Well, IIRC, Vulcan was supposed to be a higher gravity and hotter, almost desert planet. But with a thinner atmosphere. If memory serves, that is the canon explanation for the greater strength and endurance of Vulcan physiology. That's also why Kirk needed a shot to help him compete physically with Spock in Amok Time. (Although McCoy cleverly gave Kirk a mickey finn shot to fake Kirks death, allowing Spock to win.)
I think their legal strategy is this: "Authorized resellers" are not scalpers, but business partners. The state would only be able to go after these resellers for not collecting taxes and/or not declaring income.
I'm fairly confident that the contract Ticketmaster has with the acts and producers allows them to sell tickets directly or through business partnerships. That sort of boilerplate would be required for cases like a small concert sponsored by your local Chamber of Commerce where you can get tickets from Ticketmaster, the venue itself or from the Chamber. Both the venue and the Chamber would technically be resellers, selling tickets that they obtained from Ticketmaster. (I assume that venues get a discount on the tickets they buy and some kind of "buy only what you've already sold" deal so they can make a profit too.
To use an example: Imagine The Who as a band contracts with WorldWide Promotions to handle a tour. This contract almost certainly covers ticket sales, venue selection, stage equipment management, the whole enchilada. WorldWide contracts with Ticketmaster to handle ticket sales, with a subsidiary contract with the Toronto Rogers Centre/Skydome to provide the venue, declaring Ticketmaster to be the sole authorized source of tickets, with the right to subcontract ticket sales.Then Ticketmaster contracts with the venue and other resellers, where is the crime? Scalpers who have a bulk purchase account and pay the fees would just be "authorized resellers" or "authorized sales agents"
It reminds me of how in the fine print for signing up for a marketing email usually includes things like "business partners" or "media network partners", exempting mass emails from those sources from being considered spam for legal purposes. You may have never heard of XYZ inc and regard email or sms messages from them to be spam, but technically you agreed to it when you signed up with ABC inc whether you realized it or not.
What society considers to be a wrongful act isn't necessarily an illegal act. As a society, I think we do better in the other direction, virtually everything that is actually illegal is something that most of us can agree is wrongful.
As frustrating and expensive for concert and event goers this is, there is one small consideration worth thinking about. Scalpers have always been part of the ticket buying market. I remember as a kid seeing guys standing outside Maple Leaf Gardens hawking tickets to that days Toronto Marlies. Back then, you had to buy tickets at the kiosk and they set ceilings on how many tickets you could buy. All that meant was that professional scalpers paid friends, family and even the homeless to stand in line and each buy the maximum. (plus, they would also buy tickets off people who decided not to go after all, but that was a small fraction of their ticket supply)
Think of tickets to a venue as a physical form of DRM, only ticket holders can get in to see the show. Scalpers just slipped into that place between supply and demand. In that light, Ticketmasters decision to cooperate with the scalpers can be seen as a "can't beat them, might as well join them" sort of thing. Doing it this way allows Ticketmaster (as the article says) to extract a bit more profit from the ticket sales and at no risk to themselves. If the event isn't as popular as expected, it's the scalpers who take it in the teeth in the form of tickets that they can't resell. Ticketmaster not only gets to sell unwanted tickets at full price, they also get to collect that bulk sales fee.
What I'm going to be interested in finding out is if the contracts with the various acts and performers includes their share of these extra fees. If Ticketmaster and the scalpers can sell tickets over retail price, that means the fans value attending the performance that much. That is a direct expression of the value of the artists in question. If people are willing to pay 150% of the retail price for a floor ticket for The Who, that means The Who is just that much more popular and should be getting paid more as a result. And I think that is the line of argument the fans need to bring to the artists attention: "These middlemen are making more money off you and you're not getting a piece of it." If enough big headliners with enough clout demand all of that extra revenue, you'll see Ticketmaster drop those policies PDQ.
To be fair though, Raspberry Pi was never intended to be a great system, just good enough for many hobbyist projects. Its focus is as an educational platform and it has been very successful at that. I can think of about a half dozen projects I would like to make with a Pi if I ever had the time (and to be honest, space for a workbench). Hearing about this new chip, I've already come up with two things on my idea list I could do with this chip instead of the Pi. My main concern for those two projects would be whether there is a big enough ecosystem for it. Raspberry Pi has an excellent ecosystem of add-ons, user forums and tutorials to hold my hand.
In my opinion, pirating media (through torrents, ripping media only licensed for streaming etc) is a form of theft even though it doesn't deprive the IP holder of any tangible objects. On the other hand, defeating DRM so you can make a back up copy, view a copy on multiple devices you own or continue to use media after you have moved is NOT theft, even though big media companies sure try to convince everyone that it is. As I said earlier, big media companies are used to a business model where different countries are entirely separate markets and only ever see releases if the IP holders are convinced there is enough profit to be made. But what we're seeing is a gradual shift to also dividing the world up by time as well as region. Big Media companies really want to arrange things so that every access to a title, regardless of viewer, device or region results in them getting paid. Anti-copy tech on VHS, burnable media surtaxes, region coding for DVD's HDCP on HDMI connections, offices having to buy "public performance" licenses, attacking the used game market (I'm convinced that Steam's main reason for existence is to kill the used game market) The list just goes on and on.
media companies have never really been happy with the idea of selling a product that the customer owns. If they could, they would absolutely support a product or device that lets them charge based on the number of viewers in the audience. Movie night with the family? That's one streaming license per person. Want to stream your game play on Twitch? You're going to have to pay the game company a fee based on the number of total views your feed gets. And as we've seen with amateur shoutcast radio, the media companies will probably demand a fee that is much higher than your actual revenue. We already know that your local cinema doesn't make any money on showing movies, because the distribution companies really have them over a barrel. The cinema has to pay its bills through the overpriced concession stand. As far as I know, it doesn't matter how many tickets the cinema actually sells, the fee is calculated on how many tickets the distributor *expects* to sell. I wouldn't be surprised to see the same business methods being applied to Twitch streams.
This is a problem of US-centric thinking contributing to the DRM problem. For something like a century now, it has been the business model of the big media companies to release titles first in the US and then progressively in other countries around the world. The reason being two fold: 1) They released in countries that had the highest profit potential first and 2) it allowed them to milk a title for income for years after the initial US release. This kind of made sense when we were talking about actual film stock or printed books, where it was more cost effective to ship used copies abroad than to make entirely new product for those markets. An unfortunate side effect was that it meant only the biggest, most successful titles would make enough profit to justify the expense of distributing and possibly translating the work. It neglected the "long tail" because the profit wasn't there or seemed too risky. The entire DVD region issue was/is a direct result of media companies wanting to protect that model. What we're seeing in the example of the article is using DRM and that same multi-region business model being applied to streaming and digital content that doesn't have a physical existence the way a DVD or VHS tape has. Compared to physical media formats, digital distribution costs virtually nothing.
In my opinion, the reality is that media consumption is an increasingly global and almost homogeneous market, divided more by language than national borders. Other English speaking regions have come to expect access to first run media at the same time as the US markets
What I think should be done is to release titles in their original language in every country that speaks that language at the same time, with dubbed and/or subbed versions being released the same way as various language versions are available. Thus, the Australian market would have access to everything available in the US, UK Canada etc markets. A release from France would be available in Belgium, Canada, Haiti and so on. What I'm not sure of is whether machine translation of spoken word or print is good enough for a publisher to use to speed up and reduce the cost of distributing in other languages. The machine translation of text I've seen is certainly good enough to get the gist across, good enough for basic communication, but not quite good enough for say an official Russian edition of Harry Potter. Once machine translation is good enough for a release of a major title, going after the long tail of smaller foreign language markets gets much cheaper. But that does require that the media producers and IP holders get past the idea of being able to see significant income on A-list titles for years.
I'm not sure, not being a Hollywood accountant, but I suspect one hurdle that most people don't consider is that there are a number of people who get paid out of local market releases that never see a dime of foreign release revenue. It's to the IP holders advantage to keep the two markets separate as a result.
This really reminds of the days of AOL at its peak. AOL tried really hard to give its userbase the impression that their network of sites was the Internet. Back then I knew at least a handful of people who honestly thought what they were getting with their AOL account was the Internet in its entirety. Many of those that at least knew there was a vast world beyond AOL shunned it, fearing the "wild west" that was the Internet in those days.
On the other hand, everyone who was clued in Internet-wise, hated AOL and everything it stood for. They were frequently and viciously attacked for their monopolistic practices. Is Google in the middle of jumping the shark here?
I don't know enough of the electoral college system to really have a definite opinion about its merits(I'm not a US citizen or resident). I do know that, as far back as I can remember, every US presidential election has had groups complaining that the electoral college system caused someone to lose who "should have" won. The electoral college results have rarely, if ever, completely matched the popular vote results. As I understand it, this is by deliberate intent so that more populous areas can't over-whelm low population density regions. It's an attempt at curbing the "tyranny of the majority". I just can't say how well that is working in practice.
As for your hypothetical scenario of voters staying home, isn't this largely already the case? It's my impression that voter apathy is a huge problem in the US and what I found on Wikipedia seems to support this. From what I can see, voter turnout in presidential elections is usually between 50 and 60 percent and it's been that way for years A very large minority apparently can't be bothered to participate in the democratic process. Near as I can tell, that means that the more fanatical elements (right or left) end up having far more political influence then their mere numbers would suggest. Whether it is the radical right or the loony left, they do a better job of getting out the vote within their demographic.
1) In order for defective MD genes to crowd out healthy genes as you suggest, the treated patients would have to be reproductively superior to people who didn't need the treatment in the first place. Is a treated MD patient going to have more children and grandchildren then the average? Note that; as you say, MD is the result of a rare genetic defect, so the healthy people have one hell of a head start as it is.
2) Anyone with access to the sort of early genetic testing and therapy this scenario requires would also likely have access to in-vitro fertilization techniques, where this therapy could be applied to a blastocyst, totally eliminating that defective gene from the bloodline. Because most cases are caused by random mutations, we can never totally eliminate MD from the population, every time a child is conceived, there is a random chance he (it's almost always a he) will have the disease.
3) Based on your logic, we should never vaccinate, use antibiotics or clean our drinking water. No disease in history has ever killed 100% of us. There are always at least a few who survive because of genetic, environmental or cultural factors. Those that survive smallpox, measles, typhus and the many plagues this world has seen are arguably more fit than those who didn't yes? Bear in mind that we could never have risen to the level of technology we have today, with its dependence on a wide spectrum of human specializations if we kept dying off by the millions every other generation or so.
4) Letting the "unfit" die and advocating forced sterilization is eugenics. The process of life places no value whatsoever on human existence. Survival of the fittest is proof of that. We humans, however, DO. To say that we should let the "unfit" die is to say we wish to live by the same moral code as animals.
I am not a geneticist or microbiologist, but I've had to discuss this sort of stuff at length with my son's geneticist, so what follows reflects my understanding and may be wrong in the details.
The problem isn't that MD sufferers have a gene that healthy people lack. In most cases the patient has the bit of code, it's just malformed in some way. For the most severe cases such as Duchennes or Limb-girdle, the patient may actually be missing the relevant structure entirely.
An individual chromosome is made up of a supercoil of DNA(a coil which is then coiled again, think wires within the handset cord of a traditional phone. The wires are twisted to reduce crosstalk, but then that twist, once sheathed in an outer insulator, is coiled again) within that DNA are individual nucleosomes, groups of DNA sections that perform different functions. Introns are bits used to separate sets of instructions and are removed during RNA replication where the actual proteins are formed.There bits left which form start and stop codons for each instruction set. Exons are the bits left that consist of the instructions.
Most forms of muscular dystrophy, like Becker's for example, are caused by one of those instruction Exons being malformed or by the start and stop codons being malformed or in the wrong spot. The current approach, and the one described in the article, is simply snipping out the bad bit and allowing normal DNA repair processes to splice the bits back together. This allows the cell to start making the protein structures that had been lacking.
There is a major problem with this approach: It only works for treating certain malformed Exons, deleting the bad bit, resulting in proteins that may not have the full function of the healthy protein. It's enough to preserve function, not a total cure. It also doesn't work if the disease is caused by malformed or misplaced start/stop codons.
The next step after this will be the purposeful insertion of healthy genes. If done before symptoms are ever experienced, it should represent a true cure as far as the patient is concerned. Since this is done to children and not blastocysts, the patient would still have defective genes in their reproductive cells. However, knowing they would be carriers would justify in-vitro therapy, eliminating the defect from that bloodline.
Given the random genetic defect that causes my son's Duchenne's (exon 51 deletion) , he has to wait until purposeful gene insertion is possible. Unfortunately, he is virtually certain to have declined too far for it to be useful by the time it is available.
You're right. My son has DMD, the very disease this treatment is aimed at. I'd volunteer my son for this in a fucking heartbeat because the alternative is seeing him wither away and spend years struggling to even breathe before dying in his late 20's from cardiac or respiratory failure. Unfortunately, my son is already permanently wheelchair bound. He is already considered to have declined to far to be a viable test subject. That is a heart breaking disappointment we've had to swallow several times now as he keeps falling outside the study requirements for several different life extending trial therapies even as those trials accept worse and worse patients.
I've been following CRISPR with intense interest as a result of my son's condition and it really does look like a golden bullet for curing DMD. But early detection, preferably in-uterine detection, will be key. The reason being is that this treatment would essentially freeze the boys level of muscular competence. If you treat a child who has yet to show any symptoms, then he will likely never experience any symptoms. But if you treat a wheelchair bound 10 year old, he is not going to recover the ability to walk, he is going to be wheelchair bound for the rest of his life. The good news would be that this would greatly extend his life expectancy.
Who can afford this? Anyone fortunate enough to live in a country with universal health care. (roughly thirty countries, most are in the G20) Also any one without universal health care but at least have a sane and rational health insurance provider. Giving a 5 year old boy a CRISPR treatment is going to be SIGNIFICANTLY cheaper than paying for all the supports he would other wise need in his life. (as a side note, most boys with DMD die in their twenties from cardiac or respiratory failure because the muscles involved are no longer strong enough function. My youngest son has DMD)
Where do we stop with the ability to decide life or death for millions? I have no idea. But I would suggest that if a society can make a choice that makes the difference between life or death for mass numbers of people, it would monstrous to chose the option that leads to death. Allowing the sick and disabled to suffer and die simply because they are unfortunate to have a condition which is treatable is one of the more common legs to arguments for eugenics.
What is the ethical basis? It can be expressed very simply: Imagine I have a vaccine that prevents smallpox, a disease which used to kill millions, but I chose not to make it available, or special interest groups prevent me from making it available. Then your son contracts smallpox and dies. Who is responsible for his death?
If I can save a life and choose not to do so, then I am at least partly responsible for that death. I support the right to die with dignity and the death penalty. I am comfortable with accepting the responsibility for helping to ease the suffering of the patient and the joint responsibility of when society decides, after due process and a fair trial and appeals process, to execute a criminal. I am NOT comfortable watching children die of preventable or treatable conditions.
It's my understanding that political and economic scientists are in much the same boat as astronomers. They can look at known facts, examine and critique those facts to make sure we understand them. Then they can come up with theories that explain those facts, use those theories to make predictions about other facts not yet known and then look to see if there are real world examples of those predictions being accurate. Where facts contradict the theories, the theories get revised or junked altogether.
What they *lack* is the same thing astronomers lack: the ability to create and run carefully controlled experiments, especially those that are designed to limit the number of variables as much as possible. True, you can run short term experiments but the real world contains so many damn variables (economic, political, religious, human nature etc) that the sort of small scale experiments that can be run do not model the real world very well.
In this case I was referring not to arrest or censorship, but of being socially shunned, of having websites chose not to give a person a place to air their views.
The analogy of shouting fire in a crowded theatre is not invalidated by it being used in a case which was later overturned. The reason the 1919 Schenck vs The United states was overturned wasn't because the analogy itself was bad. It was overturned because his actions in protesting the draft did not present the "clear and present danger" that the United States government claimed it did. Schenck vs the US and its later overturning is one of the foundation cases of the right of a citizen to be a conscientious objector.
Your disagreement with one of my points also does not invalidate my other points. That, in general, free speech doesn't not exempt you from consequences, nor does it require any to listen to you. It certainly doesn't force others to provide a venue for your speech.
For those who advocate extremism (Muslim, Christian, white, black, it doesn't matter) there are websites where those ideas are welcome. Facebook choosing not to allow such content on their systems does not constitute censorship. Nor should it be considered an attack on those beliefs, though many extremists spend a LOT of time and energy spinning it as part of the overall attack on their beliefs so they can justify their militant position.
An actual attack would be if I were to start advocating that we should go along with their ideas, fire up the concentration and death camps, start executing the people I find objectionable without due process, only to do so NOT to the Jews or the majority of Muslims, but to focus on the white supremacists and Muslim extremists. Lets see if those people in white hoods or brown shirted uniforms still think there is nothing wrong in mass genocide when it is applied to themselves.
For the record, I don't advocate that, and never will. I do, however, advocate that law enforcement be aware of those movements, keep close tabs on them and, if individuals break the law, to arrest them and try them in court. I advocate that such current issues be included in the social or civic studies students cover in school. Those who do not learn from, or even remember history are doomed to repeat it. If we are, as a society, to avoid creating another holocaust or holodomor, we need to teach our children what those were and how they arose. I advocate that, any time such militant and potentially violent people speak out on their views, that it is the simple human and patriotic duty of us moderates to speak out in opposition.
The only thing evil needs to succeed is for good men to do nothing.
I don't think that is true. IANAL, but as far as I know, there are three major constraints on the hypothetical situation you present.
1) Free Speech does not, and never has, protected someone from the consequences of their free speech. The classic example is shouting fire in a crowded theatre, leading to false calls to the emergency services who respond and possible panic and injury among the other theatre goers. If you stand up and exhort other like-minded people to begin a race war and murder people whose skin or faith doesn't match yours, you may become an accessory to murder before the fact if someone in your chosen audience actually goes through with it.
2) The First Amendment says that the government cannot restrict your speech. It does not say that private individuals or organizations have to listen to you, or to provide a platform from which you can broadcast your opinions. Moreover, any platform or forum that chooses to support or host a certain type of content may also be criminally and civilly liable of that content leads to someone breaking the law.
3) The choice to accept or reject speech on a private platform or forum is also given First Amendment protection. If I host a blog, I can refuse to allow statements I disagree with to appear in my comment section. Telling me I had to keep those comments visible would restrict my free speech.
As others have said, there is a limited utility since the aircraft would pretty much have to know exactly where the sub or flight data recorder was in order to reliably communicate. However, it's possible that a sensitive enough satellite equipped with the right type of radar could be quite useful in at least finding a static target such a black box.
There is one fact that reduces the usefulness of this as a military communications channel that I haven't seen mentioned by anyone else. As far as I know, subs communicate with higher authority using VLF, ELF and SLF frequencies. The way it would work is that the sub would tow a very long antenna behind it while on cruise in order to communicate with the base station(s), which in turn routed the signals to the land based submarine command facility and the joint chiefs communication facility. From there, it could be further routed by conventional radio or satellite to naval or aviation assets in the area of operations.
They are low-bandwidth frequencies of course, but you can transmit a hell of a lot of information using pre-generated code phrase books/databases to cover most contingencies.Those of use who deal with passwords and IT security are well aware of how quickly the number of possible alphanumeric character combinations goes up as you add successive characters to a required length. (for those of us who don't know: an 8 character string has 218,340,105,584,896 possible combinations so you could have that many code phrases in a database)
I don't think this will put an end, or even a noticeable reduction in players disputing calls. They'll just shift to criticising the software, calling in experts to nit pick the code and any algorithms it uses. They'll dispute that the hardware is properly set up, there will be cases when they can claim that the cameras were not properly placed to make a valid call in some situations. Same thing for the fans. It will *really* get messy if different ballparks use software and hardware systems. Then you see ugly disputes over accusations that the home team made subtle tweaks to the system at their ballpark to give them a slight edge. You'll probably start to see players and teams trying unorthodox plays to try and game the system.
climate=average conditions over years or even decades. Weather=actual conditions over hourly, daily and weekly periods. And the whole point of TFA is that we are seeing large scale changes in the weather we experience BECAUSE of the massive changes in the underlying climate.
Honest question: Where do you live that has a posted limit of 110Km/hr and *isn't* a controlled access highway like the US Interstate or the Ontario 400 series highways? As far as I know, throughout the Anglosphere, highways allowing more than 80km/hr or the equivalent in mph are all controlled access, with on/off ramps, fencing along key portions and so on.
That would probably UK/European nobility who had large expanses they wanted clear sight lines for (for castles and later mansions/palaces) and happened to have a few handy peasants with their sheep. Adding golf courses to the mix only enhanced the notion of large areas of neatly trimmed grass being a sign of wealth and/or leisure.
I think the solution used by your home town is ultimately a bad thing for the citizens. First is that this is clearly yet another case of companies privatizing profits while socializing costs. Second; in theory, a number of private companies collectively providing a service is good for the people because it encourages competition. Yet time after time where a commodity service or product is being provided by a small number of closely cooperating companies, we end up seeing collusion and price fixing. It's simply easier to ensure high profits through price fixing than through efficient cost management.
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Well, IIRC, Vulcan was supposed to be a higher gravity and hotter, almost desert planet. But with a thinner atmosphere. If memory serves, that is the canon explanation for the greater strength and endurance of Vulcan physiology. That's also why Kirk needed a shot to help him compete physically with Spock in Amok Time. (Although McCoy cleverly gave Kirk a mickey finn shot to fake Kirks death, allowing Spock to win.)
I'm fairly confident that the contract Ticketmaster has with the acts and producers allows them to sell tickets directly or through business partnerships. That sort of boilerplate would be required for cases like a small concert sponsored by your local Chamber of Commerce where you can get tickets from Ticketmaster, the venue itself or from the Chamber. Both the venue and the Chamber would technically be resellers, selling tickets that they obtained from Ticketmaster. (I assume that venues get a discount on the tickets they buy and some kind of "buy only what you've already sold" deal so they can make a profit too.
To use an example: Imagine The Who as a band contracts with WorldWide Promotions to handle a tour. This contract almost certainly covers ticket sales, venue selection, stage equipment management, the whole enchilada. WorldWide contracts with Ticketmaster to handle ticket sales, with a subsidiary contract with the Toronto Rogers Centre/Skydome to provide the venue, declaring Ticketmaster to be the sole authorized source of tickets, with the right to subcontract ticket sales.Then Ticketmaster contracts with the venue and other resellers, where is the crime? Scalpers who have a bulk purchase account and pay the fees would just be "authorized resellers" or "authorized sales agents"
It reminds me of how in the fine print for signing up for a marketing email usually includes things like "business partners" or "media network partners", exempting mass emails from those sources from being considered spam for legal purposes. You may have never heard of XYZ inc and regard email or sms messages from them to be spam, but technically you agreed to it when you signed up with ABC inc whether you realized it or not.
What society considers to be a wrongful act isn't necessarily an illegal act. As a society, I think we do better in the other direction, virtually everything that is actually illegal is something that most of us can agree is wrongful.
Think of tickets to a venue as a physical form of DRM, only ticket holders can get in to see the show. Scalpers just slipped into that place between supply and demand. In that light, Ticketmasters decision to cooperate with the scalpers can be seen as a "can't beat them, might as well join them" sort of thing. Doing it this way allows Ticketmaster (as the article says) to extract a bit more profit from the ticket sales and at no risk to themselves. If the event isn't as popular as expected, it's the scalpers who take it in the teeth in the form of tickets that they can't resell. Ticketmaster not only gets to sell unwanted tickets at full price, they also get to collect that bulk sales fee.
What I'm going to be interested in finding out is if the contracts with the various acts and performers includes their share of these extra fees. If Ticketmaster and the scalpers can sell tickets over retail price, that means the fans value attending the performance that much. That is a direct expression of the value of the artists in question. If people are willing to pay 150% of the retail price for a floor ticket for The Who, that means The Who is just that much more popular and should be getting paid more as a result. And I think that is the line of argument the fans need to bring to the artists attention: "These middlemen are making more money off you and you're not getting a piece of it." If enough big headliners with enough clout demand all of that extra revenue, you'll see Ticketmaster drop those policies PDQ.
To be fair though, Raspberry Pi was never intended to be a great system, just good enough for many hobbyist projects. Its focus is as an educational platform and it has been very successful at that. I can think of about a half dozen projects I would like to make with a Pi if I ever had the time (and to be honest, space for a workbench). Hearing about this new chip, I've already come up with two things on my idea list I could do with this chip instead of the Pi. My main concern for those two projects would be whether there is a big enough ecosystem for it. Raspberry Pi has an excellent ecosystem of add-ons, user forums and tutorials to hold my hand.
media companies have never really been happy with the idea of selling a product that the customer owns. If they could, they would absolutely support a product or device that lets them charge based on the number of viewers in the audience. Movie night with the family? That's one streaming license per person. Want to stream your game play on Twitch? You're going to have to pay the game company a fee based on the number of total views your feed gets. And as we've seen with amateur shoutcast radio, the media companies will probably demand a fee that is much higher than your actual revenue. We already know that your local cinema doesn't make any money on showing movies, because the distribution companies really have them over a barrel. The cinema has to pay its bills through the overpriced concession stand. As far as I know, it doesn't matter how many tickets the cinema actually sells, the fee is calculated on how many tickets the distributor *expects* to sell. I wouldn't be surprised to see the same business methods being applied to Twitch streams.
In my opinion, the reality is that media consumption is an increasingly global and almost homogeneous market, divided more by language than national borders. Other English speaking regions have come to expect access to first run media at the same time as the US markets
What I think should be done is to release titles in their original language in every country that speaks that language at the same time, with dubbed and/or subbed versions being released the same way as various language versions are available. Thus, the Australian market would have access to everything available in the US, UK Canada etc markets. A release from France would be available in Belgium, Canada, Haiti and so on. What I'm not sure of is whether machine translation of spoken word or print is good enough for a publisher to use to speed up and reduce the cost of distributing in other languages. The machine translation of text I've seen is certainly good enough to get the gist across, good enough for basic communication, but not quite good enough for say an official Russian edition of Harry Potter. Once machine translation is good enough for a release of a major title, going after the long tail of smaller foreign language markets gets much cheaper. But that does require that the media producers and IP holders get past the idea of being able to see significant income on A-list titles for years.
I'm not sure, not being a Hollywood accountant, but I suspect one hurdle that most people don't consider is that there are a number of people who get paid out of local market releases that never see a dime of foreign release revenue. It's to the IP holders advantage to keep the two markets separate as a result.
On the other hand, everyone who was clued in Internet-wise, hated AOL and everything it stood for. They were frequently and viciously attacked for their monopolistic practices. Is Google in the middle of jumping the shark here?
As for your hypothetical scenario of voters staying home, isn't this largely already the case? It's my impression that voter apathy is a huge problem in the US and what I found on Wikipedia seems to support this. From what I can see, voter turnout in presidential elections is usually between 50 and 60 percent and it's been that way for years A very large minority apparently can't be bothered to participate in the democratic process. Near as I can tell, that means that the more fanatical elements (right or left) end up having far more political influence then their mere numbers would suggest. Whether it is the radical right or the loony left, they do a better job of getting out the vote within their demographic.
1) In order for defective MD genes to crowd out healthy genes as you suggest, the treated patients would have to be reproductively superior to people who didn't need the treatment in the first place. Is a treated MD patient going to have more children and grandchildren then the average? Note that; as you say, MD is the result of a rare genetic defect, so the healthy people have one hell of a head start as it is.
2) Anyone with access to the sort of early genetic testing and therapy this scenario requires would also likely have access to in-vitro fertilization techniques, where this therapy could be applied to a blastocyst, totally eliminating that defective gene from the bloodline. Because most cases are caused by random mutations, we can never totally eliminate MD from the population, every time a child is conceived, there is a random chance he (it's almost always a he) will have the disease.
3) Based on your logic, we should never vaccinate, use antibiotics or clean our drinking water. No disease in history has ever killed 100% of us. There are always at least a few who survive because of genetic, environmental or cultural factors. Those that survive smallpox, measles, typhus and the many plagues this world has seen are arguably more fit than those who didn't yes? Bear in mind that we could never have risen to the level of technology we have today, with its dependence on a wide spectrum of human specializations if we kept dying off by the millions every other generation or so.
4) Letting the "unfit" die and advocating forced sterilization is eugenics. The process of life places no value whatsoever on human existence. Survival of the fittest is proof of that. We humans, however, DO. To say that we should let the "unfit" die is to say we wish to live by the same moral code as animals.
The problem is of course that most people define stupid as "disagrees with me" which itself is a form of stupidity.
The problem isn't that MD sufferers have a gene that healthy people lack. In most cases the patient has the bit of code, it's just malformed in some way. For the most severe cases such as Duchennes or Limb-girdle, the patient may actually be missing the relevant structure entirely.
An individual chromosome is made up of a supercoil of DNA(a coil which is then coiled again, think wires within the handset cord of a traditional phone. The wires are twisted to reduce crosstalk, but then that twist, once sheathed in an outer insulator, is coiled again) within that DNA are individual nucleosomes, groups of DNA sections that perform different functions. Introns are bits used to separate sets of instructions and are removed during RNA replication where the actual proteins are formed.There bits left which form start and stop codons for each instruction set. Exons are the bits left that consist of the instructions.
Most forms of muscular dystrophy, like Becker's for example, are caused by one of those instruction Exons being malformed or by the start and stop codons being malformed or in the wrong spot. The current approach, and the one described in the article, is simply snipping out the bad bit and allowing normal DNA repair processes to splice the bits back together. This allows the cell to start making the protein structures that had been lacking.
There is a major problem with this approach: It only works for treating certain malformed Exons, deleting the bad bit, resulting in proteins that may not have the full function of the healthy protein. It's enough to preserve function, not a total cure. It also doesn't work if the disease is caused by malformed or misplaced start/stop codons.
The next step after this will be the purposeful insertion of healthy genes. If done before symptoms are ever experienced, it should represent a true cure as far as the patient is concerned. Since this is done to children and not blastocysts, the patient would still have defective genes in their reproductive cells. However, knowing they would be carriers would justify in-vitro therapy, eliminating the defect from that bloodline.
Given the random genetic defect that causes my son's Duchenne's (exon 51 deletion) , he has to wait until purposeful gene insertion is possible. Unfortunately, he is virtually certain to have declined too far for it to be useful by the time it is available.
I've been following CRISPR with intense interest as a result of my son's condition and it really does look like a golden bullet for curing DMD. But early detection, preferably in-uterine detection, will be key. The reason being is that this treatment would essentially freeze the boys level of muscular competence. If you treat a child who has yet to show any symptoms, then he will likely never experience any symptoms. But if you treat a wheelchair bound 10 year old, he is not going to recover the ability to walk, he is going to be wheelchair bound for the rest of his life. The good news would be that this would greatly extend his life expectancy.
Where do we stop with the ability to decide life or death for millions? I have no idea. But I would suggest that if a society can make a choice that makes the difference between life or death for mass numbers of people, it would monstrous to chose the option that leads to death. Allowing the sick and disabled to suffer and die simply because they are unfortunate to have a condition which is treatable is one of the more common legs to arguments for eugenics.
What is the ethical basis? It can be expressed very simply: Imagine I have a vaccine that prevents smallpox, a disease which used to kill millions, but I chose not to make it available, or special interest groups prevent me from making it available. Then your son contracts smallpox and dies. Who is responsible for his death? If I can save a life and choose not to do so, then I am at least partly responsible for that death. I support the right to die with dignity and the death penalty. I am comfortable with accepting the responsibility for helping to ease the suffering of the patient and the joint responsibility of when society decides, after due process and a fair trial and appeals process, to execute a criminal. I am NOT comfortable watching children die of preventable or treatable conditions.
What they *lack* is the same thing astronomers lack: the ability to create and run carefully controlled experiments, especially those that are designed to limit the number of variables as much as possible. True, you can run short term experiments but the real world contains so many damn variables (economic, political, religious, human nature etc) that the sort of small scale experiments that can be run do not model the real world very well.
In this case I was referring not to arrest or censorship, but of being socially shunned, of having websites chose not to give a person a place to air their views.
Your disagreement with one of my points also does not invalidate my other points. That, in general, free speech doesn't not exempt you from consequences, nor does it require any to listen to you. It certainly doesn't force others to provide a venue for your speech.
For those who advocate extremism (Muslim, Christian, white, black, it doesn't matter) there are websites where those ideas are welcome. Facebook choosing not to allow such content on their systems does not constitute censorship. Nor should it be considered an attack on those beliefs, though many extremists spend a LOT of time and energy spinning it as part of the overall attack on their beliefs so they can justify their militant position.
An actual attack would be if I were to start advocating that we should go along with their ideas, fire up the concentration and death camps, start executing the people I find objectionable without due process, only to do so NOT to the Jews or the majority of Muslims, but to focus on the white supremacists and Muslim extremists. Lets see if those people in white hoods or brown shirted uniforms still think there is nothing wrong in mass genocide when it is applied to themselves.
For the record, I don't advocate that, and never will. I do, however, advocate that law enforcement be aware of those movements, keep close tabs on them and, if individuals break the law, to arrest them and try them in court. I advocate that such current issues be included in the social or civic studies students cover in school. Those who do not learn from, or even remember history are doomed to repeat it. If we are, as a society, to avoid creating another holocaust or holodomor, we need to teach our children what those were and how they arose. I advocate that, any time such militant and potentially violent people speak out on their views, that it is the simple human and patriotic duty of us moderates to speak out in opposition.
The only thing evil needs to succeed is for good men to do nothing.
1) Free Speech does not, and never has, protected someone from the consequences of their free speech. The classic example is shouting fire in a crowded theatre, leading to false calls to the emergency services who respond and possible panic and injury among the other theatre goers. If you stand up and exhort other like-minded people to begin a race war and murder people whose skin or faith doesn't match yours, you may become an accessory to murder before the fact if someone in your chosen audience actually goes through with it.
2) The First Amendment says that the government cannot restrict your speech. It does not say that private individuals or organizations have to listen to you, or to provide a platform from which you can broadcast your opinions. Moreover, any platform or forum that chooses to support or host a certain type of content may also be criminally and civilly liable of that content leads to someone breaking the law.
3) The choice to accept or reject speech on a private platform or forum is also given First Amendment protection. If I host a blog, I can refuse to allow statements I disagree with to appear in my comment section. Telling me I had to keep those comments visible would restrict my free speech.
There is one fact that reduces the usefulness of this as a military communications channel that I haven't seen mentioned by anyone else. As far as I know, subs communicate with higher authority using VLF, ELF and SLF frequencies. The way it would work is that the sub would tow a very long antenna behind it while on cruise in order to communicate with the base station(s), which in turn routed the signals to the land based submarine command facility and the joint chiefs communication facility. From there, it could be further routed by conventional radio or satellite to naval or aviation assets in the area of operations.
They are low-bandwidth frequencies of course, but you can transmit a hell of a lot of information using pre-generated code phrase books/databases to cover most contingencies.Those of use who deal with passwords and IT security are well aware of how quickly the number of possible alphanumeric character combinations goes up as you add successive characters to a required length. (for those of us who don't know: an 8 character string has 218,340,105,584,896 possible combinations so you could have that many code phrases in a database)
cutting by hand in the context of a big mansions lawn in that time period almost certainly meant scythes (or possibly sheep) not scissors.
I don't think this will put an end, or even a noticeable reduction in players disputing calls. They'll just shift to criticising the software, calling in experts to nit pick the code and any algorithms it uses. They'll dispute that the hardware is properly set up, there will be cases when they can claim that the cameras were not properly placed to make a valid call in some situations. Same thing for the fans. It will *really* get messy if different ballparks use software and hardware systems. Then you see ugly disputes over accusations that the home team made subtle tweaks to the system at their ballpark to give them a slight edge. You'll probably start to see players and teams trying unorthodox plays to try and game the system.
climate=average conditions over years or even decades. Weather=actual conditions over hourly, daily and weekly periods. And the whole point of TFA is that we are seeing large scale changes in the weather we experience BECAUSE of the massive changes in the underlying climate.
Thank you, I hadn't known that.
Honest question: Where do you live that has a posted limit of 110Km/hr and *isn't* a controlled access highway like the US Interstate or the Ontario 400 series highways? As far as I know, throughout the Anglosphere, highways allowing more than 80km/hr or the equivalent in mph are all controlled access, with on/off ramps, fencing along key portions and so on.
That would probably UK/European nobility who had large expanses they wanted clear sight lines for (for castles and later mansions/palaces) and happened to have a few handy peasants with their sheep. Adding golf courses to the mix only enhanced the notion of large areas of neatly trimmed grass being a sign of wealth and/or leisure.
I think the solution used by your home town is ultimately a bad thing for the citizens. First is that this is clearly yet another case of companies privatizing profits while socializing costs. Second; in theory, a number of private companies collectively providing a service is good for the people because it encourages competition. Yet time after time where a commodity service or product is being provided by a small number of closely cooperating companies, we end up seeing collusion and price fixing. It's simply easier to ensure high profits through price fixing than through efficient cost management.