While its true that the 10-20 year timespan for various disasters, of varying degrees of scientific credibility, is a great favourite of the media, people who work closely with such 'apocalyptic' problems are usually much less sure about their probability.
Cynicism does run the risk of causing complacency over things that may be real problems. For instance, I don't know where you get your figures about ground level UV levels, but australians and new zealanders are getting skin cancer at vastly increased rates.
You're not wrong. There is in fact a proposal about the form and resolution of URNs (which are location independent) from the IETF. I don't know its status.
In general fast growing companies are not expected to pay dividends. The stock market prefers them to invest the money instead, in the expectation of future profits.
In practice, paying dividends is getting increasingly rare across the board.You could interpret this either as an indication of a very rapidly growing economy or an insane stock market.
SSL is not supported because its illegal (or was until recently) to export implementations of SSL from the USA. At one point patches existed to fix this developed outside the USA - don't know if they still work.
Java is "supported" through an interface called OJI. Netscape can't open source the sun implementation they used in the past, and third party Java implementations are a losing battle with Sun's constant updates to the platform.
What the majority of people want is not necessarily relevant. Public libraries are maintained for everyone - not for the majority. Its an important distinction. Libraries are not the property of "the majority" to do with what they will, they are a public service, provided by the state to give access for everyone to information that might otherwise be inaccessible.
It is doubly offensive for the "the majority" to try to promulgate a non-solution to a largely imaginary problem. Another point you might want to take into account is that "the majority" in a case like this is the majority of those who participate in political campaigns - the majority of interfering busybodies, frankly.
Small businesses certainly represent the vast majority of the world's economic activity, but that is not the same thing as power.
A large corporation is effectively run by a fairly small number of people, and has mechanisms in place to coordinate its activities. It can therefore make its economic weight felt much more easily than any federation of small businesses trying to act together can do.
If you use redhat, Caldera, or SuSE use rpmfind. If you use debian use dselect. They'll find all the packages you need to install to support and application.
Firstly, I'd like to recommend to you and everyone else that when you read and "earthshattering" book that punches holes in some scientiifc orthodoxy, you go out and check your facts. Mr Milton may be the untold genius of 20th century biology, but its much more likely (especially if you presentation of his arguments is faithful to his) that he's a second rate scientist,or even a simple kook, trying to make a few bucks.
Point by point now...
Age of the Earth We don't know the age of the earth very precisely, but we have a pretty good idea. You can use rocks to date fossils and fossils to date rocks as long as you don't use the fossils to date the rocks you used to date the fossils. Nothing circular about it. Different radiometric dating techniques are used for different things - carbon dating (used for organic matterto get the date since death) is accurate to the hundreds of years, the techniques used for rocks are only accurate to thousands or millions of years, so using them to date recent lava flows in an exercise in bad science. Can't comment on the stalactites, but off the topof my head, surely it depends on the quantities of water, and the quantity and nature of the minerals dissolved in them. I know of stalactites that have formed in only 10s of years myself.
Definition of Species Species is not an important concepts in neo-darwinism as currently formulated. The only things upon which natural selection works are genes, and the only way in which it does so it through their phenotypic effects. Whether or not speciation has been observed is not terribly relevant - if you accept that the fossil record is an accurate but incomplete record of the earth's biological history, it must have happened. Several phenomena (ring species,evidence for punctuated equilibria in the fossil record) suggest that speciation occurs when a small population is separated from the rest of the species and evolves on a separate track.
Beneficial Mutation is stupendously improbable by ordinary human standards. noone is proposing that large scale evolutionary change occurs of timescalescomprehensible to human intuition. I don't know what the stuff about directed mutation is on about. If you have references I'd be interested.
Punctuated Equilibria isnot an ad-hoc explanation for anything. The absence of link fossils is explained quite sufficiently by the extreme rarity of fossilisation. Punctuated equilibria is just a theory about what happens during speciation and what we should expect to see in the fossils record in any given location -the interesting point being that if speciation really does usually occur in isolated populations, we should not expect to find link fossils in the same place as the parent and child species,even if all individuals were fossilised.
Haeomoglobin I've no idea how the quoteyou give is supposed to shed doubt on the idea that "DNA determines the characteristics of the organism". Taken literally, noone believes that anyway. Many other factors play a role.You can't taken cheicken DNA and magically produce a chickenfrom inorganic matter. Regardless, we're presumably meant to conclude from the quote than chickens are in fact more closely related to both snakes and crocodiles than they areto one another,or that common DNA is not a good measure of relatedness. Either is fine - neither is a blow to the neo-darwinian synthesis. Whether snakes and crocodiles are both reptiles is irrelevant - this taxonmic distinction has no bearing on anything else, least of closeness of relatedness. Similarly evolutionary forces may have acted on one or more of the three creatures to change the shape ofits haemoglobin.
Lamarkian Change Larmarkism is not a well formulated theory. Some darwinian change could be classified as Lamarkian.
Natural selection is not a tautology. The statement you make is a tautology, but is only half the story. Properly stated, the principle of natural selection is something like "those genes whose phenotypic effects cause creatures carrying them to tend to survive will spread through the population". This is not a terribly complcated concept, but it is not a tautology. The idea that this is the main driver behind evolutionary change is another matter -by and large this is believed because noone has proposed a more credible theory.
I wouldn't say this review was poor. The reviewer had an issue with the author's emphasis on C++, and I'd agree about that. There are several OO languages in reasonably common use (C++, Java, Delphi, even VB, with fairly large amounts of code in Smalltalk, Eiffel etc still in existence), and among object orriented languages as a group C++, while possibly the most commonly used (although newer projects tend to be in Java), is distinctly eccentric in several ways.
If the author intended to make his advice generally applicable, it was possibly unwise to pick a language who features and terminology are so unusual.
Well, that might be what the constitution says, but copyright and patents are older than the USA, and in fact originate in monarchies that never say fit to write the reasoning behind their laws down.
Loosely speasking there are two liberal views of property rights (of which intellectually property rights are a subset for these purposes).
The bit of constitution you cited is an example of the view first expressed clearly by Hobbes - That property rights are conceded to individuals by everyone else because it is in our long run advantage to do so. In this case it "promotes progress in science and the useful arts".
The alternative view, originating with Locke, is that persons acquire a right to property by "mixing their labour with it". In this view intellectual property rights are acquired "naturally" by the process fo discovery and society's enforcement of them comes later.
Having said that, I personally agree with you (and Hobbes).
Full object-oriented programming is easily accessible in C
I take issue with the word 'easily'. You might think this is nit-picking, this seems to have missed the point of the article. Noone disputes that you *can* implement a framework for OO programming in C, just as you *can* implement a framework for 'true' procedural programming in old Fortran (newer versions have re-entract procedures, pointers etc, and are therefore capable of everything C is). Similarly you can write code in Java or C++ to produce the effects of parametric polymorphism or virtual classes. Would you actually want to use it ? Didn't think so.
Language choice doesn't constrain what you can do directly. All languages are Turing complete after all. It just makes some things easier and some things harder. Java vs C++ is an excellent example. Its possible in Java in simulate the effects of multiple inheritance, but rarely done because it requires so much typing.
Adding features to language of the kind suggested in the article increases what is loosely called their 'expressive power' and thus makes programming a higher level and in some ways simpler activity.
Sapir-Worff is indeed wrong, *but* there can be no dispute that choice of natural language makes it easier or harder to communicate certain things. The same is true of formal languages, no ?
Well, as someone who as occasionally said bad things about the Libertarian position on these things, I suppose I should respond. There are two aspects to your post.
Firstly, many libertarians, and people who agree with you on many matters, do not feel, as you do, that corporate interests need to be controlled. Indeed, for some, libertarianism is an excuse to refrain from accepting responsibility. I appreciate that does not apply to you. Quite a large number of libs are not only relentlessly self-righteous and bigoted concerning the opinions of others, but also seem to feel that their philosophy gives them the right to be as offensive as they please. This is not good PR.
Secondly, and more substantively, if you consider the kind of corporate capitalism that we're seeing get worse and worse at the moment to be a threat (as I do and I guess you do) Libertarianism looks ineffective and indeed in some places seems to pander to corporate interests. For instance, most libertarian rhetoric emphaises not the abolition of corporate subsidies and the kind of pandering involved in the DMCA and its ilk, but the scrapping of the regulations that try to control corporate greed.
You're missing the point. In order for resources to be developed or traded they must be owned, and in order for them to be owned they must at some point have gone from being unowned or communally owned to being privately owned. While several philosophical justifications for private acquisition exist (that individuals own property because their "husbandry" of it is in everyone's interest (Hume) or that they do so by "mixing their labour with it" (Locke)), none is adequate for all cases, and certainly none justifies the current set of property rights.
This point is overlooked because to be honest how land was acquired doesn't matter much. In recent times the issue has been much more about capital than land, and capital can be produced or bought in any amount you need as long as you have the money, so there's no need to steal it.
These issue about acquisition are coming to the fore again in the slightly different form of arguments about intellectual property. Precisely when copyrights and patents should be granted and how far they extend is a serious issue for our times. A civil liberties issue, in fact.
Well, I agree in general that the models suck, but I'm not sure about the whole "just coming out of the ice age" thing. Temperatures in Europe now are significantly cooler than they were during the dark ages. For instance, when Leif Erikson discovered Greenland it had a habitable coastal strip, which vanished as temperatures cooled. It was also, at one point, possible to make wine as far north as Yorkshire. Anyone who has ever tried British wine will tell that you can't do that now.
On the other hand, the middle ages were substantially colder than the current period. The Thames used to freeze over every winter. This has not happened for more than a century.
Although I'm not a big fan of patents in general, I have to say that this one seems reasonable. It certainly meets the criterea of novelty and usefulness that seem to be lacking in so many software patents.
You need some way of ensuring that each registered voter votes once and only once, and that only registered voters vote. The obvious way to do that is to give each voter an identifying secret of whatever kind.
The problem is that the correspondance between the voter's electronic identities and their real identities has to be broken in some gauranteeable and visible way, or unscrupulous persons can use the same information thats needed for security to trace people's voting records.
The situation is not nearly as simple as you make out. There is a concept in copyright law of "fair use", under which you can make copies for most purposes that do not interfere with the author's ability to profit from his work - so backing up computer software, copying CDs onto tape, or copying documents to scribble on them is fine is long as you only use the copies yourself. I believe this point has been tried with regard to both software and music in US and UK courts - for instance Diamond won against the RIAA when they claimed the Rio had no legal use.
As for what your employer was doing - either they're just playing it safe or its more to do with your contractual obligations to your suppliers (non-disclosure, or whatever) than copyright.
Uh, pardon ? I don't know where you live, or where you get your information, but we were talking about street cameras in the UK, whose stated purpose is to reduce street crime, and whose location bares this out.
CCTV cameras in the street are a whole different matter to the "telescreen" devices and hidden cameras in 1984 that could watch you wherever you went. Its odd that cameras in the street upset people but cameras in stores (which are universal in the US as well as the UK) do not.
There's also the question of the use which is made of the technology. Most street cameras are very obvious because their purpose is to prevent crime. The observation systems in 1984 were there to produce a general atnosphere of fear.
If they object, having accepted the agreement, then that is their silly fault, frankly. To be honest though, I don't expect they will object as long as Sun give credit where it is due, and I imagine that their not doing so immediately is just a screw-up.
PR is indeed a good idea, and yes, those democracies that use it have a less confrontational style of government that arguably manages change better. There are exceptions of course - say Italy (which can't seem to even manage stasis well), or Germany (which manages stasis only too well).
What I was getting at is that without procedural changes at Westminster (I don't know precisely what) other constitutional changes won't help much. We'll end up with an eternity of Callaghans and Majors, which is worse than an eternity of Blairs and Thatchers (IMHO). With Westminsters current procedures, governments need big majorities to govern at all.
I think any appearance of radical political change in Britain since WWII is generally an illusion. Thatcher did not change nearly as much as she gave the impression of thinking she changed.
If there is a health risk, then yes, there is a lot to lose. Do you, therefore, advocate the use of the precautionary principle in making these public health decisions ? That is, if there is even the remotest chance of a risk, ban it ? Do you want to make crossing roads illegal (thats not rhetorical, many countries have laws against crossing except at the lights) ?
Bear in mind that the WTO has ruled *twice* on this issue, that there is insufficient evidence for a risk to justify the ban.
I haven't heard of any evidence that infection rates in cattle are increased by BGH. Can you provide a reference (to a news story at least). I'm not implying you made it up, I'd just like to evaluate the evidence for myself. If this is true, it might be a sound case for banning the stuff.
As to whether I'd eat it, I don't know. I haven't looked into it in enough detail, but I've yet to hear a convincing argument as to why I shouldn't have the choice.
The evidence for whether BGH is carcinogenic is definitely not sufficient to justify a ban, despite increasingly desperate efforts by the EU to find more evidence. Studies have gone both ways, and it seems that no simple errors were made in either case. Until there is sound evidence that the stuff is a public health risk, I say give consumers the choice.
There is a very real question as to the standards of proof that need to be applied in these cases. Is the slightest suspicion sufficient ? or the balance of probabilities ? or general acceptance by the scientific community ? or beyond a reasonable doubt ? I don't know the answer - and its just as much a question for internal regulation as for import control - but I do think some clearer thinking is needed.
The price *is* lower, of course. Otherwise why would anyone bother ? The whole point is to make cattle bigger and meatier quicker, so you can sell more cow more quickly.
There is some evidence - which is pretty weak - that the hormones used may be slightly carcinogenic.
EU trade policy is all about protecting European farmers, and has nothing to do with European consumers. As the previosu poster said, the US negotiators offered to label the meat as treated. The point is not to protect consumers, but to prevent cheaper imports from competing with subsidised farmers.
The WTO's powers (like the EUs for that matter) rest entirely on sovereignty granted it by national governments. If they don't like abiding by the rulings of its courts (and the EU is showing every sign of trying to weasel out) they shouldn't have signed the treaties.
Slashdot Mirror
Being cynical doesn't make you clever.
While its true that the 10-20 year timespan for various disasters, of varying degrees of scientific credibility, is a great favourite of the media, people who work closely with such 'apocalyptic' problems are usually much less sure about their probability.
Cynicism does run the risk of causing complacency over things that may be real problems. For instance, I don't know where you get your figures about ground level UV levels, but australians and new zealanders are getting skin cancer at vastly increased rates.
You're not wrong. There is in fact a proposal about the form and resolution of URNs (which are location independent) from the IETF. I don't know its status.
In general fast growing companies are not expected to pay dividends. The stock market prefers them to invest the money instead, in the expectation of future profits.
In practice, paying dividends is getting increasingly rare across the board.You could interpret this either as an indication of a very rapidly growing economy or an insane stock market.
SSL is not supported because its illegal (or was until recently) to export implementations of SSL from the USA. At one point patches existed to fix this developed outside the USA - don't know if they still work.
Java is "supported" through an interface called OJI. Netscape can't open source the sun implementation they used in the past, and third party Java implementations are a losing battle with Sun's constant updates to the platform.
What the majority of people want is not necessarily relevant. Public libraries are maintained for everyone - not for the majority. Its an important distinction. Libraries are not the property of "the majority" to do with what they will, they are a public service, provided by the state to give access for everyone to information that might otherwise be inaccessible.
It is doubly offensive for the "the majority" to try to promulgate a non-solution to a largely imaginary problem. Another point you might want to take into account is that "the majority" in a case like this is the majority of those who participate in political campaigns - the majority of interfering busybodies, frankly.
Small businesses certainly represent the vast majority of the world's economic activity, but that is not the same thing as power.
A large corporation is effectively run by a fairly small number of people, and has mechanisms in place to coordinate its activities. It can therefore make its economic weight felt much more easily than any federation of small businesses trying to act together can do.
If you use redhat, Caldera, or SuSE use rpmfind. If you use debian use dselect. They'll find all the packages you need to install to support and application.
Firstly, I'd like to recommend to you and everyone else that when you read and "earthshattering" book that punches holes in some scientiifc orthodoxy, you go out and check your facts. Mr Milton may be the untold genius of 20th century biology, but its much more likely (especially if you presentation of his arguments is faithful to his) that he's a second rate scientist,or even a simple kook, trying to make a few bucks.
Point by point now ...
Age of the Earth We don't know the age of the earth very precisely, but we have a pretty good idea. You can use rocks to date fossils and fossils to date rocks as long as you don't use the fossils to date the rocks you used to date the fossils. Nothing circular about it. Different radiometric dating techniques are used for different things - carbon dating (used for organic matterto get the date since death) is accurate to the hundreds of years, the techniques used for rocks are only accurate to thousands or millions of years, so using them to date recent lava flows in an exercise in bad science. Can't comment on the stalactites, but off the topof my head, surely it depends on the quantities of water, and the quantity and nature of the minerals dissolved in them. I know of stalactites that have formed in only 10s of years myself.
Definition of Species Species is not an important concepts in neo-darwinism as currently formulated. The only things upon which natural selection works are genes, and the only way in which it does so it through their phenotypic effects. Whether or not speciation has been observed is not terribly relevant - if you accept that the fossil record is an accurate but incomplete record of the earth's biological history, it must have happened. Several phenomena (ring species,evidence for punctuated equilibria in the fossil record) suggest that speciation occurs when a small population is separated from the rest of the species and evolves on a separate track.
Beneficial Mutation is stupendously improbable by ordinary human standards. noone is proposing that large scale evolutionary change occurs of timescalescomprehensible to human intuition. I don't know what the stuff about directed mutation is on about. If you have references I'd be interested.
Punctuated Equilibria isnot an ad-hoc explanation for anything. The absence of link fossils is explained quite sufficiently by the extreme rarity of fossilisation. Punctuated equilibria is just a theory about what happens during speciation and what we should expect to see in the fossils record in any given location -the interesting point being that if speciation really does usually occur in isolated populations, we should not expect to find link fossils in the same place as the parent and child species,even if all individuals were fossilised.
Haeomoglobin I've no idea how the quoteyou give is supposed to shed doubt on the idea that "DNA determines the characteristics of the organism". Taken literally, noone believes that anyway. Many other factors play a role.You can't taken cheicken DNA and magically produce a chickenfrom inorganic matter. Regardless, we're presumably meant to conclude from the quote than chickens are in fact more closely related to both snakes and crocodiles than they areto one another,or that common DNA is not a good measure of relatedness. Either is fine - neither is a blow to the neo-darwinian synthesis. Whether snakes and crocodiles are both reptiles is irrelevant - this taxonmic distinction has no bearing on anything else, least of closeness of relatedness. Similarly evolutionary forces may have acted on one or more of the three creatures to change the shape ofits haemoglobin.
Lamarkian Change Larmarkism is not a well formulated theory. Some darwinian change could be classified as Lamarkian.
Natural selection is not a tautology. The statement you make is a tautology, but is only half the story. Properly stated, the principle of natural selection is something like "those genes whose phenotypic effects cause creatures carrying them to tend to survive will spread through the population". This is not a terribly complcated concept, but it is not a tautology. The idea that this is the main driver behind evolutionary change is another matter -by and large this is believed because noone has proposed a more credible theory.
I wouldn't say this review was poor. The reviewer had an issue with the author's emphasis on C++, and I'd agree about that. There are several OO languages in reasonably common use (C++, Java, Delphi, even VB, with fairly large amounts of code in Smalltalk, Eiffel etc still in existence), and among object orriented languages as a group C++, while possibly the most commonly used (although newer projects tend to be in Java), is distinctly eccentric in several ways.
If the author intended to make his advice generally applicable, it was possibly unwise to pick a language who features and terminology are so unusual.
Well, that might be what the constitution says, but copyright and patents are older than the USA, and in fact originate in monarchies that never say fit to write the reasoning behind their laws down.
Loosely speasking there are two liberal views of property rights (of which intellectually property rights are a subset for these purposes).
The bit of constitution you cited is an example of the view first expressed clearly by Hobbes - That property rights are conceded to individuals by everyone else because it is in our long run advantage to do so. In this case it "promotes progress in science and the useful arts".
The alternative view, originating with Locke, is that persons acquire a right to property by "mixing their labour with it". In this view intellectual property rights are acquired "naturally" by the process fo discovery and society's enforcement of them comes later.
Having said that, I personally agree with you (and Hobbes).
Simon
Full object-oriented programming is easily accessible in C
I take issue with the word 'easily'. You might think this is nit-picking, this seems to have missed the point of the article. Noone disputes that you *can* implement a framework for OO programming in C, just as you *can* implement a framework for 'true' procedural programming in old Fortran (newer versions have re-entract procedures, pointers etc, and are therefore capable of everything C is). Similarly you can write code in Java or C++ to produce the effects of parametric polymorphism or virtual classes. Would you actually want to use it ? Didn't think so.
Language choice doesn't constrain what you can do directly. All languages are Turing complete after all. It just makes some things easier and some things harder. Java vs C++ is an excellent example. Its possible in Java in simulate the effects of multiple inheritance, but rarely done because it requires so much typing.
Adding features to language of the kind suggested in the article increases what is loosely called their 'expressive power' and thus makes programming a higher level and in some ways simpler activity.
Sapir-Worff is indeed wrong, *but* there can be no dispute that choice of natural language makes it easier or harder to communicate certain things. The same is true of formal languages, no ?
Well, as someone who as occasionally said bad things about the Libertarian position on these things, I suppose I should respond. There are two aspects to your post.
Firstly, many libertarians, and people who agree with you on many matters, do not feel, as you do, that corporate interests need to be controlled. Indeed, for some, libertarianism is an excuse to refrain from accepting responsibility. I appreciate that does not apply to you. Quite a large number of libs are not only relentlessly self-righteous and bigoted concerning the opinions of others, but also seem to feel that their philosophy gives them the right to be as offensive as they please. This is not good PR.
Secondly, and more substantively, if you consider the kind of corporate capitalism that we're seeing get worse and worse at the moment to be a threat (as I do and I guess you do) Libertarianism looks ineffective and indeed in some places seems to pander to corporate interests. For instance, most libertarian rhetoric emphaises not the abolition of corporate subsidies and the kind of pandering involved in the DMCA and its ilk, but the scrapping of the regulations that try to control corporate greed.
You're missing the point. In order for resources to be developed or traded they must be owned, and in order for them to be owned they must at some point have gone from being unowned or communally owned to being privately owned. While several philosophical justifications for private acquisition exist (that individuals own property because their "husbandry" of it is in everyone's interest (Hume) or that they do so by "mixing their labour with it" (Locke)), none is adequate for all cases, and certainly none justifies the current set of property rights.
This point is overlooked because to be honest how land was acquired doesn't matter much. In recent times the issue has been much more about capital than land, and capital can be produced or bought in any amount you need as long as you have the money, so there's no need to steal it.
These issue about acquisition are coming to the fore again in the slightly different form of arguments about intellectual property. Precisely when copyrights and patents should be granted and how far they extend is a serious issue for our times. A civil liberties issue, in fact.
Well, I agree in general that the models suck, but I'm not sure about the whole "just coming out of the ice age" thing. Temperatures in Europe now are significantly cooler than they were during the dark ages. For instance, when Leif Erikson discovered Greenland it had a habitable coastal strip, which vanished as temperatures cooled. It was also, at one point, possible to make wine as far north as Yorkshire. Anyone who has ever tried British wine will tell that you can't do that now.
On the other hand, the middle ages were substantially colder than the current period. The Thames used to freeze over every winter. This has not happened for more than a century.
Although I'm not a big fan of patents in general, I have to say that this one seems reasonable. It certainly meets the criterea of novelty and usefulness that seem to be lacking in so many software patents.
You need some way of ensuring that each registered voter votes once and only once, and that only registered voters vote. The obvious way to do that is to give each voter an identifying secret of whatever kind.
The problem is that the correspondance between the voter's electronic identities and their real identities has to be broken in some gauranteeable and visible way, or unscrupulous persons can use the same information thats needed for security to trace people's voting records.
The situation is not nearly as simple as you make out. There is a concept in copyright law of "fair use", under which you can make copies for most purposes that do not interfere with the author's ability to profit from his work - so backing up computer software, copying CDs onto tape, or copying documents to scribble on them is fine is long as you only use the copies yourself. I believe this point has been tried with regard to both software and music in US and UK courts - for instance Diamond won against the RIAA when they claimed the Rio had no legal use.
As for what your employer was doing - either they're just playing it safe or its more to do with your contractual obligations to your suppliers (non-disclosure, or whatever) than copyright.
Uh, pardon ? I don't know where you live, or where you get your information, but we were talking about street cameras in the UK, whose stated purpose is to reduce street crime, and whose location bares this out.
From redhat's website
CCTV cameras in the street are a whole different matter to the "telescreen" devices and hidden cameras in 1984 that could watch you wherever you went. Its odd that cameras in the street upset people but cameras in stores (which are universal in the US as well as the UK) do not.
There's also the question of the use which is made of the technology. Most street cameras are very obvious because their purpose is to prevent crime. The observation systems in 1984 were there to produce a general atnosphere of fear.
It says quite clearly on a page pointed to by the Blackdown FAQ about licensing that Sun owns all changes made under the non-commercial internal use agreement that the Blackdown team have agreed to.
If they object, having accepted the agreement, then that is their silly fault, frankly. To be honest though, I don't expect they will object as long as Sun give credit where it is due, and I imagine that their not doing so immediately is just a screw-up.
PR is indeed a good idea, and yes, those democracies that use it have a less confrontational style of government that arguably manages change better. There are exceptions of course - say Italy (which can't seem to even manage stasis well), or Germany (which manages stasis only too well).
What I was getting at is that without procedural changes at Westminster (I don't know precisely what) other constitutional changes won't help much. We'll end up with an eternity of Callaghans and Majors, which is worse than an eternity of Blairs and Thatchers (IMHO). With Westminsters current procedures, governments need big majorities to govern at all.
I think any appearance of radical political change in Britain since WWII is generally an illusion. Thatcher did not change nearly as much as she gave the impression of thinking she changed.
If there is a health risk, then yes, there is a lot to lose. Do you, therefore, advocate the use of the precautionary principle in making these public health decisions ? That is, if there is even the remotest chance of a risk, ban it ? Do you want to make crossing roads illegal (thats not rhetorical, many countries have laws against crossing except at the lights) ?
Bear in mind that the WTO has ruled *twice* on this issue, that there is insufficient evidence for a risk to justify the ban.
I haven't heard of any evidence that infection rates in cattle are increased by BGH. Can you provide a reference (to a news story at least). I'm not implying you made it up, I'd just like to evaluate the evidence for myself. If this is true, it might be a sound case for banning the stuff.
As to whether I'd eat it, I don't know. I haven't looked into it in enough detail, but I've yet to hear a convincing argument as to why I shouldn't have the choice.
The evidence for whether BGH is carcinogenic is definitely not sufficient to justify a ban, despite increasingly desperate efforts by the EU to find more evidence. Studies have gone both ways, and it seems that no simple errors were made in either case. Until there is sound evidence that the stuff is a public health risk, I say give consumers the choice.
There is a very real question as to the standards of proof that need to be applied in these cases. Is the slightest suspicion sufficient ? or the balance of probabilities ? or general acceptance by the scientific community ? or beyond a reasonable doubt ? I don't know the answer - and its just as much a question for internal regulation as for import control - but I do think some clearer thinking is needed.
The price *is* lower, of course. Otherwise why would anyone bother ? The whole point is to make cattle bigger and meatier quicker, so you can sell more cow more quickly.
There is some evidence - which is pretty weak - that the hormones used may be slightly carcinogenic.
EU trade policy is all about protecting European farmers, and has nothing to do with European consumers. As the previosu poster said, the US negotiators offered to label the meat as treated. The point is not to protect consumers, but to prevent cheaper imports from competing with subsidised farmers.
The WTO's powers (like the EUs for that matter) rest entirely on sovereignty granted it by national governments. If they don't like abiding by the rulings of its courts (and the EU is showing every sign of trying to weasel out) they shouldn't have signed the treaties.