Economy is just money flowing around. It doesn't matter too much on what you spend it. You could waste for example enormous amounts of money on military forces without any particular benefit.
In case of action against global warming, the very least you get is that you do longer with fuel, keeping the price low which happens to be good for consumers. Also, it keeps stuff like oil available for a longer period of time. Not a bad thing either. And that is true even if climate scientists were wrong. My Dunning-Kruger bet however is that they are more likely to be right than you or I, and in particular that whether they are right or wrong has nothing to do with economy and this bias should be left out when deciding whether they are wrong or right.
In my country, houses used to use 3000 m3 gas for heating, these days it is 500 m3 or less without any loss of comfort. In my country we used to have a huge gas field. It is almost empty now. Instead of 30 years, we could have enjoyed it for over 150 years. Also, there are tremors now in that area of the country caused by the settling after the gas extraction, resulting in (costly) damage to housing. It pays to be frugal with resources.
The lord didn't have a truck to haul the mirror. No disrespect for the trucker (certainly not: Hats off), but doesn't give reading about Rosse's achievements on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Parsons,_3rd_Earl_of_Rosse you cause to revise your statement at least somewhat?
Well, if they do that, they increase the threat level, because non-threating people start to get pissed.
It is a bit like killing civilians in another country. These people get mad. If they have a religion (not unlikely), and it is different from yours (also not unlikely), doubly so. They could go really crazy and fly a plane into building. Or something.
So, remember: Pissing off other people indiscriminately: Not good.
When I hear people say "Think about the children", my thought is: Why, they'll grow up into terrible people anyway.
What physical law is preventing Google from creating an emergency mode? Autonomous driving can be turned off. A manually operated/atuomatic car speeding to a hospital would be more likely to reach its destination quickly with autonomous driven cars paying attention to their environment.
Bert Sorry if you're still cognitively suffering from head trauma
Iowa is in the US. In the US there is a filter for politicians. It only allows people to pass that deny evolution. So, the people in power lack spine, brains, critical thinking skills, ignore facts or have opinions without collecting facts; or any combination thereof. Rather bad bunch to make policy choices.
The public is informed even worse. They don't make these decisions for a living. So, they'll have less time to think things over. You don't want important decisions to be based on the average uninformed person. In communist China they had bunches of farmers decide what to do with people who knew stuff.
No need to put a lid on scientists voicing an expert opinion. At the very least it is a valuable contribution to a discussion.
Well, she did get shot in the head because she was vocal on the issue before. And she'll have known that her opinion would meet fierce opposition, and in a country where (mad)men are allowed to bear arms, that can get you into trouble likely.
"And the amazing thing is that evolutionary biologists- given an older example of a species and a later example of a species can (and have) predicted what the bones between those two samples would look like and (this was cool for me) where geographically and in what layer of depth the intermediate specimen would be found."
The US government has my fingerprints because in my country we're obliged to give such biometric data when we get a passport. As the first poster said: You leave your fingerprints everywhere. On the iPhone, the fingerprint is analysed (in case of Apple in quite sophisticated way), the resulting algorithm resulting in some string. This string is only meaningful to the phone. In a next scan, is the string the substantially the same or not. The string itself does not convey information as it is useless without the algorithm. IF there is an algorithm that can work the opposite way to generate the fingerprint, then what? BTW, I doubt that this is possible because apple uses interrupts in lines (where pores are) and while a particular interrupt in a line of my fingerprint is a datapoint, it doesn't say anything about the direction in which the line runs.
If you have my string, and you manage to put it on your iPhone, then you've managed to make your iPhone suitable for use by me. Now that is a great hack! Thanks!
The counter-examples are there because science works: It is a self-cleansing progress. There are two ways to get a good reputation as a scientist: Discover something. Find out that someone other scientist wrong. This means that there lots of double-checking and scrutiny. Want to make sure that your reputation as a scientist stays intact? Make sure you're right.
"You forgot the part where only two companies entered. Sure it's a race, but it's not much of one."
Watching the contest in progress would not be a spectator sport. The goal is not a spectacular race. The objective of the XPrize is to achieve a spectacular goal, by providing a financial incentive. For that reason, two contestants is enough to provide a drive to be first. After all, in XPrizes every contestant other than the winner is cannon fodder (contestant who ends up with nothing).
By canceling the prize, the goal will be reached later. Hurray.:-(
Bert
From a post by arobatino above: If you look at the graphs at https://www.genome.gov/sequencingcosts/ [genome.gov] what it actually shows is that after plummeting faster than Moore's Law for 3 years between 2008 and 2011, the cost has been basically flat for the past year and a half, probably due to lack of competition [blogspot.com].
"Cool. But this isn't really fixing the core problem of universality. If everyone uses a different key server, then I have to know what key server someone used to send them an e-mail (and vica versa). We don't have that problem with DNS. every URL gets resolved. the DNS servers push out best guess routing tables. The whole internet is transparent to the user just given the DNS and a URL. It should be that way for e-mail."
No need for new Internet protocols. You can start with this right now: Tell everyone on who is into encrypted email to do the following: Make a rule in your email client that automatically replies with the public key when the subject line reads: Public key please.
All your emails could contain the signature line: To send me a secure email, send a regular email with Public key please in the subject line. You'll receive an automatic reply containing my public key. This tells other people that they can set up their email client to do it too for their public key.
Once this gets traction everybody will know it is part of what you do when you get into encrypting email.
Who stopped those people with cancer and their friends&family from doing that if that were the more effective approach? Exactly: Nobody. Nothing stopped them from putting the money together and pay a group to invent their own drug.
Or is it pretty hard, and pretty risky and is a reward (even though it is not monetary) in the form of a temporary monopoly, i.e. a patent really that inappropriate?
Indeed. Like any IP right, copyright is a deal between society and the creator. In the end, the work will be public domain. But with DRM the copyright holder does not seem to want to stick to his end of the deal. And changes in technology will well mean that the work will be unreadable by the time the copyright expires.
Exactly, phrased differently: When they have to face the enemy and they have to choose between a rifle and the book of the deity of their choice, what would they put faith in?
Slashdot Mirror
Economy is just money flowing around. It doesn't matter too much on what you spend it. You could waste for example enormous amounts of money on military forces without any particular benefit.
In case of action against global warming, the very least you get is that you do longer with fuel, keeping the price low which happens to be good for consumers. Also, it keeps stuff like oil available for a longer period of time. Not a bad thing either. And that is true even if climate scientists were wrong. My Dunning-Kruger bet however is that they are more likely to be right than you or I, and in particular that whether they are right or wrong has nothing to do with economy and this bias should be left out when deciding whether they are wrong or right.
In my country, houses used to use 3000 m3 gas for heating, these days it is 500 m3 or less without any loss of comfort. In my country we used to have a huge gas field. It is almost empty now. Instead of 30 years, we could have enjoyed it for over 150 years. Also, there are tremors now in that area of the country caused by the settling after the gas extraction, resulting in (costly) damage to housing. It pays to be frugal with resources.
Bert
The lord didn't have a truck to haul the mirror.
No disrespect for the trucker (certainly not: Hats off), but doesn't give reading about Rosse's achievements on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Parsons,_3rd_Earl_of_Rosse
you cause to revise your statement at least somewhat?
Bert
Well, if they do that, they increase the threat level, because non-threating people start to get pissed.
It is a bit like killing civilians in another country. These people get mad. If they have a religion (not unlikely), and it is different from yours (also not unlikely), doubly so. They could go really crazy and fly a plane into building. Or something.
So, remember: Pissing off other people indiscriminately: Not good.
Bert
Yes, they count their weight in decimal stones.
Bert
When I hear people say "Think about the children", my thought is: Why, they'll grow up into terrible people anyway.
What physical law is preventing Google from creating an emergency mode?
Autonomous driving can be turned off.
A manually operated/atuomatic car speeding to a hospital would be more likely to reach its destination quickly with autonomous driven cars paying attention to their environment.
Bert
Sorry if you're still cognitively suffering from head trauma
Iowa is in the US. In the US there is a filter for politicians. It only allows people to pass that deny evolution. So, the people in power lack spine, brains, critical thinking skills, ignore facts or have opinions without collecting facts; or any combination thereof. Rather bad bunch to make policy choices.
The public is informed even worse. They don't make these decisions for a living. So, they'll have less time to think things over. You don't want important decisions to be based on the average uninformed person. In communist China they had bunches of farmers decide what to do with people who knew stuff.
No need to put a lid on scientists voicing an expert opinion. At the very least it is a valuable contribution to a discussion.
Bert
All angiosperms are sacred
Bert
Well, she did get shot in the head because she was vocal on the issue before. And she'll have known that her opinion would meet fierce opposition, and in a country where (mad)men are allowed to bear arms, that can get you into trouble likely.
Bert
Why is it a problem if the nucleus settles to the bottom of the cell?
Bert
"And the amazing thing is that evolutionary biologists- given an older example of a species and a later example of a species can (and have) predicted what the bones between those two samples would look like and (this was cool for me) where geographically and in what layer of depth the intermediate specimen would be found."
A great example of that it Tiktaalik:
http://tiktaalik.uchicago.edu/searching4Tik.html
Bert
The US government has my fingerprints because in my country we're obliged to give such biometric data when we get a passport.
As the first poster said: You leave your fingerprints everywhere.
On the iPhone, the fingerprint is analysed (in case of Apple in quite sophisticated way), the resulting algorithm resulting in some string. This string is only meaningful to the phone. In a next scan, is the string the substantially the same or not. The string itself does not convey information as it is useless without the algorithm.
IF there is an algorithm that can work the opposite way to generate the fingerprint, then what? BTW, I doubt that this is possible because apple uses interrupts in lines (where pores are) and while a particular interrupt in a line of my fingerprint is a datapoint, it doesn't say anything about the direction in which the line runs.
If you have my string, and you manage to put it on your iPhone, then you've managed to make your iPhone suitable for use by me. Now that is a great hack! Thanks!
Bert
Isn't it better for society if we can quickly identify people with weird irrational beliefs?
Bert
Plus, we want to know what you're hiding behind your body when you skype.
NSA Bert
(That's Nefarious Secret Agent Bert)
The counter-examples are there because science works: It is a self-cleansing progress. There are two ways to get a good reputation as a scientist: Discover something. Find out that someone other scientist wrong. This means that there lots of double-checking and scrutiny. Want to make sure that your reputation as a scientist stays intact? Make sure you're right.
It is not that no progress has been made.
Bert
"You forgot the part where only two companies entered. Sure it's a race, but it's not much of one."
Watching the contest in progress would not be a spectator sport. The goal is not a spectacular race. The objective of the XPrize is to achieve a spectacular goal, by providing a financial incentive. For that reason, two contestants is enough to provide a drive to be first. After all, in XPrizes every contestant other than the winner is cannon fodder (contestant who ends up with nothing).
By canceling the prize, the goal will be reached later. Hurray. :-(
Bert
From a post by arobatino above:
If you look at the graphs at https://www.genome.gov/sequencingcosts/ [genome.gov] what it actually shows is that after plummeting faster than Moore's Law for 3 years between 2008 and 2011, the cost has been basically flat for the past year and a half, probably due to lack of competition [blogspot.com].
They must have been foreign girlfriends, so what is the problem?
Bert
"Cool. But this isn't really fixing the core problem of universality. If everyone uses a different key server, then I have to know what key server someone used to send them an e-mail (and vica versa). We don't have that problem with DNS. every URL gets resolved. the DNS servers push out best guess routing tables. The whole internet is transparent to the user just given the DNS and a URL. It should be that way for e-mail."
No need for new Internet protocols. You can start with this right now: Tell everyone on who is into encrypted email to do the following: Make a rule in your email client that automatically replies with the public key when the subject line reads: Public key please.
All your emails could contain the signature line: To send me a secure email, send a regular email with Public key please in the subject line. You'll receive an automatic reply containing my public key.
This tells other people that they can set up their email client to do it too for their public key.
Once this gets traction everybody will know it is part of what you do when you get into encrypting email.
Bert
Where the definition of fully human is having been educated in humanities. And thus the circular reasoning was concluded.
Bert
Who stopped those people with cancer and their friends&family from doing that if that were the more effective approach? Exactly: Nobody. Nothing stopped them from putting the money together and pay a group to invent their own drug.
Or is it pretty hard, and pretty risky and is a reward (even though it is not monetary) in the form of a temporary monopoly, i.e. a patent really that inappropriate?
Bert
we have a national philosophers strike on our hands.
Bert
Indeed. Like any IP right, copyright is a deal between society and the creator. In the end, the work will be public domain. But with DRM the copyright holder does not seem to want to stick to his end of the deal. And changes in technology will well mean that the work will be unreadable by the time the copyright expires.
Bert
Exactly, phrased differently: When they have to face the enemy and they have to choose between a rifle and the book of the deity of their choice, what would they put faith in?
Bert
Sorry, but I promise you that the solution was very elegant.
Bert
Abraham heard the voice of god. Or he may have been suffering from a disorder such as schizophrenia. Which is more likely... .
If my guess is correct, I wish he had had such an avatar. It would have saved the world quite a bit of misery now.
Bert
The DNA is changed by the gene transfer: The DNA is mutated.
The genetic composition of the recipient organism is changed, i.e. it is mutated.
Bert