cable company puts some wire down, they ought to be able to do whatever they want
No they shouldn't. Most cable companies are monopolies, either granted by the municipality, or a de-facto monopoly because no other company is going to incur the sunk cost of installing cable into what would then become a low-profit competitive market. The government has a legitimate interest in regulating monopolies, although it should probably be done through the FTC rather than the FCC.
The real solution is the get rid of the monopolies. When streets are trenched, a large (12") government owned conduit should be installed, and multiple fibers should be pre-installed inside it. These fibers can then be leased or sold to multiple competing companies, and any bonded company should be able to run additional cables through the conduit. This would drastically cut the cost of entering the market.
Our current system, of requiring each company to retrench, is as silly as requiring FedEx, UPS, etc to each build their own roads into each neighborhood.
Because they're getting tax dollars as subsidy. Corp america doing it is bullshit unethical enough. This is even worse.
Exactly. Corporations try to control costs because it is their own money. But public universities are spending tax dollars, so there is no reason to be frugal.
It's an interesting question; where should we draw the line?
Most people want to "draw the line" just a little past what they are used to, so "the line" slowly creeps forward. Back in 1978, the first test tube baby was born, and people worried that we were playing God, and whether the resulting creatures would even be accepted as "human". Today IVF is mainstream, and no one gives it a second thought.
A decade from now, it will be common to correct genetic disorders in embryos, and it may even be considered child abuse to refrain from doing so. Today's moral handwringing will be long forgotten.
I'd argue there's an art in designing the algorithm.
I doubt if there is any art in it. You just take the statistics of a zillion sports games, and the articles written about them by humans, and shove it into a ML system. Then cycle through them until the system learns to generate reasonable articles from the data.
Perhaps not, but the vast majority of them are. I am not going to interview 100 turds just to find one halfway competent ITT graduate, especially when I have plenty of other applicants with degrees from real colleges.
Those people need someone on the doorstep to fix the vacuum cleaner.
I am very skeptical if it is possible in any first world country to have a vacuum cleaner repaired for less than the cost of replacing it. Service calls are very expensive. Manufactured goods are cheap.
What do you do when fishing boats start operating in the area?
China can just use their gunboats to shoo them away. No other country in the area can stand up to China without American backing. Only the Philippines has a defense treaty with America, and two days ago the Philippine president called Obama a "son of a whore" so they shouldn't be expecting any help for awhile.
I was under the impression that people cannot get out of student loans by declaring bankruptcy.
It is difficult to discharge a student loan during bankruptcy, but it can be done. In practice, it doesn't matter. If someone with a journalism degree and $120K in loans is making french fries at McDonalds, then they are not going to be able to service the debt, and there is nothing that can be done about it.
What we really need in this country are 4-year community colleges that are really focused on delivering value.
What we really need are good 2-year vocational schools + apprenticeships that teach young people actually useful skills, like plumbing, mechanic, welding, electrician, etc.
My company recently advertised a marketing position, and we got over 300 applications.
I recently tried to find a plumber for a kitchen remodel, and it took me over 3 weeks to find someone who wasn't fully booked for the next month, and he was only able to squeeze my job in by working on Sundays while my daughter watched his kids. I paid him $80/hr, and he paid my daughter $5/hr for babysitting, so he netted $75.
So what research into job prospects did YOU do prior to enrolling in the university?
The problem with federally guaranteed student loans is that when ill educated people default, the taxpayer is on the hook. So it is not just "their own stupid decision".
As a hiring manager, I learned long ago to just throw out any resume that mentioned ITT (or Heald, or Devry, or Univ of Phoenix). I have a perl script that does that automatically, so I don't even see them. Their degrees are worthless, and the if you paid them money there is a very good chance that you are an idiot. These scam schools should not be receiving tax dollars.
Never have insurance... unless it is something you can't afford to lose. The cost of insurance is (expected-loss + insurance-company-overhead + insurance-company-profit). If you self-insure, it is just the expected loss. So never insure anything you can afford to lose. It is a bad bet.
Anyway, it is silly to conjecture about who is responsible for what cost. Here is the answer: Read the launch contract.
Even though my Chinese friends rely on QQ I have given up on it.
I have never had any problems with it. I used QQCoin to buy my daughter a virtual dog. She wanted a real dog, so I told her I would get her one if she could care for her virtual dog for 6 months. She was doing well, but then we went on vacation, and she forgot to suspend it. When we returned, the dog had starved to death. There was just a pathetic little pile of pixels in the corner of the screen. My daughter was so sad that she cried herself to sleep every night for a week.
Samsung regardless of the shit quality of their products actually manfacuters something tangible
Tangible products tend to have low margins, since they directly compete with other products. Intangible social networking products have far more value because they are in a "winner take all" market. WeChat totally dominates in China. It is way more than just a Facebook replacement. As a voice app, it places most phone calls in China. It is also a ecommerce platform, with its own currency and escrow service. It is like Facebook+Twitter+Skype+eBay+Amazon+Paypal in a market of 1.2B people. It is so entrenched, it is unlikely lose its dominance.
Besides, it's probably best to let it proceed anyways that way we can learn from security issues (like the upcoming IoT security nightmare)
Indeed. We should look at cyberwar offensives as free penetration testing. Most arms-races are lose-lose. But the defensive side of cyberwar leads to secure systems, and greater privacy. Instead of pleading with the Russians and Chinese to refrain out of the goodness of their hearts, we should look at this as an opportunity to adopt pervasive end-to-end encryption, and stop social engineering exploits by getting humans out of the loop.
There are a ton of apps that are barely more than a skinned browser that loads a mobile website. Those are the ones that I wish would die off.
The problem is that, while people will pay for an app, almost no one will pay for web content. So I can make an app and feed my family, or I can put the same content on the "free web" and starve.
Or maybe psychopaths have a finely-honed ability to become CEO of companies.
Why is that a bad thing? There is evidence that psychopaths actually make better leaders because they don't let their emotions cloud their judgement. They will dispassionately make the hard decisions for the good of the organization, rather than dithering out of misplaced compassion.
The TSA hasn't caught any terrorists yet. It's expensive, intrusive, and useless.
The purpose of the screenings is not to "catch terrorists" but to deter the terrorists from even trying. I am not say that the TSA is effective, I am just saying that the lack of arrested terrorists isn't proof that they aren't.
I know many people like that. Some of my well paid co-workers will tell me they have to "wait until payday" for a purchase or even to go out to lunch. My sister, who makes $80k and owns a house, occasionally needs to borrow money from me for some minor expense, like fixing a flat tire on her car, because she has already spent her paycheck. She has zero savings, and no financial cushion whatsoever, yet she just got back from a Mediterranean cruise.
I couldn't live like that. The stress would drive me nuts. When I was 18, and got my first paycheck, I invested half of it in an index fund, and my savings have increased monotonically since then, even through college (I worked part time and had a military scholarship).
You need a mobile with data plan to be in job search now.
You don't need a data plan. Voice and text are enough. You can get that with a $25 pre-paid phone from Walmart, or $5 if you buy it used. If you need to browse the web, go to the library. It is free. Or you can buy a reasonable used laptop at Goodwill for $25, and use the free Wifi at McDonalds.
accepting defeat means losing the useful original meaning
The original meaning is already lost. If you actually use "begs the question" correctly, 90% of your audience will have no idea what you mean, and the other 10% will think you are being pompous. It is best to just avoid the phrase entirely in both writing and speaking.
The most important reason why this deprecates Tabby's Star as an alien megastructure is that at 5-11 million years, this new star is far too young to have undergone planet formation, let alone a highly developed civilization.
The civilization that build the megastructure may have evolved elsewhere and then migrated to this star. The lack of planet formation is an advantage since the first step in building a dyson sphere is to... disassemble the planets. It would be much easier to start with a cloud of comets and asteroids. That may have been one reason they chose this star for their project.
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Down's Syndrome, even with gene therapy wouldn't be easy to fix, since you're not changing a gene, you actually have to change the number of chromosomes.
When given both prenatal screening and access to abortion, about 90% of mothers choose to abort a fetus with Down's Syndrome. Sarah Palin famously chose to keep hers, but she is in a small and shrinking minority. With better and earlier screening, it is likely even more would chose to abort.
If a cable company puts some wire down, they ought to be able to do whatever they want
No they shouldn't. Most cable companies are monopolies, either granted by the municipality, or a de-facto monopoly because no other company is going to incur the sunk cost of installing cable into what would then become a low-profit competitive market. The government has a legitimate interest in regulating monopolies, although it should probably be done through the FTC rather than the FCC.
The real solution is the get rid of the monopolies. When streets are trenched, a large (12") government owned conduit should be installed, and multiple fibers should be pre-installed inside it. These fibers can then be leased or sold to multiple competing companies, and any bonded company should be able to run additional cables through the conduit. This would drastically cut the cost of entering the market.
Our current system, of requiring each company to retrench, is as silly as requiring FedEx, UPS, etc to each build their own roads into each neighborhood.
Because they're getting tax dollars as subsidy. Corp america doing it is bullshit unethical enough. This is even worse.
Exactly. Corporations try to control costs because it is their own money. But public universities are spending tax dollars, so there is no reason to be frugal.
It's an interesting question; where should we draw the line?
Most people want to "draw the line" just a little past what they are used to, so "the line" slowly creeps forward. Back in 1978, the first test tube baby was born, and people worried that we were playing God, and whether the resulting creatures would even be accepted as "human". Today IVF is mainstream, and no one gives it a second thought.
A decade from now, it will be common to correct genetic disorders in embryos, and it may even be considered child abuse to refrain from doing so. Today's moral handwringing will be long forgotten.
I'd argue there's an art in designing the algorithm.
I doubt if there is any art in it. You just take the statistics of a zillion sports games, and the articles written about them by humans, and shove it into a ML system. Then cycle through them until the system learns to generate reasonable articles from the data.
All they do is raise the price on the black market.
Isn't that a good thing?
Not all ITT graduates are idiots.
Perhaps not, but the vast majority of them are. I am not going to interview 100 turds just to find one halfway competent ITT graduate, especially when I have plenty of other applicants with degrees from real colleges.
Those people need someone on the doorstep to fix the vacuum cleaner.
I am very skeptical if it is possible in any first world country to have a vacuum cleaner repaired for less than the cost of replacing it. Service calls are very expensive. Manufactured goods are cheap.
What do you do when fishing boats start operating in the area?
China can just use their gunboats to shoo them away. No other country in the area can stand up to China without American backing. Only the Philippines has a defense treaty with America, and two days ago the Philippine president called Obama a "son of a whore" so they shouldn't be expecting any help for awhile.
At the depth specified, a strong storm swell will shake the habitat pretty good.
You need to read more carefully. It will be at a depth of 3000 meters, not 3000 millimeters.
3000 meters is about 2 miles beneath the surface. No storm will be felt that deep.
I was under the impression that people cannot get out of student loans by declaring bankruptcy.
It is difficult to discharge a student loan during bankruptcy, but it can be done. In practice, it doesn't matter. If someone with a journalism degree and $120K in loans is making french fries at McDonalds, then they are not going to be able to service the debt, and there is nothing that can be done about it.
What we really need in this country are 4-year community colleges that are really focused on delivering value.
What we really need are good 2-year vocational schools + apprenticeships that teach young people actually useful skills, like plumbing, mechanic, welding, electrician, etc.
My company recently advertised a marketing position, and we got over 300 applications.
I recently tried to find a plumber for a kitchen remodel, and it took me over 3 weeks to find someone who wasn't fully booked for the next month, and he was only able to squeeze my job in by working on Sundays while my daughter watched his kids. I paid him $80/hr, and he paid my daughter $5/hr for babysitting, so he netted $75.
So what research into job prospects did YOU do prior to enrolling in the university?
The problem with federally guaranteed student loans is that when ill educated people default, the taxpayer is on the hook. So it is not just "their own stupid decision".
As a hiring manager, I learned long ago to just throw out any resume that mentioned ITT (or Heald, or Devry, or Univ of Phoenix). I have a perl script that does that automatically, so I don't even see them. Their degrees are worthless, and the if you paid them money there is a very good chance that you are an idiot. These scam schools should not be receiving tax dollars.
Always have an insurance
Never have insurance ... unless it is something you can't afford to lose. The cost of insurance is (expected-loss + insurance-company-overhead + insurance-company-profit). If you self-insure, it is just the expected loss. So never insure anything you can afford to lose. It is a bad bet.
Anyway, it is silly to conjecture about who is responsible for what cost. Here is the answer: Read the launch contract.
Even though my Chinese friends rely on QQ I have given up on it.
I have never had any problems with it. I used QQCoin to buy my daughter a virtual dog. She wanted a real dog, so I told her I would get her one if she could care for her virtual dog for 6 months. She was doing well, but then we went on vacation, and she forgot to suspend it. When we returned, the dog had starved to death. There was just a pathetic little pile of pixels in the corner of the screen. My daughter was so sad that she cried herself to sleep every night for a week.
Samsung regardless of the shit quality of their products actually manfacuters something tangible
Tangible products tend to have low margins, since they directly compete with other products. Intangible social networking products have far more value because they are in a "winner take all" market. WeChat totally dominates in China. It is way more than just a Facebook replacement. As a voice app, it places most phone calls in China. It is also a ecommerce platform, with its own currency and escrow service. It is like Facebook+Twitter+Skype+eBay+Amazon+Paypal in a market of 1.2B people. It is so entrenched, it is unlikely lose its dominance.
Besides, it's probably best to let it proceed anyways that way we can learn from security issues (like the upcoming IoT security nightmare)
Indeed. We should look at cyberwar offensives as free penetration testing. Most arms-races are lose-lose. But the defensive side of cyberwar leads to secure systems, and greater privacy. Instead of pleading with the Russians and Chinese to refrain out of the goodness of their hearts, we should look at this as an opportunity to adopt pervasive end-to-end encryption, and stop social engineering exploits by getting humans out of the loop.
There are a ton of apps that are barely more than a skinned browser that loads a mobile website. Those are the ones that I wish would die off.
The problem is that, while people will pay for an app, almost no one will pay for web content. So I can make an app and feed my family, or I can put the same content on the "free web" and starve.
You need a data plan to respond to a phone call and e-mail with a resume.
No you don't. You can use Wifi, which is usually available for free somewhere nearby.
For years, I had no data plan on my phone. I never needed it. I have it now, because it is free with my wife's family plan, but I almost never use it.
Or maybe psychopaths have a finely-honed ability to become CEO of companies.
Why is that a bad thing? There is evidence that psychopaths actually make better leaders because they don't let their emotions cloud their judgement. They will dispassionately make the hard decisions for the good of the organization, rather than dithering out of misplaced compassion.
The TSA hasn't caught any terrorists yet. It's expensive, intrusive, and useless.
The purpose of the screenings is not to "catch terrorists" but to deter the terrorists from even trying. I am not say that the TSA is effective, I am just saying that the lack of arrested terrorists isn't proof that they aren't.
These people have no money yet they walk around with expensive cellphones..
That is not a problem limited to "the poor". 47% of Americans cannot come up with $400 to meet an unexpected expense.
I know many people like that. Some of my well paid co-workers will tell me they have to "wait until payday" for a purchase or even to go out to lunch. My sister, who makes $80k and owns a house, occasionally needs to borrow money from me for some minor expense, like fixing a flat tire on her car, because she has already spent her paycheck. She has zero savings, and no financial cushion whatsoever, yet she just got back from a Mediterranean cruise.
I couldn't live like that. The stress would drive me nuts. When I was 18, and got my first paycheck, I invested half of it in an index fund, and my savings have increased monotonically since then, even through college (I worked part time and had a military scholarship).
You need a mobile with data plan to be in job search now.
You don't need a data plan. Voice and text are enough. You can get that with a $25 pre-paid phone from Walmart, or $5 if you buy it used. If you need to browse the web, go to the library. It is free. Or you can buy a reasonable used laptop at Goodwill for $25, and use the free Wifi at McDonalds.
accepting defeat means losing the useful original meaning
The original meaning is already lost. If you actually use "begs the question" correctly, 90% of your audience will have no idea what you mean, and the other 10% will think you are being pompous. It is best to just avoid the phrase entirely in both writing and speaking.
The most important reason why this deprecates Tabby's Star as an alien megastructure is that at 5-11 million years, this new star is far too young to have undergone planet formation, let alone a highly developed civilization.
The civilization that build the megastructure may have evolved elsewhere and then migrated to this star. The lack of planet formation is an advantage since the first step in building a dyson sphere is to ... disassemble the planets. It would be much easier to start with a cloud of comets and asteroids. That may have been one reason they chose this star for their project.